Chapter 12

“The most simplistic of spells is invariably an attack. A raw expression of mana sent out from the caster towards some perceived threat. This is the least useful, and least potent application of magic.”

—A Child’s Book of Spells, Immaltan Vitorius

On the third day of Hell Week, Sylvas belonged body and soul to Vaelith. He did his fitness routine with Chul, lifting rocks and running around until he was ready to throw up from exhaustion, then he cast as many reinforcement spells as he could muster to get him back to the Blackhall for a more substantial breakfast than the one he’d regurgitated repeatedly the day before. After so many jaunts through null-space that his whole mana core was drained to a dribble, Sylvas had not been able to stomach any dinner.

Kaya slumped down opposite him in the rather more refined dining hall of the Naval Track students and met his gaze. There were bags under her eyes. Sylvas didn’t think he’d ever seen her looking less than excited to be alive before this moment, but right then and there, he suspected she would have handed back her arms and legs and laid down in some asteroid cave for a month if given the chance. “Good morning.”

“No and no.” She groaned. “Bad evening.”

He tried to press on with polite conversation anyway. “How are you enjoying your…”

She held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t want to talk about it. Don’t want to think about it. Got to do it all day, but these five minutes are mine.”

For a long moment, neither one of them said anything, mechanically shoveling food into their mouths, then Sylvas broke. “Lovely weather we’re having.”

Kaya almost choked on her toast trying to hold back her laughter. “Are we that desperate for something to talk about?”

“We could discuss mushroom farming, if you’d prefer?”

“Fine, we’ll talk about it.” She grumbled. “You daft Stanzbuhr.”

“How does one farm mushrooms, exactly?”

“I meant we could talk about hell week. Only good thing about leaving home is never having to think about those kagrackan mushrooms ever again.” She tossed the crust of her toast back onto her plate and skewered a sausage with what Sylvas felt was unnecessary viciousness. “They’ve got me run ragged, remedial classes about basic culgh, affinity spells and embodiment work. Reckon they’re trying to push me to Circle Four by the end of the week. Not likely when I’ve got no new paradigm to even start on yet. And affinity testing again. So bloody boring. Now I know how you felt when nothing was speaking to you.”

She most assuredly did not know how he felt. The desperation not to be left behind. The desperation to get powerful enough to protect himself and everyone else. That was the one thing that Sylvas hadn’t noticed in the frenetic activity of Hell Week; nobody had been trying to push him to advance, possibly for the first time in his life. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that either. Whether he should have been relieved, or concerned that they were happy for him to stagnate.

Maybe they’re just giving me a chance to breathe.

Before Sylvas could recount the personal torture schedule that he’d been signed up for, white shield sending spells sprang to life beside them. “Ugh noooo.” Kaya moaned, reaching out to her one.

Sylvas brushed his fingers against his own orders without complaint, but he certainly shared Kaya’s sentiment all the same.

Vaelith’s voice was as clipped as ever. “Training field east. Now.”

The beleaguered recruits met each other’s stare across the table, offered a half-hearted salute, then headed off to their respective training. At least during the normal day to day of life on Strife, Sylvas had his friends to distract him. It was a small comfort, but he was a man who’d lived a life without any, so he was surprised at how much it hurt to have those moments snatched away.

The elf was standing out in the open field when he arrived, a breeze making the red sand drift around her. She paid no attention to Sylvas approach, until he called out to her. “Instructor.”

“Nice of you to join me, recruit.” Vaelith was usually curt to the point of rudeness, but today she seemed to be genuinely annoyed at him. Not that there was anything Sylvas could do about it.

She turned on her heel, slamming the other foot down, and launched a spell right at him. There was no pause to cast, no moment to think. One moment they were standing, the next he was under attack. Casting a shield was impossible in the fraction of a second that he had, so Sylvas flung himself aside and the sizzling green bolt swept by, close enough to make the hairs on his bare arm stand up.

He was casting as he went, the spell of flight took hold just as his shoulder hit the ground, then instead of rolling away his momentum, he used it, gliding along a few feet through the red before launching himself up into the air and getting himself some distance. It was lucky that he had, the next spell impacted exactly where he would have come to a halt. Sand blasted out from the point of impact, but he was already buying himself space to think. 

Vaelith was casting now. Whatever trick she’d used to hold back the previous spells now spent, or her backlog of prepared spells insufficient for what she wanted to do now. A sweep of green flames erupted from her hands, chasing Sylvas up into the sky but not able to keep up with his rapid ascent. They dispersed in a wide cloud of crackling smoke long before they touched him, and for a moment, he thought he had Vaelith. Letting his flight spell die, Sylvas switched to Invert, and cast it down at her as he fell.

Gravity reversed, slowing his descent and launching a massive updraft of sand to provide him with cover. Vaelith should have been launched up with it, perfectly visible to his gravity sense, even if his eyes and second sight were failing him.  She wasn’t though, she’d run clear before he could offer a counter-strike, and now he was in the midst of a blinding sandstorm and she was outside, looking in and lining up her next shot. His exact position in the plume would have been obscured to her, so she’d need to cast something that effected an area rather than…

A construct made of green light and unabated rage burst into the column, its claws latching onto Sylvas as it dove, dragging him out of his own Inversion and back out into normal gravity, where he started falling. It was some sort of giant bird, like an eagle, and while its wings were tucked flush against its sides and it claws were sunk into his arm, it razor edged beak came down to tear at his face. Ripping strips of flesh away as he wrestled to try and get free. “No. No. No.”

They spun in the air, twisting, so that Sylvas ended up on top of the eagle, trying to punch it away even as they landed in the desert with a bone aching crunch. On top of the bird, the worst of the landing was passed down into it, and whatever hollow bones Vaelith had conjured into it were crushed.

Sylvas couldn’t catch a breath, but he needed to get up, to move. If he just lay here, she was going to leave nothing of him but a scorch mark. He tried to push off the eagle and back to his feet, but without air, the strength seemed to have left his body. Plan A had failed, now for Plan B. He rolled with the eagle still entangled in his arms, and as Vaelith’s next spell struck home, it struck her pet instead of Sylvas. 

The dull green of its mana-construct skeleton flared double bright for an instant before the whole thing faded away, but Sylvas remained unharmed. Mana followed the channels carved for it into reality, and the eagles and wolves that Vaelith summoned were nothing more than the blueprints for those channels infused with just enough magic to border on real. 

He couldn’t stand yet, but he could move. Tossing the disintegrating remnants of the construct beast aside, he rolled out of the way before the next blast struck, beginning his own casting. He moved as he cast, spell forms trailing in fragments from his fingertips in fractals behind him. Rolling to his feet and moving ahead of the next bolt of green flame, and the next.

There was a moment of hesitation amidst the bombardment, which Sylvas took to be a sign of the elf casting something more substantial at him. His own spell completed just as the last of the sand-cloud cleared. From Vaelith’s outstretched hands, a great green serpent rose up. A hood flared around its face, and green flame poured forth from its mouth in great coughing gouts. It would have enveloped him, burnt him away to nothing, but his Gravity Shear rippled into being ahead of him long before the fire could hit home. Warping it away from him.

Vaelith saw, and what should have been a look of frustration on her face looked concerningly like glee. She knew what I was going to do, so why didn’t she exploit it? He knew the answer. This wasn’t a fight. She was playing with him.

The Ardent had been making a fool of him from the moment he was recruited. Making him run in circles. Making him throw himself into battles to prove himself. Making him push and push to be more powerful, just so that he had more power for them to use. He was tired of being a toy.

Vaelith might have known everything that he could do at the start of the week. She might have studied every recording of him fighting prior to today, but that didn’t mean that she knew everything he could do. Not by a long shot.

The Orbitals were stowed away neatly in the pouch by his side. Not on the other side of some dimensional rift, inside the physical bag. Just a gentle push filled them with gravity affinity mana, and then he could move them as easily as thinking about them. Like they were an extension of his body. They drifted up and out of the bag as he maintained the Gravity Shear against the oncoming green flames, moving out to orbit around him, as they did whenever he wasn’t actively guiding them. It had taken him both nights since he’d gotten them to learn how to make them respond like this, but it had been worth sacrificing a little more sleep.

As the blazing green torrents of flames slowed and died, Sylvas let the Gravity Shear drop too, and for the first time since they’d begun this foolishness, he moved towards Vaelith instead of away. Charging right for her.

It was obviously not what she had been expecting. Her face went blank and expectant, as if this was some entertaining trick that an animal was performing and she wanted to see how it turned out. He was not her toy. He was not the Ardent’s pet. He would wipe that look off her face.

Casting as he ran, he made no attempt to strike at her directly. If she’d been able to avoid an Invert while completely blinded by the environment, he didn’t have high hopes of one hitting home now. What he really needed was something direct that he could launch at her, but his spell book was barren. Every spell that was listed as using gravity affinity mana had been added to his slate, but they were almost exclusively tools for use in space, not weapons to be wielded face to face.

Invert was a massive mana drain, reversing the direction of gravity entirely required a lot more power than just curving it slightly. Every moment that he maintained it, he lost a good chunk of his mana reserves. So when he cast it now, it wasn’t ever meant to last. He stepped into the area of effect in full view of Vaelith and was flung head over heels, up into the air.

He let the spell die almost the moment he’d cast it. For one moment there was a pillar of red with him atop it and sailing through the sky, the next, he was descending on Vaelith like a meteor.

Or rather, like a falling star-system. At the center, he descended, but all around him, the Elvish Orbitals spun in their respective orbits. With a push of will and mana, he launched the metal balls at his Instructor like buckshot. A close-range blast meant to break through her shields so that when he did land, the damage he dealt would be unblocked.

Spinning, Vaelith summoned a pair of construct shields to her hands. Glowing and spinning circles of green that she flicked up and down as she turned to perfectly intercept every one of the little missiles that Sylvas had sent flying her way. They deflected into the sand with sad little ‘pat’ noises.

But then he had closed the distance unimpeded. His heel was leading, and it would take her right in the jaw. He’d won.

She vanished with a pop into null-space.

At Kaya’s suggestion, Sylvas had kept his hair cropped relatively short since arriving on Strife. Hammerheart had seared a fair chunk of it off to start with, but since then he’d been maintaining the length himself. Which meant that when Vaelith, who was suddenly behind him in the air, grabbed him by the hair on the back of his head, her nails scratched over his scalp.

They hit the ground with her still riding his body down, face meeting the dirt hard. With a yank on his hair, she pried his face from the sand, and with a green spectre of a blade manifested in the other hand she hissed. “Yield.”

For a moment, old instincts possessed him, he tried to buck her off, gathered his strength for it, even feeling the searing cold of the razor edge against his neck, but then good sense won out. He stilled his body and sighed, “I yield.”

She let his hair go, and his face flopped back into the dirt as she dismounted him. Grumbling as she rose. “Sloppy.”

It was only once she was off that the orbitals hovering in the air all around her came into sight. Each was just a small ball of metal, but with a little push from Sylvas, those little spheres could move fast enough to shatter bone. He could have had her. In a real fight, she wouldn’t have asked him to yield, she wouldn’t have held the blade to his throat, she would have killed him and moved on. He was respecting that by not carrying on past the point of his death, but it still stood as a helpful testament that as well-trained and powerful as she was, he still could have taken her down with him.

Last week, he probably would have, and they’d both have ended up in the infirmary, with him being sent immediately on for psychological evaluation.

“Until you’ve got your embodiment functional, close combat is a lose-condition.” She glanced around as the spheres spiraled in towards Sylvas. As he regained his feet, they slipped back into his pouch. “Your instinct was to make distance. Trust your instincts.”

There was a thin line across his throat that didn’t bleed, but had been cut all the same, so shallow from the blade’s touch that it had left a mark even if it hadn’t gone deep enough. He cleared his throat, feeling that line vibrate. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You won’t always be here, won’t always have the dust to screen you.” She blew some of the red sand off her hands where it had settled. “Don’t get reliant on it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She gave him a considering glance up and down. “How did I beat you?” 

“You’re a more powerful mage with far more combat experience.” He replied, trying not to sound too bitter about it.

“Specifics.”

“You have more spells available to you. More powerful spells. You have a far larger pool of mana to draw on…” he started, only for her to cut him off with a glare.

“Were any of these an issue in this fight?”

“No.” He conceded with a grimace. Then he paused to rapidly recall their whole conflict blow by blow, before giving his answer. “You cast faster than I can. I’ve got no direct damage spells, so I have to rely on the orbitals which have limited range. You can teleport.”

She looked like there was a bad taste in her mouth. “I thought Fahred would have taught you to teleport by now. Given your affinity.”

“I’ve had one day of lessons. Nauseating lessons.” 

She didn’t laugh, but her sneer turned into mild amusement at least.

“Direct damage.” She was counting off his complaints on her fingers. “You’ve got nothing in your affinity?”

“Not a single spell.” It was a source of constant frustration, that he could be handed so rare an affinity by chance and there being essentially no spells written for that affinity. If I was allowed to modify the spells I have, it would be a very different story.

She interrupted his introspection. “Faster, I can help with.”

“I’m not allowed to modify spells.” He said it as much as a gentle reminder to her, as out of frustration. “There’s so many places they could be abbreviated, but…”

“Standard spell rotation, cast faster.” She fired off a couple of green bolts to explode into puffs on the distant red sand with scarcely a word of the Aion language spoken. “Combat magic.”

“How do I do that?” Sylvas asked with mounting awe.

“Simple.” Vaelith stretched. “We break your mind.”