• • Raydorn: The War in the Black
• March 3, 2024

Raydorn: The War in the Black (Chapter 55)

“You’d always think little of a journey if you jogged in place.”

Astrid, 448 A.C.A.

---

There was the smell of the ocean, and there was the scent of the water spraying all around you. As the aptly named Little Stinky trailed its wings just over the ocean’s surface, slicing through a few waves, Astrid basked in her senses in a way few ever would.

She could taste the salt of the sea without drowning in it, let it filter through her nostrils without burning them, and feel the drops of water coat her face without leaving her drenched. She let loose her arms, raising them over her head and letting her griffin lead the way. 

HONK!!

When her griffin let a blunt warning sound, Astrid opened her eyes and smirked. She pulled on the griffin’s feather hilt and the griffin spun and swooped… narrowly missing the side of their ship.

Andy screamed at her from the side of their ship, “You fucking wingnut!” 

Not that Astrid could hear her. 

‘I could explain the art of flying a griffin,’ Lapis offered, ‘you know, for safety.’

But would I listen?

‘No, I don’t suppose you would.’

Astrid kept baiting Little Stinky to go higher and higher, but not to take his time ascending. He tipped his left wing, and they ascended as if walking around a pillar. 

As they soared higher, closer and closer to the clouds, she could feel the air get thinner in her lungs. Make me work for every breath, she said to no one in particular.

‘I used to think flying was a bit overrated, but maybe that’s because I always floated in place,’ Lapis thought to himself. For a moment, Lapis’s thought strikes her as strange, as it was something she never considered, at least not from him.

No wonder you got bored. You’d always think little of a journey if you jogged in place.

‘Yes, I suppose I would. I think my cousin would like you… if you were a griffin.’

Hmm, no, I don’t suppose the God of Griffins would take a mortal riding a griffin very well. He probably wouldn’t even accept my prayers.

Lapis laughed in her head, as they flew just under the belly of the clouds. Astrid raised her hand to let it pass through the watery vapor. It didn’t feel wet, only cool, and Astrid thought, How dry…

She pulled up on Little Stinky, letting them bob their heads into the cloud, and finding themselves rather drenched.

Astrid laughed, despite how little it made sense. 

After basking in her happiness, Lapis chuckled to himself. ‘You know…’

Know what?

‘Valk would probably love any follower, I imagine he remains very self-conscious because so few know his name.’ 

Out loud, she let out a sad hum. “Oh, I’ll have to pour one out for him, poor big bird…” 

Her small frown disappeared as she smirked and pulled up on her mount to go up and into the clouds. She held her breath as she flew right through it, but kept her eyes open. 

When they came to the top, all she was was black.

And it was late noon.

Even after all of her years in the Raze, her eyes could not withstand a full-on blast of smoke without the need to rub them clean. She could breathe it in without coughing, but Little Stinky was a different story. 

The animal kept soaring higher, and Astrid held to his neck as she tried to cover her eyes, but the burn crept at the edges of her eyes. It took nearly a dozen seconds to escape it, and when she was able to take a clean breath, the air was even thinner than it should be.

She took long, deep breaths to get a fraction of what she could even a single story lower in the air, but she couldn’t see a fraction of what she saw from up there.

Smoke coated the skies for miles, all flowing from the direction they were heading. And where there’s smoke and fire, only one thing follows…

‘You need to warn the others.’

We need to hurry.

*****

The attack had begun hours before Astrid saw the smoke… before Jack could summon the wind to blow the ship’s sails. 

The Icy Pearl Isles were on fire, and their attackers bore the banner of the Black Legion. For a moment, the denizens who had been living in exile were conflicted over whether to fight back. 

The would-be legionnaires unsheathed their swords. That was when it became clear. There would be a battle, there would be blood, and there would be death.

But none of it should have had to do with the children.

Quintus tore down the burning tent and threw it away to the side where the flames could die out in pieces. He looked back and waved those who followed him onwards as he held the Raze child, Hana, in his other arm. 

“Let’s go!” he bellowed as his arm swung like a club, beckoning them onward. 

The children of the tribes and of the Raze were the first ones the adults surrounded. They herded them out like cattle, even when those of the Raze bared their teeth like honey badgers. 

Many did not have the chance to break for weapons in the chaos and were slain as they were defenseless against the knights who wore black and red. 

Clang!

As many tried to help the children move along, children in turn tried to help the elderly. Many found themselves lagging behind the pack. 

But a pirate was never too far from her swords. 

As legionnaires came at their flanks, they found they were not so vulnerable. You would think that with all that she’s experienced, Lucilla Indu Nero would shudder at the idea of battle and that the fires would break her psyche.

In a way, she did. Rather than stab with precision and slash with grace, her tentacle arms were misshapen arms flinging around at the shields of the false legion. Krera’s voice was beckoning her through the flames to die, and Lucy would not embrace her. To stay alive, she swung with all the power and weight she could muster in the hopes of clobbering God, the soul of fire herself.

Instead, she smashed men to bits, and cut others to smithereens, letting out screams that matched those of the conquered than a conqueror.

Quintus tried looking away, someone who should be helping his people, but his attention kept being torn back to Lucy. Even as some of their legionnaires went to back her up, they were in her way. 

He just needed to find someone to go to his tent, and another to take Hana.

Clang!

He just-

Clang! Clang!

-needed-

Clang! CLANG! CLANG!

-one other person-

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

-to be responsible. 

He just needed to tear his eyes away for a moment.

Hana clung to his neck, struggling to hang as he kept tossing himself back and forth, trying to find help. But he was the help, the one everyone turned to. Who would believe that they could help him now? 

As the clanging swords against swords rang through his ears, and as a familiar face helped others along, Quintus’s hand snapped out into the crowd. 

“Sharda!” Quintus yelled to get his attention, but he had taken it when he grabbed his arm. 

Sharda looked up at him as if he had never looked up at another person in his life. 

“I need you to do me a favor beyond all others, one that may help turn back the tide.” 

Sharda’s eyes narrowed on Quintus. With all the fire and destruction all around them, Quintus still spoke to him like he had a choice like they weren’t out here fighting not only for their lives but everything that came before them and could come after.

“<You tell me what you need, and it will be done,>” Sharda said in Uzuri.

His response managed to make the ends of Quintus’s lips curve. A bolt had the audacity to interrupt his moment of pride though.

Thock.  

Unlike most weapons, arrows could be rather quiet when they hit someone. Most of the noise comes from those who were shot, but this was Quintus, so Hana did most of the screaming.

“Quintus!” Sharda yelled, causing many to stop their escape to the lower caves to see the strongest man the world shot. 

In their fear they expected him to crumple like most giants do. Instead, he reached for the arrow that should have lied in his heart and pulled it out without a second thought.

“Penny!” Quintus called but was welcomed only by stunned silence. “Penny!” he yelled again, almost in an animalistic snarl, one that made the taller Susannan Penance Prim race to him. 

He handed Hana off to the teenager and roared for them to run. His booming voice had the added effect of making everyone move faster than they were before. 

Then Quintus turned to Sharda, as Sharda’s eyes scanned over his chest. It wasn’t in the same way his eyes hovered over Jack, but in the way most others do around Quintus. They look for proof that he was flesh and blood like the rest of them, and his skin never did that. 

Still, they do not speak ill of the beloved. 

“In my tent lies a heavy slab of metal covered in a cloth,” Quintus told Sharda, “I need you to race there, through the fire and death, past all the men who want you dead, and then through the village back to me. Can you do that?”

“Of course, is this weapon? Is it really that important? What will it do?”

“With the children out of harm’s way, I will join Lucy to turn the tide and help give the others the chance to get their weapons and show these mutts what the real legion looks like.

“The weapon? That will help me drown them in a tide of blood, it is all that they deserve.”

Quintus did not wait to inspect Sharda’s face and the color draining from it. He simply started walking towards where Lucy was fighting off dozens on her own, the numbers growing larger as they knew they would need to team up against her. 

As Quintus walked past a burning tent, his hand plunged into it and took hold of the staff that was holding it up, its tip still smoking. 

Then he began to run, and just as he came over a bump in the road to Lucy, he joined the fray. 

Into the breach, he thought, just before he brought the wood down on a head protected by metal. The metal did not save him though.

Immediately after jumping into the fray, half a dozen soldiers with arrows lined up to take aim, but Lucy hadn’t noticed. It was only after the arrows were notched that her ears perked, and when they were let loose she turned around. 

STAMPF! STAMPF! STAMPF!

While several broke against Quintus’s skin, two pierced his arm and one his side, as his mass was raised to protect her.

Lucy saw red.

She juked around Quintus, and swung her arm extending it several yards away from her in an arch. She managed to slice the necks of half the archers before her tentacle got caught on some soldiers between them.

Those soldiers were then encircled by her continuously growing tentacle, rats caught by a snake. Her other sword arm extended straight for the groin of the next archer to ready an arrow, stretching over a dozen and half yards in length to do it.

She relieved of him his loins, spraying them across the ground.

As the beast began to take greater form over her body, her human skin turned into the slimy texture of an octopus, even on skin that wasn’t near her tentacle limbs.

She was ready to squeeze her other captives to death, at least until the warriors of the Hotan and Icee tribes came charging in with their spears. They let a vicious war cry as they stabbed men of superior armor with their superior skills, hitting their marks between the faceplates so well that their mothers would not recognize them.

As Lucy uncurled her arm, Quintus raced past her, his arm healed. He leaped up, planting his foot down on a soldier’s head, breaking his neck as he used him as a launching pad. Then as he came down on the last of the archers, he threw his makeshift club at the head of one and brought both hands down on the skull of the other. 

Despite his hands meeting steel, they were no worse for wear, but the helmet was turned inside out.

Quintus pointed on over the hill and urged those left to push on. “We move forward, and we drive them-”

Wooosh!!

A strong force preceeded the wind and pushed Quintus back a step. Quintus threw his arms up as a gust of wind blindingly followed behind it, and by the time it died down, Lucy was at his side, along with many others. 

Quintus lowered his arms as he looked out over the flattened crater. It was an old one that had been covered by vegetation, but the power before them had removed all that originally stood upon it.

The cause was not difficult to discern, for he stood on the opposite, higher end from Quintus and Lucilla. 

In his black armor, befitting a true knight, and a sword radiating the colors of the rainbow, the Aurora Knight stood. The darkness behind the slits in his helm betrayed nothing of his eyes to them. 

He stood before them as a wall, one that had never failed to hold back a tide. The threat of his blade was equal to that of a maelstrom over the horizon. 

There were very few with any experience facing this incarnation of the Aurora Knight. Such enemies tended to die, and his once-allies knew enough to know why.

By the gods, is all Quintus can think of as the Aurora Knight begins to make his slow walk toward them, truly, they are not here.

The gods may not have been there that day, but Quintus was, and he began to walk towards the Aurora Knight to meet him.

And because Quintus was there, Lucilla was there too, walking directly behind Quintus, a scheme already in the making.

Quintus began running at the Aurora Knight first, and the knight kept his pace. As the giant was about to be in sword distance without a weapon, he dodged to the left.

A tentacle with a sword in its grip came flying in to take his place.

Cling!

Synth.

Slick!

“Aaaahhh!!!” Lucy screamed as the knight flicked his blade once to deflect, and followed with a slash that cut the tip of her tentacle clean off. 

“Lucy!” Quintus screamed in worry as her tentacle flailed around and bled the blue blood of the sea.

She ground her teeth and pulled her tentacles back, only for the Aurora Knight to dash after it.

Despite his heavy armor, he moved like the wind, and Quintus was proving just barely fast enough to keep up. 

He made a dangerous ploy to make a large sidestep between the knight and his dearest, but proved all too predictable. 

Quintus crossed his arms before his chest, baiting the knight to go for a stab. Quintus’s hide was not like most men, but he made the wrong bet that the knight did not know that. He bet that the knight had not paid attention to him whenever they shared a room.

Who wouldn’t pay attention to the biggest threat in the room?

The Aurora Knight leaped over Quintus’s head. As he flipped over, performing acrobats that left Quintus stunned, he moved his sword like a painter does his brush. He made a point to dip it in some red paint from the palette. 

Of course, the palette was Quintus and the ground around him the canvas.

“Aagh!!!” Quintus screamed as he clutched at both of his bleed clavicles. The giant was stalled, his sealing skin unable to nullify the debilitating pain in time.

The knight landed facing Quintus’s back, but his own back faced Lucy.

Lucy let her rage get the best of her, roaring and growing tentacles from her back, letting her inner beast turn her upper body completely bulbous. 

She threw her arms forward and thrust her tentacles after the knight to keep him from Quintus, assuming the wrong plan. 

As the tentacles came at the Aurora Knight, he reminded her of his namesake. 

Thuuummmm.

The Aurora Blade hummed and glowed as if crafted by the Goddess of Light herself. He slashed preemptively, and from each slash came a wave of rainbow light. Each wave hit its mark, cutting deep into her tentacles, nearly severing all of them.

Lucy ground her teeth, screaming through clenched teeth as she pulled her bleeding tentacles back. The Aurora Knight went to capitalize on her weakness.

As the knight dashed, Quintus called to him, “Kion stop!”

The so-called Kion retorted by spinning on his heel into a slash across the encroaching Quintus’s chest. He swung his sword again and sent out a wave that Quintus barely managed to block with his forearms.

Seearrr!!

The wave did not explode or implode on contact with Quintus’s skin. It took a moment to sense the magic underneath, longer than it did with Lucy’s tentacles. But worry not, they imploded.

Blash!

The wave dung into Quintus’s flesh, bathing the little grass that remained in his blood. His body couldn’t heal him fast enough as the Aurora Knight left him no room to counter, sending another wave Quintus’s way.

“Don’t do this!” Quintus called to him, to no avail.

As the giant was kept busy, the knight turned back to the charging pirate and her lone sword. 

“We’re your friends!” Quintus called to him over the echoing flames as he raced to the knight’s back.

“Really? You’re doing this now?!” Lucy yelled as she brought her saber down towards the knight.

Clang!

The knight deftly blocked before bringing his foot into Lucy’s gut. She threw up a little from the blow, but the knight was already countering Quintus with a metal boot into the giant’s knee.

Lucy could hear Quintus’s knee crack over his cry a pain, sounds she’d never heard Quintus make before.

And it was all Kion’s fault.

She attempted to rage, to swing her sword and bring hell down upon Kion, but she lacked the strength. 

He deflected her swing only to follow it up with a slice to her bicep. Her pain bought the knight time to deal with her dearest, and her cry of pain attracted her dearest in turn.

The knight twisted and slashed across Quintus’s arm to keep him at a distance, corralling him back with the act and promise of pain. 

Then he returned to Lucy to swipe away a blow from her sword and cut her from the center of her chest to her shoulder, and then around again.

Back and forth he turned and swung, cutting from them both piece by piece, and with the effects of his sword, their healing factors were failing behind. Soon, Quintus’s body was unable to stop him from bleeding over the ground with every other slash the knight made. 

Lucy’s own healing factor only worsened the longer she had to fight while surrounded by the fire, an element that would slowly dry her out till death.

They needed a new edge because the Aurora Knight was tearing them apart, quite literally. They may have been slow, but the knight was clearly prepared to take his time and draw it out. He was fighting two warriors built to fight wars of attrition, so he made attrition nothing but pain for them. 

Quintus was the first to buckle and fall to the ground, face in the dirt. This kind of pain was new to him. His body could survive more than most, but his mind? 

Lucy had the mind, and stood her ground, deflecting every other blow as the knight continued pushing her back. Her own tentacles were weights on her back, slowing her down tremendously after every other strike she landed.

Quintus couldn’t remember the last time he felt his wounds try to stitch themselves back together and fail like they were this day. His body was threading the needle but leaving too much room between each stab of the needle. 

He wallowed there on the ground, cursing his own weakness as his dearest found and bled without him. Shame threatened to consume them, but thankfully his eyes were open when they fell upon inspiration.

We’ll need luck for it to work, but what else is there to bet on?

Lucy was barely holding herself on her feet when the Aurora Knight took his sword in both hands and started bashing it against her small, frail saber. She barely managed to hold it up against his onslaught, the blade digging into her fingers where she had to hold the other end to block with all of her strength.

Then Quintus called to her. “Lucy, catch!”

Lucy gave him a befuddled look as he raised her other saber and went to throw it. It was an understandable reaction, considering her hands were full. She cursed, “The fuck?!” when he threw it, but it was the Aurora Knight who brought it together.

He took one step to turn and batted the sword to the ground, and the mistake was made. He nudged his foot but stopped when it hit something soft. 

The knight had stepped over all the tentacles Lucy had left around across the ground. 

Before he could escape, they swarmed him, wrapping around his arms and his body. They wormed their way between his armpits and held his joints tight together, unable to move.

As they tightened their hold, one slithered around his chest, and up to his face, making him drown in the smell of the blood oozing from the tip he cut off. He turned his head away to try and avoid the strong smell.

“Force him into the air!” Quintus told her, and they became of one mind.

“Let gravity do the work?” she muttered, and for the first time since the fight started, her bulbous, bloodied face grew this big smirk. “With pleasure!”

With a thrust, Lucy made sure to push him straight up over the ground, and not send him into the ocean. She would regret that decision later as she began to let him go and let him fall. Before she could finish letting him go, he twirled his sword as if it were no lighter or smaller than a pencil, and cut off the huge section of her tentacle. 

Quintus struggled to his feet as she screamed out in pain, and would only scream more as the Aurora Knight chopped her tentacle to pieces more and more before it fell away from him. Then he was in freefall, two stories up, the farthest Lucy could stretch in her state.

In the seconds he fell to the ground, the Aurora Blade began to shake and glow. The energy that radiated from its ethereal steel pulsed in a manner befitting the blade’s name. With each pulse, the knight’s descent slowed while also charging the blade full of energy.

Lucy stared up in abject horror, the color draining from her face thanks to the loss of blood and their impending doom. Quintus managed to take her into his arms before he turned around. 

Though, the Aurora Knight’s fall was enough time to make sure that even Gronin himself would feel the impact.

Pha-OOOMM!!!

The explosion of energy did not sound like most explosions. Lucy heard this muffled version of the thunderous pound that struck the Isles. 

Quintus heard it loud and clear after throwing his body over Lucy. He heard the sharpest of ringing sounds that immediately made his ears bleed and made him temporarily deaf to everything but the buzz of pressure against his eardrums.

Quintus barely managed to hold himself up before Lucy’s beast form rescinded, dumping her extra appendages to be obliterated by the blast. She felt it as they were wiped off her body, her left sword arm barely reforming in time before the following pulses took her right arm from her again. 

From the outside, these events that would ingrain themselves into Quintus’s skin and Lucy’s psyche only lasted seconds, but to them, it felt like hours.

Quintus held his hands over Lucy’s ears and his body over hers as the power of the Aurora Blade lashed against his back. It sent him reeling to a time when he was far smaller, making him shrink atop of her, trying to spare as much of himself as possible.

Lucy could do nothing but clutch to him, and beg for it to end.

When it did, Quintus fell to his side immediately, his back burning with smoke much like the rest of the rubble around them. The area of effect wasn’t much larger than the crater already was, but it left its mark on them.

Quintus’s skin struggled to heal from the wound, but he was still trying to push himself up on his side. Lucy went to touch him, only to hear him groan out in pain. She took her hand back, finding his blood on it from the wound she poked only for a moment.

“I’m-” 

Stampf. Stampf.

Before she could apologize, she heard the sound of greaves clanking against the ground. She turned to look into the smoke as Quintus sat up beside her. He put his arm over her to shield her, but his own strength faltered, and she caught him. 

They looked to each other as Quintus had to accept his limits, and that he was hanging on only thanks to her now.

But how much longer could that last?

From the smoke, the knight’s shadow could be seen, and from the slits where his eyes would shine, shone bright aurora lights. It was for a moment before the dust cloud dispersed that he stood with the tip of his blade trailing down behind him.

He walked with speed as he raised the sword over his head, and cast his shadow over them, a shadow born from the light of the moon.

But, it was as he watched them be consumed by a shadow too great to be his that he hesitated. Then came the light that shone bright like the sun. 

“Hrrrgghh…”

The Aurora Knight growled as he turned around only for the sun to blind him in the middle of the night.

Already falling from the back of the griffin, Astrid had Kan Bujian raised over her head, targeting its blinding light straight in the Aurora Knight’s face… but not those of her friends.

 Quintus fell to his side and pulled back his feet. Before the Aurora Knight could even defend himself, Quintus had raced to drop-kicked him. 

Even weakened, the force sent him into the air, into the munching maws of the mad ax woman.

The Aurora Knight saw her mad grin, and tried to bring his sword to block, but it was too late.

Rend!

Sheeeaaarrrr!!!

Her ax dug itself into his chest plate, the steel melting under her ax’s touch. It dug deep enough that the man underneath felt the burn, and let out a rather shrill and human scream of pain. 

But being that they were in the air, they just as quickly separated, and began falling back, and Astrid had momentum from a much higher fall.

Lucy acted quickly in turn, moving under Astrid and taking the blow. Astrid’s bum landed dead center of Lucy’s stomach, knocking the wind from her lungs. Lucy was gasping for air as Astrid did little more than rub her head.

“Astrid,” Quintus growled as pushed himself into a stumble. He was quick to shove Astrid off, the ax woman too slow to get to her feet.

“Gee, are those the thanks I get?” Astrid joked.

Air was coming back to Lucy, but her voice was still shallow and on the edge of a coughing fit. Lucy opened her mouth to say a lot of things to the woman she saved from going splat, but at the end of the day, they had bigger problems.

And it’s not like Astrid would ever say sorry to her.

“Hrrrrr…. AAGH!” 

A wild, feral scream brought the three of them back to reality. They turned to see the Aurora Knight slamming his fist into the ground in frustration, acting like a spoiled child who was told he could have no dessert.

Quintus thought to himself, He has toyed with us as if we were a food he should’ve swallowed already.

Astrid pointed her ax and shined the light his way, far before Quintus and Lucy were standing again. 

The Aurora Knight tilted his head, and the lights of the power inside of his blade seemed to stem from him. 

He gripped his sword and stood up to his feet, dragging it behind him as he did. 

Astrid twirled her ax as Lucy and Quintus stood up, audibly breathing and holding in each other’s wounds to stay on their feet. 

Astrid cared little for their shape, for she had no intention of needing their help.

When the Aurora Knight started to run at them, Quintus and Lucy flinched, but Astrid’s eyes only narrowed.

“Come on then, little knight,” she taunted him as he raised his blade and swung to cut her in half. 

Clang!

He found his sword, blade to blade with an invisible edge he could not see. Rather, he looked through empty space into Astrid. She held no malice, nor hate, or even fear.

She stared back into him with this grin that threatened to give way to a mad fit of chuckles. “Look me in the eye,” she said as she looked up at him and their crossed blades, “and tell me how many fucks you think I give about you.”