Chapter 22

“A recruit’s combat aptitude cannot be assessed solely in measurable statistics. The number of spells that they have memorized, the mana they have at their disposal, the number of circles they have ascended, the scores and rankings by which we scry their physical and mental attributes are all data points which can be assessed, but they do not define their character. The most powerful mage in the universe might freeze when confronted with danger. The most talented spellcaster might flinch away at the sight of blood. To know whether a recruit in the Ardent can and will fight when the moment arrives, there can be only one way of determining. They must be placed in the crucible of combat. They must experience pain, failure and defeat, and they must return from it, seeking to fight again. We are not looking for people who can win a battle. We are looking for people who can wage a war.”

—Keeping the Peace Among the Peacekeepers, Gorgan Wartback

Anyone else would have been dead. Anyone else would have received the full weight of Sylvas swing. The gravity he had shifted in the staff, an extension of himself, the impossible weight that imbued in his body would have shattered him, but imbued in the staff that he had crafted and balanced for just this strike didn’t even bend it. He couldn’t have guessed what it would have registered on the punching bag they’d tested his strength on, but he was willing to bet it was higher than whatever Vaelith scored in Resilience.

She twisted as the stave came crashing down, raising an arm into its path. What should have been a killing blow to the back of her head became as crippling blow to her arm. For the first time in his life, Sylvas saw Vaelith hurt.

Despite the mana-infused muscle surrounding it, the bone of her forearm snapped in two under the deathblow. Her incantations, probably summoning some more green flaming death to send after him, stuttered as the pain washed through her. The spells at her fingertips failed and the green dimmed.

The arm hung as limp and useless as his deadened hand. She had to see that he’d won. He said to her the very same thing she’d said with a blade pressed to his neck at the start of Hell Week. “Yield.”

She laughed. Not the smirk he’d become accustomed to, but something deep and throaty that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “From one little tap? I don’t think so.”

Then she was moving, charging so fast that his eyes could barely keep track, he flung his orbitals into a wild spin around him, halting her approach before she could lay hands on him, but he was in the danger zone now. Too close for comfort, too close for sanity.

She’d manifested the same single edged blade from their last fight, green fire licking off it, but while he fully expected her to slash out at his orbitals and put them out of action, he did not expect her to swing it down at her own broken arm, severing it and cauterizing the wound above the break. Her dead arm hit the ground with a puff of sand, then she was coming at him again. Ducking and weaving to break through the patterns he spun his orbitals into to block her. They were just balls of metal, when it came down to it, the only thing that made them dangerous was the velocity he was spinning them at.

“Come on boy,” Vaelith’s grin was feral. “Show me what you can do.”

He slammed the base of his staff into the ground, and the orbitals fell in a circle around him, still linked by his will, and his mana. Where he’d left it was where the staff stayed standing, weightless with the orbital enchantment bound at each end of it. With his hand free, he reached over to touch the crystal on the back of his broken hand, drawing out the neutral mana and casting something old and almost forgotten.

Vaelith had only paused for a moment to assess the situation before realizing Sylvas defenses were down, then she came charging in all over again with her blade raised.

The neutral mana that his glove had gathered worked just like his own used to. It was only a tiny speck of power compared to what he could wield now, but sometimes all he needed was a tiny speck. He flicked it down into the circle his orbitals had drawn in the sand and a magic circle snapped into place around him. Vaelith stepped through it unhindered in her charge, but the spells she’d cast were stopped as she passed over the threshold. The blade faded to specks of green nothing in her hand, the enhancements that she’d layered up on herself were gone too.

Her passage disrupted the sand, broke the circle, it was a trick that could only ever hold for a fraction of a second, and only somewhere that he could mark the ground, but it was enough. With a touch of will and mana his staff leapt back to his hand, and he spun it straight into a blow that should have stopped Vaelith in her tracks.

She caught the staff in one hand, and for that one awful moment he thought she was so strong she could stop it dead, but instead she used it as a pivot point, spinning her whole body up and around it, bringing her feet up level with Sylvas’ face.

The heel of her boot took him under the eye, his cheekbone folded like paper, and he flew.

Familiarity had trained instinct. Sylvas had flooded his head and neck with extra weight before the blow struck home, otherwise the odds were it would have snapped his neck as well as launching him across the plain, but that extra weight had made him even more top-heavy, and even more liable to crash to the ground instead of being able to roll to his feet.

His orbitals and staff had been left behind. All that he had left now was himself. Vaelith was coming straight for him, so fast that he couldn’t think. The last spell that he’d saved. He finished it through the blood flooding down into his mouth from above.

He was not going to let her do this to him again. He was not going to let her beat him into a pulp while he was helpless. He was never going to be helpless again. He would not let anyone make him feel like that again. Not her. Not Eidolons. Not now. Not ever.

Invert flipped the gravity around him. A plume of sand rose, and he rose with it, flung up into the air, out of Vaelith’s reach. She leapt for him all the same, but all the force she’d put into her leap was reversed when she came into Invert’s area of effect, her trajectory, which had been perfect to catch him, was now reversed. She flew down towards the sand below, and unwilling to let such an opportunity pass him by, Sylvas let the brief Inversion end, so she’d continue to plummet.

Vaelith hit the dirt hard, slamming her one surviving hand down to disperse the impact and raising a plume of red that was all her own. Sylvas drained his own weight just enough that his own landing wouldn’t be so catastrophic, landed hard and painfully anyway, then he took off running and casting. Not towards his orbitals and staff, as Vaelith seemed to expect from the way that she shot off in that direction, but in the complete opposite direction. She spotted him and corrected course almost instantly, of course, but the moments that it bought him let him finish fragmenting himself and casting his spell for later.

She closed the distance with almost comedic ease. He was running for his life, and she made it look like nothing more than a brisk jog. Throwing up his one good hand Sylvas pulled with all his might, and all his will.

Instinct saved Vaelith again, she ducked as the orbitals were dragged across the desert at the speed of cannon fire to resume their position around Sylvas. But those same instincts didn’t account for the staff, which flew to him low and parallel to the ground, knocking her legs out from under her as it spun to his waiting grasp.

Scraping the bottom of his core, he cast Gravity Spike, amping up the pressure on Vaelith, crushing her and pinning her to the ground. He needed time to think, to plan. If he could hold her down for just a minute, he’d be able to refresh his fragments and get a new toolbox of spells to deal with whatever she threw at him next.

The delay was barely even the length of a breath. He didn’t have enough mana to keep the Spike going for more than a second. She flipped back to her feet with a flex of muscles Sylvas was pretty sure he didn’t even have, and then she launched into a fresh barrage of green fire bolts. The first few he managed to dodge, as she was casting them wild as she sprinted, but by the time they were close enough to make out the expression on each other’s faces there was no way to avoid them and no time to cast a shield. Her face was contorted from its usual stern glare into something else, something savage that Sylvas would have claimed that he didn’t recognize, but that he was fairly certain was showing on his own face right now. A challenge.

Even so, the next green fire bolt that came soaring at him, he batted it away with his staff, pouring enough weight into one end to create an anomaly in the gravity surrounding it that curved the shot and made it miss him, zooming up into the air. Maybe all those dull lessons on space-flight weren’t so useless.

Within him, his core was close to empty. In the moments between casting he had tried his best to reverse the flow and draw fresh mana in, but he was simply outpacing his ability to replenish it.

When the next bolt of green leapt from Vaelith’s hands, Sylvas was exhausted enough that he might have just accepted the hit rather than try to leap away, but instead of a simple blast, the green flames surged out into the shape of some bird of prey. It swooped forward, raking at him with spectral claws that he barely managed to avoid, but by the time his attention was back on her, Vaelith was on him.

Blade and staff met, and sparks rained down around them. Sylvas had no idea how he’d even managed to get his staff up in time to block the blow, let alone how he knew to tilt it when she applied more pressure so that it skidded down the bare length of the shaft and gave him an opening to kick out into her side. It was clumsy, and he had no time to shift weight around so his kick did little more than leave a red mark on the elf’s uniform, but he was taking what wins he could.

Kicking off the immovable object of his enemy, he launched himself back, narrowly avoiding the backslash that Vaelith brought back up from where she’d been deflected. It would have had his head off.

Staggering back a step out of reach he began to cast, spinning the staff back in front of him to knock aside her next blow, with enough residual weight still clinging to one end of the staff that it felt grossly unbalanced, but hit hard enough to actually deflect her relentless strength.

He spread his orbitals as he went, each parry giving them a little more time, and then when her next slash came in, whipping around the clumsy defenses of his quarterstaff, he launched one into action, striking at the back of Vaelith’s hand and fouling the blow that should have gutted him. His uniform slit open in a long line and the flames licked across his stomach, scorching a bright red line across him. But he was alive. Every moment he was alive was a victory.

Every moment he was alive, he was drawing in more mana.

Darting in like shooting stars, the orbitals intercepted her, one after another after another. Every killing blow was knocked off course, every step she took was knocked off balance. With all his concentration on guiding them, Sylvas had none to spare to cast, but he wouldn’t have had the time to cast anyway, not with her so close.

All he had were problems, and he needed solutions. Pouring weight and mass into his dead left arm, he brought it up to block her next blow. It was as heavy as he could make it, all concerns about broken bones cast aside in the face of the awful damage it had already suffered. Denser than any metal. The green glowing blade cut through it like butter all the same. The laws of physics did not apply. His deadened left hand fell to the ground at their feet, and he slammed the doors of Clearmind in the face of the incoming agony.

Now they were both down an arm. He didn’t delude himself into thinking that made anything about this fair.

Still, the moment that losing it had bought him was worth it. He managed to blurt out a good half of his gravity spike spell before Vaelith’s blade thrust in past his defenses to bury its tip in his shoulder. 

It burned. The green flames licking out across his chest, arm and back, skin blackened and crackled, but in an awful way he had been lucky again. His staff had been protecting his right side, so she’d struck at the left. It almost didn’t matter if that whole arm was dead.

As she pulled the blade back, he slammed the tip of his staff into her gut. Not with enough force for her to even notice, but just barely enough to let him use it as a point of leverage to push himself away. The next slash sizzled past his face without making contact.

With a twist of the staff and the very last of his mana. Sylvas cast Gravity Spike.

He had no idea how much damage it would do, or if it would do anything at all, but he cast a spell that was usually dispersed across a sphere of several feet in one tiny inch of space, inside Vaelith’s body.

It didn’t matter how strong she was, how tough she was, or what protections she had cast. Nothing could keep her safe from every organ in her thoracic cavity being crushed together.

Blood burst from her mouth, her eyes widened in surprise. Sylvas spell faltered almost as soon as he’d cast it, the very last dregs of mana tearing out of him. Through ragged breaths, he panted out, “Yield!”

She had folded in around her stomach as he staggered back, whether from the pain, or from the pure gravitational pull of the spike, but as she straightened up, her teeth showed through the gore trickling from her mouth. “No.”

Manifesting the blade in her hand again, she started to cast, a spell that she didn’t already have prepared, something that would invariable turn the tide of battle. He was tapped out. Every bit of mana poured into what should have been a killing blow. He had no ammunition to return fire, or interrupt her. He’d gambled it all on one shot, and it hadn’t been enough.

The orbitals buzzed in, all pretense at defense gone now, they battered against her. One after another after another. Hits that would have downed any one of the recruits. Blows that would have torn Sylvas own jaw from his face. But Vaelith just accepted them. He saw one of her teeth fly across the sand, blood was everywhere, but she didn’t stop casting, not even as she ran at him once more.

Green fire exploded out of her. Like the illusory trick she’d used to scare them all into action back in training. But where that had done them no harm, this was searing hot, scorching across Sylvas skin. Burning away his eyelids when he squeezed them shut to prevent the blindness that was sure to come. Pain consumed him, so much that even Clearmind couldn’t hold it all back. His whole front side had been flayed of skin by the scorching flames of green.

And right on the heels of the wave of fire, she came, blade at the ready. He staggered back out of range, frantically pulling in all the mana that he could, but he had forgotten one variable.

The bird had been circling their melee, completely forgotten in the chaos, but now it hit him in the back, claws digging through what remained of his uniform and unburnt flesh to scrape across his shoulder blades. In itself it would have been bad enough, but the hit launched him back into Vaelith’s reach, and that slash for the throat which should have killed him the first time around was now coming back again as she launched herself to meet him.

There was no time to think. No space to move. His staff was splayed out of any sort of defensive position as he tried to maintain his balance. It was over. She had won.

Not for free.

With the last moment of awareness he had before the blade hit his throat, Sylvas pulled. The orbitals that had all been hanging around him, inert since he’d abandoned his attempts to stop her casting, leapt into motion. Converging on Vaelith.

They didn’t have the distance to build up much momentum, he couldn’t exert enough force on them for any sort of kill-shot, but he could make her hurt. They struck at her from every angle at once, steel striking flesh. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the blade swept in towards his throat, and he heard every thumping impact, felt – through his connection to the orbitals – as the bones in his impervious Instructor cracked under the barrage. 

Then he looked up at the stars as his half-severed head lolled back. He had spent a lot of time looking at the stars back on Croesia, when he was a child with nothing but his own company, and when he was a servant of the Hollow Heart he had spent many nights plotting out their positions and making calculations. The stars are so different here.

From the edges of his vision, the stars began to vanish, and as he took one last bloody gurgling breath, everything turned to black.