Chapter 9

“In the heat of battle it can be difficult to tell friend from foe. For this reason, soldiers wear uniforms. This may produce some confusion, as you might come to believe that anyone not wearing the same uniform as you is the source of danger, when in fact the most hazardous person on any battlefield is the one wearing an almost identical uniform to you. The only difference is often found in the addition of a few stripes or stars to indicate that they are the officers about to order you to do something suicidal.”

—Washout: Reject of the Ardent, Anonymous

Inversion coiled its way back into Sylvas brain as he integrated that fragment of his mind, and he cast it with scarcely a second thought. If the eidolons wanted up, he’d give them all the up they could handle. The leaping Chargers, already launching themselves with some force, now found the gravity that should have been catching them was repelling them instead, they were launched straight up into the sky as they cleared the clifftop, and with his staff held out like a barrier between him and the oncoming hordes, Sylvas kept the spell going. 

More and more of the Chargers lived up to their name, barging on into the mass of rising bodies completely heedless of where they would end up, and as more and more of them came, more and more of them drifted up into the sky above. If they had spread out at all, there was no way Sylvas could have caught them all in a single casting, but because they were all so mindlessly intent on charging directly at him without even a moment of hesitation they were caught in his trap. Even the mounted heap of Chargers at the bottom of the cliff began to drift up, tangled legs keeping them in one mass as they rose like some obscene writhing elevator to the level of the cliff and higher. 

There were no fliers, but the Eidolons who had closed the distance soon filled the sky in one great pillar. Some had enough momentum to carry them almost to the closer edge of the spell, but ultimately, without any traction they could get no further. The mangled elevator continued to rise, catching stray eidolons as it went up, gaining momentum. Its own collective weight was accelerating it up to terminal velocity, catching up to the slower falling eidolons who’d come before. 

Some that it hit were knocked aside, struck with such force it launched them outside the spell’s perimeter, and those fell. They fell with the awful inevitability of the headsman’s axe, bladed faces burying into the sand, wedging them in place where they dropped. Sylvas felt halfway to certain that they were dead without needing to check, just from the distances fallen, but he let his senses sweep over them all the same to confirm that the twisted coil of mana that served as an eidolon’s core had extinguished in them all. The packed sand might have made for a soft landing, but even it could only protect against so much, and the ridge that they were on had risen close enough to the surface to protrude in places. Even the ones who hadn’t fallen far enough to die on the sand had fallen far enough to die on the stone hidden beneath.

More and more eidolons came charging on, drifting upwards as Sylvas strained to keep the spell steady and his mana drained away. Seconds ticked by, and still the mindless eidolons poured in until finally, there was a momentary lapse in the Chargers and Sylvas let Inversion end.

For one blessed moment, silence echoed over the plains. Sylvas looked down at his hand, holding his staff. Was it exhaustion, exertion or the poison still filtering out into his veins that was making his hands shake? He couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was just the pain. Maybe it was the anger.

The tower of eidolons stretching up to the heavens fell. Natural gravity reasserted itself and what had been a steady rise stalled out and instead became a lethal plummet. Most fell straight back down onto where they’d been launched from, back past the ridge’s edge to pummel those still trying to make headway up it. Some, who had been charging with more momentum, came crashing down on top of the ridge itself, raising a wall of broken corpses along the top that would make it even harder for the next assault to surmount.

Sylvas took a moment to turn his attention inward to his mana reserves. Keeping that spell casting for so long had drained him badly, and he knew that his odd offhand cycling method couldn’t have kept up, even if it did draw in more mana as he poured more out. What he found shocked him. More than half of the mana he’d spent was replenished. Not through the new cycling method, which could at best keep him feeding him a steady fifth of what he was expending without overwhelming his core, but in the moments after his casting had ended. The channels cut through his left arm which had been used exclusively for casting had reversed course and were gulping in mana so quickly that Sylvas couldn’t even guess where it was all coming from.

Even so, he wasn’t going to turn a gift from the universe down. The trailing remnants of the Chargers were still coming up, still surmounting the heaped corpses of their predecessors that Sylvas hadn’t had time to clear. He stepped forward, mounted the corpse heap with an agile hop and readied himself for their arrival.

Of all the spells that he’d prepared, Gravity Spike was the most prevalent. He had dozens of instances of it stowed away in his fragments and newly empowered with this unexpected gift of mana, he launched them from his staff in rapid succession. Some burst just beyond the ridge-line, yanking the Chargers from their footing, dragging the mound of corpses they were using as a ramp away, and buying him time, but the majority of them struck into the charging mass of Eidolons. Collapsing their mana-forged flesh in on itself. Crushing them with tiny instances of their own weight magnified to lethal measures.

Some of his shots hit home, killing instantly, some skipped by, and ripped multiple Eidolons apart at the seams, like plucking the legs off bugs. Either way, the magic was effective in stopping their charge for so long as he kept on casting.

There would be more Chargers. Injured ones, or ones that had found themselves stuck amidst the pack of Gaunts, but for the most part, they were done. Sylvas picked off the last few by launching out his orbitals to punch through their chitin with lethal force. The first wave was done. Now came the real problem.

There had been far more of the Gaunts than there had the Chargers. They were capable of operating at some range in comparison to the brute force assault, and their attack patterns were more sophisticated, if such a thing could be said. They had laid in wait for centuries in the sands of Strife to ambush Sylvas and his companions during the Cull, so while he was sure that there wasn’t any overwhelming intelligence driving them, there was certainly a degree of cunning more than the Charger’s wonderful plan of running directly at every problem. Some rapid casting did away with the ramp up to the ridge, dragging all the hulking chitinous corpses up to line the ridge-top so that he could make use of them. 

Mana was still trickling into him between each cast from some unknown source, and still he didn’t have the time or wherewithal to explore that source properly. It was his mystery mana flow that he’d encountered so many times before but exaggerated to a degree that it was finally noticeable enough for him to observe it. Before it had only been a trickle, and now it was, well, still a trickle, but still this time sufficient enough to spot. Left to its own devices, that mystery source would refill his mana pool in perhaps fifteen minutes. Useless in the heat of battle unless he found some way to amplify it, but incredibly helpful in that it was entirely passive, with no requirement of focus or effort of any kind from him. He was observing everything that was happening, extending his senses out in every direction to record as much as possible to be re-examined later.

As predicted, the Gaunts did not form an orderly line and attempt to climb the wall directly in front of Sylvas. There was no grand charge with a tightly packed formation for him to target, nor an obvious and exploitable way to gain the upper hand on them. This was going to be a meat-grinder. A solid line of enemies stretching almost the breadth of the whole ridge coming at him simultaneously. In one of the fragments he’d stowed away his flight spell, ready in case things went completely against him and he needed to get out of reach of the Gaunts. He had hoped that he wasn’t going to need it, but he wasn’t so foolish as to discount the possibility. 

While the Chargers had piled over each other with an awful clattering din, leaping and bounding, the Gaunts came on in an almost eerie silence. The taller ones, the jelly-walker Plovers, made loud enough noises for all of them when the mood took them. Emitting strange trilling sounds that echoed back and forth across the battlefield. Almost like a whale song pitched up to a painful sharpness. Whether it was some imitation of communication or just the equivalent of an animal’s growl when sighting a foe, Sylvas had no way of knowing.

The Gaunts ascended the cliff-face in that same eerie silence, only the wretched sucker sounds of their disembodied arteries latching onto the stone and dragging them up. Why they took on a humanoid form was another one of the many mysteries that had completely eluded Sylvas in his attempts to make further studies on the Eidolons that they’d encountered on Strife. The consensus theory seemed to be that Eidolons could take essentially any shape, biological or otherwise, and a bipedal form was relatively common across the universe for its ease of use. But Sylvas wasn’t among the people that agreed with it. 

There would be no reason for their bodies to be so like a human’s, or an elf’s, or a fiend, or a dwarf’s. No reason why they would have exposed bones right where a flayed member of any species would also have it, or to have rivulets of blood covering what passed for their faces, dripping over the hollow sockets of their eyes. It was clear to Sylvas that they had made themselves a mockery of the species who once lived upon strife, just as surely as he knew some of the other eidolons evoked memories of other species, spiders and birds and all the rest. There was some connection here that just hadn’t been made yet. 

But he was not an academic with a lifetime to spend studying such questions. His was a simpler task.

As the first of the Gaunts launched itself up over the cliff-top, he swung his orbitals into it and sent it tumbling right back down where it came from. 

“Ha!” The noise came out of his throat unexpectedly, savage as a bark. There was nothing to laugh at in his situation, but he found himself chuckling all the same, as Gaunt after Gaunt sprung up as though they were going to take him by surprise and he smashed into them with his orbitals, moving in a long parallel like a bat.

There were only a few sweet moments of that carnage before they started surmounting the ridge in force, but they were most definitely the highlight of Sylvas’ day. Then the oozing red skeletons became a solid wall atop the one he’d already raised and fell down towards him with a feral hunger.

The orbitals he’d used as a bludgeon before now had to become more precise, each one a needle darting through the crowd, piercing through one eidolon after the next, trailing a red thread behind them as they wove through their bodies. Sylvas launched one Gravity Spike after another through his staff. The Chargers had a dense chitin to protect them, while the Gaunts were far more easily disrupted. The tendrils that they could extend out, the ones that would have been veins or perhaps muscles on a living creature, were ripped clean off them as each of the intense points of gravity burst out. Sylvas didn’t even need to aim, there were so many of them. He held his staff under-arm, directing blasts where he could as swiftly as he could call them. There was none of the constant drain of the Inversion spell now. Each one of these spells burst into being for one glorious moment then blinked out again just as fast. Just long enough to destroy before it faded to a gentle pull, then nothing at all. 

But as potent as he was, as quick as he could cast, there were certain things that he just could not overcome, and one of those was the overwhelming numbers of the encroaching eidolons. Step by step, inch by inch, he had to give ground. The orbitals that he’d sent out in their lethal swooping loops through the crowds had to draw back in closer to him to hold the closest of the Gaunts at bay. There were so many of them. So many bodies that they filled his vision. An endless tide of gore whichever way he looked. The Gaunts that had come up the easier sides of the ridge were turning in now, closing in around him on both sides, with only directly behind him still clear enough that he might hope to escape if he took a run for it now. 

I could do it, I could just run, let them sweep past. He thought, it becoming exceptionally clear that they were too much for him to deal with alone. There might be some sort of reprimand for his failure to follow orders, more sneering from Vaelith, but he’d be able to endure that. Conversely he wouldn’t be able to endure anything if he was dead. There was every reason for him to turn and run. Every reason to take to the sky and flee.

Until now he had been giving ground, letting the enemy come on and picking them off as he could. Now he took a step forward and leapt. All the weight fell away from him as he cast Inversion for a second time directly beneath his own feet.

The charging Gaunts lost all momentum, they drifted up off the ground and started falling into the sky. Sylvas went with them. With his staff and orbitals, he could float in whichever direction he wanted with all the speed he desired, and now he desired all the speed he could muster. He shot forward to the closest of the Gaunts and smashed through its gory torso with one heavy swing of his staff. He shot off in the opposite direction to crack open the head of another as it spun upside down in the air. 

Back and forth he darted about, smashing up each and every one of the eidolons in reach before they had the wherewithal to respond. Whatever else these monsters might have been, they were not fliers, they were not used to operating in the air, in inverted gravity, and they could not fight worth a damn without the traction of the ground beneath their feet to give them motion. And through it all, as he shot back and forth rebounding from one foe to the next, killing again and again, gripping onto the staff for dear life as the strength was slowly sapped from him by pain and effort, so too were his orbitals in the same chaotic motion, striking one Gaunt, then the next, and the next.

Blood filled the air, floating up until it drifted out of range of his spell, then raining down all around him. Exhaustion muddied his clean blows, leaving wounded and snarling Gaunts spinning out to come crashing down to the ground once more. The relentless momentum of his orbitals slowed, deflecting off the hard bones hidden beneath the spongy meat surface of the Gaunts to rebound in odd directions. His focus was slipping as he tried to keep it all going. And worst of all, the spell continued to drain him. 

His mana reserves could not replenish through whatever mysterious means they had before while he was casting, and so long as he held the Inversion, that meant that he had to rely on his new cycling technique to try and draw in more power through half his body, while using the other half to expel it, while also controlling his orbitals, and his own motion, and shift gravity around inside his staff and self to make the swings he made at his foes potent enough to break them. It was all too much. If he were in perfect form and well rested, it would have been too much, but poisoned and exhausted with his bones already cracked, he was going to slip up long before his mana was depleted.

Every blow he struck reverberated back along the metal staff into his arms and made the fractures there worse. Every sudden jerking motion as he flung himself about the sky tugged at the screaming muscles in his shoulders and at the bones that those muscles were rooted to. Bones he’d filled with microfractures in his battle with Vaelith. Fight after fight, he had been worn down. Pushing himself past his limits, he’d left himself vulnerable.

It was over. 

He was hanging alone and motionless in the sky, looking down at the gathered horde of Gaunts down below and the few broken carcasses still caught up in the Inversion’s range. All the enemies he had carried up with him were dead, and all the ones on the ground had the good sense not to venture into the spell’s area of effect.

Looking down, he could see everything like one of the battle-map overlays they taught them with in class. The ridge was overrun. The trailing remnants of the Gaunts and the strange Plovers, making their slow way along to easier climbing points but the wall he’d raised and the point he had chosen to make his stand were entirely surrounded. The battle was lost, retreat was the only logical option. Whatever point the Ardent had been trying to prove to him had been made. If they wanted him to know that as special as his affinity was, a gravity mage still couldn’t hold off an entire Eidolon incursion alone, then there were better ways they could have gotten the message across. He flexed his left hand, feeling the hard weight of the gems on the gauntlet pressing against his skin.

Taking one last deep breath of the thin air. Sylvas ended his Inversion.