by Andrew Rowe
They’d taken a tower and turned it into a fortress.
Strategically, I could respect that. Their team was coordinated, and it meant their team was highly likely to remain high enough in the rankings to pass the test.
I suspected I knew the cause — this area contained the people who’d bought an advantage for a match and picked the same team. Or a good number of them, at least. A coordinated team like that could be devastating.
I sheathed Dawn and walked closer.
Eyes turned toward me as I approached. Several weapons were drawn, and I could feel arrows focusing on me — not just from the archers atop the small battlements on the walls, but from the tower itself as well. They’d made arrow slits in the walls. Clever.
There was a part of me that was tempted to just toss caution to the wind and charge. It would be fun to fight that many people at once. I rarely had a chance to do something on that scale, and there was a part of me that itched to try it.
But I was here to win, and occasionally that meant conceding that strategy was necessary when dealing with overwhelming numbers and force.
I raised my hands as I approached, glancing around and judging positions. Angles of attack, areas of weakness.
“You here to switch teams?” One of the flag wearers up front asked.
I pondered that question. Could we switch teams? I didn’t think there was a way of doing that.
Either way, I wasn’t interested. Red was currently winning, which meant it would be far more fun to beat them if I stayed on a team with a lower score.
“Nothing like that.” I kept walking closer. People tensed, but still, no one attacked. Most people were acclimated to the idea that you don’t attack someone with their hands raised, and I was grateful for that.
“Stop there.” Someone else walked up front, wearing heavy armor and carrying huge two-handed mace. His blonde hair was cut short, military style. “State your business.”
I grinned. “You look pretty strong. You in charge?”
“I’m one of the leaders here. State your business or leave. You have five seconds.”
I nodded. “I’m here to challenge your leader to a duel.”
He raised an eyebrow. “With what purpose?”
“For the tower, obviously. We’re here to prove we’re the best candidates for Diamantine, yes? Certainly your leader wouldn’t feel the need to hide behind an army.”
And there it was. They’d let me talk. Now, they had a few responses. Where I came from, challenging someone like that was tough to walk away from. If they had anything like the kind of pride that I did—
“Shoot him.”
It’s possible I had underestimated some of our cultural differences.
Arrows flew at me from a half-dozen directions at once.
I grabbed the first pair out of the air with my bare hands, then flipped them and used them to deflect the others.
There were a few wide-eyed stares as I concentrated on the metallic tips, then hurled the arrows at the two closest fighters.
I was almost as surprised as they were.
A few weeks ago, I couldn’t have pulled off that maneuver. I could have grabbed one or two arrows, maybe, with some effort. But that move had felt natural, easy. My bond with Dawnbringer had made me fast, and I was only getting faster with every passing day.
To their credit, the fighter on the left got his shield up in time to block my hurled arrow. The other guy didn’t, but the arrow simply slowed as it passed through his shroud and bounced harmlessly off his lightweight armor.
Still, they looked pretty stunned. That gave me a moment to charge forward and punch the commander-looking guy in the face. I felt my fist slow as it passed through his shroud...but not a lot.
I left him sprawling on the ground, dodged a hurled spear, and heard a crack in the air.
Bullets, apparently, were still just a bit too fast for me to dodge if I didn’t seem them coming.
I felt the impact against my left shoulder, grunted, and charged the stone wall.
Body of Stone.
I took glancing blows from two spears and three swords as I rushed forward. None of them managed to break my stone mana reinforced skin.
And then I burst straight through that wall and rushed onward to the tower door.
The archers above spun, but most of them loosed too early. The two arrows that hit bounced straight off me.
A fireball flew down the opening at the top of the tower. I waved a hand and dispersed it.
Then I was at the tower entrance, or at least, in front of the two sword-and-shield carrying guards in the way.
Dawn flew into my grip.
Dawn, brace yourself.
The first guard advanced. I stepped in, Dawn flashing up, and smacked his blade with mine.
Break.
The guard’s sword snapped.
His friend stepped in and stabbed at the same time, a glowing distortion field manifesting around it as he moved. I side-stepped just in time to avoid a swing that made a zing as it cut through the air next to me.
I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew I didn’t want to get hit by it.
Another arrow. I caught it with my off-hand and threw it at zing-sword-guy. He blocked it with his shield.
Broken-sword-guy stepped in and tried to shield bash me. I grabbed the rim of his shield and yanked it right out of his hands, used it to smack another two arrows out of the way, and then hurled it into the path of another fireball from above. The fireball exploded against the shield, and I quickly shaped the remnants of the flame away from me.
Then I rammed into broken-sword-guy, shoulder first, and slammed him against the tower wall.
He gave an “oof”, slumped against the ground, and I side-stepped to avoid another zing-sword slice.
That glowing aura trail left a cut in the wall as it missed me, which I looked at with sincere admiration. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who appreciated a good wall cutting sword technique.
Another fireball. I jumped back, then swung Dawn upward.
Radiant Dawn.
Nothing happened. I’d run her out of mana.
The fireball exploded on top of me. I reacted instinctively, pushing away most of the flame. When it ended, I was singed and temporarily blinded, but not on fire.
I heard a zing and dodged, still half-blind, and barely avoided being gutted.
For the next few seconds, I forced my eyes shut to recover.
Then, in the blackness, I felt the metal approaching me. I felt each new source of fire.
And with Dawn’s presence lending me focus, I moved.
A cut to my left. Step. A blast of flame from above. Step.
Two arrows from my right. Cut. Cut.
Two more swordsmen from outside the wall had caught up with me, and were attacking from behind. I spun, parried, and commanded metal. Their swords snapped in twain.
Crack. Another bullet approaching.
Magnetic repulse.
I heard someone grunt in the distance.
Zing.
My sword flew up and parried his.
Then my eyes were open again — and my opponent’s were horrified.
With a twist of my wrist, I disarmed him. Then I kicked his shield, sending him sprawling, and rushed inside the tower.
I crashed straight into a mage-looking guy who was chanting in some kind of foreign language. I still have no idea what he was trying to do, but when I bowled him over, he hit the ground hard and didn’t get back up.
Then I was at the circular stairway, rushing up with as much speed as I could muster. My eyes still burned, but I could see well enough to keep my balance.
[One hour has elapsed. Current score: Blue 1, Green 1, Red 4.]
I was just a bit too late for this round. I cursed, but kept running. I still had a full hour left, and anything could still happen.
I charged straight into the lunge of a spear-wielder on the stairway, adjusted to make
her miss, and grabbed the shaft of her spear on the way. With a twist of my wrist, I snapped her weapon, then smacked her across the face with the broken half.
She fell off the stairway. I winced as I heard her hit the ground, but I heard her stirring almost immediately. Shrouds did a lot to absorb impacts in general, including falling.
She was up and pursing me — along with four or five other people who were already on the stairs — a few moments later.
Blearily, I realized as I rushed upward that this entire plan was terrible. Even if I took the top of the tower, I couldn’t possibly hold it against this many people on my own.
I’d been hoping challenging the leader would get them to walk away. When it hadn’t and they’d attacked, I’d gone with my first instinct — attack back harder — and that probably hadn’t been circumstantially ideal.
But I was half way up the stairs at that point, so I decided to make the best of it.
I smashed my foot down and commanded the stone.
Collapse.
With that, the section of the stairway beneath me fell apart.
One of the soldiers actually managed to leap across the growing gap as the stairway began to fall apart, swinging at me. I commended her for the effort as I caught her sword in my left hand, snapped it, and kicked her right back off into the gap.
For a moment, I was alone on the stairs. I continued running upward, deflecting an arrow fired from below.
About three quarters of the way up, I sensed metal to my side, seemingly from the opposite side of the wall. I shifted to deflect an incoming attack, but the metal didn’t move.
At first, I thought it might be a trap. Then, I remembered what I’d seen on the map.
I smashed a fist into the wall.
Instead, I found a tiny, silver-lined treasure box.
I slashed it in half. I wasn’t going to take the risk it was another one of those awful nope boxes. As it fell apart, I spun back around to deflect two more incoming arrows, side-stepped a bullet, and turned back to the box.
Inside the box, I found a glimmering blue orb. I snagged it, hastily pushed it in a bag, dodged a blast of ice that crashed into the wall next to me, and rushed up the stairway.
Then I ran upward, almost straight into a blistering hot sphere of golden flame. With a moment of effort, I commanded it to turn aside.
It didn’t.
Apparently, this one was a somewhat more determined fireball.
The golden glow probably should have been a hint, in retrospect.
When the fireball exploded, it hurled me backward. I fell, burning, and barely managed to grip the side of the stairway that I hadn’t already destroyed.
My opponent descended the stairs a moment later. She was a woman about my age, maybe a hint older, with black skin and a long, elegant cane.
She lifted the cane with a flourish, then set it up against her shoulder. Her expression remained neutral. “You’ve made quite a mess of my tower.”
I grunted, trying to pull myself up.
She whipped her hand downward, firing a tiny blast of intensely concentrated flame at my left hand. My right, of course, was still desperately clinging to Dawn.
I couldn’t deflect it — Dawn didn’t have the mana.
I couldn’t dodge.
I couldn’t shape it. The mana was too concentrated.
That left me with few options. I could let go, falling into a pit of my enemies, or... I could do something I was supposed to be avoiding.
Vanish forever.
A cutting aura extended from my left hand, meeting with the flame and tearing it apart. In a moment of effort, I pulled myself up the rest of the way, then swung Dawn upward to sever another jolt of flame.
I stared at my opponent as three swirling orbs appeared around her.
Why do I have to keep running into people who are better at flame sorcery than I am?
She smiled, pointing her cane at me. Flame glimmered on the tip, glowing brighter by the moment. “I’m Antonia Hartigan. And you are?”
Oh. It had to be a Hartigan, didn’t it?
Of course she’s a better sorcerer than me. Of course she took a tower for herself.
I raised Dawnbringer in salute. “Keras Selyrian. When this is over, I’d love to talk.”
She gave me an amused expression. “When this is over, I don’t think you’ll be able to talk.”
I did what you’re usually supposed to do with a talky mage and lunged at her.
A wall of flame erupted between us, blocking my path. I barely managed to check myself before running into it, then two flame spheres flew through it, growing brighter with every moment.
Dawn? Mana check?
I hurled myself off the stairwell just before the fireballs exploded.
I didn’t have the strength to fight her fire with fire.
Instead, I jumped straight off the stairs and toward the wall below Hartigan.
I slammed into the wall, pushing my left hand into it.
Grip. The stone shifted, making me a hand-hold.
Then I concentrated, focusing on the structure of the tower — and reshaped the stairway right below Hartigan.
She dropped as the floor vanished beneath her.
A moment later, I was awkwardly sheathing Dawn, grunting, and trying to grab onto the wall with my other hand.
Another moment and Hartigan was hovering in the air next to me, shaking her head. “A clever trick. It’s very easy to forget that Elementalists can fly.”
“I actually didn’t know—”
That was all I managed before her blast of flame crashed into me with enough force to blast me all the way through the tower wall.
I fell outside the tower. I’d only made it about half way up, but it was still a painful landing. Fortunately, my Body of Stone was still active, and that absorbed both some of the damage from the fire and the fall.
Less fortunately, I was now back at the bottom of the tower and outside it, and I knew that my opponents would be rushing around it to corner me at any moment later.
In retrospect, assaulting towers on my own may be a bad strategy.
I could handle a few ordinary fighters without much difficulty, but Hartigan was powerful enough that I suspected she would have made a difficult opponent for me on her own. With a dozen people helping her, as well as a defensible position?
Forget it.
I pushed myself to my feet, winced at the pain in my arm from where the bullet had hit me earlier, and then turned and ran.
The outer wall wasn’t far — I pushed my destructive aura outward, burst through it, and kept running.
Release Body of Stone.
Without Body of Stone active, my defenses were weaker, but I was faster. Far too fast for pursuit, unless someone like Hartigan decided to fly after me.
She didn’t.
A few arrows flew after me, but none of them connected.
Within a few minutes, I was on my own in a grove of trees out of sight of the tower.
Well, I considered as I brushed the smoke stains off my clothing, that could have been worse.
***
Metal sorcery had many uses. One of my favorites was that it was a great way to shrink, then extract, any particular piece of metal that happened to be stuck in my body.
In this case, that was a bullet in one shoulder and a single arrow in my back that I couldn’t remember hitting me.
I grunted as I concentrated on reshaping the metal, then cast the pieces aside. Immediately, my shadeweave tunic shifted to re-cover the wounds after the foreign materials were extracted.
I’d heal fast. Not within the next hour, but fast.
I took five minutes to sit, drink water, and rest. Charging straight back at that tower without support would have been terribly foolish.
No, not the kind of foolish that I decided to go ahead and do it anyway. While admittedly I’m prone to that sort of thing from time to time — I dislike giving up on anyt
hing — winning the match was a considerably higher priority, and I didn’t like my odds.
I briefly considered just trying to wreck the entire top of the tower from a distance, but that didn’t seem sportsmanlike. More importantly, my only means of doing that sort of thing was projecting my destructive aura, and I knew there was a good chance I’d actually kill someone if I hit someone with it. I wasn’t going to take that risk.
Instead, I grunted and headed toward the other tower I hadn’t visited.
It was a long walk. That meant time was passing, which was good for my wounds and recovering from the fatigue of using so much sorcery, but bad for my team’s score.
Along the way, I ran into two more groups of red flag-wearers. I wasn’t sure if that was because they’d pursued me from the tower I’d fled from or just a coincidence.
Either way, neither patrol contained a Hartigan.
I walked away with six more red flags.
That was pretty good, but it wouldn’t help if I couldn’t improve my team’s score. I hoped that switching targets would help.
When I reached the other tower, I paused to immediately question my choice.
My eyes were not actually okay — they were still pretty hurt from fire exploding in my face — but what she was referring to was the fact that the next entire tower was encased in some kind of shimmering green crystal.
So were all the people outside. Over a dozen people were trapped inside that crystal, with only their heads exposed.
At a glance, they had flags from all three teams.
Reika wasn’t one of them, at least.
I made my way to the base of the tower. One of the people with a blue flag shouted out to me. “Don’t! It’s impossible. The Green Guardian is up there!”
I sighed. “The comic character.” It was more of a statement than a question. I remembered what Reika had told me, and I remembered how incredulous I’d been.
Well, Reika. You win that round.
“Yeah, he’s, like, real. And, uh, really strong. And invincible.”
I smiled.
Finally.