Chapter 30

“In the beginning it is best for all to love you. They will excuse any cruelty and praise any kindness. But with time, love can be broken. It can sour and become hate. When the realization strikes that so much of who they are has become an adjunct of you, they will loathe you for it. You will face rebellion from those who love you, when they are pushed far enough, and all the trust that love bought you will be returned in betrayal. Fear is different. Fear is honest. Those who follow you out of fear cannot be bought or bribed, cannot be convinced or cajoled. So long as their fear of you is stronger than any other emotion, they will be yours. And as we all know, fear is the simplest of emotions to evoke, and the longest lasting.”

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

The first fight of the next day came as a shock. Another one of Malachai’s acolytes, but one that Sylvas immediately drew up short at the sight of. He had forgotten that there was a mind-mage in the competition. He’d assumed that the woman would have been knocked out early, given the limited combat capabilities of her affinity, and had overlooked her when checking the lists for today, focusing on the opponents he felt were going to be more of an issue. He hadn’t even thought about how he was going to deal with this particular problem. In their last clash, rapid response had done the trick, taking the opponent out before she could get inside his head, but now he didn’t feel so sure of himself. In fact he felt completely overwhelmed. How was he meant to beat someone who could get into his head? What was he meant to do against that?

Darling, because you are so very clever in so many ways, I forget just how stupid you truly are.

“What?”

She’s already in your head. She’s making you doubt yourself.

Now that it had been pointed out to him, Sylvas could feel the intrusion. The thread of magic winding its way into his head. The spell whispering into his mind that he was fallible, weak, stupid and worthless.

You already have me to remind you of all that, darling.

Sylvas began casting at last, striding out across the field towards his opponent, who stood quite still, looking smug with her arms held crossed behind her back, entirely at ease. Doubt was not going to be enough to stop him, and even as she poured more and more of it into him, he fought back. Not by trying to press with his own will against the intrusion, but by taking pieces out of the jigsaw puzzle that she had to assemble to fully understand his mind. Each time he fragmented off another piece of his psyche to store a spell, he could feel the thread of magic extended through that part of him snapping. She had to retreat, search for another way in, another way to get into his thoughts. 

Then by the time she was making progress again, worming her way towards some dark memory she could revive to slow him down, he would fragment off another.  It must have been the most boring fight that the arena had ever played host to, at least for those in the stands. Her standing stock still. Him, walking slowly towards her. Before long, he ran out of spells that he might want to complete and was simply fragmenting his mind by brute force to have the same effect, closing her out, blocking her progress.

The funny thing is, even if she were to somehow succeed in mastering your mind, you have one spare. I’d be able to slip into control and finish her off while she tried to torment you.

Mira stepped out in front of him, and he paused. She looked different from the last time she’d manifested, less well-groomed and more soot-smudged. She held out a hand to him and wailed, “Why won’t you save me?”

Oh please, don’t tell me that is how you remember me, how demeaning.

He stepped forward, right through the illusion that the mind mage had planted in his head. Next came Kaya, stripped of her artificial limbs and left lying in the dust. “Why won’t you help me?”

“She’d rather die than beg for help.” Sylvas spat, stepping right into the illusion once more.

The mind mage still didn’t look any more than a little perturbed at his progress, the spell still digging its way along his nerves, searching through his memories. The Crimson King burst up from the ground, its chitinous hide shining in the starlight, its claws reaching for Sylvas. The greatest terror he had ever faced. She was getting desperate.

He levelled his hand at the mage, curling his fingers into a claw so that the script inscribed in his bones would do its work. He took aim at the mind mage, and she remained as calm as ever. That wasn’t right. Even if she was incredibly certain of her abilities, there was such a thing as sanity. He closed his eyes and reached out with his gravity sense instead. Where the mage had been standing on the field, he felt nothing, but around at his side, creeping ever closer with a dagger in hand that he could feel the weight of from here, she approached. 

Spinning on the spot as he cast, he took his aim, not at the illusion, but at the caster. When his eyes opened, so too did hers, bulging wide as the Gravity Spike hit her in the chest, shattering bones and twisting organs until the crest shut it down. She had barely a moment of knowing that he’d beaten her before darkness took her.

Glancing aside, the towering, world ending Eidolon that he still saw in his dreams at night was gone. Every illusion she’d planted in his mind had faded when she lost.

Sylvas brought all the fragments of his mind back together, and let the wasted mana disperse. He didn’t give this particular opponent any courtesies, walking off the field without even waiting for the medics to arrive. She’d dug into his mind deeply enough that she knew exactly what he thought of her.

Back in the stands, Kaya immediately started ripping into him for having the most boring match of the day, and he took it all in his stride, because he’d been face to face with the worst horrors the universe had ever thrown at him today and hadn’t even blinked. A little bit of dwarvish sass really wasn’t going to top that. More importantly, by his calculations, he only had two more matches to go before he was in the final.

Two matches against the best of the best that the whole planet has to offer.

That just made his smile spread even wider. Kaya glanced across at him nervously. “You alright there, stanzbuhr?”

“Just looking forward to tomorrow.”

“Today ain’t done yet.” She twisted her neck until it cracked, then went the other way only to make a slightly sad noise when no crack was forthcoming. “But I reckon when it is, we drink.”

“Why is your response to any situation a bottle of Vlashgahr?”

Gharia answered from behind them. “Because some of us know how to enjoy ourselves?”

“Because Vlashgahr is delicious?” Kaya added.

Ironeyes added, “Vlashgahr is the traditional drink after a great victory.”

“It tastes like lantern oil.” Sylvas said to Kaya, since the other two points didn’t seem like they could be refuted.

Ironeyes nodded seriously. “That’ll be the lantern oil we use to make it.”

Sylvas stared at him a moment until he noticed the twitching of his moustache and was sure that he was trying not to laugh. “You know, it really wouldn’t surprise me.”

Then that brief moment of normalcy was over, and his slate was chiming to tell him to get ready for his match. Sighing, he got to his feet. As did Kaya, turning off the chiming of her own slate. They both stopped in their tracks.

“Oh stanzbuhr…this is going to suck.” She said with what seemed like genuine sorrow until Sylvas caught the glint in her eye. She cracked her knuckles. “For you.”

“I suppose it had to happen eventually.” Sylvas grimaced.

“Don’t worry,” Kaya reached up to pat him on the shoulder. “When I beat you, I’ll be real gentle with the bits that are left.”

He shrugged off her hand, and the pair of them started heading for the stairs. “When you beat me, there won’t be any bits left. Because there is no conceivable universe in which you can beat me.”

“Big talk from the man who nearly lost to Luna yesterday.”

“Hey!” Luna chimed in as they passed.

“Oh, come on,” Kaya called back over her shoulder, “you know you suck.”

They continued to banter back and forth, keeping their minds off of what was about to happen as best they could, until finally they reached the point where their paths diverged. Kaya opened and shut her mouth a couple of times without saying anything, which was a minor miracle in itself, then finally she thrust out her hand to shake Sylvas’ own. “May the best dwarf win.”

It was enough to cut through the tension. Sylvas chuckled as he turned his back on her and headed for his entrance. It was showtime.

Stepping out to face someone he knew, but stepping out to face someone he knew as well as Kaya, well that was a novel experience. All of the usual tension of trying to guess what he was going to be up against was gone. He knew exactly how Kaya fought, the spells she used, the way that she approached problems. There would be no surprises here. But the same was true of her; she’d grown alongside him, they had shared more or less every day since arriving on Strife. There was no way that she wouldn’t have prepared to deal with him too. Which in turn meant that both of them were probably going to be reliant on creating surprises that ran contrary to their usual nature.

For instance, Sylvas had already walked out into the arena, and she wasn’t charging yet. While he wasn’t in any mad rush to close the distance between them, Sylvas walked out.

Seeing him, Kaya did the same. The dwarf had yet to invoke her armor, so she just looked the same as usual. Like they were meeting each other on the way between lectures. She had to shout to be heard at this distance, but that never seemed to bother her. “Fancy meeting you here, stanzbuhr!”

There was a ripple of laughter up in the stands that Sylvas did his best to ignore. Lifting off, he let his will alone carry him forward with a firm grip on the gravity hook he’d implanted in himself. He didn’t shout back, he didn’t make jokes, in part because it just wasn’t how he liked to handle himself, but more to see if he could keep Kaya talking. She never could resist filling a silence.

“Just another beautiful night on Strife, I’d say. Lovely time for a walk.” She was grinning. Even at this distance he could see it, but where usually it seemed mischievous, today it felt sinister. He really had no idea of what she was going to do.

Under his breath, quiet as he could manage, he had begun casting his spells and snapping off fragments of his psyche to hold them. To his knowledge, none of Kaya’s embodiments had ever enhanced her hearing, but that didn’t mean that she just hadn’t told him. It was equally possible she had been holding that information back to reveal it at the moment that amused her the most, probably after he’d whispered some mortifying secret.

Looking at her through his second sight, there was some degree of shiny silver mana coiling around her, like there was an enhancement spell imbued in her, or she was maintaining something small and ongoing, but she wasn’t actively casting anything or producing metal with her embodiment or anything so far as he could tell.

Little streams of silver seemed to reach out from her as he got closer. Threads connecting her to everything metal around her, her own prosthetics, whatever metal had been used to patch the walls and him. He followed that thread all the way from her to him, to the palm of his hand, where he’d just a few moments ago shaken hers.

Her voice was lower now, still loud enough for everyone to hear, but no longer a bellow. “Do you know why it was maybe a bad idea to make your new body out of so much metal, stanzbuhr?”