Chapter 21

“Power is all that matters. Others will argue for strategy, or cunning, or even logistics, but all of these things can be overcome with sufficient power. Any spell can be borne down and crushed if you have enough mana at your disposal and the wherewithal to use it. Any enemy can be broken on the rack of your raw might if it exceeds theirs. We measure the rings of containment that we use for our mana as though they are the defining trait of our power. A circle five mage more than a match for any circle four, and so forth, but time and again we have seen the strong overthrown by the weak when the weak had more mana at their disposal. Do not be so blinded by your own power that you cannot recognize it in others, and do not forget that no matter how insurmountable your talents or powers become, they will never be a match for a primitive shaman with a chunk of etherium in his pocket.”

—Squad Tactics, Fal’Vaelith

The intuitive part of teleportation was slowly but surely coming to Sylvas. The fact that he could constantly regenerate his mana as he went now meant that the training session beneath the stone could carry on for hours on end, and his body was slowly acclimating to its brief jumps outside of the laws of physics so the vomit flowed a little less copiously.

At first, he hadn’t been entirely clear on why they would conduct the practice sessions so deep beneath the cliff complex, but as he became more accustomed to teleportation he realized that there were two factors that made it wise. The solid mass around them actually created a sort of barrier of gravity, he could pass through it without any issue, but it gave him a sense of limitation that open air might not have. Without that trace of gravity, he most likely would have overshot a lot more, and given how little gravity mana it took to teleport; scarcely more than a particularly potent Gravity Spike it was entirely possible that he’d have flung himself clear of Strife’s atmosphere before he got control of himself.

The other advantage was, of course, that if he did screw up, he would only kill himself rematerializing inside solid stone instead of phasing back into reality inside one of the other recruits and tearing the both of them apart. Isolation was key for this part of the training.

By the midpoint of this second session, he felt confident in his ability to cast the spell successfully and to navigate null-space, so they switched track, at his request. Fahred would teleport somewhere around the chamber, and Sylvas would attempt to trace his location from the brief gravity well that he left behind. With that achieved, he was meant to teleport after him. He missed almost every time, at least in the beginning, but soon his gravity sense started pinging him with an echo. Not the tear that Fahred had entered, but the adjoining one would place itself on his mental map, and coordinating his teleportation after that was easy. For perhaps the last quarter of the lesson, they played a game of hide and seek.

Fahred would teleport away, not somewhere in the chamber, but somewhere outside on campus, where he now felt confident that they could both reach without incident. Sylvas would trace him, and follow. The top of the Temple came first, the top of the cliffs soon after, the deep freeze off the cliffside mess hall was trickier, but no harder than Sagran’s forge that they passed through to a chorus of jeers from the other students at work there. Fahred’s office, his lecture hall, the laundry, the training fields outside of the wards. Even, briefly all the way across the ravine into the midst of the dead and toppled city that the campus overlooked, though some sinister sounds that could have been roaming Eidolons encouraged Fahred to move on from there a lot faster than the previous locations, heading for somewhere safe inside the wards. The words echoed behind even after Fahred was already gone. “Perhaps there is a more precipitous place to play chase.”

That turned out to be in one of the outbuildings among the scrap that Chul meant to get around to repairing one of these days but hadn’t quite gotten to yet. There, Sylvas was delighted to see Fahred accidentally entangle his foot in a mass of what looked like fishing nets, slashing at them with tight beams of water to free himself before porting away once more. “Oh that’s funny is it?”

Sylvas arrived in Fahred’s office once more. “Pretty funny.”

The Instructor looked genuinely irritated for a moment, then his grin reappeared just before he disappeared.

Sylvas followed without hesitation, diving back through null-space, with the sound of Fahred’s passage through that empty silence echoing behind him like the last notes of a long-forgotten melody. He emerged into darkness, and for an awful moment he thought that Fahred had tricked him somehow, and he’d buried himself alive, but his gravity sense assured him that nothing of the sort had happened. They were well above ground level, and he was nose to nose with Fahred, who was grinning like a fool now that Sylvas eyes had adjusted to the tiny thread of light making its way through the gap in the closet door. He opened his mouth to comment on how dangerous the maneouver was, putting them in such close proximity, but before he could, Fahred clapped his hands and vanished all over again.

Outside of the closet, the sound of a shower abruptly cut off, and Sylvas was instantly awash in panic. He couldn’t see outside of the closet, but his gravity sense still gave him a very good idea about who was out there. Each of the Instructors had a different resonance, based on how much they had stowed away in Cold Storage, and on the other side of those closet doors was unmistakably Vaelith, freshly emerged from a shower that they had just interrupted. Footsteps slapped across the floorboards outside and if it hadn’t have been for the clarity his Paradigms granted him, Sylvas would have been caught, and likely hung up by his genitals from the side of the Blackhall. With a talent born of desperation, he teleported out.

Atop the temple complex again, he slid a short distance along the sloped remains of a long ruined tile roof underlaid with smooth cool metal and came to a halt overlooking the campus, heart hammering in his chest. Instead of trying to follow Fahred’s trail from wherever the most feared instructor in the base was bathing, Sylvas let his gravity sense roll out and find him through the resonance of his Cold Storage. He was back in his office, which made sense. Sylvas teleported there after just a moment’s thought.

Fahred was lounging in his chair, and greeted him with, “Pretty funny?”

The sending from Vaelith was there waiting for Sylvas when he arrived. A white shield simply saying, “Anyone trained can read a teleportation trace.”

He covered his face in mortification. “Oh she’s going to finish beating me to death next time.”

“As you deserve for mocking your Instructor and being such a little pervert.” Fahred quipped back, still looking incredibly smug. Right up until his own sending from Vaelith arrived. He listened to it in dead silence, the smile slowly melting off his face.

Eventually, long after the message had been conveyed to him, he said, “Right.”

There was another long pause. “Right, lessons are done for the day. I need to find a way off the planet.”

Sylvas couldn’t restrain himself from grinning now, even as Fahred started mumbling about calculating for interplanetary teleportation or looking up wards that could stop a comet and ushered him out. Most of the reason for the smile was relief that blame was being correctly assigned, but there was something oddly satisfying about seeing the smug Instructor on the back foot for a change.

The time for his lessons to come to an end had already arrived, so he wasn’t exactly being dismissed early, but given how hard he’d been worked throughout Hell Week, actually getting to finish on time was something of a small miracle. Sylvas headed downstairs and out, eyes already turning to the Blackhall and thoughts already turning to dinner.

Which was why the first spell hit him unimpeded. It was a bolt of green flame, and it tore cleanly through his forearm and buried itself in his hip. He folded around the blow like someone had instantaneously emptied his uniform of the body within. Collapsing with a scream of pain before he could filter it out.

Vaelith’s camouflage spell faded away now that the first blow was struck, crackling lines of green seeming to birth her out of the empty space between the buildings. “On your feet, recruit.”

The wound in his hip had dug only a few inches deep before cauterizing itself, a hint of white bone visible among the black char. His left hand was useless, fingers flexing, but the whole hand dangling limp from the damage of the bolt passing through. Despite all that, he rose to his feet at her command.

“If this is about… the shower.” Despite the pain, embarrassment still flushed through him, bringing blood to his cheeks. “I’m sorry, it was…”

“War isn’t about anything, recruit.” She advanced on him again, magic beginning to coil and twist around her. Closing the distance between them. “It just is.”

Sylvas turned and ran. His left hip didn’t move like it should, the other muscles having to compensate for the burnt-out ones and doing a poor job. That leg dragged with every step, but it still kept him a little ahead of her reach as he cast.

With a lurch, his next step was into the oblivion of null-space, then he was back and running, back through the storage locker where he’d been earlier, where Fahred had tangled himself. It took a simple cast of kinesis and a tug to topple the rickety shelves. Then he was casting once more, still running to put as much distance between one trail and the next, buying himself time to think. The next jump was to the top of the cliff face, where he’d trained his team for the Cull. It was empty and barren, but also unexpected enough for him to prepare himself. The wound on his hip was debilitating when he was on foot, so he intended to be in the air as much as possible. The wound to the arm was more concerning, casting would take twice as long if he was producing mana and shaping it into spell-forms one handed. Some of his repertoire of spells wouldn’t even be available to him. If only he had some sort of focus to work with, perhaps one that was double ended so he could produce two continuous mana streams to cast with. He drew his staff from his satchel, pressing the right finger to the right thread clumsily with his deadened hand.

Then he started casting, rapid fire, one spell after another after another, fracturing off pieces of his psyche to hold them, ignoring the rapid drain on his mana. Either Vaelith came for him here and he held her off, or she’d lost track of him and he could drain the majority of the mana back and reintegrate his fractals. If she had lost him, he’d swing by the infirmary for a patch up before going out hunting her.

He need not have worried about needing to track her down. There was only one hunter in their relationship, and it certainly wasn’t him. She appeared exactly where he himself had teleported just a few seconds before and advanced on him once more.

Time to see if the staff did what he hoped. It was now or never.

He leveled it at her and cast Invert.

There was no area of effect this time around, just the sudden twisting of angles and forces by the rotation of the staff and the spell. She was hit with the invisible wave of change, gravity re-asserted itself as being behind her and she was dragged from her feet, falling along the flat desert plane until she went tumbling off the cliffside.

It worked.

As she dipped out of sight, Sylvas swiftly recast Invert, fragmenting off another piece of his psyche to keep it on hold, then he ran.

He had no illusions that the fall would kill Vaelith, or even knock her out, her embodiments made her a tank and one little knock wouldn’t be enough, at best he’d bought himself some time, at worst, her reflexes were sharp enough that…

She teleported into sight a few feet ahead of him, rolling her shoulders like she was warming up. “Cute.”

She launched a bolt of green fire directly at Sylvas from one hand, and a second off to the side. For the briefest of moments as he raised a Gravity Shear to shield himself, he thought that the second shot had been meant to lock down his options in terms of movement, but from the corner of his eye, he saw it curve, swooping back in towards him once it was past the convex shield ahead of him. He twisted, so that the edge of his shield intercepted the bolt, curving it off course, but that left his other flank open to the next barrage.

Vaelith was charging him, well aware of her superiority at close range, and veering towards the side that he had shielded instead of his unprotected flank. She was going to launch more curved shots to the other side to make him shield himself there and leave her route clear. He wasn’t going to let her.

She fired off another pair of bolts, but Sylvas was no longer there, he dropped his shield, reintegrated a fragment, and took flight. Both bolts buzzed under him to impact the sand as he gained height.

While the flight spell was active, he couldn’t cast anything else. It locked him into a single course of action if he wanted to maintain his mobility, but of course, Vaelith knew this. She had literally written the book on magical combat, and she knew that to win, you had to eliminate your opponent’s options. What she didn’t know, was all the options that Sylvas had made for himself in the past few days of training.

Draining himself of weight in gradual increments as he flew straight up, he eventually reached the point where gravity was no longer pulling at him. Even without his flight spell, he could keep to the air now, even if he would lose all maneuverability. The air was thin up here, and his breath came ragged and desperate, but he had a few fractions of a second when she wasn’t pressing him. He deployed the orbitals from his bag, and they assumed their gentle circles around him.

He was a sitting duck up in the sky. An admittedly tiny target painted against the backdrop of stars. Vaelith wouldn’t be using her eyes to track the tiny black dot, but her second sight. She could see the mana inside him, see him shaping it.

Green glowed down on the clifftop, embers of it spitting from the fire of Vaelith’s casting to zip up towards him. He still had the flight spell in action, allowing himself freedom of movement to dodge each one as they came, but it was a losing game. She could stay down there blasting away at him like an artillery emplacement until the suns rose, and he would have to dodge every single shot. She only had to get lucky once.

Pouring more mana into his flight spell, Sylvas launched himself away, not out over the campus, but towards the distant battle-line where they’d held off the Eidolon incursion not so long ago. Familiar ground for both of them, but distant enough from the campus that nothing they did was liable to cause property damage. Down below, he could see Vaelith chasing him. Moving as fast as he could in flight by the power of her legs alone. As if he needed another reason to find her intimidating.

More spells flew, tiny green specks in the shadowed landscape beneath him, growing to roaring spheres of flame as they drew close and swept by.

They couldn’t go on like this. Sylvas couldn’t anyway. His Instructor was fifth circle, she had mana to spare even without him draining his away for flight, and she hadn’t been using her supply all day like him.

She was using second sight to track him through the night sky. He could use it to stop her.

Abandoning his flight spell, he let momentum carry him on and began casting a new spell of his own. Pouring more and more of his dwindling supply of mana into it, until his core could not have been shining half as bright as the spell he was about to cast. Then he unleashed it.

It was a gravity spike, cast in the air.

If he hadn’t been filtering out what his second sight told him through his Clearmind, the sudden outburst of magic through that massive spell would have blinded him. He had to hope it would do the same to Vaelith. At least for long enough.

The barrage that had been tracing him across the sky stopped. The bolts already in flight all curving towards the focal point of his gravity spike. Even near weightless as he was, the massive amount of gravity he had just exerted pulled him in too, and down beneath him in the open empty plain of red sand, chaos was unfolding. Every grain of that sand was being called up to the gravity spike. Vaelith was hauled off her feet by the sudden change in direction of gravity, and even if she hadn’t been, the ground must have bucked. Even the sand compacted under her feet would have tried to rise.

He had his moment.

Letting the second to last of his fragments reintegrate into his psyche, Sylvas cast teleport.

Vaelith knew him. Knew his capabilities. Knew that he was a careful tactician. She had been watching him every moment since he arrived on Strife. She knew without a doubt that he would not move into close-combat with her, because doing so would give her every advantage, just as it had the last time they fought. He would never repeat the same mistake twice. Her knowledge of him gave her all the advantages, but it was a double-edged sword.

In the moment she was still blind, Sylvas stepped out of null-space behind her and struck.