by Rick Field
Letting her magic flow between the two weapons she now wielded, she felt for the first time the massive amounts of magic DawnBreaker had amassed from Milor. Denying herself the right to feel envy for her friend's humongous reserves compared to her own, she focused instead on the goal she attempted to accomplish. The limited intelligence built into her Legendary weapon, Light of Knowledge battling the Darkness of Ignorance reached out to her Masterpiece, Light of Dawn breaking over the Shores of Hell. At the same time, the barely-intelligence of DawnBreaker met with Lucifer.
Liane could feel the sword heating up in her right hand as the properties of the weapon changed, and she was pretty sure that Milor would forgive her the cost of the magic she was about to expend in exchange for the upgrade of the intelligence of his weapon he was going to get in its place.
She could feel the knowledge the weapon had accrued from Milor; knowledge it had been unable to use until Lucifer upgraded its intelligence. At the same time, it released the vast stores of energy it had accumulated, re-filling her damaged core. She knew how to use the sword now, really knew how to wield it beyond 'sticking the pointy end in the target'.
All of this took mere seconds, the pace of magic far outstripping the pace of the real world. The Blood Construct was nearing, targeting her and Milor through extraordinary magical senses. She didn't know if that huge blast of magic that it had used to destroy Epter had killed Danulia, and without her faithful construct, she had no way to find out.
Still, she could feel it nearing. Whatever Danulia had used to hide the construct, it had been powerful and effective; completely hiding its awful presence from her senses; now that it had been unleashed she could feel it nearing with every breath she took and every beat of her heart.
Closing her eyes, she focused on her staff. She had collapsed the ceiling into the hallway, and she had sealed the door, creating additional barriers for the artificial creature to get through. Neither of them would be very effective, she knew. Stepping forward, Liane built the runic script in her mind before tapping her staff to the ground. A line of script spread out across the breadth of the room, flowing up the walls and across the ceiling before meeting up in the exact middle.
She took a step back, and repeated the process. Now that she knew the runic paragraph, she no longer had to think about it, and repeated it again and again and again, over and over, until her back had hit the far wall. While she placed down her lines, her magic was already reaching out to the broken palace enchantments. It would still take her days to reconstruct the defenses.
It was time she didn't have. Instead, she ripped out the entire power delivery structure, abusing her status as Imperial Champion to its limits, and simply hooked up her new protections to the Palace Anchors directly. The runes flashed, and vanished from normal vision; her Magic Sight showing them glowing and twinkling with many times the colors of the rainbow.
It would have to do for now, and focused on where she felt the Construct approaching. Had this been a fantasy novel, she would have time to strike a heroic pose and make a dramatic declaration about standing her ground and not letting it pass; instead this was reality and she would have to fight for her life and the life of her country the moment the creature breached her defenses. Her left hand clenched Lucifer, her right hand clenched DawnBreaker's handle. The fingers on both hands popped.
Her heart pounded now that she was waiting. A Blood Construct. Her one and only encounter with one, a Blood Construct she had built herself, still haunted her nightmares. It had frightened her to her core, frightened her so much it had scared her away from the entire area of Elemental Construct research altogether. Once, she had hoped it would be her Masterpiece. Instead, it had scared her off and forced her to throw away her research, very nearly costing her the title of Master. If Milor hadn't been kidnapped, and if she hadn't gone to rescue him, she never would have built DawnBreaker in a fit of desperation and she very likely wouldn't have been able to gain her Master's title at the end of her eighth year of study.
She wished she hadn't destroyed her research, hadn't stopped thinking about it. And while she had thought about finding a way to destroy one, she had never really pursued it.
Now she wished she had.
Chapter Eleven
Liane waited, her mind in turmoil but her body at rest, trying to give herself as much time to heal as possible. This last week, she had been hounded, attacked, hounded again, and attacked some more. Her magic had been repeatedly drained and recharged and she had been forced to delve deep into her reserves, costing her greatly. She had been healed, but not been given time to let the healing take, had taken Panacea and gone into battle right after. She was hurting, mentally, physically, and beyond all, magically.
She wondered how long it would take the Blood Construct to track them here, how long it would take it to get through the rubble of the collapsed ceiling beyond the barricaded and sealed door.
Her right leg trembled, and she could feel her knee-joint click repeatedly. She drew a deep breath and tried to force down her heartbeat and respiration. Her fear made it difficult, adrenaline flooding her system with primitive fight-or-flight responses.
She had once conjured up a Blood Construct of her own, her foolish youthful exuberance making her feel invulnerable. In return, it had nearly destroyed both her and her Assistant, and if it hadn't been for Amy forcing her magic through the Proctor-Assistant bond, Liane never would have been able to put down the fledgling creation. This time, she faced a Blood Construct that was fully grown, doubtless a lot stronger than her own had been.
Her mind touched on the Deep Secrets, and she wondered if she should contract with the Major Spirits for the power, or the knowledge, or the speed, or the strength, to face what was coming. The knowledge that she had already abused her knowledge enough to have spent almost a decade of her lifespan stayed her hand.
The palace shook again, and despite knowing the protections she had erected, Liane started to duck when the door disintegrated. For a moment, she debated reasoning with it, before it took the choice from her.
It launched a vicious attack, which effortlessly penetrated the first layer of the multi-barrier ward. Her hands started to rise and her lips started to form words by their own accord, deeply ingrained muscle memory starting to cast protective magic before her conscious mind registered the second and third layers of her protection falling. With each additional layer, the creature's beam-attack slowed, until finally, stopping completely somewhere in the middle of the room.
Liane's casting interrupted at the unusual sight of the beam-weapon, suspended in mid-air. The spell destabilized fractions of a moment later, turning the world white and forcing her to close her eyes and avert her head. She could hear the destructive energy being channeled upward by the failing barriers, making her realize that yet another room of the palace had been destroyed.
She turned back and looked through watering eyes. Her normal sight was blurry and unfocused, but her magic sight was unhindered and provided her with enough information. The beast attacked again, this time using a bolt of energy the likes of which were just as unknown to her as the beam-weapon had been. It swept aside her previously erected barriers, causing them to fail-safe with outward-facing explosions in an effort to diminish the approaching strike.
The remaining walls of room took the brunt, and Liane managed to dart aside just in time to cause the bolt to streak passed her. The room was almost gone now, the roof disintegrated after the first, failed, beam-attack, the walls blasted outward by the subsequent bolts triggering the fail-safes in her protective barriers. Lifting Lucifer in her left hand, she returned with a hex of misfortune. To her consternation, a protective barrier flashed into visibility, deflecting her hex.
A returning bolt of pure magic made her dart aside under the influence of full Warlock acceleration. Ease of long practice made her ignore the dizzying effects of synesthesia, and she attacked the floor beneath the creature. Before the ground could erupt into vicious bl
ades, the Construct had jumped aside, launching a barrage of attacks at her. Liane cursed to herself as she dodged three consecutive blasts. The Blood Construct could see magic just as easily as she could, obviously, and was able to dodge magic-in-progress.
For the first time, she realized how unfair of an advantage it was.
During a lull in the barrage, Liane charged her favorite gravity-increasing hex, attempting to swat the creature with a hundred-fold increase in gravity. Her spell completed, and the look of consternation on the Construct's visage as it was mashed to the ground would have been funny if Liane weren't fighting for her life. Immediately, she raced in, bringing Lucifer down in a vicious downward strike while preparing to destroy the Construct's runic enchantments. To her surprise, the tip of her Legendary Staff hit the magical barrier, and slid off before it was able to reach the actual physical body.
Already, Liane could see the creature preparing to unravel her spell. Her mind worked overtime in an effort to find a way to penetrate her foe's defenses in turn, and she could feel the enhanced DawnBreaker tremor in her right hand. Without thinking, she lifted the magical blade. To her enhanced senses, what happened next was both beautiful and disconcerting, as her masterpiece warped the laws of physics around it.
As she brought the weapon down, the tip suddenly seemed to weigh a dozen times its actual weight, causing the sword to come down with tremendous force. The magical shield shattered like glass, the mystical blade striking against the Construct's body. It did very little damage against the enhanced body, but it did supply Liane would the opening she needed, and Lucifer struck out immediately.
With its shields still broken, and its body immobilized by a hundred-fold gravity, the Construct was unable to stop the legendary weapon from connecting and allowing Liane to start breaking its enchantments.
Already, she could feel her mind and magic unravel the spells that made the Construct what it was, only to feel herself pushed aside by Lucifer's precognition, just barely out of the way of the ground underneath her erupting into vicious spikes.
The force of the shove had broken her concentration, causing the gravity spell to fail. She managed to get some distance between herself and her foe, and she found herself eyeing the Construct wearily. It could not only see magic in progress, but it was obviously intelligent enough to learn her spells and use them against her. She hoped that she hadn't just made the mistake of teaching it her gravity-manipulation spell.
It had gotten to its four legs, and was now staring at her with equal fervor, its glowing red eyes filled with hatred, its wolf-like nuzzle dripping saliva. Big and black it was, covered with runes that glowed the same murky red as its eyes. It stood nearly tall enough to look her in the eyes, and it filled her with fear and loathing, a deeply primal part of her psyche recognizing the wrongness of the existence of the creature before her.
“Why?” she demanded, hoping to appeal to its obvious intelligence, hoping against hope that it would give her time to recover.
It just growled at her, the runes on its body glowing with rolling red colors. Magic erupted around her, and she broke the spell with Lucifer, only belatedly realizing that it had, in fact, just tried to use her own spell against her. This was becoming more and more dangerous, and she edged a step back. The more she could distance herself, the easier it would be for her to avoid its attacks, despite the fact that it would be giving the same advantage to the unnatural being as well.
Its attack came with a sudden ferocity that took her by surprise, and once more it was Lucifer's precognition that barely got her out of the first few bolts in time. Her right hand, still holding DawnBreaker, came up, catching the last bolt on the edge of the blade. She remembered how the weapon had once safeguarded Milor in battle, dispelling magic as long as it had magic available to it.
At the time, the sword had been newly bonded and had been draining Milor; right now it was a bonded weapon that had been charging for years. Rather than draining her, the sword drained its reserves and cleaved right through the bolt, destabilizing the spell and causing it to wither into nothingness. She couldn't spare the time to glance at the meticulous blade, but she knew she had just found a secondary way of protecting herself. Lucifer would protect her magically, DawnBreaker would protect her physically.
The Construct lashed at her with gravity again, and she unraveled the spell just as quickly. Her attempt to turn the spell back on her opponent failed as the creature unraveled it, and she realized that she had inadvertently just shown her enemy how to do just that.
Cursing, she threw caution to the wind, and turned her entire arsenal against it, catching it in a vacuum-sphere before leveling a misfortune hex, catching it, and the still-resent vacuum sphere in her Runescape.
For a moment, the Construct was caught within her greatest combat achievement and she hoped that it would be enough. Instead, she found the creature unaffected by the lack of air pressure, and starting to break her Runescape entrapment. Relying on Runescape to hold the Construct for a few more seconds, she started to drop into the meditative trance required to contract with the elemental spirits.
Her concentration shattered when a noise, a noise that wasn't remotely speech or intelligent, ripped through her. The lapse in concentration was so great she lost her hold on Runescape as well, and the creature was once again free. Immediately, it leveled a barrage of magic at her, and Liane threw herself, still holding both weapons, to the ground. A desperate spell warped the floor upward, holding and cocooning her, shielding her from the furious attack.
The Pillar cursed to herself; of course the creature would know how to break the trance – Danulia had demonstrated that ability to it during the earlier fight. Of course it would know how to stop her from contacting the spirits.
Liane felt her heart pound, and for the first time, she wasn't sure she would be able to survive this encounter.
She drew in a breath, and tried to ease her pounding heart. She was a combat veteran, both in formal duels and in all-or-nothing fights to the death, and it never got easier. She didn't want to be a combat veteran. She wanted to explore magic, to delve into its deepest secrets. Her job as a Pillar allowed her nearly limitless access to all of Kirian research and knowledge, but it also forced her into dangerous situations; situations she would rather avoid.
And yet, here she was again, fighting, not just for her own life but for the existence of Kiria as a whole.
The Construct rampaged above her hardened shell, she could hear it tearing through the remains of the Imperial Quarters. She hoped desperately that nobody else was present. She closed her eyes, and focused her awareness. The Construct hadn't yet found the door through which Milor had vanished, and it surprised her. That door had been right there... Liane suddenly remembered the words spoken by her friend's ancestors – the door was hidden and would only be visible to those party to the secret. For a moment, her beleaguered mind wondered how that had been done.
Another blast above her returned her to the present. She made a promise to herself; if she got out of this alive, she was resigning her post. She would raise a tower as she had promised herself, heal her magic using the new principles of magic she had uncovered, and spend the rest of her days locked inside of it, researching to her heart's content. Forget Pillars and Emperors and Kiria; she had had enough.
The Construct howled, and Liane released her held breath, then drew another. Let the creature be frustrated. The longer she could hold it, the better. If Milor could get that horrible sleeping force of magic to wake up and take back the country, she would have won. She didn't need to defeat the creature, she had only to hold it.
Liane's closed eyes opened and focused on the all-encompassing darkness of her protective cage. She had been going about this all wrong; her hubris and self-confidence leading her to believe that yes, she was capable of defeating this creature here. All she had to do was stall it, give Milor the time needed to activate the guardian.
The ground shook, and Liane could feel
her protective shield start to crack. The Blood Construct was unraveling her spell; it wouldn’t take long before her temporary shelter became her permanent grave. She released her breath and drew another one. Her heartbeat had slowed with her long and deep breaths, and her panic had receded. It was time to change her method of battle. This was more akin to a formal duel than a lawless brawl. There were rules, rules that both she and the Construct had to obey; both had a job to do. Hers was to stall or defeat her opponent. The creature's was to get past her and find or destroy Milor, preventing him from freeing the country.
With one last breath, she broke her own shield before the creature could, and jumped out while reapplying the Warlock acceleration spell with hardly a thought.
Her voice tasted like fresh strawberries and smelled like the winter's dawn as she chanted her spells. Forget war and jumping about, this was a duel. There was no need for her to be constantly on the move to dodge incoming spell fire from more than one opponent. The air thickened as her magic gripped for her artificial opponent. It had already lobbed its favorite spell at her, creating a sextuplet of energy bolts that would gladly obliterate her.