Outworld Liberators-Chapter 219: Luck That Brought Trouble First

Oswin had covered a good stretch of ground, yet there was still no sign of Fay.

Back in the pavilion, Radeon and the disciples snacked while they watched the screens, almost like common spectators at a play.

Even so, Radeon’s eyes were sharper than the rest. He was not merely watching Oswin fail to find Fay.

He was studying the shape of Fay’s fortune. To him, luck was never just luck. It had kinds.

There was the simple kind, the dog shit sort that made a man stumble into profit without effort.

There was selfish luck, the kind that made one person seem blessed while everyone around him suffered for it.

And then there was Fay’s kind.

Fay’s luck brought adversity first. Sometimes it harmed others. Sometimes it harmed her too.

Only later did it open the way for reward.

As they ate, the disciples found themselves growing strangely at ease. To see an ancestor, a being so far above them, sitting there with food in hand and shaking his head at a screen like any other man, made something in them loosen.

It was not that Radeon seemed small. He did not. Even in idleness, grace clung to him. But there was a sameness there too, some human thread that made the distance between them feel less impossible.

Tabulae, who did not see what he saw, looked up at him with curiosity.

"Why are you shaking your head, Father?"

Radeon pointed at the screen.

"Look at your sister Fay. The Specters and Mended Cadaver Orchard is as large as all of Radeon Terraces. Meeting anyone in there should be near impossible. Yet she runs into one of the strongest combatants inside and even manages to befriend her. Why do you think that is?"

The newer disciples scratched their heads. Ever since the library, their sense of the world had grown wider and stranger. They no longer dared throw out answers lightly.

It was not only respect that held them back. The world itself had become too mysterious.

Almsgiver, however, still spoke as he pleased.

"Isn’t Big Sister Fay just seriously lucky?" the fat boy asked.

"Correct," Radeon said. Then he let his gaze pass over them. "Do you all want to stay close to lucky people?"

Every one of them nodded.

That made Radeon chuckle. He shook his head again, though this time with more amusement than anything else.

"Do not think of it so simply. Luck may seem vague and unreal, but I have studied how it works."

Then he began to explain.

He spoke of different kinds of fortune, of karmic tides, of the way some luck gathered through merit while other luck fed on ruin. He spoke of people who were born to rise, and others who seemed blessed only because disaster had chosen a different target first.

The disciples listened with wide eyes, and more than once they gasped at the depth hidden in something as common sounding as luck.

Still, for all their wonder, none of them could keep their eyes off the screens for long.

Fay and Jenkii were running now.

Behind them came a thing too monstrous to name lightly. It was over a hundred meters long and at least ten meters high, a vast structure that floundered after them with terrible speed.

At first glance, it looked like a building, the broken shell of some old hall or manor. Then its walls split open.

A maw appeared in the front of it, skull faced and lined with jagged teeth. Spidery wooden limbs thrust outward from the frame and stabbed into the earth to drag its bulk forward.

Each violent lunge shook loose splinters and old dust.

On the screen, Fay did not look back. Jenkii did, once, and instantly regretted it.

"Why is the damned house chasing us?" she shouted.

Fay ran at her side, breathing hard.

"Maybe it wants tenants?"

Even Jenkii nearly laughed at that, though terror bit harder than humor.

"I can take the front and hold it off. Shall we try again?" Jenkii asked.

She was not used to running from anything. They had already fled it for a quarter of an hour, and that alone sat poorly with her.

Fay did not slow. Wind tore past them as they ran.

"Its mass is too large. We can kill it, sure, but we will be emptied out by the end of it. And that is assuming the damned thing has no trump card left."

Jenkii bit back her answer and kept pace.

Fay had already made up her mind. Somewhere in the back of her thoughts, she remembered a passage from Radeon’s Book of Creatures in All Existences, one of the few books she had taken real liking to.

She had seen something like this there. A creature known by many names. Poltergeist Box. Imitator. Mimic.

easts that devoured structures and took them into themselves, from little treasure chests to whole buildings, and in older records, even stranger things than that. They consumed because that was their nature.

Soon, the ground changed beneath their feet. Dampness gave way to slick mud.

"Ready yourself, Jenkii. We are close," Fay hissed.

Jenkii tightened her grip on the axe.

"Good. This moving house is not even that scary."

The words were brave, though both of them knew better.

A few breaths later, the mud had risen to knee depth. Even so, neither of them slowed.

Their arts ran deep enough that mud and shallow water hardly mattered. Qi carried their steps and kept them from sinking.

Behind them, the Mimic House let out a hideous roar. It plunged after them all the same.

Fay and Jenkii kept running, showing no sign at all that they meant to fight. Fay even let her breathing turn ragged and feigned a stumble so Jenkii would have to catch her by the arm.

That made the Mimic more frantic in its pursuit, lunging deeper and faster into the mire.

Then its weight betrayed it. The bulk of the thing began to sink.

"Now," Fay snapped.

Jenkii answered with a roar of her own. Fire qi surged through her body until heat shimmered along her limbs.

She spun with her axe in both hands, and the blade tore through the old wooden frame as though it were tofu. Splinters burst in every direction.

The Mimic shuddered and answered by thrusting wooden spikes from all sides of its body, but Jenkii’s fire qi burned through them before they could reach her.

"Now," Jenkii shouted back.

Fay moved at once. She leaped high, whip in hand, and brought it crashing down on the places she guessed would be the creature’s weakness.

Fay found it. A great beating heart of steel stood hidden within, eight long legs jutting from it in every direction, each nearly as tall as a man.

She struck at it at once, but it moved too fast, skittering from place to place while the wooden walls around it knit themselves back together with wet bog mud.

While Jenkii kept slamming her axe down again and again, the horror structure was reduced room by room until only that last chamber remained.

Then the ground to their right began to rumble.

That alarmed both of Fay and Jenkii at once. This was a bog. Soft mud and water swallowed tremors rather than carrying them well.

For the earth here to shake at all meant something large was coming.

"Help, Senior Fay. Help me."

The cry came from the distance.

Oswin burst into view, running hard. Horrors of all shapes and sizes chased after him.

Behind Oswin, a black creature with a chuckling mouth. It was a juvenile tiyanak, not yet grown into its full infant form.

The thing spread misfortune and drew calamity wherever it went, calling danger down upon whoever it chose to haunt.

Fay and Jenkii could run later. For now, they went all out.

Both of them hammered the last chamber without restraint, flame and force crashing into it until Jenkii finally tore free the charred box hidden within.

"You know that one?" Jenkii asked, seeing the young man racing toward them.

"Yeah. He’s my junior brother," Fay said.

"Oswin, hurry up here," she shouted.

Fine, dry sawdust coated Fay’s skin. She rubbed her palms together until sparks leaped between them.

With a push of qi, she heated it, gathered her flame, and blew the dust outward in a glittering cloud. The grains settled over the pursuing creatures, and at once they began to writhe and roar, as though suddenly thinking twice about rushing any closer.

The juvenile tiyanak was the first to flee. It melted at once into black muck and swam through the bog, slipping behind a stone where it hid and played the fisherman, content to let the others press the attack in its place.

Not all the creatures had been driven off.

A mountainous abomination of stitched flesh came lumbering through the mud, its bloated belly clutched in one hand while the other raised a butcher’s knife as large as a man.

Qi spread over its body in a rough violent coat. Then it leaped high and came crashing toward Jenkii.

At the same time, a freezing arrow whistled from some hidden point in the rear.

The shot came from a worm bodied archer bracing a bow of flesh, an innate weapon that looked grown from its own body.

Freezing qi gathered around the bone arrow as it drew, as though the creature had cooled it from within itself, then it loosed another shot at once.

Fay raised her buckler and tried to knock it aside.

The bone arrow burst apart on impact.

Shock flashed across Fay’s face as shards of frozen bone sprayed toward Jenkii and Oswin.

Both barely managed to react in time, throwing up qi barriers to stop the blast. It was an unnecessary drain.

"My bad," Fay said.

Jenkii and Oswin only nodded. None of them could have known the thing would explode like that, and this was no time to point fingers.

Then Oswin answered in kind.

Hidden inside his machine body were more tricks than most people guessed.

A barrel slid out into his palm and snapped up toward the butcher’s face.

Light flared. An explosion bloomed.

When the smoke cleared, the creature’s neck was sizzling and its head was simply gone.

It was a hand cannon, much like the one once sold in the Auction House, only this one had been remade by Oswin’s own hand.

The creature’s head was blown away, yet one hand shot down, seized a spare head from the swollen flesh of its stomach, and slapped it into place atop its neck.

That was enough to change all three of their expressions.

There was no point grinding themselves down against such a thing.

Then, behind the horrors, a crimson blast burst open with the thick stench of iron.

Human qi. All at once, they knew someone else had been drawn in by the commotion, mistaking chaos for fortune.

Jackson had arrived in search of opportunity, and after the pill he had already found, it was plain he had grown bolder.

He had gathered enough blood to cast a blood bomb and thrown it without hesitation.

Oswin read the strike for what it was. A probe. Even so, another man on the field was better than letting themselves be torn apart here piece by piece.

At once, Oswin moved. Glassy smoke streamed from his right hand as a hidden canister within his machine body opened.

The smoke spread and formed brief mirrors around them, bending sight and rendering them invisible for a dozen breaths.

In that instant, he also dragged Jackson into cover while the butcher creature raged at the place where they had been a moment before.

Then they ran. Fay pointed the way on instinct alone, and Oswin followed without question. He already knew what sort of luck lived in her.