Broken Lands

Chapter 402 – The Final Show

Sophia wanted to head to the Gateway immediately after it opened. Unfortunately, Cliff wasn’t able to give a good idea of when that would be, so naturally it was on a day when they had an Arena fight scheduled. Even if there wasn’t an Arena fight, they would probably have waited until the next day; while they were prepared, there were always last minute things that needed to be dealt with. 

Arak Shade had the most to prepare. He technically led the Arena; worse, it was a new position for him after the execution of the previous leader of the Arena for murder. Despite that, he was happy to leave the following morning. Sophai couldn’t say for certain why he was willing, but she could guess one piece of it: out of all of them, he was the one who had the easiest time traversing the Maze alone and he had devices that he could use as beacons to return to places he’d been. If he needed to return to Mazehold on his own, he might well make it and still be able to find the Gateway again later.

The Flying Stars’ final Arena performance was also the last performance of the night. It pitted Sophia’s entire team against a Gauzewing Monarch. It was a fight that any one of them could handle on their own if they had to, but that wasn’t really the point. The entire point of the Arena was the show.

To make it exciting, the Flying Stars were going to fight without using any offensive magic  or Abilities at all. They had to kill the Gauzewing with steel. Everything else was allowed, as much for the spectacle as because it would be useful. 

They’d considered going the other way and using only magic, because Gauzewing Monarchs could redirect or even reflect most spells, which could be exciting, but that was still how they were usually killed. Restricting themselves to steel ought to be more interesting for the crowd.

The fight began with the entire Flying Stars team high in the air. Sophia had her wings, of course, as did Ci’an. Sophia’s wings were bright on their own, but for the demonstration Ci’an wore a band clipped around one of her legs that illuminated her in the dark sky. She didn’t need to be stealthy tonight. They led the way into the air in a pair of matching spirals, mirroring each other’s movements.

Jax had a vastly improved pair of Light-Flying Boots that he could direct simply by leaning one way or another; they gave him a relatively stable space to fight, even if he was also always moving. Xin’ri had updated her flight harness to look like a pair of shiny glittering swan’s wings, but the wings were still only an illusion. They both jumped up into the sky when Sophia and Ci’an were twenty feet above them, spiraling upwards in an opposing mirror. 

Dav was the only one with a completely new flight method; it was debuting for the first and probably las time that night. 

Xin’ri had gone through a dozen different options before she found something that didn’t interfere with his movement Abilities; while he could fly by essentially manipulating his personal gravity, it was a little awkward because he had to continually maintain it or fall. Unfortunately, almost all of the equipment Xin’ri could make also depended at least partly on affecting the local gravity and that meant that either Dav’s Ability or Xin’ri’s gear would react weirdly when they were both in use. 

They might have been able to work around it if it was consistent or if Dav simply avoided using the Ability, but he’d worked it into his normal fighting style over the past year. Being able to suddenly move in a completely unexpected or even impossible direction was extremely useful.

Xin’ri’s first try was to use one of the simpler elements in a more straightforward approach. Unfortunately, it ran into an issue that seemed to be specific to Dav: whenever he Called a spell to himself, he also damaged any gear that wasn’t attuned to him, as if he’d grabbed some of the enchantment. By the time she settled on making something that had to be attuned, she’d also moved on at Sweetfire’s suggestion to something a bit more specialized for Dav: a feathered cloak. Unlike everything else she’d tried, it didn’t depend on physical force to fly; instead, it called on the mythic meaning of a feathered cloak and its resemblance to the wings of a bird. 

Xin’ri was positively disgusted by the fact that it worked better for Dav than any of her more practical designs. She was even more annoyed that it worked the best if she covered it in purple lightning-attuned feathers. As far as she was concerned, color should matter and lightning was not the right element to aid flight, but for Dav the combination allowed him to move swiftly and easily across the sky, faster than even Sophia, though he still couldn’t fly for as long. 

She muttered something about Dav’s mystery Signature as he spread his arms and rose smoothly into the sky surrounded by flickering purple lighting that made no noise. He rose past Jax and Xin’ri then passed Ci’an and Sophia until he stood in thin air above the middle of the Arena. The two spirals below him leveled out into opposing circles that contrasted and widened as they flew in the pattern they’d spent the past four days practicing. From where Sophia flew, it looked good; she hoped it looked just as good from the ground.

Sophia heard the new Arena Master droning on about the Flying Stars. When he finally got to the part where he introduced the monster, she looked down towards the base of the Arena. With the Arena light, the creature coming out of the far entrance looked like a large gossamer sheet or maybe a gauze curtain. It poured into the sky below the Flying Stars, then slid upwards without apparent effort.

From Sophia’s vantage point, it looked more like a handkerchief being pulled quickly upwards than a flying creature.

Sophia, Ci’an, Jax, and Xin’ri rose higher and spread away from the center of the arena while Dav fell past them. The purple lightning that shrouded his form made his location obvious in the dark night sky. It was time to highlight the Gauzewing Monarch’s signature attack and defense. They might not be that dangerous individually but en masse they were one of the reasons no one tried to fly over the Maze. 

At least, they were one of the excuses. Sophia certainly didn’t want to deal with having all of the nearby flying monsters converge on them at once, even if they were several zones away; the stories said it might even trigger monsters to escape from a link-gate if there weren’t enough nearby. No one had ever returned from a flight deep over the Maze, though a few had managed to skip a zone or two. 

The sheet of glittery fabric that was the Gauzewing Monarch closed around Dav. Sophia watched it as it seemed to gather around the lump that was Dav. They’d practiced this as well as they could, but Gauzewings were difficult to capture so this was the first time they’d ever done it for real. The fake fabric undulated around Sophia’s boyfriend as it tried to crush the life out of him.

“It’s not that bad in here,” Dav projected across the mindlink. “Air’s a little stale, but it’s almost a nice massage.”

“Get out of there,” Sophia sent back. “It’s been long enough.”

“If you’re sure,” Dav teased. 

Sophia knew what came next, even if it was hidden by the monster: Dav summoned his sword out of the tattoo that normally hid it. All he had to do was nick the Gauzewing Monarch. They really didn’t like being injured when they thought they had something captured.

The Gauzewing Monarch disintegrated into a storm of shimmering butterflies. Dav quickly dropped below them, then flew to the side and up. With him out of the way, the butterflies quickly returned to their filmy original form and started the chase again.

It was impossible to tell in the darkness, but the butterflies were the reason it was called a Gauzewing Monarch: they were monarch butterflies, at least in appearance. No one was certain if it was a single creature with a weird escape transformation or a colony of monstrous butterflies that could join together to smother their prey. Sophia’s guess was that both were partially true; they weren’t exclusive options. Whatever the truth was, the butterflies were a visual spectacle that worked well against the dark sky and would have been used for the last fight of the day no matter which team was scheduled. 

The butterflies weren’t harmless, either. They could sting, but the true threat was the glitter that fell from them as they flew. It caused extreme drowsiness, which was a threat even if its opponents didn’t actually pass out; they would be slowed and make poor decisions. Sophia was immune because of her necklace and Dav was probably immune the same way almost any poison or venom was ineffective. This one was magical, but that didn’t seem to matter. The rest of the team was more vulnerable, though both the alchemicals they drank before the match started and the masks created by Xin’ri would help. 

With that, they’d established the challenge of the fight for the audience. They had to kill something that would dissolve into hundreds of tiny shapes the moment it was injured without using any wide-ranging attacks. It was supposed to seem far more difficult than it was, though it would stretch their flight capabilities.

There were several possible ways to approach the problem, even with their limitations. The simplest was also the least interesting: kill the butterflies as they appeared. It wasn’t difficult to trigger them and the Gauzewing Monarch only had so many. It would be a long, drawn-out fight but the end would never be in doubt. 

The middle option for showiness was actually the hardest. Somewhere in the Gauzewing Monarch, there were vital organs. There was no outward sign of them, but if they were hit, the Gauzewing would not be able to dissolve into butterflies; it would simply die. There would be no slow mark of decline; it would simply fall. When it would happen was difficult to predict, but it would almost certainly be faster than killing enough of the butterflies.

The showiest option happened to play perfectly into the team’s strengths. When the Gauzewing Monarch split, one of the “butterflies” wasn’t a true butterfly; it was a miniature version of the gauzy original. It covered itself in an illusion to look like all of the others and hid away from enemies instead of charging towards them like the other butterflies. Irritatingly, it could swap places with any butterfly as long as it saw an attack coming. It couldn’t then immediately jump, but even one was enough to make it a pain in the butt for most groups.

Killing the miniature gauzewing wouldn’t destroy the other butterflies but it would prevent them from returning to the Gauzewing form and make them slow to react, almost as if they were affected by their own sleep dust. They could fly, but it took a direct threat to get them to do so; they preferred to stack on top of each other on the vegetation, though they’d also accept a wall or even the ground if that was all that was nearby. Few things hunted the butterflies, as they held very little meat for the sting, especially when they were affected by the sleep glitter, so they seemed to consider themselves safe enough. 

That was the win condition the Flying Stars intended to reach. It was how the Gauzewings were usually captured, though it was also the source of a lot of the difficulty: the butterflies were all too fragile while they were creating a new miniature gauzewing. If everything went well, the butterflies would be gathered after the match and the Gauzewing would be kept for a future match once it was recovered.