Chapter 31

“Power is what you make of it. There is no mage so powerful that the correct counter could not be composed by determined opposition, given time. So too is the fight with the Eidolons. They seem unsurpassable, but there is one thing that must be remembered when faced with the hopelessness of fighting them. We are still here. If they could not be defeated, there would be no life in the universe.”

—On Hope, Elenya Starweaver

In that moment of realization, Sylvas reached up, trying to finish casting a Gravity Shear, but he was a hair too slow. With a clenched fist, Kaya yanked on that invisible thread of silver and he was launched across the battlefield towards her. Using his internal gravity, he pulled with all his strength against her, but there was no preventing the precious distance between them from being eaten up. She threw back her head and laughed as liquid metal rushed out to cover her, great jagged cleavers sprouting from her arms. “You thought that you could use metal! Against me!”

He landed hard, in a skid, and immediately had to throw himself forward into a roll to avoid the scything blades being swung at him. Encased in metal now, Kaya seemed less like a person and more like a machine, her motions were precise and controlled in a way they never seemed to be in her day-to-day life.

Back on his feet, he spun to face her, only to be yanked off balance once more by the invisible thread hooked into his hand where she’d touched him before. It felt like the skin on his hand was trying to tear itself off the bones each time she did it.

She came on with both her bladed arms swinging, and Sylvas did the only thing that he could, backpedaling out of her reach as best he could, feeling the tension growing the more distance he put between her and his hand. Like a fisherman, she was reeling him in, until eventually there would be no escaping her. Her voice boomed and echoed inside of the metal shell that encased her. “No running this time, stanzbuhr!”

Deploying his orbitals, he struck out at her with a half dozen spherical fists, but her armor withstood each blow, and she moved as though she hadn’t noticed them at all. He had to break her concentration somehow, or this was going to be brief.

He started casting, drawing on the gem buried under the skin of his right hand, feeding the burning mana through his newly reinforced channels and tracing the spell-form out, ready to cast the moment that she yanked on his invisible leash once more. When she finally did, he extended his hand out towards her as she dragged him in closer and cast. It was a simple enough spell. One of the most basic a fire affinity mage could cast. Nothing more or less than a cone of fire extending out from his palm to bathe her entirely in its scorching heat.

A mage with a fire affinity had protection from their own fires, a resistance to heat and flame that was a natural defense against harming themselves when they cast. Sylvas lacked that affinity, or that protection. The heat of the flame seared his hand, even as it doused Kaya. The metals in his skin that she had managed to seize control of were melted as his skin sloughed off from the heat.

Whatever else she had been expecting, it wasn’t this. He managed to completely deplete all the fire mana he had available in one continuous stream of flame, and then he let it cut out, only to discover that though her armor was now red and shimmering, the dwarf inside seemed to be mostly unhurt.

“Nice try.” She laughed, darting towards him with a blade upraised, “but not nice enough!”

There was no time to cast, his orbitals were useless. He crossed his arms above his head and flooded them with density.

Sharp as a razor, her blade swung down with all the force she could muster, slicing through skin and flesh before stopping with a clang as she hit his metal sheathed bones. Blood poured down his upraised arms, tickling across his elbows to soak his chest and spatter the ground, but she had not landed a killing blow.

She pressed down, trying to force her way through the reinforced bone, or to force his arms down enough that the blow might still prove fatal, but he had learned to control his Tidal Body and with it, found enough strength to hold her off. Metal grated on metal, but neither one of them moved.

Rearing back, Kaya plucked her blade from his arms and swung again, but this time, he had the moment he needed to get the hell out of her way. Just a quick jerk of motion would have flung him out of the blade’s reach, but instead he did the unexpected. He threw himself inside her reach, caught her by the arm behind where the blade sprouted and slammed his hip back into her. It was a clumsy replica of the throws that Chul had taught him, made all the clumsier by the disparity in their heights and how much Kaya weighed in all that armor, but it worked. Her feet lifted off the ground and she flipped past him, all the strength of her blow turned against her.

She hit the ground hard, but not hard enough to knock all the wind out of her, judging by the tirade of swearing. Sylvas started to put some distance between them, backing away from her so that he could take to the air and start unleashing spells again, but she rolled to her feet, reached out and tried to yank him back to her.

The spell found no purchase. The invisible thread leading to his hand had been connected only to the metal lacing the top layers of tissue, and he had inadvertently burned those layers off. At a distance, he could trap her with his spells, toss her up into the air like he had Luna or just pick her off with Gravity Spikes, given long enough. Her focus remained on close-range combat.

Go on then. Put this farce to an end. There’s no way she can beat you.

Ignoring Mira, he stopped and cast his healing spell to slow the bleeding of his arms and give them back their full and comfortable range of motion as Kaya got back to her feet. 

“No running today?” She chuckled inside the smooth faced helm. “Decided you want to play with the big boys?”

He didn’t reply, but he didn’t run either. He waited for her.

Back on her feet, she rolled her head, punched out with her bladed arms to loosen up and then assumed a fighting stance. “Alright then big boy, let’s go!”

Sylvas leapt at her, using his mental control over the position of his body not to fly up, but forward. She swiped at his face as he came, but he ducked under the blow, driving a shoulder forward into her chest. She staggered back but didn’t lose her footing, scissoring both bladed arms in towards him, forcing him to abandon his grip around her, or face the sharp edges.

He dropped from her into a crouch, avoiding the blades and then uncurling once more into a full body tackle that took her legs out from under her at the knees. She fell forward, blades slamming into the sand, creating a triangular wedge between her legs and the sharp edges that Sylvas now occupied. Remembering his ground-work from wrestling Chul, he spun out to the side, getting around her, behind her, before she could snap those blades back in against herself. Lunging in again, he wrapped his arms around her midsection and heaved.

For a moment, he wasn’t sure he had strength enough to do it, then he shifted his gravity up a little more, and her feet left the ground. She flailed as he flung her bodily overhead, and when she landed in the dust it was with an awful clatter.

As she was rising again, Sylvas rushed in to meet her. The armor protecting her body meant that blows would do little, but that didn’t mean she was entirely bereft of weak-points. He clenched a fist and swung with all his strength, not at her, but at the blade growing from her arm. It was solid steel, but he was more solid by far. It shattered under the blow, and using the recoil to drive him, he swung around and hit the other one with his opposite fist, shattering it too. Robbing her of the advantage of reach and leaving her nothing but her fists, now topped with ragged shards of metal to fight him with. She could grow the blades back, of course. But he hoped that she wouldn’t try now that she’d seen how easily he could break them.

If the loss of her weapons troubled Kaya, she gave no indication of it, launching herself back up and at Sylvas face, leading with her head. His nose was flattened by the impact. Blood exploded across the top of her shiny shell and it was his turn to be launched into the air, off his feet. He managed to catch control of himself before he landed, going weightless and steering himself to a halt but his ears were ringing, and the soft tissue of his face began to swell.

“That all you’ve got?” Kaya sounded more than a little punch-drunk as she clambered back to her feet once more. 

He smiled at her with a warmth he wished he wasn’t feeling. “No.”

Charging at him once more with a fist cocked back, it was obvious what she meant to do next, so obvious that for a moment, Sylvas thought that she might have been making a feint. But in the end, she turned out to be exactly as straightforward as she’d always presented herself as. He ducked around the swing, catching her across the chest with a clothesline and dropped her to the ground one last time. She flailed, swinging at him with one fist then the other, but he waded down through the flurry of blows, ignoring them all until he was sitting crouched on her chest, with his fist drawn back. “Yield.”

“Yield?!” She bellowed back at him. “I’ve got you right where I want you!”

Sitting on her chest is right where she wants you? She’s forward, isn’t she?

His heart wasn’t really in the next punch, but it didn’t need to be when there were so many tons of weight in it instead. The metal face plate crumpled under the blow, from a smooth surface to a crinkled concave in a single hit. It melted away the moment that Kaya lost consciousness, so the damage to her face wasn’t as horrific as it could have been, but Sylvas was still quick to get up off her so the medics could get in and do their work.

She was the best close-combat fighter in the Blackhall, and he’d beaten her without any tricks. There was some pride in that. But it didn’t balance what he’d just done to his best friend’s face.

And here I thought that we were the best of friends.

He stepped off the arena floor and into the darkness of the waiting room, expecting some medic to come rushing up and attend to him, but none were forthcoming. It had been his last bout of the day, and he wasn’t in danger of dying, so presumably they just didn’t care. 

Still, something made him pause in his progress towards the door. Some tickle of awareness that neither his gravity sense nor second sight could entirely identify. A presence that he felt without any of his senses. 

And I know what that means, Sylvas thought, realizing that it had been quite some time since he’d seen his watcher.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” He asked the room, only to see the shrouded figure of a woman became visible against the wall of the chamber as his eyes began to adjust to the dark. She had been invisible to all of his countless means of detecting her until now, which to him meant that she was choosing to let herself be seen. 

“I am merely here to observe.” She replied, in the same metallic voice he’d always heard from her.

“So you’ve always told me.” He replied, keeping a sudden burst of temper in check. He didn’t know what the being was, a construct of his mind or something real, but he was starting to get tired of it. “You’ve been observing me for quite a while now, haven’t you?”

She had not moved, gave no indication that she was anything but a statue, yet he felt like her attention had just tightened around him. “Are you familiar with the concept of convergent evolution?”

He blinked as he consulted his memory, only to find a blank. “No?”

“It is not necessary that you become so, but it is a curious development that was not foreseen.” She explained, without explaining anything at all.

“Why are you observing me?” He tried a different, more direct tact.

“Knowledge of that may interfere with your decision making.” When he opened his mouth to ask what the hell that meant, she continued. “You can call it, curiosity.”

“Curiosity.” Sylvas was in no mood for this nonsense. “Was it curiosity that brought you to my world, knowing what was about to happen and doing nothing to stop it?”

“Some events cannot be changed. They are canon. They are… necessary.”

“The extinction of all life on Croesia was necessary?!” He’d lost whatever grasp he had on his temper, dashing over to grab at her robes, but his hands passed through the space as if there was nothing there at all. Because there was nothing there. 

She was gone.

Well darling, that was entirely unhelpful. Mira’s voice whispered in her ear.

“She always is.”