The Sketch Rift: The Eternal Crusade

Kill it with Fire

Soal could feel the Slicers' paper-thin wings scraping against his skin as well as anyone could. Long, uninterrupted paper-cuts started to appear on his skin, and in great agony, Soal dropped his sack of items, only to find it already ripped open by the passing Slicers. Hurriedly gathering his sword, shield, and armor from the bag -- much of the rest inside only spares -- and left the container to rot on the ground as he attempted to locate Moth and the Crusader ring, which had definitely broken apart by now. There was no end to the Swarm visible; it surrounded him in all directions and cast an unpleasant maroon-brown shadow on all of the land and sea that it touched.

But Moth returned, lumbering against the tide, and with enormous concentration, conjured a small brick wall from Plot Holes behind which they could get their bearings and avoid the Swarm temporarily. Soal raced to slide his armor on over his ordinary clothing, but Moth's only shield was his wits. "Those that were meant to protect me: they're conveniently gone...?" he confirmed to Soal, his voice as focused as it could possibly be. "We need to get to Sogbury. Right now, I'll lead. Just don't say a word. Yes, though, I know how to get there from here."

As they did so, experiencing additional paper-cuts with every step, Soal attempted to slash the surrounding Slicers with his sword, only for them to dodge it every time. This allowed him a closer look, however, at the insects themselves -- massive, at about the size of your average tissue box, but with wings made of tried-and-true cardstock paper, flailing as would a bumblebee's and somehow keeping these monsters afloat. Moth compensated for the Swarm's vastness by occasionally forging more unstable, but more prominent, walls behind them with plot holes as the harbor seemed to approach, the echoes of waves lapping the shore faintly audible.

"Hemingway and Nathaurus must still remain in Sogbury," Moth hollered over the clamor of the cloud, "or this venture will be reckless even for a Slicer Swarm errand! Then, we'll have to go and check with the Crusade. Ivel must be at wit's end by now, judging that he is probably a Sulukridger anyway."

Soal made no response and hardly attempted to listen in the first place, seeing as Moth was actively disregarding Soal's basic survival instincts of avoiding injury. Before he knew it, their passage had already driven them to the piers of Sogbury, at which point the Slicer Swarm itself began to turn itself back around -- supposedly to target Moth, by Soal's own speculation. The Swarm was less now of a one-way tsunami of wasps than it was an area of space brimming with papery-winged arthropods thrusting themselves in various directions, desperate to harm something or someone.

As if prematurely aware of Moth's arrival, the nineteen Thieves of Sogbury who served beneath Gnat opened the floodgates of the Swarm into their most reliable steamboat for the duo's entry, rocking with the might exerted from hundreds of ramming Slicers, yet kept aloft by a constantly active force of nineteen disregarded Sulukridgers running back and forth between two sides of the steamboat to ensure its stability.

As soon as the Kiwi Realm's Un-Characters sank down in the center of the primary chamber below deck, the gates shut immediately, managing to squash the handful of Slicers that fluttered inside, only to all be instantly destroyed with a brief gesture from Gnat, who stood at the far end of the room, across from Hemingway. There was another figure in this room as well, who was not to be

"You know you really need a better boat," Soal stepped into the clear center at the Ambassador's side, "when you have to do this to keep it going."

"Well, when it's your job, it's your job," Gnat was more than happy to show off what Hemingway had taught her, as seen with what killed the interior Slicers. "Soal, Moth, I'd like you to meet our latest visitor, Anibar... again."

"Yes, that's me," the High Commander of the Revolutes who, much to Soal's shock, had simply wandered into Sogbury as the Slicers began their attack. "Come on, you know you've met me before. And it's good to see, Moth, that you're still around to be 'protected' another day." The aged Anibar must have been the sole (former) Crusader with whom Moth still had trust, as he mentioned recently in his revelation to the Master Bringer, perhaps the motive behind the mild grin she provoked on his consistently apathetic face.

Only now did Soal somehow recall how his day had begun. "Wait -- no, that can't be," he paled at the thought. "When I started following you, Moth, Irene and... well, my mom were still asleep. Do you think they..."

"Perished? I have no certainty in that regard," the pseudo-Sulukridger attempted to console Soal in a very Charles Hemingway-esque manner. "They're definitely awake now, Soal. I would simply in such a scenario bring to mind what the Ambassador once told me, that I can do little to inform you of currently, which does little to keep me up at night with each passing crisis."

As a melancholy Soal joined Moth and Anibar in the center of the chamber, illuminated by a dim, flickering light bulb obviously salvaged from the Facility, Gnat spoke again. "Hey," she queried. "Don't you think this is all some kind of cruel joke?" Upon such a suggestion, everyone glared accusingly at Moth. Soal remembered George Hamilton's repeated references to an undesirable internal brawl on his journey in Tynee that left several members of his company injured or dead, and all of the others regretful. Taking these words to heart, Soal prided this company upon not making the same decision against Moth, similarly to how it almost happened nearly identically in Ruce Range long ago.

"Why aren't we taking this so seriously?" Anibar finally snapped. "The Slicers, as he says it, have formed a cloud over Hendera, the Waise Chain, and even the Facility. Their stingers of paper have probably already killed those who were unfortunate enough to suffer a thousand cuts. It deserves to be killed with fire."

"You're exactly correct," Moth took this phrase somewhat literally, which seemed to be more of a plausible solution by the minute. "They're paper bugs. And they're within close enough proximity to one another that the fire would spread to the rest of the Swarm. My decision is final: let's kill them with fire."