Chapter 20
“There is more that is not known about null-space than any other dimension that has ever been encountered throughout sapient history. It is as though its designation was also meant to describe all that we could learn about it. It is a place devoid all forces and natural laws. A place devoid of even the ever present thrum of mana. A dead-zone to all senses and sciences.”
—Null Point: An exploration of the unknowable, Belhild Jharglen
A murmur ran through the crowd in that instant. Words like ‘vaporized’ were whispered into the silence. Then he sprang back out of null-space behind her. He had no staff to deliver a killing blow, but he had his hands, and enough weight dumped into them to make his punch heavy enough to shatter steel.
Her physical enhancement saved her. She moved faster than the eye could follow, ducking under his punch and returning a blow of her own to his ribs. He grunted and stumbled away, and she started casting once more. He could recognize the spell-forms now. The same lethal beam as before, cast point-blank. She didn’t relent, even as she was casting. Her hands were busy shaping mana, but her feet lashed out. He caught one on his forearm before her boot could meet his temple, but she seemed to have been expecting that, and used the rebounding momentum to bring her other foot up in an equally graceful kick to his jaw that left her air bound for just one moment.
He managed to bring one of his still-heavy hands down on that leg just after it connected. Her blow jaw might have cracked his jaw, but there was also an answering crunch from her knee. One that resulted in a less than graceful landing a moment later. Staggering back from each other, Sylvas realized with grimace that even with his hit, not only had her casting not been interrupted, but she’d managed to deliver a inconvenient injury to him. She had broken his jaw. Granted he wouldn’t die from a such a thing, he couldn’t even feel it through his sensory filters, but he couldn’t speak, couldn’t shape words.
And if he couldn’t do either of those two things, then he couldn’t cast spells either.
Damn it, I’m still not ready for that yet, Sylvas said to himself with resignation, noting that closing the distance hadn’t worked out in his favor yet again. It was the same issue he’d always had with Vaelith, and even Hammerheart, choosing to fight in close when in reality his own spells worked better from a distance. But that confirmation was the whole reason why he had risked trying in the first place.
After all, he couldn’t shore up his weaknesses without actively working upon them.
He lurched forward, ducking a kick. The woman spun, bringing her fist around for a backhand blow that would knock him out but he caught the arm stopping it cold, imbuing his own arms with the weight and density to withstand the blow. With a practiced movement that would have made Chul proud, he then grabbed hold of his opponent’s limb, twisted, pushed, and put her into an arm-bar.
Her spell that had felt so long in the casting in the seconds that they’d been brawling, was unleashed. It burst out of the open palm of the arm he had pinned against him, melting clean through the sand he had it pointed at and tearing up a strip across the whole arena as she tried to jerk herself free.
She was stronger than him, outside of his ability to manipulate his weight, and she had a decent amount of close-combat training, certainly enough to put his to shame. But with the element of surprise on his side, and all incredible weight that he could bring to bear at will, he drove her down to her knees as the spell ended. He was burned, and badly, from his proximity to the spell. The whole left side of his uniform was scorched away, and the flesh beneath was a rosy red that promised blistering in the near future. He ignored it. There was more important work to be done.
The woman twisted, purposefully choosing to give up her footing in order to shift his weight and bring him down in a heap with her, the fire spell once again back on her lips again. This close she wouldn’t have to land a hit with it to send him to the medical ward. As long as one hand or the other wasn’t under his control, he was as good as cooked. Showcasing her skill during the fall, she had somehow managed to turn the tables on Sylvas and ended up half on top of him. An inconvenient positioning that prevented him from simply crushing her under his weight, his only option was to let her arm go free and accept the punch to his back as he rolled out of her attention to grab him back. The two of them broke away and regrouped, Sylvas discovering that the woman bore smirk on her face as she gazed back at him, still continuing with her spell.
It was in that escape that Sylvas realized it was time to take things more seriously, and turned his attention towards his body. All of his work between matches had already started to pay off in the way that it toughened and strengthened him, allowing him to fight far beyond his earlier ability. Now it was time to call upon one of the other enhancements that he’d been working on, his ability to heal and recover from injury.
One that only needed a touch of mana to activate and his broken jaw all but yanked itself back into place.
There, now I can cast again. Sylvas thought as he matched the smile that he saw on the woman, the simple act enough to instantly put her on guard.
So much so that when he charged her, casting as he moved, she immediately played for space. It made sense, her spell was almost ready, and the spell that Sylvas was chanting was a shorter, simpler spell. One that he doubted most people would even have considered a spell at all once they were in their fifth circle. Some little tool of utility that lay forgotten.
She stopped running, and levelled both her hands at him, crying out the final words of her burning spell in triumph. It leapt out, burning blinding bright for just an instant before it got to its maximum temperature and became invisible once more. Sylvas blotted it out. Just a few feet in front of her, he opened Cold Storage. The opening flared out, black and empty and the endless heat poured in. He could feel the pressure of it as it went into the nothingness. Heat and the perfect neutral temperature of the vacuum colliding. There was nothing physical to her spell for him to deflect, which meant there was no weight keeping him from storing all of it inside his personal demi-plane. No mass to disrupt the portal or weigh on his ability to retain it.
The spell stuttered out and he let Cold Storage close.
Both of them were breathing heavily, but at last, her smile was gone. He could neutralize her most lethal weapon. It was his turn to smile. “If you want to concede—”
“Shut it, Vail!” The woman interrupted, starting a cast as she charged him. It probably wasn’t true that every mage with a fire affinity had a temper to match the heat of their magic, but Sylvas was yet to encounter a coolheaded one. Perhaps some stereotypes did have a root in reality. She wove her spell quickly while running. Not the lethal spell she had been trying to sear him with all through the fight, but a lesser spell of flame that first shrouded her fists in fire, then narrowed once more from blazing red flames lapping up her arms into jagged points of burning blue just ahead of her clenched fists.
If one of those blades hit me, I’ll do more than just cut me. Sylvas took another step back as she made her first swing, launching herself in motion, following up with another and another. Not clean punches, but long sweeping swipes, the same that she’d been making with her beam. Hmm, she’s replying on the heat to do the damage.
Each time that Sylvas managed to dodge back out of reach of a hit, he felt that same heat radiate over him, leaving scorched line after scorched line across what was left of his uniform until it was more black than white. His training in wrestling was useless if he couldn’t close the distance and get a hold on her, and the streaking flames made that impossible. He started casting with each ragged breath, shaping his mana with one hand as he tried and failed to catch a roundhouse kick with the other.
She was just too fast. To the point where it seemed unnatural, the way her limbs blurred into motion while her body seemed to move the same as his. It was only when he felt the metallic clunk during that last kick that he realized the bracelets she was wearing were matched with anklets, and they were responsible for her impossible speed. If he could get a grip on one of them and break it, he could throw her entirely off balance. But then again, getting a grip on anything when she moved so fast was beyond his abilities.
Even as he went on casting, he let mana flow into the orbitals still stowed away in his bag. They came alive as he staggered back from a solid kick to the chest, but he didn’t let them rise out and start circling him. Instead he finished his spell and let them slip off into Cold Storage. As the tiny hole through into that dimension closed, he lost touch with them. They would just be drifting there, inert, until the way was opened again.
A rapid spinning kick took his legs out from under him. Blurring so fast he didn’t see it coming. He was casting again, but the impact of his back on the sand interrupted him for just long enough for her to spring on top of him, bringing both blades down in a lethal arc towards his head.
With a strength born of desperation, Sylvas flung himself forward, inside her guard. His arms were still pinned beneath her knees, but there was just enough slack for him to dump a half ton of weight into his head and ram it into her chest. Needless to say, this would not have appeared in any of the Ardent’s combat training models, but it worked, it knocked her onto her back and gave him a chance to free himself. He half scuttled away until he could find his feet again, while she simply flipped back upright as if it were an entirely natural thing for a person to be able to do.
She barely took a step towards him before he finally managed to complete one of his shortest spells. The way opened, he felt the connection, and he pulled.
The opening to Cold Storage was not in his bag this time, it was behind his opponent, and as he regained control of his orbitals he hauled them through to pepper her back with blows. She was as resilient as she was fast, some other embodiment no doubt, but there were some things that pure toughness couldn’t get her through, and the repeated impacts of metal spheres on her back drove the wind out of her lungs and robbed her of the chance to keep her spell going. The flames on her hands died.
There was a moment of indecision. Reignite the flames and close the distance, or open up some space and return to taking potshots with her beam attack. That moment was all that Sylvas needed to rob her of that choice. He turned tail and ran.
The textbook told them; when an opponent shows a preference for one choice, take that choice away from them. He’d just shown that he wanted to fight at a distance, so she took off running after him automatically. It was funny, Sylvas hadn’t really thought of the ways that he could use their completely uniform training against the other students before now. He probably should have. He tried to run, so she tried to chase him, and his orbitals swept around in an arc at shin height to snatch her feet out from under her.
She went down hard, leading with the bad knee that he’d already hit. She probably couldn’t filter out pain the way Sylvas could, explaining the extra fraction of a second that impact bought him. He cast as he ran, mana supplies dipping at last beneath the halfway point despite its regeneration.
Up on all fours, she launched herself after him, scrambling across the sand like some wild animal before she could find her footing, but by then it was too late. Sylvas had recalled the fragment of his psyche that he’d broken off earlier and completed the teleportation spell it had stored. With a dull pop of air suddenly filling the space he’d occupied, he was gone.
At the opposite end of the arena, he landed with a skid and turned to face her again. She was already casting the beam attack, and at this distance, she could sweep it across a wide enough angle that she’d be certain to hit him. Even with Cold Storage opened up between them, the odds were looking poor for his survival. He was covered in burns, skin flaking off and taking blackened flesh with it. He might have been able to ignore that sort of damage in the short term, but it was taking its toll on him. The crest would kick in sooner rather than later to end the fight if it seemed like he had sustained enough damage for it to be life threatening.
To live, he’d need to avoid the whole thing. To do that, he needed to make sure he was somewhere the beam couldn’t reach. From the moment that he arrived, he’d been casting, and as she fired off her spell, he did the same.
The hole into null-space tore open, ripping him out of reality, and he hung there in the dark for one breathless moment, letting his gravity sense guide him to the point that he wanted to go. Then, with a push of gravity mana and will, he skipped over the part of the spell that closed the aperture behind him and opened the one ahead of him all the same.
During the act of teleportation, while in null space, there was no gravity. Movement there was reliant on momentum being carried over from the real world. The force of being flung into null space would move him forward, and then when the old aperture closed and the new one opened, the gravity exerted through that exit would pull him clear. However without closing the entrance, with both of the two apertures open, he hung dead in space, the gravity of both openings exerting an equal pull on him. Until one closed, he was trapped outside of reality. In a place without warmth, air, or any of the other things vital to sustaining life. Normally this journey took but a moment, and a moment could be easily survived, but today he lingered long past that moment. With a grunt of effort, he closed his hand around the orbital that he’d carried through with him, and willed it to move.
Yet he did not move towards the aperture that would take him back into the real world. He moved sideways into the void. And just in time too.
The two openings of the teleportation spell were bridged, and in the absolute darkness of null-space the invisible bar of heat that was his opponent’s primary attack was a white bar of light. It cut off, at almost the very moment that the two holes in reality were joined. With the way clear, Sylvas flung himself forward with all haste. Using the last tiny breath held in his lungs to speak the section of spell that he’d skipped, closing the old entrance to null space, and leaving only the one behind to drag him back out.
He hit the sand gasping for air, mana reserves drained to the last drop from the effort of keeping his teleportation spell open in the way that he had in a place with no ambient mana. All the strength seemed to have left his body as he struggled to get his legs under him, still gasping and shuddering from the awful cold of the empty space between dimensions. Turning around to look for his opponent was basically an afterthought. If the gambit had worked, he’d won. If it hadn’t she had all the time in the world to blast him as he tried to recover.
She was lying in two halves. Split at about waist height. Though which half was which would have been hard to discern, since they both looked like splayed lumps of charcoal. That was what would have happened to him if her spell had connected. Even with the native fire resistance that her affinity granted her, she’d been burnt away to nothing when he redirected her beam through null space to hit her. It might have left nothing of him at all.
Despite the awful damage she’d done to herself, both parts of her had been enveloped in protective energy from her crest, which had been pinned high enough up on her chest that the beam had missed it entirely.
He recalled his orbitals back to his bag. One had caught the edge of her last attack, and would need some serious repairs, but he intended on working on them all anyway. He glanced around for the medics, only to find that they were already clustered around his opponent and frantically at work. He had expected cheers from the crowd, or at least from his own section, but even the Blackhall had fallen silent. With the exception of Bael, they probably didn’t realize what he’d just done.
When it became clear that he wasn’t about to be hauled off for more medical treatment despite his burns and bruises, Sylvas let out a sigh and headed for the newly minted exit from the arena. That was his last match of the first day.
Now came the real work.
