Affinity:Chaos

"How could you not invite us?"

The voice was calm, yet it rolled through the entire cavern with enough force that every fighter heard it clearly. The ongoing clashes froze mid-motion. Both humans and Gnomes wore the same lost expression as they searched for the speaker.

The scarred Ninth-stage Gnome halted his attack and turned toward the empty air, eyes cold and sharp as he tried to pinpoint the source. Lewis, finally given a heartbeat of breathing room, immediately fell back toward the rest of the squad near the partially opened tunnel. Alice stopped as well, but her lips curved into a faint, familiar smile. She knew that voice better than almost anyone here.

’I hope he didn’t come alone,’ she thought, never taking her eyes off the scarred Gnome.

The Seventh-stage Gnomes and their puppets also scanned the darkness, elemental energy still flickering around their hands.

A figure covered in brilliant lightning materialized in the open space. His armor was far more complex than anything Lewis or the other lightning users of Asterope could form, layered, living, with occasional deep thunderclaps rolling out from within it. Reynolds stood there like one of the lightning gods from the old scrolls the Faction still kept. The members of Alice’s squad who had never seen him in this state stared in open awe.

The two Ninth-stage Gnomes exchanged a quick glance. The second one snorted coldly.

"He’s only an Eighth-stage Sovereign like the other two. Kill the girl and come help me deal with him and the remaining brat."

Alice shot Reynolds a sharp, questioning look. He gave her a single, clear nod. Relief loosened something in her chest. Grey had come with him.

She had no time to ask anything further. The scarred Gnome moved the moment the order was given.

A long scythe of condensed darkness formed in his hands. He swung it in a vicious arc aimed straight at Alice’s neck. At the same time his puppet raised both arms and formed a massive water arrowhead that hung above her, tip gleaming with lethal intent.

Alice reacted at once. Her frost zone pulsed outward in a sudden wave, the intense cold slowing the scythe just enough for her to raise a thick block of ice and catch the blade. The impact sent deep cracks racing through the ice, but it held for the critical second she needed. The moment the scythe was stopped she answered with a rapid series of thunderbolts that streaked toward the scarred Gnome’s chest and shoulders.

Above her the falling water arrowhead met a flaming bird that Alice had formed in the same breath. The bird slammed into the arrowhead with a high, piercing screech. Steam exploded outward in a dense white cloud, filling the immediate area and reducing visibility to only a few meters.

The scarred Gnome blocked the thunderbolts with a sweeping wall of darkness, then melted into a mist of black energy and vanished from sight. Alice’s eyes narrowed. She expanded the frost zone further, trying to sense his movement through the cold.

The moment he disappeared, every Seventh-stage Gnome and their puppets opened fire. Elemental attacks of every kind, fire spears, earth spikes, wind blades, darkness lances, even a few arcs of corrupted lightning, rained down on the spot where Alice stood. The combined assault lit the cavern in chaotic flashes of color.

There was no clean way to dodge all of them. Alice clenched her teeth, judged the incoming storm in a fraction of a second, and chose the weakest cluster of attacks on her right side. She charged straight through it, accepting that she would take damage rather than be hit by the full concentration of force.

The scarred Gnome’s puppet moved again at that exact moment. Until now it had only shown water. Without warning it switched to wind. Its speed increased dramatically, body blurring, and it appeared directly in front of Alice almost instantly, one arm already swinging in a heavy downward strike.

Alice had never seen the puppet use wind before. The sudden burst of speed caught her completely off guard. She brought both arms up and blocked with everything she had left, ice and lightning reinforcing each other. The force of the strike still drove her backward several meters, straight into the full rain of attacks from the Seventh-stage Gnomes and their puppets.

A massive explosion swallowed the place where she had been standing. Blinding light and a shockwave of mixed elemental force expanded outward, shaking the floating platforms hard enough that two of them cracked and dropped large chunks of stone into the darkness below. The old buildings nearest the blast lost entire sections of their remaining walls.

On the other side of the cavern, Reynolds met the second Ninth-stage Gnome and his puppet without hesitation.

The second Ninth-stage and his puppet charged together the moment the order was given. The scout leader and his own puppet peeled away to go after Lewis and the remaining squad members near the tunnel.

Reynolds showed no fear. The lightning surrounding him flared brighter, armor plates shifting and overlapping with living energy. He became a living bolt and crashed into the puppet with bone-jarring force, sending it tumbling through the air across nearly thirty meters. The second Ninth-stage’s eyes narrowed. He checked the condition of his puppet in an instant and saw it had taken no serious damage, only superficial scorches. At the same time the attack he had been preparing finished forming.

More than eight thick tendrils of darkness, looking like the legs of a giant octopus, rose and waved around him in a constantly shifting pattern. One tip sharpened into a curved blade and slashed horizontally with surprising speed. Another elongated into a heavy spear and thrust straight forward with enough force to punch through solid stone.

Reynolds was still moving from the previous impact. He twisted his body in mid-air, letting the blade pass close enough that it shaved a line of sparks from the outer layer of his armor. The spear came an instant later; he shifted just enough that the tip grazed past his ribs, the darkness leaving a cold trail across his side. Four more tendrils stabbed toward him from different angles before he could fully recover his footing.

He moved in short, precise bursts, lightning flashing with every step, slipping between the attacks by the narrowest margins. One tendril managed to graze his left shoulder, the darkness biting through the armor and drawing a thin line of blood. Reynolds clicked his tongue, then released a concentrated burst of lightning from his entire body. The explosion of power forced the remaining tendrils back long enough for him to break free of their reach and create distance.

The second Ninth-stage Gnome did not give him time to breathe. He closed the gap in a blink, both hands forming a dense orb of swirling darkness that he hurled forward. Reynolds met it with a spear of pure lightning. The two forces collided in mid-air with a deafening crack, the shockwave pushing both fighters back several steps. Before the light faded, three of the tendrils came in again from the sides and below. Reynolds spun, his armor flaring, and cut through one tendril with a lightning-coated hand while dodging the other two.

The fight between them accelerated. Every exchange sent fresh shockwaves rolling through the cavern. Platforms trembled. More dust and small stones rained from above. The second Ninth-stage pressed harder, the tendrils becoming faster and more unpredictable, while Reynolds answered with increasingly dense bursts of lightning, his armor growing brighter and louder with each passing second.

Meanwhile the shockwave from the explosion on Alice’s side reached them, drawing both fighters’ attention for a split second.

When the light of the explosion finally died, the place where Alice had stood was empty. No body. No movement. Only scorched stone and lingering elemental residue.

The hearts of every remaining member of the Asterope squad sank. Sara’s eyes turned red at the edges, tears threatening to fall. The thought that Alice had been wiped out by the concentrated assault hit them like a physical blow. Lewis’s grip on his spear tightened until his knuckles went white. Several of the younger members looked ready to break formation and charge in blind revenge.

"Why the long faces?"

Alice’s voice came from above them, calm and clear, cutting through the despair like a blade.

"Alice!" Sara’s head snapped up, hope flooding her face so strongly that her knees almost buckled.

Alice stood on a higher ledge beside a masked man in dark robes. Her clothes were torn in several places and a thin line of blood ran from her temple, but she was alive and standing. Relief and joy crashed over the entire squad. Lewis and the others stared upward in open shock, still half-convinced they were seeing a ghost.

A strange, invisible force field suddenly expanded from the masked man’s position, shoving every Sixth- and Seventh-stage Gnome and their puppets backward several meters as if an invisible wall had slammed into them. The fighting around the tunnel entrance stopped again for a brief, stunned moment. The lower-ranked Gnomes staggered, some falling to one knee under the unexpected pressure.

Grey had arrived.

The scarred Ninth-stage Gnome reappeared from his darkness mist on a distant platform, eyes locked on the masked figure with sudden wariness. The second Ninth-stage also turned fully toward the new arrival, the tendrils of darkness around him coiling tighter. The entire cavern seemed to hold its breath as the weight of another powerful presence settled over the battlefield.

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