01.02 - We Didn't Start the Fire

Lucian stared at Aurelius in bewilderment. He struggled to process the surge of emotions flooding him: surprise, elation, apprehension, and an undefinable undercurrent of something else entirely.

“So… wanna join me, or what?” Aurelius asked.

Lucian swallowed hard. “I…” He hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Great. Let’s go. We don’t have all night. We’re going to intercept the ones coming our way before they can deal too much damage to the area.”

Just as Lucian began to steady his nerves, the sixth meteor blazed through the sky, its fiery descent cutting through the darkening horizon. It smashed into the nearby forest, the explosion ripping through the trees with a monstrous roar.

Lucian stumbled as the earth quaked again, the force nearly knocking him off balance. Aurelius caught his arm, steadying him.

“Judging by the size of that one,” Aurelius said, “the monster spawned from it might be quite a threat. And it’s close to the two nearest impact sites. We’ll head there first. Can you give me your training Core for a moment?”

“Sure.” Lucian unfastened the small device from his wrist and tossed it to his father.

Aurelius caught it with ease.

They followed a nearby road that led in the approximate direction of the nearest impact sites.

The path ahead was partially shrouded in darkness, and Luc strained his eyes to follow Aurelius’ actions.

Despite Luc’s limited understanding of Core programming, he glimpsed a sequence of adjustments Aurelius made to the Core program’s parameters.

The air grew thick and acrid as they neared the first impact site. A faint, infernal glow pulsed on the horizon, and the stench of smoldering wood clogged their nostrils.

The ground trembled beneath their feet, and a low growl emanated from the direction of the crash. No monstrous form was yet visible, but the tremors and the unnatural heat left no doubt it was a harbinger of flames, drawn straight from the heart of the fallen meteor.

Aurelius finished whatever he was doing to the Core and tossed it toward Luc.

Luc stared at the Core, then back at his father.

“What is this supposed to be?”

“’Trial by fire,’” Aurelius said in a smug tone and pointed towards a now clearly visible Fire Elemental that made its way toward them while searing all the trees, shrubs, and undergrowth in its path.

“That’s supposed to be a figure of speech,” said Luc. “I don't think this is meant to involve literal Fire Elementals.”

A towering inferno, easily the height of a small tree, loomed a mere stone's throw away. With each monstrous stride, the Fire Elemental devoured parts of the forest, its molten rage threatening to engulf them whole.

The air itself seemed to boil around them. The sweat beads on their skins evaporated almost instantaneously.

The Fire Elemental that had reached them by now took a swing at Aurelius, who seemed to have anticipated its behavior and dodged at the last second.

“If I were you, I'd stop complaining and take aim already. Otherwise, we might get burned to a crisp,” Aurelius said casually, as if this were a standard training exercise.

“And you want me to fight with this thing?” Luc asked while pointing at the device he had used in training.

The following silence was unsettling.

His father wouldn’t normally send him on a quest he couldn’t handle.

Wouldn’t his iron balls just melt before impact?

Would his father interfere if he screwed this up?

Could his father interfere if he screwed this up?

Not like Luc had much of a choice now.

Luc stood eerily close to the Fire Elemental when his father's voice cut through the roar of the flames. “Target the brighter point, just above the belly! Now!”

Instinct took over. Aligning his arm with the flickering ember his father indicated, Luc poured most of his Aura into accelerating the iron ball emitted from his gadget.

The impact was almost instantaneous. The Fire Elemental shrieked as its Core was ripped free. The remaining flames sputtered and died, leaving behind nothing but smoke where the monstrous creature once stood.

Relief washed over Luc’s body, momentarily pushing back the exhaustion.

His legs buckled beneath him, and he slumped to the ground, the adrenaline from the fight receding like a tide.

“What the hell did you modify in this Core's program?” Luc asked. “I knew there was a limiter on this thing that I was not supposed to mess with, but what the hell just happened?”

“Think of it like a safety valve. I removed the output limiter and increased the Aura throughput and capacity of the spell.” Aurelius just had a wry grin. “You think I'd let you unleash the full power of the Core without proper training? Taking a direct blast from that thing wouldn't be pretty, as you have just witnessed. Come on, that was just the first; there are at least four more just like it.”

A second Fire Elemental’s flaming aura illuminated the mountainside from across a small hill, slowly zeroing in on their position.

“Luc, do you have some juice left in you, or did you exhaust your Aura reserves with the last attack?”

“I am fine for another round,” Luc said as he got back on his feet.

“Great, let’s turn this into a sniping exercise. Try to hit its Core as soon as it crosses the hill and comes into view. Don’t worry about your Aura reserves. If they run out, I’ll take care of it.”

“You want me to knock out its Core from this distance?”

“No different from a clay pigeon, don’t you think?”

“Clay pigeons don’t try to evade.”

“Neither do Fire Elementals if they don’t see it coming.”

The Fire Elemental had come into full view by now. Luc could barely make out the spot that supposedly contained its Core when he emitted the first ball in its direction.

His first shot missed the Core by what could have been a few millimeters. The Fire Elemental roared with a shrill hollowness that echoed throughout the mountains.

“I think you just encouraged it to invite its friends to the party,” said Aurelius. “I’ll take care of them later, but as long as you have some Aura left, I’ll leave this one to you, so don’t miss your mark again.”

Luc gathered every ounce of Aura he had left and accelerated his projectile, while adjusting his aim based on the information gained from his near miss.

The second projectile didn’t so much fly as violently cut its path through the air.

The Fire Elemental didn’t evade, or rather, it couldn’t evade. It didn’t even recognize the attack, let alone predict its trajectory.

But as it slowly dissolved, yet another, more dire threat emerged behind the vanishing flames it left behind.

A behemoth three times the prior Fire Elementals’ size loomed on the horizon.