by Gage Lee
“There’s something else,” he said, breathing hard and watching me over his sword. “Don’t look at me like that.”
We went back to circling one another, searching for any signs of weakness. Eric’s serpents rose from his shoulders, their sinuous lengths gleaming with fire aspects. That was something I hadn’t seen him do before. I wasn’t sure I liked it.
“Look at you like what?” I asked, hoping to distract him before he flambéed me.
“Like you think I’m hiding something,” he responded.
One of his serpents lashed out at me, the heat so intense it tightened the skin on my face as it passed my nose far too close for comfort.
“You’re not?” I summoned my fusion blade and held it in a high guard position to ward off any more face-burning tricks.
Eric lowered his blade and laughed. “I’m trying to tell you my deep personal feelings here. That’s the exact opposite of keeping secrets.”
Before I could ask for more details, he surprised me with a brand-new tactic.
Bolts of fire lashed out from his serpents. The sizzling blasts ripped through the air all around me. My serpents responded by snatching a handful of them and draining their aspects away. My Thief’s Shield caught a few more, but there were far too many of them for me to deflect or absorb.
And most of them weren’t even aimed at me. The fiery missiles struck the furrowed ground and kicked up globs of molten earth encased in heat-haze halos. A worrying number of those were headed in my direction.
With a bark of surprise, I twisted away from the attacks. My shield drained the heat from Eric’s makeshift projectiles, but that only transformed the molten globs into hard, glassy chunks that pelted me like hailstones. Thanks to my artist-level core, the physical assaults didn’t kill me, but they didn’t feel great, either. A sustained attack like that would hurt.
A lot.
And Eric wasn’t slowing down.
“Touchy much?” I taunted him, shifting into full defense.
Eric’s assault didn’t slow, though, and all my tricks and techniques weren’t enough to protect me from every impact. While no single attack could do enough damage to slow me down, the combined assault was exhausting.
“Stop projecting,” Eric said with a snort. “Tru’s parents don’t want her to have anything to do with a human.”
I spun my fusion blade to knock down another barrage of dirt bullets. “What’s wrong with humans?”
“Ever hear of dragon hunters?” Eric responded, flinging another storm of burning dirt at me.
Though I still couldn’t entirely shield myself from the onslaught, I recognized the problem. The barrage of attacks had overwhelmed my shield. The shield wasn’t powerful enough to defend against the entire attack, so it bled off the most dangerous aspects, fire, rather than speed or power. That kept me from being flash-fried, which was nice, but still left me open to the pummeling rain of crude bullets. I had to figure out some way to stop both sides of the attack if I wanted to win this duel.
And I really, really wanted to win.
“What do dragon hunters have to do with anything?” I asked.
“My family,” he said, punctuating his words with a rain of fiery earth. “My ancestors were excellent at killing dragons back in the day.”
This time I dropped under the attacks to let my Thief’s Shield technique recover. It had nearly reached its limit, and if it failed I’d have no hope of beating Eric. “That makes things tricky. Have you tried talking to them?”
It was Eric’s turn to take a breather. Pushing me to the limit had drained most of his jinsei. We both needed a few seconds to recover before we could continue. “I tried, but they aren’t listening. You know how dragons are. They think they’re smarter and stronger than anyone else and don’t need to listen to puny humans.”
“They’re right,” I admitted. “They’ve been around longer than sacred artists. And they’re far more than a physical match for any human. Why should they listen to us?”
That question had troubled me ever since my discussion with Tru. The dragons could dominate humanity if they really wanted to. It would cost them a lot, there was no doubt about that, but we really had no idea how many of them were in Shambala. Or on Earth. Zephyr had hidden out with humans for years, and no one had been the wiser. As far as I could see, the dragons didn’t need us at all.
Eric let up his attack for a second and put his hands on his hips. “Time out. You think dragons are entirely self-sufficient?”
This was a prime opportunity to push my attack, but I held back. Eric was the most competitive person I knew. If he’d called a temporary truce in our sparring, then what he had to say was important to him.
That made it important to me.
“They’re powerful enough to get by.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you saying they can’t?”
Eric said nothing for a long moment as he eyeballed me. When he finally broke his silence, he chose his words carefully. “You can’t really believe that power is all that matters. People can’t eat jinsei, Jace. Sure, at our level food isn’t that important. But even among the dragons, there aren’t many artists. Most aren’t even disciples. Shambala is a great place, but it can’t survive on its own.”
My friend’s words hung in the air between us. Maybe he had a point. On the other hand, enough power could get you all the food you wanted, and I said as much.
“Jace, come on, man,” Eric said, exasperated. “Think about it. The dragons couldn’t defeat the Locust Court. They needed you to do that. And that’s only one example. Neither humans nor dragons could defeat the demon host alone. They had to write the Empyrean Accords. Even the strong need allies.”
And then Eric came at me faster and more powerfully than ever before. He leaped into the air and flung a storm of burning bolts at me. Before they slammed into the ground all around me, he landed and unleashed another spray of blistering heat.
There was no way my shield could absorb that attack, and my serpents were instantly overwhelmed by the sheer number of incoming missiles. Rather than waste efforts on a defense that would only fail, I braced for impact and turned my thoughts to a way to survive the next series. Bolts of hardened earth slammed into me, driving me backward and raising welts across my jinsei-hardened body. A lesser artist would have been torn to shreds and burned to ash.
Which I would be if I didn’t do something, fast.
If there was some way to absorb both momentum and fire aspects from Eric’s assault, I could turn the tables on him in a heartbeat. But that’s not how my shield worked, and I doubted I’d master a new technique in the few seconds I had left before the Resplendent Sun hammered me into the ground. Already my robes were smoldering, and it was hard to catch my breath amidst the brutal storm of attacks.
“That’s the problem,” Eric said as he continued to hammer at me. “No matter how strong you are, there’s always someone a little stronger, a little meaner. Power alone can’t watch your back.”
It was hard to listen to Eric and concentrate on my defense at the same time. I only half heard him pressing his point, explaining how the dragons were blind for not seeing they needed allies. How angry he was with Tru’s parents for refusing to let her date until she’d passed through her transformation to adulthood, and how expensive all that would be.
I felt bad for my friend, but I wouldn’t let him beat me because his dating life was rough.
Not when I still had one more trick to try.
The rats I’d put rings on before the last stage of the Empyrean Gauntlet still lived in the courtyard. Not all of them, of course. Some had died of old age, while others had suffered one mishap or another. But there were still more than a dozen of them nearby, ready and willing to accept my bond.
Eric’s attacks rocked me back onto my heels, then drove me to my knees. He kept pouring on the heat. It was his best shot at taking me down.
And it was almost enough.
I activated the Borrowed Core tec
hnique, followed instantly with the Army of a Thousand Eyes to bind as many rats as I could to my core. Then I triggered my Thief’s Shield.
When the magma-like projectile slammed into the shield this time, I tapped into the power of all those extra cores and diverted some heat from Eric’s attack to my companions. The fire was more than enough to destroy a single rat, but by spreading it out I protected all of them. That gave my shield enough breathing room to drain away the momentum aspects, and all those projectiles fell to the ground at my feet.
“Sometimes,” I said to Eric as he gasped for breath and desperately tried to cycle his breathing, “power is enough.”
My serpents lashed out, striking Eric in the arms and legs with their blunted edges. Weakened as he was by his ferocious assault, my friend toppled onto his back in the middle of the sparring ring.
He lay there, panting, as I approached. I reached down to help him to his feet, and his eyes burned into mine.
“I know it seems like you’re strong enough to do it all on your own,” he said. “But one day you’ll be wrong, Jace. You know this quest’s gotten too big to fit on your shoulders, right?”
Maybe that’s how Eric really felt. But it sounded too much like the words I’d heard from other, more experienced people my whole life. Tycho and Grayson had both been so sure I’d never amount to anything. Ishigara had thought I was too weak for soul scrivening. The Inquisition and its dragon allies had been positive they could twist me to their own ends. And they’d all been wrong. Time and again, I’d proven that my power was a match for any threat.
“I don’t know,” I said, and clapped Eric on the shoulder. “Maybe you’re right.”
But I really didn’t think so.
The Discovery
MY DUEL WITH ERIC GAVE me a lot to think about. I’d never used my techniques like that before. It made me wonder if my bond with the rats could help ease some of the problems I had with jinsei sorcery. With all the demands of training my clan members, trying, and failing, to learn how orichalcum was made, and maintaining relationships with my friends, I didn’t get a chance to test it until my class with Professor Krieger the next week.
A class I almost missed because I’d had to run interference so my clan members could reach their classrooms without being assaulted by challenges. While no one had to accept a duel, Byron had shown me it was all too easy for the younger kids to lose their temper and decide to settle things in the ring.
I couldn’t allow that to happen, and my head was full of worries as I hustled into the Basic Jinsei Sorcery classroom several minutes late.
“Now that our last student has arrived,” Krieger said, his eyes flicking in my direction as I sealed myself into my laboratory space, “I thought we’d start today’s class with something a little more exciting than usual.”
With a flourish, the professor whipped his hand through the air. A long pennant of flame unfolded from between his fingers to form a fiery sheet that hung in the air. Weaves of jinsei held the flames in place, forming a glowing banner that held two words, “Fire magic!”
It was an impressive display of skill and mastery. Fire naturally likes to spread, so constraining it with jinsei was difficult even for skilled sorcerers. If I tried that trick, there was a good chance I’d burn off both my hands and set the School on fire.
Unless my new theory worked.
And I wasn’t entirely sure it would. Last semester, I’d nearly drowned myself attempting to summon a cup of water. My serpents were so eager to help gather aspects they didn’t know when to quit. And that was the mildest mishap I’d had with sorcery. Using it in the shrine during our quest to find the Umbral Forge had nearly buried me in lava.
I’d grown since then, but the idea of handling sorcerous fire in an enclosed space still gave me the heebie-jeebies. To come so far only to incinerate myself during class would be a horrifying embarrassment.
On the other hand, the sealed laboratory space was equipped with emergency countermeasures designed to keep students alive. My odds of dying in there were far lower than they would be almost anywhere else.
Although those same safeguards hadn’t saved me the last time my sorcery had run amok...
I took a deep breath, banished all the negative thinking, and waited nervously for Krieger’s next instructions.
“Today’s experiment involves one of the simplest tasks: lighting a candle,” Krieger said mischievously. “At least, it’s simple when you have a book of matches. I’d like you to light a single candle using flame aspects you’ll find at your workstation. We’ve upgraded the safeguards in each cubicle to protect you if the experiment runs out of control.”
With that last, Krieger glanced in my direction, his eyes twinkling. He was taking far too much pleasure in my discomfort. I didn’t believe the professor meant me any harm. He was just amused by my unique difficulty.
After watching my clan members stumble around making mistakes I’d thought were easy to avoid, I could see why. Sometimes it was funny when someone else fell flat on their face.
“Begin,” Krieger said.
I glanced up at the row of lanterns above the chalkboard at the front of the room. Mine was on the far left, and it glowed a steady green. That meant the scrivenings that would protect me from out-of-control flames were still fully operational.
Of course, it had also glowed green while I nearly drowned, so maybe it wasn’t the most reliable source of comfort. Still, I’d take what I could get.
I went to work before my nerves got the best of me. Krieger had placed a clearly labeled jar of fire aspects on the right-hand side of my workbench and a single candle resting in a flat dish in the center.
“Should be a piece of cake,” I whispered quietly to myself. To my serpents, “Please don’t kill me, serpents. I have a lot of work left to do.”
The vial contained only a handful of yellow-red aspects. The little globs of light reminded me of gummy bears because of their soft edges and the way they sort of wiggled when I jostled their container. They were kind of cute, and I had to remind myself they could incinerate me in the blink of an eye.
I took a deep breath, popped the lid off the vial, and wove together a spell to light the candle’s wick. Threads of jinsei formed a lattice of silver strands that bridged the gap between the vial’s mouth and my target.
That was the easy part. My work with threads of fate had increased my skill in weaving simple strands of jinsei. My serpents didn’t even need to get involved for that part of the challenge.
I cycled my breath a few times to center myself and reached out for the rats wearing my rings. It only took a few seconds for me to forge my connection with them. With any luck, that was the missing ingredient in my sorcerous cookbook. With my new idea in place, I reached out for the flame aspects with my mind.
A serpent instantly appeared. Its tip slipped into the vial’s narrow mouth. With careful precision it coaxed the first fire aspect out of the bottle and onto the jinsei framework I’d created. The aspect squirmed a bit, like a kitten trying to slip out of its flea collar.
I bore down on the little glob of primal flame. It scrambled into the lattice, more quickly than I’d expected.
This was usually the point when my serpents went berserk and began gathering every aspect within a hundred-mile radius. The last time I’d messed with fire aspects, I’d created a miniature volcano that consumed an ancient master’s shrine.
And some very bad people.
Also, me. Almost.
“Not today,” I whispered.
My serpents did not get the memo to behave. They lashed out in every direction to collect aspects quickly, nimble as a spider weaving a web.
“Stop,” I insisted.
The temperature in my sealed lab began to rise, and the green safety lantern flickered yellow, then back to green, then yellow again. Wavy lines of heat distortion made the walls swim around me.
It was time to put my new secret weapon to work.
My insectoi
d serpents were part of me, even if they looked like steampunk prosthetics. They emanated from my aura and were physical because of the jinsei they absorbed from my core.
That meant the aspects they had gathered should be in my aura, too. A quick glance up at the haze of heat gathered around the serpents’ bladed tips told me that was true. It also told me the serpents somehow shielded me from the aspects, at least a little, because they’d already gathered enough to set my clothes on fire.
If the aspects were in my aura, that meant I could control them. The problem in the past had been that there were too many aspects coming in too fast. Since I’d advanced, I couldn’t turn that flood of power off, but I could at least throttle it down.
And that let me funnel aspects out of my body and through the bonds I’d forged with the rats. In return, they used the Thief’s Shield technique I’d scrivened into the rings to protect themselves from the aspects’ intense heat.
The flow of fire from the serpents into my aura and on to the rats’ auras happened in the blink of an eye. The temperature in my workspace plummeted back to normal. More importantly, my serpents seemed to lose their hunger to gather more. It took what felt like forever, but one by one, my supernatural appendages folded up and vanished into my aura.
The single fire aspect finished its climb up the jinsei lattice just a handful of seconds later. The candle’s wick caught fire, and the aspect danced merrily atop its new home.
“Yes!” I whooped with excitement.
It hadn’t been easy, and it had taken far more preparation than I’d hoped, but my hypothesis had proven valid. As long as I could dissipate the aspects harvested by my serpents, I could control the jinsei sorcery. I’d never be able to whip spells about with wild abandon, but at least I wouldn’t face imminent death every time I tried.