War of Dawn - Chapter 27

Chapter 27: Eliza, the Boundless Umbra

The air around the revolutionaries’ fort has seemingly tripled in weight the moment Eliza stepped onto it. Silence fills their plot of the forest like a flood as even the faint buzzes and chirps of the nightly creatures vanishes in deference to the commandant’s presence. Eliza keeps her gaze set onward and, yet, all around feel her crushing presence, like a force of nature. Her anger-filled aura alone sends mighty shivers down Hilda’s spine and she’d wager that applies to everyone else – none dare move a muscle, not even Peter or the Wraith.

Hilda finds her mind beset torn between two feelings: relief that Eliza came to their rescue and dread over what’ll happen to them now that their stunt has blown up in their faces so. But Paula’s the one wo seems to be having it worse; her bulging, fearful eyes are locked on Eliza, as though a veritable Altr stands before her.

If anyone has half a mind to say anything, they still don’t. The first sound that cuts the silence comes from the commandant herself, her words bearing the impact of a charging ox that’s set on goring Hilda and Paula: “A Wraith, Necromancer and several civilians… Who are they?”

Neither girl answers, fear having taking away the movement of their tongues. Eliza’s words barely register with Hilda, her racing heart and trembling breath echoing across her skull and muffling any outside noise. Her trance is broken only when blades of green wind, as sharp as a sword’s edge, cut across the ground in front of Hilda and Paula, carving a meter-deep gash into the soil.

“My patience hangs by a thread, Novitiates. Who are these people?” Eliza asks again, her impassive voice stomping over the panicked gasps of the two girls.

Hilda reflexively swallows, struggling to summon back her voice through her dry throat. Slowly it returns, emerging from her lips in meek and subservient tones. “R-Revolutionaries, ma’am.”

“Zorros de Valdivia…” Eliza mumbles, more to herself than anyone else.

“Y-Yes, ma’am,” Hilda continues. “They were working with the Necros.”

The commandant finally moves her head, looking around at the wounded revolutionaries still collapsed throughout the fort. Those who haven’t lost consciousness from the wounds inflicted by Hilda and Paula dare not do anything in this clash far beyond their stature. As Eliza’s gaze sets upon each and every one of them, Hilda sees them flinch like fearful animals.

“I see...” Eliza’s voice remains ever impassive, though Hilda feels in her bones the pressure of the commandant’s rising anger. “Then I needn’t show mercy.”

Hilda stops short, her brow curving with a tinge of hesitation. “You’re going to kill them all, ma’am…?”

“Is there a problem?” the commandant asks, unmoving and uncaring, as though her question was beyond inane.

“They are not Necros. Couldn’t we just arrest them… or…” Hilda voice fails her halfway through the question when Eliza’s head turns to stare into her daunted eyes. Her throat feels like sandpaper and the air that flows through her nose burns as if she just tried to inhale a handful of cinnamon.

Plumes of flame erupt around Eliza, trailing embers around Hilda’s foot and passing a clear message for her to shut up right this instant. “Those who, to further their agendas, cooperate with the enemies of all life in this world will share in their fate. It is as simple as that.”

Uttering those words, the commandant steps towards the immobile Wraith, unbreakable poise behind every motion of her slender figure. Peter backs away with every one of Eliza’s steps, waving his trembling hands to gather waves of the earth elemental. From underneath his hood, his green eyes are wide in panic.

“S-So there’s another Scion around… That w-won’t change anything!” he yells, though the fearful tone of his voice betrays his bravado.

When Eliza continues her approach, Peter flings an EarthBolt towards her. The spell arches across the air but as it approaches the commandant, it simply unravels and dissipates into a soft cloud of orange energies. Still, Eliza stops. Her sight shifts past the Wraith, setting upon Peter, and despite her mask, Hilda can see in his flinching countenance that he’s very aware of that.

“Your kind fancies yourselves ‘weavers of death’ and, yet, you can’t tell when you’re staring at your own… Fool.” Eliza spits.

“W-We’ll see about that, wench! Kill her!” Peter cries out, commanding the Wraith onward with a stressed motion of his hand.

And, still, nothing. The Wraith does not budge an inch, like it’s turned to stone. The flame in its chest flitters madly as though it is struggling to not be snuffed out against a mighty gale. The fiend no longer twitches with anticipation of new victims or laughs at their powerlessness. From within the swirling darkness in its face, Hilda can still hear its faint breath as it sniffs around. But the breathing is now different, reaching Hilda’s ears with a note she is all too familiar with: trembling fear.

“What in blazes…?!” Peter gasps as his panic doubles with every passing minute. “Vlad! What is your Wr—”

Peter roars at his back, turning to question his peer. That is when he, Hilda and Paula notice it: Vladimir has left. So focused they were in the battle against the Wraith that they never even saw it happen.

“The one you’re looking for left before I arrived, it seems. A wise man, cutting his losses,” Eliza says, her tone not varying one octave. Despite her opponents’ increasingly desperate and unpredictable state, she faces them like they’re mere pebbles at her feet. “‘Do as you must to win but, if victory’s impossible, do as you must to survive’; rule three, one of your ilk once told me… You’ve been made a scapegoat of.”

Peter’s countenance flares with rage and befuddlement at this betrayal. “Vlad, you bastard… Was it because of Carla? I swear I’ll get you for this after I’m done with them…!” he growls to the memory of his long gone ally. His attention, though, is brought back to the present as his body is buffeted by a shockwave that spreads throughout the area. It strikes Hilda and Paula like a boulder chucked at their chests, taking the air out of their lungs and kicking them back.

Peter turns around in time to see the aura around Eliza erupts in a bright flash, horror setting upon his already worried eyes as three golden circles manifest at her back. “Reality isn’t so kind as to indulge your delusions, Necromancer.”

There's an explosion of light, dizzying in its radiance, and when it subsides Eliza's outfit has shifted into an imposing suit of heavy armor, as black as night but with white silver trim. The layered plates buckle close and thick like a fortress, from her tassets up to the wide pauldrons. A flowing red cape wraps around the base of her armored neck, matching the faded red and white tabard she wears underneath it all.

Eliza's masked face is hidden behind a towering helmet, with a tall upper rim and a cross-shape opening from forehead to mouth. Inside, however, lies only an impenetrable darkness. Were it not for the commandant's crushing presence, one would assume the armor to be empty.

Peter, now feeling the full might of said presence, crumbles away. Whatever spell he was readying in his very quivering hand fades and the earth element vanishes from between his fingers.

“An Ascended…! Oh, gods—” he yelps and takes one step back, on the verge of making a run for it, before being stopped. Blue sparkles glitter around him and, before he has the chance to finish his thought, his entire lower body’s flash frozen in a crackling explosion of ice.

An outrageous rumble cuts the silence over kilometers of forest as the earth around the fort starts quaking like it’s is being torn apart. And it is: one by one, massive blocks of stone and soil as tall as Valarheim itself rise from beneath, tossing aside the mighty trees like pitiful bushes. Hilda covers her ears, each roaring noise of the earth putting to shame even the loudest explosions of Litnir’s mines. When the dust settles down, the entirety of the fort is isolated, encased by walls that look as though they could withstand a mountain crashing down on them.

“You’re not going anywhere, filth. Neither are your cohorts,” Eliza’s voice emerges, ever muffled, from within her helmet. “Just accept your end with whatever dignity a traitor to mankind has.”

Opening her empty hand, a weapon materializes out of thin air: an enormous Alterium scythe. With a black oaken haft and a red, triangular pommel, the weapon stands almost as tall as her. Atop it all, a jagged, talon-shaped blade of the traditional Alterium reddish brown, large enough that Hilda figures even Ryouma and his Zanbatou would be impressed.

Peter stares helplessly at Eliza and his frozen legs, the ice sinking deep into the earth; too deep for any normal human to uproot. His entire body is shaking, though Hilda can’t tell whether it’s from fear or from the piercing cold – likely both. Struggling to bring his hands together, he conjures back a pittance of the earth elemental.

“Move you worthless creature! Get her or she’ll kill us all!” he shouts at the top of his strained voice, flinging a pathetic excuse of an EarthBolt that pops at the Wraith’s feet. His mind is too far destabilized to cast any proper spells.

Still, the message seems to have gotten across. Despite the fear that mars the fiend’s soft breath, it slowly pulls itself into a fighting stance. Its bones creak and jut out from all corners of its forearms, while his muscles tense up, nearly doubling in size as it musters all the strength it didn’t need to use against the Novitiates.

With an enraged roar unlike anything it uttered since arriving, the Wraith blasts off towards Eliza, its mighty feet cracking the soil beneath. The commandant answers by raising her left hand; a yellow sphere of light swirls into existence within her palm, tiny and, yet, shining as bright as the midday sun. Hilda and Paula can barely stand to look at it though, fighting their rebellious eyes to keep them open.

The air encircling Eliza trembles and swirls, bringing forth dozens of portals of darkness. The commandant flicks her fingers out and the sphere bursts into countless beams of light that fly into the portals. Before the Wraith has even taken five steps forward – before it, or anyone, even realizes what’s happened – the fight is over.

One portal cracks open below, firing off a golden blast that shoves the Wraith airborne and reduces one its legs to a charred stump. Then two portals open, then ten, fifty, a hundred of them. From every single one a beam emerges, pouring a barrage of light that pierces and pummels the Wraith around like a weightless ball. One by one, the beams converge on the fiend, encircling like a gilded cage. Unstoppable. A lone second is all it takes; when the beams disappear in a flare of golden energies, there is nothing. No blood, no meat, not a single trace to indicate that the Wraith was ever there.

The bafflement in Hilda’s face is only rivaled by the utter shock that has broken across Peter’s. He can’t even bring himself to say anything, producing merely baffled stutters from his mouth. Slowly Peter slumps in defeat within his icy confinement, as a convict who’s just realized that he’s no measure to avoid the noose.

If anything, Hilda’s contempt towards him is gone, as the moment Eliza unleashed her power, she became the center of the entire universe. The menace she usually feels from the commandant has grown overwhelming, multiple times greater than normal. Even at their angriest, Hilda’s never felt anything like this from the other generals – an ocean of tangible, devastating hatred and contempt towards the Necromancer and his undead servant.

Eliza stabs her scythe’s pommel onto the ground and, immediately, two portals spin into existence beneath Hilda and Paula; there’s a white flash and, when their eyes adjust, the two girls find themselves far outside the fort’s boundaries. The commandant is nowhere in sight, though. It is then that, as suddenly as the previous one, another massive tremor rips through the area. But it is not new pillars of stone being summoned from the ground.

Hilda’s jaw all but falls off her head, and goosebumps spread across her skin, as she watches the entirety of the fort ahead, and its surrounding stony palisade, slowly rise off the earth. Little by little, the plot of land ascends into the air like a hot air balloon, pushing aside the canopies of the large trees in its path. Massive chunks of soil and rock fall back towards the gaping crater left in the forest below, as if fleeing from what’s to come.

The fort floats up hundreds of meters into the night sky; it is then that Hilda notices a speck of dark blue light shining in the middle of the stars. Eliza, who, with a wave of her hand, brings forth three wide, runed circles at her feet. As the lines dance, they take the form of a lone drawing across the entire spell: a spiral.

“Set your eyes upon the bottomless fissure, the gateway to the void. May your rotten souls find rest in its bowels. Creperum. Canalis. Fatum. Inanis.” The glyph shines upon her words and disappears.

Eliza brings her hands together and, inbetween, a small, pulsating orb of the dark elemental materializes out of thin air. The orb surges as soon as it takes form, unleashing waves and streaks of dark energies, erupting with static electricity that shoots off from the air around it. Rays of dark blue light fly out from Eliza’s fingers and the small orb starts to twist upon itself.

The rumbling noises of the fort fade away; in fact, all sound fades away, even Hilda’s breath and her beating heart. Like reality itself has decided to take cover, the only thing anyone hears is a very deep thrum, soft and, yet, incredibly loud. It comes from within the orb, now a spiraling sphere of the dark elemental.

Hilda sees a burst of white light and, with that, the orb shoots off from Eliza’s hands; like a comet it tears through the night with a sparkling trail and crashes into the fort. Peter and the revolutionaries scream in fear but are immediately snuffed out; the thrum disappears as a wave of black energy explodes from the center floating island. The spiraling sphere begins to grow, expanding with each second, and, soon, what once had the size of an apple is as big as a two-story house. And it shows no sign of stopping.

The spell churns, creating a swirling maelstrom of darkness and, at the eye of the storm, the fort is torn apart. Its wooden structures, the revolutionaries’ possessions and equipment, food, the nearby trees and everyone caught in its grip are pulled together and crushed from all sides. All is flattened, twisting and stretching to the width of a strand of hair and beyond before being dragged into the dark abyss.

As the spell continues to grow, the very space around it distorts; the light of the stars, the fabric of the world, like an unraveling tapestry, all swirl and spiral helplessly as they are pulled inside the pitch black hole.

As the last remnants of the revolutionaries’ fort vanish into nothingness, Eliza waves her hand once more; the spell, which had been destroying all as a maddened beast, stops growing at once. Rather, it begins contracting upon itself, shrinking. As it goes, the fabric of reality caught in the black hole traces its way back out, strands of black and white light swerving off the void and sewn back to proper place, restoring the night’s colors and the colors of the stars.

Soon, the spell has contracted back to its original size; with one final glint, the orb explodes in a shower of dark blue sparkles that streak across the air and illuminates the forest. Like a pond that just had a huge boulder dropped within, the night sky wobbles and ripples but, as the sparks fade, it settles down as though nothing happened.

From the ground, Hilda and Paula can’t bring themselves to look away from the destructive spectacle. As it ends, Eliza does away with her scythe and slowly descends to the earth; carried by soft wind currents, she lands as smoothly as a delicate feather. Her bearing is anything but, however. Though her face lies still hidden behind her helmet, Hilda needn’t see it to feel that her rage is not yet spent – now, she sets her sight on them.

Eliza clenched fists tremble with outrage at what the two Novitiates have done, the seven elemental forces wafting in popping bursts around her golden aura. After all that’s happened here, not one fiber of Hilda desires to argue their case – they’d be dead without the commandant’s intervention, even. Bearing the look of a dog that knows she messed up, all Hilda does is steel herself for whatever’s coming.

Paula shows no signs of confrontation of any kind, either. In fact, for the past minutes since Eliza’s arrived, her face has been locked in a horrified expression that hasn’t changed even after it all ended. As Paula stares at Eliza’s seething visage, however, something inside her snaps. Horror washes over the lines of her face, filling every centimeter of it in an explosion of burning despair.

Like a crumbling building in an earthquake, Paula collapses to her knees. She opens her quivering mouth, making movements as if to speak but no words find their way out – only agonized moans. Heavy sobs sends her body into incontrollable trembling as she drops her head to the earth. A downpour of tears streams down her cheeks, breaking rivers across the muddied soil, and staining her eyes red.

With a struggling breath, she weeps: “I’m sorry…” Her words barely register as a whimper, muddled and broken in every distraught syllable. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry… I’m sorry… me perdoa… me perdoa… me perdoa…”

Falling at the commandant’s feet, her cries pierce Hilda as an arrow, tugging away at her heartstrings. And it hurts like nothing she’s ever felt since joining the Corps. Hilda looks on, petrified, clutching her trembling right hand as she strains to think of something – anything – she could do. But, no, there is nothing to be done after they decided to do this and Paula’s tears are all they earned from it.

Hilda makes to tread forward to pick up her friend but she stops short – Eliza herself kneels over to Paula. A faint sigh flies through the gap in her helmet and the rage-filled aura around the commandant subsides. Paula clutches the bottom of Eliza’s tabard as a lifeline, her tears soaking the red cloth.

“Me perdoa…” Paula weeps, gasping for air.

Eliza turns her head away from the bawling girl, staring off into the sky; she does not answer but a faint sound slips out from her helmet, one that Hilda almost doesn’t hear.

A grunt, very brief but wracked with pain and regret.