by Dean Murray
It wouldn't do me any good to kill an enemy and then be crushed by what was left of him, and so I continued to fall back. It wasn't until I felt the ground underneath me begin to slope upwards that I realized the Unseelie warriors had nearly succeeded in trapping me against the edge of the bowl that the other Awakened had carved out of the mountain.
The real me, the one who had been so scared of linking with the Scepter of Storms, had no idea what to do in this situation. I could see the Lady leading a charge on one side of the river of snarling forms, backed up by Intravil and other familiar faces, but for all of her awesome strength and speed she didn't seem to be making any more headway than Jace and Kat were on the other side of the mass of enemy fae.
They weren't going to arrive in time and I didn't know what to do…only somehow I did. My free hand came up and black filaments no bigger around than a single strand of my hair shot out of my palm. Every thread hit an enemy fae, and cut through the exact center of their chests as though they were made out of nothing more than smoke. Each time a thread pierced an enemy, it split into two more threads.
Not every thread hit a new enemy, but many of them did, and a split second later the space around me was enveloped in shiny black threads that had multiplied so many times it looked like someone had woven a tapestry between all of the figures around me, a tapestry that was impossibly fine, and which hung perfectly suspended in the air by the bodies that had been incorporated into its design.
As each dark fae had been struck, they had stopped moving—frozen in place into perfect stillness. Some of the bigger fae had required more than one filament to stop them from continuing forward, but there had been plenty of threads to spare.
My entire corner of the battle was covered in the black threads, with only a few islands on the fringes where someone from my side had been hemmed in by the filaments without actually coming into contact with them. I felt the threads pulsing with something simultaneously familiar and alien, something that wanted to pour into me, but which I instinctively knew I needed to keep at arm's length. I reached out and pushed against that force, sending it crashing through the filaments, and between one heartbeat and the next every fae in that interlocked network dropped to the ground as though their strings had been cut.
I'd been standing slightly higher than my enemies—high enough that I'd believed that I'd been able to see everything, but I'd been wrong. As the fae collapsed in front of me, I saw a flash of movement dart forward out from behind the thickest concentration of falling bodies.
I was still moving at more than ten times normal speed, but that still wasn't enough—not when Kyle was racing toward me at somewhere in the range of twelve or thirteen times normal speed. He streaked across the ground like a silver-tinged bullet, barrier effect shredding the tattered, already dissolving black threads, and the sight of him took my breath away.
Numbers spun through my mind like a high-speed ticker tape, so fast that I couldn't identify individual equations, but I somehow knew that it was an analysis of how much power Kyle was burning to maintain such a powerful barrier effect while still moving at such amazing speed.
It was the kind of display that would have been completely impossible without the necklace he'd taken off of Mephistoles' body, but even with that artifact most Awakened still couldn't have managed it. It was a display of efficiency and emotional strength that only the most learned Awakened could possibly understand.
Someone like Jace or Kat would have dismissed it as a product of Kyle owning two artifacts, but I knew better. Only someone who truly understood the universe around us could possibly work with such efficiency. The Brísingamen necklace amplified someone's emotions, but it could only work with what the Awakened in question was capable of sustaining on their own.
Kyle wasn't just angry, his fury had reached another realm completely. It was the kind of emotion that was capable of creating a new fae, a peak that only few Awakened ever achieved in any given incarnation.
The old me was terrified to know that all of that emotion was combined with such incredible knowledge. It was figuratively shaking in our boots to know that those two powerful attributes had been married with two of the most powerful artifacts ever created.
The rest of me simply reacted.
I amped up my time sense and all of the supporting systems to something equal or maybe even a little better than what Kyle was sustaining, and then I started throwing dark bolts of energy that seemed to compress the air as they passed through it.
The ticker tape was back and it was still moving much too fast for me to focus on any one piece of information, but once again I was able to derive an overall impression of what the numbers and equations meant.
Kyle's energy and emotional expenditure bordered on the impossible, but he'd come at it from the most efficient way possible. He'd created his time amp as one single effect and then done exactly the same thing as he'd amped up the rest of his systems individually.
I'd gone about things in the opposite manner. I hadn't had any choice—not once I'd realized that Kyle was shooting towards me at more than twelve times normal speed—but that meant that each of my effects had been less efficient than they otherwise would have been.
Just in amping my speed, strength, circulatory and respiratory systems to thirteen or fourteen times normal speed by way of three separate layers of effects, I'd already expended more energy and emotional reserve than Kyle had in creating all of his effects.
When you added in the black bolts that I was hurling at him, the answer was a number that didn't make sense. It was too large—much too large to have been generated by just me, even when I'd been at the peak of my abilities.
Kyle changed direction again and again, working his way towards me like a field runner. The combined output of his effects was beyond impressive, but he was apparently at the limit of his abilities. He was committed to closing far enough that he would be able to use his sword—there simply wasn't anything left over with which to throw any kind of distance attack at me and he didn't dare drop his barrier effect.
My attacks continued to chip away at his barrier. All I needed was one good strike at the center of his field, but he was denying me that with a skill that hadn't been gained in any laboratory.
I came close on four separate occasions, and then he was within arm's reach of me and it was too late for any of that. His sword swept across his body with a smoothness and speed that I shouldn't have been able to avoid, but I didn't even try. My sword crashed into Excalibur with a shock that I felt all the way from my wrists up to my shoulders.
His eyes went wide, but I wasn't sure if it was because I'd managed to intercept his blow or if he'd expected my sword to snap from the force of his blow. I didn't have time to dwell on it, but I'd been equally shocked that my weapon hadn't sheared through his with the same ease that it had sliced through powerful fae bodies.
His weapon swung around again and darted in towards me in a straight thrust, but I managed to turn it to one side at the last second and lash out with a kick to his knee. It was a blow that would have destroyed the knee of any lesser opponent, but his soft-tissue augmentation held and he simply fell back to force the next exchange to take place at a distance that favored him.
I was in trouble. I'd somehow acquired skills beyond anything I remembered learning, but they weren't the equal of his—at least not while I was still second-guessing them. He was better than me and he was going to cut me to pieces within the next pass or two unless I managed to come up with a better plan.
I retreated, sword a blur as I battered away attack after attack, but I didn't manage to buy myself enough room to launch any kind of distance attack. He followed me and never let up in the slightest.
Jace and Kat were jockeying for position less than a dozen yards away from us, but they couldn't risk any kind of distance attack while the two of us were moving so quickly and they were both obviously too worn out from keeping Ari and my dad amped up to face Kyle sword-to-sword.
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Dad and Ari were both moving slowly now, their augmentations dropped so that Kat and Jace could marshal their strength. Ari just looked scared, her eyes darting from side to side as though expecting one of the Unseelie fae to kill her, but my dad was headed in my direction as though intent on trying to get a blow in on Kyle.
I wanted to yell and warn him off, but Kyle's circulatory amp seemed to be better than mine. I was already gasping for oxygen, lungs working against air that seemed to have the consistency of silly putty, and I didn't have any breath to spare. More importantly, I was worried about drawing any attention to my dad.
I was a demigod, but that didn't stop me from praying to whatever else might be out there. I prayed that Kat or Jace would see my dad and stop him before he got close enough for Kyle to notice him, but they were both too focused on Kyle and me.
Dad took another step and he was suddenly even with Jace—less than a dozen yards away from Kyle and me, but lacking the augmentations that would have allowed him to flee if Kyle turned on him.
Kyle sprang forward with a speed that exceeded anything he'd yet displayed, and then as I threw myself backwards to avoid his thrust, he reversed course and covered the distance between him and my dad in two lightning-fast bounds.
I was already moving forward again by the time he took his first step, but it was too little, too late. Jace and Kat both flashed into motion, but they were simply too slow. They weren't going to save my dad—not as depleted as they were—all they were going to do was make sure that they were the next to feel Kyle's blade.
A flicker of motion off to the side was my only clue that another player had entered the field. Byron was moving at something approaching twenty times normal speed. The computer in the back of my mind ran the numbers. He had to be burning a peak memory—that or he was an even more talented researcher than I'd been led to believe. He was coming into the fight fresh and he was fast, but Kyle saw him at the last moment, and Kyle apparently was the superior swordsman.
Excalibur took Byron low on the right side of his chest, and the shock from the pain instantly dropped him out of amped status. Kyle casually punched my dad in the chest hard enough that I heard ribs shatter, and then he turned around and stabbed me in the stomach.
This time I saw the blow coming, but I was too committed to avoid it. All I could do was drive my blade home in him at the same time.
Neither of us managed a clean, killing stroke. We'd both stood up on our tiptoes at the last second to make sure that the other person missed our heart. I wondered if Kyle had been the one to teach me that in some past incarnation, and then Kyle and I locked eyes and there wasn't any room for idle speculation.
I felt his attack, insubstantial but still deadly, and responded out of reflex without consciously understanding what was happening. I felt the pressure of his thoughts trying to bore into my brain and I pushed back against him, searching for a soft spot even as my hand locked down around the wrist holding his sword.
He'd already done the same and just like that our physical bodies mirrored what was going on inside of our minds. We were frozen in place, intertwined in ways that meant that the slightest loss of control could result in our death.
I reached into the depths of my memory searching for an answer as to what was going on, and was surprised when the answer floated to the surface. We were both performing a kind of anti-healing on each other. It was a deadly, painful way to die, one that was only possible when the subject was within arm's reach, and part of me was shocked that Kyle would choose to violate his promise in such a terrible way.
He pressed against the arteries inside of my head, trying to rupture the walls, and I strengthened the blood vessels at the same time that I tried to constrict his airway. It was a complex, lightning fast dance that was the equal of anything I'd seen so far on the battlefield. We moved around inside each other's bodies in an intricate battle where the slightest delay in shoring up some vital system would be just as lethal as shoring up something that wasn't under attack.
I wasn't Jace. I'd never put in the decades of study required to master the effects that dealt with the body on the levels that we were manipulating. Apparently Kyle had, but somehow all of that knowledge was at my fingertips too.
We were like two draft horses who'd been tasked to pull a heavy load in opposite directions. We ramped up our power in a smooth, continuous curve that quickly surpassed anything that either of us should have been able to manage.
The computer running in the back of my mind was flashing up numbers that were well in excess of anything I'd ever seen before. From the outside it looked like it all happened in an instant, but to me—still running at more than a dozen times normal speed—it seemed to take forever for us both to finally hit our maximum output.
It was a battle that I couldn't win. I had less than two decades of memories to offer up against the centuries that he'd lived. I'd gotten lucky somehow in my fight against Sandra, a fight that should have left me wiped as clean as her, but I couldn't count on that happening again.
Years vanished in fractions of a second as memories sprayed out of my forehead in an invisible stream that felt like it should have forced me over backwards. I felt Kyle's anger beating down on me as he amped up his strength further in an effort to break free of my grip on his wrist.
I compensated for his increased strength as I tried to savage his nervous system, nearly managing to force all of his neurotransmitters to fire off simultaneously before he thwarted me. I kept expecting him to overpower me, but we were just too evenly matched for that.
The rest of the world started to fall away from around me, but before it completely disappeared I heard Jace yelling that it wasn't safe to separate us, and felt Bethany land on my shoulder.
Jace was right. I was relying on the pressure Kyle was exerting against my systems to prop them up even as I kept him from pushing them too far. Locked together as we were, it would have been child's play for Jace or Kat either one to kill Kyle with a single stroke of their sword, but the sudden collapse of all of his efforts at once would probably kill me as well. We were locked into a battle that would only end when one of us ran out of power or made a fatal mistake.
The battle felt like it had lasted forever, but the computer in the back of my mind disputed that conclusion. It was certain that we'd been locked together for only slightly more than a minute, but even that felt wrong. A full minute of this should have drained me several times over.
I retreated inside of myself, trying to hold off Kyle with most of my efforts while still figuring out what was happening. For the first time I was able to sense the specific memories that were being consumed as I worked my effects.
I remembered sitting in a darkened room with the sword that was now buried in Kyle's chest resting across my knees. I wasn't alone. Bethany was there, less than an inch tall, and wide-eyed.
"You're going to have to keep this a secret from everyone. It's got a lot in common with a ward. It needs time to mature—to crystalize and reach its full potential. As much as I would like to take it into battle with me tomorrow, I can't. Do you understand?"
"No, but I'll do it for you anyway. I owe you my very existence…"
"Don't talk like that, Bethany. You aren't my slave. You don't owe me anything. I ask you to do this because it's the right thing to do—because you are the very definition of Seelie."
She took a deep breath and nodded. "How will I know when enough time has passed?"
I shook my head. "I don't know. All of my research for the last hundred years has been pointing towards this artifact in one way or another, but now that I've created it we are in uncharted territory. It may only take a few years, or it may take decades—centuries even."
"I don't understand. If there isn't any way for me to tell when it's ready to be used, how will I know when the time is right?"
"You'll know the time is right because you won't have any other choice but to give it to me. It will be the right time because I will ha
ve won your heart and you won't be able to bear seeing me cut down."
The memory slipped away from me before I could finish analyzing it. There were so many layers of significance there that I knew would be forever lost to me, but rather than fixating on that, my mind turned to the question of how I'd known with such certainty that Bethany was a Seelie fairy.
As soon as the question crossed my mind I was pulled into another memory, one where I was sitting on the floor with a crystal as large as my palm cradled between my hands. The images played through my mind and I was able to watch the crystal as it elongated and took the shape of a sword—of my sword.
The emotion I was feeling as it happened was one of pure joy, a joy that I'd been skirting around for weeks without ever understanding. It wasn't the happiness of a soft bed and a warm meal, it was the joy of creation, a happiness that was unlike anything else. I'd been feeling the strongest of positive emotions when I'd created Bethany. She couldn't be anything other than Seelie fae.
The outer layers of my mind were still focused on the battle with Kyle. Somewhere out there I was still fighting him, desperately trying to stop his heart or send his other organs into a cascading failure. It was an important fight, a fight that I was only barely managing to stay abreast with, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't tear myself away from the images in my head, the images being consumed in the battle.
Someone else touched my shoulders, a heavier hand, and the memories streaming out of my mind changed. I caught flashes of me walking down a long hall with Intravil at my side. She was still cold, still distant, but there was more humanity in her eyes.
Another pair of hands wrapped themselves around my upper arms, and suddenly I was sitting on a riverbank in a jungle somewhere. I wasn't wearing much, just some crudely cured animal skins, and as I reached down for water a crashing from behind me brought me around to find a massive feline creature flying toward me.