Heretical Edge

(The following is actually the donator-chosen interlude for the previous arc that has just been decided upon)

Through twilight shadows that had settled over a forest in the wilds of the state of Montana, the sound of running paws digging into dirt could be heard. The source of that sound, a wolf who sprinted between trees, leapt over fallen logs, and skidded this way and that around thick prickly bushes, was larger than most of its kind. At least, those that ordinary humans would have been familiar with. Yet barely a fraction as large as it could have been. In this case, the wolf was only about twice the size of those more mundane Earth creatures.

Virginia Dare could have made herself the size of a bus, and torn through every tree in her path. Instead, she kept her transitioned wolf form fairly small. She didn’t need size now, not for this. What she needed was… well actually she needed a lot of things. She needed to be able to know for certain that Felicity was safe and unharmed. She needed her adoptive mother-figure, Gaia, to be out of Crossroads custody already and back with her friends and family where she belonged. She needed her adoptive father-figure, Tiras, to remember who she was and everything they had done together. But he didn’t. His memory of all that time had been wiped away, utterly erased.

She needed to be able to tell her daughter who she really was. She needed to hold Joselyn again, tell her how much she’d missed her, how proud she was of her, how much she--how sorry she was that she hadn’t been able to fully be there for her while she was growing up. She had done her best. She had tried to help where she could, without giving away her secret.

For over a century, Virginia had been forced to hide her connection to Joselyn, to protect the world. The spell that prevented the Fomorians from invading again depended on no one finding out who she really was. It depended on no one finding out she was Joselyn’s mother. The fact that Koren and Felicity had realized the truth had, all on its own, nearly broken the spell. It was so close, those moments directly after the two of them had discovered who she really was had been terrifying. They had seen the Fomorian ships, perched right on the border between this universe and the next. They hadn’t wandered off, they hadn’t given up. Even after all this time, there was an entire fleet of Fomorian monsters sitting right there, just waiting for their opening.

And that was only its reaction to Koren and Felicity, two people who hadn’t even been alive when the spell was cast. If Joselyn found out the truth, if Virginia’s daughter found out, there would be no saving it. Losing little Joselyn’s memories of her, being erased from her own daughter’s life, was a key part of the sacrifice. The moment she remembered, that would unravel the spell entirely. Virginia had absolutely no doubt about that. Joselyn couldn’t know, or the protection spell would break, and the Fomorians would be allowed to invade once more. And if that happened, hundreds of millions--if not billions when all was said and done--would die. Banishing the Fomorians from Earth had been the only thing that saved them the first time around.

Worse, if the Fomorians did invade, Virginia was certain the Seosten wouldn’t risk defending the planet. They would invade as well, grabbing every human they could to use as stock for their supersoldier Heretic program. All sense of subtlety would be gone. They would turn straight to abducting every human in sight and taking them as far from this world as possible. Earth civilization, as a whole, would be erased. Every single human would either be pressed into service as a warsuit for their Seosten handlers, or simply killed and turned into biological material for the Fomorians to transform into… whatever they wanted to use them for. Or even worse, with enough human samples to work with, the Fomorians might find a way around the block that Grandfather had installed that was supposed to prevent them from creating more humans.

That was supposed to be impossible, but after all these centuries, Virginia had learned not to count anything as actually impossible. Especially if it could make a bad situation worse. Impossible had a habit of stepping aside at the most inopportune moments for that sort of thing.

So, she couldn’t tell anyone why she was so worried about Felicity. Not to that level, anyway. She couldn’t tell her own daughter, Felicity’s mother, who she really was, couldn’t sit with her and worry about the girl together. Not in the way she truly wanted to, in any case. She could be close. She could be a friend, a mentor, a teacher. But she always had to maintain that slight distance.

In the end, she couldn’t actually do anything to help any of those situations. Not right now, anyway. What she could do was try to take her mind off them for at least a while by visiting Earth and running through this forest. Being a wolf helped clear her mind a little bit. She allowed the instincts of the wolf to take over somewhat, enough to stop obsessing over every worry. Soon enough, she would need to get back to doing something useful. Preferably something that could contribute to finally saving Gaia from that Crossroads prison, or getting Tiras his memories back. Either of those would be a good use of her time. For now, for these brief moments, she simply ran and turned her conscious mind off as much as possible.

When a very soft, distant whining sound reached her ears, however, Virginia’s mind snapped back into place. She skidded to a halt, nose sniffing as she tilted her ears one way, then the other, seeking the source of the sound. It was familiar, that much was clear, even if it took her a moment to place why. Then she had it. A spaceship. The whining sound belonged to a set of starship engines starting up. Which wouldn’t have meant all that much on its own. Spaceships visited Earth now and then, after all. But then a very different whining sound filled the air. It was the sound of an electrified whip, the sort used to torture or control slaves. There was a high-pitched whip sound, then a crack, and finally a cry of pain. Not from an adult, but a child.

Hearing that cry, Virginia spun toward the source of it and took off. Her wolf form sprinted through the forest with much more purpose this time. Before, despite running at what would have been the top speed of a Bystander car, she had barely been jogging from her own point of view. Now she wasn’t taking it easy anymore. Her wolf body was a blur of motion, barely visible from any outsider perspective. They would have seen a flash of gray-black-white fur zipping between the trees. And with each step along that blindingly-fast journey, she took in more information through the wolf’s enhanced senses. Her ears twitched, shifting slightly to hear footsteps, heartbeats, muttered curses. Her nose sniffed, filling in the blanks that her hearing couldn’t quite pick out yet.

Twelve slaves, of varying species. Four of them children, the rest adults. Six slavers, one of them an Akheliosan like Fahsteth, but not the man himself. This was a female member of that species. Two Centaurs, a cat-like Rakshasa, one of the two-headed humanoid hyenas known as Prevenkuat, and a Guhlben (the enormous species who stood an average of ten feet tall and very nearly just as wide). All of them heavily armed, forcing their prisoners through a clearing and onto the ramp of their ship while it was starting up. They knew they needed to leave before any interruptions appeared. Interruptions such as the one that was sprinting full-speed at them.

Given how close the ship was to leaving, with several of the slaves already forced onto it, subtlety was clearly not the way to go overall. But taking them by surprise certainly was. Just as she drew close enough for the Rakshasa or Prevenkuat’s hearing to pick up the sound of her approach, Virginia used a power that created a silencing effect around herself. They would hear nothing. A separate power blocked them from smelling her by forming a small bubble around her body, preventing any scent that could have given her away from escaping. They would hear and smell nothing about her approach, no matter how intently they were focusing on the surrounding woods.

Of course, there was little that those small measures could do about the ship’s own more technological sensors, or the warning runes that had been spaced around the area. Virginia didn’t have time to disable the latter safely, and the former didn’t work through scent or sound. Fortunately, she had other ways of dealing with both of those. For the sensors, she used a third power, which added a dark cloud around her sprinting form. The cloud would hide her from technology, making it impossible for the sensors to detect her unless she was right on top of them. By which point, it would be too late.

Meanwhile, as far as the warning spells went, Virginia took a different approach. She didn’t avoid setting them off. Instead, the moment her sharp wolf vision picked up the nearest of the runes waiting to reveal her presence, her mouth opened before a swarm of what would look like tiny fly-like insects that way. The swarm were very simple, mindless ‘creatures’ that could be set to various tasks, such as identifying specific similar targets and attacking those. They were incredibly weak, but also fast, working best as distractions and annoyances.

In this case, the targets they were set to were the runes of those warning spells. The instant they identified those runes as the targets, the swarm spread out in a wide circle around the upcoming clearing. They spotted every single warning spell, dozens of them set against various trees and rocks, and attacked those runes. In that moment, just before Virginia crossed the magical alarm line, every single rune was set off by her swarm. The slavers were abruptly bombarded by every alarm they had going off at once. They had no way of knowing where the actual threat was coming from, as their alarms began blaring from every direction.

Of course, the obvious response to that would be to retreat to their ship with their prisoners and flee. But that was a solution that would take them two, possibly three seconds to come to while they reacted to the sound of their alarms. And Virginia wasn’t about to give them those seconds.

All of this, from the moment she’d first heard the crack of that electrified whip and the cry of the child, to the moment the alarms were set off all around the clearing, had taken place within five seconds. Her ensuing sprint through the woods to reach this spot had covered just over twenty miles of forest. That was how attuned her Natural Amarok-Heretic senses were to sounds that didn’t belong. And how fast she was, between the Amarok speed and other various enhancements. Enough to hear the whip-crack and cry from twenty-two miles away, and cross that distance in only a bare handful of seconds while still roughly the size of an ordinary wolf.

The slavers had only just started to react to their alarms going off, as Virginia abruptly launched herself out of the treeline. In mid-leap, she summoned another power, creating three clones of her wolf form. The clones were composed of jagged rocks and what appeared to be thick oil. Oil which ignited in flames a second later, as they split off from the real Virginia. One slammed into the Rakshasa while he was still drawing a sword, taking him to the ground. The other two collided with the nearest Centaur, who had already produced what appeared to be a massive cannon of some sort that was almost as large as he was. Their burning stone-forms were enough to knock the Centaur down as he fired, sending a foot-wide blast of energy ripping straight through a line of trees.

The other Centaur, this one female, had twisted toward Virginia with an identical cannon raised and ready, but before she could fire, a thought from the Boscher Heretic made a geyser of water from an underground spring erupt upwards. The second the water touched the weapon, Virginia used a different power, one that allowed her to transform water into any material it was touching. Metal, in this case. The same metal as the cannon. Just like that, the weapon was encased in its own metal. When the Centaur pulled the trigger, the weapon exploded in her hands.

All of that came while Virginia was still in mid-leap. Her actual target was the giant Guhlben, its own rotund form utterly dwarfing hers. Or, at least, it did until, a second before she would have bounced off of him. Then she abruptly grew to her actual full size. Suddenly, instead of being only twice the size of a mundane wolf, Virginia was almost forty feet long from nose to the start of her tail, and her shoulders stood about twelve feet high, with her neck head adding another couple feet onto that. The Guhlben was ten feet tall, but full-Amarok Virginia stood several feet taller. Between that, the incredible speed she had been moving at when she launched herself, and her various extra strength enhancements, she knocked the massive figure down before landing on top of him. The earth itself shook violently as the two huge creatures slammed into the ground.

Before the giant could even start to collect himself, Virginia's mouth opened and she bit right through his head, tearing it free from his shoulders with a violent twist and sickening crunch as blood and bits of bone and brain matter were sent in every direction. Immediately, her magenta aura flared through the clearing, better illuminating the saucer-shaped spaceship at the edge of it with its ramp down. Beside that ramp, the two-headed hyena-like Prevenkuat raised both hands with a pair of dangerous-looking pistols held out toward their attacker.

Ignoring both the pleasurable feeling from absorbing the death of the creature beneath her, and the raindrop-like sensation from those two pistols as the shots bounced off her fur, Virginia raised one paw and slammed it down into the dirt. Immediately, a crack appeared, running all the way to where that Prevenkuat stood before opening up into a much wider hole. That hole appeared just long enough for the creature to fall about halfway in. Then it slammed shut without any warning, cutting the figure in half.

With another thought, Virginia detonated her burning stone-and-oil duplicates. The resulting explosion was enhanced by the amount of damage they’d taken in those few seconds from the Centaur two of them had crashed into, and the Rakshasa the other had taken down. Both of the creatures were killed by those explosions.

Pivoting her enormous form toward the ship as it pointed three laser cannons her way, Virginia bit one of them straight off, her teeth going through the metal like it was flesh and bone. Meanwhile, a pair of amber-colored lasers shot out of her eyes to melt the other two barrels. In that same motion, her tail slammed into the other Centaur while she was still reeling from her own weapon exploding in her hands, throwing her sidelong into the last member of their little group, the female Akheliosan. The Centaur’s neck snapped under the impact.

Speaking of the Akheliosan, she hadn’t been sitting on her heels. In that same second, while Virginia was pivoting to face those last two, the sound of a small army of running feet filled the air. The shark-like being had used her power to control predators to summon a pack of what looked like a cross between jackals and armadillos, with an armored shell covering their canine forms. There were twelve of them, all rushing forward to attack.

Immediately shifting back to her human form, Virginia summoned her sword, dropping to one knee to drive it into the ground in front of her while summoning a portal under each of the incoming creatures. The resulting damage was divided amongst those twelve targets, but that was still enough to kill them. The summoned army of predators was utterly destroyed with that single motion.

Only one target remained, the Akheliosan who had summoned the creatures to begin with. She was also the source of that whipping sound, and the cause of that child’s cry. The whip dangled from one hand, before lashing out toward Virginia, now revealed in her human shape.

But Virginia had spent a lot of time around whips, thanks to Gaia. She knew how they worked, and had plenty of experience in sparring against them. Even as the whip extended toward her, she twisted her head slightly, allowing the electrified length to snap right past her face. Her hand moved as though to grab the whip then, but at the last second, her body transformed once more. Instead of becoming a wolf again, she was electricity, joining the current along the whip and using that to travel all the way down it to the handle, and the person holding it.

She reformed at that end, holding the Akheliosan’s wrist and twisting it around effortlessly in order to pull her downward into Virginia’s sword as it was driven up into her throat. In that same motion, the woman triggered another spell on the blade to send half a dozen yellow sparks off of it and into the cut she had made in the other figure's throat. The sparks bounced through her body, then detonated into a column of fire stretching twenty feet into the air.

The flames died down as Virginia continued her pivoting motion, leaving nothing but ash where the Akheliosan had been.

They were all dead, the six slavers, and their ship’s weapons had been disabled. But it was at that moment that Virginia realized the problem. Though most of the slaves were clear of the ship, several, including the child who had cried out, were onboard. And the ship had apparently been given instructions to flee. Worse, it wasn’t just about to take off. From the sounds it was making, the damn thing was going to make an immediate emergency jump. Which was supposed to be idiotic for any number of reasons.

Without conscious thought, she focused on her time-stop ability, creating a bubble around the area that would freeze everything, including the ship’s departure. Virginia didn’t use this ability often, but now was an emergency. Sprinting onto the briefly-frozen ship, she ignored everything else and went straight through the corridor to the cell where those few prisoners were. In less than three seconds, she would have them off the ship and safe.

Then… something happened. Something went wrong. Her time-stop… failed. How? Why? She had no idea. Time abruptly resumed, just as she was reaching for the first prisoner. Virginia had a second for her gaze to snap toward the suddenly-closed hatch, before a violent twisting sensation sent her to the floor as the ship made an emergency, completely suicidal jump straight from ground level. It should have been impossible. But then, interrupting her time-stop also should have been, unless… unless someone was there. Unless someone else she never detected, who was capable of disabling her own time power, had been waiting for this.

Whatever it was, whatever the truth, the result was the same. The ship jumped, with Virginia onboard. Just like that, they were floating somewhere out in the middle of deep space.

But then things somehow managed to get even worse. A high-pitched warning siren filled the ship, a sharp voice telling its occupants that the ship had sustained catastrophic damage from jumping so close to the planet and that they would be immediately transported to the nearest inhabitable planet.

Virginia barely had time to speak a single curse, before a tingling sensation filled her. Her surroundings vanished and were replaced with a very unfamiliar sight of dark purple and green rock formations, a red sky, and amber-colored grass. The few slaves who had been on the ship were all around her, crying out in surprise at their abrupt transport.

Slowly, Virginia raised her gaze to stare at the sky. She wasn’t on Earth. She was on an alien world, with no ship, no idea where she was, and no idea where to find any civilization.

Already, she could sense her connection to the spell protecting Earth being drawn to its absolute limit, like stretching a rubber band. That stretching could only last so long. If she didn’t find a way back to Earth within just a few days, that connection would snap, breaking the spell.

And the Fomorians would be able to invade.