Chapter 22

“Through combat we are pushed to the limits of our ability. Through learning the limits of our ability, we can surpass those limits. That is all that needs to be said of the Ardent way.”

—Training Manual of the Ardent, Fal’Laehdra

Against all odds, Sylvas managed to turn the tables on his situation, the next half hour passing by in a barrage of questions, answers, and medical text, all of which filled the gaps that he had in his paradigm’s theories. Once he made it clear why he was doing what he was doing with both his embodiment and his paradigm, and the reasons why he needed them for it with not only his role in the Ardent, but regular everyday life, he had gotten her enthusiastic support. 

And as such, he took full advantage of it, making more progress in that half hour than he thought he would have made in weeks of personal research. 

Unfortunately though, the time that they had to work together was short lived before the next patient arrived and Sylvas was forced to leave, the two of them sharing only a brief, uncertain look before going their separate ways. A departure that left him with immensely mixed feelings. 

Romantic entanglements, even imaginary ones, were a problem he never wanted to deal with. First Gharia, and whatever it was that Enore had intended for him, had both ended in disaster. The only thing he’d ever had resembling a romance was with a dead woman, and looking back upon that relationship now it had been a good deal more toxic than the heavy metals he was building his embodiment out of. Nostalgia was all well and fine, but confronting the past meant acknowledging the parts that were bad as well as the parts that he would miss.

Thoughts of Mira were still bubbling in his head by the time he made it back to the Blackhall, and dinner, now containing more of the exotic supplements than actual food by weight, passed by in a pensive silence as all the others chattered and argued amongst themselves about the battles that they’d witnessed that day. Malachai’s fight in particular kept coming up. Usually in the context of people arguing about how effective the barrier around the arena was. Whatever he’d done, without so much as conjuring a single skeleton or wraith, had apparently been impressive or frightening enough that those who had been seated in the frontmost few rows had collectively tried to flee when the magic had come too close. 

As nightfall then settled over the campus, Sylvas and the others were already in flight to the arena for the day’s activities. The schedule was tightly packed, and while all efforts seemed to have been made to break up the matches for each student, it was inevitable that some would be more tightly clustered. Sylvas had one match almost at the very start of the day, and another just before lunch time. Sending messages back and forth with Malachai, he’d made arrangements to sit with him and his clique after the fighting was done, both to gather their insights and intelligence, and to make a genuine attempt at building a friendship with the prince. 

Even if the man was a little maniacal in his pursuit of ascension.

The Grayhall remained their blind spot as far as opposition went. The Whitehall and Blackhall had a decent amount of cross-campus friendships and alliances, especially after the exercises up on the Mournhold together, but the Grayhall students remained something of an enigma. Sylvas knew in the abstract that their top ranked student was an ice affinity mage thanks to Gharia, who was technically a distant cousin of hers, but beyond that the whole thing was a mystery. Given that he’d fought one recruit from the Blackhall and the Whitehall so far, it felt likely that whoever was next would be from the Grayhall. 

But that simply narrowed down the possibilities from dozens of known dangers to a whole host of unknowns. The general consensus was that the Grayhall had the weaker set of recruits this time around, but as had already been established in the earlier rounds, at this level of power, weakness was a very arbitrary idea. Having the specific tool to deal with a specific problem was far more important, and without knowing what he was up against, Sylvas had no idea how the problem of him was going to be solved.

The first few matches of the day did little to hold his attention. A freshly healed Gharia went up against an earth affinity human from the Grayhall and thoroughly trounced him, using her mastery of the air to keep out of reach and erode her way through his heavy defenses until eventually he was knocked down. Her latest ascension had really helped her to round out her combat abilities. There’d be no repeat of Mournhold, with her reserves running dry. 

Sylvas didn’t know exactly what she was using as her mana cycling technique anymore, but to his second sight, it felt like every time she was moving her mana restored, and the faster she went, the more she gathered. Given how mobile her fighting style was, this seemed ideal for her. His only regret was that the little bubbles that she used to cast in such wide and wild swathes seemed to have been trimmed from the roster of spells being used. Perhaps he’d see them deployed again in later fights.

Of the other contenders, there were a few interesting ones, like an elven life mage who formed a sort of exoskeleton out of wood that she used to brawl, and of course, Malachai’s showing against one of his fellow Blackhall students. The reliance on skeleton servitors that they’d witnessed up on Mournhold seemed to have been some sort of affectation that he’d adopted while there, or perhaps just a means of using all of the readily available resources. In combat, he laid out sweeping scythe blades of death, not to strike the opponent so much as to herd them into the desired position. Then he made use of something resembling the death-bomb that he’d left behind as a trap to force them forward into easy reach of his next attack. Sylvas couldn’t even remember what the other fighter’s magic was by the end of it. The poor man been so thoroughly overwhelmed that Sylvas wasn’t even sure if he managed to cast.

His own first match was coming up, so he could at least allow himself some degree of relief that he probably wasn’t going to be matched up against Malachai with him having just fought. Though given that the pale-eyed prince hadn’t even broken a sweat during his last match, it made Sylvas wonder if he couldn’t have just kept on going and going. Strife was a planet thoroughly drenched in death after the genocide that had occurred, and the font of mana that Malachai could draw on was likely nearly endless.

Shaking that particularly grim thought from his mind, Sylvas followed the indicators on his slate down to the waiting room for his own match, trying to turn his anxiety into excitement  for the match ahead.

Without fanfare, the stone ahead of him rippled open to disgorge him onto the arena floor, and he strode out without a moment of hesitation. The scorched marks of his last battle had been removed, and the sand was as pristine and red as it had ever been. The dome overhead warped his view of the stands a little, in a way that he had not expected, or noticed in the midst of everything happening yesterday. Today people seemed closer than they should have been, given the distances involved. He didn’t have much time to think about it though. The quiet dignity and bowing from yesterday had apparently been abandoned. Before he’d made scarcely any progress across the arena floor a shot was fired his way.

He had not time to raise a shield, and barely enough time to dodge it. A single narrow beam of vision warping transparency that he momentarily mistook for that same superheated beam as he’d faced last, before it struck the wall behind him and splashed over everything. Water.

The first shot might have missed, but the hosepipe spray of pressurized water chased after him in the direction he’d dodged, and he had to keep running to stay ahead of it. He part-cast as he ran, fragmenting off personality slices to maintain each of his spells until he was ready to use them. He only had time to bank a couple before the bar of water sputtered to a halt and he got his first good look at who he was up against. It was a fiend from his own campus, Abbas. The one that he’d once dropped a tower on. He couldn’t restrain a grin. He has already beaten this opponent soundly in the past, even before he’d come into proper control of his powers. It was a nice little boost to his confidence.

Overconfidence, perhaps, as Abbas now switched from a simple beam to a wide spanning wave led by a white arc that soared across the battlefield, flooding everything as it went. It must have taken a massive amount of mana to conjure, but there was no denying that it would have been effective just a day or two ago. There was no time to cast before the wave would have washed over him. Sylvas raised a hand and clenched a fist.

The enchantments that had been layered inside of his staff’s heads had been copied into his hand. One of them that he could use to focus his spells in tighter, and another that had allowed him to steer it around like it was one of his orbitals. A contained sphere of his gravity mana that he could fling in any direction. When he clenched his fist, it formed that sphere. With just a thought and a shedding of weight, he flung himself up into the air over the wave-top.

He hadn’t meant to give away that capability quite so early in the contest, but it was a minor loss, and being able to make full use of his new mobility now would be excellent practice for the later fights. There was a lot about his newly enchanted body that would take some getting used to, and how it moved in flight was one of those, particularly now that he no longer needed a borrowed air affinity spell for flight. Moving around by willpower alone was entirely different from the smooth motion of flying, he felt like he’d been thrown up into the air instead of ascending naturally.

The wave hit the back wall of the arena and washed back. If Sylvas had been hit, the returning tide would have tumbled him over yet again. The water slowed on its return, fighting against what had come along behind it in a roil beneath him before starting to soak down into the sand, making a bloody morass. Dodging with his feet being sucked down into that would have been impossible, against a grounded opponent, Abbas probably would have done fantastically. What a shame Sylvas was in the air.

Taking aim, he launched a Gravity Spike at the fiend. Abbas leapt to the side to avoid it but couldn’t entirely escape its pull. Even as he launched himself away, he was dragged back to the same spot before the spike faded, and as he landed heavily, the water that had still been gathered around his feet by his last spell splashed up in a wave, knocking him off balance. It bought Sylvas all the time in the world to launch his orbitals and cast a second spell.

Unfortunately the timing was just slightly off, Sylvas own spell triggered a moment before Abbas, an Inversion that took the next massive wave that the fiend had launched in his direction and turned it instead into a rising tower of water. A river flowing up to strike the top of the dome and rain down around them, the bright starlight surrounding them in rainbows. That tower of moving water was between the two of them, hiding them both from the sight of the other. Except Sylvas wasn’t solely reliant on sight. He had other senses which let him follow the other mage’s movements. He curled his fingers to make his hand a focus for the next Inversion, narrowing down its area of effect and taking careful aim as one of his orbitals zipped into place in front of the opening to his palm. When he cast, it shot off like a bullet from a gun.

The original inversion had ended, but the pillar had now become a waterfall. Abbas was still blind. Unable to see the bullet orbital fired from Sylvas right hand, it passed cleanly through both the pillar of falling water and into the fiend’s chest in the same movement.

And just like that, the first fight of the day was won. 

There would be some confusion and debate about how Sylvas had turned his orbital into a shot like that. There would be even more discussion of how he’d flown without a spell. Two parts of his new embodiment revealed ahead of schedule. It wouldn’t matter in the long run. These were fundamental parts of his new abilities that he expected to become public knowledge sooner rather than later. At least now he would no longer have to feel restrained through the rest of the fights.

The medics had to wade through the knee-deep quicksand that Abbas had created to get to him. The wet sand was so red you couldn’t tell where the fiend’s blood began and where the ground it soaked into ended. His orbital had buzzed back to continue its usual circuit around him after it had landed the killing blow, so there was nothing more over there that he needed to do. He headed back for his own exit with all haste, giving his orbitals one last fast spin before they slipped back into his satchel to clean off any remaining blood.

They didn’t bother sending anyone to yell at him or give him a medical look over this time. The fight had been one-sided enough that neither were necessary. But neither was he in any mad rush to return to the stands. His next fight was going to be relatively soon, and after such a tidy demonstration of what he could do when everything went right, he was fixating on all of the ways it could have gone wrong. He sifted back through his eidetic memory, going over every detail of the fight. Picking out the specific spells that Abbas had used, and how he could have countered them directly or indirectly. 

In a more chaotic battle, going over things like this, blow-by-blow, was rarely productive, as everything influenced everything else, but when a fight had been so abrupt it was a different matter. Obviously, Abbas shouldn’t have kept on swinging with the same spell over and over when it wasn’t working. Switching back to the water spray rather than the more substantial wave probably would have been a better plan. Sylvas also suspected that he could have used a well place gravity spike with a higher diffusion than usual to turn the tide against the other mage, literally. Pulling all the water back in his foe’s direction the way that he had with the one more compact gravity spike that he’d used. It was something to consider for the future.

“You proud of yourself, bullying that poor wet noodle?” 

Sylvas startled from his thoughts to see Gharia standing by the door of the waiting room.

“That wet noodle was trying to drown me.” He quipped back.

Her tail swished from side to side as she came in. She was looking much better after the healing attentions of the medics, though some of her scales did have that slightly sticky appearance they got when she shed and replaced them. “You can’t hold it against him. Everyone’s trying to kill you.”

He smiled back at her. “You’re not… currently.”

“Feels like most of the time we’ve spent on Strife has been trying to kill each other.” When she came to sit beside him, there was something predatory about the way she moved. From what he had learned about her species, there was some sort of carnivorous reptile somewhere back in their distant evolutionary past, and there were moments when the animal part of his brain seemed to notice it and cried out in warning.

He forced the tension out of his shoulders and let himself slump a little beside her. No matter what awkwardness they’d accidentally caused one another, they were still friends. “Doesn’t really feel like a good team building exercise if you are trying to pull an army together, does it?”

“Pfft.” Her tongue flicked out. “Most Ardent work in small teams like ours. Planetary annihilation events are scarcer than you think, with how big the universe is. Not often they need more than a few of us to fix any problem.”

It was not a perspective that he’d heard, but then again, all he knew about the Ardent, he’d learned from the Ardent. He’d taken everything that he saw on Strife as some sort of indication of where his life was going to go in the future, taken all of the texts both official and unofficial that the Ardent had written and committed them to memory. From those two points of reference and the time he’d spent with the Ardent in the field, however brief that had been, he had built up an image of the life that he would lead, and now doubt began to creep in. “Then what’s the point of training us to be soldiers?”

“Honestly? I don’t think they know what else to do.” Gharia didn’t have many human looking expressions, but her shrug was one that Sylvas had recognized right from the start. “You can’t just send people to some boot camp to make them as strong as possible so they can fight monsters, then set them loose. It’s got to fit in to society, somehow. There has to be a connection, otherwise the Ardent would just turn into… I don’t know. It would be chaotic. I guess structuring things almost like a military made sense to whoever was in charge at the time. It fit in with how they knew to do things from their own planets. Though…I’ll be honest, the Ardent is much looser run than most official militaries, probably because of all the different cultures involved.”

Sylvas stared down at his palms as Gharia spoke, thinking of how he’d carved them open just a day before. Thinking of what he was making himself. Not a soldier, certainly not anymore, but rather something different. “So you don’t think this hasn’t all been training to make us into soldiers?”

“Some of us, maybe?” She shrugged again, leaning her shoulder against his. “The ones who aren’t so good in the thinking department.”

“Like Orson.” They both said together, Sylvas grinning, Gharia’s tail swishing in amusement.

They sat for a moment in companionable silence, before Sylvas had to go and spoil it. “Are you fighting again?”

Gharia bobbed her head. “Soon. You?”

“Soon too.”

“Hope I’m not fighting you.” She said it half-joking, and they could probably have checked by comparing the times that they were called. In fact, that would have been a good way to work out everyone’s pairings ahead of time, if they were all willing to share information. They wouldn’t be, of course. Too many people would be relying on the element of surprise against whoever they were fighting to give it up, even if it gave them forewarning of what they’d be facing.

“The feeling is mutual.” He smiled at her.

She gave him a firmer nudge with her shoulder. “You’d look so sad after I beat you.”

“I’m sure I’d look devastated if I somehow lost to you.” He sniped back before remembering that this sort of low-level snark was considered flirtation in her culture.

Well, I supposed she started it. Was all he thought afterwards.

There was another lull in the conversation, broken only by the alert on his slate informing him that it was time for his next match. “Right, I’m up.”

“So soon? They really didn’t want you getting your breath back.”

He rose, rolling his shoulders and limbering up. Not that he needed to. His newly rune woven musculature didn’t seize up the way that it used to. Thanks to its enhancements he was ready to do practically anything at any time. “Not like I was struggling in the last match.”

“Poor Abbas.” Gharia’s tail continued to flick back and forth. “He’s meant to be graduating soon. A win here might have meant his pick of the places he might be stationed to.”

“Hadn’t crossed my mind.”

“Well, you aren’t allowed to throw a match to help out anyone’s career except mine. Okay?”

“Deal.” He grinned, holding out a hand to help her up. She didn’t need it, but he’d been raised to be polite. She let him pull her up.

Standing just a little too close to him, she met his eyes. “Good luck.”

“I suppose there is a first time for anything.”