nycdaug Book 2, Chapter 9.39: Critical Internal Damage—Multiple Locations
Book 2, Chapter 9.39: Critical Internal Damage—Multiple Locations
A monolithic spike of crystal shot from her palm. Where fire was torn apart and ice was shaved into vapor, the crystal bored through the vertical wind like a driven pike. She’d intended for it to hit somewhere else. Yet, her slide had ruined the angle. The partial anchor had twisted her stance at the moment of release.The lance missed the chest by a body-length and slammed straight through Noctyn’s left leg.
Crystal detonated the limb.
The bat shrieked, a sound that tore through the chamber, its flight stuttering violently as the damaged leg buckled. The vertical column warped, skewed, lost coherence for a fraction of a second.
Tommaso was yanked forward as the creature lurched.
He didn’t fall.
He propelled himself, hovering in the air, right in front of Noctyn’s chest.
“You’re dead now, ugly ass,” he snarled, teeth bared.
Fire roared back around his arm.
“Flame to fist—”
The creature twisted too late.
“I bind, I twist—”
Tommaso slammed his fist straight into its chest.
Inferno’s Wrath of the Thousand Flames.
This time, the blow landed clean.
His fist , hammering into the creature’s core. The bat’s chestplate of hardened flesh fractured with a sound like cracking stone.
The vertical wind collapsed.
[Damage Dealt: Substantial Internal Damage–Chest Area]
[Aetheric Anti-Ingress Field Dissolved]
Fabrisse’s breath hitched.
[Warning: Adversary creature entering unstable mode—Status: Maddened, Evolved]
Noctyn growled. Its throat distended. The sound hit Tommaso point-blank.
Whatever Noctyn had released, it erased his flame immediately.
His Fireform vanished in a single violent instant, stripped from his body like it had never existed. He became a streak.
A body hurled across the chamber faster than thought. He hit the far wall with a sound like a collapsing tower. The shockwave rippled through the chamber, dust, fragments, and snowdust raining down in silence that followed far too quickly.
Fabrisse couldn’t see Tommaso anywhere anymore.
No.
A human—
No human could have survived that.
But Fabrisse had seen snowdust. Maybe Zan had intervened in time?
This was no time to think about whether Tom had survived the strike.
Noctyn turned.
Its ruined leg dragged sparks of crystal as it pivoted in the air, blood spiraling upward into the dying remnants of the column. One eye fixed on Fabrisse. The other slid to Severa.
The emergency construct fired again, unleashing another volley of crystal at Noctyn. They clattered harmlessly against its wings. Noctyn opened its mouth. The sound wasn’t loud, but final.
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A pulse of echolocation detonated, and the crystal volley dissolved into dust immediately. The construct shattered.
“Anchor me again!” Severa commanded. “I will aim at its heart.”
Fabrisse scrambled to stack stones on her feet again. Eidralith screamed at him.
[FP: 5/44]
[Warning: Please rest and rehydrate immediately to avoid collapse.]
He still cast Stonebind anyway. The stones screamed as they fused, but this time there was no ingress field to halve the result.
[Aetheric Equation (In Practice):
28% Earthen Surface + 18% Mastery Sequencing + 15% Mnemonic + 0% Emotional Stability = 61% + 2% RES Sustainability = 63%]
Severa swayed as the force of the wind slammed into her. One of her knees dipped. Her boots ground against the fused stone, grinding sparks, but this time both feet .
She shot out the lance of crystal.
Noctyn sensed it.
Its wings beat hard, blood spraying from the ruined leg as it twisted away, throat expanding again. But before it could, an ice shackle snapped around its neck, yanking its head back. The bat shrieked in rage and fired its echolocation instinctively.
The sound detonated into empty air above them. It tore nothing apart.
Then Severa’s lance struck Noctyn squarely in the chest—dead center, right where Tommaso’s fist had cracked the shell. She chanted,
“From fault to facet, let truth divide.
Bloom, and let false flesh be denied.”
[Skill Cast: Facet of Revealed Truth — Legendary, Rank II]
The lance branched into a cathedral of crystal. Veins of light exploded from the impact point, fractal growths racing through muscle and organ alike. Spines burst from its wings, tearing membranes apart from the inside. Crystal spears punched through its shoulders, its ribs, its throat. Beautiful. Horrifying.
[Damage Dealt: Critical Internal Damage—Multiple Locations]
Noctyn screamed, but the sound drowned in blood. Blood poured in sheets, atomized by the wind, painting the chamber in red mist and glittering shards.
Noctyn began to fall.
Fabrisse’s breath came out in a broken gasp as he kneeled on the crystal surfact.
[FP: 1/44]
[Warning: Please rest and rehydrate immediately to avoid collapse.]
Noctyn didn’t get to finish dying. Something hit the crystal lance from behind with impossible force. The branching cathedral of crystal shattered in a blizzard of razored light as the Grand Luminary came screaming through the air, his back slamming into the lance hard enough to pulverize it. He vanished upward into the abyss above, leaving behind only turbulence and a spiraling wake of broken magic.
From the depths beneath the broken column, the swarm rose.
Hundreds of miniature Noctyns—wings beating in murderous synchrony—launched in a single coordinated dive, aimed straight at them.
“Blasted. That ‘Grand Luminary’ is useless,” Severa spat. She had already yanked another vial free and downed it in one savage pull. That was her last one.
Fabrisse could the strain radiating off her—overdrawn channels, stressed sequencing, magic held together by sheer will.
Whatever she did next would cost her.
Light pooled from the corner of her eyes, dribbling down her neck like river branches. Yet, they spluttered. unstable, collapsing in on itself before it could fully manifest.
Not enough aether.
Fabrisse scanned her profile.
[FP: 17 / ???]
The swarm screamed closer.
Severa lowered her arm slowly. She winced. “There is only one way now,” she said. “I will cancel my bulwark.”
Fabrisse’s eyes widened. “We’ll fly to the ceiling.”
The shriek of the swarm grew deafening.
“. . . Pray we don’t get impaled, then,” she whispered.
She released the spell.
The crystal bulwark vanished. The swarm missed them by meters.
Stone, ice, blood, and crystal blurred together as the wind wrenched them up.
Above them, darkness rushed closer.
Fabrisse threw his arms out instinctively.
Then came impact.