by Eric Vall
I grimaced. Of course, his father had his own weapons expert. Was there anything Gawain or his father didn’t have?
I smirked. Oh, yes, he didn’t have Nia. I did. Still, I felt kind of bad for him.
“Sorry to hear that,” I apologized. I was still curious about the gun though. It was cool after all. “How does it work?”
To my shock, Gawain stood and offered me a better look at it. He pointed to a small design along the handle.
“Put your finger here.” He instructed.
“Why?” I eyed him skeptically.
“Do you want to know how it works or not?” He rolled his eyes, exasperated.
I did what I was told and put my index finger over the spot in the embossed design that he said to. A blue halo around the barrel began to swirl. Within it, glyphs swirled.
“It’s imbued with scan magic which allows the user to register what kind of magic they have into the bullets,” Gawain explained. “I’m a fire elementalist, so by default, it shoots bullets with the same kind of magic, but I can change the properties with this.”
He showed me a dial on the bottom of the gun with six symbols on it, one for each of the four basic elements, but I wasn’t sure I recognized the other two. One was white and looked like a halo. The other was dark purple, almost black, and was shaped like a spiral.
“What are those two?” I asked, and Gawain scoffed.
“Don’t you pay attention in class?” He shook his head and pointed to each of them. “Light and dark. It’s a little beyond the realm of the basics, but against the right monsters, they certainly come in handy.”
My eyes lit up. Light and dark magic? That sounded intense.
“But I’m a summoner,” I stated obviously. “What’s it going to do for me?”
Gawain shrugged and chuckled a bit. “I don’t know. I don’t have a shit setting for my magic pistol.”
I eyed him and gave him a smirk. “Tell that to the girl that just had her tongue down my throat.”
Gawain snorted. “I’m not so inclined to believe in the words of a sexy parlor trick.”
I glared at him now with a sneer of my own. “Who the hell are you to judge anyone? I handed you your ass in front of the entire Academy, and you disappeared for months without showing your face here.”
As Gawain holstered his gun once again, he crossed his arms and took several paces away from me, probably to pout. Silence fell between us again, and that was fine by me. The less I had to hear that prick’s voice, the better off all of us were. We remained as such for a time. He’d taken to kicking around a small ball of fire he maintained with his mana, and I took advantage of not having monsters breathing down my neck to examine my dagger more.
There was still a dull blue glow to it, and I wondered if Gawain’s gun was made of the same material. Impossible, I thought, because the rhin was still in the testing stages, and it was only just discovered recently. I supposed Arwyn and Poppy could have developed another weapon though. I certainly wasn’t going to ask Gawain. Even if he did know, he probably knew less than what someone like Arwyn would, and I’d rather get my facts from a reliable, likable source.
I could also still feel my pulse thump in my hands as I held the blade, and it was warm to the touch. It wasn’t hot enough to burn, unlike when I’d had it at my hip before. I still wasn’t sure what that was all about. Maybe the heat really only flares up when I’m in danger? I didn’t know. I was definitely no scientist, nor that knowledgeable of a mage. Perhaps I would be one day. For now, I was a first-year summoner taking his practical exam with a cute girl, a friend who didn’t use to be my friend, and a glorified daddy’s boy with a platinum spoon shoved so far up his ass he couldn’t walk right.
The little fireball Gawain had been bouncing around with his feet fell to the ground and disappeared into smoke. He sighed, clearly bored while we simply waited for something else to happen. Maybe this was all our round in the Magicae Nito would be. We’d already fought a horde of beasts, as well as another baroquer. That seemed to be the pattern to these things, anyway.
“When you defeated me in the duel that night, I lost a part of myself,” Gawain began out of the blue.
I scoffed as I put my dagger back into the sheath at my side and crossed my arms over my chest. “More like I bruised your precious ego.”
“You did,” Gawain admitted, “and it was the first time in my life that I had felt that kind of humiliation.”
“Serves you right,” I quipped.
Gawain chuckled a little and mimicked my stance. “Anyway, the rumors that I went to train are true.”
“With a monk far off and away to the west in the mountains?” I asked, half teasing, half serious.
“Is that what people are saying?” Gawain’s eyes grew wide, and I nodded, unable to contain my amusement at his horror. “Ugh.”
“So, if that isn’t true, where did you go?” I prodded.
“If you must know, I did go to the mountains, but I trained on my own,” he clarified.
I quirked an eyebrow. “On your own? Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of learning something?”
Gawain looked offended that I would even suggest such a thing. “Of course not, you stupid yokel. I don’t know how they do things in the wilds, but I would have thought that they taught you folk to be self-sufficient, unlike us Enclavers.”
“You got one thing right,” I retorted. “We’re definitely more self-sufficient.”
“Then you should know the value of finding strength within yourself to know when to take matters into your own hands and learn where you can be better.” He finished off his statement with a bite, and I eyed him as he stared at the ground.
“I do know, Gawain,” I started. “I just never thought that you were the type to admit you have faults.”
“As I said, you forced me to find a great deal of humility in myself that night. I might come from a family where money is everything and magic is twice as such, but I knew the moment you spared me that if I ever planned on facing you again, I needed to not only be a stronger fighter but a stronger person.” Gawain sighed and tossed me a sidelong glance.
“Are you challenging me to another duel, Madox?” I snorted.
“Not yet,” Gawain said, “You’ll still beat me now, but one day, we’ll duel again, and we’ll see who the better mage really is.”
I shook my head as I laughed. “I look forward to it.”
I wasn’t sure what happened. Did Gawain Madox and I just have a conversation that didn’t involve us wanting to throttle one another? That in of itself was once unheard of. Maybe he was simply playing nice because we were still being watched, though if that were the case, he wouldn’t have acted like such a dick earlier.
Whatever the weird exchange happened to be was short-lived, however. The ground beneath our feet quivered again, a signal that more monsters were coming, but more than that, as I looked around the Shadowscape, something was different.
Where ruins of an outlying village laid before, the remnants of what used to be the very arena in which the Magicae Nito now took its place. Beyond that, where it was once barren, there were now torn-down, broken trees that overlapped the ruins in sort of an odd splice effect. The stench that normally accompanied the inside of a rift seemed to grow more potent as well, and the sky was also a different shade of green in some places. In fact, the shade change fell in line with the destroyed arena and the oddly cracked trees that now jutted weirdly out of the ruins that had been before.
At the same time we noticed that, flares shot up in the direction of where Varleth and Erin were headed. Flares weren’t good. Flares meant that they were in some deep shit as Orenn had put to me upon my first trip into the Shadowscape with a squad. My stomach lurched.
“What the bloody hell is going on?” Gawain’s eyes narrowed, and the jokes and good nature were set aside. No sooner had he asked the question did I formulate an answer.
“A rift opened up inside of the arena,” I repl
ied flatly, and admittedly, there was a tremor of terror in my voice.
“What?” Gawain went rigid and took a few steps closer to me. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means this isn’t a test anymore, Madox!” I shouted at him, and he gritted his teeth. “We’re inside of a real rift, the real Shadowscape.”
At first, Gawain sniffed, as though there wasn’t any possible way I could be right, but the more he took in our surroundings, the more realization dawned on his features. He swallowed thickly.
“We’re inside of the Shadowscape,” he parroted.
“We have to get Varleth and Erin,” I told him.
“We can’t leave the gate unguarded!” he argued, and I swore. Gawain was right.
“Then I’ll go it alone,” I declared, and I reached to my bandolier for a summon crystal as the ground shook again. It was violent, and I was barely able to keep my footing, and then it stopped again. The air was quiet, too quiet. In the Shadowscape, I’d grown to learn that silence was never really silent, I just wasn’t listening close enough.
“We have company,” Gawain said suddenly, and sure enough, as soon as he summoned the fireballs to his hands, a swarm of chatteroshi leapt from the rubble that used to be the audience stands. I grabbed the first crystal I felt and threw it to the ground. My little kalgori appeared, and it danced around me, excited to be set free.
“Piece of cake.” I smirked, and I flourished my arm as I sent it off into the fray.
“Multiply,” I thought, and just as always, one kalgori turned to two, then to four, then eight, until there were hundreds of tiny butterflies with razor sharp wings flitting around the destroyed arena.
Immediately they swarmed, and as they cut through the point of the horde, Gawain hurled several fireballs in the chatteroshis’ direction. Of those blasts, two of them landed on their designated marks, and they disintegrated the beasts to nothing but ash.
The chatteroshi retaliated though, and the ones that weren’t struck down by the flames or kalgori wings charged at us. My hand flew to my dagger, and Gawain’s to his gun. As the first of them reached us, I easily struck it down with a quick thrust of the blade through its skull. It crumpled to the ground, and blood seeped into my cloak as it vanished into dust.
I ordered the kalgori to swarm and attack again, and they swiveled in midair with precise synchronization. With an absolutely terrifying amount of speed, they sliced through the air like glittering knives and cut down another large group of the chatteroshi with precision and grace.
At the same time, Gawain had given up on his gun, likely because there was a chance it wouldn’t work properly and cause more damage than good. Instead, he took a battle stance, and then launched a devastating flurry of attacks. Fireballs shot from his palms, and he expertly dodged a chatteroshi that had managed to slip through the barrage. He countered with a kick laced with fire straight to head of the monster, and he stepped on it for good measure until it vanished, too.
Just like that, the swarm was defeated. Between Gawain and I, they were simply no match. I had barely broken a sweat.
I recalled the kalgori back to its crystal, and I pumped my fist in the air with a triumphant shout. It might have been a small victory, but I did take some amount of pride in having been able to take them out so easily.
“See? Piece of cake!” I yelled to Gawain, only Gawain didn’t respond.
I turned to face him and immediately stopped in my tracks. A little girl stared at us from the center of the arena. Her hands were clasped behind her back, and she stood up pin straight. Her skin was pale and blue, and her eyes were glazed over as though she was blind. Bright white hair was braided in pigtails, and a gold chain with angel wings hung around her neck. She wore a little black dress that was covered in dirt, and she seemed to give off a sort of glow. It reminded me of my and Varleth’s newly acquired weapons, but also of something else, or rather, someone else. I couldn’t place my finger on it though, even as a chill swept through the Shadowscape.
“Are you okay?” Gawain asked her, but he received no answer. In fact, she didn’t move at all. “Hello?”
“Gawain,” I muttered, and a warning was laced in my tone. I knew that something wasn’t right. No one should be in here. Maybe she was a monster? That didn’t seem right, and yet, I somehow knew that to be at least partially true.
He ignored me, though, and he rushed forward, towards the center of the arena, and towards the little girl.
“Can you hear me?” he asked her again. “Do you need help?”
“Gawain, stop!” I chased him down, though it seemed the closer I got to him and the little girl, the further away they became. It didn’t make any sense.
Finally, Gawain stopped, and I caught his arm before he could run off again.
“Gawain, she’s dangerous,” I spluttered, and he roughly shoved me back.
“She’s a little girl in danger!” he shouted at me, and he tried to give her chase again, but again, I caught his arm.
“No! Something isn’t right about her, Gawain!” I insisted, but again he yanked himself away.
The little girl eyed us carefully and then smiled at us as she giggled. The sound was beautiful, like the song of an angel, but her smile was off. There was no innocence to it, and it was filled with a sense of malice that left a dreadful feeling in the pit of my stomach.
It clicked then. I knew who this little girl was, and she was no little girl. She was the angel from the rift in Bedima, the same angel that had tried to invert Bathi Highlands into the Shadowscape.
“Gawain, we need to leave,” I told him, and he scoffed.
“No,” he argued, “we need to help her.”
“She’s dangerous.” I reiterated, and again, Gawain turned on me.
“If you’re too chickenshit to help her, fine, I’ll do it alone!” he spat, and when I reached for his arm again, he had already begun to sprint in her direction.
I faltered as I screamed out for him.
“Gawain, no! She’s a monster!” I tried to move my feet, but something held me back. Magic, maybe? No, it was my indecision. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to follow Gawain, but there were other things at stake, too. The gate, for one, if that was even the real gate anymore, couldn’t be left unguarded. Then there was the matter with Varleth and Erin. I hoped they were okay. I felt like I had abandoned them, but other things were going on that needed to be handled, too.
I ran my hands through my hair and came to a decision then and there. I yelled in frustration and then ran after Gawain.
Chapter 15
I had only made it a few feet, but my chest heaved as if I had run for miles. Time could be a bit wonky in the Shadowscape, I knew, but I’d never experienced it quite like this before. Usually, the time that passed was simply a different flow between the real world and this one. An hour in the Shadowscape could have been ten minutes on the outside. Reversely, though, like the case in Bathi Highlands, six days had passed in the real world before we made it out. To us, though, it was only a handful of hours.
Maybe the weird time phases had something to do with the real Shadowscape overlapping the mock one? That was a possibility, I was sure. I didn’t have a full grasp on how the mock rift worked though. I knew that it was some kind of projection magic, a charm, specifically, but I couldn’t wrap my brain around the monster aspect. Why use real monsters inside of a mock rift? They might as well have sent everyone into a real rift so that maybe they could have done some real good as opposed to dying fruitless deaths simply to prove themselves. We as mages had all kinds of magic, so why was it impossible to replicate monsters in the same fashion that a rift was simulated?
Along those same lines, if it was necessary to use real monsters in the Magicae Nito, where did they have this stash of monsters that they unleashed within each round, and why wasn’t there more protection, like soldiers on standby in case a monster did get loose and make it through to the other side? I sighed, frustrated and desperate. This
was not the time dwell on the technicalities of a Magicae Nito.
I had to find Gawain.
My feet carried me as fast as they could. I weaved around what was left of the arena, but there was not a trace of him or the little girl that had appeared before us. I wasn’t that far behind them. Where could they have gone? It was like they simply vanished from existence.
My chest heaved, and I panted. As I approached the middle of the arena where the little girl first showed herself, I noticed something on the ground. Amongst the rest of the debris and ruin was a stone that was mismatched from the rest of them. Where the arena walls were built of a yellowed, almost golden stone, this one was dark grey and stood out. There seemed to be some sort of aura emanating from it as well, as though it was calling out to me.
I drew closer, and when I jogged to a stop, I knelt down. I recognized this stone. It was the same kind that the tablet Varleth and I recovered from the thugs in the tavern was made of, and it had the same symbols that the book Orenn found in the Shadowscape in Bathi Highlands.
My brow furrowed as I picked up the piece of flat rock. How was all of this connected? Did the angel monster, or in this case the little girl, have something to do with all of this? Her warning the last time we met still rang in my ears.
‘We want you to burn. To die. To be consumed.’
I shivered as I recalled the rasp of her voice as she spoke within my mind, and I pocketed the piece of stone. I didn’t know what its purpose was, but I did know that there was no coincidence that it was here. I was meant to find it.
I stood again and took in my surroundings. Everything felt weirdly out of place, and my sense of direction was warped. I cupped my hands and brought them up to my mouth.
“Gawain!” I yelled and then yelled again when there was no response. “Gawain, where are you?”
I dropped my arms again and kept moving one foot in front of the other. There had to be some way I could get a better idea of what was going on. I needed a vantage point, something higher that would give me a wider scope of that the spliced Shadowscapes had done to the environment. My initial thought was the tower where Sleet and the other faculty usually spectated from at the far end of the arena, but there was nothing left of it. The only integral part that remained was the staircase, and even that wasn’t as sturdy as I would assume it once was. It didn’t go all the way up anymore either, so it wouldn’t have given me the height I needed, anyway.