Page 52 of Spectral Seas (Spectral Worlds #2)
S SS’ KYRONE MANEUVERED TO the front of Soren to shield him from the force of the chasmic bridge’s psionic pulsations. As he pulled the Umbra to his feet, Abby and Leta reappeared. Sss’kyrone tilted his head to the side as he peered at the peculiarity of the two. They had oddly blinked away and then back again, still in each other’s embrace.
“What happened?!” she screamed.
“It’s the device,” yelled Abby. “It’s like a magnet. It pulled us back.”
“Well,” Leta yelled, “if we can’t flee—”
“We fight,” yelled Abby. Then he faced Sss’kyrone and Soren and again yelled, “We fight!”
Soren furrowed his brow at the two. Though his focus was on sustaining against the device, he too could not help but notice the two blink away and return. But rather than question what they’d just witnessed, the Indici and Umbra both nodded in agreement.
Sss’kyrone gripped his long fingers over Abby’s shoulder, squeezed then released him. Then the abbot stepped toward the gyroscope, spread his cobra hood and reared his head up into Sss’kallion’s direction, blue orb eyes blazing, as he launched his own psionic attack.
The relief to Abby, Leta, and Soren was instant. With Sss’kyrone projecting psionics between them and the device, they immediately regained some strength and focus. They put it on the Viridians. With their heads down in prayer, the Viridians were easy targets. Under cover of the high decibel revolutions of the sphere, the three from the Alpha Plane approached them unopposed. In a single-motion, Soren ducked and dove into a spin over the top of the nearest prostrated Viridian. As he twirled, he reached down and ripped the electro stave prod from the Viridian’s webbed hands. As the Viridian propped himself up to respond, the Umbra fluidly planted his feet and jabbed the arcing tip of the staff deep into the center of the aqua-man’s exposed chest.
With a bit less elegance, Abby and Leta followed Soren’s move and managed to disarm and take out two Viridian guards near them.
Sss’kyrone’s assault was intensifying, with his chest puffed out three times its usual size and the skin of his neck and head spread wide to a cobra hood, the solemn monk had become a mirror of the temple’s statue of their mighty god.
Sss’kallion was visibly weakened by Sss’kyrone’s psionic onslaught. The fiery glow engulfing the priest’s head had rapidly diminished, fading back to a halo. The other rebel priests remained locked in the lightning-arc mesh, but without the power of the head priest, it too was weakening, slowing the revolutions of the ancient gyroscopic machine. In turn, the growth of the great crevice above arrested. The tentacles frenzied, some probing further through the breach, bringing cascades of lightning to the points where they’d reached in from the void.
Sss’kyrone raised his arms out wide before him, then slowly stepped forward to further intensify the assault. Annihilating the head priest in their psionic joust, Sss’kyrone snapped Sss’kallion away from the grid altogether and forced him to his knees.
Abby, along with Leta and Soren, continued to take out the prostrated Viridians and when Sss’kallion collapsed from his knees and faltered to his side, Abby chipped to Leta, “ We’re going to win .”
But with a sprawled-out hand, Sss’kallion broke his fall. In a jerking flinch, the priest fixed his gaze not on his afflicter, but to the two-dozen reptoid warriors praying prostrate before him.
Awakened by the priest’s telepathic signal, the reptoids lifted their heads from prayer, rose to their feet, and joined Sss’kallion in deflecting Sss’kyrone’s psionic assault.
The Viridians too must’ve heard the priest’s psionic call as they too rose from prayer. They were sluggish in getting up and Soren was able to take advantage of their daze, blunting the two closest to him, but once on their feet the others recovered quickly. They rallied and charged the four from all sides.
As Soren stepped backwards to shield Sss’kyrone, he twirled his stolen stave into a wide impenetrable wheel to fend off the stabs of the encroaching Viridians.
Abby and Leta found themselves separated from Soren and Sss’kyrone, surrounded by the awakened Viridians.
Two Viridians came at Abby simultaneously.
He crossed staves with the first, then the second, then the first landed an arc blow that sent Abby’s staff flying from his hands. Abby grabbed his opponents’ staff, jerked the Viridian toward him, released the staff, then threw his hands upon the commando. The Viridian vanished.
Beyond where that Viridian had stood, Leta was fending off another. But she witnessed Abby’s use of his rare ability, and he caught the horrified expression on her face.
The assaulting Indici noticed too.
A splitting wedge drove through Abby’s skull. His mind flooded with the indecipherable telepathic hisses of the rebel Indici, and among them, faint whispers. It isss true, said one. He posssesssess the touch, said another, the touch , hissed others, the touch . Abby willed himself away from the plane, to no avail. He stepped back from the oncoming Viridians and focused his mind toward deflecting the assault. One clear whisper came louder than the others. It’s ussselessss to resssissst . Resssissst echoed the others. Abby spun to face the reptoids. Sss’kallion was focused in his direction. It was his voice penetrating the shields of his mind.
Your powersss are dimmed , Sss’kallion continued, by the masss-chine and the massster .
No longer separated from Soren and Sss’kyrone, Abby waved for Leta to regroup.
The four found themselves surrounded on the three sides by the arcing electro-tipped staves of the Viridian Guard. On the fourth side were the reptoids.
Having corralled the four, the commandos stopped their advance. But the Indici slowly approached in a zombie line, cobra hoods spread wide, their ominous, expressionless, blue orbed eyes glowing bright.
Sss’kyrone wavered. He threw a foot forward to secure his footing, to strengthen his fight. But it didn’t help. His head wobbled, his hood shriveled and pulled back into his neck as he collapsed. With their sole psionic resistance disabled, Abby and the Umbra fell too.
No longer held back, the crushing weight of the psionic waves compounded. Abby’s head was crushing in a vice. He watched as blood trickled from Soren and Leta’s black orbed eyes. As was everything in the Indici plane, their blood was an indigo hue of blue. He touched the warmth of his own cheek with the tips of his fingers to discover that he too was leaking indigo blue.
We cuh-ould end you, Sss’kallion whispered into their minds. But you are for the massster .
Abby pushed his strength to his shoulders and neck and fought to raise his head again, to face Sss’kallion. His peripherals were clouded, but the priest and his warriors in the center of his vision were crystalline, framed in alert augments flashing hazard.
Then, from the perimeter wall behind Sss’kallion and his warriors, a dozen new tactical alerts flashed onto his ocular. Abby squinted to focus. New rectangular augments filled with data, each suspended around one embattlement statues…No…Abby blinked to clear his vision. To amplify, focus, not on statues…no…the augments overlaid living beings, reptoids. Lined up along the rim of the plateau, their blue flaming eyes glowing and their heads cobra hooded, were Sss’kali and the freed Indici.
~*~