Vortex Quest B. 06

== VORTEX QUEST 6-11 ==

== TIME AND FIRE ==

The dead volcano was of the classic, "steep mountain with a hole down the middle" variety. The fertile land around it was mostly autumnal-colored forest, coral-like undergrowth creeping up the mountainside.

A few hamlets at the rim hoped to take advantage of temporal fluctuations and speed up food growth without getting torn apart by temporal tides. Risky business.

The Sneak Attack sank into the volcano from above, cloaked in a vision of perfect reflection. Nothing gave away her presence.

Which was also a problem.

Xane was at the helm, carefully executing Chay's orders as the leader leaned forward between the bow arches and stared down.

The Ghoul had layered the volcano shaft with strips of time fuckery only Chrono-Sight could reveal. Lowering the ship was like threading it between massive spider webs, except touching the webs would rapidly age the ship's planks by a century or toss it back into the past and also the webs were invisible. And of course the ship was nearly invisible, too.

"Starboard, six Bnr'ess," Chay said and waved that way. "Thirty degrees right, then tip her gently forward."

Xane let the levers crunch into their positions.

Marcus came in from behind. "Lots of juice left in the vision gem, but the generator is running out."

"Almost through," Chay said. "Get ready."

Marcus pissed without so much as turning aside. Xane pissed, too, careful to redirect the splattering from the console.

Goro entered, Diego riding him as a backpack.

The pantheon was naked. Anything on their person made it harder to anchor in the present, so they made due with their cock cages.

"Okay," Xane said. "On course. Any last hints?"

Chay put the psychometric-lens over his left eye. "It's down there. It won't *have been* there once the fight starts. Time Ghouls have about a minute in reserve when at rest, so the fight'll start a minute *before* we attack. Less if we're lucky. We need to hit hard enough to make it waste the full minute."

"Time is such bullshit," Marcus mumbled.

"After that," Chay said, "we're down to the two-ish second skips we prepared for. Plus whatever the Ghoul has set up. Doesn't *look* like there's strands at the bottom of this hole but stay aware. Don't stand on those bone piles."

Goro glanced down into the shaft where silver sparkled at the walls. "Where are the demigods we're doing this time-prison-break for?"

Chay didn't point at anything. "These shiny orbs are something like spider cocoons. They're in one of them, trapped in time. We'll have to break open a bunch, I guess. Maybe I can figure it out from up close."

Diego hopped off Goro's back. "We're ready."

"Okay," Chay said. "Xee, turn our baby around."

===***===

Shapeless like the flow of time, barely solid enough to be a living creature. The amorphous quadrupedal beast slumbered, a shimmer in the air the size of a mansion, resting on black ground. A gentle aurora running along the volcano shaft provided illumination, occasionally setting off a glint in the temporal fabric of the cocoons stashed along the walls.

The Ghoul's sense were turned inward in peaceful dormancy.

Then an object nearly as big as itself crashed right into it. A sharp tip of wood and iron, full weight bearing down. The Ghoul was torn apart, time-energy and guts splattering as its immaterial bones were ground to paste under the weight of the assault.

Tension uncoiled. The Ghoul spent its Large Leap for a minute past-ward and rushed aside. There wasn't anything coming its senses could detect. Concerning.

Eventually, the timeline caught up and the assaulting projectile hit empty rock as it appeared from nowhere mid-crash, the Ghoul safely out of the way.

It had been one of the flying vessels the Linears used -- that much the Ghoul's intellect recognized. The cover of gray smoke hanging in the air and expanding was a stranger phenomenon. A cloud this far down?

A blinding beam. Again the Ghoul was ripped through. A leap. The beam came from the smoke. And it followed to the new position. Another Leap, now a mere half second. The Ghoul barely avoided getting sliced.

It ran as it kept leaping, zig-zagging through time and space, faster than the beam could reacquire. The beam died. Bipedal Linears dropped from the smoke.

The Ghoul roared into the continuum, summoning its defenses.

===***===

Goro waited for instructions.

Pumped up and ready to come down on wherever Chay pointed, he strained his Chrono-Sight to catch the Ghoul's maneuvers in the wake of the Doom Pipe's beam.

Chay's fog grew tendrils, refracting and breaking where they met ethereal Ghoul skin. "Can *not* puppet it."

Goro flexed his muscles and catapulted himself into battle. He rained onto the barely visible beast.

A sense of movement in all directions hit him. He steeled his chronopsychic focal-juncture, like the serpentine bird lady had taught them. Like burying his heels in sand, but the sand was the present and his heels were... also the present. They had never found a great metaphor.

His hit landed... on air.

The Ghoul had 'teleported' away by side stepping two seconds earlier. Another jump, another escape. Goro kept the creature occupied, waiting for orders that still didn't come.

"It's summoning," Chay shouted.

"Where?" Xane asked.

"Everywhere."

The ground was littered with bleached bones. Shimmer surrounded them as they rose and flesh grew on them.

Chimeras big and small rose, resurrected by being dragged back to a time before their death.

Goro switched track and attacked the abominations instead. Slime-filled heads exploded, guts gushed, bones cracked. It didn't matter. The damage was undone within seconds.

Marcus appeared beside him, burning chops eviscerating a few monster faces. "Keep going," the animus-fighter said and arched his spine as he flew over a reptilian skull he had just ripped apart.

"They heal," Goro said.

"No, they get rewound. There's only so much time stored up in them. Chay said."

Goro sent his bodyweight into a red-furred Godzilla. "Did he say *how much* time?"

Marcus managed to shrug while digging his hands into the eye sockets of two separate porcupine-chimpanzees, eye balls popping with steam.

The Doom Pipe fired in the background, washing out the area with blinding light. Goro's eyes healed in microseconds. A path had been carved through the resurrected menagerie but the damage rewound within moments.

"Goro," Chay's voice said. A nearby monster that was just a ball of tentacles attacked another chimera -- puppeteered.

The leader dropped beside the berserker, riding in a ward-bowl. Diego held him stable by the waist.

"Leave the small fry to us," Chay commanded. "Corner the Ghoul. Drive it into a position where rewinding two seconds won't move it out of the beam-fucked area."

Goro looked up at the nebulous gray blob. With each second, a purple thaum-bolt zoomed from a different place and ripped chaos into a monster.

"Where's Xee?"

"Hiding in my fog. He should have a shot from anywhere. Don't worry."

Goro grunted a goodbye and aimed for the spot where the Ghoul stood, as evidenced by a house-sized flicker in the air and the crunching chimera-meat underneath its four shapeless legs.

Hitting it wasn't on the table, but he could prance around in a semi-circle, force it back, step by step, toward the closest corner.

He calmed his breath and heart-beat, entering a focus state like the mark of the warrior had "taught" him. Eyes on the Ghoul, legs ready to snap him into either direction with superhuman speed, Chrono-Sight to follow the creature's motions, present-anchoring to evade the waves of weaponized seconds.

The plan failed - Goro got jerked through time.

If it hadn't been for the training with both snake cunts, he wouldn't even have noticed. He simply got reset two seconds, his anchoring overturned by colossal time-force. But he could tell the Ghoul was strategically shoving him into the past to create openings for it to escape.

He was always significantly too late to land a hit, the Ghoul always ahead on maneuvers, even while evading Xane's assaults and navigating Diego's fields. Bolts landed on barren rock, wards wrapped around air.

A foot touched down on Goro's head. With a twirl, a demigod landed before him.

"Trade me," Marcus said. "Bosses orders."

Goro gave a grunted acknowledgement and flew backward to ram his back into whatever random fox-frog-mantis chimera was closest.

Chay was holding his own. Invisible when he wanted to be, he left the immortal beasts to swipe aimlessly while he landed divinely empowered kicks where they hurt the most. The tentacle puppet from earlier followed him like a trained pet and kept his rear safe.

"Good work," Goro said, earning a wide grin.

"Means a lot," Chay said, causing a weird hot glowing sensations in Goro's chest.

Diego beside him let his Tinder Whip snap at a bipedal bear-snail, ripping smoldering zigzags into its fur. "Not causing much damage, though, so not eating up much rewind." He created a ward shield and pushed the abomination back. "Mostly keeping them busy."

"On it," Goro said.

One mania-warrior fist blow broke the neck of a hammerhead-shark looking freak. It dropped dramatically and took two beasts down with it. Using the force of his swing, Goro tossed himself into the bear-snail and made it fall backward, its shell cracking. Just as it rewound, he stepped on it, again and again.

"You think," Goro said between stomps, "Marcus'll have more luck?"

"Yeah," Chay said. "I figured out 'time slipping' when I watched you. The Ghoul is too strong to stay present-anchored but you can 'ride' the time wave's echo to get those two seconds forward again."

Goro kept the bear-snail's head constantly crushed between his thighs, breaking the skull over and over with light flexing. "Uh... not to sound like a meathead but... can you break that down for me?"

The others leapt over a mini-hydra. Chay brought his fists down, Diego's whip tied three necks together and let the serpent flesh smolder.

"Buddy," Chay said, breathing hard and grinning, "you always sound like a meathead. But yeah, look at what our Marky-boy is doing."

===***===

Being a beautiful, naked freestyle-dervish with limbs aflame never got old.

Marcus flew and glided and hopped and lashed out with his white-burning blows. The total lack of clothing made his balls and aegis tug lightly with every flip and spin but he was in his element, drawing spirals of white after his hands like comets, stretching his reach to fence the Ghoul in.

Naturally, the time fucker jittered across the battlefield in two second intervals.

Both Marcus and the Ghoul were on the defensive. The monster tried to stop him so the demigod had to leave enough space to evade within a two second window. Meanwhile the animus-fighter was trying to box the creature into a corner even as he kept distance.

Marcus was winning.

Hit over and over by a shift two seconds into the past, he did as Chay had hastily taught him. Let the wave wash over you, shoving you through time, then grip the echo with your focal-junction as it washes backwards aaaand swing around.

Disorienting as balls but getting tossed through time was really just a random teleport and his animus-powered senses adapted well.

The Ghoul roared in an impossible way -- the beginning and ending cut off, lost in rewind.

It rushed at a wall, away from Marcus. Resurrecting chimeras crumbled back to aged bones. Was this victory?

"Fuck yeah," Marcus shouted, tossing his fire-fists forward just to make a point. "Don't mess with me you bitch cun-"

The Doom Pipe's beam ripped into the warm air with the light of ten suns.

Backflipping to greater distance, meeting up with Chay again, Marcus let his eyes recover.

Cocoons were bursting along the wall, something amorphous and nearly invisible spilling out along with organic debris.

"We did it," Diego said. "Everything's exploding."

"No," Chay said, sounding disappointed and horrified. He had one eye closed, looking only with the psychometric lens. "It's ripping the bags open on purpose. There's something stored inside. Nothing living. Time? Shit, it stored time. Get anchored."

Marcus dug his feet into the ground in horse stance as if bracing for a physical wave and focused. A cacophony of ether-temporal subharmonics washed over him, threatening to send different bits of him into different centuries.

It was beyond anything Gloomwhisp had ever thrown at them.

But the pantheon held.

"Was that it?" Goro asked. "Is it done?"

"That wasn't an attack," Chay said. "It recharged. Watch out!"

Lava. Or at least something sufficiently bright, liquid and heated to turn even a divinely powerful man into smoke. The Ghoul was summoning blobs from nothing.

"Superheated ectoplasm," Chay said. "From when the volcano was still active a thousand years ago. Evade. I need to check on Xane."

It hadn't even occurred to Marcus that the wizard hadn't known to brace himself. But Chay was already getting tossed into his clouds by Goro's hand and lava blobs were incoming.

A ward appeared around them. The first lava ball impacted, big as a fridge. The ward shattered and was instantly replaced by a new one inches behind it that caught the splatter.

More blobs rained from the ceiling, appearing out of nowhere from a millennium in the past.

"Get to cover," Diego shouted and started hopping across bone piles. He kept his force fields angled and rounded so the splashes weren't fully impacting, instead redirected.

Marcus tried to swipe a claw of whitefire at the rain. It was too liquid at this temperature, like slicing through water. Better than nothing.

The trio of Marcus, Diego and Goro closed in on the wreckage of the Sneak Attack, when the Ghoul appeared right in front of them. Rather, it had altered the past to have been there since two seconds ago but who had time for semantics?

Goro didn't lose speed. He flew at the transparent shape's middle -- the closest things it had to a face -- and brought a fist forward. The Ghoul reeled back from the impact and vanished.

"What happened?" Diego asked.

Marcus knew what he meant. The 'vanishing' had lacked the little outward echo that Chay had used to figure out time slipping. This time it had just popped out of existence.

Then I came rushing from behind. Marcus jumped up and rushed down on it like a fiery drill while the berserker rammed into it from below. Again, it vanished without a temporal trace.

"Shit, this is bad," Marcus said and hurried back under Diego's ward. The lava rain was beginning to leave puddles. They made it to the crash site where bent iron arches offered minor protection.

"What's happening?" Diego asked. "Is it... learning?"

"It has friends," Goro shouted.

A Ghoul rushed in from the left, another from the right. Diego shifted his ward to catch the brunt of the right one, Goro flew at the left and-

A bird-sized butterfly in gold and red dashed from the lava-rain perforated clouds.

Xane was okay. Marcus briefly had to hold back a breakdown. Destiny deserved a long and enthusiastic cocksucking for that favor.

"The Ghouls are echoes," the butterfly broadcasted in Xane's voice. "From past and future. They might stand out in the lens. Hold on while boss works something out."

Just as the fake-Ghouls popped on Goro-impact, the butterfly slapped the lens onto Marcus' face, tinting his world red as the rim spikes painlessly dug into his skin.

The outlines of living beings crowded his view. Ghoul after Ghoul paraded the perimeter of the wreckage.

"Diego," Marcus said. "Get me up."

The lean, tan, naked man nodded and formed his ward into a bubble just large enough to fit two men.

The Filipino and the South American crammed inside.

Diego got it a few feet off the ground. Goro gave it a kick from below and the duo was sent nearly to the fog cloud's level.

Lava rain pummeled the ward, creating heated, red glowing regions along it.

Marcus strained to see any anomalies. Some Ghouls intersected, he discarded those. Which left about a dozen to examine.

They went down, crushing the Ghoul that had closed in on Goro in the wreck, popping it. The bubble squashed and bounced back, ninety percent as high as before.

"How do you time slip?" Diego asked. "Sorry, do you need to focus?"

"I don't know," Marcus said. "This is a Hail Mary anyway. Uh, I time slip by... When the Ghoul hit, it's like a riptide in the ocean, you know? Impossible to fight. But the... normal tide exists in the same *physical* space, unlike the ocean, so you just need to swing your juncture's focus around in time... and grab at where the other tide is in space... while you're in the space where the time is... Fuck, this is pointless."

"Sorry," Diego said, aiming the descending bubble at the top of the wreck which was now very much on fire.

"No no," Marcus said. "Looking for the real Ghoul is what's pointless. This shit would give Einstein a headache, okay? You're brilliant. I suck."

Diego expanded the bubble into a shield above them and pulled Marcus in by the neck.

They collided into a kiss in the flickering of superheated plasma tapping on their ward and bouncing on flaming wood around them.

It was a tender kiss, almost chaste. Marcus wasn't used to being handled delicately. He was struck by the all-consuming urge to ravage Diego with the force of a thousand orgasms all day long -- but he had practice pushing through those feelings for a battle.

They jumped off the wreck as Diego's ward shattered under the assaulting heat.

Goro was riding a Ghoul, squeezing its body between his pumped-up thighs as he brought his fists down. The creature popped as the duo landed.

The clouds above had consolidated. Now red rays were shining from the center, roaming the bottom of the volcano like searchlights.

They *were* searchlights. Some kind of thaum-trick Chay had figured out, that passed through Ghouls without refraction -- except for one.

"The real time cunt," Marcus said. "All the way by that cocoon drop."

The Doom Pipe fired. Bone piles and rocks got scorched as Xane's aim tracked the creature, duplicates popping in the beam's wake. But it was futile. The real Ghoul skipped through time too fast.

And its shapeless limbs shredded yet more cocoons. Creatures frozen in time tumbled out, Kobolds frozen mid-scream, wounded chimeras frozen in a fight, motionless Hellions, all coated by something gooey that kept them in stasis.

The emerging stored time was going to help the Ghoul stay in the fight. But worse, it was pulling the cocoons apart, weaving and stretching strands of shiny silver.

The strands that ripped you through time. Those spider webs were solid enough to *touch* and no amount of present-anchoring was going to suffice.

===***===

Looking down from what was left of their cloud platform, the battlefield wasn't in their favor.

A hail of boiling, glowing blobs from the volcano's active days, numerous merging and time-leaping duplicate Ghouls, no valid target for the Doom Pipe and now also cocoon wrappings that shunted you into last century.

"Maybe," Chay shouted at Xane, "maybe it's time to consider retreat options. Shred the web strands above and make us a path."

"I'll try," Xane said, carried between lava drops by his butterfly wings, the massive gun between his thighs. "A lot to keep an eye on, though."

"I'm going down," Chay said and turned his levitation upside down. He broke through the clouds like a smoke asteroid and stopped his fall inches above the ground.

Lava puddles weren't growing. They tended to slip back into their own time after a while on the ground. Maybe something useful about that.