1:15 PM September 13th 2026
The Ice Bubble outside New York Preparatory Academy
The now clearly class four monster had lost all resemblance to whatever it had manifested from. Nearly completely organic, only the tough metallic segmented hide hinted as to its possible vehicular origins. The thing resembled a giant millipede now. Four clusters of too many legs to count lined its body. The eyes were bright glowing orbs that flashed off and on in time with its attacks on the ice shield, as if it was blinking to protect its vision of the shards that it sheared off the dome.
The first two clusters of legs lifted up every time the millipede, as big around as a bus, reared up. Then the dozens of limbs came down on the cracking and weakening shield pummeling away as much of the ice as possible. Each blow was backed by the weigh of its massive upper body. End to end, it could have stretched the entire three block gauntlet that Kyle and Jones had just fought their way through.
Somehow, Anna was holding off the mass of about a block and a half of a New York City Street. But she wasn't enough. And the monster could tell it was going to win that fight eventually if nothing changed. There was an evil gleam of delighted anticipation about it, as if it was already imagining the taste of those refugees.
Why it was so determined to breach the school's defenses when there were so many easier to reach people in the surrounding buildings, Jones didn't know. Before he could say anything to deter him, or even just confer about their plan of attack, Kyle took off. Once again, the force of his launch into flight cratered the ground around his boot prints.
This was no semi-controlled skimming of the street like his previous careful attempts at flight had been. No. This was a full-on flight. Like a missile, the armored warlock shot straight for a point in the center mass of the monster. Unerring and determined, he pulled his course up just barely at the last moment before impacting.
In a maneuver that he couldn't possibly have ever practiced before, Kyle flipped around and shoved the blazing arc of his lightning wand-sword into a junction of the overlapping steel plate segments on the monster's body. A high, multi-voiced scream came from the monster's head as it whipped towards the searing pain that an angry big brother was dishing out. It was fast.
Faster than Kyle had anticipated.
In a flash, and distressingly soon after the start of the battle, Kyle found himself caught between the crushing mandibles of the monster. Sizzling and popping, the monster's venom ate away at Kyle's protective shell everywhere it splattered on him as the enraged monster shook him like a dog shaking a toy it was having a particularly great time destroying.
"Ha, ha. This is not good." Kyle coughed, immediately regretting the loss of space in his deflating lungs. How to get out of this little pickle? How to get out of this? He didn't know. Being shaken was making it a bit hard to think. And Kyle was more of a reader than a fighter. An eater, really, if he was honest about it.
The monster finally stopped shaking Kyle. While the creature worried him in its jaws, Kyle had a moment to think. His eyes focused on Jones down below him. Not nearly as far down as Kyle had thought he was. The soldier hadn't cut and run like Kyle half expected him too.
Instead, he was charging. His yellow Magicorps beret a bright beacon of hope to those who saw it. Mainly Kyle. Sporadic bursts of precisely aimed alchemy ammunition were wreaking carnage on the millipede legs supporting the behemoth. But it wasn't enough. Not for as many legs as this creature had. Jones would run out of ammo long before this beast ran out of legs.
Still, he fired. Alternating between the semi-automatic and his wand, the soldier ran straight up onto a group of legs, tossed something under it, then dashed away hastily. A flash followed soon afterward and as Kyle's dazed eyes cleared, he saw that it had been one of the alchemy grenades he'd given to Jones.
If only there was a way to disable all those legs at once.
Also...
What was he doing?
Why was he just laying here limply, while Jones did all that fighting? Why was Jones fighting? He should have just left the dangerous big monster to Kyle? Jones was going to have all those other smaller monsters on him any minute now because his attacks on the class four monster that Kyle had run off halfcocked to fight without any kind of plan, had drawn a lot of attention to the soldier.
Oh. Kyle shook his head and felt it pounding angrily. His vision swam and he almost blacked out. That was not good.
"Okay. Don't do that." He admonished himself, feeling a trickle of something running down his face to dribble against his lips. Licking them, he tasted blood.
He needed to get free, but even in the armor, he wasn't strong enough to just force his way out of this predicament. When he struggled, the monster just bit down harder. Which he definitely didn't want it to do because it sent a stabbing pain into the right side of his chest and made breathing infinitely less pleasant.
"Fine," he grouched in his semi-delirious state. "We'll do it the slow way." Gradually Kyle slipped one of his arms out of the monster's tight grip. It was tricky. The thing didn't want to let him go. But it didn't seem particularly invested in trying to open up its chew toy just yet. It was just slowly letting its venom-acid-saliva burn its way through Kyle's armor as it gnawed Kyle between its mandibles.
Every time the mandibles would loosen, Kyle moved his arm a little more. He was only able to move the one arm, the other being too firmly stuck in place. That was fine. He could do this. The lightning sword he'd been using had gone out. Which was good, otherwise he might have electrocuted himself.
While he carefully wiggled his way to freedom, Kyle started calling the ambient magic to himself again. He'd been careless shoving himself into this fight the way he had. This was the Armor of God's General... with fucking tornado razor wings that he was pretty sure the original didn't have. And he'd wasted that by letting his fear for his sister and his anger at this creature that was after her get the better of him.
So, he gathered magic. More than enough magic. So much magic it might make a person sick if they tried to hold it all for a working. But that wasn't what Kyle was doing. He was channeling every subatomic particle of it into his wand in preparation of an instant release spell. Finally, after a few more chews, the warlock was able to point his wand into the soft organic interior of the monster's gullet. Triumphantly, he gave a hoarse whisper to trigger the spell he knew would do the trick.
"Fireball." It was quite possibly the largest fireball that Kyle had ever seen. Certainly, it was the largest he'd ever cast. Added to the fact that the monster's acid-venom was flammable, it gave a most spectacular sight for those watching. An enormous gout of fire plumed out of the monster's face, and Kyle in his armor along with it.
He shot in an uncontrolled arc, wobbling in the air for several meters before he'd regained control of his attitude and altitude. Swinging himself around as fast as he dared as he was still at risk of blacking out if he moved too quickly, Kyle prepared the next stage of his assault. Because, the Warlock of the Archivist had a plan now.
The legs were the problem. The legs had always been the problem. Get rid of the legs and what could that thing do? It couldn't run, it couldn't fight. It would only be able to thrash wildly and try its damnedest to spit on its attackers. And Kyle was pretty sure that it couldn't spit very far.
"Archive Query." He commanded, knowing that his pact item was safely with him and would heed his call. "Retrieve spell. Snare of Arachne. Activate." Lines of magical light poured from Kyle as he fed the spell with more ambient magic. The lines flowed together into an intricate web, ensnaring and tangling the dozens of monster legs flailing against it.
Soon the gigantic monster was fully cocooned and immobilized by layers of magically entwined cords. Cords that Kyle held the ends to in one large mechanically armored fist. So restrained, Kyle found the creature a bit pitiful. It whimpered evil wheezing hisses at him with sad headlight eyes. Yeah. This had definitely been some kind of vehicle at some point.
He didn't want to kill it. It was a living thing. Kyle didn't even really like killing bugs. Though he might never think a millipede was cute ever again after this. However, he knew he couldn't leave it tied up for someone else to deal with. That wasn't how the spell worked.
It was now or never.
Below him, Jones was inundated with smaller, but still very large monster problems of his own. In the ice shield dome, Anna was running out of time. So, while Kyle wanted to give himself several minutes to come to terms with the reality of the fact that he was about to kill a living creature – even if it was just another monster, and even if he'd already murdered dozens of the things that day – he couldn't give himself time to think about it.
None of the other monsters had been restrained. They had a fair chance at a fight when he'd killed them even if his intelligence, magic, and equipment had made the match unfair. Could he kill a thing that was not currently a danger to him in cold blood? It looked up at him with what almost seemed like pleading in its eyes.
None of the other monsters he'd killed had anything that seemed like real sentience or life in them. They'd just been mindless things devouring life and magic. They hadn't really seemed to know what they were, or care about anything other than the moment they existed in. This one seemed to know. It knew it was about to die.
"I don't have time to feel sorry for you or think about the morality of what I'm doing. I'm sorry." He took a deep breath to steady himself. The finishing blow was not one that should be used lightly. Nor was it one that he could have used in any other circumstance. He adjusted the ties in his hands and fed more magic into them covering the face of the struggling creature.
Sensing the end was near, it struggled more, so Kyle directed the snare to tie itself to the ground and prevent too much movement. Sighing, he let his shoulders sag.
"Archive query. Retrieve spell. The Curse of those who Witnessed the Curse of Sodom and Gomorrah." The struggling stopped and the shrouded form of the millipede became less defined. Kyle dropped the magical ropes holding the Snare of Arachne, then he turned away. There was no reason to make sure, Kyle knew it was done.
Instead, he cleaned up the monsters harassing Jones, once again relying on his whirlwind bladed wings to blender up the manageable sized monsters surrounding the dome and providing Anna with a route to safety once she opened a spot in the shield.