Chapter CDXX: Gulto Happens ~Lich
Whenever the lights go out, and after the murmur of shock and the awe of the thunder has quietened, there is always the sound of something being lit, be it the scraping of a match, the click of a battery-powered torch, the strike of a cigarette lighter, or the flick of a Yoshi’s thumb over a facet of the Ruby of Erisot. Sky-blue light shone from the Boomerang as Lich held it before him, bouncing dimly off the walls and rippling off the water’s surface of the cavernous platform room. It was not strong enough to penetrate the darkness beneath them, though, where a subterranean lake lay at the bottom of the abyss.
“Just stay calm,” Nase ordered as the two Guardians arrived at the small bridge to the platform area. Lich held the Boomerang above his head.
“Syoro, nothing’s happening,” an acolyte called out from somewhere behind the platform to them.
“Stay calm,” Nase repeated, “and wait. The torches will be back soon.”
“What’s going on?” another piped up.
“The Guardian of the Cyan Arc will tell you,” Nase announced and turned to Lich.
Lich blinked as Nase turned to him. “Uh…’ano everyone,” he spoke meekly.
Around the room were several large chalice-like torches, brown like the mud beneath a stream. Green light glowed weakly from a ring around their square pedestals as Mana reacted with the materials inside each one. He saw the silent acolytes’ worried faces in the aquamarine glow, watching him, waiting for his next move. Some dark brows were knotted in distrust, while others displayed curiosity. Finding a reserve of confidence, Lich cleared his throat
“First and foremost, if some of you wish the Shadoles to take me down to the Underworld from what you’ve heard over the past few days, then I ask that you put aside those thoughts right now because this is far more important than what the media would like you to think of me,” he addressed them. “You all know the daring attack that was made a little while ago in the lead-up to the Mana Sword being taken. Let me inform you that that was merely the advance party. They’ve got the Sword. Now they’re sending in the troops for the Mana Seed.” Or at least, that’s Havering would probably do, Lich thought.
The torches began to ignite with a sound like a gas stove, beginning to drown out the Arc’s cyan glow.
“Use your spells and Faerie Walnuts wisely, because this is going to be a long battle,” Lich warned them. “The enemy is tough and highly resilient.”
“And here!” an acolyte called out.
Down the other end of the long room, robed in the eerie green light, were the armour suits of the Mechna Knights marching up the flight of permanent stairs onto the first platform below them, two abreast.
“Group One!” Nase commanded. “Encase the left leader! Group Two! Encase the right!”
Every caster of spells has a different method of invoking, evoking and casting, but each one of the acolytes commanded to act somehow produced blue lights, and each one contributed to a block of ice quickly growing around each leading Knight.
As Lich turned off the Boomerang’s light and put it in his belt, everyone looked down towards them with bated breath. A few seconds later, there was a crackle and clatter of metal as they were smashed aside into the abyss. The march forward resumed as they took the final steps onto the platform and spread out. Coming between four torches, they could be seen for what they were, as empty suits of armour.
“Poltergeists,” Nase spoke to himself.
“Nase, it–”
“All groups drain the front row!” he yelled, and turned to Lich. “Yeah?”
“It’s not going to work,” Lich finished. “They’re not alive or undead.”
There were murmurs of confusion from the acolytes as they tried to recast the spell.
“Then what are they, Lich?” Nase asked.
“Magical robotic suits of armour,” he replied. “Multehx told me about them.”
“Syoro! It’s not working!” an acolyte called out.
“Wait!” Nase commanded, and then turned back to Lich as the Knights reached the edge of their platform. The spells stopped. “Robots?”
“Yes, but–”
“Freeze them!” Nase cried out.
Lich turned towards the Knights, bowed his head and shook it.
“That’s…not going to work either?” Nase asked.
Ice hailed down onto the Knights, ranging from mere pebbles to veritable boulders. The suits of armour smashed apart.
“You watch,” Lich told him, without turning around.
Here and there, a gauntlet quivered, a breastplate stirred, and a helmet clattered. Like a tornado in reverse, the pieces of armour reformed into the suits. The acolytes groaned or cried out in surprise.
“What are they?” Nase asked, desperately.
“Magical, robotic, suits of armour,” Lich repeated.
Nase blinked. “Did you say, ‘magical’?”
“Yeah, twice, why?”
“And they are their own entities?”
Lich shrugged. “I think so.”
“I think I can still do this…”
Nase brought up his hands. Weaving an intricate pattern with them, an orange light glowed around his feet and faded. He shot out a hand towards a Knight and slowly curled his fingers in. Blue fairy lights surrounded the Knight before they zipped across the room to Nase, entering him at his fingers.
The Knight staggered and bent over, as if it was in pain.
“That’s it!” Nase cried exultantly. “Anyone who can cast Luna’s Mana Absorb, do so! The rest of you, keep knocking them down!”
Another hailstorm started, immediately followed by a few trails of blue fairy lights once the Knights were down. As they reformed, some did so more slowly and their mere appearance looked weak. Nase laughed with the relative ease of it. All that mattered now was that no-one casting the Freeze spell ran out of their Mana energy, and they would be done. The Knights had fallen into a trap.
“Join in,” Nase told Lich.
The Yoshi nodded
and with the next wave, he summoned a green ring of light-flames around his
feet. He clenched his right fist tightly as he pointed it towards a Knight in
the middle of the platform, then jerked it above his head and snapped his fist
open.
Clouds of green smoke popped around him as the Mana was condensed into packets
of its own critical mass, before they hurled themselves across the Mana Field
and into the Knight’s presence, where they exploded with small green mushroom
clouds.
The Knight clattered apart, with its helmet flying off into the abyss as the hailstorm began. The other Knights seemed to notice this before they fell apart and some of them were drained of their energy. Upon reforming, the remaining parts of the suit flew down into the darkness. The Knights seemed to notice this as they ran or slid on the ice towards the nearest edge and fell off; three nullified suits remained.
“Stop!” Nase called out as he closed his eyes.
The silence was broken by distant splashing.
Lich closed his eyes too and felt for the Knights’ presences on the Field. They were slowly moving towards him, fighting the drag of the water.
“Keep going!” Nase commanded.
Lich raised his hands once more but Nase grabbed one of his shoulders. He turned to his friend and saw his face. It was the most worried he had ever seen it, even worse than before a tough exam.
“You remember where the shelter room is?” he asked.
Lich nodded.
“I’ve got an emergency phone there.”
“But the power–”
“It’ll be fine.
Call for the Army’s anti-terror squad. Go.”
Lich flicked the Boomerang back on again at his waist and ran into the private chambers, shooting a brief glance back towards Nase, who was busy recasting the Mana Absorb spell. He pulled out the Boomerang as he ran down the hallway, turning right once he reached a junction.
Counting doors, he entered the third on his right and came into the antechamber for Nase’s bedroom, surrounded by five other doors: two on the left, one ahead, and two on the right. Pausing briefly, he opened the first door on the left to find a hallway and the Boomerang’s light disappearing into an open space at the other end. He ran down it, and then jerked to a stop as he realised he had entered Nase’s private training room by mistake.
“Not this one,” he murmured as he ran back down the hallway and tried the next door on the left.
This time, he came upon Nase’s bathroom. Moving quickly between a basin and a spa bath, he came to a cupboard door next to the shower cubicle. He opened it and was greeted by the sight of shelves of towels and other bathroom paraphernalia as he felt around behind an upright for a latch, which he pulled out, then did the same further up. Lich put the Boomerang back in his belt, then grabbed the middle upright and grunted as he pushed the whole shelving aside to reveal a steep flight of stairs.
He then grabbed
the rails on either side and ran down, and down, as the shelving sprang back
and the door closed behind him. After a while, he reached a crude passageway
mined into the rock and ran along it, arriving at an open metal door some time
later. Feeling the wall just inside it, he flicked a switch and a lone light
flickered on.
Nase’s shelter was like a concrete tomb, with the
only thing of any real colour being the bright red telephone on one wall. Lich
moved over to it, consulted a list of numbers beside it, picked up the receiver
and dialled the number. The phone rang at the other end.
“Major Tenovos here,” a gruff male voice answered at the other end. “Yes, Syoro Porami?”
Lich gulped. “Syoro Porami is busy right now. This–”
“Who is this?!” the voice demanded.
“–is Syoro von Kippo, Guardian of the Cyan Arc,” Lich answered meekly.
“And I’m the Emperor. No, who is this?”
“Dyluck Yoshi von Kippo, Guardian of the Cyan Arc, Major Tenovos, Syoro,” Lich answered.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t you. Decided to stop shirking your duties and come back from your alien world, have you, Conscript Ii-ossh-ee?”
“That’s Yoshi, major, and I–”
“I DON’T HAVE TO TAKE MY ORDERS FROM YOU!”
“And I don’t have to take my orders from you,” Lich replied coldly. “The little Conscript that Sergeant Tyrope kept locking up is now a Guardian of Fa’Diel, remember; so treat me as one or I will recommend to General Tigolatu that you are removed from your post. I heard you received a court-martial after my book was published.”
There was silence at the other end of the line.
“Now listen to
me,” Lich continued. “The
“Tipsot’s not capable of that.”
“It’s not Tipsot.”
“Then the Scorpion Army?”
“No.”
“Then we’re not responding.”
“You’re what?!” Lich spat.
“Orders from the top.”
“General Tigolatu would–”
“I received that order, so I am carrying it out.”
Lich sighed. “By
Article Fifteen of the Charter of the Order of the Guardians and Sages of
Fa’Diel, to which the
“Unreasonable request,” Tenovos answered immediately.
“Why?! I thought the motto of the Army of Pandora was ‘To Protect Peace to the Last with Duty and Honour’!”
“What sort of
response do you think the rest of the world will have if we invade the
“People – will – die!”
“I suggest you
start treating me as a Major of the Pandoran Army,
lest I recommend to the Guardian of the
Lich waited
until he heard the click, and then screamed a flurry of expletives into the receiver,
beeping his only reply.
When Lich came back to the platform room, everyone’s attention was focused straight down. The Knights had started to scale the wall. He drew himself up beside Nase, still standing on the bridge, and sighed angrily. “They’re not coming,” he growled.
“What?!” Nase yelled.
“They’re not coming. No backup.”
“Did you try Article Fifteen?”
“Yeah. They wouldn’t take it.”
Nase sighed and frowned. “We’re starting to get tired here. They’re absolutely relentless. I can’t…think of what else to do.”
“Don’t say that, Nase,” Lich answered with a pat on his back. “We’ll think of something.”
The Water Palace Guardian looked to his acolytes. “I can’t tell them this,” he said.
“Do you want me to?” Lich asked, concerned.
“No,” he spoke, closed his eyes, and released a sigh. “No. I just never thought…the day would come when Luka’s history repeated. If that is the Goddess’ will, let it be so.”
Lich nodded. “Better make the most of it, then. We shall go down in history and be remembered as the Last Stand of the Honest Guardians.”
Nase smirked. “That sounds good. Let’s go.”
And so the Last Stand of the Honest Guardians commenced. Hail rained down over the sides of the platform, the occasional green explosion burst a Knight apart, once or twice cyan flashes knocked pieces away from a clambering suit, and afterwards a twinkle of blue lights flittered up from the depths below. On and on it went for a good few hours; so much for Lich being home by lunchtime.
The Yoshi caught himself yawning a few times: getting into the rhythm had started to get boring, and this was not necessarily a good thing. Even though he slept like a stone the previous night, he was still a bit warp-lagged. And, combined with the spell-charged battles he had fought in the past few days, his Mana energy was not at its best. The same was for Nase. Even though he was pulling Mana across the field to himself and consistently recharging his energy, the Water Palace Guardian was starting to feel the strain of the ongoing fight thanks to the large amounts of Mana he used to talk to Lich in the previous days.
It was the acolytes, though, who were suffering the most. The constant casting of hailstorms were sapping them of their strength, almost leaving Lich’s advice worthless. The Knights were getting fewer in number, but not as quickly as the strength of the hailstorms was. Even with Nase’s encouraging words to his acolytes every now and again, and the Guardians’ shifting from position to position amongst them, they were beginning to falter. It did not help that they were stranded from their supplies of Faerie Walnuts, thanks to the lack of electrical power.
Lunchtime had passed by the time the first knight clambered over the edge, right before the ziggurat that held the seed. It became the focus for all the attacks as soon as it came, but that left other places open for the Knights to clamber up. The acolytes returned to focusing their attention on them, but what had been a storm of ice-rocks was now a storm of sleet. They could not be smashed apart by it anymore.
Tactics changed. Those who still could cast tried to create giant waves of water to carry the Knights back off the edge, and it worked for a while, but soon those walls of water decreased in size until it was almost as if the Knights were walking into the ocean at a beach. The Cyan Arc fired rapidly at the Knights, trying to get the water to carry piles of armour off, but the suits were too heavy, and too numerous in parts to fully collapse once Lich’s arm started to get weary. His Burst spells were failing as well and, much to his horror, his Faerie Walnuts were gone. Nase’s Mana Absorb spells kept going, but instead of the equivalent of a gash to each Knight it was cast upon, it was a scratch, then a tickle. The Knights were among them now, mingling, moving about in them.
They were mere robots, after all. They did not need patience, they did not have any fatigue; they had purpose, and, as more and more arrived, their purpose became apparent. It was not massacre. Even though those who had no Mana energy left tried to kick and punch them apart, they were merely shoved aside. It was not even taking the Seed, as none climbed the ziggurat.
Lich and Nase found themselves surrounded by the Knights, isolated from the acolytes around them. Lich started the Boomerang’s shield up. However, before Nase could order his eager acolytes to focus on only one Knight, all of the Knights were attacked at once. The two Guardians were at the focus point of all of the waves. In the ensuing chaos, they were thrown around before their arms were grabbed by the Knights. Thinking quickly, Lich tilted his wrist back so that the Boomerang’s laser aimed at the Knight’s helmet, and flicked the jewel.
But he had no Boomerang.
As he was dragged away, backwards, he peered between two Knights before him and saw the Cyan Arc lying forlornly on the water-covered tiles. Lich gritted his teeth and struggled, but then as he looked at it again, his face filled with abject terror. A thoughtful acolyte was rushing over to the Boomerang. Lich screamed at him not to touch it, but it was too late.
The electrical
self-defence mechanism activated. Blue sparks jumped everywhere. Knights lit up
like bug zappers. Acolytes and Guardians alike jolted. And then, the lights
went out once more.
Confused groans, the clanking of armour, and the dragging of heavy objects filled the darkness. Lich started to regain his senses, and thought he heard plastic clacks and clinks associated with his brother: an electronic device was being played with. He tried to find the source of it, but the darkness was confusing. The soft pulsating glow of the torch pedestals as they primed themselves once more was all that he could see right now. He tried to move his arms, but found they were still held by empty metal fingers.
“N…Nase?” he asked quietly.
He received a click and a moving tap as his answer.
The torches started to fire again, and as the eerie green light filled the platform room once more, he saw Nase was still held by the Knights, who had moved aside so that he could see that they were before the ziggurat.
A figure was casually seated on the stairs, grinning. As Lich’s eyes refocused, he saw its apparent lack of a face and gloves. The professor’s disembodied eyes glanced from him to Nase, his disembodied mouth chuckled, and then it spoke, “I do hope your premiums are paid up, Mister Porami.”
“I hope you’ve got good lawyers,” Nase answered, his aggressive tone overpowered by his exhaustion.
The professor snickered. “As long as it’s not an agent, I’d count things pretty futile.” He stood with a gentle groan and ran a hand through his spiky hair, setting off a few idle sparks which caused the Guardians to flinch, and then looked at Lich with a villainous smile. “Especially if it’s not him.”
“You tricked me,” Lich snarled.
With a sneer, the professor moved down, tapping his cane on the floor as he walked, and patted him on the shoulder in mock consolation. “I’m a villain; second best, kid. It’s part of the job description. And exceptionally easy at that.”
“Who are you?” Nase asked, struggling to get free.
“Besides your match; nay, your superior?” he smirked, and then chuckled. “Alas, I only go by one name, though I’m sure your friend here could give you a moniker.”
The professor started to pace in an arrogant, thought-producing manner. Nase looked to Lich for the answer.
“He’s not ‘
“Quite frankly, I'm a genius,” he boasted. “More than your run of the mill crook or hood, which these worlds seem fraught with these days.” He put a hand to his brow melodramatically and muttered, “I swear, it's no challenge to out do the simplistic foes put forth now a days as they don't bloody try anymore. Flashy attacks, big explosions, evil laughs and they think they have it. Amateurs…”
He spun around and rested both of his hands on his cane before him. “I'm probably one of the greatest people you'll have the fortune to meet, Mister Porami, though our friend here has met the one better.”
“Havering will not get away with this,” Lich spoke, ignoring the professor’s glance. “The Markior is alive once more and Multehx is…” he paused for a moment to work out the best thing to say. “He’s on his way. We did it before. We can do it again.”
The professor bellowed a laugh and grinned sardonically. “The mortal foe of the hoover is no threat to the master. And the agent…” he paused, looked away and murmured, “will be dealt with. Thoroughly.” He returned to his normal stance and sneered at the Yoshi.
“Then why do you come here?” Nase asked. “What good does the Seed do for you? It is worthless unless it stays in its cradle.”
“And so it shall,” he said with surprising sincerity, approaching its Guardian. “I'm counting on you to do that to the letter, Mister Porami.”
He then took his chin in a hand and turned his face up to him. “Hmm...no obvious scarring...nothing broken...still, I do hope those ruffians didn't damage you too much.” He let him go with a “tsk”. “Such lack of civilization from the unfavoured.” He smirked and tapped him on the cheek, tweaked his nose, then patted him on his shoulder. “Well now, right as rain already. Fast healer.”
Nase frowned. “Don’t make me thrash you to an inch of your life, heal you up, then start all over again.”
“I’d be happy to join him,” Lich added.
“Perhaps you don’t realise who I am, Doctor Yoshi von Kippo,” he answered, a dark smirk creeping across his face. “You will soon enough. As for now,” he sighed and turned to the Knights holding Nase, gave a complicated gesture, and he was surrounded and released, “I’m sorry, but you’re not the one requested.”
With another gesture, he turned and briskly walked towards the private chambers, the Knights following. Nase gave Lich a worried glance through his escort, but it was quickly swallowed up as they continued to march.
Lich’s gaze followed them until he couldn’t see them anymore. He then turned his head the other way, and saw Knights surrounding and on the basement staircase, standing guard, but no acolytes – they had to be down in the basement.
Nase shouted something in Empiretongue, cut off by the sound of something being slammed. A flickering blue glow outlined the chambers’ door, and then silence reigned once more. Lich mustered his strength and felt for presences on the Field: Nase was still alive but moving rapidly back and forth, indicating that he was in a confined space. That was all he got before his strength faded.
The professor returned with the entourage of Knights and smiled sardonically. “Well, Doc, hope you don’t get nosebleeds easily; the scourge of required respiration, I estimate.”
“What are you doing?” Lich asked nervously.
“This,” he answered, thumbing a remote.
There was nothing gallant in collapsing unconscious into your alcohol post-stomach.