by Ren Ryder
“We’ll see.”
Chapter Nineteen
Willow ferried me to a secluded point in the Wildwood at the direction of the higher-ups overseeing the trials. I almost expected to be met in the woods by assassins, for all the sneaking we did in getting there. Bell would be singing her own praises and undermining my decisions for the rest of my life if the executioner’s blade fell without warning right then and there.
The whole process was so secretive. I almost didn’t see the point, considering it was common knowledge that Oberon was the one pulling all the strings.
Willow left Bell and I without a word, but there was an unspoken camaraderie lingering between the two of us that didn’t need words to be recognized. I knew Bell would never see Willow as anything but an enemy, but I didn’t think the situation was so clear-cut.
An enormous barrier rose from the ground and came together high above in the Dayside’s sky. I strode up to the barrier’s edge to examine it. It felt like a soft bubble ready to pop, squishing beneath my fingers but holding up despite my prodding. The barrier had a cloudy quality to it that made it difficult to get a clear view of the other side.
I marveled at the power required to form then hold together such a powerful working, wondering at how much of an area was encapsulated inside it.
“What’s this all about?” I asked.
Bell shrugged. “Beats me. I’m sure I don’t have a clue.”
Almost as if he’d heard my question, Oberon’s voice tickled my ear. “Welcome to our high-stakes game of hide-and-seek. Each champion will enter the barrier at separate locations. Seek out and eliminate others or hide and lay in wait for the opportune moment to strike, the choice is up to you. Any champion may resign after the game has begun by exiting the barrier, but they will be eliminated from the running and will not be allowed to rejoin the battle. This, our third and final trial, will determine who will take up the mantle of the Seven Year King. To the last man goes all the spoils. Champions, you may enter the barrier at your leisure.”
What is it with the fae and their obsession with the number three?
I furrowed my brows and held back a laugh. “So… if I’m hearing this right, a king is going to be chosen from the winner of, a children’s game…?”
Bell flicked my ear. “A hide-and-seek deathmatch is the opposite of a children’s game.”
“If you say so…” I trailed off.
“I do!”
I pretended to back down. “Right, excuse me.”
I flipped my many-colored cloak inside out so the colorful streamers would be hidden against my body rather than flapping in the wind. I didn’t want a casual observer noting my position due to my flamboyant appearance. No doubt it wouldn’t stop the cloak from trying to strangle me at an inopportune moment, but I’d made a deal to keep wearing the clothes for Willow’s benefit.
“So, what do you think?” I asked.
“Duh, we should hide and wait it out. Why fight when we don’t have to?”
“That’s uncommonly good advice, coming from you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?!”
I tried to play it off. “What, it’s a compliment.”
“Oh! Well, compliment me more then~”
I yawned. “Maybe later.”
“Ooh, I could just— you butthole!” Bell smacked me.
I rubbed my face where she hit me. “You know, if I die here, it’ll all be for nothing.”
“Are you still carrying around that death wish of yours?”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling a little standoffish. “What’s it to you?”
“It’s everything to me! I thought you were going to try!”
My throat went dry all of a sudden. I swallowed. “I will. I’m going to give it all I’ve got.”
“Good, that’s what I wanted to hear.”
I grumbled on the outside but knew I needed to take this trial at my best if I wanted to have a chance of winning it all. Even assuming Fin wasn’t in the running, the other champions had the home field advantage. Trying to hide myself in the Wildwood as a novice woodsman was going to present a real challenge when I was up against faeries on their own turf.
“Well, shall we?”
“Yes, let’s.”
Bell zoomed inside the barrier without a second thought, but I wanted to take it slow. I stretched my hand out, pressed it through the barrier. Electric tingles ran through me as I followed through with my body, stepping fully onto the final trial’s battleground.
There was something about this section of the Wildwood that set my preternatural senses afire. The Wildwood was ancient, brimming with thick cords of ambient mana acting as a natural latticework of energy connecting the forest like a huge single organism, but this area felt all the more potent. I almost expected the trees to start moving of their own accord.
Looking around in a panic, I tried to see if there were any observers taking note of my position on the other side of the barrier. I shouldn’t have worried. There was no one in sight of me for as far around as I could see in any direction.
Instead of ramping myself up for an imminent fight, I decided to try and advance into the battleground leaving as little trace of myself as I could. I cycled a new influx of mana through my body, shed my mana skin and condensed my power beneath my skin so my presence would be more difficult to pinpoint. At the same time, I flung my senses out as far as I was able to, maybe a hundred yards, to highlight my awareness on the area around me as I roved forward.
My stomach fluttered with annoyance at Bell playing in the trees. “Can you stick close by? I don’t want someone spotting you ahead of me.”
“Don’t be such a worrywart. What’re the chances we cross paths with someone right at the start?”
I tried to be realistic. “Pretty high I imagine, since Oberon has a hand in it.”
Bell, looking chagrined, stopped her capricious perusal of the forest and winged back over to my side. “Oh. Yeah, that’s right. He would do that, huh.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him, that’s for sure.”
Stepping light, I tried to avoid the dry leaf beds scattered all over the forest floor. It was an almost impossible task, seeing as the trees had begun dumping their leaves en mass in preparation for the changing seasons. Still I had to try, because any misstep could mean broadcasting my position to my opponent’s ears.
Out of sight of the barrier’s edge and a good ways into the perimeter, I decided to stop and survey the area from on high. Picking out a tree, I leapt into the air and grabbed the lowest-hanging branch some ten meters off the forest floor. It was easy to forget that such feats had been well out of my ability not long ago.
Swinging my legs, I pulled myself up and balanced on the foot-wide branch while grabbing another to stabilize my upper body. Moving quick and sure, I began to climb, coordinating handholds and footholds to keep three points of contact at all times. The sudden exertion made me break out in a thin sheen of sweat, but it was an energizing feeling.
Bringing my staff along with me made things more complicated, but there was no way I was going to leave it behind. I had to pass it from hand to hand like a juggler while I climbed.
“Do you think Fin is in here somewhere? That man is a monster,” Bell whispered, alert to her surroundings.
I kept my voice down when I responded. “He said he wasn’t in it for the prize.”
“And do you believe that?”
“I want to,” I said.
“Hmm~”
I looked down to find I was way, way above the forest floor. At least a hundred meters separated me from the ground. Since I wanted to make sure a random passerby wouldn’t be able to catch sight of me from the ground, I kept climbing.
By the time I was satisfied, I was several hundred feet off the forest floor and hidden behind layers of leafy branches that would make me almost impossible to spot. Sap clung to the pads of my hands where I’d stuck my fingers in sticky holds on my way up. I tried to brush t
he mass off on my trousers, but all it did was smear across my pants.
Most of the branches had thinned out up in the highest reaches of the tree, but I found a half-hand wide branch to straddle that bore my weight with ease while I cast my eyes about my surroundings. I could see the barrier in the sky. It looked like I was a good distance short of halfway to the midpoint where the barrier arched then met overhead in the middle of the battleground.
I settled in for a long wait.
“You think they’ll find us here?” Bell whispered.
“I don’t see how. I could imagine stumbling across another champion’s path if we kept on moving inwards towards the center at ground-level though.”
Without warning a beam of phantom blue plasma streaked across the Wildwood and hit me straight in the shoulder. The force blew me off my perch and sent me tumbling backwards. Yelling, I snapped-cracked through two thin branches before I stopped myself short, hanging on with both hands. My staff tumbled end over end, bouncing off tree branches before falling all the way to the forest floor with a crash.
“Bell!”
“I’ll find him!” Bell zoomed off into the forest in a flash of silver light.
With wild eyes I looked for the perpetrator in the place where the plasma beam originated, but I saw nothing but trees and shadows. My right shoulder flared with pain and I screamed.
Another beam of focused faerie fire glowed ice-blue a hundred yards out at eye-level in the treetops. Pain lancing through the meat of my shoulder blade, I swung and threw myself out of the way of the incoming volley. A streak of fire blazed over my head to the left, missing me by a bare margin.
I landed on a lower set of branches with a heavy thud, grabbing on for dear life so I didn’t plunge all the way to the ground in my haste.
“I can’t get eyes on him,” I cursed and covered my wounded shoulder with my left hand.
I checked the wound over. It was a through-and-through and the flesh was cauterized; I had to muscle through it.
A flash of faerie fire from a different section of the forest made me swivel left towards the threat. On the defensive, I drew off my source and cycled a new influx of mana through my body, letting the excess leak off into a thin skin of mana. Ready to leap forward into the fray, I pumped wind mana into my body so I could take flight at any moment.
I shouted as a blast of blue plasma pierced the underside of my right hand, burst out the other side, and left a streak across the sky before dissipating when it struck the barrier.
From behind?
“Bell, where are you? I could really use your help right about now,” I muttered.
Whoever I was up against, they were good, able to launch strikes from cover without revealing themselves while producing decoys to focus my attention in the wrong area. I stuffed my shaking hand against my waist and forced my mind to focus amid the turmoil. Hissing through my teeth, I let my senses expand into the forest around me, feeling for irregularities, anything that shouldn’t be there.
Nothing.
I leapt sideways as a plasma beam tore through the airspace I’d been occupying a moment before. I sailed through the air, crashed through a tree and skidding onto a thin branch that bowed then bounced upwards before supporting my weight.
As long as I can’t pinpoint their location, moving erratically is the best I can do.
With my mana skin enforcing my body and wind mana buoying my movements, I leapt into open air. At the top of the hyperbolic arc I spun my hips and flipped midair, increasing my field of view. Three bright balls of faerie fire lit up at different spots then blasted off to try to shoot me out of the sky.
Stretching out my left hand in front of me, I yelled and shot a burst of wind out to alter my course midair. My arm was near yanked out of my socket from the move, and the three plasma beams arced with deadly accuracy into the trajectory of my initial jump. When I realized I’d avoided the volley I screamed in triumph, then in surprise when I collided head-on with a tree.
After I peeled myself off, I saw my impact had left a dent in the thick bark. Shaking my head to clear it, I kept myself in a ready state, aware that I was exposed no matter what I did.
My left hand was buzzing, and I looked down to see my ring of shadows had revealed itself on my thumb. It was reacting to something. I got a vague impression of a shadowy figure hidden in the treetops. Was it trying to tell me that my opponent was cloaking themselves with shadow magic?
An insistent tug on my finger brought me into focus on a spot fifty feet dead ahead of me. Shadows danced in the leafy branches of the tall oak, obscuring a small, human-sized block of shadow halfway up the tree. As I watched, a bright bolt of faerie fire formed a few feet in front of the magical blind.
“Gotcha.”
With wild abandon, I threw myself into the belly of the beast. A loud crack ripped out behind me where the tree trunk was blown to smithereens from the force of my jump.
A dozen balls of faerie fire burst into being around the shadowed point. The enemy let loose with a coordinated offensive barrage as I streaked through the air towards him, casting aside stealth in favor of firepower. Baseball-sized balls of blue fire homed in on me, closing the distance at double the speed they would have otherwise.
I tried to call up a gust of wind to wipe aside the threat, but it all happened too fast.
Faerie fire peppered my body: two to my right thigh and one on my hip, three to the chest and one to my neck.
Suppressing the pain, I roared a challenge as I tore through the barrage and crashed straight into a shadowy form. I wrapped my arms around the person and tackled them clear off the treetop, holding on with all my might. I struggled midair with the champion as we fell towards the ground, flipping over and over in an attempt to come out on top. I mashed my teeth together and yelled, then shot a blast of wind above us, shooting us downwards at bone-crushing speeds towards the ground below.
I blinked and we covered half the distance to the forest floor.
My cloak flapped in the wind, constricting around my neck with the strength of a professional bodybuilder. Choking, I tried to orient myself downwards and wrangle the fae champion underneath me.
I blinked and the earth filled my whole field of vision as it rushed up to meet us.
We smashed into the ground with the force of a wrecking ball. My bones shuddered, I could hear them crackling like kindling in a fire. Then everything went black.
I must’ve only been knocked out for an instant. When I came to, I found my cloak twisting about like a boa constrictor. Wheezing, I slid shaky hands up under the fabric to create a barrier between it and my throat, pushing the cloak away from the soft musculature of my neck so I could take a breath.
As the dust began to settle I flopped about like a fish out of water. Any followup attack launched at me then would catch me completely unawares and unprepared.
My ribs felt like they’d been blown inward, full of shattered glass that tore up my insides further with every breath. I groaned and fought to get my legs underneath me without the use of my hands. After tipping over onto my side and rolling back to my feet, I managed to lever myself into an upright kneeling position.
I was… pretty sure, that I had been the one on top when we landed. If this was how I was feeling, then…
Taking another wheezing breath, I dropped my hands from my neck, holding them up with an uncertain air until I was sure my cloak was done trying to squeeze the life out of me. I pounded a fist into the body of the cloak and pulled hard on a bright-colored streamer to ensure it had stopped moving.
For the first time, I got a good look at the capable opponent that’d launched the coordinated magical attack on me. Specks of shadow rose from his small form, dissipating as the working lost cohesion.
I recognized the broken remains of the champion as a dark-skinned imp with bone piercings worked into its flesh all over. The champion was clothed in all-black and looked hardly more than a shadow himself. As far as I could tell the faery wasn
’t carrying any standard magical implements or tools, but he was wearing a weird necklace that produced a trickle of shadowy power.
And he was still breathing, but he was battered by the fall worse than I was. White bone jutted out of his skin and burst through the imp’s right leg. The imp’s right forearm was twisted around backwards, broken. Even his neck looked bent the wrong way.
I prodded the imp with my good hand to see if I could get any reaction from the faery.
Nothing.
My ring of shadows tugged my hand over the dark imp’s neck, and I was flustered enough by its insistence that I let it happen. A shadowy mouth grew out of my ring and devoured the black miasma emanating from the imp’s necklace. Maybe I was imagining things, but when the mouth receded and the ring returned to normal, the band looked to have grown wider.
Bell fluttered down from the treetops above and alighted on my shoulder to take a gander at the fallen champion laid out beside me. “Oh, hey, that’s an imp! Did you take him out all by yourself? Congrats~”
I turned my head to rest tired eyes on her. “There’s a literal hole in my shoulder. Do you mind?” I croaked, suppressing a coughing fit to speak.
“Oh! Sorry buddy, I didn’t see that. Who would’ve thought faerie fire could have such destructive potential! You’re a mess!”
Eyes narrowed, I asked, “You remember you were supposed to be looking for this guy?”
Bell’s back straightened under my scrutiny and she didn’t meet my eyes straight away. “Right! Yeah, I was trying— swear! I couldn’t find him anywhere, scout’s honor! How’d you manage to find him, anyways?”
Now it was my turn to feel uncomfortable. I stared at my ring of shadows, which, now that it had revealed itself, stuck out like a sore thumb. “I sorta… made a deal with the djinn during the test of mind?” I cleared my throat. “I didn’t tell you? I could’ve sworn…” I trailed off as I realized I had been withholding quite a few important details from my sylph companion.
My ring of shadows sputtered and spit out black miasma then glazed translucent before going invisible as it veiled itself.