Chapter 18

“Accidents happen. That is the nature of the universe. Sometimes these accidents are happy, sometimes they are not. Yet pretending that those who have a series of accidents in their favor are imbued with some supernatural force called luck is the height of ignorance.”

—Luck: The Lie, Albrecht Magnus

Over the course of the morning, several more combatants that they knew were called up. Malachai wiped the floor with Orson in one of the early matches. Not even bothering to conjure up any undead to join in the fighting once he’d worked out the limitations of the other man’s magic. It was brutal to watch, but also something of a relief. Whoever Malachai ran up against was liable to be steamrolled, so at least this way Sylvas didn’t have to see one of his close friends being beaten bloody. Veltrian obliterated an unfortunate earth mage, shattering all of his stone constructs apart with a scream. Even the mind-mage that they’d encountered in space got a turn in the arena, reducing his opponent to tears without ever touching her with a single visible spell.

Before he knew it, Sylvas’ time to fight was coming. Rather than pushing his way along the row of seated Ardent, he hopped into the one in front and had a clear run to the tunnel back down into the walls of the arena. From there, he had to rely on the overlayed guidance of the eye-slate to guide him through the myriad passageways to his own little waiting room. It was a blank cell with a bed already showing signs of bloodstains from when previous contenders had returned here after their matches. 

He decided not to sit on it. Instead, closing his eyes and letting his newly constructed mana cycling begin to flow through him. The infusion portion of his embodiment was still only partially completed, his new paradigm was still far enough in the early stages of creation that it felt wrong to attribute any meaningful progress to it. Still, it was slowly coming together, he just needed to figure out a small problem he was having before he could get any further.

If only I could ask the medic a handful of questions, he thought despite knowing full well that just explaining what he was trying to do would earn him a tongue lashing. Maybe if I end up truly stuck.

The equipment that he’d been working on was, as yet, incomplete thanks to the destruction of his gauntlet, and he’d learned no new magic between his last training exercise and this one. If anything, he should have been absolutely riddled with anxiety over what was to come, but instead he could barely contain his excitement. On a logical level, he knew that fighting would almost inevitably lead to his injury or death, but emotions rarely paid much heed to logic. That and the sad truth of the matter was that he loved this. He loved magic, he loved fighting others using magic, it was the only thing in his life that really brought him joy. The moment of elation when his plans snapped into place and victory became assured was like a drug, and since the first day on campus, he’d been chasing that high.

Of course accompanying that thought was Vaelith’s, and by extension his other Instructor’s, concern that he over relied on complicated, last ditch plans and the inevitable consequences that would follow them.

When the horn sounded and he walked out into the arena, he didn’t see the crowd that he’d been worrying about, nor did he hear cheers or jeers from those who had attended. His focus was solely on the person coming out of their own ripple in the stone. His orbitals drifted out into formation around him, his staff was already gripped in his hands, and he had started speaking spells into his fractal selves the moment he stepped out into the light.

It would have been kinder for the Ardent to pair him with a contender that he didn’t even know. Someone from the Greyhall, or someone from one of the factions in the Whitehall that he’d never encountered, but instead he stood across the arena from Ironeyes. He would have been surprised to see the dwarf out here again if he himself didn’t already have a second match booked for a few hours’ time.

Letting his staff hover beside him, Sylvas crossed his arms and bowed before they’d closed even a fraction of the distance towards each other. Ironeyes paused, then bowed in return. Normally they would have made their way to a more moderate range so that neither of them had any great advantage, but they both did best at a distance, and it seemed silly to close the distance, only to try and put it back again after.

It would also make it easier for Sylvas to hurt his friend, if he didn’t have to be close enough to hear his voice, or to make out the expression on his face. 

Like last time, Ironeyes launched a bolt of lightning directly at his target, and like last time it encountered a shield, but while all that Belle could do was bounce his attack off, Sylvas’ Gravity Shear could redirect it. It flew off to the side to strike a wall, and Sylvas let it drop and cast Inversion before the dwarf could launch another.

He didn’t try to launch Ironeyes up into the air, as that would have just given him a height advantage to rain lightning down on him, instead twisting the gravity in the area around the dwarf sideways, so that the wall behind him, where he’d entered the arena, was now down. Ironeyes skidded backwards, trying to maintain some sort of friction with his boots, but it took only a moment for him to lose his footing and go tumbling. The area of the spell’s effect didn’t stretch all the way back to the wall, so he landed in a roll just a few feet back, but it had bought Sylvas the time to bring his staff around and take aim.

Gravity Spike lanced out, missing Ironeyes as the dwarf turned himself into a bolt of lightning and leapt away. Even as lightning, he couldn’t escape its area of effect entirely, and the lightning bolt that had been shooting off to one side was grounded far sooner than he’d probably intended, and barely out of the direct line of fire from Sylvas next spike.

That one hauled the dwarf off his feet, sending him tumbling towards its epicenter. The area of effect for each spike was smaller when Sylvas cast it through the staff, but it became multidirectional instead of just a solid pull straight down and he was relying on that to make his misses effective, to keep Ironeyes off balance and unable to cast.

It had been working well until now, but a lightning bolt came crashing down from the heavens to strike him just an instant after the last Spike was cast. Ironeyes was nothing if not resilient, holding onto his spells even as he was flung about like a ragdoll.

Sylvas’ own resilience was also tested. There was no getting out of the way of the bolt in time, no clever trick to survive it, just the sudden taste of iron and ozone on his tongue and a pillar of white pain all around him. Anyone else would have fallen, overwhelmed by the overload of the lightning in their nerves, but Sylvas could close himself off to all that. His body was damaged, as anything would be if struck by lightning, but he did not falter. 

He stepped forward out of the lightning and cast another gravity spike, only to find his shot fouled by his staff. Hit perfectly, it had been melted and twisted by the lightning strike, and the delicate lines of enchantment inside its length had warped. It flew right past Ironeyes to kick up a roiling sphere of dust off to one side but doing little else.

Still, he definitely had the element of surprise on his side. Ironeyes had probably never seen someone shrug off that lightning spell before, and now he looked like he was reassessing his options. He fired off another bolt of lightning in Sylvas direction, almost casually, just to see what would happen. Sylvas didn’t dare risk tanking another hit after the damage the last one had done, so he spun one of his orbitals in to intercept it. That was when he noticed something odd. Instead of the lightning bolt hitting the orbital and killing it, it flowed around it, redirecting off it, as though he’d cast a Gravity Shear. 

He was manipulating the gravity of his own mana stored inside the orbitals, and in manipulating it, he was creating a tiny area where gravity’s effects were different. It wasn’t enough to shift most solid objects, but lightning wasn’t a solid object, it was made up of tiny particles, and the slightest change in gravity was enough to twist them off course.

When the next bolt of lightning came, Sylvas put a rapid calculation into action, positioning his orbitals in a curved chain in the air that twisted the lightning away from him, and back in Ironeyes direction. It went nowhere near to the dwarf, but the fact that Sylvas could return fire without even casting managed to clearly startle him. 

Another lightning bolt came all the same, since Ironeyes was still trying to hide whatever other tricks he had up his sleeve. This time, Sylvas didn’t try to intercept it with an orbital, instead choosing to dump out all of his own weight so he had the same gravity as one of his orbitals. Once more, the lightning curved, albeit far closer to his skin than was comfortable. Static charges crawled over him, but it was still better than being hit.

Ironeyes couldn’t have worked out what Sylvas was doing to avoid harm. There was no real way to understand it from an outside view. Yet that didn’t stop him from continuing his attacks. There was no real way for any of these lightning bolts to make direct contact anymore. Sylvas imagined that if he’d been blessed with the magnetic affinity, it would have been even easier to manipulate the lightning, but the two were similar enough. The air was thick with ozone, and the bolts of lightning crackled around him in a blinding flurry, but neither he or his orbitals were being touched. Everything was curving around them. Pulling his orbitals into a circle around him and setting them spinning, he adjusted the gravity inside himself and around them through the next few bolts being flung his way, until each new shot curved around him and into the circle of orbitals where it chased its own tail, slowly depleting power until the whole circuit was revitalized by another blast of lightning.

Slowly, painstakingly, he began walking across the arena. Ironeyes pummeled him with spells, bolt after bolt hammering into him, looking for some hole in this invisible defense, but finding nothing at all. At about halfway across the field he hefted his staff once more. It was no more use for directing spells at a distance, the focal point had been contorted inwards. But that didn’t leave him without a use for it. Levelling it at Ironeyes and taking careful aim, he waited for the next lightning bolt to hit, then he twisted the gravity around. All the electricity that had been dispersed amongst the orbitals closed in on a single one, trapped in a tight orbit by the gravity that Sylvas himself had just grossly inflated.

The lightning ball swept out of position in the perfect circle of orbitals, and came to a halt in front of Sylvas staff. With a pulse, and another fractal of himself collapsing back into his mind, Sylvas cast Gravity Spike again. Not all the way across where Ironeyes stood, but right there, where the focal point of the staff had been warped to. Tight as he could make it.

The sphere of the orbital, bathed in crackling electric light, leapt away from him and across the field. Ironeyes tried to leap aside, using his lightning jump, but that just made him vulnerable to Sylvas next move.

Instead of chasing the dwarf down and trying to break through his no doubt formidable defenses, Sylvas closed his eyes and teleported. The sudden burst of gravity where he vanished into null space was matched by an equal spike at the other side where he emerged. It was enough to yank the crackling lightning that Ironeyes had become entirely off his intended course, and into reach. Even as he was reforming, Sylvas staff was singing through the air, meeting the back of the dwarf’s head with a dull, wet crack.

Ironeyes collapsed into the safe cocoon of the Crest’s protection, and without a word spoken between them, it was somehow over. Sylvas staggered a step after the almighty swing that he’d just taken, and then all of the pain of walking through a lightning bolt caught up to him. He was led off by the medics in much the same way as his classmate.

It would have been nice to savor the cheers of the arena, to check that Ironeyes wasn’t going to hold a grudge, to do anything at all other than being carted off for medical care yet again, but it seemed that this was just his lot in life. Just as the cliff back on campus was riddled with subterranean tunnels, so too was the area beneath the arena. Not the arena floor itself, which seemed to have been treated by the builders as sacrosanct, but out under the structure there was an equally large underground area carved out of the stone. Passages and rooms that he was hustled through, past the previous losers of the day into a cell of his very own.

Until now he’d just been going along with whatever was happening, trusting in the staff, but finally he became aware that his medic today wasn’t the usual one from Blackhall, but a young dwarf man who had a frankly heretical lack of beard but a bristling moustache that did much of the same work obscuring his face. He was casting diagnostic spells at Sylvas with a look of mounting confusion on his face. Always an expression that it was a delight to see on your doctor. Eventually, after pushing Sylvas onto a stone bench to sit and fumbling through a few more attempts at diagnostics, he threw his hands up in the air. “I don’t understand how you’re still standing.”

“I feel that way most days.” Sylvas managed to quip back.

“Your body is riddled with metal, crystal, things that shouldn’t be inside you, but those bits, they seem to be…covering your bones and muscles? Gah! And now I’m seein even your nerv—” 

Sylvas stopped him in case there were scrying spells in the room attempting to spy his abilities. “It’s all from my new embodiment. I’ve been injuring myself too much and too easily with the magic I use. The embodiment is going to help fix that.”

“Fix? With all the metal you’ve in your important bits that the lightning strike came a hair from cooking your heart. I don’t know what in the darkest pits you’re tryin to do with this mess, but the metals you have on your bones… well they weren’t quite vaporized, but they certainly melted. From the slag fragments I’m seeing…you should be in absolute agony.”

Sylvas shrugged at that assessment. “I can block pain.”

“No, that ain’t it,” the dwarf grunted back as he continued his assessment, spells flashing by his face one after the other. Eventually realization crossed his face. “Ah, they acted like fuses.”

“Pardon?”

“Bits in a circuit, you make with a metal that’ll melt if too much is trying to pass through it, to protect the rest of the—” He paused to scribble out some notes on his slate. “The metal melting away saved everything beneath it from the lightning. That’s why the bolt didn’t kill you.”

“Which is what the embodiment is supposed to do.” Sylvas started to reply before adding. “When it’s finished. This…well…”

“Lucky beats tough most days.” The dwarf sighed as the last of the spells faded away. “Tough just means you’ve been hit too much.”

Sylvas couldn’t disagree with that. “I have another match in a few hours, is there going to be a problem in…getting me moving again?”

The dwarf shrugged. “If you can repair whatever you’ve got going on with that embodiment, I can treat everything else around it. Should have you back on your feet shortly. Do recommend finishing off whatever you’re plannin though, universe not likely to give you two freebies like that.”

“Certainly not to me.” Sylvas agreed, wasting no time in turning his attention inwards as the two of them began their work. 

Melted or not, the metal was fortunately still in his system, he’d just have to use the embodiment spell to grab hold of it and consciously guide it back to the spots where he’d been injured. It was a different sort of work from the spell’s initial melding into his body, but not so different that he couldn’t do it. Knowing the basics behind the healing spell Vaelith used was a big help too. Letting him stitch the odd Aion word of healing into his efforts as they worked.

Unfortunately while said work was necessary, especially if he wanted to move and exist without pain, he couldn’t help but chafe at the extra time it took. While he was down here, he was missing all the matches up above and all of the vital intelligence that it could have imparted on him. The delay also meant that the repairs he needed to make to his staff would have to wait until after his next match too, which robbed him of much of his ability to directly attack. If he had Kaya’s affinity for metal, it would have been as simple as touching the staff, letting his will flow into it as his mana did, and reshaping it to his desire. But while the metal inside him was obedient and acting like just another part of his body, the staff was not. 

But what if I changed that? An unexpected idea popped into his head. He drew himself back to the surface to see that the dwarf had finished his work and was starting to pack up. “Before you go, I need… some, uh, additional materials to finish what I’m doing.”

“You mean metal?”

Sylvas couldn’t help but look at the ceiling and room again, as if he could somehow spot scrying spells with his own eye. “Some specific metals, among other things, yes.”

The dwarf quickly understood his concern and handed him a slate. “Note it down on here and I’ll send out the request for you. Though I’ve got to get sort my next patient before I can bring ye anythin back.”

Sylvas nodded and filled out the request as quickly as he could, then bid the dwarf farewell as he then left. Then once he was gone, Sylvas immediately went for the remains of his staff. It had been the first thing he’d ever made. The first time he’d discovered that he loved enchantment and crafting in general. He had an affection for it that he doubted even he knew the full depth of. But, even so, he’d long since resolved he would do whatever it took in order to be victorious.

With a shift in gravity, his hands became denser, and he snapped the staff’s metalwork in two, prompting liquid metal from the core of the staff to start pouring free from it out almost immediately. It was an act that would have left a terrible mess had Sylvas not then lifted the entire thing up to his mouth and started to gulp the silvery liquid down. It tasted as bad as he might have expected, at least until he turned off his sense of taste. Thought, touch and sight were more than enough for now and even those were probably going to be filtered down more as he proceeded. 

The heavy metal slowed his thoughts to a crawl as it filtered out into him, but cycling his mana and pushing it to where it needed to be began easing his own stupefaction much quicker than he would have guessed. Drop by drop it vanished into his system, integrated into part of the larger whole. Just like Kaya was part machine and all the stronger for it, so too would Sylvas be by the time all was said and done, the limits of biology reinforced and empowered by metal, crystal, and magic. Not much unlike the objects of power mages everywhere crafted.

Except Sylvas was doing it to his body, rather than a simple trinket.

On the curling petals of his broken staff, inscriptions had been embossed into the metal, lines of Aion script that guided and focused the magic passing through it. These were the very same words and sigils that he intended to copy as he started to cast a new spell, one that according to the schema of embodiment that he was following was only supposed to be used after the first had run its course and his body had everything it needed.

Which it should, so long as I keep the spell’s focus narrow, Sylvas assured himself as the magic took hold and immediately began writing out the staff’s sigils one by one with the silver metal he consumed onto the bones of his fingers. The very bones had been broken time and time again, reduced to powder then healed back to a solid state. Falling deeper into Clearmind, Sylvas ignored the countless microfractures that forcing the metal into the bone was producing, the messages that his still changing nervous system was trying to scream at him about the damage that was being done. Now that he had started the process, he could not stop, not if he wanted to keep his arms.

Moving downwards, to the bones of his arms went more of the script, previously hidden inside the long shaft of the staff, a half on each arm, just as a half had been graven into each length from the grip in the center. From the day that he had discovered the craft, Sylvas wanted to be an enchanter, quietly honing his craft. He wanted to be a researcher, exploring all the possibilities of magic. He wanted to be a warrior, to turn all of his power against his enemies.

But through all his training so far, his own interests and his mentors intentions tried with all their might to drag him in opposing directions. They had told him that he could only be one thing, and that he had to choose what it would be now and live with that decision for the rest of his life. He had never believed it. They had believed that all the different directions that he was being drawn towards would make him weaker for the division in his focus. 

They never realized that in Sylvas’ mind all those different paths led him to the same place. 

He wasn’t trying to be three different things at once, he was fusing all three of the things he wanted into a single thing. He was more than just the sum of his parts. He was more than a staff, some orbitals, an affinity, and a fractured mind. He was exactly what they wanted him to be. An unstoppable force. An immovable object. A weapon beyond measure.

And couldn’t wait to show them that.