Retribution, p.45
Retribution, page 45
Nico was fidgeting stiffly, his hands clenching and unclenching, but Agrona was perfectly still and outwardly calm. If he harbored any concerns that this phoenix could be right, he didn’t show it.
He would never let that happen, I told myself. And yet…the more of her mana I took in, the harder it was to contain it, and the more I ached. Pressure was rapidly building in every part of me so that I felt like an overfilled balloon about to burst…
A painful quake shook my core, and I let out an involuntary gasp of agony.
“Cecilia!” Nico said plaintively, reaching toward me.
Agrona’s hand grabbed Nico’s wrist. “Do not interfere.”
I closed my eyes, pushing away these distractions. Agrona said I needed to taste her mana, to absorb it all. There was more to it than just that, though, there had to be. Simply taking her mana wasn’t going to help me bypass the shield because…
My eyes snapped open.
I needed to understand.
Mana was all just mana, that much I knew. It took on the attributes of fire, water, earth, or air depending on the environmental stimulus, and could then be further molded into deviant attributes by an appropriately talented mage, but—aside from purity, something determined by the clarity of a mage’s core—the mana utilized by one mage was identical to any other. Likewise, the mana itself I was pulling from the phoenix should not be different, and yet…
The physically superior asuran body required mana to function, unlike a human body—or elven, I thought somewhat awkwardly—and that meant the core, veins, and channels were probably structured differently, too, if for no other reason than mana had to constantly, and automatically, be circulated, in the way my heart kept pumping blood without my needing to focus on flexing and unflexing the muscle.
Does that cycling of mana somehow make it stronger or more pure? I wondered, glad that my mind had a puzzle to work on, which took away from the strain on my body.
A thick stream of mana particles—mostly pure, though intermingled with some freshly absorbed atmospheric mana that kept its natural hue—was running out of the phoenix and being drawn into my mana veins, making us both glow with a bright orange-white light.
It could be both—but it could also be more attuned to the asura’s body…like blood types in a human!
I made this final connection with a sharp breath. “Phoenixes, basilisks, dragons…the form of their purified mana has changed over the ages, hasn’t it?”
I directed the question to the phoenix, then realized that she was too far gone to answer. Her skin, now more pale blue than gray, had tightened unnaturally over her frame, and beneath it the muscles had atrophied and shrunk. The orange had leached from her eyes, leaving them a dull cloudy color.
“It is that evolutionary change that has fueled the deviation in our mana arts,” Agrona said softly.
A sudden spike of pain from my core drew my back inward, and I realized I was at the end of my ability to continue drawing on the phoenix. I immediately lessened my grasp over what little mana remained to her, but a strong hand gripped my elbow painfully.
“No, you must take it all in,” Agrona said firmly.
I met his eye, tried to read whatever alien thoughts or emotions shined back at me and failed, then said, “I-I can’t, my core is—”
Then, I experienced a second moment of realization.
Dawn’s entire body had been full of mana, and an asura had to circulate mana at all times to support their body. I lacked the physical attributes that made this possible for them, but I had something else even better.
With a single thought, mana spilled out of my core. Instead of being released from my body or focused into a spell, I guided it through my mana channels, into every limb, every organ, focusing on strengthening my physical form. Instead of stopping there, as most Strikers would, I guided the mana to keep moving, cycling from one part of my body to the next, and eventually back into my core.
Soon, my entire body was infused with mana. This, in turn, eased the pressure on my core and allowed me to drag the last particles of mana from the phoenix’s cold lifeless husk.
I watched where the phoenix mana and my own intermingled, curling in and around each other like flames. Although her mana had been too warm and alien at first, I realized I had already acclimated to it, made it mine, and I knew with absolute certainty that, if faced with a phoenix, I would have no more trouble defending against their spells than I would any other mage.
This thought brought a frown to my face, and I looked at Agrona. Behind him, Nico was watching me carefully, tense as a compressed spring.
Agrona was grinning, beaming down at me pridefully. “Well done, Cecil.”
“Will it be enough?” I asked, thinking about Seris and her damned shield. “I feel it, the phoenix-attribute mana. I’ve already taken it and made it my own. But the shield…will this insight be enough against basilisk mana?” A tentative thought was worming around in the back of my mind, but I was afraid to give voice to it.
Nico, apparently, had no such compulsions. “Is Sovereign Kiros still imprisoned? Cecilia could—”
“No,” Agrona said firmly, his grin cracking like thin ice. Then softer, letting a shadow of the smile return, he said, “No, that won’t be necessary. I may have other uses for Kiros. An understanding of asuran mana will be enough.”
Nico held my gaze from behind Agrona, making no other move than a slight flaring of his eyes. It was enough to communicate his thoughts.
“There is something else,” I said, flush with the power rolling through me like a firestorm. “I saw other asuras. In Dicathen—in the Beast Glades.”
Agrona’s brows rose as he considered the withered corpse of the phoenix. “Interesting. So, Lady Dawn, all these years protecting Mordain, and you give him up as life leaves you. Tragic.” To me, he said, “Perhaps, after you have eliminated the mild threat that Seris and her rebellion pose, you can sharpen your claws on a real enemy, Cecil dear.”
410
GOOD HUMOR
ARTHUR LEYWIN
“Where’s your pet Alacryan?” Gideon asked, staring around warily as if Lyra Dreide might jump out of the shadows from any direction. His face was soot-stained, and I couldn’t help but notice that his eyebrows were gone again, and part of his hair had been singed. “Not that I want her to see this, but where can you lock up a retainer and expect her to stay?”
Next to Gideon, Emily gave me a small wave. She was pale-faced and had dark bags under her eyes, but the fact that she was on her feet at all spoke to the return of her strength. It had only been a couple days since the bestowment test, and without Ellie’s regalia, I felt sure it would have taken Emily several more days to recover.
“I had one of the vaults in the Earthborn Institute fitted out to be a cell,” I said, coming to a stop before the two inventors. “Regis and Mica are watching over her while she coaches my sister on the regalia.”
Gideon huffed as he turned around and started to walk quickly away.
We were standing on the lowest floor of Vildorial, surrounded by freshly constructed stone dwellings, the destruction of the Scythes’ attack on the city already a distant memory—at least physically. I could still see the threat of attack in the furtive glances of the dwarves and elves that bustled about, in the way they avoided small talk and never moved their hands too far from their weapons.
It was with mixed feelings I saw some of that tension melt away whenever they saw me, my presence bolstering their courage.
“You should have all three Lances on her, at least,” Gideon continued after a moment as he led us into a narrow tunnel that I knew connected to some old mining shafts.
“The Lances are not mine to order around,” I pointed out conversationally. A small dwarven boy waved, a huge gap-toothed grin on his round face, and I raised a hand in return, then followed Gideon into the dark tunnel. “Bairon stays by Virion’s side at almost all times, and Virion has been busy tending to his flock. With Dicathen shifting back into our control, he’s been able to reach out to more of the elves scattered around the continent.”
“They’re trying to figure out how many are left…” Emily said softly, her voice hoarse with emotion.
The same despair that clung ragged to her words clawed at the back of my throat, and I had to cough to shake it loose. “Fighting broke out in Kalberk, and Varay went to assist. Apparently, some of the soldiers who fled from Blackbend made it to Kalberk and warned them what was happening. Instead of surrendering, the highbloods in charge of the city locked it down and dug in.”
“All the more reason to forge ahead with my other project,” Gideon insisted, moving quickly despite the dim lighting. “This war isn’t over yet.”
No, it isn’t, I thought, considering what would come next.
I had been trying to put myself in Agrona’s place, using everything I knew about him to gauge his next move. If Kezess fulfilled his end of our agreement, then it was my hope that we’d seen the last of any full-scale battle on Dicathian soil, and it was possible, if perhaps overly hopeful, that Agrona might simply write Dicathen off as more trouble that it was worth and turn his focus to Epheotus.
One particular element made that course unlikely, however: me.
I still didn’t understand how Agrona had come by his knowledge of reincarnation, or how he had been able to search across worlds to find the Legacy and the two anchor points he needed to fully manifest her potential in this world—me and Nico. But, regardless of how he had made these discoveries, their implementation hadn’t gone as he planned. I had been reincarnated on the wrong continent, in the wrong body, and he had been forced to look outside his own domain for a vessel. Instead of being an anchor point entirely under his control, I became his enemy.
And through the actions of his own daughter, I was given the only power in this world potentially capable of standing up to both Agrona and Kezess.
I was under no illusion that either one of them would just let that go. Kezess was willing to exchange favors for knowledge in a tenuous alliance, but Agrona…
I knew the lord of the Vritra clan couldn’t help but want what I had. The idea of striking a similar bargain with him—a trade of aetheric knowledge for his vow to leave Dicathen alone—had crossed my mind, but after much consideration, I also knew there was no vow he could make that I could rely on. And even if I decided to take such a risk, I couldn’t consign the entire population of Alacrya to their fate just because Dicathen had been made safe.
Regardless of his intentions toward Dicathen, Agrona would come after me again eventually. I couldn’t just sit around Vildorial waiting for that to happen.
These and many other thoughts occupied my mind as we delved into the old mining tunnels.
The tunnels grew hot and stuffy, the rock all around us radiating heat, and the air was thick with a sulfuric burning smell. We passed through several exhausted fire salt veins, the shafts abandoned for more fertile ground, until eventually our tunnel opened into a much larger cavern. Scaffolding had been constructed up the sheer walls and railings hung from the ceiling high above. Thin veins of fire salts were still visible in some places, but their low glow was overshadowed by a series of bright lighting artifacts that had been set up in a grid across the floor.
I was surprised to see six men and women—four dwarves, an elven man, and a human woman—already waiting for us. They had been sitting around a worn worktable and chatting idly but jumped to their feet as a group when they saw us approaching.
“Master Gideon, sir,” one of the dwarves said. He had a frizzy mop of dark hair and a beard down to his waist.
“Crohlb, I assume you got the package down here without trouble?” Gideon asked, moving directly to a stack of metal crates resting on the other side of the table.
“’Course,” the dwarf said, grinning. “Glad to finally see these artifacts put to use.”
Gideon grabbed the first crate, heaved, immediately failed to move it more than an inch or two, and then turned to two of the other dwarves. “You two, drag this over here and open it up for me.”
I watched curiously as the two dwarves together lifted the top crate, moved it to a separate workbench, and then opened the lid. A shimmer of heat haze appeared momentarily above the open crate, accompanied by the same sort of dim orange glow that lit up the darker recesses of the cavern ceiling above.
Gideon pulled on a pair of heavy leather gloves like those used at a forge and then reached into the box. Metal scraped against metal, and Gideon lifted out one of his artifacts. It was a sword with a straight double-edged blade. Curling veins of dim orange swirled and spiraled through the dull gray steel. As I leaned in closer to get a better look, I could feel heat coming off the weapon. The crossguard was slightly too large, almost clunky, with a bastard-style hilt that could be wielded comfortably with one or two hands.
I activated Realmheart, and the cave shifted into a riot of color as the mana particles became visible. Fire-attribute particles clung to the blade, dancing up and down its length along the glowing orange lines. A strong source of mana radiated from the hilt as well.
Gideon held the sword out to me handle first. The dark leather was warm to the touch, but not hot. Gingerly, I ran a finger along the flat of the sword, but pulled back as the scorching heat of the fire salt-infused steel seared my flesh.
Gideon snorted. “I guess I’ll have to add a warning label to the hilt that reads ‘hey idiot, don’t touch the glowing hot steel.’”
I chuckled as I took a step back and swung the blade experimentally. It wasn’t the finest craftsmanship I’d ever felt, especially in the balance department, but as these were only Gideon’s prototypes, I expected the designs to be refined as more weapons were crafted.
“Infusing the steel worked as we discussed?” I asked, spinning the blade around and down in a cut that left a heat-haze arc in its wake.
Emily responded through a half-stifled yawn. “The crucible method was genius. Suffusing the fire salts into the melted iron allowed us to get the mineral itself hot enough to liquify, and increasing the carbon content of the steel by infusing it with high-carbon iron allowed the fire salts to bind to the steel, solving two problems at once.”
“Yes, yes, the wunderkind did it again,” Gideon grumbled, though I could tell he wasn’t actually unhappy.
At the center of the workbench rested a small shield generator like the one we’d used during the bestowment testing. Gideon activated it with a pulse of mana, then stepped back and looked at me expectantly. “Go on, touch the blade to the shielding. Gently though,” he added quickly. “We don’t need freakish Lance strength right now, I just want you to see.”
Rolling my eyes, I lowered the blade toward the small bubble shield. When the edge contacted the transparent barrier, it hissed and popped, sending off sparks. I raised the edge slightly, breaking the contact, and the noise subsided, though a thin trail of smoke rose from the sword.
Without waiting for further instructions, I pushed the blade down again, harder this time. Sword and shield surged against each other, the mana inherent to the blade’s structure clashing with the mana forming the shield. It lasted a second, two, then…
With a sputtering hum, the shield artifact lost power, and the shield itself popped.
“This is only a very low-power generator, but you see?” Gideon said, his eyes bright. “The fire salts, even in this form, continue to attract fire-attribute mana, creating a strong enough force to counter—and with enough strength, even break through—an opposing mage’s shields.”
I held the weapon up to examine it more closely. There was a sort of trigger embedded into the clunky crossguard. “What’s this do?”
Gideon grinned manically. “A weapon hot enough to sear flesh and capable of countering enemy shields without being imbued with mana was a good starting point, but a non-mage, even a talented warrior, would still be at a disadvantage against an augmenter. The mage can empower his body, strengthening his muscles and enhancing his speed and reaction times. This feature may not entirely counter such overt imbalances between an augmenter and nonmagical soldier, but it definitely adds to the experience.”
“I’m pretty sure Master Gideon just wanted to fit his original cannon idea into the weapon somehow,” Emily said under her breath.
Gideon scowled and shooed Emily and the six non-mages back. “Go on, trigger it, but only for a moment. It has the strongest effect if done while swinging the weapon.”
Moving back to put even more room between myself and the others, I took a couple more practice swings with the sword, getting used to its heft and balance. Then, as I made a sharp sideways cut from left to right, I pressed the stiff trigger.
Mana rushed from the grip into the blade, and the sword burst into flames. At the same time, it lurched forward as if propelled from behind. I absorbed the unexpected momentum by twirling the blade, releasing the trigger in the act, then bringing it back up in front of me so I could examine the effects.
The orange veins were glowing brightly, although the excess mana was being burnt through very quickly. Perhaps twenty percent of the mana stored in the handle had been expended in that single explosion.
“Eh?” Gideon said, practically vibrating as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “When triggered during a forceful movement, the sudden influx of mana into the fire salts causes a violent combustion effect, which can add to the speed and strength of a strike, as well as creating a fiery explosion.”
“It’s a little unwieldy at the moment,” Emily added, “but with the right training, a non-mage soldier should be able to properly time and target pretty devastating strikes with it.”
Her words drew my attention to the six non-mages watching quietly from a safe distance. I glanced around the shuttered mine. “What are we doing here?”
