The Restored: Chapter Thirty-One

Kelly and Jin watched from the windows of the airship that they had boarded as Alyphize rose into the air on a current of red light, and they exchanged a shocked look. They’d been mainly scanning the streets below, looking for someone who was approaching the Central Aura Depository. 

Somehow Alyphize had already made it inside. 

Jin whirled around and faced the controls of the airship, then she swallowed thickly to stop the nervous bile from rising up her throat. Only the cool, calming voice of her new demon helped keep her composure. 

“We need to turn this ship around,” she said. 

“Do you know how to do that?” Kelly demanded. 

“No,” Jin admitted. “I only had a little bit of education in airship combat, and it was all about using the weaponry, not on steering. But you saw that the Dancer–” 

“The what?” 

“The Dancer? It was painted on the side of the ship when we boarded. Ugh.” 

“Okay, okay, whatever,” Kelly said. 

Then the lights in the city started to go wild, and Alyphize’s voice rang out through the entire city at once, and Jin spat out a curse so nasty that it made Kelly blush in embarrassment. 

“The spell spike on the Dancer is pretty strong,” Jin said. “I’m pretty sure I can rig it to release all of its power at once. The ship is still floating, so its internal shielding is clearly pretty good, but I’ve got a lot of experience with weapons. You just need to figure out how to turn us to face her, and make sure she doesn’t notice.” 

Kelly’s eyes widened, and then he gave a resolute nod. Jin turned and rushed into the upper level, inside the hollow area where the enchantments were all held, and cast some metal sensory spells, pausing only for a moment when she spotted the really strange aura generator that was dominating a large chunk of the room. The crystal was a solid gray, almost the exact shade as her aura, and it had long, sharp brass spikes pushed through the crystalline surface. 

That was strange, but she didn’t have the time to worry about that right now. She focused on the metal sensory spell, and started to look for the lines that directed and metered the power flowing into the spell spike.

Kelly, down in the main ship, was carefully reading over and studying all of the switches, buttons, and levers around the main steering wheel of the ship, trying to figure out what all of them meant, when his familiar nudged him mentally. He thanked her, and picked up the manual that she’d pointed out, and had barely opened it when he saw motion out of the corner of his eye. His eyes grew wide, and he whipped his head around, dropping the manual. 

Alyphize had begun creating demons. Not even a quarter mile away, they were tearing through the air, looking for anyone and everyone who they could take and eat. He started to panic, and barely managed to force it down. This ship was pretty well defended. Right? Right?

He started crafting an invisifield spell, and the moment his mind sensory arch-star detected a mind other than him and Jin, he dropped the spell. 

Not to hide the whole ship, of course. That would have taken exceedingly difficult mental illusions, as he’d have to try and model the entire thing in three dimensions, and he hadn’t even cast the spells to help him get its dimensions in his head or anything of the sort. 

No, the spell he cast was simpler – he just rendered himself invisible. Jin was already above, hidden by the airship plating, so the demons wouldn’t see her. 

One demon flapped by on wings like a swan’s, then another on bat-like wings, and then a third. By the time the fourth had passed him by, he started to relax, letting out a breath of relief as his invisibility spell held. 

In the hull, Jin was in the middle of reworking the metal that made up the lines of the spell when she felt the aura around her hand start to flash. When Axel had taken her to meet Devi, and they’d gone for a walkabout in the Wandering Path, she’d been pretty entranced by the older girl. Her smooth, rich skin, her competence at a rare and dangerous branch of magic, and her absolute confidence… 

Then Devi had asked her to help her get free. What could Jin say, other than yes? She knew what it was like to be forced to work for someone. It had taken the person she’d been raised to look up to forcibly working to deprogram her in order to get her out, and even then, it had come down to a split second choice. 

Jin activated the magic swirling around her wrist, the boon that Devi had marked her with, and the anchor in the Wandering Path formed. An instant later, Devi stepped out, then her head whipped around. 

“Jin?” 

Below them, Kelly cursed when he felt a mind appear overhead, and let go of his invisibility spell. His familiar ability, second harvest, went to work, forming a copy, and he used the original to make Jin invisible to the demon who had to have appeared, while using the second version to maintain his own. He hadn’t expected that Alyphize would be able to manifest a demon right on board the ship! 

Though he was no master of combat, he didn’t want Jin to accuse him of being a coward either. He slowly crept over to the ladder and clambered up, then blinked. 

“Who are you?” he asked, shifting his magic around him to let the invisibility magic fade. With all three of them hidden behind cover, there was no need for it anymore. 

“Kelly, this is Devi. Devi, this is Kelly,” Jin said, nodding to both of them. “She’s –” 

“Oh! You’re Devi? I thought you’d be… older.” 

“I’m twenty!” Devi protested. “That’s plenty old.” 

Kelly could mentally hear Axel grumbling about how they were all children, but he pushed the thought aside. 

“Can you fly an airship?” Kelly asked. “I was working on the manual, but I don’t know how.” 

“Of course I can,” Devi said. “Nexus forced me to learn.” 

Kelly’s lips pressed together as he remembered her forced work for Nexus. He’d tried to ignore some of the bad things that had been going on around him, but…

“Listen,” Jin said, then quickly outlined her plan. Devi listened with rapt attention, nodding along, then she started to speak. 

“I can help you power your super death ray and see if it works. But the Throne will fade back into the Fallen Void eventually, as will all the demons. The world can’t support them here forever. We have to think about what comes after.” 

“What do you mean?” Kelly asked. “I’m not sure we’ll even make it out the other side.” 

“What I mean is that once the Throne is destroyed, Nexus will use it as an excuse to declare martial law, and exert even more power over the city,” Devi said. “They’ve all retreated to the Malapert, this is the perfect time to actually stop them.” 

She held up a square of fabric, one similar to Axel’s gun locker. 

“I copied the coordinates to Axel’s gun locker, and built a way to access it. Did you see all the guns and bombs and swords in there? Between that, my own personal cache, your ability to make us invisible, and Jin’s ability to pass through force wards…” 

“Not sure I can anymore,” Jin admitted. “Definitely not in combat, my flickering familiar benefit is gone.”

“Still. We can get on board the Malapert, and blow its generator up! We can stop Nexus.” 

Kelly frowned, then slowly shook his head. 

“I can’t do that. They’re bad people, but they deserve time in prison, not an extrajudicial execution.” 

He was actually pretty proud of his word choice there. He’d heard Rhys using the words in a conversation with Axel that he hadn’t been supposed to listen to, and picked them up from that conversation. 

Jin and Devi exchanged a look, then Devi shook her head. 

“Whatever,” Jin said. “For right now, we just need to kill Alyphize. You can agree to that, right?” 

“I can,” Kelly agreed, sighing with relief. “She’s actively endangering everyone in the city’s lives. I don’t like it, but she has to die.”

“It will also speed the Throne’s return to the Fallen Void,” Devi said. “Alright. Kelly, you make us invisible, and I’ll steer the ship, slowly, so that they don’t immediately catch on. Maybe I’ll try and make it look like we’re falling really slowly, like our power’s being sapped a tiny amount…” 

Kelly nodded and started building spells, then they descended the ladder, and he was left to pace around, waiting impatiently as Jin worked on the spells and Devi steered the ship. 

He felt useless. He knew that wasn’t fair – they’d not be able to steer the ship if he wasn’t here, or at the very least, they’d be fighting off constant waves of new demons that the Throne was spawning. But he still didn’t really feel like he was doing anything. 

Jin was a crazy warrior battle mage, and Devi was some genius portal mage, and what was he? Just some average mind mage. Perhaps if he had actually known how impressive his invisifield spell was to maintain with so many minds at once without connecting a mind bridge to each one, he’d have not felt that, but as things were, he sat and stewed. 

When Jin finally finished, she called them up into the hull of the ship, and pointed to a large circle, easily four hand spans across. 

“This is where the ship mages would put in power normally,” she explained. “It’s a pretty standard spell for that, and it should let all of us put in aura. It’s gonna take a lot, so we should add what we can to shave off the charging time.”

She placed her palm in the circle, and both Devi and Kelly followed, and the three of them began pouring aura into the spell. The aura generator cracked, adding its own aura into the magic.

A few moments later, the power rolling off the generator spiked up, and Kelly looked up in confusion. So did Jin and Devi, and all three of them exchanged a confused look. 

“Generators aren’t supposed to do that,” Jin said. 

“Duh,” Kelly responded. 

Devi bit her lip and shrugged. 

“I know Elucidite was being sponsored by nexus to build some models based off of living aura trees. Maybe this is one of those?” 

They chatted a bit about it as they continued to add power, then the amount of aura surged up again, as if someone had added a second generator into the mix. They exchanged another weird look, but this time, they were silent.

Then the amount of aura flowing from the generator absolutely exploded. Magic poured from it in a torrent so bright Kelly had to shut his eyes against the endless, burning gray light. 

He pulled his hand back first. Even snapping to try and drag what fragments of power he could from the air, his aura wasn’t nearly as dense as Jin, Devi, or Axel’s. A short time later, the other two had to pull away as well, but the generator continued to blaze the gray of Axel’s aura. 

Then the spell completed, and even through the thick metal plate hiding them, and his closed eyes, Kelly’s eyes still stung as the spellspike activated. The ship started to fall, and he stumbled back, snapping his eyes open. 

“What’s going on?” he shouted. 

Devi’s eyebrows drew together, and a boon flashed in her aura, tearing open a portal. 

“Sorry Kelly, wasn’t planning to implicate you, but I don’t want you to die,” Jin said, waving her hand. He was suddenly lifted by his belt buckle, then all of them tumbled through the portal, and out into the Wandering Path.