Published: March 9th 2017, 5:19:17 am
Scanner kept her fingers wrapped around Coates’ shoulder. She said that it was a way to keep him hidden, but in truth it was a way to keep him close. The last thing Scanner needed was for Coates to get a transfer over the border between sections only to leap off in a random direction. There was the separate issue that Scanner wanted Coates close, but she wasn’t about to admit that part either.
The door in front of the two casters was cut from reality with orange and silver light from Scanner’s fingers. The doors Scanner made could bring anyone from anywhere to anywhere, the only issue was keeping someone sane over the journey. For Scanner, traipsing around the void was a walk in the metaphorical park, for a normal human it was instant insanity, for Coates it was somewhere between the two.
“You good yet?” Scanner asked as she tested her hand in the door. She’d been keeping the journey’s short, single steps to keep her and Coates moving, but even then she could tell that each time hurt Coates more than the last. It wasn’t that the Caster was bleeding, it was that she could feel magic seeping through his skin, leaking out of him as it tried to get back into the void.
“Yeah,” Coates lied, he would have appreciated more time to enjoy the air, but he wanted this to be over. The faster he went through all of the doors the quicker he’d stop feeling like death.
“Okay then,” Scanner said as she pulled his shoulder through the doorway of light. There was half a moment, a heartbeat where both of them froze to their core. Ice crept along their skin and tried to hold them in place. It tore at Coates and licked Scanner. Just when it felt like it was going to seal them in place, Scanner yanked Coates out into the street of Upper Wrathgate, a block from where he was supposed to meet Keys.
Coates dropped to the ground, coughing the ice out of his lungs and spitting out slush. He could have sworn that the snow coming out of him was blood red, but it was too dark to tell what colour anything was.
“You doing okay?” Scanner asked, she was the only one who could hear him or see him at this point. She wasn’t about to hide him from herself.
“Alive,” Coates confirmed before righting himself so he was at least kneeling instead of heaving on the ground. Scanner offered a hand and Coates didn’t take it.
“Maybe you should just jump back,” Scanner suggested, “Keys knows you’re here, she can-“
“Not happening,” Coates said, “last thing we need is for people to know I’m here. People see me flying out and they’ll be calling for an invasion of Inner bef-“
“I get the point,” Scanner sighed. Coates finally grabbed her hand and the younger caster pulled him to his feet. “Just figured you didn’t wanna do that again.”
“I don’t,” Cotes confirmed, “but,” Cotes finished his note by shrugging and coughing the last of the ice out of his lungs. “Where’s Keys?”
“Bout a block over,” Scanner said before leading the way. There were people in Inner Wrathgate that knew Upper like the back of their hand, Coates wasn’t one of them. Locals knew their way around, but Coates hadn’t been a Wrathgate local when everything started, it was something he and keys Shared.
Coates checked around the corner for anyone who might be watching before Scanner simply strode out into the street, she was used to being invisible. She didn’t have to be reminded that nobody could see her, it was how she lived. “You coming?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Coates said before frowning at the two men down the street. They were either guards of breaking curfew. Maybe Upper Wrathgate didn’t even had a curfew anymore, Lord knew there weren’t as many rules up here.
Scanner pulled Coates into an alley and up to an iron door at the back of it. There was a long-faded sign above the door, and the handle had been pulled off ages ago. Scanner knocked and dismissed the spell over Coates and herself.
The door cracked open and a glowing pair of eyes glared at the pair of Casters. “Coates?” the man behind the eyes asked before opening the door. “Who the hell invi-“
“Oh, shut it,” Keys said from the other side as moonlight poured into the pitch black room. The man with glowing eyes snapped his fingers and candles lit. “I said I was calling someone, you knew it was him.”
Coates nodded to the brick house beside him, June. The last time and June and Coates had met left June with a broken ankle and three stab wounds in his chest. That had also been June’s first impression of Coates, seeing as he had recently come into his powers at that point. June was gigantic for a sixteen-year-old, six feet eight inches of muscle and magic. The stab wounds might have healed, but the glare explained the rests.
“What’s this about Keys?” Coates asked.
“Well,” Keys stopped herself from using Coates name in front of June and Scanner. There was a good chance that Scanner already knew his name, but she didn’t need to give June more information that he needed; plus, Coates would kill her for calling him Raj. “I figured you needed to see this.”
“We’re playing the pronouns game now?” he asked Keys. Keys responded by nodding to Scanner.
“Sorry,” Scanner started before reaching out for Coates’ head.
“What the hell?” Coates asked, “if she had it, she could have done it back in Inner, Coates kept away from Scanner’s fingers and almost backed into June. “I didn’t need to come here for this, why did-“
Keys sighed, “Coates that’s not everything. I wouldn’t have done this unless I thought it was needed.”
“Keys,” Coates hissed.
“Trust me,” Keys said. The average person in Wrathgate, hell maybe the world, would have told Coates to turn around right then. Keys didn’t play by the same rules that Coates did, it was a different game when she was involved. That being said, Coates had known Keys long enough to understand when she wasn’t playing.
“Fine,” Coates sighed before approaching Scanner and letting her cast memories into him for the second time that day.
The memory started blurry, covered in dust and rubble as Keys glanced down at her arm. She was bleeding, and it hurt like a bitch. How many times did she have to hit this thing? If she took much longer it was going to kill her instead of the other way around.
The memory of Keys peeled herself from the wall she’d been kicked into and stared down the shadow standing in the street. It didn’t seem concerned with her, only paying enough attention to cast a single spell and slap her around. Keys didn’t like getting hit, but she hated being ignored. She pulled bac-
Scanner stopped channeling the memory into Coates. He’d seen enough to understand the gravity of what was going on. All he’d needed to get was the taste of magic on the air when the shadow was around. Inner Wrathgate’s head Caster took a deep breath and tried to process what he’d just seen.
“Need me for the arm?” Coates asked, if Keys was still hurt, she’d done a good job of hiding it when she’d seen Coates earlier in the dy.
“It’s fine,” Keys dismissed.
“Let me see,” Coates insisted before storming over to Keys. June flinched when Coates moved, considering revenge for half a second before letting him by. Coates rolled up Keys’ sleeve, running his fingers over the makeshift bandage that she’d put over her cuts. “You need a better medic.”
“Feel like lending yours?” Keys asked.
“Taken sorry,” Coates pulled off Keys’ bandages and ran his finger over the cut. She’d slapped something on it, but it dripping shadows, magic. “Slash?” Coates asked the name of the spell that might do that.
“Yeah,” Keys confirmed.
“Damn,” Coates started whispering in arcane as he ran his finger along Keys’ arm. The Caters’ flesh started to stitch together, wrapping itself in new tissue as the shadow dripped out of her cut like blood. Within a minute her arm was as good as new.
“That always feels so fucking weird,” Keys commented.
“You coulda asked me to do that today,” Coates pointed out.
“We’re supposed to hate one another,” Keys responded.
“You don’t?” Scanner asked. She was asking June’s benefit. Scanner had known Coates and Keys before the divide between Wrathgates, philosophically the two differed too much to work together, but in small doses they were almost friends.
“We do,” Coates and Keys responded in unison. After a moment of silence Keys pulled herself off the counter she was sitting on and waved Coates toward the door. “Scanner, keep us hidden.”
“I never said I was going with you.” Scanner protested, “I’m not taking care of that bullshit.”
“Bullshit?” Coates asked.
“There’s three more outside town,” June answered.
“I’m not your strike team,” Coates snapped at Keys before she could leave the door. Keys sighed and glared at June.
“You saw what one did to me, Coates,” she said.
“I’m not your lapdog,” Coates continued, he owed Keys a lot, more than he could ever repay, but he wasn’t about to let her call that in at any point. “If you’ve got a problem up here it’s your problem. Those are the-“
“I know what the rules are,” Keys hissed, “you think I want to call you? We can’t afford to lose another Caster, what if this get-“
“Another?” Coates and Scanner both asked. Keys growled at giving away information.
“The first two of those things that show up took out Retriever, he was on edge duty when they arrived,” Keys explained. “Can we go now?”
Coates frowned at the news about Retriever, he’d been a nice kid, reckless, but nice. Beyond the loss of a decent person, it took a lot of firepower to take out a caster, more than Coates was comfortable being North of him. Coates nodded and Scanner copied him.
“Awesome,” Keys spat, “glad I could convince you to help out Wrathgate.”
“Fuck off,” Coates hissed before pushing past Keys into the street. Scanner made everyone silent and invisible as they started toward the border of the city. Coates had to get back home, he was going to help Upper, but if there was something he didn’t understand in the city he had to put everyone on lockdown. “What do you think they are?”
“Some fucked up thing made by the state?” June suggested, Coates rolled his eyes, he hadn’t been asking June but Keys would have said the same thing. Had the civil war pushed into Wrathgate, Upper and Inner would have been on opposite sides.
“Either that,” Keys started, “or someone has a real weird combo that we haven’t seen before,” the Caster glanced around, “Scanner can you get us to the edge, quick?”
“You want a door?” Scanner asked.
“Yes,” Keys asked. Coates thought no, but kept it to himself.
“Alright then,” Scanner ran her mental fingers over her internal map of Wrathgate, drawing a line between where she was and the Northern edge of the city. Once she’d pinpointed both she hissed in her impossible language, carving silver and orange sparks into the air that slowly drifted together to make a door. After half a second they random dancing of her fingers had carved a hole into reality, revealing the void beneath all of it. “After you, it’s a long one,” Scanner said.
Coates took in a breath of Earth’s air before stepping into the void alone. Without Scanner on his shoulder the void was different, instead of a cold abyss it was half a wall and half nothing. The void tried to kick him out, the freezing temperature combining with the feeling of swimming through grease. The magic slathered itself over Coates’ skin, over an appropriate host and tried to hold on. Coates’ shut his eyes and reached out, his fingers clamping around the edge of something solid, something he could feel and pull on. Coates surged through the abyss and the void spat him out onto the broken cobblestones of the edge of Wrathgate.
The magic receded off of Coates as he struggled up, it hissed off him the way that ice reacted to hot water. Coates’ magic was there to defend him, keep the unwanted energy away. Without Scanner it wasn’t a temperature problem, it was an issue of him being a target for the magic. Too long in there and he would have been torn apart, or taken over.
Keys dropped to the ground beside Coates, and both of them noticed June had already been dropped to the ground. June looked like he’d just been through one of the worse parts of hell, but he was intact.
Scanner popped though reality like she’d gone on a nice stroll.
“I forgot how bad that was,” June spat out ice as he struggled to his feet.
“That’s why most people like walking,” Scanner pointed out, “you’ll get used to it if you keep working wi-“
“No you won’t,” Keys said as she scrambled to her feet, “let’s get moving. No chitchat.” Keys pushed forward and Coates willed himself to move. Was he supposed to fight right after doing that? He could barely keep air in his lungs, let alone throw out spells. “They ain’t far.”
“How’dya know?” Scanner asked.
“I can taste them,” Keys hissed. She’d been around the shadows enough to know the difference between as proper Caster’s taste and a shadow. There was something forced about the way that shadows made the air taste, like the air had been shoved through a broken filter. “Just ahead.”
Coates stared out over the scarred field that sat outside of Wrathgate. Back before the war it had been farmland, but mines and drones had taken away that purpose. The only thing the edge of Wrathgate was now, was a wasteland where Casters could practice. He couldn’t see the Shadows, but as he searched for them he started to feel them, like something was wrong, the same way that the average person felt when a Caster walked by.
“Well,” Scanner said as soon as she felt the shadows, “I’mma back up. I’ll catch any of ya if it gets too bad.” Scanner carved a silver door into the air and leapt through it. The invisibility on the rest of the Casters faded, it would have as soon as they cast a spell anyway.
“June,” Coates started, “what’s your third spell?”
“What?” June responded, “I’m not tellin-“
“June,” Keys threatened.
“Blink,” June said.
“Were you saving that for me?” Coates asked, blink was a fantastic spell to have if you wanted to get into a fight with Coates.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Well I’m Gravity, Dash and Regen,” Coates said, “there you go, now we’re even.”
June frowned at the idea of them being even. When he’d squared up against Coates he hadn’t figured out what his third power was, Coates had shattered him with one.
“Remember mine?” Keys asked.
“How could I forget?” Coates asked as he ran over the powers in his head; Slash, Plants and Flicker. Easy enough to remember, Keys was sunscreen.
A shadow moved in front of the three Casters, well out of range, but enough to make all of them jump.
“Wish you’d told me we were getting into something,” Coates said, “I woulda brought more knives.”
“You’ll be fine,” Keys said, “throw rocks.”
There was a moment of silence between the Casters. The second shadow revealed itself from behind the rocks. Why hadn’t they gone into Wrathgate? What were they doing just waiting out here?
Of course, the answer was waiting.
“Want to open?” Keys asked Coates. The two Casters shared a nod and Coates stepped forward.
June knew the difference between the two versions of Coates from experience. There was the casual Coates who walked with purpose, then there was the serious Coates that waltzed with murder in his footsteps. Humans were naturally prey animals, eyes skirting around for something dangerous, the serious version of Coates wasn’t prey, he was a hunter.
The world took a breath as Coates counted down the feet between him and the first shadow. Three hundred feet, that was the range limit on dash. Once he hit that point he could go flinging toward the shadow like a one-hundred and eighty-five-pound bullet. Coates could do that, and he’d thought about it, but the way the shadows stayed in place, the way they hovered on the edge of his range, it sat wrong in his stomach.
Casters in combat had a strange way of thinking, abstract twisting their three spells into a million forms to see what they could do. The epitome of that was the idea of combining spells, using them on one another instead of in tandem. Coates had never been sure how he could speed up the idea of gravity and use it on himself, but that was his plan.
Coates stopped at three hundred and three feet away. He didn’t know the number, only that his power told him that he couldn’t *quite* get to the shadows. The magic in Coates’ blood willed him forward, trying to convince him that one more step would be perfect. One more step and he could draw blood. Instead, Coates looked up, whispered the word for gravity and then followed it with the word for dash.
Two hundred feet in the air, Coates came to a sudden stop, catching himself and breathing in the night sky for a second. He had time, it wasn’t like they could hit him up here, he could have waited.
A sigil started to sketch itself across the sky dark purple light tracing out a web of circuitry across the air above Coates. The caster closed his eyes as sparks feel down onto him and he continued to channel the power of gravity into one point, one point with nothing to force downward. The magic above Coates breathed a sigh of relief once it was done sketching. The Caster opened his eyes for half a second to check his work before nodding.
There was a crack in the sky as Coates wrapped his dash power around the rune, twisting it into a bastardized form, stretching the gravity magic until it touched the edge of his foot. For Coates the moment lasted a lifetime, a million small feelings as the magic figured out what it wanted him to do. For everyone else, there wasn’t time for a breath as Coates disappeared, and the ground below him turned into a crater with him in the centre of it.
Earth and concrete broke into fine bust below the Caster as he landed. The ground around him shook and turned after the impact, but none of the shadows died, they’d all had the mind to move out of the way before Coates artillery fire had hit. All the attack had done was make everything one big dust storm.
Coates ducked out of the way as one of his hundreds of chunks of earth came flying back at him. A second ripped through the air and Coates snatched himself with his dahs power, flying backward out of the dust cloud and landing with a light tap. The ground beneath Coates tried to kick him off, bucking at the Caster. A shadow came out of the dust with hands held high, trying to bend the ground below Coates. Gravity held it down, it wasn’t that simple.
A torrent of fire erupted from June’s hands as he rushed forward, the geyser of fire tearing at the second and third shadows who were still far away from Coates. Both of them disappeared for a moment before popping up in front of June. He shut his eyes and flashed out existence in the half second before he would have been crushed between slabs of earth.
June reappeared behind the Casters, pulling back his hand with sparks flashing at the edge of his fingertips. Both of the shadows felt the static and spun around, twisting the earth below June as they tried to hit before he did.
Before the shadows could counter June, vines ripped themselves out of the ground and twisted around the ankles of the two false casters. The plants cut into the ‘skin’ of the shadows and started pulling them into the ground. Thunder clapped as June launched his attack. Lighting lashed across the nothing where the shadows used to be, and the two shadows reappeared in the middle of the middle of the crater.
The pair of shadows turned to the Casters from Upper Wrathgate and took a step forward. As soon as they’d made the threat the third shadow came flying onto the scene, literally. The third slammed into the second and shattered it into a thousand sparks of darkness before crashing into the earth and breaking the ground. As soon as Coates dashed something it in impervious to harm, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use people as bullets.
Coates waited for the sickness that came with killing, the horrid vertigo of taking a life. Instead he felt nothing, whatever these things were, they were either already dead or had never been alive. That meant he could go all out, and it was already three on two.
The shadow that Coates had thrown peeled itself from the ground, shoving stones around with magic and keeping its attention on Coates as he stalked forward. This wasn’t a winnable fight, not that winning had been the point in the first place. The shadow raised its hands and called on the power of earth to try to catch Coates.
There was luck to random encounters. The shadows could blink, which meant that they could dodge Coates’ attacks if they knew they were coming, but their second spell, earth, was useless against him. The binding power of ground control was killed by Coates power over gravity, and any stones the shadows threw could be caught and snapped back at them.
The shadow waited for Coates to make the first move, predicted the first twitch of the Caster’s fingers. The stones around Coates shot forward, cutting through the air toward it. The shadow blinked out of existence and popped into reality just in front of Coates, close enough to be crushed, but also close enough to strike.
Water poured out of nowhere and shot at, and then into Coates as it turned into ice. Coates screamed as the icicle turned into a spear and cut into his chest. Blood started freezing to the weapon as it kept building wider and wider.
Coates hissed in the impossible language, and a dozen stones ripped into the shadow, breaking it into a fog of midnight.
Blood was filling in Coates lungs as the ice splashed down into water. Coates dropped down to the ground and tried to take dep breaths, he knew how this went, and it was going to hurt.
Part of Coates power of healing was his passive ability to heal himself. The issue was that his body simply tried to bring him back to point zero. His ability wouldn’t push a bullet out of his skin, or force water out of his lungs. He was going to be throwing up blood and water for the better part of an hour, if not more. The flaw in his healing was the reason that Inner Wrathgate still needed a doctor, he could only heal the basic tissue, more complicated procedures needed a steady had and a scalpel, magic or no.
“Son of a bitch,” Cotes swore as he coughed up the first bit of his blood and water. Healing didn’t stop the pain of stabbed, it only let him survive it. For a second Coates thought about bringing Gallows on the next tangle with these shadows, but then he realized he shouldn’t be hoping for a second round in the ring. Quiet nights might have been boring, but they were the best thing Wrathgate could get.
“Coates?” Keys called out over the battlefield. The dust from Coates’ last attack was still settling, and Coates wasn’t in the mood to yell something with blood in his lungs. She would smell him out eventually either way, Keys had a good nose.
“Over here,” June yelled at her as he pulled up beside Coates. The massive Caster put a hand on his shoulder and Coates flinched away from it. He might have trusted Keys, but June was a different story. “You okay?” June asked.
“Do I look okay?” Coates spat out blood and descended into another coughing fit as his lungs sealed the water and blood inside. “I’m great,” Coates hissed.
“Well then, I won’t help,” June snapped back just before Keys trotted over.
“Got yourself stabbed Coates?” she asked as she watched the blood from his torn shirt onto the ground. Coates’ chest had healed at this point. “Nice.”
“I had to kill,” Coates took a second to spit out more blood, “two you lazy piece of-“ Coates lost his insult in another fit out coughing and gave up. He was going to quiet and miserable.
Orange and silver sparks cut through the air in front of Coates as Scanner stepped back into reality. “Not looking so good Coa-“ Coates stopped listening to Scanner way before she stopped talking. The last thing he needed right now was another quippy reminder than that there was a giant hole in his chest. What he needed right now was time, and sleep. Sleep sounded good.