Midnight Mercenaries Prompt #1
By the time they reached the center of Suncrown Village, the mercenary line had already carved a path through the Lightbloom’s outer growth. The work had been slow and delicate: Cutting through florafaun that burst from the ground and ruined buildings, dragging civilians free from collapsed homes where the roots had pinned them in place, and clearing enough of the overgrowth that the wounded could be carried back toward Runestone Shan’dor.
Xylaes moved through it all with the same silent efficiency he had carried through a dozen other wars. Rifle when distance allowed it, sword when it did not. He rarely spoke, observed everything, and let the brutality of the place settle into the same mental compartment where he stored the rest of the horrors he had seen over the years. The dead suspended in bamboo did not linger in his thoughts, neither did the twitching bodies tangled in vines along the streets. They were facts of the battlefield and nothing more.
The town center forced the entire advance to halt, where the Lightbloom had gathered there into something monstrous. A towering mass of bamboo, roots, and flowering vines rose where the square had once been, a thick growth twisting together into a structure that dwarfed the surrounding buildings. Bodies were embedded throughout the thing, their faces frozen in shock with limbs protruding from coils of vine. The whole structure shuddered as the mercenaries approached.
Then, it lifted itself from the ground. Roots tore free from the cobblestones as the upper body of a colossal mandragora forced its way up from the center of the plant mass. Three long necks rose into the air, each head lined with serrated teeth. When it screamed, the sound came out layered with dozens of voices tangled together.
The mercenaries spread out immediately at Commander Dal’shula’s orders. Archers climbed broken walls and rooftops while spellcasters formed a loose line across the front of the square, and the melee fighters tentatively moved in closer. The first volley erupted almost all at once. Enchanted arrows streaked upward in glowing arcs, striking the creature’s outer layers with bursts of frost and flame. Rifle shots cracked across the square as specialized rounds punched into the exposed portions of the creature’s core. All forms of magic followed a heartbeat later, crashing across the vines in waves that shredded sections of the growth.
The mandragora recoiled under the barrage. One of its heads snapped downward toward the nearest fighters while another reared back and spat a stream of toxic fluid across the square. The third twisted wildly, jaws snapping at the arrows that continued to hammer into its body. A vine lashed out and wrapped tight around Solstryce’s ankle and knocked him from his feet before dragging him through the burning spread of poison toward the creature, he twisted sharply and severed it in one clean cut before pulling himself clear. The melee line was soon pulled back, no one wanted to risk losing fighters to the thing’s grasping vines.
Xylaes joined the ranged gunfire at first. He lifted his rifle and placed two clean shots into the creature’s central mass where the vines were thickest, the rounds tearing fist-sized gaps through the bark and tangled bodies embedded there. The impacts did next to nothing, and the damage began closing almost immediately as the surrounding growth twisted to compensate.
Around him the rest of the crew escalated their attacks. Arrows tipped with alchemical charges detonated along the creature’s spine of vines, and Stellan’s rifle cracked through the chaos as explosive ammunition tore into the thing and burst apart inside it. Others nearby began to join the assault as well, fighters and casters from both military and mercenary ranks, including a few familiar faces he had seen in passing through Silvermoon and during the fighting on the Isle of Quel’danas.
Beside him, Tinnaire drew in a sharp breath and hurled a massive sphere of fire that roared across the square before exploding against the creature’s writhing body, setting parts of it aflame. Nearby, Fiorenze answered with astral magic, luminous streaks of starlight raining down and bursting across the mandragora’s mass in violent flashes. Talonoa raised a hand and sheets of biting frost spread across the vines, making sections of the creature solid long enough for the others to shatter them apart with gunfire and spells.
It slowed the mandragora, but it did not stop it. The ground split open again as florafaun surged from the surrounding streets and the Ruutani moved forward to defend their creation. The mercenary line fractured briefly as fighters turned to intercept the swarm before it could reach the archers and spellcasters. Steel met bark and thorn as the melee line surged to meet them, blades carving through the plant-creatures while shields and swords forced them back from the firing line.
Two of the newer members of the crew, Avalear and Solstryce, quickly proved their battle prowess and anchored the melee line as the swarm closed in, their movements sharp and efficient as they cut down the florafaun and drove back the Ruutani pressing through the streets. The clash spread along the edges of the square, trying to buy the ranged fighters the space they needed to keep their focus on the towering monstrosity, but there were too many.
Xylaes fired the last round in his rifle and slung the weapon across his back. A florafaun rushed him from the side, thorned limbs raised to strike. He cut it down with a quick slash of his sword before turning back toward the towering creature in the center of the square.
The void had already begun stirring beneath his sleeve.
He ignored it for a moment longer, studying how the mandragora weathered the barrage. Much of the magic striking it was Light, and the creature endured it with stubborn resilience. Most of the crew fought with it, but they needed something else, something any Light-touched creature feared.
Xylaes exhaled slowly, then he stopped holding the void back. The runes along his arm ignited beneath his sleeve as the power surged outward, but this time it did not remain confined to the limb that bore them. Shadow spilled across his shoulders in a sudden wave, the air around him darkening as the void gathered into something far larger than the blasts he had used before. As the surge intensified, the ground beneath his boots seemed to lose its hold on him, and slowly, his body lifted from the cobblestones.
Within seconds his entire silhouette blurred.
The void wrapped around him like a living storm, tendrils of dark energy unfurling outward from the shifting mass surrounding his body as he rose several feet above the shattered square. The shadowy extensions lashed through the nearby battlefield with violent precision, striking down the florafaun and Ruutani that attempted to close in on him, without pulling his attention away from the real target.
Xylaes raised his arm toward the towering mandragora and the first spell struck like a collapsing star. A sphere of compressed void energy tore through the air and slammed into the creature’s central mass before imploding. The detonation crushed an entire section of the plant structure, ripping vines apart and tearing several embedded bodies free from the bark as the pressure collapsed inward.
The mandragora shrieked, and Xylaes followed immediately with another. This one came as a jagged beam of void energy that carved a glowing wound through the creature’s outer layers, the dark power eating through vine and bamboo like acid as it drilled toward the heart of the structure. When the beam collapsed it left a smoking channel straight through the growth, exposing the pulsing tangle of roots at the center.
“Core’s open!” Talonoa shouted to those around him.
Arrows, gunfire, and spells poured into the opening he had created, but Xylaes was already drawing more power. The void storm around him thickened as he pulled deeper into it, the tendrils lashing outward in constant motion to crush anything that approached too closely. A Ruutani tried to spear him through the side with a jagged branch grown from its arm. One of the tendrils snapped down and slammed the creature into the cobblestones hard enough to shatter it before it finished the strike. Another florafaun leapt from behind, but it never reached him. Xylaes barely noticed either of them, his attention was fixed entirely on the mandragora as he unleashed the next wave of magic.
This time the void formed into a tempest of jagged projectiles that blasted across the square like black meteors. Each impact detonated violently against the creature’s body, shredding layers of vine and bamboo apart in rapid succession. Sections of the massive structure began collapsing under the sustained barrage.
One of the mandragora’s heads lunged toward him in retaliation, jaws wide enough to swallow him whole. Xylaes answered with a spiraling vortex of void energy that erupted from his hands and struck the creature’s neck. The vortex tore into the plant flesh and twisted violently, ripping the entire head free from the structure in a spray of shredded vines and splintered bark.
The remaining heads shrieked as the assault intensified. The towering creature jerked and twisted under the relentless attack, its thick necks lashing through the air in violent arcs. One of the heads suddenly buckled as its supporting vines split apart, the weight tearing free and crashing down into the writhing mass below. The last head thrashed wildly above the square, snapping and recoiling as more of the creature’s structure was blasted away. Its movements were slowing now and whole sections of the towering growth sagged where the vines had been torn apart. Its roots began ripping loose from the cobblestones as the monstrous structure struggled to hold itself together.
Xylaes hovered higher as the void around him surged to its peak, a churning mass of shadow and chaotic energy coiling around his body. A final spell gathered in the air before him, a dense sphere of dark power threaded with lightning-like fractures of violet light. When he released it, the mass surged across the square and detonated deep inside the mandragora’s core.
The explosion tore at the creature from within as the continuing barrage of spells, arrows, and gunfire ripped away its outer layers. Roots snapped loose from the ground as the entire towering mass began to buckle inward. The structure that had once filled the market square crumbled into a crashing avalanche of broken bamboo and burning plant matter.
For several seconds the void continued to writhe around him in the air, tendrils snapping down on the last scattered florafaun attempting to reach the line, then the storm slowly began to recede. The shadows peeled away from Xylaes in drifting strands until his boots touched the cobblestones again and only the faint glow of the runes beneath his sleeve remained.
Around him the mercenaries stared at the ruin of the monstrosity they had just brought down, Xylaes simply lifted his rifle again and checked the chamber. The Lightbloom wasn’t finished yet.
@themercenaries
@talonoa @inistellan @kharrisdawndancer @fio-renze @solstryce @dawn-blossom
Implied mentions of @tycildawnwhisper and @theeternalautumn
