Artorian's Archives Omnibus

by Dennis Vanderkerken

  On days where there was no archery, Artorian joined in on hand-to-hand training. What should have been self-defense was instead an onslaught. Keeper Irene had decided that on those days, she needed to relieve some stress. Great anticipation spread through the camp like wildfire anytime the call went out. “Artorian is fighting Irene!”

  The first fight they’d ever had set the pace, the betting rate, and the guaranteed high-attendance rate as several of the Initiates went full-fanboy.

  “I am done with you. I have had it.” Irene power-walked on to the field and threw her papers to the ground. That was the first sign that told everyone something was amiss, and it momentarily hushed them as it stole attention. The second sign was that she erupted into a Choir combat-chant and charged right at the gi-clad old man without so much as a warning.

  A roaring outburst boomed from the excited Acolytes, followed by a collective gasp from the Initiates as they were about to see a slow, old man get decked in the face hard enough to send him flying farther than Keeper Kendra. To their amazement, Artorian held aloft a single finger. With a small, circling inner arc, he pushed on Irene’s wrist as she flew by. His left foot shifted backward; his right shoulder pivoted to fill the space she’d previously been occupying. Her punch missed wide, her balance was gone, and Irene barreled right into the mud with all the velocity she’d built up.

  Artorian just blinked, quizzically observing his finger while stroking his beard. “Peculiar. Is that how this works?”

  Fury embodied shoved upward with a wet *thud*. Covered in mud, the irate Keeper didn’t care if that was a fluke. The surprise humiliation filled her with blind, irrational rage. She pounced on him with all the ferocity of a Morovian Liger, which just so happened to be the name for her particular combat-style. “Artorian!”

  It was a back and forth that was difficult to follow until the old man slipped and failed a block or deflection, unable to get in a single offensive strike on her while Irene continued pounding him like a hung slab of meat. “You. Messed. Up. My. Filing. System!”

  He took quite the pummeling, and the clamor of many acolytes hesitantly died down while they watched the one-sided beatdown. At the end of the bout, the old man didn’t need his robe in order to look blue. He was wheezing, on his back, and in a layer of plowed mud. He’d been the plow.

  Irene wasn’t satisfied with a single day of sparring. Oh no. This Elder had caused her significant administrational grief. She’d taken exception to that and would not let it go easily.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Every other day, Irene fielded her combat expertise like clockwork. The winner was always easy to discern. Irene was without equal during practice, yet there were definite moments where she did not have the upper hand. The happenings were sporadic and sudden, but certain attacks Irene launched at Artorian found that an unexpectedly perfect counter awaited them.

  Not only did she fail to strike the intended target, the blow was redirected back on her. This threw her off balance, dropping her to the muddy ground that Artorian usually found himself in. The first time the old man had done it on purpose, he’d raised both fists to the sky and excitedly burst out a, “Wooo-hooo!”

  His momentary elation led to a mistake. He paraded the short-lived victory to the lauding cheers and cries of observing Choir members. When his gaze met his caretaker’s, on the other hand… Artorian noted she was looking past him rather than at him. “Oh, dear.”

  He could tell she mouthed the words ‘get him’ just before his stomach and face dropped. The shadow of a tigress loomed over him before he took an all-too-familiar skidding trip across the mudscape with a noisy *fhwa-pwap*!

  Sure, there were clerics on standby for patch-up duty, but Keepers hit hard. This was trial-by-fire as far as getting the rust off from fighting-skills was concerned. On more than one occasion, a booming crash and stilled body hushed the crowd. Clearly, they thought he was finally struck hard enough that he’d kicked the bucket. Then a thin arm moved, and a persevering thumbs up showed to the sky. The crowd was always instantly cleared of their concern, and they’d release another boisterous cheer. Which, of course, only served to agitate Irene further.

  With increasing regularity, Irene’s more deadly strikes were deflected or ignored entirely. Then a counterattack hammered into her frame. These cacophony-causing counters made their fans go wild! It also had them duck for cover against the inevitable mud-wave that came after it. A few weeks in, a makeshift wooden wall had been erected around the mud pit. Makeshift due to it getting wrecked almost daily. It prevented a good amount of mess but getting some mud on you had become part of the experience.

  Fan clubs had secretly begun to develop. People who showed up in some cheap variant of blue backed the old man, while people who showed up in full regalia backed the Keeper. When asked what sort of style he was using, Artorian didn’t understand their question. “Style?”

  A fan-Initiate scribed things down with enthusiasm. “Yeah! Are you using Sabertooth Claw Strikes Angry Bird, Heaven’s Palm, or Splitting Mountain? We’re debating in our tents where your fighting type might be from. Popular theory is that it has Phoenix Kingdom influences. A few of us were fans of coliseum events before joining the Choir. We’ve got quite a collection of fighters and their moves. Irene’s fan club found out she uses a style based on a ferocious creature from her homeland, Morovia.”

  The old man considered the query but still wasn’t following. He didn’t quite know where or what this ‘Coliseum’ was. He’d been out of the world-news loop for… a long time. “I didn’t get this from anywhere, my dear. I’m just building it as I go. All I’m really doing is preventing Irene from getting a solid hit on me, so I suppose you could just call it ‘No’?”

  That got a laugh from the fans, but when they wrote it down as ‘No Style’, it thwarted their desires as that meant something entirely different. To their aggravation, after having a glance at the writ, the long beard had a good laugh and refused to call it anything else. A few of these clever fan-Acolytes had puzzled out he’d been doing something with Essence sight in order to give himself an edge. It was the only way they could explain some of the odd mid-fight mannerisms.

  During bouts, Artorian had to wipe his eyes after he managed to fully deflect a hit from Irene. He would call out numbers to Yvessa that made absolutely zero sense to anyone else. “Twenty-two IR is insufficient! Note that for me, would you?”

  During one match where he was sternly decked in the schnozz—in addition to crying out in pain—Artorian rose with a bloody nose from the mud and kicked at it. Mad that ‘Air is entirely useless,’ whatever that may have been about. Another gem was a complete pause in the middle of a fight where he just pushed his hands over his eyes and doubled over. “All that blood is driving me bonkers! It doesn't tell me anything useful! *Argh*!”

  The Initiates wrote it off as the old man being just a teensy bit senile, while the Acolytes chalked it to some kind of distraction or delay tactic. Artorian kept private notes—ones that he’d only jot down when Yvessa wasn’t present to spy. In truth, he’d been using evening practice to feel out combinations of Essence sight. Not everything worked, and some things that did work were utterly useless. Being able to see air currents did nothing useful during hand-to-hand combat, unlike during archery.

  Awareness of the cycle of liquid in a system was no good, and infrared and ultraviolet only gave him horrible headaches if it wasn’t already night. Light-vision was a trip, and while it was good for determining if something occupied a space or not, it was terrible in a fight when your opponent was a pitch-black lump.

  The only truly useful sight was the costly one—muscle sight—which allowed him to predict the motions that would be coming at him. The mixture of celestial, fire, and water taxed his eyes, actually drained Essence even if he cycled it, and gave him a killer headache. All for minimal returns.

  Stacking roughly five sets of the correct kind of Essence allowed him to deduce a zero-point-one-second pr
ediction based on muscle, Essence movements in the opponent’s system, some golden glow outlines he didn’t understand, and where the body was going to be forced to go because of it. At best, he could stack it fifteen times for a zero-point-three-second prediction, and he’d gotten lucky with it the first time—when Irene made that first lunge on him in the field.

  He’d clearly seen a golden outline of her entire frame about to collide fist first with his face. Artorian had reflexively pushed Essence up along his arm, wrist, hand, and finger as a temporary boost. When his finger impacted the side of her wrist, he’d been able to push the golden outline away as reality caught up to it. Then he simply stepped out of the way as Irene flew past him. The cost had forced him to turn it off immediately, but the results had been spectacular.

  Being beaten by Irene was certainly painful and left quite the patchwork of bruises. However, having a skilled combatant as your opponent had its upsides—learning was faster and more in-depth. The fact that she didn’t pull her punches was a deterrent for the Initiates but a boon to the aged Artorian who needed a crash course in survival. Not being hit was ideal, but ideal was usually far from reality. He had greater success denying Irene an attack than he did landing one on his own.

  Her masterful control of Essence was a true mosaic of muscle-infusing at specific times and with precision-measured amounts. Enough to beat him… but not break him.

  Artorian was forced to be on the defensive, and that needed to change. Finally, it came to him. It was the way arrows launched that had given him the idea, and the lessons from how he managed to counter Irene reinforced the thought. If you could at all deduce what an opponent might do, they had a disadvantage against you. An arrow took that window of opportunity away as it accelerated and struck a target before one had a chance to react. So… why not become the arrow?

  It was a chilly day when Artorian stepped on the training field again. Several healer Acolytes came prepared with the usual array of minor potions, and he was administered one before ever getting started. Both he and Irene did a full set of warm-up stretches as the empty space around the field filled up with clerics.

  “Want anything special today, old man? You been wanting new teeth? I bet we could get your hair to be pretty if I ripped that scraggly beard off and we regrew the hair from new follicles!” Irene taunted from the other side of the field as Artorian was doing in-place jumps on solid ground.

  He stopped and took a stance in reply. Irene took this as a challenge, just as she always did when he signaled he was ready. Her advance was calculated and confident, a tigress’s smile on her face. She was going to maul him today.

  Artorian focused and began applying his theory. He pulled Essence from his Center and spooled it through his spine, reinforcing it. More went into his legs, gathering around the bone to prevent shattering and funneling into the muscle for raw output. As much as he could stomach was filtered to his ankle for flexibility, while a significant amount was rammed into the front of his foot and toes. When running, the amount of force you could put down determined just how fast your forward push would be. He’d discovered he could amplify that force and really shoot forwards if he kept a constant cycle of energy.

  That’s not what was happening today. Smoothly cycling was being set aside. This was a burst. A quick, sudden, and explosive *boom* cracked the air around them. A spherical indent formed in the mud. Essence was pushed along his right arm to form a channel as the movement began, surrounding the bone and reinforcing the wrist… just in case. He opened the Essence channel on his right palm…

  The sheer force of the send-off split the muddied ground into a tiny canyon from where he’d stood a moment ago. The steaming mud was forced away, and his vision became completely unreliable as the world devolved into a sharp set of lines from the extreme, burning increase in speed. Only Essence sight was providing his brain information quickly enough to operate on.

  The attack was a straight-shot launch, Artorian’s body brushing against the air and irritating it severely, causing extra-flammable parts of him to burn. His on-fire body-made-projectile reappeared when he planted the pivot foot. He buzzed back into focus in front of a wide-eyed Irene whose surprised expression was matched only by the haste with which she erected Essence defenses.

  Sight returned as the sheer kinetic might of all that velocity twisted and spun up from his leg, carried through the spine, funneled through his reinforced arm, and hammered into her chest through his open palm. A noise similar to a thunderclap matched the point of impact. The devastating blow struck her sternum directly. All the velocity and kinetic energy he’d built up… transferred.

  The technique had been exhausting, incomplete, and terribly flawed. Still, Irene had a sudden lesson in flight as she was launched forty-two feet into the air at an upward angle. She easily cleared the height of the far wall on the farm end of the cloister. With a sopping *whap*, Irene rolled dozens of feet through wet grass as she landed. Artorian collapsed from the effort, not even realizing he was on fire. Snapping out of their stunned and rooted positions, clerics ran over to throw buckets of water over his burning frame. Fans hopped the fence on all sides, and entire platoons of Acolytes sprinted to the side of both combatants.

  A half-unconscious Artorian had found a handful of drawbacks and problems with the technique immediately. He was bleeding from his nose, eyes, ears, and… more private and chafed areas. Even with reinforcement, it had hurt him tremendously. He was administered several healing potions and prompt celestial care. When he was lucid enough to give the usual shaky thumbs-up, the surrounding crowd erupted in a cheer! They didn’t grasp the extent of the damage; regardless of how self-destructive that may have been, it had looked awesome!

  When Irene was recovered from the fields, she too was immediately escorted to the medical block. Hadurin had his work cut out for him. The strike hadn’t just broken her sternum, it had pulverized it. He could and would mend it with time, but he gave Artorian a few harmless whacks on his concussed head while firmly telling him to never do that again. Several of the old man’s tendons had significant tears in them, he had bone fractures, and a slew of other minor internal and external injuries that accelerating oneself to stupid speeds caused.

  Luckily for Irene, her chest could be reconstructed with the combined help of nearly every healer at the cloister and a good number of potions. Still, she felt the damage when she woke, and the leftover bruise was a thing of beauty. It ached like the call of the abyss, and she groaned, “What,” she coughed, and oh, celestial did it hurt, “was that?”

  Artorian was awake and recovering in the cot next to her. He was in equally not-great shape. He was pleased as punch to have the opportunity to lay this one on her, tossing her words back at her.

  “Something special.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Olgier, the red-haired trader from Rutsel, was having a fantastic season! Those boors at Lapis didn’t know the value of their product had risen sky-high. He’d just bought and sold at the same stock price he always did. He’d made a killing! With rocks!

  To build profits even higher, that salty village Elder at the cloister had just given him some information worth its weight in gold. Olgier’s money-loving voice oozed mercantilism as his hairy hand pressed to Artorian’s shoulder. “Really? An anti-venom against the stuff raiders have been using? That is truly a celestial blessing.”

  His gap-toothed smile gleamed at some passing Initiates who picked through the bundled wares on his cart. Using the local vernacular was always of benefit. Artorian had a grumpy expression smeared across his face. Small, little grumbles emanated from the old man.

  “They very much did, and not a copper of it is going to the village. Not a copper!” He huffed again with a finger waggle for effect and leaned into Olgier’s side. “It’s time to go, I tell you. A few days before your next visit, the expedition force is leaving.”

  Olgier felt a rush at the little prizes just falling into his lap. Was it a holiday? The tr
ader felt rushes of skewed pleasure at the physical outburst of the venting old man. “Leaving? Surely not. Taking their findings to their Choir, you mean.”

  “No. They’re. Not!” Long Beard’s gnarled walking stick swung through the air a few times, demonstrating apparent frustration. “They’re leaving it here to be finished, and they’ll be back only when it’s done. Something about ‘bureaucracy and paperwork’ requiring them to only leave a token force behind, since the majority of the expedition must return.”

  Artorian leaned back in closer to whisper in Olgier’s ear, “Next time you visit, could you drop me off at Rutsel? I can have all my important things packed in no more than a handful of sacks. I’d pay for the trip, of course.”

  Olgier gave a supportive pat to the old man’s shoulder, nearly knocking a very wobbly Artorian off his feet. Silly him! He didn’t know his own strength some days. “Of course, of course.”

  Schemes were already flying about his brain. He could say he was taking the old man to Rutsel, but… if he took just a minor detour… that would put them in ‘business partner’ territory.

  Nobody would miss an old man. Plus, his life’s most valuable gatherings were going to be right in his hooded cart? Not to mention that untarnishable Lapis robe which hung over the Elder’s other clothing? An absolute steal.

  Artorian let out a relieved sigh and pulled some packets from his side. “These are the last letters. I’ve written in them that I likely won’t be sending monthly mail anymore, as I’ll be traveling. Hopefully, it should prevent the Choir and the Academy from getting worried. This first parcel ought to be delivered to Paladin Jiivra at the Choir. I’m sure she’s made it by now. The other still goes to the Skyspear Academy and isn’t addressed to anyone in particular. I’m certain they’ve got a library section for my writings now.”