Chapter 28

“Your squad will become your friends, no matter how hard you try to avoid it. Even if you start off loathing every single one of them, hating everything they do and wishing they’d all drop dead so you could get reassigned, by the end of your first fight, they’re going to be closer to you than kin. You’re going to know how they think, how they move, and how they react on instinct. It is an unavoidable intimacy, and it will spill over into your personal lives. You will find yourself saving the cagey weirdo a space in the corner of the bar because you know he likes walls at his back, you will step up to knock the teeth out of a stranger who insulted a guy you just spent six months saying was the worst thing to ever happen to the universe, and you will find yourself moving around each other like dancers in the barracks, completely aware of not only where one another are, but where you’re going to be. This is the real nature of squad-based combat. You stop being individuals and become part of a bigger whole.”

—Squad-Based Tactics, Fal’Vaelith

The second planet was a fresher corpse than the one before. It still had its atmosphere mostly intact, even though there was no question of survivors, given that the Consortium had hit not just one site on the surface but two, almost equidistant from one another around the planetary surface. Perhaps that balance was why so much of the magnetic field and atmosphere remained intact.

Sylvas updated the map the moment that it came into sight on the periphery of his senses, and they narrowed in on the only sphere of space that the Consortium could have been operating out of to reach all of their usual black markets and target planets. The inclusion of this particular dead world shunted their previous projection almost twenty light years across the map, into a completely empty area of space that they’d never have even looked at if Kaya hadn’t worked out the asteroid situation. Completely remote. Completely isolated. Sylvas started calculating their new course immediately.

Hector’s hand came down on his shoulder. “I want you to take us down. Land us somewhere on that landmass in the middle, between the two holes.”

Sylvas frowned. “There isn’t any more information to be gained by doing that. We already know what we’re going to find down there.”

“It isn’t about that.” His smile tightened up. “Just set us down. Please.”

Sylvas brought them in. The clouds of debris risen up from the planet were spread like wings to either side of them, stretching out beyond the gravity of the world and out to embrace the rest of the system.

Why would you name a world ‘Festival’ anyway? Did they suppose it would be an endless party?

The surface of Festival 4 was a far cry from the rolling dead fields of Grisworld 2. The process of converting the planet from a lush rainforest into arable farmland hadn’t even been started yet, so far as Sylvas could tell. Everywhere that he looked, there was dense forest, overrun with vines and creepers. Actually finding somewhere to touch down safely would have been impossible if they didn’t have mages on board. It took only a momentary distraction from steering for him to cast Gravity Spike and create a massive crop circle out of the jungle, crushing the dying trees, undergrowth, and everything else flat into a cushion for them to land on. It was a gentler landing than they’d had anywhere else, with a little springiness still left in the rapidly drying wood that had crosshatched flat beneath them.

“Alright, kid, you and me are going to take a walk while your friends get themselves battle-ready.” Hector turned to the other two. “We don’t carry a lot of showy gear, but if you have a browse through the catalogue on your slates, I should be able to find anything you think you can use in the ship’s storage. Beyond that, grab whatever you usually use out of your cold storage before sticky-fingers Sylvas lifts it. The second we hit Consortium space, it’s going to be a fight.”

They made their way back through the ship to the ramp, and Hector helped himself to an oxygen mask, offering one to Sylvas out of habit before remembering that he could basically survive in the vacuum of space at this point. “Never going to stop being weird.”

Sylvas shrugged his shoulders. “Imagine how I feel, not needing to breathe most of the time.”

Once they were out on the planet’s surface, Hector stretched his arms wide, then twisted his neck from side to side until it cracked. “Always feels cramped in there, even though there is plenty of space, you know?”

Tell him to do that again, with his shirt off.

Sylvas very carefully ignored Mira. “I can’t say that I’ve noticed, but much of our time on Strife was underground or indoors.”

Hector laughed. “Come on, you’ve got all that power, and you never feel like you want to cut loose?”

“I suppose that I’m accustomed to being restrained.” Sylvas wasn’t sure where this conversation was headed, even if they were apparently headed out into the jungle. Hector began pushing trees out of his way, and as dry as they were, they shattered apart into splinters as they went.

“Well, I get tired of it all. I want to let it all out. Everything that I can do, and I never get to do it. It’s exhausting.” Hector continued his rampage off into the jungle, and Sylvas had no choice but to follow.

“So we’ve come to this planet… which is already abandoned and dying, so that you can unleash your power without fear of harming anyone.” Sylvas had caught up eventually, both to the conversation and to Hector.

“Yeah, something like that.” Hector dusted some tree fragments off his hands.

“How far do we have to be from the ship before you’d consider it safe?” Sylvas asked as Mira made her calculations.

Hector glanced back. “Another hour out?”

Very carefully, Sylvas stepped in front of his mentor and began to cast. The usual gravity shear was liable to blast them both with sawdust, and his focused one would only mildly accelerate the process of hacking through the woods. Combining the focused gravity shear with the spellform of his trusty old arcane arrows from before he’d even found his affinity made something new. 

A sickle blade like the ones made of death that Malachai threw around manifested itself slowly from Sylvas’ hand, and with one final word, he launched it forward. In a line, at just above ankle height, the trees were sheared through. A passage wide enough for the two of them to walk comfortably, shoulder to shoulder, stretched out ahead of them until it vanished over the horizon. Sylvas’ mana reserves were depleted almost a quarter of the way, but almost instantly, he began to feel them refilling and simultaneously came to recognize why so much of his mana had been spent in what shouldn’t have been that expensive a casting. 

Almost half of the mana suspended in his core was no longer gravity affinity. 

It was a kind that he’d never encountered before. One that he couldn’t even really perceive because it was so alien. It was war affinity mana. The kind that only the eidolons of war drew on, and which he had only just barely begun to channel. He hadn’t noticed it flowing into him and gathering along with all the other kinds that he drew in, and usually, because he couldn’t interact with it, it would have just dissipated back into the environment. Now it filled him, clogging up the space that he’d usually have filled to the brim with solid gravity mana. It halved his capacity. The speed at which he was now regaining mana, thanks to the etherium his unique ability produced in proximity to an eidolon, and the mana flowing out from Strife itself was so great that even at half capacity, he was still more powerful than he’d ever been before, but it still startled him. He wondered if this was how others with mixed affinities had to manage things.

“Race you, kid!” Hector called back over his shoulder as he took off running, and Sylvas, startled out of his thoughts by the sudden motion, took longer than he should have to start off running after him, before remembering a second later that the path had been made for the other man’s benefit because Sylvas could fly.

He caught up to Hector with almost contemptuous ease, his reinforced body capable of withstanding windshear that would have stripped off his skin before he’d changed. He flew along just in front of his mentor.

You should really clap and encourage him to go faster. That would be polite.

It seemed Mira was still feeling a little bitter about the breakfast conversation, but Sylvas did put on another little extra turn of speed and waved goodbye as he did so to placate Mira. Not because it amused him.

Faster than either of them might have expected, he arrived at the far end of the path that he’d cut, so far ahead that the ship was gone from sight over the curve of the world, and Hector had dipped over the horizon, too. With another cast, Sylvas struck down with a gravity spike, as wide as he could make it, and leveled another vast circle of forest, ramping up the gravity just a little more than he had before to ensure that the mat of ruined forest stayed entirely flat. He didn’t much fancy the idea of tripping up in the middle of a fight.

Hector hadn’t said that they were going to fight, of course, but Sylvas knew. He could feel it in his gut. With one colossal leap, the man cleared the final distance between where he’d been and where Sylvas stood. A jump from beyond the horizon, easily far enough from the ship now that they could both unleash their full power without risking hurting anyone else. He landed with little more than a bend in his knees and met Sylvas with a grin. “Looks like you run away really well. That’ll come in handy later.”

Sylvas chuckled and brought up his hands, ready to cast.

Once more, Hector leapt, closing that last little bit of distance between them in a single bound and delivering a punch to Sylvas’ hastily raised arms that would have shattered them not so long ago. It sent Sylvas skidding back. He hadn’t prepared any spells, nor did he mean to until Hector started casting. It had been a long time since he’d had a decent workout, and a brawl with a fifth-circle mage with an eidolon alligator living in his soul seemed like the best he could hope for in lieu of a gym.

The next time Hector surged in, Sylvas dodged to the side, sending a jab of his own into the other man’s ribs. With a twist of his body, Hector avoided it, letting Sylvas’ arm extend out behind his back, then throwing himself back into it in a sudden switch of direction that spun them both. He tried to bring his arm around and lock Sylvas’ against him, but he was too slow, and soon the two of them were both dancing away from each other, still circling. 

Sylvas went on the offensive, jumping at Hector’s left side, then using his inherent flight to swing himself around to the other and slam a fist in past his guard. Once more, Hector proved surprisingly fast, his head ducking forward to miss the punch and then his jaws snapping shut where Sylvas’ wrist would have been if he hadn’t jerked it back when he realized he’d missed.

Hector let out a laugh that sounded joyous in a way Sylvas wasn’t used to hearing, then his mentor ducked his head down, rammed his shoulder into Sylvas’ guts, and wrapped his arms around him, trying to drive him to the ground. Sylvas brought both fists down on the man’s back, once with the usual force he used when fighting, and then, realizing how powerful his opponent was, a second time, with his full strength. Hector caved under the blow, losing his grip. But some part of Sylvas was not done yet. The anger that had been simmering beneath the surface ever since Strife came up to meet him, and when Hector tried to pull himself free, he couldn’t. Sylvas had seized hold of him with the pull of gravity and was bringing his fists down on the man, again and again, shifting mass until each blow rang out so loud it made all the dying trees around the outside of their hastily flattened arena sway with the impact.

Power washed off Hector as he invoked his eidolon, calling on its strength to counter the raw magic of Sylvas’ pull, but he still wasn’t done. He brought one hand down on Hector’s back, and for a moment, he was entirely unsurprised to see that it now showed red claws. They dug into Hector, through skin and hooked in his ribcage, so when he tried to pull away, he couldn’t. Sylvas’ other fist curled, the blood from the gashes he’d just put in Hector’s back trickling straight up to orbit it. And when he brought the next punch down, it knocked the other covenant mage down to his knees, tearing him off the claw that faded as fast as it had appeared.

Following all that up with a swift kick to the head should have put an end to the whole fight, but Hector rolled back out of reach, staggering to his feet and casting something instantly and wordlessly to stitch the wounds in his back and calling on the dead trees around him to call them to his aid. The flattened jungle beneath their feet bloomed back to sudden life, and a wall shot up between Hector and the rapidly advancing Sylvas.

The man was speaking, but Sylvas could barely hear it over the roar of blood in his ears. “Good! I thought a little fight might bring your puppy out. Help the two of you synchronize. You’ll be through the first phase of your covenant in no ti—”

He never got to the end of his sentence. The same sickle of gravity that had carved away the great swathe of forest to bring them here had manifested itself again to carve through the living shield he had thrown up. Hector barely had time to throw himself to the ground to avoid it before Sylvas came leaping over the fallen wall to grab for him again.

Red, bloodied claws slammed into the ground where Hector should have lain, but the mage had teleported away, putting some distance between them. “Nice one! You got me with that. But maybe you should wind down a little before somebody gets hurt.”

The jovial tone seemed mocking to Sylvas’ ears, and Mira, usually the voice of reason when emotion overwhelmed him, was just as furious with Hector after the way he’d mistreated her.

Get him.