Dust Eater Gravity

Sliding my thumb over the smooth crystals, I decided.

“Purple,” I said with an eager smile, crawling back under the platform as quickly as I’d gone over and holding onto it with my claws as I brought a hand to my heart.

My white aura flashed pitch black and then everything nearby fell into the sky.

Everything that wasn’t planted in the ground rose into the air and began to revolve around me. Stray leaves, dirt, the cooling lava in the nearby pit, large boulders, and even the massive Goliath—it didn’t matter how heavy they were, because I wasn’t fighting against the pull of gravity—I was redirecting it. Around the black form of my tiger self, a wide sphere began to form, keeping everything at a short distance but floating helplessly around me otherwise.

I Lunged down to earth as quickly as I could, power shifting to allow it, and as I touched the ground everything on that side of my sphere slammed into it at the same speed. I rose back to my platform in a blink and came down again just as fast, over and over and over again. The Goliath, my enemy and target, bore the brunt of my attack, crashing into the ground with each leap. A fall from such a height meant little enough to me, but for something like an elephant, even a normal fall could tear away skin, such were the size of their bodies.

The Goliath was bigger than an elephant. A lot bigger and a lot heavier. Take the square/cube law into account and…well, long story short, it had a lot of mass. For something that size, slamming into the ground at the speeds I was capable moving at was an enormous threat—doing it dozens of times, far more so. The ground broke as it fell with me, the cliff side breaking as I leapt again, and then I set up a pattern, trapping it between rocks and hard places. It carved massive furrows in the ground with its body as I ran through the forest, set fissures racing through the ground as I brought it down on mighty trees again and again, and was generally battered as I pulled him along for a wild ride.

The Goliath tried to fight back, to struggle against my hold, but it was as futile as…well, as trying to fight gravity. It had nothing to hold onto, nothing to stop its rise or descent but the cruel, cruel ground below, no way to even adjust itself in its orbit. Without any way to fly or restrain itself, it was powerless against my pull and I used that to its full effect, wielding it like a blade against its body. I dragged out the effect of the crystal instead of expending it in one use as I’d done with Lighting and Air before it, prolonging the change to try and get the most out of it and hurt him as much as possible.

And I succeeded. As I slammed him down into mighty trees, as I pulled him into cliffs, as I made him fall again and again—I hurt him. I broke rocks upon him and broke him on the rocks, until spider webs of cracks raced across his armored form, deep impacts on its body shattering it in places and cutting it deeply. I did more damage to it this way then I’d done in the entire fight prior, tearing away chunks of its HP with every fall, whittling it away as I ruined the cliffs and shattered the earth. Against the altered force of gravity, it was a toy in the teeth of a dog.

As I felt the crystal’s power running its course despite my best efforts, I rose high into the air, first to the platform Levant had maintained and then higher and higher still. I passed my grandmother’s ship in altitude, glancing at it from where it watched so far away, and went higher still. In the seconds I had left, I jumped from platform to platform until the air thinned and my normal eyes would have seen nothing but carpets of green and brown on the ground below—

And with a snap, the effect gave out and my Aura turn from black back to white. The Goliath and everything else I’d caught within my hold found themselves abruptly forced back into Mother Nature’s merciless grasp and began to fall.

I gave them a few second’s head start and then followed them down. I pulled my grandmother’s gift from my Inventory with a hand, thumb tracing across the pattern I’d already memorized, and found the crystal I was looking for with the searching touch of my power.

In a crushing instant, my Aura turned to stone around me, shifting from bright light to solid matter in a flash. It continued to move as if there’d been no change, stone limbs as flexible as any of the elements before them, and it was from within a stone tiger man that I landed upon the Goliath’s belly. I slammed into it like a falling star, Suryasta and Levant appearing at my side to gather and ignite the air and hasten our descent. I pushed the Goliath down as fast as I could, flames trailing behind me as I tried to keep track off our position relative to the ground.

My senses cried out at the last second and I released the beast, leaping aside as it crashed into the ground hard enough to make it feel like there was an earthquake. The ground shattered around my feet as well, but it was nothing compared to the cloud of soil and debris that shot into the air as the Goliath’s body drove a crater into the ground. It was enough to hide him completely from sight, but I showed no mercy and refused to let up on him, dashing into the cloud on the legs of a mighty stone beast.

It took only moments to find him, the blinding cloud doing nothing to hinder my sight. It laid on its side, every breath sounding pained as its limbs struggled and twitched weakly. Its armor was broken, its body nearing its end, and so I went in for the kill without hesitation. I leapt upon it with crushing force and lethal grace, striking with stone claws and teeth as I moved towards its head, and jumped down to land on the cracked tusk before its ruined eye. Its mask and face were as much a ruin as the rest of its body, cracked and torn in the wake of my onslaught. At some point, the damage I’d caused to its trunk had been worsened and it had been all but torn away by the many falls.