Sike Saner
*aromatisse noise*
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2007
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- #101
Chapter 34 – Behind Enemy Lines
“So. This is it, huh.”
“So it is,” Solonn said, watching the racetrack not far below. Already pokémon were gathering there. Soon he would join them.
The past few days had flown by, but they’d been incredibly busy. With the aid of the defectors, the force now assembling to move out had constructed their plan of attack. Already, he could see it coming together. There were Grosh and Oth, along with a small team of fighting-types, all pooling their efforts to gather boulders, both conjured and found. There were Zdir and Valdrey with Quiul, most likely reminding the mercirance of her own roles in the mission.
And here was Zilag, and Solonn was about as certain as could be of what he was up to. “They say our chances aren’t too bad.” They’d said it more than once. He’d clutched those claims like treasures.
“I know,” Zilag said. “They really do seem to know their stuff. And you’ve got some great allies on your side. But… well, this isn’t really about them. It’s about you.”
He circled around to meet Solonn’s gaze. “I… think you’re gonna do just fine. You, specifically. You personally. I’m not saying you could take them all on your own. I’m just saying… well, I just want you to know that I believe in you, all right?”
Solonn didn’t doubt his sincerity, not exactly. But he could see the quiver in Zilag’s eyelight. The reassurance was for them both.
But he smiled all the same. It was the least he could do. “Thanks,” he said.
The noise amidst the bleachers had almost entirely trickled down to the track by this point. The mission would begin soon.
Sure enough, <Your attention, please. Your presence is requested at the stadium floor.>
“And there it is.” Solonn knew that Zilag wouldn’t have heard it himself. Zilag, as well as Hiledas, would stay behind with the kids. This was mostly because neither of them had undergone anywhere near the amount of training as the ones who’d be heading out—they wouldn’t exactly be dead weight, but their chances of surviving the mission were less favorable all the same. And nobody liked the idea of orphaning their children.
Zilag nodded in acceptance. He moved back around to Solonn’s side, clearing the way for him to descend. “Go make ’em pay, all right? I’ll keep you in my thoughts.”
If it happens, I won’t forget you, that might have also meant. Solonn couldn’t keep the flicker out of his eyes—just how much concern was Zilag holding back for his sake? But again he smiled, and he gave an assuring nod, and with all the confidence he could muster, “Will do,” he said. “Take care, Zilag.”
“You too, buddy.”
Solonn drew and released a deep, steeling breath, then closed the remaining distance down the center aisle, taking his place at nearly the edge of the gathering. Over the heads of the people in front of him, he could see Zdir and Valdrey standing atop a winner’s podium that had been raised in the center of the arena, with Quiul waiting on the steps leading up to it.
“I trust everyone’s here?” Zdir spoke up. Even as she asked, her eyes were sweeping the crowd as they confirmed their presence; she’d know just fine whether anyone was missing, as well as if anyone wasn’t paying due attention.
Apparently satisfied with her findings, “All right. Now, I don’t need to tell any of you why you’re here. I don’t need to tell you what we’re about to do. But I do want to emphasize the value of your contributions today.
“The Virc, by and large, will never thank you. They’ll never know what you’ve done and will do for them. But no matter how their leadership might deny it, I am still one of them. I am still Virc. And on behalf of my people, I want to thank all of you in advance. For the lives we save, for the minds we put at ease, I thank you. Gods go with us all.”
“All right, let’s go kick some ass!” Valdrey said, smacking her hands together with a loud clank of armor on armor. “Split up, folks; it’s time to go…”
At her instructions, the crowd parted swiftly. For the most part, the teams were already assembled, but fitting everyone into the general vicinity of the arena below had required some strategic positioning of some of the larger pokémon.
Consequently, Solonn had to pick his way through the crowd to join Zdir’s group. Grosh had been assigned to her team, as well, as if Solonn needed any help figuring out where to go. He took his place at the steelix’s side and soon found himself crowded against it as the rest of their team gathered close together in the loose semicircle marked by Grosh’s half-coiled body.
“Hey,” Grosh spoke up, at which six different faces turned toward him before following his own line of sight and figuring out whom he was actually addressing.
“Hm?” Solonn responded, still keeping his eyes trained upward as best he could; his horns and the close quarters made leaning too far back unfeasible.
“You’re gonna make us proud,” Grosh told him, a smile playing about his eyes. “Me and her both.”
Solonn’s eyelight flickered at the mention of his mother, and he averted his gaze. “I’ll certainly do my best,” he promised, and not only to those who were physically present.
“Of course you will,” Grosh said. “You’re your mother’s son. You’re gonna have not only your own strength on your side today but hers, too. She’s not gonna let anything else happen to her boys. And neither am I.”
The flickering intensified… but a smile, however faint, formed around it. Solonn didn’t doubt Grosh’s dedication in the least… and he was sure that if it was truly possible, Azvida would be lending her figurative hand in their mission, as well.
Solonn met his father’s gaze once more. “Thank you,” he said earnestly.
With the departing pokémon now divided almost cleanly in half, Quiul descended from the podium and insinuated herself into the group on the far side of the arena, taking her place next to Valdrey. In the next moment, a golden aura swelled around the other team and took them away in a flash of light. Seconds later, Quiul returned for the rest.
As she squeezed her way in among his team, Solonn caught himself counting the passing moments. Counting his heartbeats. He tried to treat it as a countdown—not to their departure, but to their eventual victory. Soon, he told himself silently, it would be over. Or this part would be, at least.
We will win, he told himself as he took one deliberate breath after another. We will make it. Still, as he and the rest of his team left Wisteria behind, those heartbeats grew no softer.
* * *
The sunlight was more than a few minutes in the past now, replaced by the cold, blue glare of dozens of eyes. Most of their owners hung back, Solonn included, as Grosh, a gurdurr by the name of Thuras, and a pair of machoke siblings named Daran and Kala worked to block off one of the exits to the Sinaji’s territory with their gathered boulders.
This was just one of four such exits. Each of the teams had already sealed one apiece; separately, as before, they were tackling the last pair.
They’d encountered little resistance to speak of thus far: just a trio of guards at each of the exits they’d hit, all of whom now lay lifeless at their posts. But the team’s current task was not silent work. Stealth was hardly a priority in this venture. Avoiding confrontation was not their goal, not this time. It wasn’t a matter of whether or not they’d be noticed by Sinaji further in, but rather when.
There was nothing to do about that other than wait and keep a watch out for approaching trouble. Each of the teams was large enough to deal with being discovered, provided that the Sinaji didn’t bear down on either of them en masse—or so they hoped. So Solonn hoped, as he mindfully kept his eyes glued to the path leading inward rather than on his father, making a conscious effort to breathe steadily, holding a quick nhaza at the ready all the while.
Don’t jump the gun, he reminded himself. Fire when you have a reason to. No sooner.
Minutes passed, and no such reason came. Before long, “Got it,” Thuras announced. There was a momentary scraping of metal against stone as she retrieved her steel beam from wherever she’d set it down.
A few seconds’ delay; then, “So have they,” Zdir reported. With Zilag no longer reporting from Virc-Dho, Oth’s telepathic connection with him had been severed, and their connection to Zdir had been re-established.
“Come on,” she said, and began moving away from the now blocked exit. Her team filed out with her: nine glalie in the lead, herself included; the three fighting-types; Lirimi, an azumarill; and Grosh grinding his way along from the back, his heavy head looming above the procession. Quiul presently accompanied them, as well: a member of both teams, poised as she’d been all the while to teleport to the aid of either if needed.
The tunnel ahead of them came from the same place as the one leading to the fourth exit. There, they’d join the other team, and from that point they’d move forward as a unified force, able (they hoped) to withstand the full brunt of the Sinaji’s forces in a worst-case scenario.
Even though they could still only guess just what, apart from glalie, comprised those forces.
As they continued onward, Solonn gazed out over the heads of the ones before him, scanning for signs of life, friendly or otherwise, hoping his team would reach the meeting place soon.
The enemy reached it first.
The deep blue light of protect auras flooded the room. A volley of nhaza split the air, innumerable shots fired in unison—but not by Solonn, and as far as he was aware, not by anyone else on his side. He heard one body topple over, saw another—gray and muscular and roaring her lungs out—hurtle through the air on her own power—
—But never saw her land, forced to dodge a speeding glalie barreling right toward him. He wheeled about, his horn catching her as her shield fell; she hissed in pain and shrieked in fury. A number of other voices—one bottomless and all too familiar—cried and screeched and bellowed out in nearly the same instant.
There was no time to turn and find out why. His attacker returned the favor immediately, her horn slashing at his temple, narrowly missing his eye. He roared, and a fresh protect shield came to his summons as she tried once more to blind him. She shielded herself again in the nick of time, too.
Solonn caught her third strike with his horn, and for a few moments after, the two were locked in a fencing match, trying to get their horns past one another.
Then someone slammed into him from behind—he felt and heard something crack apart against his back, accompanied by a short, gurgling cry—and the force drove his horn deep into the eye socket of the glalie before him.
A burst of yellow light filled his vision as he wrenched himself free of the now-dead Sinaji. Nothing and no one caught him as his momentum threw him backward. He spun about in midair, regaining control of his levitation just in time to avoid plowing face-first into the glowing, segmented tail that fell to earth like a hammer before him, splitting the skull of the glalie below. Blood splashed against him, turning into a briefly-obscuring cloud of mist that cleared to reveal a torrent of flame roaring across the opposite end of the chamber.
Valdrey’s team had arrived.
Solonn didn’t stop to gawk at them or at what had become of the glalie hit by the rapidash’s flamethrower—not that he wanted to find out. He’d spotted Alij with a small horde of Sinaji all bearing down on him just as Alij’s aura failed him; without hesitation, Solonn charged to the rescue—only for the pair of glalie in his path to disappear into thin air as he struck them. Illusions!
Alij recognized this at the same time; he dealt a sweeping strike against the “multiple” Sinaji as they closed in, destroying a pair of double team clones and revealing their maker in one stroke. Solonn wasted no time in driving the identified enemy straight into the nearest wall. The Sinaji fell to the floor and didn’t rise again.
As Solonn leaned in to make sure the illusionist wasn’t playing dead, his massive frame glowing deep blue all the while, he noticed that the shouts and shots and cracks of colliding bodies were dying down. He turned and was met by a scene that calmed right before his eyes. The fight, it seemed, was over.
Easily more than a dozen glalie lay before him, their blood-mist heavy on the air. Some quivered slightly in place, still breathing, while others were plainly dead—some more plainly than others. He caught sight of one who looked as though they’d tried to swallow a bomb. He ripped his gaze away in an instant, retching in spite of himself.
Lirimi and Kala were down, too, against the wall near the Sinaji Grosh had smashed, their strange, opaque blood smeared across the floor. Quiul knelt before them, healing their injuries, while Daran watched her work, muttering to himself all the while. A prayer, Solonn supposed.
“Will they be all right?” Grosh asked from somewhere behind Solonn; the latter couldn’t help but glance back to make sure the steelix was all right. To Solonn’s immense gratitude, he was, from the looks of things. But the golduck standing at his side, with medicine-filled pouches belted to his waist, left Solonn wondering how long that had been the case.
Said golduck then offered Solonn a few berries for his own injuries, which he readily accepted. Within moments, he could feel the damage being undone.
Meanwhile Quiul wasn’t responding to Grosh’s question just yet, clearly focused on her work. When the multicolored aura surrounding her and her patients finally dimmed and vanished, “Yes… and no,” she answered. “You’ll live,” she said to the machoke and azumarill, “and you’ll heal. But not if you do any more fighting anytime soon.”
“I’m fine,” Kala insisted. She tried to push herself back up, but could barely get more than her upper torso off the ground before pain distorted her features and brought her back down with a snarl.
“No you’re not.” Daran laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Look sis… I know you’re worried about me. But I’m gonna be okay. I mean, look at us: we didn’t even lose any of our guys.”
“That’s… not true.”
Ronal’s voice carried a distinct and chillingly familiar gravity. Solonn didn’t need any further clarification on what had happened. It was only a question of just who had fallen.
The answer, he found, was Zereth. He lay face-up before Zdir, whose already dull eyelight was muted further still as she held him in her gaze. There was another dead glalie just a couple of feet away, whose face had been gouged so many times that they were completely unrecognizable.
“His killer,” Ronal identified; it seemed he’d followed Solonn’s line of sight.
Solonn looked away from the dead Sinaji, letting his gaze sweep across the room again in helpless, dreading curiosity over whether or not any of his other allies had suffered the same fate as Zereth. Oth thankfully hadn’t; they hovered near the center of the chamber with the luster of half a dozen cosmic powers making their dark hide glitter like the night sky, and no injuries that Solonn could detect. But they were only one of the people he was concerned about. “Was anyone else…”
“No,” Quiul said. “No one else but theirs…” She went quiet for a moment, staring into space. “Eight of theirs, to be exact,” she determined aloud. “And the ones still breathing have a long nap ahead of them.”
“There’ll be more.” Zdir turned to stare down an adjacent tunnel leading deeper into Sinaji territory. “This isn’t over yet.”
“It’s about to be,” Grosh said, and his spiked segments rotated restlessly. He shot a glare that seemed to burn despite its lightlessness at one of the still-living Sinaji, baring his teeth at him.
Solonn wondered just how many of the Sinaji had already fallen to Grosh alone. Not enough, no doubt. At least not as far as the steelix was concerned.
Even after all was said and done, even if they made it out of this alive and triumphant and none of their enemies survived, it might never really be enough for Grosh.
Quiul disappeared then, taking a very tired-looking Lirimi and a none-too-happy Kala with her.
Right before another rush of light filled the tunnels beyond.
Zdir and Valdrey’s forces promptly moved to intercept the incoming wave, to keep them bottlenecked at the entrances to the chamber. Several Sinaji poured in regardless before they could stem the tide, and a couple of them promptly burst into multiple illusory copies.
Solonn took out three of these in succession, then veered sharply out of the way as Haex the bisharp slashed a fourth into nothingness. His next target was solid; he felt the other’s armor shatter against his skull. Someone tore into his side as they rushed past; he hissed sharply but held his ground against the threat that chose to stick around.
The Sinaji he’d engaged lunged at him again at the first opportunity. Solonn lowered his face and took the impact in his heavily-armored head, then pulled back just far enough to rake his attacker’s face with his horn and fling him a short distance away with a toss of his head.
Solonn heard the Sinaji hit the nearby wall, but saw him come back for more. He spotted another pair of them coming at him from the right, but an ancient power barrage pummeled one of them into submission just as quickly. He threw himself out of the way of them both, then fired a nhaza at the already-injured Sinaji as he came to a stop. The attack hit its mark, its target dropping from midair at the impact.
<They are breaking through!> Oth called out. They launched more stones toward one of the tunnels, catching one of the newcomers square in the face, but she endured the assault well enough to unleash a parting shot before a steel beam upside her head brought her down.
Her ice beam caught Grosh in the midst of another iron tail attack. The silver glow faded from around the lower third of him, and he came crashing down, forcing Solonn and several others to scatter in his wake.
He’s alive, Solonn frantically assured himself, he has to be… He couldn’t afford a glance to confirm it, not with jets of something deep purple and foul-smelling peppering the floor bare inches away. He threw his shield up—only to take a toxic shot from another source somewhere behind him the moment it fell.
His hide tingled where it struck him, then burned. He hissed, then groaned as the poison started to kick in. Shaking it off to the best of his ability, he spun about to ram his assailant, hoping to spot Quiul somewhere nearby in the process. Had she even returned yet? Had she tried, only to be deflected back from whence she’d come by a body thrown or charging into her path?
Solonn felt the breath explode out of him as armor—both his own and his target’s—shattered at his heavy impact. The other glalie fell, eyes rolling back, and Solonn was sure he’d be following suit before too long if no one neutralized the poison, all too certain of what the attack he’d suffered had been. He let out a ragged breath, biting back a surge of nausea. His body wanted nothing more than to try and purge the sickness out and sleep off the rest… but the fight still raged on all around him. He was still needed…
He shook his head, trying to clear his mind, but to avail. Facing forward again, he saw two glalie—or one glalie and an illusion—charging him in tandem, horns first. In his delirium, he reacted on instinct, trying to raise a shield—but none came.
Then a powerful burst of water blasted the copy out of existence and its maker yards away. The golduck responsible dropped to a three-point stance in front of Solonn. Barely any sooner than he’d landed, he’d whipped a handful of berries out of his pouch.
He rapped on Solonn’s teeth with his free hand. “Open up, b—” He broke off mid-word to give the glalie he’d hydro pumped moments ago a second helping. But Solonn managed to get the message through the growing pain and illness, albeit barely. His jaws parted, but shuddered all the while; the golduck barely managed to get the berries past them before they helplessly slammed shut.
The last thing Solonn felt like doing right now was eating, but he had just enough sense left to force the medicinal fruits down. Their effects, while not instantaneous, were swift nonetheless; in no time, he was back off the floor, alert and well once more, his wounds no longer bleeding.
He saw something huge and reflective swing back up into view, with something blue darting away from him—Grosh had been revived. Hope welled back up inside Solonn, putting all the more fight back into him—he charged the next Sinaji he singled out full-force. Another caught the business end of his horn soon after.
The din began to fade out once more, and individual shapes became more readily discernible amid the chaos once again. Solonn dared to wonder if maybe it was all nearing an end. Then something new crept into his vision: snaking branches of ice invading the space surrounding them, growing and fanning out and dancing rhythmically.
He wasn’t responsible for them, and he doubted anyone else on his side was, either. Not wanting to find out what the enemy had in mind with the display the hard way, he tried to will it out of being. The branches began withdrawing quickly, very quickly, suggesting more minds than his own trying to override their conjurer’s control… but then halted in their retreat. They quivered, as if uncertain… and indeed, Solonn found himself no longer sure that he wanted their dance to end. A breath later, he was completely convinced that he didn’t.
As he stared, transfixed, at the hypnotic ice formation, he began to want something else altogether. Something far less benign.
His will to fight transformed. Vindictive anguish took its place, and it pulled his gaze away from the ice branches at last and redirected it toward the rapidash a short distance away until the brightness of the flamethrower erupting from the latter’s mouth forced him to close his eyes. But no matter. He was already locked on to his target, already blindly speeding toward the alien creature whom he now viewed as the enemy, as one of those responsible for the death of countless fellow Virc, the death of his mother…
And then his barely-thought notions of vengeance blew apart, and he could have sworn the rest of him was doing likewise.
He screamed so loudly that his voice gave out almost immediately, leaving him gasping and choking. His eyes screwed even more tightly shut, but he could still see blazing orange light stabbing into them. He dropped involuntarily, rolling onto his back and shaking uncontrollably, still fighting to breathe, his heart racing painfully. Only one coherent thought endured the onslaught: the raw, primal, terrifying certainty that he was dying.
Until it, along with all the pain, all the terror, and everything else, simply fell away.
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