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A whooshing gust of wind, accompanied by the cessation of the thud-thud-thud of the elephant’s feet in its mad dash towards Sigurd was what had initially convinced him that this was what perhaps death was like.
To him, it felt as though he were still standing on his own two feet. The pain in his shoulder and his gut continued to sear his nerves. His brow was still furrowed, and his face was still scrunched in anticipation, despite not knowing exactly whether or not he had been hit yet, or whether this was his mind playing a cruel trick on him—stretching out and lengthening his final moment, so that he might continue to think about her.
Then again, when framed that way, it might also have seemed a small mercy. He was too exhausted and riled to think very deeply about anything, let alone the implications of his mind stretching out his final moments. And in any case, it would cease to matter to him in the next instant.
But if nothing else, it gave him the chance to console himself and cut through his fear with the knowledge that he had given everything he had in service of the cause, to protect his duchy and the lives of his knights.
Surely he had to have been dead by now. So why did nothing feel different? His eyes were shut tightly, bracing for impact, and everything still ached, even through the blood-pumping, pain numbing thrill of battle.
For half a minute, Sigurd stood there, eyes closed, tense, waiting to meet his death head-on. At this point he had noticed he had gotten an uncharacteristic amount of thinking done while seemingly nothing happened. He elected to open his eyes.
She was nearly in disbelief at the sight she was seeing. One second, her hands had been poised to deliver an aimed strike at the elephant threatening to close the distance with Sigurd, even worrying to herself that she may well not be able to get the shot manifested and off in time at this distance, let alone strike true…
…when, piercing from the grey clouds above, a figure clad in red and blue, and robed in a billowing crimson cloak quite literally swooped in from the heavens before her very eyes, to…grapple?…with the elephant!? Is this a hallucination? Is she being distracted? Is this a trick or an illusion? Scratch ‘nearly’, actually, now she was totally in disbelief.
She turned her head to the others on the battlements with her to verify if they were also seeing what she was seeing. Having confirmed that everyone else was also transfixed by the impossibility unfolding supposedly right in front of Sigurd, moments from what would otherwise have been his death.
At that confirmation, she called to the knight beside her, “Is this an illusion?” Befuddled and bewildered. He only furrowed his brow and brought his hand to his head while his jaw hung wide open, flicking his eyes from the battlefield, to her, and back again.
“Are you okay, sir? You look like you need medical attention.” He called out in the Kryptonian language to the knightly-looking man, who was clearly bleeding from his injuries and putting everything he had left into keeping himself on his own two feet. It was worrying, with how battered and bruised he looked it seemed like he might keel over and pass out any second now. Meanwhile, he held the elephants charge back with his body, the force of the animal driving his inclined boots into the dirt trying to overpower him.
Funny he thought that. Nailed it dead center. There was a soft thud and a dampened clatter as body, armour and sword tumbled onto the patchy, loamy grass.
Alright, well, finish up with ugly here first and—hey!
The shadowy figure of the animal began to vaporise into a dark foggy cloud, threatening to move right past where he had blocked its charge. He had seen this happen while the people on the ground were fighting, this is what he had worried about. The black smoke felt clammy and was unpleasant to the touch. It reeked of death. This was going to be problem.
He took a sidelong leap, breathed in to the highest pressure he could build in a short span of time, and let loose to blow the cloud away—it seemed to work, but clearly physical attacks weren’t going to cut it against these things. He saw the elephants dark silhouette beginning to take shape again from where he had blown it away to.
Deciding to deal with what he could actually help with, he knelt beside the unconscious fighter and took him into his arms before rising to full stature and gently striding into a lift-off in the direction of the watchtower.
He ignored the incredulous looks of the other men wearing similar garments and took pains to scan the battlefield for the wounded or cornered. He spotted some knights fending off some some manner of felines and smaller skirmishes taking place over a wide front where this mass of the dark, discoloured fog had built up. For the moment, though, it seemed like the situation elsewhere was stable enough, so upwards and forwards he went.
Sophie could see the stranger more clearly as he approached the watchtower with her sibling in tow. Sigurd was unconscious, and the stranger’s hand held down his bloody shoulder, keeping pressure on where he had been hurt by the leopard.
Instinctively, her aura began to shine and her eyes narrowed in suspicion at the red-and-blue clad man. Getting a closer look at him, she saw he bore a red and yellow sigil or crest on his chest blocked partially from her view by Sigurd’s body.
His garb was blue and tight-fitting, complemented with splashes of colour, some kind of emblazoned crest and billowing red cape. It complemented his build—a sturdy frame, visibly fit and strong, but by no means strong enough to hold back a charging elephant. It got her thinking about what else he could do, besides flying and grappling charging animals.
His cape was tucked or sewn somehow into his uniform in cleanly-folded pleats, a brilliant red that the day’s breeze pushed gently to his left side. It gave him a silhouette that was larger than life, imposing yet filled with radiance and colour. It made him stand out massively against the backdrop of war and miasma.
He continued to approach at a purposeful, yet polite and disarming speed—not so fast as to make her feel as though he were intruding, but also not slowly or leisurely, moving with the urgency of a knight holding a casualty of battle in his arms.
The figure was squarely within view of the watchtower now, his eyes searching for something in the crowd that had assembled to protect Sophie. For her part, she was also sceptical somewhat, but she had stowed her aura, lest she strike the hovering man and he drop Sigurd. She noticed only now how high up he was off of the ground. The way he hung in the air weightlessly, looming in front of them in the watchtower, unsettled her deeply.
His expression changed. He’d found what he was looking for. He was looking right at her, and slowly began to approach before stopping halfway upon seeing how the knights around her had taken a wary expression and their hands held their weapons at the ready.
He slowed to a stop as the knights formed a perimeter between him and who he assumed to be their leader, or at least someone important. Wasn’t sure what he expected to happen. He was holding a casualty of the fight in his hands and would really prefer he get attention sooner, rather than later, but it was clear that they were wary of him if their faces and their elevated heartrates were any indication.
He heard a few arrows nocked into bows from elsewhere on the wall and glanced briefly to look. Five bowmen, not all of them with the bow stretched and aiming in his direction but all with arrows nocked and facing him regarded him from a ways away to his side.
The best course of action would have to be a diplomatic, disarming approach, but the wounded man in his hands didn’t have the time for pleasantries.
He attempted to piece together a sentence in English, but it continued to escape him. That was what they had been speaking, right? With such a dense brain fog clouding his mind, it was nothing but a tangled, convoluted mess of sounds in his brain, all without meaning. So he furrowed his brow for an instant, shelved the idea and tried in the Kryptonian language again.
He called out in a plea to them, “Are you in charge here? This man needs help, he’s lost a lot of blood.” He waited a moment. His lips then pursed at their raised eyebrows and confused expressions.
Sophie couldn’t make out a lick of the gibberish he had just spouted when he opened his mouth. She watched as his expression flickered from frustration to resignation as he began to approach them again.
“My lady! Stay behind us! We know not his intentions!” One knight, she couldn’t remember his face, called out to her from the line of men in front of her.
“Oh just move out of the way, will you?” She shoved her way between them while they scrambled to maintain the cordon, each getting stared down in turn as they attempted to rally in front of her. Eventually they desisted and allowed her to stand in front of them. “If he means us any harm I’m more than capable of defending myself. Sigurd is hurt.”
She turned to the man in blue and watched him land on the watchtower, keeping his distance. Gently he set Sigurd down on the ground, looking expectantly at her group. When they didn’t move, he lifted the hand that covered Sigurd’s shoulder, and opened his bloody palm for them to see.
Sophie knew Sigurd had been bleeding, but the stranger’s hand was painted completely in a deep wet red. Her eyes widened as she looked at the claw marks on his shoulder. Pushing the men aside, she strode forwards with purpose and gestured for the flying man to back off as she knelt down to heal Sigurd. He stepped back up into the air as though there had been solid ground beneath his feet and gave a sheepish expression.
He rose and backed off from the watchtower. While he wasn’t sure exactly whether that fallen fighter would get the attention he needed just then, if nothing else he had delivered him to safety. He also knew that the language they spoke here definitely probably maybe sounded like English, if just with an accent he couldn’t place; curious experience, listening hearing what English must sound like to a non-English speaker.
Glancing back over onto the battlefield, his job evidently wasn’t over.
Isolated pairs and trios of men were being harassed from above by shadowy, smoky vultures and birds of prey circling the skies above the field where they fought the horde of nebulous, black billowing beasts.
He put thrust back into the direction of the fight, gliding in an upwards arc, intending to contest hostile air superiority over the battlefield. But if he couldn’t lay hands on them, how was he going to take the birds out of the sky? They’d just dissolve into smoke and become intangible the second they saw him coming.
He got his confirmation when he began to engage them. He intercepted his first two birds off-guard, while they were diving down with their claws at the ready to rip into their prey. He had tackled them with his shoulder, and they tumbled chaotically off-target and forcefully into the ground before disappearing into a puff of smoke. But the smoke lingered, and gathered itself back together.
His third bird saw him coming. He hadn’t come at it very fast, his hand open to smack it out of his way. His hand swiped right through and came out the other side trailing clammy black gas behind it.
Looping back around to strike it again or catch it, the results were the same. He gave up and continued to soar over the battlefield looking for some other way to go about it. He could hear the flapping of the same vulture’s wings behind him, but it wasn’t hard at all to outpace—that wasn’t the problem.
Streaks of warm-coloured, bright light emanated from the men on the ground, and he saw that when they struck true, their targets didn’t reform. The light penetrated and outshone the darkness, searing it, crumbling the constructs of darkness into inert dusty-brown smoke, and not the pitch-black kind from which no light escaped to meet the eye.
To his right, a ray of light erupted on top of an elephant; it blew it to smithereens and a cloud of grey mist that looked very convincingly dead. In his head, the strategy clicked.
He judged that the most effective way of dealing with the shadow animals would be to distract these flying things by getting them to focus on him and not the guys on the ground. And then when they were all in one place, whoever just did that would be able to take them all out in one strike.
Admittedly, the foreign flying man had been making her job a lot easier since showing up. He had brought Sigurd right to her position to be healed, and immediately afterwards had taken to the skies above the battlefield to distract the flying shadow beasts and relieve the men on the ground from aerial attacks.
He had also made it easier for her to see exactly where the birds were—the big red cape was difficult to miss.
More than anything, though, he and she together seemed to have brought back some courage to the knights on the ground. The men’s auras shone more consistently and clearly than before, cutting into the darkness with confidence.
She did notice, however, that for all his fantastical feats of strength and his ability to fly, it seemed like he lacked a holy glow of his own. She watched as he swiped in vain at the black birds in the sky, certainly earning their ire and getting them to focus on him above the knights on the ground, but never being able to do any meaningful harm to them himself.
Even with the elephant he had stopped in its tracks, all he had done was blow the cloud of smoke away with a powerful breath. It was clear he was just some manner of mage, and not a holy knight with any kind of command over holy aura. What was a mage trying to prove by coming here?
It also became clear to her that he was flying in a big loop, corralling all of the birds into a tight enough space to where she would be able to get most of them in one strike. He flew much too quickly for them to catch him. She summoned a burst of light to the centre of where he flew around in a loop, catching what amounted to a good majority of the birds that had been in the sky in a pillar of radiant light, eviscerating them instantly.
That strike had taken a fair bit out of her. She would have to gather her strength for her next and take care not to exhaust herself before the battle was over, especially to be able to attend to those who needed healing.
Looks like it worked, he thought to himself. Now let’s try and improve the situation on the ground…
Most of the birds had been taken care of. Provided that more of them didn’t show up out of nowhere, the current number of hostiles in the air wouldn’t be able to harass the men on the ground in any meaningful capacity.
More important right now was harassing the heavier animals on the ground and exposing them to whoever was handling the big guns. Although there was no guarantee of how often those light attacks could be effectively brought to bear.
Between distracting and delaying the creatures on the ground and moving the wounded to safety, he had to hope it would be enough to give the defenders the breathing room they needed to get the ball out of their court.
He had also noticed by now that he had been attracting a lot of attention flying around like that, and the few birds that were left in the sky were now converging on his position.