Broken Lands

Chapter 332 – According to plan (Almost)

The only good thing about the disaster unfolding in front of Sophia’s vision was that the mammoth simply didn’t fit in the trail, and each time it tried it was scratched by the vegetation. It had bloody scrapes on both sides of its head from trees that Sophia was certain shouldn’t be hurting it that much. At the same time, that definitely explained why the crystal beasts weren’t making their way through the forest on anything but the trails. They couldn’t; the trails were even more limiting for the monsters than they were for the expedition.

Sophia found a feather near Arak and used it to shift back to her own shape. She quickly reported what she’d seen in the hope that he’d know what to do. She wasn’t sure; how was the rest of the expedition going to help in such a tight space?

Arak laughed. “Sounds like it’s going according to plan.”

“That’s the plan?” Sophia stared at the expedition leader in shock.

“More or less.” Arak glanced down at the unconscious injured fighter. “It’s a good thing you got Emari out of there. Hopefully this will finally make the point I’ve been trying to tell her about Abilities that can protect her against things she doesn’t see coming. She could have stopped a mammoth if she used her Abilities properly, but clearly she didn’t. As for Larian, yes, that’s how he ties down big monsters: he can’t be hurt by something throwing him around. In fact, being thrown gives him something he can use to get back at the monster quickly, something about his shield being attracted to the last thing that hit it.”

Sophia blinked rapidly as she tried to compare that to what she’d seen. It was true that none of the people in Larian Steelfang’s team seemed to be particularly worried about him; they were giving him space to be flung around rather than trying to stop it while they used whatever attacks they had that could reach the mammoth.

“It’s completely different from how he handles monsters that don’t toss him around; against them, he likes being a shield for his allies. That’s why I paired him with Emari; she’s immovable if she sets herself. Against small monsters, she can back him up as a secondary shield. Against something like the mammoth, she’s supposed to be his backstop and give him something to run into so that he doesn’t run into anything else.” Arak shook his head with a slight smile. “Clearly that didn’t work out this time. Still, early failure is good; it reminds you that you aren’t perfect. Having it happen early in the Maze means you’re more likely to survive.”

“Early failure?” Things were starting to add up for Sophia, and she thought she recognized the picture that was forming. It was like something her father would do to make sure his lessons really sank in. “It’s deliberate, isn’t it? You wanted to remind people that this is dangerous without anyone getting too hurt.”

Arak shook his head. “It’s not that simple. I’d rather not have something go wrong. All I did was set things up so that if something did go wrong, no one would die.” He frowned at Emari’s unconscious form, then added, “Or be permanently damaged. Probably. A few more blows while Emari was out and I might have failed at that. I really didn’t expect her to miss activating her Ability.”

Despite Arak’s words, Sophia had the impression he wasn’t all that upset that they’d been underprepared for the mammoth. She was pretty sure that meant she wasn’t wrong and that he’d hoped for an outcome that would remind them to be careful. At the same time, she couldn’t argue with the fact that he’d done everything reasonable. The only other thing Sophia could think of that he could have done was to make them spend a little more time looking ahead before each clearing. It would take more time but it would mean that they wouldn’t be caught off guard by another mammoth.

“Heavyweight, over here! And the Boulder trio!” Arak called out. Sophia remembered Heavyweight from when they met before the expedition. He was a tall, muscular man who left footprints visible in the dry ground as he passed, as if he were several times heavier than he looked. The Boulder trio turned out to be the three black women who could summon giant rocks out of thin air and throw them at monsters.

Arak waited a moment for them to arrive, then explained his plan. “Heavyweight, you need to knock the mammoth onto its side. Don’t worry too much about the crystal taint; Sophia will be protecting you. You have your feathers, don’t you?”

Heavyweight opened his jacket to reveal a pair of feathers tied to the arm of the armor he wore under the jacket. They definitely looked a bit ragged. “Seemed like something I should protect. I tried putting them under the armor, but I couldn’t find a good place; figured they wouldn’t work if they were snapped or no longer feathery. They do still work, don’t they?”

Sophia reached out to the feathers mentally. She could feel them as part of her Domain, though they did feel a bit less substantial than the feathers floating in the air, but they were enough for her to weakly reinforce her aura around him, and that was all she needed to protect him from the crystal taint. “For now. If they get any more damaged, come and check with me again.”

Heavyweight nodded, then buttoned his jacket back in place. “Good enough. This won’t be the easiest thing I’ve done, but as long as it’s not expecting me it should be possible. It certainly won’t be expecting my weight; nothing ever does.”

“Once it’s down, do we kill it?” The shortest of the three black women asked. “Or do you want us to cripple it?”

“Break its legs, then start working on the skull,” Arak instructed. “It might be possible for you to crack the skull from the side as long as you avoid the crystal growths, but breaking the knee joints will be enough if you can’t. It’s probably going to take several people using lightning to actually put it down. Try to avoid damaging the tusks if you can; we can lightning-sear them to destroy the taint and once we do, they’re the most valuable thing we’ve found yet.” 

Arak paused, then added, “Except possibly for some of the things in the Night Market. They’re the most valuable thing that we will split across the expedition so far, possibly the most valuable thing we’ll see during this trip.”

“What are they used for?” Sophia didn’t need to do anything special, so she had time to ask.

“They’re one of the ingredients in some sort of steel that’s used for third upgrade weapons and armor, somehow makes it harder and less likely to break. Any mammoth tusk will work, but lightning-seared crystal-tainted mammoth tusk adds something that lets certain Abilities work with it more easily. I’m not a Professional, so that’s all I know.” Arak shrugged. “I think it’s used in some other stuff, too. Wands, maybe? The important thing is that it sells well. Speaking of which, I need to get a few more people together to handle the lightning-seared part.”

Sophia watched Arak gather people and send them to handle specific roles. He came back to her a couple of times to check on how things were going at the front. The first time, it was essentially the same as the first time she checked; Heavyweight wasn’t there yet. The second time, Heavyweight had managed to knock the mammoth’s head into the weirdly unyielding vegetation and given it several puncture wounds and a couple of lacerations, but it was still on its feet. 

Heavyweight seemed to have pulled its attention away from Larian, which was definitely not the plan. Fortunately, the mammoth couldn’t throw Heavyweight around the way it tossed Larian all over the place. Instead, Heavyweight grabbed one of the tusks and wrapped his arms around it, then pushed forward to put his full weight on the tusk, weighing it down until the mammoth had a hard time moving its head at all.

Sophia called for Dav to talk to Arak so that she could watch what was happening as it happened. They’d done that before, and Dav was only acting as a mobile healing beacon; it wasn’t anything that would interfere with his ability to talk to Arak. He was nearby anyway, since Arak had grabbed him to sit near Emari to see if he could do anything about her damaged ribs while Arak coordinated the fight and Greenleaf worked on her broken leg.

While the mammoth struggled with Heavyweight, one of the three women of the boulder trio (the tall one, not the vocal short one) snuck up to the opening. Sophia wasn’t sure how she did it; she was simply walking forward, yet somehow she was always partially hidden by the plant life from every angle. It wasn’t just the shadows; it was probably something about the clothing she was wearing. It didn’t look like camouflage, but it certainly worked like it.

When she reached the opening, she paused in place and waited for the right moment. Sophia wasn’t sure what she was waiting for, but it was obvious almost a minute later when the mammoth stomped one of its legs and threw its head to the side as best it could, trying to shake Heavyweight loose.

A boulder appeared in the air and flew directly into the side of the mammoth’s rear. It made a loud noise like the one it announced its presence with, but it sounded a little muffled by the way Heavyweight’s presence partially blocked its trunk. 

It tried to catch its balance, but a second boulder hit at a slightly different angle; it actually lifted the mammoth a little into the air. When the mammoth came back down, it was on its right side, the same side as the tusk Heavyweight clung to.

Sophia’s attention wasn’t on Arak, or at least she didn’t think it was. She still vaguely heard his reaction to Dav’s narration of the events Sophia saw. “Heavyweight needs to work on getting into position. Good improvisation, though; I hope they can kill it after all.”

As it turned out, they couldn’t. A dozen boulders to the mammoth’s head only succeeded in pissing it off. The ones that hit its joints achieved their purpose, however, and the mammoth could do nothing more than try to move its head. Hitting the spine didn’t seem to do much to it, other than stun it long enough for Heavyweight to shift to a better position where his extreme mass was working for him to keep the mammoth’s head pinned to the ground by its tusk.

That was when they found out that the mammoth wasn’t just a crazed large animal. It began to glow softly with magic and a shining ooze seeped out of the tusks. The moment it touched Heavyweight’s armor, it withdrew. After a few more probing touches, the ooze tried in earnest, sending a stream of itself at one of Heavyweight’s arms.

Sophia felt it when the odd material struck Heavyweight. It was wrong, neither alive nor dead but in some in-between state that relied on magic to spread. She could feel the sharp edges of the tiny crystalline particles that made up the ooze; in truth, it was more like sand than water. Sophia pushed True Death into Heavyweight’s armor, protecting him against whatever the crystal taint was up to now.

It took more mana than Sophia expected for such a small amount of material, but when the opalescent ooze pulled back, it left a solidified coat of itself behind, truly dead and inactive but fused into the sort of crystal shape it liked to make. Sophia now knew something she hadn’t before: the crystal protrusions on the creatures they fought weren’t the crystal taint itself. Instead, they were residue from its infection, dead leftovers that it couldn’t reclaim.