Sworded Affair

Chapter 181 : To Infinity and Beyond

Soon after Astrid noticed her would-be kidnappers, they too detected her presence. Under her watchful eye, each member of the party palmed a straw effigy, wrought in a crude facsimile of each man's likeness. A grid of black and white squares appeared, like a chessboard's flying cousin, with an image of herself in the centre square. Each man placed their effigy upon the grid, forming a loose cordon, and as they did so, their bodies began to fade away.

"They don't know they've been spotted," she realised. "They'd never risk a lengthy, channelled teleportation otherwise."

Reaching out with her borrowed magic, Astrid grabbed hold of the ambient magic in her immediate vicinity, and began to twist.

"A warped curve here, a little invisible edge there, and just a little off the top for everyone."

As was true in most fields, magical or otherwise, it was far easier to destroy than to create. Teleportation magic was complex to begin with, add the requirement that a dozen combatants arrived at precise coordinates in the same moment, and it became something that took a good long time to cast. Conversely, Astrid only needed a few seconds to thoroughly trap her surroundings, as well as prepare a trump card, just in case the confrontation went poorly. As for the remaining time, she spent that with her staff raised, pointing at the optimal angle for overlapping fire, assuming her opponents all survived her first defence.

A dozen men vanished into the aether, and only half of them arrived at their destination. The other half emerged in eruptions of gore, torn to shreds by Astrid's spatial mines, rictus grins across their faces and their eyes maddened with primordial terror. Her staff unleashed its charge, burning two more unlucky souls to ash in a gout of sickly purple fire. Astrid had expected the survivors to duck and roll, prioritising their own survival in the face of enemy action, as mercenaries and thugs were wont to do. Instead, to her surprise, they squared their backs, stared death in the eye, and fired at centre mass with two tasers and a sedative dart.

Astrid slammed the butt of her staff to the ground, causing a sudden tremor beneath everyone's feet. Theoretically, this affected everyone equally; in reality, she was the only one prepared for its arrival, so the advantage was asymmetric. The violent shake threw their aim off, with both tasers going wide, while a pair of darts bounced off of her chest and back, unable to pierce the enchanted spidersilk that made up her robes. Still, her opponents were professional, and quick to regain their footing. In the time it took Astrid to breathe in heavily, they retook the initiative, discarding their ineffective ranged weaponry in favour of their stun batons and nets, approaching carefully from intercardinal.

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Astrid allowed them to close in, before breathing out: the thick green miasma swallowed both men to her front, their screams fading quickly to faint gurgling as their insides liquified, bathed in corruption. Spinning on her heel, Astrid swept her staff wide, catching the incoming baton and beginning to force it back, her staff having the advantage in weight and reach. The second survivor wasn't idle though, and took the chance to toss his net, catching both Astrid and his partner, utterly uncaring of any friendly fire. His partner opened his mouth, possibly to protest, only to receive a second blast of miasma right to the face.

This second wave was far smaller than before, little more than half the potency of the first breath, but it was still enough to melt everything above his nose. As that included the human brain, he was a dead man seconds later, falling limp against the net.

"Echo Victor Three."

On the downside, with his partner dead, the sole surviving kidnapping lost any hesitation in using the net's additional capabilities; with a single three word command, electricity flooded the filament. Astrid grit her teeth, forcing her mana to manifest externally, creating a defensive coating along her skin that was effective, but very expensive to maintain.

"Finally got you," the last man standing grinned, pulling a fist-sized green cube out of his storage item.

The faces of the cube were each split in nine, and rearranged themselves with every passing second, like a demented, magical Rubik's Cube. The man seemed content to wait, letting Astrid wrestle with the electricity attacking her reserves. It cost more than half her mana, more than the eleven dead men had required, but eventually Astrid was able to overpower the net and its limited battery, tearing it to shreds with an explosion of force.

"That's checkmate," her opponent interrupted, pointing the cube in her direction; no longer shifting, and with a pixelated smiley face covering the side facing her.

Abruptly, Astrid's remaining mana reserves vanished, leaving her with a gnawing emptiness she hadn't felt in years. Breathing out, she found that instead of the final charge of miasma, only clean air emerged from her lungs; which were empty of the imbuements characteristic of a wielder of decay.

"That won't work on me," the man laughed. "You put up a good fight, lass, even forced me to use this Heaven Canceller. But you can't do anything now, not with it active , and suppressing all the magic the System gave you. Now, you're nothing more than an ordinary, teenage girl, so give it up."

Astrid inclined her head, seeming to acknowledge his point. As the kidnapper hooked the cube on his belt and approached, confident in his greater physicality, she reached into her storage ring, pulled a Glock 17, and shot him in the head.

[They always forget that storage items don't belong to the System. Amateurs.]