Chapter 30

“The way that mages are taught to fight is multi-faceted, but it lends itself equally well to inter-ship combat as it does to direct interpersonal confrontations. The problem that most mages of the Ardent encounter when placed on duty aboard a ship is that they find themselves extremely limited. There is a division of labor aboard a ship, with each mage fulfilling a certain duty, while they have been trained without exception to handle every aspect of a fight themselves. Only through time and trust do they come to realize that they can work in harmony with the rest of their ship’s crew.”

—Squad-Based Tactics, Fal’Vaelith

At first, it seemed as though the region of space that they’d emerged into was as completely devoid of content as the underverse that they’d just passed through. There was nothing but darkness all around them, punctuated, after a moment of adjustment, by the distant sparkling of stars. All was still and silent until Sylvas saw the shadow.

They had emerged at the perfect center of the sphere where the Consortium base was located, and lo and behold, just off the port side of the ship, a great black circle was blotting out all sight. If it was a space station as Hector had suggested, then it was bigger than anything manmade that Sylvas had ever encountered, and it had been equipped with some sort of artificial gravity that he could not distinguish from the naturally occurring force. His other senses caught up to his eyes, flooding him with data from all of the ship’s scrying and his own, and confirmed his suspicions. They were looking at a small planet. One that had found itself flung free of its solar system of origin to drift out and eventually find itself in deep space. It was one of the rarer phenomena in spatial cartography. Sylvas wet his lips.

Well, darling, that makes things easier. No ripping open hatches or smashing through bulkheads to get in, just a whole planet to search.

Sylvas chuckled. “That is easier.”

Around the periphery of his sensory sphere, Sylvas could faintly detect ships moving around, but they all seemed to be keeping their distance from the planet at the moment, and the Folly had come out of null-space inside of whatever defensive net had been set up to catch anyone incoming. He supposed that most pilots, less confident in their calculations, would come into a system farther out to avoid any possibility of a collision. He did not suffer from that lack of confidence in his abilities.

He spun them to face the planet and then began their descent.

Darling, where exactly are we going?

“You tell me!” Sylvas pushed their acceleration higher as the ships on the periphery all started moving towards them, amplifying the mass of the ship so that the exoplanet’s gravity pulled on them harder while pushing more and more mana into the engines and pressing them forward with all his will.

There was no hint as to where the Consortium base was situated. It had to be under the surface, given the lack of atmosphere, but where most underground bases would have been throwing up some heat, some radiation, something to help distinguish it from the endless black nothingness of the planet’s surface, this one was giving nothing away.

I know that you’re a little out of sorts after all that business with the eidolon, but I will remind you that I am privy to exactly the same information as you. If you can’t work out where we’re going, how the hell am I meant to?

“Look at the futures.” Sylvas put the ship into a sideways spin for reasons he later wouldn’t be able to explain beyond saying ‘instinct.’

A shot was fired from down on the planet. A vast blossoming ball of violet lightning that would have done them some pretty serious harm if they’d continued on their previous course.

Mira fell silent as she sifted through all of the various glimpses of the past and future that his last paradigm granted him. In a way, it was the most helpful thing she could have done, because the next weapons emplacement on the planet fired off, and Sylvas had to yank them sideways to avoid being consumed in the storm. It would have been nice to just follow the first shot down to the surface and the enemy base, but it was painfully apparent from the purple glow rising through the exoplanet’s paper-thin atmosphere in a dozen different places that where the shots were being fired and where the Consortium was actually based were entirely different places. If anything, Sylvas would have expected to find that wherever the shots weren’t coming from was the only place that there was an entrance.

Each shot that rose up towards them got a little bit closer to predicting their approach, and while Sylvas had been able to avoid them without any difficulty to begin with, now each storm that rose up to swallow them needed something far more drastic to circumvent. “Any day now, Mira.”

Darling, if you don’t kill us in the next few minutes, I’m going to give you such constipation as you wouldn’t believe.

He grinned. All of the possibilities of the future were narrowing down. A thousand of them where he was too slow to dodge, too sluggish in avoiding the incoming ships, where the Folly and all hands were lost in a crackling, destructive nightmare. Where they were voided out into space. All of the failures, whittled away by every right choice that he made, brought them closer and closer to the future that he wanted. Mira lit up a mark on the planet’s dark surface, closer to one of the weapon batteries than Sylvas would have expected but isolated enough to be plausible.

The best guess, darling.

Sylvas dove for it. The atmosphere was so thin that he barely felt it as they tore through, and the shots that had plenty of space to angle in at them from the various weapons planted on the planet now narrowed down to only the one closest to where Mira had marked. At this distance, Malachai would have been able to hit the oily spire with some killing spell or another, but the fact he hadn’t cast anything out at it suggested to Sylvas that everything on the surface was automated. Probably sensible, all things considered. This far from a star, there was no way for anything to live on the planetary surface.

As they closed in, the ship’s sensory apparatus opened out more. Whatever spells they’d been using to obscure their entrance couldn’t hold up against closer scrutiny, and from the endless dark stone, a cavernous entrance suddenly emerged. Sylvas cast as they plunged towards it, a gravity shear that enveloped the front of the ship as they slammed through the defensive wards, tearing through them and the projectiles being launched from the automated turrets without a scratch. 

The same could not be said of their landing. There was a vast landing bay beyond the entrance, but it was filled almost to the front with landed transport freighters, and with the Folly coming in so hot, Sylvas had to haul it up and scrape across the ceiling to avoid slamming head-on into them. The same bay stretched back for a mile into the dark, only the running lights of the ships giving any hint as to the vastness of the cavern that they had commandeered and widened out. 

The smart thing to do would have been to head back around towards the entrance, make a landing there, and work their way in on foot, but Sylvas was unwilling to give up the momentum that they’d won. He carried on, skirting the narrow band between the landed ships and the ceiling all the way to the rear of the vast cavern before bringing the Folly into a spin and touching down on top of one of the freighters he felt certain was trapped by the others crowded around it.

Darling, another brief reminder, you, I, and our little doggy might be well on the way to indestructibility, but everyone else on this ship would absolutely die as a bloody smear if you’d made a single mistake in that approach.

“That’s why I didn’t make any mistakes.” Sylvas shut everything down, dumped the access bay open, and turned to meet up with the rest of them. 

Kaya and Malachai already stood ready by the exit, Malachai with his scythe already deployed and Kaya glistening silver in her all-over armor. Hector jogged to catch up to them. They headed down the ramp together and immediately came under fire. Sylvas had plenty of time to prepare spells for this assault and already had a Gravity Shear up to deflect the spells being flung their way. Once again, the Consortium was actually helping them. If it hadn’t been for the sudden influx of security personnel charging it, it might have taken them half an hour to find the exit from the massive bay. Now, they headed straight for it, leaping down off the freighter they’d mounted to use the bodies of the ships as shields until they could close the distance.

Kaya pulled up short of the end of the last ship and glanced back at Sylvas, who found that he was smiling despite the seriousness of their situation. “Ready to go fast?”

She gave him a nervous nod, then let the metal flow over her to completely encompass her whole body. Sylvas hoisted her up, the same way he’d moved around the great slabs of rock in the labyrinth, stepped out into the line of fire, took aim, and launched her with as much force as he could muster. Her armor grew spikes in flight, and by the time the Consortium troops realized what was flying at them, she’d already hit them in the center of the mass of bodies. Their practiced firing-range casting abruptly stopped with that distraction, and Sylvas used the opportunity to charge in himself. 

The war mana being generated by the fighting was still just outside of his usual range of perception, but he could taste it now, like blood on the air. It flowed into him, into Strife, and in turn, it disgorged a wave of fresh power through him. He half expected it to push his own usable gravity mana out of his core, but to his surprise, at least half of what Strife had vomited out into his soul was gravity mana, already perfectly attuned for his use. He had been changed by contact with the eidolon, but it was changing, too. He should have realized that shifting affinity would affect everything.

Unrolled from her spiked sphere, Kaya was on her feet, blades manifested from her arms, and was slicing her way through the mid-ranks of the Consortium security. They had all turned to face that threat, ignoring the far greater one bearing down on them. The eidolon howled in exultation at their foolishness, and then Sylvas leapt.

Red claws tore through flesh like it was mist. Their ablative armor was far more extensive than the little vests that Sylvas and his crew had thrown on, but it might as well not have been there at all. Perhaps it could have absorbed a hit from a spell, but against an eidolon’s claws, there was nothing it could do. Sylvas stopped himself dead in the midst of a swing, only realizing belatedly that he’d almost hit Kaya. He was going to have to be careful about how he used Strife if it was going to drive him into such a frenzy.

For her part, Kaya showed no fear at all, grinning at the gruesome display of gore that surrounded them and jogging on along the hallway that had opened up beside them. Sylvas triggered a pulse of gravity, and it washed out through the layers of the underground complex, feeding gravitation data back to him that Mira turned into a map as they went. Malachai and Hector arrived at the entrance to the tunnel just as Kaya and he made it to the first bend in it.

Kaya cast a little of the quicksilver that coated her body out into a smooth sheet, and with a little more concentration, she tightened it up until it took on a mirror sheen. Extending it out, she could see the reflection of what was down the corridor. The trio of guards milling around and arguing. The automated defense turret that had been hastily set up. She gave Sylvas a nod, and he cast a Gravity Shear before the duo rounded the corner.

The turret was a lot more effective than the guards, raining a stream of lightning bolts on the shield Sylvas had raised that deflected out into the walls and ceiling as they charged. The guards were lifted off their feet when the Shear touched them, launched off at odd angles to crash into the poured concrete of the walls before tumbling down to lie in broken heaps.

Maybe Sylvas would have felt some guilt about the people he was killing if it wasn’t for the influence of the bloodthirsty eidolon, but he doubted it. He’d seen three worlds rendered barren and dead by these people. They had no respect for life, so he could find no reason in his heart to care about taking theirs.

Apparently, fighting and furious was the perfect combination to awaken his eidolon and strengthen their bond. Just as Hector had predicted, his mana was no longer flowing into his core but into Strife, and it, in turn, was pouring out far more back into him. All of the old mana-cycling techniques he’d spent so long mastering became utterly pointless. So long as they were aligned, Sylvas and Strife could generate an infinite amount of mana for themselves to share.

He set off another pulse, mapped another sphere of the underground. The passage split in two directions, and it took little more than a hint of a preference from Mira before he set off down the left one. Kaya jogged to keep up. “So what’s the grand plan here, stanzbuhr?”

Strife’s growl echoed with his own metallic voice. He had never sounded less like himself. “Kill them all.”