A Lesson in Trickery

It didn't all descend into chaos immediately. There were a few seconds of stunned confusion from Glouach and his minions, during which time I grabbed my staff and cast the incantation for the fog spell. I fumbled the visualization; my spellbook hadn't fallen out of my hands close enough to just cast from it, and I simply hadn't cast the spell before. Well shit. I saw Clarence, visible once more, dash through the shadows towards Artemis, knife out, ready to cut away at the tentacles restraining her.

The monsters were coming to a realization of what had happened. Three were on my side of the firewall, the majority on the opposite side. I could only hope that my stealth skill worked like I hoped it did, and tried to break the line of sight between me and that side of the room by crouching down. The strange fish-men finally came to and pointed at me, shouting in their strange abyssal tongue. They threw their hooked spears at me, and I quickly blocked two of the three with rapid castings of my shield spell, but the third struck me in the fucking foot of all places.

I was pinned to where I stood, and had no time to remove the spear. A shock of pain jolted through me, but I grit my teeth and focused on the knowledge that as soon as the fight was over I was either dead, or ready to use my healing skill to recover. Pain is a lot easier to ignore, if you know that your injury isn't going to debilitate you for a long time. Without my spellbook I knew I had to stick to my most familiar spells, which meant the shield, the invisible wall and the icicle. I chanted thrice and three icicles flew towards my opponents, razor sharp and heavy. They all hit too, and drew blood, but with the scaly, armored bodies of the fish creatures, none of them were penetrating deep enough to kill or even seriously injure them with just the one casting.

"You have doomed them all, Coward," Glouach spoke into my head, and then I heard the water start to bubble underneath my feet. But at the same time I heard Artemis call the octupus man a motherfucker, and the sound of an impact of a mace to fish.

Fuck, it had to be done. I threw my staff into my off-hand and grabbed the spear embedded through my foot into the floor. I ripped it out and nearly blacked out. I did fall on my knees, holding my staff, and saw the three fish-men rushing at me, ready to choke me dead, or bite my head off for all I knew. I unleashed the spell from my staff. I only had the one casting stored, but it was that or die. I shaped the wall so that there were three horizontal arrow-slits and the fish-men crashed into the invisible barrier at full speed. I slid a few inches back on the floor from the impact, but remained unharmed.

I conjured the icicles from behind them; I didn't actually need arrow-slits for the icicle spell, as I could conjure them from any point I could see, but I like to keep my options open and it was far enough that they couldn't reach me unarmed. It took three castings for each of them to put them down, but by this point I could cast the spell quickly enough that this didn't take more than a dozen seconds, and under the assault of slashing and bludgeoning ice they didn't have the time to react.

I took two deep breaths, looking around the room to see what I could do next to help the people on the other side. The sounds of combat came through, my friends were still grunting and swearing, not screaming or crying out in pain or gasping in death. There was still-

There was a crash, like a chair broken against flesh, and Glouach crashed and tumbled through the firewall. He took exactly one second to calm himself from literally going through fire, and cast a spell. The spell caused the water to rise in the pools underneath our feet, but fortunately it seemed more like a bubbling than a deluge. He turned to cast a vicious spell at me, but I had a faster, lower ranked spell to cast. I cast my fire protection spell and dove through the firewall leaving him behind once more.

The other side was a pandemonium. Each of my friends were holding off two or three enemies, and all of them were bloodied. Well, except for Hannah, but her left arm was holding the sword bent in a wracked angle. Artemis was recovering from tossing Glouach through the fire, and Clarence was dancing and dodging between two fish-men, his tailored suit cut and tattered. These were all close fights, not like anything we'd been in before- it was always either a quick, brutal triumph, or an inescapable horror, these were opponents well matched to my friends skills. So I helped them by cheating.

As quickly as I could, so that my arrival would still be a surprise, I cast shield spells as , blocking and disrupting the enemies attack patterns, causing them to stagger and stumble. Each one of my allies exploited the openings I had given them, and each of them executed one of their enemies. This left me and Artemis free.

Chum shouted over the din of battle: "Ey, boss, them humans underneath are about to start choking." "Fuck, Alex, let's go kill the wizard," Artemis said. "Hey, buddy, if there is a spellcaster behind a barrier, he's preparing a spell to cast at ya, as soon as you go through. If I was to guess, I'd bet it's the drowning spell our pal Clarence was talking about," Chum said.

Stolen novel; please report. "So, we both go, whoever doesn't get caught in the spell kills the wizard, then pulls the other out of the bubble," Artemis said. "It's gonna be a killing version of the spell. You'se going to have to be real good and real lucky to survive even a few seconds inside it," Chum said. "She's right, there's no other choice," I said, "We go on three- one, two-" "Ah damn forget about it," Chum said, and rushed through the fire ahead of us.

We looked at each other and followed the imp through the flames.

We burst out through the fire and the flames, but too late- the octopus cast his spell, and Chum was enveloped in a sphere of deep black water, and rightaway it was clear that the pressure within was far beyond what was conducive to life. Yet somehow he turned to me, smiled and pulled out what looked like a black square of cardstock that he dropped before being first squished into gore and then disappearing in a puff of sulfurous smoke.

I knew it was not a short spell by the fact that even several syllables into the incantation me and Artemis were still both alive, and she rushed towards him with her magical mace ready to strike. She went for his head, and he changed the spell mid-incantation to one I knew well- Shield. It completely blocked Artemis, but at the same time it stopped him from chanting the incantation for the murder bubble, so there was some advantage. I threw a few icicles at him, just in case, and he blocked them with corresponding shields, moving out of the way and back at the same time, then switched to a quick, practiced spell.

The black tentacles once more flew from out of the shadows. Artemis dodged, but I was nowhere near fast enough for the lashing attack. The tentacle wrapped around my ankle- the same one that I had been limping on since the spear pierced my foot, and pulled me down to the ground, and towards a shadow in the corner of the room. It was a trajectory that passed by Glouach as it dragged me, and I allowed the instincts of my artificial staff-fighting skill to activate. There was no knowledge of staff fighting in my head, but if I let go and allowed my instincts free reign, while focusing on the staff, my body moved on its own.

Artemis was trying to attack quickly enough that Glouach wouldn't have the time to cast enough shields to intercept her each attack. With her relatively high level and stats that should have been a winning strategy- her strikes were lashing out almost too quickly for me to follow, but Glouach with his strange voice and speech seemed capable to speak almost twice at the same time. He found a moment to cast an offensive spell we hadn't seen before- some sort of a blast of green energy- and it hit Artemis straight in the chest. She went pale and gasped, and was momentarily frozen in fear. Glouach moved to finish her off, but all of this had happened in the handful of seconds that it had taken for the tentacle to drag me half-way through the room, right at ankle-length of the octo-man and I first feinted, then swung with the short end, at his shins. My staff impacted his shins with a crash and a crunch, and he let out a wretched gurgling screech as he dropped next to me on the floor, and I grabbed onto his face tentacles and didn't let go.

Now we were both getting dragged to a corner of the room- me by the ankle and Glouach by my hands gripping hard at his face. He screamed in incoherent rage, as Artemis took off in a dash after him. Somewhere in his screaming he must have enunciated a proper spell, as a floating bubble of water enveloped Artemis and lifted her up in the air. It was not the murderous black orb that had squished Chum, but she couldn't get out of it on her own. She also had, at best, three minutes of air. But three minutes was a long time in a fight. Glouach clearly knew that too, and now that he could focus entirely on me, he turned and twisted in inhuman, cartilaginous contortions.

The problem was that while I had two hands to grasp at him, his facial tentacles numbered, well, eight. And as he twisted and focused his fury on me it was my turn to scream. He grabbed the back of my head with the unexpectedly firm and powerful tentacles, and pulled me towards the sharp beak in the center of the mass of tentacles. The first bite was the worst. The beak clasped onto my nose and chin and latched on firmly, pressing down with a terrible, heavy pressure of a hydraulic press in slow motion. I felt the bones of my jaw start cracking and the more cartilaginous meat of my nose be crushed and cut. Then he pulled back and bit in a different angle, and the pain started all over again.

I suffered there for no more than seconds, but I was learning that time was an extremely subjective concept, ever elongated by pain. He let go when he heard the coughing and deep breath and exhalations of Artemis, at which point he kicked me away, pulled away from my face, and turned to the other two people in the room. The lights from the firewall were dimming, there were only solitary flames in the room. Hannah had finally leaped through and joined the fight, having finished her own enemies, and now she and Artemis both engaged Glouach.

And we had lost sight of the goal of this entire encounter. Shit, people would probably be dead by now, it had been what? Two minutes? If someone choked or breathed in water instead of taking a deep breath and holding it in, there was every chance that they were dead. So I cut away the tentacle around my foot with a whispered icicle, and began moving. I had to crawl; my foot was too badly damaged and the shock that had let me push through it had worn off, so there was nothing but burning pain coming from the lower left of my body.

With the apprentice distracted by battle with my most competent friends, I crawled to the first of the underwater cages that his captives were in. It wasn't quite full up with water, the people in there jumping up towards the light and air, taking gasping breaths. It was built into the floor somehow, not even a lock and key, just bars or steel in a cross pattern. The floor was made of wood though, just like everywhere else, and so I cast shards of ice at the connecting points, and the wood splintered and shattered until I could pull the steel lattice off the floor with my hands.

The sputtering and desperate people came out of the water, pulling their semi-conscious comrades out with them and as I was thinking of a plan for getting the rest of them out in time, Glouach threw a spell of green death towards the packed group of injured survivors.

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