Book 4 Chapter 35: Test Run

++One of the primary benefits of being a warrior is that one can ignore a lot of the self-maintenance that others must toil to uphold. Turn your ankle during a training session? Don’t worry, your body will mend both quickly and cleanly. Took a gash in combat? So long as you don’t go bleeding to death, you can just ignore it—infection of all sorts seem terrified of a warrior’s body. And of course, training is a lot easier when you don’t need to worry about pacing yourself or waking up one morning more sore than you were right after exercising the day before!++

- A quote upon how it feels to live and train as a warrior, attributed to the first Duke of Wolsingham.

There were dozens of attackers closing in, maybe even close to a hundred. Warriors were recognisable among them, flitting around with that inhuman speed, some casually leaping six or seven feet to clear foliage, others hefting guns not entirely dissimilar to the belt-fed machine gun my father had unloaded into my attackers during that second kidnapping attempt all those years ago.

The air was sharp and hot with burning powder and flying bullets. My new eyes were not yet so keen that I could see the projectiles physically, though I certainly saw their physical effects as they cut through branches and thickets, or else perforated bodies in explosions of misting blood. The marksmanship on display was certainly leaving much to be desired, but with this amount of firepower it hardly mattered. Natives were fleeing and crying out, some attempting a defense with their own weapons—firearms, too, I noted—while most simply panicked and scrambled.

I did not especially care if these people died of course, but I was a guest in Shuo Meg’s domain and decided that it would be rather ungracious of me to stand idle and watch her subjects—students, whatever—perish when I could do something to affect the outcome. Perhaps I could add a few gentle nudges, mitigating casualties a shade. No need to engage too heavily just yet.

Qaigor chose that moment to take the choice from me by screaming, waving a sword through the air and sprinting directly at the nearest group of enemies with all the control of a rabies-infested gorilla.

My brother must have learned lessons in caution from his fight at the refinery, but apparently they had not sunk in very deeply. I watched the stunned attackers turn as he tore towards them, faces disbelieving and guns raising up to aim his way.

But they were all too slow. A train at full speed would not have closed in any faster than Qaigor did, and before the quickest of his enemies could squeeze off a shot he was already on them, swinging with a great arc that saw multiple bodies cleaved right in half and limbs flying in all directions.

Their own warriors took approximately two seconds to identify the obvious threat and start moving in. Some were raking him with automatic gunfire, the heavy slugs tearing for Qaigor like angry hornets. Before they could land I had already thrown up an aether wall and sent it spinning to lodge into the dirt between my brother and his attackers. Steely-hard, the material buckled and groaned with how many shots were hitting it, but held. Just about.

Qaigor capitalised well, continuing his rampage as I moved in to engage more completely. It seemed I had no choice now, not if I did not want my idiot brother to die.

I ran and cast at the same time, flinging magic with the sort of excess that I would never have brought to a real battle. In protracted combat, magicians like myself had to be careful of exhausting our mana too quickly.

But if I started using my mana on full blast now, I would kill almost as many allies as I did enemies. I had become far too powerful to wield that power without thought. Each of the missiles flew with barely half my full strength, but was more than enough to dismember even the lesser warriors.

I fired them off as I marched forwards, calmly measuring out each shot and keeping myself on guard while Qaigor did his business. Bullets started tearing my way quickly, and I almost caught myself ignoring them as usual when I remembered, infuriatingly, that my shield amulet was on Victoria. The replacement I was wearing now was the product of maybe four hours of effort, compared to the hundreds I had put into the amulet that now protected my sister.

Granted, my power had expanded greatly since then, and I would have needed to update my amulet soon anyway, but a mere four percent of my maximum enchanting output—itself only about three quarters of my maximum mana output—was not enough that I would be testing its interaction with high powered machine gun rounds while I was wearing it.

I darted left, the dirt exploding underfoot with the strength of my movement. Bullets cut the air around me, leaving little pockets of vacuum in their wake that hissed and whined like hunting hounds angry to be denied their prey. The attackers were adjusting their aim, but none were anything close to accurate.

What they were was numerous. With my body occupying only a finite area, and a good score of barrels aimed my way, several of which were churning out half a dozen shots each second, it was really only a matter of statistics that I would be hit eventually.

Eventually came. A machine gun round caught my upper thigh and punched through the barrier there, digging down into my flesh. I felt an unfamiliar sensation: pain.

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Then anger.

I stopped my dash and turned, digging aetheric hooks into the ground to yank myself unexpectedly around and come flying at the enemy. A second set of aether formed up ahead of me, this time a shield. Made with my full power, it caught the machine gun rounds and turned them aside like a brick wall struck by hailstones.

Apparently my enemies realised they weren’t getting past it, too, because they dropped their cumbersome guns and drew out long blades; sabres and rapiers, all made from bright, Garamon steel. It was becoming clear to me just where these attackers had gotten their financing from, if not from who in particular. But there would be time to chew on that later.

The first sword came from around the flank of my shield. I could have adjusted the aether to block it, but I wanted to apply my training to something more practical than a sparring match, so instead I dropped the shield and formed out an aether parrying stick, smacking the weapon aside. My enemy switched to a kick at my knee so fast, so unhesitatingly, that he nearly shattered the joint, but I was just able to turn my leg in time to take his blow from the front rather than the all-too-fragile side.

It still left my leg numb and sent me staggering, and I just knew there would be an ugly bruise on the skin before long.

The warrior seemed encouraged by my falling back. He redoubled his attack, drawing his blade back to swing again, and I knew that his skill at arms surpassed my own.

No matter, I would simply cheat. Before he could slash the steel across my chest and destroy this new body I had worked so hard on, I sprayed a mass of fluid, viscous, clingy aether much akin to spider’s webbing fresh from the spinneret. It tangled his blade, weighing it down as the fluid oozed to the ground or what was left of my shield, or even my attacker’s own body, sticking fast and restricting his movements. While the man was tangled, I took my time lining up a shot and produced a new length of aether into my hand.

This time, it was a sword. Lighter, harder and sharper than any steel. It would have reached organ-deep even were it not being thrust forwards with my inhuman strength.

More warriors were on me before the first had even fallen, though. I threw up another wall of aether and set a patch of ground ablaze with flames hot enough to chew through steel, forcing most to stumble back and letting me tie up only one in combat.

This was where I learned a single, devastating fact about my aptitude for physical conflict. I had none. It was almost funny. Either lichdom did not grant the inhuman mastery I was used to when it came to primarily physical affairs, or it did and I was simply the most untalented specimen conceivable when it came to this field. Whatever the explanation, I fought exactly like a human with few enough hours of practice to count on one’s fingers.

My enemy was evidently not comfortable with his own weapon, which was the only reason I was lasting as long as I had. That would not save me when the other warriors got past my obstacles however. I sighed, bit back an irritated curse, and decided to finally give up on testing my physical prowess altogether.

If I was to become a champion fighter, it seemed I would have to do it through simply being stronger and faster than everyone else. And I was not.

Yet.

I conjured enough light to permanently blind a normal human and let it beam out, shielding my eyes with a translucent lens of aether at the last second. My enemy cried and stumbled away—overeacting to be sure. He was durable enough that there would be no permanent injury as a result of this. But then, in another quarter-second he was dead enough that there may as well have been.

I stepped past his falling corpse to launch out a volley of aetheric disks, like throwing knives but with roughly ten thousand times the kinetic energy. They actually heated up into little red and orange streaks as they flew through the air.

Most missed, flying wildly in all directions, but a few clipped my enemies. Little glancing blows; a missing arm here, an exploded head there, one man taking no hits at all but being so approximate to several misses that the burning trails succeeded in igniting his fibrous clothing and left him rolling around patting at the blaze like an imbecile.

I took my chance to lunge in close with my aether sword, swinging and twisting, trusting in my shield to turn away any glancing blows now that it had partially recharged and relying on magic to get me out of any corners when martial skill alone failed me.

Compared to if I had simply flown up into the air and started dropping fireballs on them, the going was slow and tedious, but altogether necessary. I would need to be at least halfway competent fighting with my physical abilities one day, for any number of reasons. I risked a glance over to see that Qaigor had just hoisted one man off the ground by his ankle, spun him over his head a few times like a bolas and then hurled him several dozen yards to impact a tree trunk.

My brother was strong. He was very strong, and he was getting stronger all the time. In a few more weeks he would likely be over the threshold to count himself among the warriors of the fourth order, in a few years after that he would be approaching the fifth order, and by the time his powers finally plateaued he would likely be standing at the foot of the sixth order.

Qaigor was strong, but warrior’s talent was, ultimately, the same as magical talent. And no living thing had ever equaled me at that.

I would one day be a warrior of the sixth order, and likely break into the seventh. The former was unheard of, the latter thought impossible. The latter meant I would have physical strength measured in thousands of a normal man.

The day may well come when I would be arm-wrestling Demigods and looking at modest-to-good chances of victory. It would be foolish not to learn how to make the best use of that physical prowess.

But that did not mean that I enjoyed it.

I took an arm off, then lashed out a punch with a move I had seen Blakely make use of many times before. The enemy was not without limit, and they did not have the suicidal bravery—or drunkenness—that was so common among the veterans of Garamon’s armies. A few more piled up corpses were all it took to break their morale and send the remnants fleeing.