Chapter 10
“There are many things that they don’t tell you about waging war in a squad. Things that the textbooks and lecturers overlook and sidestep because they find them distasteful, or harmful to morale. Members of your team are going to die. It is inevitable. Members of your team are going to break in the face of the enemy. They are going to show cowardice, and run, and fail to follow orders, and put all of you in jeopardy. These are irrefutable facts that are so uncomfortable to face, that most people prefer to pretend that they don’t exist. Battle reports get edited. Courage gets found in the most unlikely of places. The people that you consider friends as close as kin are going to fail when they come into contact with the enemy, and you are going to have to decide whether or not to risk your mission to save their lives. You are going to have to decide whether you are going to risk the lives of all your other friends, to save the one. And then you are going to have to decide whether you can live with the decision that you just made.”
—Treatise IX of Practical Combat Magic, Fal’Vaelith
The eidolons could sense when the spell ended, and they could sense that their prey was falling back into reach. Sylvas poured more and more weight into every part of his body as he fell, increasing his density until blinking against the whipping wind was an arduous task. More and more weight, enough to make his landing into a meteor strike. With so much weight, it was a strain to bring his arm across, to touch the gem on the back of his wrist and draw out the mana he needed, everything felt sluggish and slow as he fell, but he did it all the same. It had to be now. He didn’t know what the Plovers were capable of once they got into range and he had no intention of finding out like this.
A gravity mage like him with so limited a repertoire of spells could fall back into the mass of eidolons while casting Gravity Shear to displace the enemy and protect himself. He could touch down into the same mess that he’d left and have to fight hand-to-hand with a frantic frenzy of motion before being overrun.
He reached terminal velocity just before hitting the outstretched arms of the Gaunts, and he completed his spell as his super-dense body crushed right through them to hit the ground below.
It hurt like only falling from the sky could hurt, but the density and weight that Sylvas had layered on kept him in one piece, even if that one piece was in a lot of pain. What mattered more to him in that moment than whether he survived the fall was whether or not he had succeeded.
Static Shock washed out from him in every direction. Ironeye’s old area of effect spell, nowhere near as potent as the direct lightning strikes that he could call down now, but more importantly, far less mana intensive, so even the tiny amount of lightning affinity mana Sylvas had stockpiled could cast it. With a thunderclap it exploded out from the point of impact where Sylvas had struck down.
There was no nuance or control. Lightning was unleashed and it leapt out from Sylvas in every direction. Where it touched a gaunt, flesh blackened and crackled, then the lightning arched on to the next foe and the next. Their slick wet flesh was the perfect conductor for this kind of magic, and before Sylvas had even recovered from the shock of impact with the ground and pushed his way back up to his feet, the destruction that he’d wrought was done. In a perfect circle around him, every blackened Gaunt that had been standing now fell, twitching, to the ground.
Using his staff like an old man’s walking stick, Sylvas pushed himself back up to his feet as the extra weight trickled away. The Gaunts had no faces to speak of, just bare teeth and the hollow sockets that dripping blood sometimes obscured, but in that moment Sylvas wanted to believe that they looked wary, standing outside the blackened circle of corpses he’d just created. Every way that he looked, there were Eidolons staring back at him without eyes. Every moment that they hesitated was a reprieve from his death sentence. He had to make them hesitate longer.
Sylvas stumbled forward a step, then another, then control over his quaking legs seemed to come back to him and he ran. He was the one charging towards them now, the words to his next spell coming to him easily, as practiced as nursery rhyme. The broken off shard of his mind snapped back into place and he cast Gravity Shear. The ripple started just ahead of him, then spread out wider and wider in a great distorting umbrella, and when it hit the closest of the Gaunts they were dragged along its length and flung out behind him. Still he ran on, pouring mana into the shield and pressing further and further into the mass. He wasn’t doing enough harm to disable any of the eidolons like this, but he was keeping up his momentum, and if he kept on going long enough in any given direction, he’d break out of the pack. He’d have room to maneuver and work out his next move without a bloody skeleton leaping on his back.
Some Gaunts clung to the sand as if it might keep them in place, others leapt as though they might get over the top of the shear, but none of them escaped him. Beyond the edge of the shield, they lapped in again, those displaced but not by enough to be launched by the force of his progress, but so long as he kept on running and he kept up his shield, they could not touch him.
The presence of the closest Plover was announced with the same awful trilling as before, as sharp and cutting a noise as Sylvas had ever endured even in the company of a fiend who’s whole specialty was inflicting pain with sound. It loomed into sight from the periphery of his vision, far faster now that it was close than it had ever given a hint in might be out on the field below. He supposed that the fact it no longer seemed to have any compunctions about trampling its fellow eidolons might have contributed to that speed upgrade. All the trailing tentacles that had flowed behind it as it strolled idly amongst its monstrous kin were now arched forward like the stingers of scorpions and before Sylvas even had time to recognize what was happening a spell was unleashed.
Perhaps technically it was not a spell, just a spell-like effect that the Eidolons were inexplicably capable of generating, but in practice, it was a bolt of lightning arching together from all those disparate tendrils to crack straight in at him.
The gravity shear curved the lightning away as it approached, but even having it pass close by was enough to do horrific damage. Sparks chained off from the main tree of the bolt, branching out to lance into him, his side, his arm, his leg, all of them were ablaze with fresh pain. The blackened corpses underfoot were all too familiar now. He looked like them down that whole side, crisp and charcoal and tearing apart to bleed. The shear hadn’t been enough. It had curved the spell, but there wasn’t enough pull to make it completely miss. He’d been too confident in his defenses and now this was the price he had to pay for it. His breathing was ragged now. The gauntlet that he’d thought might be his salvation fused into his flesh by the lightning strike, the gems embedded and seared into his skin. In its branching and crackling, the lightning bolt had taken out his three orbitals too, as they darted in on the basis of his instinct, as though they might be able to stop a bolt of lightning.
A grunt of effort escaped his lips. Running on through exhaustion and the suffering he’d inflicted on himself was one thing, but the damage that had just been done meant that his chances of actually surviving the day had plummeted. If he couldn’t keep moving, he couldn’t outpace the Gaunts. If he couldn’t outpace the Gaunts, he was dead. Already the moment that he’d paused for the lightning to course through his body and ground itself in the red sand had been too long.
A spindly fingered hand reached out to him, and from it extended the mouths of these monstrous things, lamprey like on the end of each blood vessel it extended. He’d suffered through that touch once before, when he hadn’t known anything about these beasts, but he’d learned since then. A touch was not just a touch, it was a bite out of his soul, and he did not have any soul to spare. He knocked the grasping claw away with a swipe of his staff, but there were more where that came from, dozens of them in fact, looming in from all sides. He had to get moving again. He had to keep up the Shear and drive his way out of the pack.
With the next lightning strike, the Plover had adjusted its aim. It hit him dead center.
Air wouldn’t come to him when he tried to draw breath. When he tried to blink it away, his vision was filled with the black negative of the bolt that had just struck him. He couldn’t see what horrific state the center of his chest was in after being hit. He could smell roasting meat, and his stomach turned over as he realized that the animal being roasted was him. All of the strength seemed to have left his body. He tried to swing his staff at the approaching Gaunts, but it fell from his limp grasp. He tried to run, but his legs gave out beneath him.
Even as he fell, he could see the gore-slicked Gaunts rushing in towards him, grabbing hands and tendrils fully extended, pushing down into his skin, tapping into his own veins and lapping up his blood with a ferocious thirst. They caught him as he fell, a hasty hammock constructed of their woven blood-vessels, rooted in his flesh and holding him. They were draining the life out of him. Every drop of blood would be sucked out with each beat of his own heart feeding it right to the Gaunts.
Except his heart wasn’t beating.
He couldn’t breathe, and his heart wasn’t beating. The lightning bolt had stopped his heart. The Gaunts crowding in around him were trying to drain out his blood, but nothing was pumping it, they were just tapping into his arteries and drawing nothing. More and more of them crowded in, more and more of the writhing tapeworm nightmares wended their way into his skin, but they weren’t doing anything worse than making that initial puncture. They could only drain the living, not the dead.
Somewhere in the midst of all this his focus had gone and the spell that had been protecting him had fallen away, but now there was a solid shell of Gaunts squeezing in all around him anyway, no matter how many more came charging in, he was at capacity.
He had to restart his heart. With his mastery of the gravity inside his body, that wouldn’t be the difficult part. But he had to do it in the same moment that he knocked all of the Gaunts off him or they’d kill him all over again.
The fragments of his mind were still in orbit around the part of himself he thought of as himself but they grew harder to reach with each passing moment. The darkness was encroaching. Drowning everything. Pulling him down.
There, right at the furthest extent of his ever-shrinking senses, he found the spell that he needed. There was still one final breath of air in his lungs to speak the final word. All he had to do was open his eyes and cast.
All that he had to do was open his eyes and cast, but the strength to do it was fading fast. All that he had to do was shape the mana and speak the words as the life drained out of him. All he had to do was the impossible.
