Rise of the Archmage Alister

Marabell was the first out of the carriage. She grabbed her poleaxe off the roof of the cabin as she moved, looking for the source of the scream as Blas rushed out after her.

The carriage driver was dead, a black spike the length of a person through his chest and abdomen. It flickered and twitched like a dying bug inside the corpse as it slowly slumped into an inky liquid. The horses were lying dead on the ground as well; the carriage had its wheels smashed inside one of the carcasses that were torn in two with organs trailing down the road. Like a massive bite had been taken out of their middles, all of them were cleaved apart. A couple of knights who had been beside the carriage for safety were injured and in bad shape. One had a cut across the metal of his chest plate, coated in boiling ink. Another was stumbling to his feet after his horse had suffered a terrible fate.

Perched atop a thick branch was a beast of prey, wings jutting out from its body as if a mockery of biology. While it seemed to be a bird, it was hard to tell as it was a mass of black undulations that paid no mind to reality. Wings, a dozen in total, flapped in an orchestra of chaos as it took off from the large branch towards the group. When one wing moved, it wasn’t a smooth motion, it buckled and twisted in on itself before jutting out at random angles, before eventually settling back to how it was supposed to move. Like a glitch in reality, all of its limbs followed this twitchy mess. Despite this, it was swift and almost as large as Alister was tall.

Marabell spun her poleaxe around hammer side first and clocked it in the breastbone to send it tumbling away from the carriage, “Fuckin’ hell Blas, is the eldritch problem around the bones really getting this bad?”

“Reports have increased but nothing like this, we’re just unlucky as per usual!” he shouted in return, grimacing as knights surrounded him and his family.

Marabell waved off any that tried to protect her, and tossed a couple of healing potions to the injured knights, “Olana ranged only. Harriet don’t let it touch you; act cautious. If it touches anyone, I have some emergency potions but I assure you they taste like ass and feel like you got the worst hangover. So just don’t get gooped. Got it?”

“Yes, Mom!” Harriet shouted back, eagerly climbing atop the broken carriage to grab her own, smaller poleaxe that looked very similar to her mother’s. Olana, quiet as usual, merely nodded and took out a small notepad from her clothing that had symbols written on it. The twins were not infallible, they were nervous and shaking at the prospect of fighting this thing, but their mother had also drilled into them a lot of combat training as a mercenary… and they also really wanted an excuse to try to fight.

Wisteria was cussing under her breath as she scrambled to get her rifle from its case atop the carriage, while Alister grit his teeth and stood out of the way of the others, realizing he couldn’t do much here but cantrips from the back. Blas stood beside him, setting a hand on his shoulder.

“It’s alright,” he said, anticipating his son’s discomfort, “Small spells will be helpful too. Just do what you can from back here. Marabell could probably handle this on her own, let alone the fact that we have knights with us. Her kids look like they want blood. And Wisteria probably wants to kill it with vengeance. I am not too useful in this fight either. I have no animals with me, and putting myself at risk when there are others more suited would be selfish right now. At least at the capital, I had beasts, but there’s nothing around right now thanks to this thing.”

Alister nodded, looking back at Wisteria who was shaking as she was trying to take a shot. The creature had spun back around, body folding in on itself to twist and turn, even see-through for a moment in odd triangles as its form snapped back into place.

It let out a gargled screech of anger, its beak opening to show a mass of wet, tarry tendrils in place of tongues that took up its entire mouth and lashed out at the air in front of it. Marabell answered this with a wide swing of her hammer to the open beak, spinning momentum sailing the large 7’7” woman forward where she connected with a snap and crunch like a carrot soaked in ink. The sharp crunching and wet squelching only got louder and angrier as it was stabbed in a swift motion with the spear tip. The eldritch bird vibrated and made a high-pitched sound not unlike the shrill ringing feedback of a microphone as it screamed.

Marabell barked a short order to back up and the monster split into many blobs of tar off her spear, each of which rippled and formed themselves into smaller eldritch ravens.

Harriet took this as an opportunity to step forward again and use her much smaller poleaxe on one of the much smaller birds. She swung down with the axe-side overhead onto the creature with a nervous grin across her face. Olana tore a page out of her notebook of symbols and flicked it like a playing card at another of the inky corvids. The paper had a magic circle already pre-written on it, and while tossing it she pushed mana into it, making it alight in fire upon contact. It wasn’t very strong, but the small blaze was flashy and distracting, so she followed it up by slashing at the bird with a tanto-like blade.

Wisteria’s attack was by far the loudest - the damned rifle was unpleasantly noisy - but since there was a moment where the blobs weren’t yet moving, she got a solid hit in as she stood on the step of the carriage for a better vantage point. The crack of the gunpowder made Alister’s ears ring, but the effectiveness was worth it, as the small bird she hit splattered into a rain of ink and meat.

The knights were not sitting idly by either, as they dispatched the blobs with extreme prejudice. They were not a particularly hard enemy, but like with fighting a slime, without finding and destroying the core, it seemed this creature would slink itself back together again each time it was destroyed. As the tarry masses were slain, they slumped and rolled back along the ground back to what remained of the main body by Marabell.

Blas had fished a simple gun from the luggage of the broken carriage and was taking shots at pieces of ink as it clambered along the ground. This gun was not as potent as Wisteria’s rifle, and it didn’t do any extra damage with his skills right now, but it was something to use from the back as he pondered the situation, at least.

Alister, likewise, was casting a few simple cantrips, trying his best not to get ahead of himself and do anything that would delay his recovery. The rest of the group looked to have this in hand, and a small sheet of ice here or there wouldn’t make much difference, but he at least felt like he was doing something this way. He was left thinking about the creature, however. He was thankful that whatever apparent mental effects these things had had yet to be relevant thanks to his family’s preparedness, but it made it difficult to imagine the danger they truly had. And there was the significant question still lingering in everyone’s mind of “Why?” Why was this creature here? Why was there an increase in eldritch entities in the area? This was the, what, third time? It was starting to feel too unlike a coincidence. The woman of red fabric treated it as a test, which would mean they had gotten the attention of someone or something strong. Alister would assume some sort of god, but if that were the case he’d imagine Wisteria would have a better inkling of it.

“Physical damage’s ineffective,” Marabell stated, giving Olana a slightly annoyed glare as she didn’t stick to ranged attacks as she told her to, “I cannot sense a center to this creature here, so we need to snuff out the ooze to the point it can’t control it anymore. Fire and ice should both be effective for that, and Wisteria if you can do some of your holy magic stuff, that should work too. Whatever can destroy the bits it’s made of.”

Olana and Harriet both looked at each other and smiled with the grin of twins who had just been told they were allowed to cause chaos, while Wisteria nodded seriously at the proposition. She used a skill to quick-holster her gun and put a hand to her golden bird skull charm she always had around her neck.

Wisteria muttered a prayer beneath her breath and with a soft golden glow, she cast a divine buff on her rifle. “May the light of Iker guide us forward and shuffle the sinners before me from this mortal coil,” she whispered, simple but genuine. A warm yellow light surrounded her weapon, then spread like candlelight to buff the weapons of the knights.