Katsi’s vision was blurred with a green afterimage, but she sent out another tentative pulse, checking for movement through the air. The other group had stalled but was still coming toward them. “They’re coming,” she informed Migo.
The muscles of Migo’s body rippled as he struggled back to his feet. He flexed, his claws jabbing into the ground.
“What do we do?” Katsi asked, daring to try and adjust the rings on her finger.
Migo grunted.
“Come on, Migo. You need to learn how to speak. You’re only grunting and growling slightly more than you do as a human and it’s rather inconvenient.”
He gave her a look that could only be equated to a scowl.
Katsi let out a huff. She didn’t feel like she was in any condition to be summoning more lightning. She’d put too much of herself in that last assault. She needed to learn some kind of moderation or she’d wind up killing herself. “Do we go up to meet them this time, or do we wait for them to come to us?”
Migo looked behind them to where the survivors had fled, then flexed his claws again, shaking out his wings.
“You’re in pain, aren’t you?” she asked.
Migo shrugged at her with his shoulders, a humorous gesture in his present form. “You?” he managed to say in his deep, guttural voice. He truly was making more progress in being able to communicate.
Katsi bit her lip, hesitant to admit the pain her magic had caused her. It was much worse than the pain of whatever had struck her chest. “I need to maintain better control,” she admitted. “I’ll be more careful. I got worried that you were in trouble and tried to act quickly. I realize that was probably enough force to kill a hundred waheshi and yet I used it on fifteen.”
Migo shook his head before perking back up and facing the direction of the approaching shamans.
Katsi hesitantly sent out another pulse and sensed them just beyond the nearest buildings. The ones that hadn’t been leveled yet, anyway. Since burning herself, using her magic to any degree also carried with it a sense of fear. What would happen if she did too much? She shook her head and took a deep breath. She needed to be smarter. More delicate. Wasn’t that what Adrina had been trying to teach her all that time? It didn’t matter how powerful she was if she didn’t know how to use it properly.
She took a steady breath in. She connected with the air, rising up only enough to stay out of reach of any waheshi that might come charging out. She’d have to keep her eye out for any projectiles. The best way to conserve her energy would be to keep her magic connected on a subconscious level. The more attention she gave it, the more it seemed to absorb from her.
Migo held his ground from below. He wisely didn’t move forward at all. They had an understanding on a subconscious level. She’d need to strike the waheshi before they had a chance to reach him. She couldn’t let the same thing that happened earlier be repeated. No more falling into traps. They knew the Ashjagar was formidable, but not invincible.
The first evidence of the enemy’s arrival was a flurry of spearlike stones flying out from a nearby building. Then another one came from the opposite side.
Katsi floated to the side, but knew that wouldn’t be enough in case they changed the trajectory of their projectiles. She reached out with a mental hand, guiding the stones on a new path that steered them into the other wave of stones so that the two volley’s crashed into each other.
“So far so good,” she muttered to herself, shaking out her hands.
The enemy earthmelders didn’t let up, but sent in even more volleys. They were merely testing her. Did they know she was the one who’d called the lightning earlier? Did they know that her body was suffering?
She worried that they wouldn’t be able to simply hold their position. If they kept attacking from a distance, they’d eventually wear her out. She spared a glance down at Migo, and he was crouched, wings and tail twitching in anticipation. In a peculiar sense, she thought she could even see tendrils of her red energy sparking between the spines of his back. What had she done to him?
Another volley drew her attention away. They were trying to be clever, sending volleys in from various directions. One was even aimed at Migo, but he jumped over it with ease. She spotted motion to her right and realized that they moving to surround them.
Not good. She bit her lip, feeling a sense of worry start to tingle its way through her stomach. She lowered her elevation slightly, yelling down to Migo. “They’re trying to surround us.”
Migo grunted, jerking his neck to the right. He started prowling in that direction and Katsi had the distinct impression to follow along with him. It was a similar feeling to what she got when she talked to Scales. She felt what he wanted her to understand.
Once she started following overhead, Migo picked up the pace, bounding over the rubble more gracefully than she’d seen him move as Ashjagar.
A couple volleys of stone barraged them from either side, targeting Migo even more. Katsi decided to keep things simple and called up a massive gust of wind that blew up from the ground. This offset the projection of the volleys enough to rend them harmless, but Katsi’s armlets burned again, sending a trickle of worry down her spine.
The shamans seemed to recognize that Migo and Katsi were onto their scheme. The rest of them came out from their hiding places, the waheshi dispersed amongst them.
That was Katsi’s cue. She steadily controlled the winds, lightning flashing overhead among the darkening clouds. She took a deep breath, reminding herself that she was powerful. Not the armlets or rings. They were only supposed to be an enhancement. She could call lightning even without them. The jewelry remained at a warm temperature, but didn’t rise as she tested the first streak of lightning, a pink flash that sparked out towards a waheshi. The bolt redirected at the last moment, striking the roof of a nearby building instead.
So that’s how it was going to be. She tried a different location, striking at another waheshi, but with similar results.
“Sands,” she muttered. If they could redirect her lightning, did that mean they had someone experienced with stormcalling? She tried something different, focusing instead on two targets with her next attempt, but she waited for the shamans to try something else, hoping to slip in a counterstroke when they wouldn’t be expecting. As two volleys of stones came hurtling toward them, she had her opportunity. Like a snap of her finger, two beams of lightning struck down, aimed for her targets. One of them was still deflected, while the other one narrowly missed the target, but it struck down in the middle of the group of shamans, stunning half their entire group.
Katsi triggered it again and again, sometimes focusing on different targets. She was able to hit two more waheshi in the span of a few seconds, and she stayed hovering over Migo as he quickly pounced against one of the splintered groups. There were three people and a single waheshi that had split off to this location.
This waheshi hissed, something Katsi hadn’t seen before, and it backed up, standing protectively between Migo and the three shamanfolk.
Katsi looked over her shoulder to see that the rest of them were closing in fast. Another hail of stones came crashing towards them, but Katsi simply redirected the energy, aiming it at the group Migo was preparing to assault. It clattered around them, easily deflected by their shamans, but Katsi’s skin was burning again. She didn’t know how much time she had left.
Migo growled. He too sensed that their time was drawing to a close. Act quickly, or be surrounded. A loud intake of breath filled his lungs with the sound of a bellows before he opened his jaws, a burst of red, crackling flame shooting forward. It engulfed the entire group, their screams cut short.
Katsi took that moment to send in another bolt of lightning directed at the waheshi. There was a single flash of light, then Migo stopped.
Migo’s tail flicked, battering a waheshi that had snuck up from behind. Katsi hadn’t even noticed it. She turned around, sending more lightning strikes in quick, concentrated bolts. The wind sizzled with the stench of burned air, and a light rain sprinkled down over the ruined city.
Katsi’s breath came in labored gasps. Staying in the air felt like more work than ever before, but the sight of more charging waheshi kept her senses sharp as blood pounded in her ears. Or perhaps that was simply the lingering sound of thunder, so deafening it blocked out all other sound but that of her own beating heart.
Another volley of stones from behind took Katsi by surprise, two of them colliding with her back. She screamed at the sudden pain and dropped to the ground beside Migo. He grabbed a waheshi that lunged for her in one of his massive paws, ignoring the stabbing and biting from the beast before throwing it across the battlefield, directly into one of the approaching shamanfolk.
Katsi adjusted some of her armlets, trying to move them to places where her skin wasn’t as singed, gritting her teeth against the sharp pain that rippled through her flesh.
“Migo,” she said, her voice weak as she called down yet another bolt of lightning, managing to strike a waheshi straight through its center. The beast groaned, taking another step before collapsing. She wasn’t sure how much longer Migo would be able to hold them off. He released another bout of red flame as a waheshi dove into his side, claws scraping with the sound of tearing flesh.
“Migo, we have to leave,” Katsi said.
