106 CVI. | 'When the waters run red...'

It seemed like no one wanted to make the first move. Even the gentle wind had gone, leaving the air so still that Zeff could feel his own heartbeat. And perhaps that wasn't a coincidence. Zeff had heard that a strong enough soul could affect the atmosphere physically.

Indeed, the pressure of the Gargoyle's presence was palpable. Zeff had felt it as soon as he met her, but now it was on another level. Everything seemed heavier. Even breathing felt somehow more difficult. Was this really just the field density of her soul? Filling the air with pure willpower?

It was a warning, he knew. His own body was telling him. This person standing before him was not someone he should fight. This person was a monster. And he was nothing. Thirty years as a servant? A child, by comparison. Helpless.

But no. That wouldn't work on Zeff. He wouldn't succumb to mere dread. The old well wouldn't let him. His pit of boiling hatred. It wouldn't let him forget everything that had brought him here.

Gargoyle or not, this woman was standing between him and his son, between him and the people responsible for Mariana's death. So he maintained his concentration and tried to assess the situation.

The first point was hyper-states. None of the Rainlords were using them yet, but Sanko was already wielding pan-rozum. If any of their reapers moved to merge with them, she would undoubtedly attack. But she probably didn't know who had which abilities, so she wouldn't know whom she should target first. What they needed was a distraction so that Octavia and Rayen could safely merge with Wendy and Lonogren. Perhaps he could provide that for them.

At least, that was what Zeff was thinking until Octavia Redwater surprised everyone by stepping forward.

"Everyone, wait a moment," the little old lady said. "I have something I need to show you." She ripped the top of her cane off, revealing a white inner piece, which she grasped with one hand.

And immediately, Zeff could sense it, as could everyone else, he was sure.

Octavia pulled the rest free. A white blade, thin like a rapier but so much more deadly than that. Because it was made from bone.

Zeff didn't need to look any closer. The foul aura leaking from it told him everything he needed to know.

Sanko's eyes filled the holes in her mask. "Where did you get that?"

"My grandson, Diego," said Octavia. "Said he nearly killed himself trying to use it, so he thought I would like it as a birthday present. He is now my favorite grandson."

"You fool," said Sanko. "Do you know whose bones those are?"

"Sure do."

"You'll kill half your allies. Or all of them."

"Oh, don't worry about that. I've been practicing. It is pretty terrifying, though, isn't it? Are you sure you still want to fight us? I promise we won't think any less of you if you decide to back down now."

"Quaint. But your trinket won't stop me. I faced the monster it belonged to, you may recall."

Octavia frowned. "Did you really? Y'know, I was kind of hoping that was just a rumor."

"You are an amusing person," said Sanko. "I only wish I were better at holding back."

"Oh, I know the feeling. It's quite frustrating, isn't it?"

But Sanko was through talking, it seemed.

The Gargoyle took a single step, and a series of ripples ran across the pavement as if it were a pond, unsettling the Rainlords' footing for a moment before the ground came shooting up all around them in a dozen geysers of living stone.

Octavia responded with a flash of her blade, and shadow gushed forth, pure blackness, enveloping the six of them in a brief cage that exploded outward, knocking the rocks down and letting the Rainlords free.

By this point, they were already merging with their reapers.

Zeff could feel his mind shifting. Ax's mind was there now, too. He could feel every emotion that Ax felt, share every thought as if it were his own. And the memories. They were an ocean. A thousand lifetimes, and hardly a thing forgotten. Names and faces, histories and places, firsthand knowledge and endless information.

The pan-forma merge completed itself. The normal enhancements paled in comparison to this feeling. This was beyond adrenaline. This was fire with all of the heat and none of the agony. Burning in glory, flirting with death, certain in the strength of their two minds.

When the moment passed, and Zeff and Axiolis returned to the present, they were already mid-stride, running adjacent Rayen and Evangelina. Santos and Socorro were running with Octavia in the opposite direction.

Everyone was moving now. The dozens of other Rainlords all around them were already either opening fire from a distance or rushing in to provide upfront support. Rayen Merlo's flesh was in turns vanishing and reappearing, but always with a faintly violet glow. And Zeff, of course, was launching a storm of frozen spikes toward Sanko.

But it was Octavia who got to the woman first. The white blade shuddered visibly, and Zeff saw light bend around Sanko's torso, distorting like a bubble in space itself. It was similar to the destruction type abilities, but this was a single point, not a path, and the sound was different. This was the rushing of wind past his ears. He felt the violent shift in gravity, as well, pulling him and everyone else suddenly forward.

In an instant, he watched as Sanko's body imploded, sucked into the bubble and spaghettified.

And just like that, the bubble was gone again, disappeared into thin air, leaving a small crater in the ground along with the dusty remains of Sanko's body.

But there was no blood--no bits of flesh, even though a few busted stones lay where Sanko's feet should have been.

She was not dead, rather obviously. The Rainlords needed no assurances on that point. Even if they had believed that the Gargoyle could be defeated so easily, there was still the matter of that oppressive presence having not diminished whatsoever.

It was common enough knowledge that the Gargoyle's power involved earth in some way, but if not for Axiolis' memories, Zeff would have lacked any genuine details. Instead, he was able to recall tales from half a century ago about Sanko's fearsome control of integration.

Hers was an ability type most often relegated to the supporting role, but she had lived long enough to become an exception. She'd used pan-rozum to do more than simply fuse elements together. She'd learned to fuse herself into them, to become an entity of dirt and rock and stone. Integration may not have allowed her to create her own elements, even with pan-rozum, but that was a small price to pay when she could wield almost every element of every type of ground in the world as an extension of her body.

Everything beneath the Rainlords' feet belonged to the Gargoyle now. Axiolis didn't know what her maximum range was, but anything less than a kilometer was just wishful thinking, Zeff knew.

And it was no surprise when the ground began to tremble.

The six retreated to the air--Rayen's group on a platform of ice, Octavia's group on one of platinum, courtesy of the Lady Socorro.

Rather than pursue them, however, Sanko went after their support. A tidal wave of rock and dirt launched up and swallowed a building full of Rainlords some thirty meters away. One moment, the structure and all the people were there, and the next, there lay only flat land and a few sinking chunks of broken roof tiles.

There had hardly been time to react. More Rainlords were rushing up the hill to the Keep's entrance, but if the six heads didn't hold the Gargoyle back, then those new Rainlords were practically dead already.

Rayen went full tilt. Pan-rozum brought out the full strength of her alteration ability, transforming herself into a being of ultraviolet light. To the naked eye, her flesh was almost invisible, save only for the dimmest of purple outlines around her body, making her clothes appear to float in space. Zeff, however, could at least see the woman's soul now--a kind of translucently blue whirlpool that completely filled the space where her body should have been.

And in a blink, she was gone, launching her assault at the speed of ultraviolet light. She carved a swath into the ground so fast that it left a second wave of exploding rock in her wake. She zigzagged faster than any human eye could follow, and then focused her efforts into a concentrated burst of nigh invisible light, creating a shock wave that left a massive crater behind and a fresh hole in the Keep's front wall.

That seemed to grab Sanko's attention.

The other five heads attacked as well--Octavia with another singularity that sucked up one of the Keep's towers, Zeff with a pair of building-sized spears of ice dropped from the heavens, Socorro with a gigantic slab of platinum dropped above the Keep, Santos with a series of earth-shattering explosions, and Evangelina with a splash of fuming acid that melted half the Keep's gate.

Parson Miles burst up above the castle and knocked Socorro's slab away with an arching tornado. Lawrence and his men would not be far behind, Zeff knew.

But of course, they were not the real threat.

The sundered earth convulsed and bloated skyward, and from it, a gargantuan figure began to rise.

It became a giant, born of rock and clay and dirt and grass, carrying whole trees and sidewalks up its body. Its head and shoulders alone were enough to dwarf the crumbling castle by its side.

The Rainlords wasted no time attacking. In unison, explosions and materials and gunfire and beams of nearly invisible light all bombarded the earthy titan with a furious maelstrom, carving out chunks of its body and causing it to shower chipped rocks across the battlefield.

But it wasn't enough. The giant's body repaired itself as quickly as they could damage it. Even a pair of rapid singularities from Octavia did little more than make the golem shiver before refilling the gaping caverns in its stone flesh.

The ground all but vanished beneath the beast's clawed feet, sunken in so greatly that it flattened the hill that they had all been standing on. Rhein's Keep shifted as its foundation did, losing many of its broken pieces to a sudden landslide but otherwise remaining intact.

The beast grew to its full height, a living skyscraper for Rheinhal, complete with the same devil's face as Sanko's mask, this time bearing a devil's body to go along with it. It had the hunched posture of a gorilla with its short legs and long, powerful arms; and from its huge back jutted two enormous wings, crooked and grotesque and almost certainly incapable of flight, if that mattered. It probably didn't, Zeff felt.

From his position of momentary safety atop an icy platform, Zeff reached for everything he could muster from his mind. Pan-forma burned inside him, granting three important increases: soul defenses, physical regeneration, and connectivity of his creations. The latter bonus was often overlooked somewhat, but it meant that Zeff could create complex structures more easily, treat multiple creations as one in his mind, and even have his materialized mass regenerate on its own, if he wanted it to.

And he called on each of those material enhancements now as he created something that had been in his mind for years but that he had never quite been able to manage without forma to help him.

The body of it was a long tube of soul-strengthened ice, thick enough to withstand cannon fire--because that was exactly what this was going to be: an enormous cannon. Only without the fire.

It required an explosion, which was the difficulty of the trick. If the explosion were too weak, the cannon would be useless. If it were too strong, the cannon itself would burst apart. He and Axiolis had to strike the correct balance between power and structural integrity.

Zeff plugged up the cannon and filled it with warm, swirling water. The time was ticking now, because the surrounding ice would freeze the water if he took too long, but Zeff knew the timing. From there, two things needed to happen in near succession. First, he had to create a vein of superheated steam inside the sloshing water. The heat would cause the water to boil in a violent flash, resulting in the explosion he needed. Second, he needed to materialize the soul-strengthened cannonball with his maximized velocity. This way, the explosive velocity of the steam would increase the already moving cannonball, granting it much greater punch than Zeff could give it otherwise. And it all had to be done in an instant, with immense precision.

With full concentration, Zeff wrenched one open palm upward and created the vein of superheated steam, and with the other hand, this one a closed fist, he threw a backhanded punch, creating the cannonball of solid ice while simultaneously unplugging the cannon.

The cannon jumped from the force of the explosion, and the cannonball rocketed into the sky and barreled into the Gargoyle's stomach, shattering on impact.

And Sanko hardly even seemed to notice.

Zeff scowled inside his own mind and just kept firing. He'd hardly expected it to end the fight, but still, this was more than a little frustrating. His ice became all but lost in the huge flurry of other attacks that the Rainlords were launching. Multiple paths of destruction, little more than splinters against the Gargoyle's skin. Octavia's singularities managed to poke bigger holes into her, but they didn't seem to be doing very much.

Then the Gargoyle finally launched an attack of her own.

Earthen spires shot out of the giant's body in every direction--thousands of car-sized arrows looking for Rainlord blood. And finding it, too, because Sanko also chose that moment to send an earthquake tearing through the ground, throwing everyone off balance.

Zeff tried to avoid them by leaping off his platform, but one spire took his head clean off, along with his arms and chest.

Even without his brain, however, the Lord Elroy remained conscious, still able to sense the relative positions of other souls. Pan-forma allowed his mind to reside with Axiolis', and reapers, of course, did not require a physical brain for their own consciousness. So instead of regenerating from his splattered brain matter, Zeff's body regenerated from his legs as they tumbled to the ground. Pan-forma would always regrow the body from the largest surviving section of their merged souls, regardless of whether it was the head or the little toe or only the soul without any flesh whatsoever.

In mere seconds, Zeff had a skull again, and after that, his gray eyes returned as well, allowing him to witness the result of Sanko's attack. Spears of jagged rock littered the uneven earth, having created a sloped field of stone spires, almost like a maze. Aftershocks were still making the ground quiver.

And the blood. Pools of it were everywhere, growing with each moment as dozens of Rainlords lay dead or nearly so, smashed beneath piles of stone.

Octavia and Rayen were still attacking Sanko, Zeff saw. Evangelina, Socorro, and Santos looked like they would be on their feet momentarily, but he also spotted Parson and Lawrence descending from the broken cliff that the Keep now stood upon.

Zeff didn't even think. His body just started moving on its own as he felt the old well boil to the utmost brink, ready to explode now that he finally had those two men in sight. No doubt, they were hoping to finish Zeff's brethren off while they were down.

He was absolutely not going to let that happen.

The old well loosed an explosion of burning water. Not steam. That wasn't the kind of water that could hold his hatred. Only lakefire could fulfill that purpose. Flaming water, eternally burning and boiling, never extinguishing or evaporating.

This was the old well's purpose. To preserve the ingredient he needed for when the moment presented itself, the moment that demanded explosive refusal. And it worked. Almost too easily. It had been many years, but Zeff felt the response. Emergence found him once again.

A mountain of ice blinked into existence, already hurtling toward Parson and Lawrence. The two men noticed it rather immediately and diverted courses--Parson zooming up and away, while Lawrence launched himself down toward the three Rainlords via a radium projectile.

Unfortunately for Lawrence, however, there was a second mountain of ice, and it clobbered him into the cliffside.

Before Zeff could press his attack any further, however, a tornado swirled down from the sky and whipped him and the other Rainlords into the air. Zeff coated himself in ice, but the oncoming blades of wind chiseled through it in rapid succession and slashed his flailing body from a hundred different angles.

Then he was free again, left to fall back down to the ground in peace. It was Rayen's doing, he saw. She and Parson were both practically invisible, but their souls could be seen in direct conflict. A beam of ultraviolet light had gored a swirling vortex through its center, but somehow, the vortex was preventing that same light from escaping. A series of booms rang out as they struggled there in the sky, but Zeff had already turned away from their fight in order to focus on his own.

Evangelina and Santos had gone off to support Octavia, and so it was only Zeff and Socorro now, perched on a field of half-broken spires as they readied to face Xavier Lawrence.

After going up against Sanko and Parson, Lawrence almost seemed like an easy fight. But that was wrong, Zeff knew, and he reminded himself that this was not a man to be underestimated.

A radium dome arrived first, trying to bathe the two Rainlords in soul-enhanced radiation, but Zeff was ready with four enormous pillars of ice--more enormous than he had even intended them to be, in fact--and they knocked the dome away before it could do any damage.

Then came a bed of radium, instead, and Socorro and Zeff both platformed themselves away. Zeff's platform, however, didn't let up. It grew upward and sideways and then back down toward Lawrence with increasing speed. It was almost too fast, like flying on a rocket made of ice, and Zeff barely managed to maintain control.

But his reliance on only ice was limiting him, he realized. The decreased temperature made it more difficult to produce. So this time, he reached for water, as much of it as he could create.

And a tsunami appeared.

It reached nearly as high as the Gargoyle's head and came crashing down on Lawrence, who merely shielded himself with a radium shelter. The water hissed angrily against the white metal, making it jostle from the sheer force of the wave, but the radium held strong nonetheless.

But Zeff already knew what he wanted to do next.

Spikes of radium jumped out of Lawrence's shell, and Zeff met them with a pair of pressurized water drills. Previously, he'd only been able to make them the size of his thumb, but now, the drills were bigger than each hand. So when Zeff pushed them into the spikes, they carved the radium down and left cracking holes in the wall, allowing the Rainlord to do the rest of the work with brute strength alone.

He punched through, and Lawrence was there, right in his face, having caught Zeff's fist with his own radium-coated palm.

With both men wielding super strength, a brief hand-to-hand struggle occurred, and for a moment, they were able to look each other in the eye.

"I'm sorry for what I am about to do, Zeff."

"Don't apologize for dying, Lawrence."

Zeff coated himself in spikes of his own, aiming to skewer the old man with them, but Lawrence released him and used a sudden block of radium to knock Zeff and his spikes back.

Zeff toppled back, bouncing atop a row of spires. A hail of platinum shards bought him time to find his footing again.

But the General did not press his attack yet, Zeff saw. Instead, Lawrence's body flashed pristinely white as pan-rozum transformed him into pure radium. And his body did not tarnish with air exposure like normal radium did. Rather, it began to glow fiercely blue, even in this bright daylight.

And Zeff knew what that meant. Lawrence was pushing the radiation to absurd levels with the power of his soul. Already, Zeff could feel its debilitating effects, attacking his flesh on a cellular level, weakening muscles and hindering regeneration. This skill was the reason Lawrence was called the Blue Bear.

But Zeff was not in the mood to be intimidated. He lobbed another tsunami and followed in its wake, preparing to materialize another drill. A rapid series of platinum javelins came flying to his aid as well, providing extra support.

Lawrence's glowing body pressed through the water, hissing inside a billowing cloud of steam, and the man launched a wall of radium spikes toward Zeff, each one glowing blue as well.

Zeff propelled himself out of their path with a vertical platform and pulled out his two-finger hand guns. Icy bullets burst forth as Zeff sailed through the air.

A glowing cage materialized around Zeff in midair. He immediately felt the radiation degrading his body, slowing his movement, and he knew that it would spell the end for him if he stayed inside it for more than a few seconds. His water drill punched through, and Zeff fell toward the ground again.

Jaws of radium leapt up to meet him, and Zeff responded by filling the open maw with a sudden geyser. The water shot up with enough force to carry Zeff with it, removing him from danger. He caught himself with a twisting slope of ice, allowing him to create a path that brought him right back down to both feet again.

But Lawrence was there now--a figure of blue heat, looming directly in front of Zeff--and the radiation was at its most potent, destroying the Rainlord's muscles and numbing each of his physical senses.

A platinum wrecking ball slammed into the General, but not before he grabbed Zeff's arm. Rather than be taken along with Lawrence, however, the limb tore free, spewing blood and melted flesh from the gaping wound.

Even with pan-forma, Zeff needed a few extra moments to recover. The effects of soul-empowered radiation lingered still, and he could see his own skin forming a puddle of slop around his hands and knees. Lawrence, on the other hand, would be requiring no such time.

The Lady Socorro Garza picked up the slack. She hadn't stopped attacking once, materializing boulder after boulder, pinballing the Vanguardian General around in an effort to keep him off balance. He seemed to have had enough of that, however, and punted the next boulder right back at her. It dematerialized before reaching her, and she started creating multiple boulders at once, all gunning for Lawrence from different directions. Lawrence met each of them with soaring blue lances, sparing one for Socorro as well. She barely managed to sidestep it, but a horizontal blade jumped out of its shaft at the last moment and slashed her neck and arm, very nearly decapitating her.

Then an earthquake interrupted, halting both attackers as they had to stop and steady themselves.

To Zeff's amazement, the Madame Redwater had not yet fallen. She'd been holding off the Gargoyle for a solid minute without assistance, keeping the endless streams of rock at bay before they could smother and crush her.

The black shadow swirled around Octavia in a mad frenzy, dicing up the rocks it could get to; and the ones it couldn't, it left to Octavia's magnesium transfiguration. With pan-rozum, the little old woman was no more, replaced with a white hot flame that burned with such intensity as to render Zeff hardly capable of looking at it. Rocks soared into that bright core and were rendered to ash. And intermittently, a singularity would pop up as well and devour a chunk of the Gargoyle's body.

She was a whirlwind of light and darkness now, exuding more power than Zeff had ever witnessed in a single Rainlord. He couldn't tell what had become of Evangelina and Santos, but if they had gotten caught up in the middle of that chaos, then they were probably not faring so well right about now.

The ground beneath their fight sunk lower and lower as the Gargoyle continued consuming it, requiring more for her giant form as Octavia kept destroying it. But more and more, the Gargoyle was getting closer to that white hot flame, swarming it with increasing mass. And soon, the heart of the fire was no longer visible, engulfed too greatly in earth.

Then, in a blink, Rayen's swirling form was there in front of Zeff, wrapping her plump arms around him. And in another blink, Zeff was suddenly standing on a bridge somewhere, confused. Until the acceleration sickness caught up to him. He bent over to retch, and for a moment, every muscle in his body felt like it had disintegrated. Pan-forma struggled to heal him, and Rayen said something, but Zeff didn't catch it. When he looked up, she was gone, replaced with the half-smashed corpse of Evangelina Stroud.

After a beat, Rayen reappeared with Socorro Garza, who fell to her knees and heaved all over the pavement.

Rayen said something again, and this time, Zeff could actually hear it.

"We are going back for the others," she said in two voices. "If we are gone longer than twenty seconds, run and do not look back."

And before he could so much as protest, the woman was gone again, leaving only a trail of faintly visible light to indicate the direction she'd gone. It led toward a cityscape in the distance.

A cityscape. At the foot of an enormous mountain range.

Rheinhal, Zeff finally realized. The hilltop that appeared to be moving must have been Sanko. Rayen had carried the three of them to safety.

At the speeds that Rayen's body moved, a normal human would have been rent to dust. If it weren't for Zeff's passive soul defenses, he knew that he and Axiolis would not have survived, either.

Such were the limits of Rayen's ability. She could move within one of two speed ranges: that of an unaided human, or that of pure light. Everything in between those two extremes was impossible. And unfortunately, this also meant that Rayen could not bring any of the weaker servants here without maiming or killing them. Even carrying reapers by themselves would not work because it was impossible for her to maintain a strong enough grip on them. If she tried, her soul would simply tear through the reaper, instead.

Moreover, the speed was a danger to Rayen herself, Axiolis knew, on top of being difficult to control. If she went too far with a single leap, her own body would break down, taking the merged souls with it. It was the same for every "light-wielder" who dared to use pan-rozum.

For now, Zeff would have to stifle his anger at Rayen for forcing him to retreat. He understood why she had done it, of course, but still. His and Axiolis' collective pride wanted to rush back to the battlefield at that very moment.

But he didn't. Reason won out as he helped the regenerating Evangelina to her feet and then did the same for Socorro. He tried to explain the abrupt change in circumstances.

And he remembered Rayen's words. Twenty seconds, she had said. That didn't seem like nearly enough time to wait before deciding on a full retreat. Zeff wasn't even done talking to Socorro and Evangelina before time expired.

Nonetheless, they waited, and it very quickly became clear that Rayen was not going to return.

They had a decision to make.

"We must not delay," said Socorro. "Rayen gave us the opportunity to run. We should trust her judgment and go."

Zeff wanted to argue, and so did Evangelina, by the look on her face. But neither did. Difficult as it was to admit, Socorro was probably correct. Even if it meant abandoning all of their forces. Abandoning Francisco...

Socorro started walking, and after a fashion, the Lady Stroud and the Lord Elroy followed.

They had taken too long, however.

Zeff and Axiolis sensed someone approaching from the sky, moving at jet speed. Captain General Parson Miles was not going to let them flee so easily, it would seem.