My Best Friend is an Eldritch Horror - Chapter 277 (Patreon)

As soon as the portal spat Damien out, he Warp Stepped straight upward. Nausea brushed at his senses, but he was so used to the feeling by now that it didn’t even make him blink. Wind bit at his lips and Sylph appeared beside him, forming a disk of air beneath their feet.

An enormous courtyard stretched out far below them, full of beautifully trimmed bushes bristling with bright flowers. Arches lined the yard, a churning portal within each of them. Damien counted ten guards patrolling the area, but it was difficult to determine if they had noticed their arrival at the distance he was at.

“Good job,” Sylph said, squinting down at them. “I don’t think they noticed us.”

“How can you tell?”

“I’m modifying my eyes,” Sylph replied, staring past him at the ground. “I can control my entire body, remember? I spent some time seeing how bird eyes functioned, then learned to mimic them with the Corruption. It honestly does most of the work for me. It’s like it was meant to change shapes into other things – oh, wait.”

They both snorted.

“They really didn’t see us arrive?” Damien asked.

“Nope. One of the guards is glancing around, but I think he wasn’t paying much attention. Most people wouldn’t be able to move that quickly after stepping out of a portal, so he’s probably already convinced himself that he didn’t see anything. People see what they want to see. It’s a very useful tool when you’re breaking into somewhere.”

“Noted.” Damien looked away from the courtyard to the surroundings. Behind the courtyard was a small, curated forest of beautiful trees. Just beyond that was a towering castle. Huge, gray brick walls rose several stories high and four towers at every corner scraped the clouds.

“That’s the Gray estate,” Sylph said.

“There aren’t all that many other things that it could have been,” Damien said dryly, scanning over it. “Where would Nolan be? That thing is huge. There’s no way we can just wander around it until we run into him.”

“I’m not sure,” Sylph replied. “But I do know where his father should be. The Grays aren’t royalty, but they sure do fancy themselves as such – at least, they did when I learned about them. There should be a throne room near the center of the keep. His father should be there.”

“Good idea. We can deal with his dad and force him to tell us where Nolan is,” Damien said. “Any idea how we’re supposed to get inside without bringing the entire place down on us?”

“It’ll be easy, to be honest. We’re not trying to break into anywhere secret, so most of their best defenses won’t even be an issue. Set the bomb off at one of the walls. It should do enough damage to draw most of the guards away. Nolan’s father should remain within the throne room, since it’s fairly well defended, along with his guard. We just show up, deal with them, and we’ve got what we need.”

“Perfect,” Damien said. “I’ll deliver the bomb. Meet you at the top of the farthest wall? I assume we want to be as far from the explosion as possible.”

“Don’t forget Auntie said it takes a minute to go off.”

“I won’t,” Damien promised. He stepped off the edge of the wind disk and Warp Stepped, appearing on the ground at the base of the wall in an instant. As soon as his feet were on the ground, his hand was in his bag, pulling the bomb out.

He sent a pulse of Ether into the bomb and the runes at the entry point lit a dull white. With every passing second, light slowly scrawled across it, filling the runes in. Damien set the bomb down at the base of the wall and stepped back.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

Damien cursed, looking up toward the source of the noise. A guard stood at the top of the wall, staring down at him. He glanced back at the bomb – there were still around forty seconds before it went off.

“Pick that up,” the guard yelled. “No littering at the base of the Gray estate. And how did you get there? This is protected land, kid.”

Damien gritted his teeth. He didn’t know exactly how large the explosion would be, but he doubted anyone standing directly above it would survive the blast. He cursed and Warp Stepped, appearing on the wall beside the guard.

“Holy sh–”

Damien’s elbow slammed into the guard’s temple and the man crumpled to the ground. His helm rang off the parapets with a clang and Damien caught him a moment later with a wince. A tingle erupted on the back of his neck, and he spun, casting Devour.

A thick stream of fire scorched through the air. It hit the disk of black energy and vanished within it, fading away. The guard it had come from gathered the Ether and started to throw another spell in Damien’s direction.

He Warp Stepped, driving his palm into the man’s chest and throwing him into the wall. The guard cried out, but managed to hold onto his spell. A lance of flame shot out, but it vanished into another Devour harmlessly.

“Who are you?” the guard asked, glancing around desperately.

Damien didn’t reply. He didn’t have time to. He’d lost count of how long was left on the bomb, which was still at the base of the wall. Teleporting once again, he slammed his fist against the guard’s helmet. It rang like a bell and the man crumpled to the ground.

He grabbed the man and glanced over the other side of the wall. The inside of the Gray estate really did look like a castle – there was an entire miniature ecosystem within it. Several small houses were directly on the other side of the wall, and beyond them was what he suspected to be a market.

The far side of the estate was probably where the actual Gray family lived. A large, beautiful mansion stretched out across the castle grounds, covering nearly half of them with its two enormous wings.

At their center was a big, circular building – likely where Nolan’s father sat. Damien cursed again, then teleported the guard in his hands to the ground in the center of the market. He sprinted back along the wall, doing the same to the other guard.

“What in the Planes are you doing?” yet another guard yelled, fumbling at his belt as he turned the corner of the wall to see his fellows vanishing from Damien’s hands.

Ether surged in Damien’s chest and he Warp Stepped again, appearing beside the man and Warp Stepping with him. They both appeared in the center of the market, beside the other guards and a small, building crowd of surprised onlookers.

An instant later, the sky turned yellow. Damien thrust his hands into the air as an earthshattering crash split the air and the ground bucked. He created an enormous portal above the market, just moments before rubble from the wall shot toward them, peppering the unprotected buildings and tearing them to pieces.

He waited for an instant longer, then let the portal fade. Smoke rose from a massive hole in the wall, and the stone connected to it continued to crumble and fall away. Flames licked across the stone and the grass on the other side of the wall, quickly spreading to the rest of the forest. Runes flickered and died along the wall as they failed to resist the amount of structural damage the explosion had done.

The effect traveled along the walls, vanishing beyond their vision. Damien grimaced. He didn’t want to think about how many years of work had just been undone in just a few instants. The guard he’d grabbed scrambled away from him, his eyes wide in terror.

“Please don’t hurt me. I’m just a hire, I swear.”

Damien ignored him. He turned and Warp Stepped once again, appearing on the far side of the wall just as the cacophony of alarm bells started to fill the air. Several guards already laid on the ground, unconscious.

His senses picked Sylph up just beside him an instant before she allowed her camouflage to fade away.

“That was bigger than I expected,” Sylph said. More smoke was rising from the hole now, and a second crash shook the castle as one of the towers creaked, its base heavily damaged from the blast, and toppled over, smashing into the forest below.

“You’ve got no idea. The runes on the walls must have taken the brunt of that explosion,” Damien said. “I saved a few of the guards, but… how many did we just kill?”

“The walls are solid, so nobody was inside them unless someone was in a stairwell leading up to them,” Sylph replied. “Aside from the tower, you didn’t blow up anything that looked like a guardroom. Anyone caught by that blast will probably be fine. The Grays are certain to have some very powerful healing mages.”

Damien nodded, his eyes going cold. “Right. Let’s go. Lead the way, Sylph.”

“Just try to keep up. We want to keep the casualties down – these mages are going to be useful for the fight against the Corruption. Just make sure you don’t put yourself at risk. You’re more important than they are.”

“Likewise,” Damien said.

Sylph let out a dark chuckle as her body faded away, consumed by her camouflage spell. “I was made for this, Damien. I’m not at any risk from a bunch of guards that have never seen a real fight.”

Damien’s senses tracked Sylph as she leapt off the edge of the wall and ran through the air, heading toward the circular building at the center of the Gray estate. Damien Warp Stepped after her, appearing near the door just a few instants before Sylph arrived.

To his surprise, Sylph emerged from her camouflage. She opened the door and strode inside confidently, not even bothering to draw her weapons. Damien followed after her, jogging for a moment to catch up.

“What are we doing?” he hissed. A guard dashed past them, a sword drawn. Sylph’s face changed, shifting to that of a terrified schoolgirl. The guard’s eyes brushed over them and he continued on, not stopping.

“Nobody is going to bat an eye at two college aged students walking around in the Gray estate’s public floor,” Sylph replied once the guard was out of sight. “We can just act scared until we get somewhere better defended.”

“That seems too easy.”

“You’d be surprised how easy it is to get places when you don’t look out of place. The average person has no idea who they’re protecting anyone from,” Sylph replied, jogging off down the center of the hall. Damien followed her, the droning scream of the alarms outside still ringing in his ears.

Several more guards passed them, and one barked out directions for the nearest safe room, but none stopped to actually press the two for questions. Sylph took Damien through the beautifully decorated halls, passing by stone busts of mages, inscribed with names and descriptions of their ‘great deeds’ for House Gray.

A few minutes of travel later, Sylph held her hand up and they both slowed to a stop at a corner. She rippled, fading from view for a few moments.

“The main hall is just down this turn,” Sylph said. “It’s closed, as we expected. Nelson Gray’s personal guard is likely to be with him, and they’ll be a lot more powerful than the rabble they have hired to protect the walls.”

“Nelson? Is that Nolan’s dad’s name?”

“Yes,” Sylph said. “If it was just me, I could probably sneak in there silently. I don’t think I can do that with you, though. We’re going to have to be more direct.”

“That was always the plan,” Damien replied, rolling his neck. “Besides, I like direct. It gets things accomplished much faster.”

“Be careful. Nelson is a powerful battle mage in his own right,” Sylph warned. “I’ll stay camouflaged at the start and try to non-lethally take out as many of them as I can before they figure out I’m there.”

Damien nodded. Henry stretched out of his shadow, rising up to loom over Damien in his Full Manifestation. He wrapped himself around Damien, melting into his mage armor and turning it black.

Ether hissed around Damien as he pulled it into himself. He overloaded a gravity sphere stepped around the corner, coming to face a pair of huge double doors reinforced with twisting metal. They were beautiful.

Damien threw the gravity sphere. It struck the doors and went off with a loud, rending screech, ripping the metal apart. He strode up to one of the doors and slammed his foot into it, casting Reduce on the piece through his heel.

The door shrunk, ripping itself off the hinges. Still warped and heavily damaged from the spell, it returned to its normal size as it crashed to the ground and skidded across a fine red carpet. Damien stepped into the room, directly across from a tall man with a neatly trimmed gray beard sitting in a padded throne.

“Nelson Gray,” Damien growled, his senses picking up six guards scattered throughout the room. He extended his hand and a portal snapped open in the center of the room. The ravaged corpses of the assassins he had killed tumbled into the room, the pieces of their bodies making a small pile on the velvet floor. “I think these belong to you.”