Transcendence, page 14
part #6 of The Beginning After The End Series
“How’s that, Jona? Are you satisfied?” I fumed.
“Arthur!” called a clear voice from behind me.
Looking over my shoulder, I spotted Captain Glory. She wore a hardened expression and her two longswords dripped with blood. Her hair had come loose from its ties and was caked with mud and dried blood, and her armor wasn’t any better off, but there was still a fire raging in her eyes.
“You look like crap, Vanesy.”
She scowled in mock outrage. “That’s not something you say to a woman, even during war.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, managing a pained smile.
“Did you do that?” Vanesy asked, looking around.
I nodded. “I was testing something.”
“Testing something during battle? You never change.” She said, eyeing me thoughtfully.“Do you think you can do it again?”
“Probably,” I answered. Suddenly, Sylvie’s thoughts poured into my head. ‘Arthur, I’m coming back.’ There was a flood of emotions laced together with her message: worry, desperation, and fear.
What happened? Did you find something already? I sent back to my bond, her emotions affecting mine.
‘No, I had to stop midway...’ She was silent for a moment, but there was a grim sense of foreboding that made my heart beat faster until she spoke again. ‘Someone is headed your way. Arthur, he’s… he’s strong.’
Chapter 17
Why I’m Here
My heartbeat quickened and my palms grew slick with sweat as Sylvie’s emotions leaked into mine, but I had no time to rest. With their conjurers and archers nearby sustaining serious injuries, the enemy augmenters and soldiers were quick to approach us.
“We got some headed our way. Don’t get cold feet on me now,” Vanesy quipped. Her lighthearted tone didn’t suit the screaming and clashing of weapons resounding in the background.
“Cold feet? I’ve been taking the brunt of attacks from their conjurers and archers, trying to establish a pattern in their attacks,” I answered, just as an Alacryan soldier reached us. I drew Dawn’s Ballad, parried a wild thrust, and drove its sharp blade through the breastplate of an enemy soldier in one swift motion.
“Is that how you were able to set off those explosions just now?” Vanesy asked as she dodged a crushing blow from a large warhammer, wielded by a brutish fighter who stood at least a foot taller than her. It was compelling watching my former professor fight up close without holding back. Her fighting style, combined with her unique utilization of both earth and fire to conjure glass, produced an array of glimmering attacks. By creating a layer of sharpened glass around her swords to extend her reach, she was able to cleave through enemies several yards away.
“No, that was something else.” I shifted slightly, letting a spear point move past me as the charging soldier behind it impaled himself on my sword. “Vanesy, we should end this battle soon, or at least take it away from here.”
“You say that as if we were”—Vanesy ducked, narrowly avoiding the head of an axe—“purposely prolonging the battle.”
I swung Dawn’s Ballad, sending a sharp crescent of wind at her attacker. With a sharp hiss, blood splurted out from the barrel-chested Alacryan’s unprotected neck. He was only able to gurgle wetly before collapsing to the ground, his eyes wide and frantic as his hands pressed down on his fatal injury.
We appeared to have a moment’s reprieve from the fighting, so I turned to Vanesy and put one hand on her shoulder. My tone grew stern as I replied. “I’ll admit my priorities may have been a bit different until now, but we’re out of time. Take the battle elsewhere—anywhere away from here.”
Her forehead creased. “What’s going on?”
“There’s someone coming, someone as strong as—if not stronger than—me. Get everyone away from here so they don’t get caught in our crossfire.”
The furrows on Vanesy’s brow deepened. “Our? You can’t mean—”
I nodded gravely. “This is why I’m here—in case something like this happened. Get everyone away from here.”
“I know you’re strong—I can’t fathom how strong you actually are—but damn it, that doesn’t mean you can’t use anyone’s help!”
I remained silent, knowing with absolute certainty that Vanesy would die if she stayed to help me in the coming battle, but unwilling to say it out loud.
“Shit,” she said under her breath, surveying the battlefield. She looked back at me resolutely a moment later. “Fine, but you better come back alive, or I’ll pull you out of hell myself just to send you back.”
“I promise.”
Vanesy took a step back and saluted me as Torch swooped down from the sky. The captain jumped onto the flare hawk and bellowed, “Dicathens! Retreat!”
Just like that, the tide of battle shifted. Vanesy flew overhead, rallying her men who might not have heard, but already our soldiers had begun edging back, defending themselves from our enemies as best they could.
I couldn’t just watch as our soldiers withdrew, however. I threw myself back into the fray, holding back as many of the pursing forces as one man could. There were far too many, however, for me to stop them all.
It’s okay, I told myself. The Alacryan soldiers weren’t the real problem. Vanesy’s and Captain Auddyr’s divisions were going to have to manage.
As the battle moved away from me, I put away Dawn’s Ballad and made my way toward the edge of the clearing. Jumping up onto a tree, I conjured a cushion of wind underneath my feet and made my way southward, hopping from one branch to another.
Just beyond the clearing, the orderly trees, evenly spaced and maintained by woodcutters from the nearby town, became wilder and denser. There were large trees strewn below, fallen in storms. The harsh winter had stripped away much of their bark but, judging by the thin layer of frost on the untouched ground, the Alacryan Army hadn’t passed by here when they’d made their way up.
The only sound around me was the rustling of leaves and the occasional snapping of branches from the wildlife.
Sylvie. Are you there? How close are you?
My repeated attempts at establishing contact with my bond were met with only silence. She was either too far away, which shouldn’t be the case, or intentionally ignoring me.
‘Aren’t you a cute boy. Could it be that you’re lost?’
I flinched at the unfamiliar voice that rang in my head, nearly falling off the branch I was perched on. Scanning quickly to the left and right, I tried to locate the source of the sound.
I wanted to move, but my body was frozen with a tangible fear. A deep sense of dread crept up like a rising tide, slowly but surely, as I surveyed the area.
Even with augmented vision and hearing, I couldn’t find her. Yet I knew she was there—her high, grating voice still scratched the insides of my ears.
‘Are you, perhaps, looking for little ol’ me?’ Her shrill voice screeched inside my head like a coarse blade being dragged against ice. I took a deep breath, trying to stay calm. My mind knew she was intentionally intimidating me, but my body couldn’t help but fall victim to her tactic.
Her voice seemed to come from all around me and, at the same time, within me. My limbs stiffened and my heart beat hard enough to break out of my ribcage.
Struggling to maintain control, I bit down on my lower lip. As the pain and metallic taste of blood washed over my tongue, freeing me from the hold of her killing intent, I immediately activated Realmheart.
The dull browns and whites of the end-of-winter scenery washed into shades of gray, the only speckles of color radiating from the mana around me.
Unable to see any sources of mana fluctuation, I began to doubt what I’d heard—no, I wanted to doubt what I’d heard. But then a flicker of light whizzed past the corner of my eye like a green shadow. It was almost impossible to follow the shadow’s movement, but if I kept my eyes unfocused I could catch glimpses of it.
The green shadow stopped. It looked like she was inside the trunk of a tree about thirty feet away.
‘Sharp eyes, little boy. Sharp eyes.’ She moved once more, inhabiting one tree after another, using branches as if they were tunnels and leaving behind traces of sickly green mana. My eyes darted, trying to follow her movement. Her cackling laughter echoed in the thick forest.
“Your eyes look like they’re spinning, dear,” she teased, her shrill voice just as earsplitting out loud as it was in my head.
“Am I here?” she asked, sounding farther away this time.
“How about here?” Her grating voice sounded to my left.
She let out a childish giggle. “Maybe I’m here!” Her voice seemed to grow more distant. Was she trying to avoid me?
“I could be over there…” she taunted once more, her voice coming from several yards away to my right.
“Or I could be right here!” Suddenly, an arm shot out from inside the tree I was perched on.
I had no time to react as her hand gripped my neck, spreading a searing pain across my throat. I was lifted into the air, held by my neck, as the source of the shrill voice came out of the tree.
I gripped her bone-pale arm, splotched with discolored marks, and tried to break free from her hold. She was wearing a sparkling black dress that accentuated her tall and sickly-thin frame. I could practically see her ribs through the thin piece of fabric, which would’ve looked elegant had it been worn by any other woman.
I struggled to lift my gaze high enough to see her face, but what stared back at me was a ceramic mask masterfully drawn with a doll-like face. Long, scraggly black hair was pulled into two ponytails behind her head, each with a bow tied at the end.
“My, what a handsome young boy you are,” she whispered from behind her mask, the drawn eyes looking straight at me.
Like a bolt of electricity, a shiver shot down my spine at her words, making me struggle harder. My neck felt like it was being branded, the burning pain almost unbearable. Fighting to hold on to the last of my consciousness, I willed mana into my palms.
With Realmheart still active, I could physically see the specks of blue mana gathering around my hands, turning into a shimmering white as I formed a spell. Tightening my grip around her wrist, I released my spell: Absolute Zero.
She immediately let go of my neck and pulled her arm away from my grasp. Upon release, I fell from the tree, crashing through a hollow log on the ground.
“The little puppy has a bit of a bite,” she reprimanded me from atop the tree.
I hurriedly got back up onto my feet, ignoring the burning pain still radiating through my neck, but the woman was already in front of me, looking down at me through the small eyeholes of her mask. Her right arm was discolored and swollen from where I had briefly touched her with the spell.
She shook her head. “No matter. I’ll just have to be a bit more strict in your training.”
I involuntarily took a step back. She had no intention of killing me; she just wanted me as some sort of pet.
“What’s your name, my dear?” she whispered, looking away as she buried her right arm inside the tree behind her.
“My mother told me not to talk to strangers, especially ones as… strange as yourself,” I answered, wincing from the pain as I gingerly touched the wound on my neck. Usually, thanks to assimilating with Sylvia’s will, I’d have already felt my body healing, but the injury she had inflicted was different.
“Not to worry. We’ll get acquainted soon enough,” she replied, pulling her arm back out of the tree, the marks from my spell seemingly vanished. But the tree she’d put her arm into now had a gaping hole in it, as if someone had branded it with acid.
She took long strides, her scar-marked legs sinking into the ground as if she were wading through water. “Unfortunately, we don’t have much time—I have tasks to finish. Any chance that you’d willingly be this beautiful lady’s slave?”
I drew Dawn’s Ballad from my dimension ring. “Sorry, I’ll have to refuse.”
“They always do.” The bony woman sighed dramatically as she shook her head. “That’s all right; breaking the will of a disobedient slave is half the fun.”
As she said the final words, mana the color of rotted seaweed began gathering beneath my feet. Immediately, I jumped back, just in time to avoid a cluster of murky hands that shot out from the ground. The humanoid arms of mana clawed the air before corroding and shriveling back into nothing.
The woman tilted her head but I couldn’t see her expression through her disturbing mask. Through Realmheart, I could sense that these spells, much like Tessia’s, had a similar attribute to wood, but every spell this creature conjured left a mark of corrosion.
I slid my fingers down my burning neck, wondering what I’d see in my reflection. More of the murky green mana gathered around my mysterious enemy, but before she had the chance to finish her spell, I sent a stone spike shooting up from the ground beside her. The earthen spear dissolved the moment it made contact with her.
“You’re just prolonging the inevitable, my dear,” she cooed in that high, grating voice that made me want to claw my ears off.
She raised both arms, conjuring more pools of mana on the ground and the trees around me, only visible to me because of my unique vision.
My first thought was that I should conserve mana during this battle. Then I realized, for the first time in a long while, that I had no reason to hold back. Most likely, she was either a retainer or a Scythe, one of the key enemies against whom I had spent years training to fight in the land of asuras.
Breaking open the metaphoric wall I had built to control my mana, I felt it pour out of my core in a rush. The once-dim runes that ran down my arms and back glowed brightly, clearly visible even through the thick mantle I wore over my undershirt.
Particles of mana in blue, red, green, and yellow flowed from my body while the mana in my vicinity swirled and gathered, drawn to me like moths to a flame.
“Looks like I found someone special,” the woman effused as she crossed her raised arms, invoking her spell. Dozens of vine-like appendages erupted from the ground and shot out from the trunks and branches of nearby trees.
My expression remained calm, her imposing intent no longer affecting me, as the disfigured mana-hands reached for me with their spindly fingers. A small crater formed in the ground below my feet as I dashed toward the slender witch-woman, ignoring her spell.
I ducked and swayed, dodging the vine-like hands that followed my movement, never breaking my stride as I reached the witch, yet the woman didn’t even flinch, confident in the aura that had dissolved my earlier spell.
“Absolute Zero,” I whispered, coalescing the spell completely around my body.
The spell’s effect was instant. The murky green hands froze whenever they came within a foot or so of my body, transforming the area around me into a nightmarish landscape of horrific statues.
My first instinct was to swing Dawn’s Ballad, but I was afraid that my sword would be destroyed like the stone spear, so I took one last step, coming to stand just in front of her, and willed the aura of ice to form into a claw-like gauntlet around my left hand, as the augmenter had done back at the start of my earlier battle. As my spell collided with her aura, a cloud of steam rose up with a hiss, blocking my vision.
It only took one breath for me to realize that the steam was toxic. My reaction was immediate, and I fell to my knees in a fit of coughing as both my innards and skin began burning. The toxic gas surrounding me had already melted a lot of my clothes, exposing my arms, and it was the fading of now exposed the golden runes that snapped me out of my daze.
The runes—imparted to me by Sylvia, the very symbol of how this had all started—pulled me out of the cold grip of darkness.
I promptly created a small vacuum to suck the toxins out of my searing lungs. It helped, but with no air to breathe and the oxygen from my lungs sucked out, I was left with just a matter of seconds before I blacked out.
As toxic as it was, the fog at least concealed me from the witch’s eyes. She was probably assuming I had fainted by now—or worse—so I used that opportunity. Locating her mana signature, I fought to stay conscious and waited for the right moment.
The seconds seemed like hours, reminding me of the time I’d spent with my consciousness in the aether orb, before she finally drew close enough. While she shouldn’t be able to sense the mana fluctuation around me from the effects of Mirage Walk, I could only pray that she wouldn’t be able to see the dim glow of my sword.
With the last bit of my energy, I triggered Static Void, stopping time around me as I exploded to my feet and struck her with Dawn’s Ballad. My sword crackled as it tore through space, imbued with a gleaming white lightning that seemed almost holy as I released time just before my blade made contact with her face.
The force of my swing dispersed the cloud of acid covering us both, but even without looking I knew I’d somehow missed my target. I shuddered as my gaze fell to the blade in my hand—or rather, what was left of it. The tip of Dawn’s Ballad, forged by an asura, had been corroded flat, and an inch of the teal blade was gone. Then, spotting the faint trace of blood on my blade, I shifted my gaze to the witch.
I could only see the point of her sharp chin. Her head was thrown back, a thin trail of blood rolling down the side of her neck. The entire forest seemed to hold a fearful breath, broken only by the sound of her mask shattering on the forest floor below.
Chapter 18
A Lance’s Battle
“Where’s my mask?”
The witch had realized her face was now bare, and her hands fumbled over it, though she kept it turned away from my line of sight.
“My mask. I need my mask,” she kept repeating. She tore at her unruly black mane, clawing at her ponytails and using her undone hair as a curtain to cover her face. She kneeled on the ground, muttering as she gathered the small shards of her shattered mask.
I breathed raggedly and slowly inched away, fearful of what she might do next. I had used Static Void with Realmheart activated and in return, the tip of my sword was now gone.
