Chapter 6

“The reason that rapid advancement through the circles of magic is discouraged should be self-evident. The mana base is destabilized each time an additional circle is added, and by rushing the addition of circles the risk of a breach is increased. This is the short-term danger of such rapid advancement, but the long-term harm is much more insidious. Even if the mage manages to survive through the rapid expansion of their mana core and maintain stable circles, their actual abilities will be stunted. A boundless mana pool can serve as a crutch, allowing the caster to bypass the best practices of mage-craft. To overlook the use-cases for their embodiments, and more pressingly, to ignore the changes that their paradigm has made to their personality and outlook. While an embodiment going unused fundamentally weakens the mage, there is no such thing as an unused paradigm. The shape of the mind is changed by the paradigm’s creation and there is no going back from it. The overlapping points of various paradigms are likely to tangle. Interference between the different paradigm effects are likely to disrupt the mage’s ability to think clearly. In essence, running before you can walk leaves you unbalanced and incapable of doing anything but running, which robs the mage of the vast majority of their utility and power.”

—Progression Fantasies: Why You are Investing in the Wrong Embodiment, Curgal Groenen

Sparks flew from Sylvas staff as the glowing green blade scraped down the length of it. A quick shift in weight and the position of his hands kept his fingers attached as he turned the killing blow aside, but he was still wide open to the kick to the ribs that sent him rolling back out of Vaelith’s reach and right into the waiting jaws of the wolves she’d summoned.

Kicking out, he knocked one of them aside, but the other clamped its jaws shut on his arm. He cranked up the density and weight before the teeth could dig much deeper than his skin, but in turn, that made the arm a useless dead weight that stopped him from moving. He just couldn’t think fast enough to deal with everything that was happening at once. Vaelith’s focus was that much better than his that she could be casting multiple spells and fighting at the same time, while he had to fragment his mind to even come close to matching up, with each fragment he broke off sapping his focus. Dividing it and making it harder for him to think.

The orbitals buzzed in a rising spiral around him, knocking the first wolf’s legs out from under it before it could make another attempt to latch on, and deflecting one of the flaming bolts that Vaelith had flung his way as she closed the distance.

Tapping one of his fragments, he rammed the tip of his staff into the side of the wolf biting down on him and cast a gravity spike. Whatever these green constructs were made of it wasn’t flesh, but it tore like flesh all the same. It twisted like flesh as the sudden surge of gravity in the wolf’s midsection collapsed it in on itself.

The other wolf had found its feet, Vaelith was already bringing her heel down at his head. There just wasn’t enough time. If he just had a moment to think, he knew he could out-maneuver her, he could adapt to what she was doing, but she never ever gave him that moment.

Another fragment collapsed back into his mind as he cast Inversion. All three of them, wolf, man and elf lifted off the ground. All leverage lost. Her kick stunned him at the moment of impact, but without gravity on its side, the impact wasn’t lethal, and she rebounded from the blow, flipping back and up out of reach again. The remaining wolf was already twisting around frantically trying to grab onto something, anything, to keep it from drifting up into the sky, but Sylvas, with the brief experience he’d already had working in reversed gravity was able to twist out of its reach while he waited for the lights flashing behind his eyes to stop blinding him.

He really needed to stop letting Vaelith hit him.

An array of spells came crashing down at him. Darts of green flame that he knew would eat through his flesh like acid if they made contact. He’d have to release his Inversion if he wanted to avoid them, and that would bring the wolf and Vaelith crashing down on him again. Reaching out his now-free hand, he caught onto one of his orbitals and accepted the inevitable. He let the Inversion end. He let his enemies drop down on him. He used the orbital to pull him out of the way.

Or at the very least, he tried to. As the green darts diverted with the sudden gravity switch, the orbital he was relying on to pull him to safety zipped right out from between his slippery fingers. He hadn’t even realized that he was bleeding until that moment. With nothing to hold onto, he plummeted back to the red sand below, landing in an awkward heap and bruising his ribs. They already ached from the early morning wrestling session with Chul, and this time he felt a distinctive pop as he made contact with the packed dust. That wasn’t a good sign.

Vaelith had manifested some sort of spear and had it’s razor tip pointed right at him. She fell from the sky like a meteor poised to wipe out all life on a planet, heading straight for Sylvas.

All his orbitals recalled. Colliding together around that spear-tip as he desperately struggled to get back on his feet. The force knocked them all aside, knocked them all out the sky in fact. They rained down around him, their sad little chimes tinkling as they hit the sand. But it bought the moment he needed. Gravity Shear rippled out from his upraised hand, and as Vaelith hit the shield, it turned not only the spear-tip, but her whole weight, aside.

Struggling to draw in a ragged breath with his ribs screaming at him, Sylvas darted in the other direction, stumbling as he went despite his boots granting him weightlessness on demand. He spun his staff behind him as he ran, letting gravity wells deepen at either end of it so that when Vaelith’s inevitable rain of green fire came chasing after him, course already adjusted to loop around the Gravity Shear, they’d be knocked off course again. He didn’t even need to look for that to work, which was lucky, because he didn’t have a moment to look back if he meant to stay out of Vaelith’s lethal reach.

Reaching out to the orbitals, he found that the mana he’d invested in them was gone. Blasted away on impact with Vaelith’s spear. They’d be useless until he collected them by hand and invested them with a portion of his own power again. Another option gone.

In their tactical classes, this was what they talked about. Everything that you did was meant to remove an option from the enemy. Every attack that missed was still eliminating a place that they could have moved to. Every spell that was cast guided the enemy closer to the one that would end them. It was nice in theory, not so nice to be on the receiving end of that theory. Vaelith was relentless.

She was all about efficiency. He had a few big spells that could turn the tide of a battle, a few clever tricks that he kept up his sleeve, problems that demanded solutions, while she just used an even spread of the same spells and inherent abilities each time. No one of them insurmountable, but when used together they formed an unbreakable wall. It didn’t matter if any one of them was countered, because there were already a dozen more inbound. It was the perfect counter to how he fought, he realized ruefully. Keeping on so much pressure that he never had a chance to formulate one of the big solutions that kept winning his battles.

Distance was always to his advantage though. He might have been able to counter her physical strength by throwing weight around, but ultimately, the closer they were the less time he had, and the less effective his own spells became, as he was constantly caught up in the midst of their effects too.

The wolf had outpaced the outer edge of the Gravity Shear, never ceasing in its pursuit, so he slowed his pace, turned on his heel and brought his staff down hard. That was the one advantage that he had over the constructs, they might have been tireless, efficient, stronger than him and faster than him, but they were ultimately mindless automatons programmed with only what Vaelith had instilled in them. When it leapt for his throat, it was predictable. The arc it would take. The timing to intercept its leap with a blow heavy enough to shatter whatever constructs of mana made it solid. The ghost of the wolf washed over him harmlessly as it dispersed, then Vaelith was there again. Close enough to see the glow of her eyes.

The casting time he needed could be measured in fractions of a second. He only needed to buy himself that. As she charged straight at him, he threw his staff. One end of it was still heavily weighted by his mana inside it. It hit the ground directly in front of her and stood upright. She feigned a dodge to one side, then leapt to the other, and he was able in that last moment to seize hold of the those same hooks for gravity that were placed in the orbitals that he’d installed into the staff caps and flung it sideways. The end of the staff clipped her hip, spinning her off balance, making her skid in the sand. It wouldn’t even leave a bruise, and she beat the staff down with a hastily summoned blade that shattered his control over it. Another option taken away.

An option that gave him the moment he needed to teleport.

Blinking hard against that moment in the void, he appeared on top of the temple tower. She’d be able to follow him. She had mana enough to waste and enough experience to chase after whatever jump he made, but what she likely hadn’t considered was that he was not as risk-averse as her. He leapt off the top of the tower without a glance back.

It had taken him some time to get his casting time on teleportation so short. There were abridgements made to the spell when using natural gravity mana rather than having to manufacture an echo of it as part of the process, and he had tightened up the casting even further.

To point where he confident he could cast it before he hit the ground. What made the timing particularly tight however was that he was not only piling on more and more weight as he fell but that he had also used a snap cast gravity spike to yank himself towards the planet. 

All so that he would hit terminal velocity well ahead of the time falling object normally would.

The ground rushed up at him in all of its bone shattering glory and he could have sworn that he felt his foot touch dirt before he was snatched away into the void once more.

This time he wasn’t aiming his teleportation for the top of the tower, but above it. He emerged back into reality, gasping for air above where Vaelith had just appeared on the tower top. He didn’t even need to kick out as he fell, but he did out of habit from the many times he’d practiced this same move in his mind.

The blow hit her squarely between the shoulder blades. His super dense body falling at terminal velocity was an unstoppable force. With the density of his legs he might even have made it out without any bones breaking.

But if he was the unstoppable force, she was the immovable object. The whole tower roof heaved with the impact, tiles launching off in a crescent in front of her where they’d been displaced, and the ancient stone arches below creaking with the impact. This building had withstood an apocalypse, but it bent under his blow. Vaelith folded in on herself under the weight of the blow. The green armor that she’d manifested around herself sparked and crackled as though it were alight before it shattered. But it took the worst of the blow. His kick didn’t kill her. It didn’t knock her out. It just drove her to her knees.

Rebounding back off her, he shed weight as fast as he dared to prevent him from falling straight through the roof and into the rafters below. Even with that the tiles shattered to dust as he landed, shards slipping out from underfoot at the impact of his landing, sending him staggering.

Then Vaelith was there before he had a chance, blade pressed in against his throat, a fierce smile on her bloodied lips. “Yield.”

Sylvas did. He held up his empty hands.

“Better.” She conceded as she let her sword fade back away to nothing and wiped at the blood on her lips. A soft incantation that seemed so foreign to her usual brash casting suffused the air and with a gentle glow whatever internal damage he’d done to her was healed. 

He allowed the remaining fragments of his mind still holding spells to collapse back into him. She’d given him a few seconds to recognize that they were going to be fighting before attacking this time around. Enough time for him to put some distance between them with a chain of teleportation spells around the campus, pausing only long enough between each one to part-cast some spells and break of parts of his consciousness to maintain them. “Not good enough.”

“No.” She agreed. “Not good enough. You shouldn’t have closed at the end. More distance and you could have picked me off the roof, let the fall do your work.”

“You’ve survived that fall before.”

“And I’d have survived it again. I was ready for the ambush. But it would have kept you out of reach.”

“I ran out of mana.” He was forced to admit.

“I know.” She didn’t bother to tell him how. Either a scrying spell he hadn’t found yet, or just keeping a count in her head.

He didn’t have anything to say to that. So he just cycled in some mana to replace what he’d used. Wherever a teleportation spell had been cast there was usually a glut of gravity mana still lingering around, and with both of them having ported up here, he was able to gather a fair amount of it rapidly. If she came at him again unexpectedly, he’d be able to teleport away, even if it would have left him running on fumes.

She was staring at him. Not just the usual burning appraising stare that made most of his classmates wither, but something even more intense. He didn’t like that kind of scrutiny. “Why haven’t you gotten stronger?”

He blinked in surprise. He was widely considered to be the most powerful mage among the recruits. Probably would have been even without the rarity of his affinity and the additional advantages it could buy him. Admittedly a lot of his magic had utility effects rather than raw destructive capabilities, but he felt that he’d more than compensated for those shortcomings. “Stronger?”

“From arrival day to the cull, you were pushing.” He opened his mouth to object, but he didn’t dare to interrupt her. “Adding circles so fast they thought you’d reach your fifth circle in a year. Now you’re treading water.”

His temper flared, but he kept it out of his voice. “I advanced fast because I was told I had to if I wanted to survive. My mana base, my body—”

“I think you advanced fast because you actually wanted it then.” She closed the distance between them, making Sylvas very aware of how unsteady his footing was up here. “What changed? Did you lose your fire? Did I break you? Or did you just get scared?”

“With respect, Instructor.” Sylvas said carefully. “Did you stop paying attention to what I’ve achieved since I created my last circle? Or what happened back up on the citadel?”

“What I am paying attention to is the fact that if you had your fourth circle already, not only what happened on the citadel wouldn’t have happened in the first place, but you would have won today as well.” She said with surprising self-effacement. She was a circle five mage, considered to be one of the best fighters in all of the Ardent with decades, if not centuries of active combat experience, and she was suggesting that he’d have beaten her.

“A…lack of mana was not the only factor in my loss.” Sylvas didn’t even know how to begin to reply.

“It wasn’t, but it would have been enough to overcome the other factors. Not to mention what a new embodiment and paradigm could have done to improve you.” Vaelith replied, her focus on him intense. “Tell me if I’m wasting my time, Vail, and all of this will stop. I’ll wash my hands of you. I won’t push you anymore. I won’t drive you to be better. I’ll leave you be on this path of…of calculated mediocrity you’ve put yourself on.”

He grit his teeth to keep from snapping back at her and took a steadying breath. His anger hadn’t been so close to the surface before. Not when he was keeping all of his old miserable memories tidily stowed away. She’d been the one to break that wall. To force him to confront his past. She’d been the one that had used that moment of breaking to shatter his mind and make him into the stitched together remains of the man he used to be, because he was more use to the Ardent as a fighter with his mind in fragmented pieces.

It was all Sylvas could do but stand there and glare back at her angrily, not trusting himself to speak.

“Disappointing,” Vaelith grunted when it was clear he wasn’t going to reply, turning her back on him and revealing that his boot-print was still visible on the back of her uniform jacket. “Get your head sorted, Vail. One way or the other. Until then, don’t bother coming to me.”

She didn’t waste time with a spell to teleport her away, she just jumped off the roof, with green construct wings bursting out to catch her as she dipped out of sight. Leaving Sylvas alone on the top of the tower trying his best to swallow down all of his rage towards her, towards the system that punished him at every turn, towards everything that his life had become. Once upon a time, he had been chosen for greater things. He had been tricked into it, but he had believed with all his heart that with his mind and his magic, he might remake the whole world. Now that world was gone, and he was alone amidst strangers who were never satisfied no matter what he did. It was like the orphanage all over again. Even with all the power he’d gathered so that he’d never be stuck in a situation like that again, history was repeating.

When he tried to swallow his anger, he could taste bile in his throat.