18 - Adaptation

The Infrared Lance speared through the Ghost of All Granavale’s head. The fireball above its head glowed with malice, a miniature sun that threatened to consume them all.

For half a second, nothing happened.

Then the Ghost of All Granavale screeched, a high pitch keening, clutching its smoking eyes as they burned from the highly concentrated infrared light.

With its concentration broken, the massive fireball expanded. Yet in growing it became weaker, less hot, less dense.

And then the Ghost of All Granavale grew back its pair of eyes, inky blackness smothering the smoking flames. But imperfectly. Its ivory mask had half burned off, and its face was covered in burn scarring. It reminded him of the Phantom of the Opera, a musical from his past life.

Archmund hit it with another Infrared Lance.

Again it screeched as its eyes burned with blindness.

Its fireball expanded even larger, but its power was dissipating, wisping away into the air. Without fuel or the force of magic, fire didn’t last. The Ghost of All Granavale might have been proficient at fighting multiple opponents, but evidently regenerating its own body and sustaining a killing fireball were too much for it.

“I’m surprised that worked twice,” Archmund said out loud.

“It won’t work a third,” Mercy said, pointing at the Ghost of All Granavale with a black-gloved hand. “Look at its eyes now.”

The Ghost of All Granavale had forgone regenerating normal eyes. Its eye sockets were filled with empty blackness, but speckled around its head was a wirey black gauze peppered with undulating eyestalks.

Archmund fired another Infrared Lance.

His beam hit the black gauze, and one of the eyes burst into flame, but the Ghost of All Granavale shed it, the afflicted eyestalk burning away to ash before it could hit the ground.

And now that it had found an adaptation that could stall him…

Mercy grabbed him by the collar and pulled them both out of the way of a fireball.

“It was a good shot, Granavale, but—”

“I’m just not at its level. Yeah, I figured that one out already.”

“Not what I was about to say. No tactic works all the time, every time.”

“I was hoping I would blow up its head,” Archmund said.

The Ghost of All Granavale had changed tactics. Perhaps it now viewed them as serious threats. It took a spindly hand and scratched four deep gouges into its own torso, excavating shadowstuff from its own body. Then, it flicked its fingernails towards the two of them.

Four shadows formed upon the ground. From each an Undead Noble rose. Two bore Gemstone rapiers. Two bore Gemstone hand fans. All four had thick visors over their eyes.

The Ghost of All Granavale scratched itself again, and cast its inner darkness into the outer world. Another four Undead Nobles arose.

Then again, and another four.

“It’s learning,” Mercy said. “Not just for itself, but for any other Undead Nobles. They’re all going to have those visors from now on.”

“Damn it,” Archmund said. “How come it didn’t bother adapting to your attacks?”

Mercy unleashed a broad net of electrical bolts from her fingers, which danced across all twelve Undead Nobles. They jiggled lightly under its power but did not fully convulse.

“Oh, it did,” she said. “Look at it.”

The lightning grew brighter and hotter.

“Rubber clothes. Rubber bones.”

The air split, oxygen to ozone.

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“Rubber something. Who knows?”

The bolts danced across the ground like the staccato tap-tap-tap of a drum.

“But that’s a crutch,” she said, as her power crested. “When Monsters try to be clever, overwhelm them.”

Her power exploded, like power lines bursting, and seared through the Undead Nobles, leaving branching fractal burns across their rubber garments. Their Gemstone gear and rubber armor fell to the ground, emptied, leaving the putrid stench of burnt rubber. None of them dropped raw Gems.

“Why didn’t you do that with the Starbeast?”

“Would’ve taken too much. But these are small fry.”

She said that, but her breath came out in pants and sweat was visible on her brow.

The Ghost of All Granavale didn’t stand idle. Again it scraped at its flesh, and again it cast the pools of darkness, and again twelve lesser Monsters arose. They looked like suits of armor, but the armor lacked a metallic sheen. If he wasn’t wrong, it was made of rubber. For lack of a better word, he decided to call these Monsters Rubber Armors (maybe the smoke deprivation was getting to him). All carried Gemstone weapons — several swords, a few maces, and even one flail, all shining with the unearthly light of death.

The Ghost of All Granavale also raised its hands once again above its head, pouring its magic into another fireball. Again, it went from the size of a marble, to an orange, to a basketball.

Archmund really didn’t like this. He’d been a desk jockey in his past life. He was barely ten in this one. He lacked the reflexes for something as harsh as this.

He hit all twelve Rubber Armors with an Infrared Lance to the face.

They lumbered forward, raising their weapons, and he grimaced.

“You think that’ll work?” Mercy said. “That main ghost would have to be pretty stupid to not—”

He fired the Infrared Lance again, more concentrated this time, and the nearest Rubber Armor’s helmet burst into flame. As its head was consumed, it collapsed, until it was hollowed out.

“Ah.” Mercy said.

Truth was, Archmund did think the Ghost of All Granavale was stupid. At the very least, primitive and unlearned. Rubber was an organic material. It caught fire if you dumped enough energy into it. In his world, it came from trees, for heaven’s sake. Frankly it was a bizarre, bizarre bit of convergent evolution that the restless dead naturally generated false rubber instead of metal or ceramic naturally — though, if they sought to mimic life, it almost made sense. Rubber was made of carbon, and so wasn’t that different from skin. Metal or ceramic rarely congealed naturally in the bodies of living things.

Now that he knew it worked, he hit all of the Rubber Armors with Infrared Lances. All of them burst into flames and collapsed, leaving their armor but again, no Gems.

But it was still stupid. If you tried to resist an electrical current, you could be very successful for a time with a substance like rubber or wood or human flesh. But eventually, the current would overwhelm you, grounding itself through whatever the most efficient path was, even if it ran through your heart. Far wiser it was to intentionally create a path for the electricity, catching it before it caught you and guiding it harmlessly into the ground — the principle behind the lightning rod.

Then again, lightning usually acted completely randomly instead of following the commands of a noble girl to kill the undead. Magic tended to have unpredictable effects on the laws of physics.

The Ghost of All Granavale gouged its flesh again; its fireball still yet grew. Now it was the size of a large bear, or perhaps a small elephant. It was growing slower than it had before, but because they’d been preoccupied with stopping the Monsters sent against them, they hadn’t be able to interfere as easily.

“Shoot the shadows out of the air!” Archmund shouted.

“Now there’s a thought.”

Mercy’s Topaz glowed; lightning electrified the air, striking the ceiling of the manor hall, almost like a cage. The blobs of shadow flew against the bars of that cage, split into bits by the dancing lightning. When they landed, they were negligible, far too small and thin for anything to form.

“How do we kill it?” Archmund said, wondering out loud. His Ruby floated before him, rotating serenely despite the chaos and destruction around them. He probed the Ghost of All Granavale with his Infrared Lance, shooting it across its hide.

“If my men were here,” Mercy said, “They’d throw themselves at it. They’d cut it apart and cut it down with their swords, and they’d stab each piece over and over again until nothing was left. Our job would be to stun it just long enough so someone could get in and start cutting. And if you get that wrong, someone dies.”

“There has to be another way.”

The Ghost of All Granavale fixed its twisted eyestalks upon him. It wasn’t educated, but it wasn’t unintelligent either. It clearly knew there was some connection between its mysterious burning pains and him.

It raised its onyx cube Gem, and pulsed magic into it. There was a brief wind, followed by a stillness. The fires throughout the manor hall quieted, only to roar up again.

There was something in front of the Ghost of All Granavale.

Archmund couldn’t see it — if he squinted, he imagined he could see the air rippling, but then again that could easily just be the heat haze — but he felt it, in that sense beyond his senses from which his magic sprang. It was an odd feeling, this certainty. Knowing that there was a whole dimension of being in this world that his last had not had.

The fireball was still growing, but much, much slower.

Mercy jolted him out of his reverie by firing a stream of lightning towards the Ghost of All Granavale — and the bolt shattered, split into tendrils, outlining a large invisible wall that stretched across the entire balcony.

“There’s no other way,” Mercy said. “Not after this.”

She pointed at the Ghost of All Granavale’s fireball, which was about the size of a regular elephant now.

“It’s still feeding that, but we’ve only shown it magic so far. So it thinks it’s safe to build up its fire behind that shield it has until it’s strong enough to blow us to kingdom come.”

She took a deep breath, and clasped him on the shoulder.

“We just have to prove it wrong.”