Chapter 21:
To burn the infection away
Izuku was long since accustomed to the hot sun of the desert and biting winds. Riding a camel as he did so, however, was new and uncomfortable.
They were much smellier creatures than the horse and oxen, but with those he had ridden on the wagon they carried along not on their backs. There was that horse he rode back to the pond which birthed him into this world, but again, he'd had a saddle for that. And the horse didn't smell so bad. Or rock back and forth so much.
Camels suck.
His frozen armor spell was losing its battle against the afternoon sun and so he recast it again. A few meters ahead of him he saw Strom cast a similar spell on himself. Similar but different. Instead of a thin layer of ice, a swirling barrier of excited air swirled around him. Izuku suspected the idea was for the air to wick head off of him instead of outright protecting him from the sun.
"What is that spell?" Izuku asked.
Strom turned around curiously, and smiled.
"It is called cyclone armor. It not only keeps a man cool but protects from and even absorbs elemental assaults on my person, both magical and natural. Fire, wind and ice need not bite me."
A cool breeze swept over them, kicking up a fine sheet of sand that danced over them. They all leaned back on their camels to enjoy the fine relief it brought.
"It is actually much better for hiking up snow capped mountains, and is what my clan mainly uses it for." Strom added. "I didn't get to enjoy that breeze because the armor protected me from it, like it would the frigid winds and snow. It also keeps good visibility from snow and sand."
That did sound useful. Of course, Izuku perked up on one word in particular.
"Can you tell me about your clan's history?" Izuku asked. "Whatever you're comfortable sharing with an outsider, I mean."
"I assume that, with the world being as it is right now, your education into culture, history and languages has been put on hold in favor of combat training?" Strom asked, turning to Isendra.
"You would assume correct. And I'm less happy about it than you are." Isendra told him.
He nodded.
"Well, it's on trips like these that it's best to teach such things. Even though you seem to be using these hours to practice finer control of your spells I will regale you all the same! But don't slack on your deliberately underpowered ice armor practice. That's good training." Strom told him.
Strom hummed a bit before continuing.
"Well the first thing you should know about my clan's history, is that I was banished from said clan specifically for discovering it's lost history. A dark spot in its past. And as I am banished, I am willing to share all of it! I am suffering the price, I may as well enjoy the fruits of my punishment. Strom explained. "My druid clan are kin to the children of Bul Kathos, that much is well known, but we were formed not by that ancient in particular but instead a rival, Esu, who seduced us into elemental magic.
Isendra perked up at this explanation.
"She only taught us the beginnings of elemental magic. We later branched out away from the first druids after being banished by followers of Bul Kathos and their way of physical purity. I was banished prematurely, before learning much of my clan's magic. I only know two animal summoning spells and luckily had hidden my knowledge of the Elemental magics, but that was enough to spare my life and convince my teacher to merely banish me never to return, instead of leaving me to the beasts." Strom finished. "For that mercy, I will always be thankful. But for their rejection of truth and their own inheritance, I shall always hate them."
They were all silent after he finished describing the internal emotional typhoon that was his existence. He was a shockingly open and expressive man.
Isendra was the first to break this silence.
"Are you certain your clan was formed by Esu?" She asked.
"Indeed," Said Strom. "Our writings show that she called herself such. She was a firstborn, a rival to Bul-Kathos."
There was a lot of terminology that still went over Izuku's head here, and he made a point of writing the many new questions in his head down. Isendra continued to stare at Strom, as if staring at an alien artifact.
"That's strange, she never mentioned starting another clan of elemental magic users." Isendra said.
This time Strom ogled at her.
"Wait, are you saying… Esu is alive? That you've met her?" Strom asked.
"Oh yes." Said Isendra. "She visits my clan's main fortress all the time. Should the world become more peaceful again I would be overjoyed to introduce you."
Cassia rudely interjected with her usual demeaning snort.
"As if one of the Firstborn would be interested in meeting a failure who was banished from his clan." Cassia said. "If what you say is true, then why would the creator of your clan want anything to do with such a pathetic man?"
Izuku felt the bite of Cassia's words on Strom's behalf, but he merely smiled and raised an eyebrow at the woman. Most shockingly the smile was a genuine one, and it reached his eyes. When he spoke, it shone through into his voice as well.
"Funny. You demanded so very much of this pathetic man the other night." Strom said.
The otherwise beautiful blonde twisted her face into an ugly expression and turned the reigns on her horse to gallop away for another group.
Izuku felt further retribution was in order.
"So THAT'S what all that demonic screeching was about." Izuku said, deliberately ignoring the Isendra's look of horror and raised her hand commanding him to stop. "I thought Andarial had come back and picked up the hobby of skinning cats alive while singing opera."
Cassia heard every word, and the scandalized glare she threw back at him warmed him like a cup of hot cocoa and a snowy day. She kicked her horse into a full trot to get away from Stroms uproarious laughter. Izuku looked to Isendra to find her face was beat red as she bit into her own knuckle trying to hold back her laughter, and had to stop breathing altogether to accomplish the feat.
"You. Really. Shouldn't have said that." She warned him in an unusually high pitched voice, brought about by her suffocating herself.
"She's right." Said Strom. "And as a bit of further advice, you also shouldn't kiss and tell. I normally never would, but I am deeply ashamed of myself for having kissed that one."
It was nighttime when they arrived at an overlook glaring down upon the small town they were sent to destroy. Even from afar, they could hear the screaming and the crying.
Every single person, from hired rogue, to trained soldier and masterful mage wore expressions of stone that betrayed nothing of their inner turmoil.
"The place is walled on most sides." Said Isendra. "I can create a grant barrier of ice on the sides where it is not. It will trap them all inside, leaving one or two entrances for you all to flood in and the infected to flood out into our swords and arrows."
Grognan nodded.
"Then your little pyromaniac and I can reign fireballs from outside to destroy as much cover as possible, what little will remain shall not avail them for long." The red-garbed mage added.
How did Izuku manage to have a reputation as a pyromancer even out here? Was he more famous than he realized.
Thinking on it, he realized he had traveled with the caravan for three months. More than enough time for word of the twelve year old who killed Andarial to travel far and wide. He probably had Gheed to thank for that.
"When that barrage ends, us sorcerers can run in to join the fray." Drognan continued.
"I would hold off on that." Said Isendra. "Once you finish the barrage of fireballs, I should be finished preparing a meteor to strike the city. The more devastation we cause from afar, the less…"
She took a deep, shuddering breath,
"The less we have to suffer witnessing up close." She finished, unable to meet anybody's eyes.
Not that anybody else was trying to meet hers.
"You can cast a meteor strike?" Cassia asked, her usual antagonism replaced with what might have been confused for respect.
"With a few minutes of preparation, yes." Isendra said.
"Then you will all have your hands busy." Said Strom. "While you do that, I can send a molten boulder spell to destroy any buildings you miss and block an extra avenue of escape, saving you the effort of an ice wall. But I will need a vanguard to guard my flank."
"And you shall have one in me and any of these mercenaries who would join me." Cassia said, looking about at the nearly one hundred mercenaries within earshot.
The best stepped forward to crowd around her as a rallying point.
"Once all of that is over though, and Vanguard makes it inside, Izuku, Lady Isendra and Drognan should join us inside." Said Geglesh. "Seal the way behind you to prevent any escape."
"And leave some archers and swordsmen interspersed at a distance to catch any that might." Said Izuku. "Any self-admitted cowards ready to volunteer for that task?"
He actually got some chuckles for his joke, and with the mood sufficiently lightened several did raise their hands. Some of the younger, or especially old, volunteered to be at the very back to pick off stragglers.
"Go now. Form an evenly dispersed circle around the city from afar. Far enough to see any approaching." Geiz ordered his men.
These men left and did as instructed.
Those remaining looked between each other, as if waiting for somebody to have an additional stratagem or word of wisdom, or encouragement or even a justification for the distasteful task they had been assigned. None came.
"Okay. So. Bombarding a small city with fireballs..." Drognan tried to begin with his instruction as if he was preparing to give a lecture on earth science.
He then breathed out in frustration and leaned back into the rocky alcove they had found for themselves. He seemed defeated despite the battle not having even begun yet. The signal was the erection of ice walls. Thankfully said signals hadn't started yet.
While the rest of the forces sent to eliminate this plague had either circled evenly around the small city or else prepared themselves for storming it, the two of them had crept around the cliffs overlooking it in order to find a good vantage point. There were plenty to be found, as two sides of the city were built against the rocky faces of cliffs as natural buttresses. These cliffs gave the pair of elemental mages a perfect vantage point, looking down upon the buildings with sadness and disdain.
"Okay!" Drognan started over, his voice now more forlorn and angry. "You are going to want to aim for the buildings closest to us first, then focus outwards towards where Isendra is positioned on the far corner. That way, when she called her meteor strike, she eliminated the most people possible. That way we have fewer to take care of face to face."
Izuku understood and nodded in agreement.
White light erupted upwards from the multitude of city gates along the two walls. Even taller walls of ice covered the few exits and entrances to the city.
The pair began their bombardment.
Isendra stood there, panting and sweating, trying to remain conscious after dropping a meteor on the front of the city. The extra word of rebuilding the ice walls to cover the new gaps in the stone walls of the city took even more out of her.
She hadn't even gone into the fray and yet she had already drunken through her supply of mana potions. Her over-eagerness to be done with this distasteful assignment was causing mistakes.
"Mistress!" She heard her apprentice call out.
She turned to see Izuku running southward along the wall, past the breach she had created and promptly covered up. He was similarly out of breath and exhausted as she was. She had seen the hailstorm of fireballs, and had taken great pride in knowing which was her apprentices and which was the elder caster. The size difference made it obvious. Not that she would ever say size was everything. But Izuku's were bigger and surprisingly more powerful.
"Follow me! Stay close. Treat them like any other undead or demon, for that is what they all are!" She lied to her boy, knowing that he recognized her words as such.
She didn't give him time to respond or even think on her question. She charged through the gap she deliberately left in the ice while and felt him follow from behind her. The mercenaries closed in behind them to shoot or cut down anything that may escape.
The city was alive with fire and shambling horrors. Men, women and children twisted by the dark powers into a mockery of their former selves.
Limbs and fingers were stretched far too long, to the point of tendons snapping and muscle tearing, and the wounds of the skin similarly ripping still bled as they crawled on all fours to attack anything, including one another. One saw them as soon as they entered, and bared its teeth. The misshapen jaw had stretch such that each was so far placed from each other as to leave black gums separated by molars that had been filed down into fangs.
Madness filled their eyes and corruption grew on their skin like vining plants or mold with the occasional horn or tuft of fur sprouted.
It screeched and charged at them on all fours, aiming to bite and claw at them. They vaporized it into dusted charcoal with a pair of fireballs.
The screech and fireballs got the attention of the surrounding corrupted and they swarmed. They did not do so quickly or efficiently, as few of them could move at a respectable pace due to their mutilated forms. Some were lengthened, some were twisted into something resembling a human rope, others were made to be backwards. These last ones had to crawl on their backs with their hands and legs turned in the wrong direction while their shoulder blades and pelvises jutted forward on their torsos.
She and her apprentice mowed them down with novas and ice blasts and so much fire, as if to burn away the horrific sights before them.
The pair advanced into the underground areas of the city to find it had once been a beautiful oasis, with the underground being tunneled and tiled into bath houses and eateries. It outright put Jerhyn's palace to shame, even with the walls painted, as they now were, with blood and gore and ash.
There were far more of the corrupted down below. Whether they had taken shelter down her to deliberately hid away from the spell onslaught or if they had merely been down here coincidentally to begin with, she did not know. Nor did she care, merely returning to her slaughter of the people now reduced to less than animals.
They did not scream in pain as they died, only ever screeching in aggression or moaning pitifully as they shambled about. There was still a great deal of screaming and weeping, and it took her far too long to realize it was hers.
She did so upon breaking into an empty bath room the size and shape of a play theater that had been barricaded from the inside and stopped herself. With no enemy in sight for the first time in what must have been an hour she collected herself, if for no other reason than for her apprentice's sake so as not to see her in such a state any longer.
She turned around to console him and felt all of the blood in her body run cold.
"Izuku?" She called out.
There was no response.
She rushed back into the thin, ornately windowed hallway and scanned every inch of the piles of dead, unmutated, and rotting people. There was no sign of her apprentice.
"Izuku!" She yelled, now in a panic.
She was answered not from the direction she came, but behind her in the pooling water of the bath theater. A large crash into the water as if a piece of the ceiling caved in.
She turned around to see that something large had indeed fallen from the ceiling, but it was a fleshy, rotting thing the size of an elephant. Pieces of it were still connected to the ceiling, like lengths of intestines.
The mass rose and revealed itself to be women; Many of them, each clearly pregnant before the corruption, and now molded together like an army of clay figurines smashed together and tossed aside. The black growths of corruption filled the valleys where their flesh combined and from it many horns, larger than most she had seen so far, erupted from painful-looking sores.
Isendra readied her staff as the many mouths of the creature all screamed in unison and the mass of limbs charged.
Izuku sprinted back up to the surface from the subway-like bath houses beneath the city. It was not by the entrance to the underground that he and Isendra had gone down together, but it was the only one he could find after getting separated.
He reached the surface not to fresh air, but to the smell of burnt katsu.
It seemed many more of the corrupted and demonically twisted people had shambled back up to the surface. This explained why the path he had taken back up was so empty of the beastly people, but now he was faced with a wall of them.
"Ice them!" He heard a loud, booming voice from above and behind him.
Izuku hurled an ice nova forward, which he commanded to only push forward and not behind him. Geglesh the boulder came tumbling over the railing to the underground passage with sword in one hand, wineskin in the other, and he used both to shatter the frozen abominations like fine china.
"We need to get you somewhere with cover!" Gaglesh ordered.
They ran, not away from the enemies, for there was no direction they could go without running onto such. No, they ran towards the burned but still standing ruins of stone homes and shops seeking a hold out from the onslaught. They found one, more western in style than middle-eastern, but still standing and not on fire. With these traits, it won by default.
Gaglesh kicked the door down, and in doing so also shattered the bookcase that had been barricading it.
"Ice wall, kid!" Gaglesh ordered.
Izuku caught his meaning and filled the doorway with a thick wall of ice, large enough to keep the corrupted out for hours. The other windows were still boarded up but he didn't take any chances, covering each and every possible entrance in ice thick enough to stop a bullet.
These creatures were weak, only deadly due to the many pointed bits on them. He hadn't encountered any mutated into a form able to wield magic, or retain their strength, or worse, increase in strength. But he couldn't rule it out.
He turned to Gaglesh to see him taking a long drink from his wineskin. The look on his face did not indicate that it was pleasant going down.
"The upstairs?" Izuku asked.
He nodded but held out a hand to stop Izuku from going up there. He stopped his wineskin and took point, climbing the stairs with his sword drawn. Izuku followed closely behind.
They arrived on the second floor to find the windows and patio door similarly barricaded, but Gaglesh took no liberties. He slowly walked in, as if to advance on the wardrobe and check it for an enemy, but he stopped three steps in.
Izuku stared in confusion when the man lowered his weapon and stood up straight. From behind he almost looked defeated, and when he turned around to stare at Izuku he looked even moreso. Like a man who had accepted his own death.
Izuku let his confusion show on his face until he saw movement on the floor, and promptly registered that there was no floor.
The inhabitants of that abode, whoever they had been, looked to have been melted into a slush of human meat, forming a mossy carpet on most of the floor. Thick tendrils, like rope of muscle, covered every bit of the floor like banyan tree roots. They were lined with sharp demonic horns and human teeth.
"Kid. Get going." Gaglesh ordered solemnly.
He lazily tossed his wineskin to Izuku who caught it.
As soon as it landed in his hands the ropes of meat and bone came to life, springing like a Venus fly trap. They wrapped around him quickly, coiling and cutting and suffocating. Gaglesh screamed in agony as the sound of his flesh being torn apart and bones snapping filled the room. Whatever he tried to yell was incomprehensible over his death wails.
In a moment of shocking clarity, Izuku knew exactly what to do. Later he would marvel at his own instincts, but he followed them to the letter. He dropped the wineskin to the ground and pointed Ash Bane directly at Gagleshe's pained face.
There was a pause, as they looked at one another, and all pain left the drunkard's expression as he stared directly into Izuku's soul.
Then he nodded, and Izuku cast the most merciful fireball he'd ever use.
It exploded upon the man and the trap containing him, and as Izuku intended he didn't have time to feel pain as he was reduced to burned splinters instantly. He didn't even make a sound as he and the creature which felled him died.
The blast also had the unfortunate effect of knocking Izuku off of his feet with so much force that he slammed into the wall at the top of the stairs, though he was fortunate enough to not go tumbling down those too. The hit to the head he took was enough to make his vision go blurry.
When he picked himself back up he stumbled, his center of balance ruined.
The blast had also blown out the windows, along with the patio door which had been close enough to the blast to be similarly destroyed.
He stumbled towards the patio, casually burned away the last of Gaglesh's remains along with the human meat trap which killed him. He didn't see the point in half-assing his crematorial mercy killing.
He reached the railing at the end of the patio and stared out at the sea of human bodies twisted by demonic forces. He felt no more pity, or anger, or sadness or even horror. He felt, instead, a profound boredom like one would feel while cleaning a toilet, or a grease trap.
Remembering the rescue of Deckard Cain, he raised his hands and flooded the street beneath him with his own mana. Then, with a thought, he ignited it along with all of the corrupted people it enveloped.
It wasn't the powerful flames of his fireball or firebolt, but the weak flames of his old bastardized fire wall. It would not be enough to be instantly fatal, but they didn't seem to complain about the otherwise slow and agonizing death he met upon them.
"I must cauterize the wound." Izuku absently mumbled to himself in a voice that sounded foreign to him. "Burn the infection away."