Starbreaker: Volume 4, page 2
—On the Nature of Eidolons, Part One, Vivien Hartwood
He threw up a Gravity Shear overhead as the stonework crumbled away from the construct. There was a glimpse of glowing crystal through the distortion. Jagged slabs of it swung into motion like pendulums. Without the shield raised, they might have hit home, might have split him in half, first one way, then another. With the shield, they rebounded and dragged the spidery shape of the construct down from the ceiling as they did. The central mass of the construct was a whorl of stone, the capstone that held up the roof of the chamber repurposed now into a hammer, being brought down on the shear.
There wasn’t enough force in his shield to abrade it, but there was enough pull on its four bladed legs to pin it against the curvature of the shield overhead. The whorl lit up, glowing blue as it ejected crystal in the exact same way all the others had. But while they had projected them as armor or weapons, this one fired the crystals out like cannon fire, sprouting them through the shield, and then surging with power to launch them down into him.
He swung the shear as he tried to leap aside, hoping to foul its blind aim, but it was to no avail. As the shear turned, so too did the construct pinned on top of it, and so the firing position was rotated to keep him dead center. Dropping the shield, he flung himself aside, just as the four-legged construct fired off its payload of crystal. It hit the floor of the chamber with a catastrophic cacophony. The chiming of bells turned deafening and wrong as each delicate crystalline form shattered into razor dust in the air, bursting out in a cloud from the point of impact.
The twist of the shield had at least ensured that the full weight of the bow-legged construct didn’t come crashing down on Sylvas. It landed with a stumble to one side of him as he tried to deal with the explosion of razor shards heading his way.
An inversion would launch them up into the roof and out of the way if they had any weight. But the fact that they were drifting in the air showed just how little of that they had.
Spiked Inversion is ready to cast whenever you are ready to cast it, darling. I took the liberty of degrading the personality fragments carrying both Inversion and Gravity Spike to the point that their original spells lost coherence, then recombined them.
That particular shard of psyche that he’d snapped off before the fight began seemed to chime, drawing his attention, and he chuckled as he recombined it with himself and completed the casting. Gravity under the explosion flipped, up becoming down, and the intensity of that inverted gravity quadrupled, just like when he cast his basic gravity spike, launching all the shattered crystal back up into the roof from whence it came.
“What would I do without you?”
Die many painful deaths, darling. Now perhaps—
Whatever she was trying to tell him to notice, he was distracted by the impending doom, in the form of the big stone construct having regained its footing and now launching itself directly at him. Another shield would have stopped it, but those same pronounced whorls were engraved all over its stony shell, just waiting to unleash a fresh flurry of crystals. Sylvas had no interest in getting caught in a loop. These constructs may have had limited programming defining how they could respond to a situation, but he did not.
Flying straight up, he avoided the initial charge, but before the rushing form passed entirely by beneath him, he dropped once more, increasing his weight to the most his reinforced body could tolerate before crashing down with all the mass he could muster. The sudden impact knocked the construct to the ground, splaying those spindly legs across the room. Sylvas had hoped hammering down onto it would have been enough to break it, but it seemed this one was built of sterner stuff than those he’d already faced. He barely had a moment of advantage before all around him, the whorls in the stone began to light up blue, signaling fresh crystal growth was going to be forthcoming.
He launched himself again. Rather than risk being skewered, he shed all the weight he’d gained and soared off to the far side of the chamber to buy himself enough breathing room to cast. Even as the crystals came jutting out of the construct in every direction, his hooked fingers aligned with the center of its mass, and he unleashed a Focused Gravity Spike. A single point at the center of the construct was his target, each one of his fingers curled in to align on that point, and at that point, gravity intensified, drawing in everything around it until the construct imploded in on itself, all the potentially lethal crystals that should have broken away falling in towards that focal point until the whole thing was just dangling legs splayed out at broken angles and a condensed heap of stone in the middle. The magic animating it faded away.
—You can finish that thing off so we can get on with our day. You know it is very rude to interrupt a lady when she is speaking.
“I’ll just stand around until you’re done next time.”
See that you do.
The remaining constructs in the chamber had begun deploying from the walls, but there was no element of surprise left for them. If they’d mobilized a little faster, then perhaps they might have gotten the drop on him while he was distracted by the big one, but everything in the labyrinth still seemed to move at a much slower tempo than Sylvas was accustomed to. If they meant to ambush him, they would have to start moving faster, and if they didn’t mean to ambush him, then the painfully slow process of them extricating themselves from the walls only at his approach gave him a massive advantage. Targeting them in order of how close they were to actually being able to launch an attack, Sylvas rattled off a series of Focused Gravity Spikes, shattering and stilling them one after another.
After just a few seconds, silence fell over the chamber once more, broken only by the occasional tinkle of a fragment of stone falling from the shattered remains of the defenders of the labyrinth. This was all too easy. There had been moments of pressure but nothing even close to the relentlessness of what he’d been capable of handling at peak efficiency. Whoever was in charge of designing this labyrinth clearly hadn’t done so with someone like him in mind; whoever had made the adjustments to make it into a challenge or test for him had failed in their efforts.
Don’t get overconfident, darling. They may just decide to drop the whole building on your head and be done with it.
The prospect failed to inspire much fear in Sylvas at this point. Even knowing that above the labyrinth itself there was solid stone for as far as he could sense, he was relatively sure that he’d be able to break through. The only limitation before had been his mana, and the enforced restrictions that the Ardent had placed on the spells that he could use and modify. As their captivity stretched on, it became increasingly apparent that whatever loyalty he owed to the Ardent was not being reciprocated with any sort of rescue attempt, so he found himself caring considerably less about their rules. Not to mention that the restrictions were meant to be lifted after he achieved his fifth circle anyway. Something that he had managed, even if it had been overshadowed by later events.
Introspection time was over. He’d identified the next route to expand his map, and he took off once again. Forwards and backwards. Illusions and traps. Inch by inch, he mapped out the maze that he’d been dumped in, no longer waiting to face off with the constructs as they emerged, just letting Mira’s pattern recognition spot the specific shapes that they formed in the carvings and the floes of mana and unleashing a short, sharp burst of destructive gravity before they could unfold into threats.
Perhaps a minute passed in peaceful motion before the abiding sense of wrongness began to creep over Sylvas again. Something wasn’t adding up. Some sensory input or calculation was skewed. So far as he knew, he had been traveling in a straight line along the passageway away from where he’d last fought, but up ahead the same passage opened out into the same chamber, and his sense lied that it was somewhere else entirely, even though he could see the scattered debris in precisely the same pattern. Either it was an illusionary projection of the last room good enough to fool all his senses, some incredibly clever piece of spell-work to make everything in this room actually copy what had happened in another, or his senses had been tricked somewhere in that passage, and he’d ended up coming back along the same way that he came in.
I can find no evidence of us being tricked in the passage.
“Well, it wouldn’t be much of a trick if we could.” Sylvas grimaced.
He tried to realign the mental map with the new one that his senses were producing and found them to be directly at odds with one another. As they overlaid, they seemed to indicate that the whole world had been rotated through 180 degrees. Even when he manually contorted it back into its original layout, his senses went on insisting that this was an entirely new, unexplored area despite his boot prints in the dust.
With a sigh, he released his mental hold on the map, leaving it entirely to Mira. The contradiction was giving him a headache. There was some clever piece of magic here that he hadn’t even detected, and he had no patience to stop, search, and solve it when all the mechanical defenses of the labyrinth were grinding to life. He picked the next passageway around, and he took off again. He made good time, scanning as he went for any indication of trouble, finding none and then emerging into the same chamber yet again, with yet another overlaid version of reality that ran contrary to what he knew to be real. The whole room was a trap, and he’d fallen into it. He shot off towards the passage that had first brought him into the chamber, only to find that it too seemed to lead back to the exact same point. A systematic search of all the remaining tunnels led to the same conclusion. He was not leaving this chamber.
Less than ideal, darling.
There was clearly something about this chamber that mattered to the designers of the labyrinth. Some sort of dimension-warping oubliette wasn’t completely out of the question, of course, and a trap could be set in the ceiling above, just waiting for him to try and blast his way out before it blew him to pieces, but everything that he’d encountered so far spoke of a more elegant mind. One that meant to test, rather than destroy. If they wanted him dead, they could have just dumped him out an airlock while he was en route to wherever the hell this was. They were teaching him that his senses couldn’t be trusted in this place, that they could be warped and manipulated. Whatever was at the heart of the lesson had to be here in this chamber. It was the nexus around which all the manipulations centered.
Reaching out with his usual senses was providing him nothing useful. They had shown, time and time again, that they could be fooled, even his gravity sense—something that he was fairly certain only a scant few mages throughout history had ever had use of—was being confused. But that was here and now. His vision, his understanding, was not limited to the present.
He lowered the filters blocking out his newest Paradigm and let the waves of history wash over him. There he was, coming back into the chamber from each of the different entrances. There he was, rushing out of each passageway to return to the same place. Here were the elves installing the spider construct in the ceiling. Here were other mages, casting enchantments on the place, brushing against his domain of gravity magic in their manipulation of the dimensional structure required to keep inverting his journey down each passage. It wasn’t a portal partway along each of them; it was an anchor to keep anyone who strayed into this room from escaping. An invisible shackle, locked around his ankle, dragged him back here whenever he went too far away. The shackle was buried beneath the chamber floor, just as the construct had been buried in the roof.
He cast his Focused Gravity Spike straight down in the center of the chamber, manipulating its casting to put it in a spin, drilling down through the remains of the construct and through into the stonework below. Into the carefully balanced piece of self-repeating magic hidden there beneath its many layers of illusions and misdirection.
A ripple passed out through the air, washing over the chamber and beyond as the spell unraveled, then Mira carefully wiped away any of the mapping information they’d obtained since trying to leave the chamber for the first time.
“Shall we try that again, without the interference?” Sylvas almost mustered a smile before the trap tethered to the spell he’d just broken triggered, and the floor of the chamber gave out from under him.
Chapter 3
“Some posit that this limitation of manifestation is simple survival instinct; they are reliant upon a common affinity with the mana of a region to maintain their physical form while on this plane of existence, but I believe that we are looking upon them as creatures when they are fundamentally not. An eidolon is not a creature. It is, so far as I can ascertain, a natural formation of mana that happens to bear a resemblance to a creature. A pattern, much like a spellform, albeit infinitely more complex and comprised not of fragmentary language, but from something older and more solid. Perhaps they are what that language was trying to describe.”
—On the Nature of Eidolons, Part Two, Vivien Hartwood
Sylvas caught himself before he’d plummeted far, but there wasn’t all that much distance to fall anyway. Less than a three-story drop before he would have arrived at the generously spiked floor down beneath the original chamber.
Upstairs had been all pristine carving and delicate curves, but this layer of the labyrinth seemed to be a little more utilitarian and focused on its purpose of containing and tormenting its occupants. The bare stone showed through, and the constructs that lurched into action to attack Sylvas were no longer pieces of art but finely honed instruments of war.
The smooth stone of above had given way to slick and shining obsidian, jagged and barbed. These constructs, already lying in wait for his arrival, perched on the various spikes, had the same spidery movement as the bigger one from above. Four legs each, but moving in such a blur that there could have been double that number. With so much more space in this pit, they seemed less massive and cumbersome despite being the same size, though some part of that was likely how finally honed they were in comparison. There were no crystalline growths protruding from these; they were streamlined and precise, every motion deliberate.
Throwing up a shield deflected the first charge of them. They curved around the Gravity Shear instead of striking right at him, but where a living foe would have been confounded and confused by the abrupt shift of up and down, the constructs reacted instantly. They spreadeagled their legs to connect up with the others that had leapt alongside them, connecting together with something like magnetism to form a broad web. Where individually they would have been flung around. By joining together, they were able to catch both sides of the curvature and stabilize their position.
They only accounted for half of the constructs—the closest of them. The rest skittered around the edges of the room to avoid the shield, leaping from spike to spike, rebounding off the walls when that didn’t buy them enough distance and closing in on Sylvas with such speed that he almost instinctively moved to fling himself back up and out of the room.
I wouldn’t do that if I were you.
The spell that had been broken, and the trap that it had then triggered, still hung in the empty air where the floor of the upper chamber had been, pulsing with a dangerous energy that it took only a momentary glance at for Mira to confirm his suspicions. It was another of the same traps from earlier that would eat spell energy and turn it into an explosion. Exactly what he could not be in the midst of if he was going to fight these constructs. A trap layered on a trap layered on a trap.
Cursing under his breath, Sylvas dropped his shield and went on the offensive, quick-casting a focused gravity shear into the shape of a blade and lashing it through the closest of the leaping constructs to tear them in half. It bought him a second of time. He launched himself from the position where he’d caught his fall, not to the side where too many of the constructs were in motion but straight ahead, flattening himself out as much as he could to pass through the gap in the net of constructs. Their legs snapped together like a trap as he passed through, but they were just a fraction of a second too slow to catch him in their pincers. From the other side of the net, he had a lot more options and no more enemies just waiting to pounce from behind him.
A focused gravity spike into the center of the net, where the legs had all snapped shut and brought the construct bodies together, was the first thing on his list. Shattering the mass of them gathered there and scattering all the connected constructs in disarray.
He poured more mana into the spell, weaving extra Aion words into the original casting while it still lingered, intensifying the pull and extending its duration. It was a single point of gravity, dragging in everything around it, collapsing the crystalline structure that the constructs had formed together, folding those that were closest in on themselves, and most importantly, dragging all the surrounding constructs off balance.
They navigated the lethal spikes lining the bottom of the chamber with precise movement, and with that sudden surge of gravity, he had robbed them of that precision. They went tumbling down into the pit as he cast. It wasn’t deep enough to stop them, but the complex tangle of spiked stone protruding meant that they’d have to reposition themselves all over again if they wanted to take a leap at him.
It was just like the Ardent had taught him: control the enemy’s mobility and lock them into limited areas so that you can attack and they can’t. The fundamentals were the same, whether he was fighting eidolons, mages, or a swarm of spider constructs.
With the majority of the scuttlers down in the dark amidst the spikes with no direct route to him, Sylvas had a moment to think. To breathe. He poured a fresh torrent of gravity into the spike in the middle of the room, having to fly away from it with all his speed to maintain his position as its pull became ever more ridiculous.
The remaining attackers tried to leap for him, only to go tumbling in towards the point of gravity he’d manifested. One after another, they released their grip on the stone spikes to make their attacks as their programming demanded, and one by one, they went soaring off to collide with the crushed remains of their brothers.
