Starbreaker: Volume 4, page 30
“Any correlation to our maps?” Sylvas asked Mira as they hung there.
I suspect we might need at least one distinctive landmark to begin making a guess, darling.
He closed his eyes and felt for the gravity below. “We are on the day-side of the planet, and we are facing in the direction of its rotation.”
Wonderful, we’ve eliminated half a hemisphere.
“The planet rotates along its vertical axis, so that way is north. Was the colony in the northern or southern hemisphere.”
Northern, Mira replied, begrudgingly.
“So we head that way and look for your distinctive landmarks.” Sylvas couldn’t bring himself to smile after everything that had just happened, even if outsmarting Mira was a very rare treat.
Their scouting mission took the better part of an hour going as fast as they could go. Eventually, they caught sight of a patch of coastline, and they were able to correlate it back to the map. They were actually a dozen miles south-east of the colony. Something that wouldn’t have normally been a massive concern but which placed them about halfway between the colony and where the Consortium had marked the vault. Which meant the shikari.
Sylvas wasn’t sure if the shikari lacked the talent for stealth or simply felt like there was no need for it. But on his return to the downed Folly, he could make out trees moving on the southern horizon. Moving as if disturbed by a minor stampede of animals passing beneath.
Plunging back down and through the cockpit, he found the other three assembled around the dinner table. They had managed to slot poor Hector into some sort of backpack, though his arms and head lolled out of the top no matter how many elasticated straps they used. Before saying a word, Sylvas reached for it, and Kaya blocked his way. “Nope.”
“I’m responsible for—” His argument withered in the face of her stare.
“Nope,” Kaya said again. “He’s riding with me. You’ve got to stay mobile, and I can shield him.”
“I assume from the haste of your approach that the shikari are closing on us,” Malachai interrupted before either could say another word.
Sylvas nodded. “Yes.”
Malachai didn’t roll his eyes, mostly because one of his eyelids was melted half-shut. “Then can we please move?”
With his flight spell on all of them, they soared over the forest canopy. If they remained on foot, Sylvas did not like their chances. The ship had been overtaken by the shikari only moments after they had departed from it, and despite their current height, he had no doubt that the animals were tracking them without much effort. It wasn’t as though they could hide their rather distinctive scent, even if they could hope that the winds this high up might disperse it over a wider area.
Hector probably would not have been particularly happy to be treated like luggage strapped onto Kaya’s back, but he had no opportunity to complain, and necessity had driven their choice far more than dignity. If they had any dignity left after that catastrophe, they wouldn’t have been running for their lives, hoping to get to a settlement and a healer.
With flight on their side, they cleared some distance from the pursuing shikari, but it didn’t fill Sylvas with any confidence. Eventually, they were going to have to touch down, and then whatever time they’d gained would be rapidly lost. He would have found it hard to believe just how fast the creatures were moving through the dense forest if he hadn’t already seen them in action.
After what felt like an hour, the forest fell away to cleared land. Stumps of trees dotted a landscape that looked blighted by civilized intervention, and then that gave way to plain dirt, and finally to the beginning of agriculture, or at least to irrigation ditches that had not yet been filled even though they had been dug. Sylvas called out to his friends, “We’re nearly there.”
Kaya bellowed back, louder than was really necessary to overcome the wind whipping by, “So are they!”
Already regretting it, Sylvas looked back. The shikari had broken free of the tree line and were gaining ground fast now that there were no obstacles. There had been dozens of them back on the Consortium base, and in pursuit of them now there were at least double that number. To cast against them, Sylvas would have to end his current spell and allow his friends to drop to the ground. To stand and fight them, they’d have to land and face them on even terms.
Sylvas sighed. “If we make it to the colony, they aren’t going to be happy with the friends we’re bringing along.”
“Then we must stop their pursuit,” Malachai said it as if it was the simplest thing in the world.
Chapter 38
“Proposal Three: The shikari are the cause of the Aion’s downfall. A predator that the magic-reliant Aions had never encountered before, and which could dispatch their defenders faster than they could cast. An outside context problem for a species that was entirely devoted to magic. These creatures have proven themselves quite capable of planetary annihilation on a grand scale in contemporary times, so why should the Aions have been in receipt of any different treatment from them?”
—The Shikari Potentialities, Olivan Veilbohr
Just the thought of facing the shikari now, as bruised and battered as they were, filled Sylvas with dread. Even in their prime, it had been a brutal match-up against considerably fewer of them.
I would personally prefer to never fight them again, if that is an option, darling? Perhaps we just head for the colony and allow them to deal with the issue. Surely, they’ve got the means; otherwise, there wouldn’t still be a colony?
“Just like we planned.” Sylvas said, realizing full well that he wasn’t comfortable with that risk. “I pin them, and you scythe them.”
“As you say.”
Kaya was making a long and protracted groan, but she didn’t argue.
They had just reached the first tended fields, now abandoned, presumably to escape the shikari. The colony itself couldn’t be much farther. If they meant to stand and fight, it would have to be now.
Sylvas took a dive, and the others followed him to ground. The moment they touched on the mud, he spun and began casting, but it seemed as though the preternatural intelligence that the shikari had shown before was not limited to simply working out ways around existing problems but predicting future ones. They had begun spreading out the moment that they left the trees, and now they were dispersed so widely that there was no hope of catching all of them in a single gravity spike.
I have a proposal, but you’re not going to like it.
Sylvas grinned. “Have I ever said no to you?”
Alright then, I have a proposal, but I don’t like it.
Gathering all of the shikari in one place would require bait.
The monsters bounded across the field, slowly closing in around them in a great arc. The center of the line slowed so that the flanks could curve in and overtake them, and the assault could come from every direction at once. They were cunning hunters, but cunning could be used against them. Sylvas frantically cast the spells that he was going to need into personality fragments to be used when they were due, and then he cast one last backwards glance at his friends. Malachai stood ready with his scythe in hand, and Kaya was surrounded by the thickest metal armor he’d ever seen her layer on, covering both her and Hector—probably the only viable way to ensure he didn’t get snatched off her back in the midst of the fight.
Then the first of the shikari was almost in leaping distance, and Sylvas let the first teleportation spell click into place.
He repositioned behind the enemy line and let off a series of focused gravity spikes, each one hammering into the midst of the shikari, knocking all of them off their balance, sending them tumbling in towards the event horizon he’d just conjured. Then he was flying along the rear of their curved line, firing off shot after shot, enough to hurt, to distract, to knock their plans askew, but not enough to kill any of them. He wasn’t trying to thin their numbers. Quite the opposite. As they realized he was there, the charge slowed and reversed, and the far flank peeled off from its pincer movement towards Kaya and Malachai and instead flowed back along the rear of the line in pursuit of him. Of course, the shikari were coordinated enough that the other flank was doing the same thing, the same pincer, closing behind their line instead of ahead of it, and the rest of the line churned up mud and dug in claws to slow and return from where they’d come. They had no idea what Kaya and Malachai were capable of, but Sylvas had shown he could hurt them, so he was their target.
Just as they’d reversed course, so too did Sylvas, turning back from his original course around the rear of their line and heading back towards the central point. All the while, he was still peppering them with focused spikes, sometimes hitting a limb and snipping it off, sometimes striking home into a central mass of body and crushing organs and bones. Not one shot was enough to stop the shikari. Not one of them meant to.
Once he was back in the center, he began to cast once more, gathering the black gravity mana in a great sphere between his hands as he layered on more and more magic. He decreased his own mass as he went to give the spell less and less to hold onto. It was nothing more, and nothing less, than a tiny black hole, and it did exactly what it was meant to do when Sylvas cast it down at his own feet. The charge towards him accelerated past the limits of even shikari. The gravity well dragged everyone and everything towards it. The pincer movement tried to unstick itself and slow, but between the pull of the black hole and the pressure of all the other shikari behind it, there was no way to stop it now. Sylvas stayed there, atop the black hole, gritting his teeth as he resisted its pull, pouring more and more mana into it and marveling as all the water from the rows upon rows of irrigation ditches splashed up and was drawn into a slow, spiraling orbit. Clods of dirt tore up, too, and whole swathes of the newly laid fields were stripped bare, everything falling in towards the one central point of this extreme gravity spike, focused in as tight a space as he could make it and still growing stronger.
Even as weightless as he was, he soon had to throw all of his will into moving away from the black dot in the middle of it all, dragging himself away inch by inch, even as it drew all of the shikari towards it. It was slow—agonizingly slow—but he could see the shikari suffering the exact same thing in reverse. For every move he made away from the black hole, they were all dragged the same distance closer. All of the shikari were gathered around now, all of them straining against his magic’s pull, all of them helpless in the face of it. They had no magic, they were subject to the laws of physics, and Sylvas controlled those laws. With one last frantic push of power and will, he launched himself free of the black hole’s hold and cried out to Malachai, “Now!”
The scythe blades of death that the necromancer had launched at Sylvas during their duel back on Strife had been vast, expansive, and lethal. The one he released now was almost comedically compact by comparison. All of the shikari were bunched so close that he had focused on the intensity of the spell rather than its spread. It cut through all of the shikari, passed harmlessly through the black hole beneath Sylvas’ feet and then dissipated with a sound like a woman’s scream. Sylvas released his spell, breathing steadily again for the first time since he’d cast it, and turned his attention inward to see how much mana he had to spare in case there were any survivors. His core was still full.
All of the mana that he’d just spent, on the flight, on the teleportation, on the black hole vast enough to drag in all of the shikari… they’d all cost him nothing. He didn’t even need to run through his cycling technique. Magic flowed into him from all around, drawn in by the hunger at his core, and Strife within him had guzzled it all up, regurgitating a perfect mix of war and gravity in such vast quantities that he hadn’t made a dent.
He looked down at his hands, the overlay of jagged claws over them in stark red, and he could see the war mana flowing around them, the destruction and battle that they’d just wrought turned into raw power for his eidolon. For him.
It was with that realization that the first phase of his covenant clicked into place, Sylvas and Strife both aligning to the other.
The scythe strike had not been enough to kill all of the shikari. Out on the periphery of it, there were a few that had suffered only near-lethal harm. Sylvas dove for them now, his claws already hooked and ready to tear through their flesh, to take their blood and make it his own. Every drop that he shed as he tore through bone and deeper swept up into orbit around him, and just as he’d directed his orbitals to strike out with it, the blood of his enemies now became his weapon, slicing and carving through everything that still moved.
His heart hammered in his ears, in his chest, but it was not fear or exhaustion that drove it to such a wild rhythm, it was excitement. He was one with Strife, and it loved to fight. Its whole being revolved around battle. He had become one with it, and he would never know peace again as anything but a burden, an interlude before the next glorious slaughter could begin. Strife had calmed as they came into alignment, the endless fury inside of it tempered by Sylvas’ constant need for control. The combination of their two souls combined took a wildfire of chaotic intention and forged it into something solid. A blade.
He tore through the shikari with joy in his heart, and Mira watched with no small amount of dismay from his hindbrain. On the opposite flank, there were some half-dead shikari trying to pull themselves out from under the corpses of their kin, but Sylvas had no intention of letting them escape. With a fresh surge of blood from all the dead at his feet carrying him, he launched himself at the shikari. Those red, ragged claws of war mana worked fine at parting their scales and their fur, but it wasn’t enough. Fragments of what he’d learned from the new spellbook that Mira had been constructing combined with the instinctual manifestation that Strife gave him allowed him to speak the new words with care even as he brutally kicked each shikari that tried to rise back to the ground.
The claws that enveloped his hands were no longer translucent lines of red but a rather a solid, rich burgundy comprised of both war and gravity. Claws forged from his gravity shear, shaped in the way that he’d made his first sickle so long ago. He laughed aloud as he brought them down on the first of the shikari to try and snap its teeth his way, parting its skull and jaw down the middle in three places. It didn’t die, it tried to regenerate, but he dug in under its chin, caught hold of its spine, and ripped it out through its throat. More blood rained down around him, and it was glorious.
All too soon, there were no shikari left, just him, surrounded by their broken and ruined bodies, and his friends, standing back at a safe distance, staring at him as though he had just grown a new head. He spat some of the shikari blood from his mouth and laughed. What had they expected? He was a trained soldier, a warrior, and now half of him was an eidolon of war. Was it such a surprise that he would fight? That he would win?
Calm down, darling. The fighting is done, for now. Hopefully.
“Hopefully?” Sylvas turned to follow the gaze of Kaya and Malachai to the newest arrivals on the battlefield. They were not shikari, but that didn’t mean that they were friends, either.
Chapter 39
“Sometimes I have to do the right thing. I hate doing the right thing. It always ends up costing me more than I’m willing to pay. I still do it, because otherwise I can’t sleep at night or look myself in the mirror. But it still sucks.”
—Selected Daybook Musings, R. Clarendon
In the chaos of battle, Sylvas had gotten turned around, but these new arrivals had clearly come from the colony. There were a dozen of them, in a wide variety of different outfits that suggested that they were a rag-tag assembly of volunteers rather than a dedicated armed force. Even if they had uniforms, it seemed likely they’d be in rags by now. Piecemeal armor, fragments of ablative plating stitched onto civilian clothing, weapons that could scarcely be called that with how little of a threat they posed, and faces full of fear.
Yet they came out to try to rescue you anyway.
Slowly, it dawned on Sylvas that she was right. These survivors had seen their ship going down and come charging out to try and help them, even though it almost guaranteed that they’d clash with the shikari. They’d ridden out on some sort of enchanted skiff of a design Sylvas had never seen before, but it was one that Hector probably could have identified with his eyes closed. Sylvas did close his own eyes for a moment, letting his magical senses slide over the assembled party. Seven people, three of them at circle 5, one at circle 3 or 4, and the rest entirely without magic. Yet it was one of the people without magic that they seemed to defer to. She strode forward with a defiant grin on her face despite what they’d just seen. “Nice to meet you.”
It took Sylvas a moment to parse what he was seeing. The hodgepodge of armor, the machete strapped to the underside of a rifle to use as a bayonet, and the bright red of her hair bundled up under a cap. “You’re Rania Clarendon.”
“Guilty as charged.” She pulled off her hat, letting all her curly locks fall down. “But I’ve no idea who you are, other than a complete maniac.”
Sylvas glanced down at himself, entirely coated in noxious shikari blood, and he raised his hands. “I can assure you, I’m not actually…”
Kaya spoke over him, striding into the ankle-deep morass of corpses to stick out her hand to Rania. “Our pet maniac is Sylvas, this is Bone-boy, and I’m Kaya. You mess with either of them, I’ll kick your teeth out your culgh. Now are any of you a healer because I’ve got half a guy in my backpack who could use some help?”
“You’ve got who in your what?” One of the other colonists said with dismay, confusion, and all of the other usual emotions people felt when first confronted with Kaya.
