Chapter 51.3: Eye of the Storm

“Reloading,” Jindel yelled, dropping back to the toolbag of ammunition.

Penny tried to lay cover fire against the oncoming bandits, to keep them off Ventyr, but the two remaining rounds in her chamber wouldn’t be much. She aimed through the wafting purple haze and froze, a chill running up her spine at the recognition of it again—gods, who could say what that stuff would do to them the longer they were near it.

Swearing, Penny refocused on her sights. If she was going to die mad, she sure as hell wasn’t going alone. Squeezing the trigger, she shot the western bandit in the shoulder, staggering him before shooting again, this time putting him on the ground. He disappeared behind the wagon remains.

His companion kept coming, charging around the opposite side of the pile of wood and jade toward the bandit lord, his lieutenant, and the two vigilmen. Penny was out of ammo until she could swap places with Jindel and drop to reload, but that wasn’t going to help anyone here and now. She did still have the fire-starter in her free hand, though.

With a shrug, she cocked back and threw the small, steel device. Her aim was terrible, though. Instead of finding its target, the fire-starter caught Fjornsson in his big, bald skull. Penny winced.

Something was wrong with the soldier, though, something serious. It had been clear when he’d lashed out at Ventyr without warning and stormed off after the gunman, but now he supported the case further. It wouldn’t have taken a genius to tell which direction the projectile had come from, but Fjornsson turned the opposite direction, roaring rabid fury at the woman Penny had intended to hit. He coiled, cocking back the smaller asuran hammer before hurling it at the rushing bandit and immediately leaping back on the slender rifleman he’d been chasing for no clear reason. Penny had a very bad feeling about his condition.

Her gaze moved to the female bandit, though. The woman tried to dodge aside but still took a heavy corner of the projectile in the side; Penny could swear she heard the thick crunch even over the noise. The woman dropped her mace, almost instantly vomiting, and fell in on herself. Still Penny didn’t think she was entirely out of the fight yet.

And then Penny got her answer about the man she’d shot on the other side of the collapsed wagon, the one with the axe. Despite his evident wounds, he was back on his feet and pushing himself around the jade pile and toward Ventyr.

Jindel finally rose to take her place, and Penny fell into cover, catching sight of those terrifying streams of agony magic again. Penny sat and called up at the other woman, “Do we know what that bandit jerk is doing with the magic?” It bothered her now.

Jindel held poised, waiting for a good shot, then cracked one off. “Dwayna only knows,” she replied. “If you ask me, it looks like he’s pushing it back into those crystals over there.”

Penny nodded thoughtlessly, the information almost passing through her head unchecked as she grabbed at the ammo. She froze, though, dropping a handful of rounds as something struck her: a memory, vague at first, but then a whole lot clearer.

She popped back up to her feet, weapon still empty, and followed the courses of magic with her eyes—were there more of them now? Where they all met, the man funneled them together, through himself and into the jade, coalescing it all into something more vivid, solid, almost a fluid pumping into the pile of broken shards. Where the twisting torrent touched them, vibrancy returned, spreading from one jagged bit to the next.

Penny squinted. Were some of those crystals… Gods, a few of the bigger ones had started to move! That snapped all her thoughts into place.

“Oh, come on!” Penny all but yelled. She stomped a foot in a fit of frustration, screwed up her face, and dropped to begin ramming rounds into the pistol’s loader again.

“What?” Jindel asked, ducking beside her to also reload. “What is it?”

“Don’t you see? That piece of shit is rebuilding the jade monster.” She waved a hand, willing the wild thoughts into order even as she explained it to the younger woman. “You know, from Ventyr’s letter. The damned thing that started this nightmare!”

With a tightly furrowed brow, the crusader absorbed that. “What? No. That’s—”

“Far-fetched?” Penny finished. “Unlikely? Crazy? Yeah, I’d say so, but here we are, up to our necks in it again. So we can…” She trailed off, suddenly staring at Jinkke and Yissa.

The two asura had been just behind them the whole time; she knew that. But she hadn’t previously paid much attention to what they were doing back there, assuming wrongly that they’d been helping with the fight somehow. That wasn’t it at all. The two were sitting among a pile of tiny, gutted golems, stripping out parts like a pair of broke junkers.

“What are you two doing?” Penny demanded.

Neither did more than glance at her before returning to their work, Jinkke yanking a finger-sized cylinder from a golemite’s casing. She threw it beyond their wagon in the other direction, drew up her confiscated energy rifle, and shot at it a few times. One of the shots must have hit, because the canister burst into a wide mist of purple that dissipated slowly into the air.

Penny repeated the question, increasingly confused and frustrated. “What in Grenth’s green ass are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” Jinkke replied, already taking a prybar to another golemite shell. “Disposing of the magic.” Her matter-of-fact tone was only matched by her unhindered continuance.

Penny blinked in surprise. Quickly and clearly that plan actually made sense—a lot of it.

Yissa, unsatisfied with the simplicity of that answer, went on. “My operating theory is that the human can only channel agony magic at a minimum concentration. If we can dilute currently untapped energy into either the earth or atmosphere—it turns out, incidentally, that in its current state, atmospheric dispersion is optimal—he will have expectedly less to manipulate, and with a decreased supply of raw material—”

“Yeah, he can do less damage,” Penny finished. Despite her annoyance at the babble, she let herself be impressed. “I get it. It’s good, and you better keep it up, because I think that guy’s trying to rebuild the jade thing that killed all Ventyr’s Vigil buddies.”

The scholar’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “A jade construct? He’s forming a jade construct here?” She hopped up from her seat and scurried to the crates, scrambling to see over them. “How do you know? What are you observing? Where is it? I don’t see it.”

“Damn it. Don’t pull those down,” Penny barked. “Those crates are the only thing between us and being shot dead!”

Both Yissa and the vigilwoman went still beside her, gawking out at the bandit’s work. There may have been a quiet curse off Jindel’s lips; Penny wasn’t sure. But she was dead certain she heard the yip of fearful awe that came out of the scholar. “I see it now,” Yissa said, extending a small, three-fingered hand to point beyond the crates.

Penny leapt forward to join them and slid the asura aside. “You wha— Oh gods.”

All three of them watched with wide eyes as several shards of repowered jade, glowing purple and angry, levitated from the pile, rotating slowly around the downward flow of mursaat magic. Another shard rose, reaching the same level of illumination as the others, and joined the spiraling dance. The new piece’s pace slowed, allowing each other stone to catch up, shift its orientations, and snap into place against one of its many facets.

All but forgetting everything else that had gone to Torment around them, Penny blinked at the absurd and terrifying sight. “Are they—” She croaked, trying to find her voice, then cleared her throat. “Are they flying?”

The other two nodded.

“And putting themselves together,” the crusader observed.

Yissa raised a finger. “I’d offer that the practitioner is technically the one assembling them, rather than the shattered jade assembling itself.” The tremble in her voice did nothing to dispel the excited light in her eyes. “But yes, to answer your more accurate question, we are witnessing the same thing you are. It’s mesmerizing.”

Penny shook her head, wiping a sudden flow of sweat from her brow and catching her breath. She tried desperately to process everything fast enough to keep up with the developing situation—and gods was it developing. Ventyr needed help, Yult had gone insane, the bandits were making a monster, and Yissa wanted an autograph.

Furthermore, that golem was still on a plodding course toward them from the west. It was maybe thirty yards out now, and Penny suddenly noticed that three new asura were running to take up positions behind its back. They were already firing, blasts of energy searing past both Penny’s wagon and the bandits’.

Fear coagulated in her gut, and Penny hissed a curse, dropping behind the crates to finally finish loading her gun. As her hands mechanically slid rounds into the loader, she stared off into the distance, beyond the edge of the Thaumacore complex and beyond the treeline, where she knew another ridge rose before descending into the Brisban wilds. As far as she knew, no one was out that way: no Inquest, no Vigil, no bandits, and certainly no deadly magical constructs. She could run. Hell, she could probably even drag some of the others along with her and save them as well. She knew the crusaders wouldn’t budge. Nor, probably, would the scholar—that one would die a maddened death with a gleeful, studious grin on her face. But Jinkke? Penny could save Jinkke; she could get the two of them out of that nightmare before it turned really bad. Minkus would…

Penny let her head fall to her chest with an almost pained exhale. She still couldn’t look at her dead friend, but she couldn’t ignore his presence etched in her mind either. Minkus would die for his sister’s safety—he actually had—but he’d never sacrifice others to do it.

Penny couldn’t run, not even with anyone who would go along with her.

“Shit,” she snapped, stuffing the gut twist aside again and ramming another round into her gun. She rose to her feet.

In only that moment, though, the scene had changed. The asura off to her left had reached their golem, but the focus of their fire had shifted. All of it was now on the bandits’ wagon, and that additional pressure was drawing attention away from Ventyr and Yult. The man Penny had shot now peeled off to respond to the new threat, and the woman on the opposite side of the jade stack took cover instead of pressing on to Ventyr.

That was when Penny noticed something odd at the golem. One of the oncoming asura had separated from the other two and was… waving? The little person was waving. At her.

“What in Torment…” She let the question die on her lips, stunned to silence as the plump form and balding pate of that asura registered in her mind. “Gods, is that Baldy?”

Penny hadn’t asked anyone in particular, but hearing the question, Jinkke popped up to her side, scrambling to a precarious perch between wagonbed and crates and peering in the same direction. “Smoke and sparks,” she popped, sounding almost excited, “it is. It’s Wepp! What is he doing attacking with the Inquest?’

Penny shrugged, unable to take her eyes off the pear-shaped figure. “Hell if I know. But he’s got them firing at the bandits.”

Wepp waved another greeting, this time at Jinkke. He raised his weapon, wobbling slightly as he eyed it. Then he shook his head and pointed their attention back to the bandits, where his two teammates still directed their fire. 

“And,” Penny continued, unable to stop her brow from rising, “I think he wants us to go at them too.”

The man Penny had caught in the shoulder had gotten his hands on a gun, a pistol by the looks of it. He’d fallen to cover behind the illuminating jade pile and was taking half-baked shots in the direction of the asura. The two Inquest fighters on the northern side of the golem ducked back behind their mobile, waddling cover. At the sound of returned fire, though, Wepp wasn’t quite as coherent. Leaping in fright, he wobbled his way back behind the golem, already looking unsteady.

Penny groaned. She knew exactly what came next.

Wepp bobbled backward across the deck of an invisible ship and toppled to an unconscious heap in the grass. Penny wanted to put an exasperated hand to her forehead, but she had no time for it.

While the man with the gun exchanged fire with Wepp’s new friends, the woman with the mace had nearly intercepted Ventyr, who was doggedly aimed at the bandit leader once again. At least Penny thought he was aimed at the leader. His pace dramatically slowed by the beating he’d received from the norn, every other step he took looked uneven. He wasn’t in shape to take on a basket of kittens, let alone the skilled swordsman Penny remembered that crimson-clad asshat to be.

“Vent’s going to get himself…”

Before she could finish, Jindel had already caught Penny’s meaning, jumping out of cover to run for the sylvari’s side.

It was just as well, because Penny’s focus had already shifted from the sylvari to the lunatic human beyond him, pulling at those three— No, five. Seven? Gods alive, how many lines of evil magic were flowing into the man now?

She almost leapt away from the crates as she recognized anew how many violet streams connected them to the man. The magic was flowing from every crate—every last one!—other than those Yissa and Jinkke had opened and emptied of their contents. That nut job had absolutely tapped more sources since they’d started into this fray, a lot more.

Looking at him, Penny realized that increase  was taking a toll. Just a minute before, Penny would hardly have called the leader’s expression serene—he’d looked as tense as a smuggler caught in a Seraph sting—but there was a sense of control about him. Now, though, with his teeth gritting and brow drawn tight in near anguish, he looked like he was being actively tortured and barely hanging on. Sweat ran down his face in waves, and even the movement of his hands had changed, from that nimble marionette dance to the desperate tugs of a lone dockman pulling a ship to moor. And on the other side of his struggling hands, all those strands of energy had intertwined into a single—gods, she didn’t even know how the hell to describe it, but it made her hair stand on end. One thing was clear, the more that man brought in and funneled through himself, the more it wracked him. He was twitching now, and his nose began to bleed.

Penny followed the twisting purple current from the man to the pile of jade, where the pulsing storm of energy caused a wider circle of shards to glow, beating like a heart. More were levitating now too, spiraling into line with those already airborne, moving into the flow, and dropping back down into the pile, which itself was now moving, rising, reassembling.

That was when the breath caught in her throat. She normally loved being right, but not this time. Something large and terrifyingly headlike split the glistening pile of stone.

“Oh gods. It’s happening,” Penny coughed at the two asura. She pointed, and the two hopped up to look.

“Smoke and sparks.” The words barely oozed out of Jinkke’s mouth.

With a disturbing degree of excitement, Yissa pushed past Penny to see. “We are witnessing the formation of a jade construct!” She squealed excitement as the words kept flowing from her mouth. “Do you comprehend the uniqueness of this moment, this place, this experience? We—”

“This isn’t one of your tomes!” Penny barked, yanking her back down. “We’re dead if we don’t do something.”

Jinkke spun, turning back to the golemite she’d been working on, and gasped. The other two turned as well, recognizing immediately what had frightened her. There was a new trail of  coalescing purple magic wafting out of it.

“Oh, shit!”

Jinkke skipped past Penny’s shock, bounding to the golemite and careful not to touch the fleeing magic. “We have to remove the source, posthaste!”

Penny very nearly nodded, but something stopped her. She let her eyes follow the still forming flow of energy. It twisted and jogged, making quicker and quicker headway toward its summoner. It narrowly missed Jindel before meeting the leader’s calling, tugging hand. And the moment it did, he winced, gasping for a breath.

“Stop!” Penny yelled, ducking behind the crates and spinning back to face the asura.

Surprisingly, they did it, though contest still dressed Jinkke’s face. “Why? He’s drawing more as we speak, further nearing completion of that construct.”

“Look at him,” Penny demanded, pointing over her shoulder in the direction of the bandit. They obeyed again, stepping back to the crates and leaning around the side as she went on. “This stuff is hurting him. The more he draws or summons or whatever, the more it hurts him. I think he’s feeling the madness as he uses it. Gods, he’s barely hanging on.”

Recognition washed across Jinkke and Yissa’s faces as they turned back to her.

“We give him more,” Jinkke said, eyes darting in that way that meant she was running calculations. “Not less, more: overload his psychological and biological systems before he can complete the process.”

Yissa ‘s brow furrowed sadly. “But we need to retain as much of the raw material—”

“No,” Penny raised a finger in her face. “I don’t want to hear one more looney, suicidal thought from you. We throw these things at him—all of them—and force his hand!”