Chapter 11
“A man can be healed within hours of his injury. The cruelty of fate reversed, if it is reached in time. But beyond that we discover the world of prosthetics, amputations and transplantation.”
—Aspirational Healing, Dr. Coodler
The flight spell seized him, launched him up and out of the crowd. Straight up as fast as it could carry him. The probing tendrils of the Gaunts had made a mess of his skin, puncture holes oozed blood all over him, but as he soared into the light of day above their shadows he could see that they were gone. It was only him still rising. He had not brought any passengers.
With a twist of gravity in his chest, up to down, his heart beat once more. It did not pick up the rhythm, so he did it again, again. Over and over, he forced his heart to beat, and with each beat more life returned to him until he could feel it starting to move for itself. Just in time for him to bleed out.
He was a colander leaking blood out of a hundred tiny punctures. Every artery in his body was squirting out his lifeblood with each new beat of his heart. He tried to bring his arm around, to touch the gem storing life aspect mana on his gauntlet but he found no strength in it. He didn’t need to touch the gem, the gem was inside him, and any mana inside him was his to command. He drew the foreign mana into his hand and it ached with every inch it travelled, but there were more pressing matters than him destroying his own mana channels to cast a spell he wasn’t meant to be able to touch because of his aspect. He traced the shimmering green mana in the air as he fell back to earth, his flight spell abandoned once he had enough height. It trailed from his fingertip like a smear across the sky, but through it all, and the half spluttering mumbles of the words he’d heard Vaelith speak, he managed to squeeze out a healing spell that stoppered his bleeding for now.
With all his current life-threatening injuries dealt with, he turned his attention to the ones that were incoming. He was plunging back down towards the battlefield. His whole right arm was now essentially dead after the lightning burn and using the wrong aspect of mana. He had lost his staff amidst the chaos of pressing bodies, his orbitals had been taken out by some sort of feedback from the second lightning strike and his gauntlet was tatters and ash. His heart was beating and he could breathe, but every one of those breaths was an aching gasping thing. His chest was blackened and burnt, and spreading out from where he’d been struck, like the microfractures he’d seen so often in his bones were odd zig-zags where the lightning had passed through his flesh.
If he had an orbital, he might have been able to catch himself before he landed, to break out past the enemy lines and start doing something to slow them. But they were gone, and having brought himself back from the dead, Sylvas found that his mana reserves were guttering out too. With the destruction of his left hand and the structures he’d woven into the gauntlet, his one-sided mana cycling had come to a halt.
All that he’d have left was his body. It hadn’t been much to begin with. Even before he ruined it.
Casting one last brief instance of Inversion to break his fall and integrate one of the last floating fragments of his mind, Sylvas landed right where he’d left, amidst the horde.
The first Gaunt to charge him caught a foot to the midsection empowered with enough shifted weight to punch the meat off its spine and snap it in half. The next lunged with its tentacles extended, only for Sylvas to grab a handful of them and use Chul’s favorite hip check and some shifting weight, to launch the thing across the battlefield. If he’d aimed a little better, he might have hit a Plover. The next leapt onto his back, but he dropped into a roll that would have launched it off, if he hadn’t spiked his own gravity, pinning it to him, and making sure it went beneath him as he pumped up his weight to somewhere in the vicinity of a mountains’. One by one, he took them down with the skills that he had been learning sparring with Chul and his newfound mastery of his Tidal Body. But they were not content to wait in line to fight him one by one, and he couldn’t really blame them. He was going to pass out from exhaustion long before he got through them all at this rate. Despite the absurdity of it, Sylvas had a smile on his face. Here he was, surrounded and doomed and he couldn’t stop laughing.
He hammered his forehead through the skull of a Gaunt and stepped right over its falling corpse to get to the next. Somewhere in the midst of the brawl he’d started bleeding again from a dozen different places, and whole new puncture wounds that he hadn’t seen to heal. It didn’t matter. He was dead all the same.
Everything he’d achieved, everything he’d been through, and he was going to die in the dust, punching and brawling with Eidolons as if he didn’t have a brain in his head or the power of a mage within him.
It was simple arithmetic. There were too many of them, and only one of him. If he’d done as Vaelith said and focused on growing his mana-base by adding more circles, then perhaps things would have gone differently, but he genuinely didn’t think that he could have held his own if he had rushed ahead like that. So much of what had carried him today was a result of his own work since the Cull.
The Plover that had struck him down had come waddling closer through the fighting, trying to get another clean shot at him so that it could finish him off. Lightning crackled within the bulb of its head and along the length of its tendrils where they extended out from beside its legs, it was fully charged and ready the moment that there wasn’t a Gaunt between them.
He ran a hand down what remained of the tattered front of his uniform to remove some of the blood that might have been his or one of the Gaunts, but it struck him then that the Crest should have kicked in to save his life after he was struck by lightning. There was no reason that it wouldn’t, except that somewhere in the heat of the battle it had gone missing. Plucked from his uniform while he slept or lost in the chaos of the fighting. Right now, which one was true didn’t matter. The Crest didn’t matter. If he’d had the crest and it had put him into whatever cocoon of protection spells the Ardent favored, it would simply have been a feast for the Eidolons to pick apart later.
Taking a step back he flung himself over the crowd. Piercing tendrils he hadn’t even noticed popped out of his flesh as he soared over the massed Gaunts, and before the Plover could discharge, he was beneath it, under the spindly legs. Jamming a finger into the embedded wound on his right hand, he touched one of the crystals and drew out the mana he needed. It seared his fingertips as he shaped Hammerheart’s spell, and all the blood sizzled away until he got a hold of the chitinous leg and the flames spread up from where he was holding tight.
There was a moment’s reprieve as the Plover caught alight, the Gaunts had stayed clear of the area beneath it to avoid being trod on, and now as the flames rushed up to consume it and it flailed, flames went licking off in every direction, giving them pause.
The only way he made it out alive was with more mana. Not the tiny specks of the wrong affinity that he had stowed away in his wounds, or the trickle still flowing into him between casts. Hiding beneath the flaming Plover as it died a slow and gruesome death by immolation, he abandoned everything except for that singular goal. Closing his eyes to the world outside, he reached for the black hole at the center of his being and he poured more weight into it. More and more. Amplifying its already terrible draw, sucking in all of the gravity affinity mana he could reach. It didn’t matter that it was searing through his channels and ripping him to pieces or that it was threatening to destabilize his circles because he was pulling in so much. He had one way out of this, one spell still held in an orbiting fragment of his mind, and only the mana to fuel it could save him now.
As the Plover toppled down to crush some of its allies, Sylvas was exposed once more, and the rushing tide of Gaunts fell upon him like they were starved. Grasping claws tore at him, tendrils wormed their way under his skin to scrape over his already aching bones, the pain would have been enough to distract anyone from any task, but with his Paradigm of Clearmind, he could simply elect not to feel anything at all. All of his concentration was on drawing the power he needed, no matter the destruction it wrought.
They carried him down to the ground under the weight of their bodies, pushing and jostling to get in at him. If they were left to their own devices there would be nothing of him left. Even now he could feel life slipping away. His injuries, the ones they’d been causing throughout the fight, the ones he’d inflicted on himself in his desperate draw of mana, and the latest horrific wounds being dealt to him now, were lethal. There was no question that he would die with so little blood left in his body. But just as darkness threatened to consume him entirely, he felt the tiny dribble of mana left at the bottom of his core flare to life.
Enough for only a single spell.
Without his gravity sense, it would have been impossible to plot his journey. But there were some places so familiar to him now on this world that he could travel there almost without having to think about where they were. Snapping the last fragment of his mind back into its natural place and biting through the red tendrils trying to force their way down his throat, he cast.
Some parts of the Gaunts came with him when he teleported away, but they were sucked away by the vacuum of null-space. All the little stoppers inside of his wounds plucked out, all of his blood bursting out to freeze in the nothingness between universes.
He smashed back into reality in the infirmary.
