Chapter 23
“Where the duty of the militia member is always to whosoever founded their militia, and the duty of a mercenary is to whoever pays their bill, the duty of the Ardent is uniquely to the Empyrean. Not to any specific leader within it who has risen to power, nor to any faction with which they are aligned, but to the ideals of the Empyrean. To a universe in which all sapient beings can live in peace and harmony without fear. Small wonder then that those in political power loathe us. We serve a higher cause than their ambitions.”
—How To Be Ardent, Fal’Dulse
The arena felt different as Sylvas emerged this time. The moisture that had filled the air when he fought Abbas had been burnt off, but there remained a strange energy, not dissimilar to ozone, still lingering. He couldn’t quite place the sensation until he opened his second sight and realized in rapid succession that his opponent had already taken the field, and that they were so engorged with life affinity mana that it was pouring out of them to fill the whole space. Outside of the arena’s protective barrier, that mana probably dispersed harmlessly, but the longer that they were in an enclosed space, the more it would build up. Life begetting more life. He didn’t know who the mage at the far side of the arena was, presumably one of the Grayhall recruits, but she had flowers starting to grow around her feet because she had so much mana exuding from her.
She didn’t seem inclined to bow, or even seem to take too much notice of him, so Sylvas started a slow stride across to meet her. There were so many different ways that a life affinity could manifest, other than the obvious use for healing, that he really had no idea of what kind of fight he was facing here. She was coming out towards him too, casting as she went, but the spell she was unleashing never seemed to come. Sylvas himself had begun fragmenting off pieces of his mind into partial spells to be set off later, but he wasn’t ready to make an attack just yet. Not until he knew what he was up against. Some small part of him was curious what she could do, and didn’t want to interrupt her casting until he had the chance to find out. It wasn’t the wisest part of him, of course.
No, that would be me.
He blinked in confusion. That wasn’t his voice in his head. Someone had planted that thought there. Someone—
The life-mage cast and from a bloom of green, a great beast emerged at a stampede pace. Long antlers curved back along the length of its body, entangled with vines and leaves, but that was where its similarity to a deer ended. The body was lithe and muscled, like some great cat, and the face was more canine, long jaws under a long snout, all lined with jagged teeth.
Sylvas cast a gravity spike at it as it came, twisting in his fingers to form the focus like his staff used to do, and unleashing a point of intense gravity right into the center of the beast’s mass. Even at this distance he could hear the crunch of bones collapsing and the wet squelch of the body coming undone. This huge and fearsome creature didn’t vanish like a construct as it fell, but lay there upon the red sand, its great chest heaving as it drowned in its own blood.
For a moment, Sylvas felt sick. This was a living creature, newborn into existence, and he’d just murdered it for getting in his way.
Eidolons are living too, and you carve them up.
Sylvas cleared his mind, filtered out that feeling of guilt and grief, and tried to close down wherever that voice was coming from too. He had no time for distractions.
While the deer-cat-wolf thing had been the first living creation of this mage, it was far from the only one. Some sort of flattened looking feathered snake soared up from the life-mage’s hands, circling around to dive at his back, a trio of oversized weasels with boney plates covering their length also moved to flank him. The biggest creature had been meant to draw all his focus while these others closed in for the kill, and it had worked. Or would have worked, if he couldn’t simply will himself to fly up and out of reach. The undulating sky serpent was still coming for him, but one foe was easier to face than four.
What troubled Sylvas more than one wiggling worm was that the mage still hadn’t stopped casting, the green light flared time and time again, and more and more creatures were being summoned into being. It seemed a simple enough thing to simply take out the mage and put an end to the creation, but it was when he cast his second focused Gravity Spike at her that he realized the problem. One of the newly minted sky-serpents took off at a sharp angle the moment it was conjured into existence and intercepted the spell. It was utterly destroyed in the ensuing crush, but it had stopped the spell before it reached its target.
This could be a problem. Sylvas thought with a grimace.
Letting himself drop, he poured more weight into his body. He came down hard on the gathered weasels, crushing them underfoot with his landing, then took off running towards his opponent. Each step shaking the earth. If her pets were going to interpose themselves between the two of them to protect her, he just had to remove the opportunity.
Dumping weight, he launched himself over the first charging line of defenders, some sort of sheep-dog combination covered in wiry wool that looked rough enough to tear off skin. Next he had to roll into a dive to avoid the swooping sky-serpent that she’d first summoned, moving just a little too slow to catch it by the tailfeathers and bring its time to an end.
One by one, her creatures came, and he dodged and leapt them with all the mobility that only someone controlling their own gravity could. Mid leap, he allowed one of his fragments to reconnect to his mind and he cast Inversion. The next mass of animals hit the reversed gravity at a full charge, tumbling up into the sky and out of his way as he ran on, neutralizing his own weight so he could run on through the Inverted area without it effecting him.
Such wild fluctuations so quickly would have in the past cracked every bone in his body, but with their new reinforcements and enchantments, they held without so much as twinge. His muscles on the other hand weren’t so lucky and quickly began to ache from the rapid switches in gravity. There’d be no doubt that he’d be exhausted when this was through. But in this moment, he had complete control without any risk of tearing himself apart. His body was finally where he needed it to be, where he could actually use his magic without accidentally risking killing himself.
And it was all that he needed to win.
When he let the inversion falter and the animals drop back down to earth, they hit hard, and most didn’t rise again. When he hit the next line of summoned creatures, he lashed out with kicks and punches that hit with enough weight to knock them out of his path and rend through their flesh. It didn’t matter how tough these animals were, they were limited by the rules of biology, and Sylvas wasn’t. Not anymore.
Close enough now, Sylvas cast again. Another focused Spike, aimed right at the woman now watching him with wide eyes. All her myriad beasts converged, trying to get between her and the shot, but when it impacted on one, it caught hold of all the rest, the intense gravity pulling all of the different creatures together into one point. Skin gave way to the pressure, bone burst through, and blood that should have come raining down formed an orb around the point of intense gravity for a moment before it dispersed. A whole crowd of her summoned creatures crushed together into one amorphous mass that fell twitching to the sand.
That cleared his path, leaping over the tangled mass of bodies, Sylvas went in for the kill, readying one final Gravity Spike to be cast at point-blank range where there was no possibility of her avoiding it. Abruptly, the flow of mana in the arena shifted. Where before life affinity mana had been flooding out of his opponent, now it course had been reversed, she was sucking it all back in, swelling with power far beyond what Sylvas would have supposed was her natural limit. Going back into her core, it should have ruptured her circles, but it wasn’t being drawn into her core, but her body. She swelled with it. All the gathered life mana of the planet flooded into her, swelling the muscles of her body, making her grow larger and larger even as the green glow of the mana suffused her.
By the time that Sylvas had closed the distance, she was no longer a passive figure, but a towering monstrosity in her own right. Every muscle and vein of her body popping out as she swelled in strength, and all of it on display as she lifted her now massive fists overhead, ready to bring down and smash him into pieces.
He was at the midpoint of casting a new Gravity Spike. One final killing blow that would have made all of her massive size irrelevant, but it wasn’t going to be complete before her blow came crashing down. With a quick tug and a shed of gravity, he flung himself back and out of her reach. Tentacles erupted from one of the sheepish things that had closed in at his back, its whole head opening out to unleash them. They lashed around his arms and it tried to drag him to the ground.
With an impact that shook the stands, her fists hit the ground, and Sylvas, so close to the point of impact, was knocked off his feet by the shockwave. The sheep-beast lost its grip on him as it too was knocked aside, and he was able to scramble back to his feet faster than it could line up another ensnaring outburst of tendrils. He took aim and cast his Spike into the bared green chest of the giantess he now faced and she folded in around it. Just as it had with Vaelith, and her own toughened body, the spell gave no external sign of the awful damage it was doing as everything inside of the other mage was twisted and crushed, but after one faltering step towards him, she collapsed.
All the life mana flooded out of her in the moment before the crest enveloped her, and the sudden rush of it made Sylvas giddy. The medics took the field almost as soon as his win was sounded by the horn, but Sylvas work wasn’t done yet. He had to intervene to kill off the remaining creatures so that the medics could work safely, standing guard over the woman who’d been the latest off his victims with no sense of irony at all.
So you feel like a hero after ripping up her insides? That’s strange.
He shook his head against the intrusive voice. The mind mage. He’d fought against one on the Mournhold, one in Malachai’s little court of followers. It had to be her, working pre-emptively in trying to get inside his head and plant seeds of doubt. He amped up his Clearmind to entirely empty himself of all thoughts. Creating a completely blank surface that mind magic could find no purchase against. He just let his body go through its trained movements, striking down one beast after another and thinking of nothing at all.
