by Andrew Rowe
He had his own variation on the classic Instant Striking Style, using his shield arm to make it difficult to judge when he’d draw into a life-severing cut.
As dangerous as he looked, his true lethality was hidden from sight. He’d set up the match. There was virtually no chance he hadn’t prepared tricks or traps specifically designed for countering Dawnbringer.
My jaw tightened as he drew closer.
I wouldn’t exactly put it like that, Dawn. But, uh, yes. I’ve fought Taer’vys before, many times. Back at home, during my pre-Thornguard training.
Zero, Dawn. And you’re not helping.
You’re not about to today, either.
When I last fought Taer’vys, I was a teenager. He was a grown adult — he’d already graduated into the Thornguard’s Bladebreaker division. He had a lot more experience than I did at that point.
I’ve learned a great deal since then. And, more importantly, I have you.
I tuned Dawn out, nodding to Taer’vys as he approached.
He stopped about ten feet in front of me with an easy smile and a casual stance.
As soon as he settled into position, the announcer spoke again. “Swordsmen, you may begin when ready!”
Neither of us moved right away.
I was rapidly evaluating the situation.
Taer’vys was a Thornguard, and a highly ranked one. As a member of the Bladebreaker division, he was only going to be sent to handle very dangerous assignments, usually involving neutralizing an enemy sorcerer or retrieving a valuable artifact. If he was on Kaldwyn, that meant he had orders from someone in a very high place.
He also knew me personally, and I had a vested interest in keeping my identity a secret. I couldn’t let my location or the fact that I had Dawnbringer get back to the Children of the Tyrant.
I didn’t know if he’d already recognized me or not. I wasn’t wearing the mask. I’d made a conscious decision not to wear the mask for the tournament as a whole, and I didn’t regret that. Wearing the mask for the whole tournament never would have worked, if it had been allowed by the tournament runners at all.
Really, the mistake I’d made had been at a much earlier stage. If I didn’t want to be found by my enemies, I shouldn’t have entered an international tournament where I was going to be watched by tens of thousands of people.
Oops.
In fairness, I hadn’t expected to run into someone from Mythralis anywhere near this quickly, and certainly not someone I knew personally. My understanding had been that people from Mythralis almost never traveled to Kaldwyn, and I couldn’t have expected Taer’vys to show up.
Now that he was there, though, I had to hope he didn’t recognize me. It wasn’t impossible.
It had been close to a decade since we’d seen each other. I’d been a teenager the last time we’d sparred. I’d grown my hair out since then, nearly to the middle of my back, instead of the military short I’d been forced to wear it during my training. I had new scars, and I wasn’t wearing the uniform he would have always seen me in.
Would that be enough?
Honestly, I doubted it. He probably had already identified me before the match even started. Still, I thought it’d be best to try to avoid giving him any additional hints, on the off chance that my false name and years apart had thrown him off.
That was going to be a real challenge. We’d trained under the same master for swordplay and metal sorcery, and he was one of few people who had a pretty good idea of how the Sae’kes worked. And even if he didn’t recognize my face, there was a good chance he’d recognize my voice.
He was also both brilliant and devious, which made for a pretty terrifying combination.
While I was processing which abilities I could hope to use without giving myself away entirely, Taer’vys made the first move.
“Keras Selyrian. Interesting name, that. Tell me, what does loyalty mean to you?”
I narrowed my eyes.
That question was a classic Thornguard authentication phrase. I’d never joined the Thornguard proper, but even I knew the proper answer.
I also knew the question was information gathering bait. If I gave the proper reply, I’d be confirming that, at a minimum, I was familiar with Thornguard to a degree that a citizen of Kaldwyn shouldn’t be.
While that should have made me nervous, it actually served to do the opposite. If he was trying to draw information out of me, that meant he didn’t know everything already.
Even if he knew my real identity, there was the chance he thought I was there on another Thornguard assignment. True, I’d been kicked out of the training program, but he didn’t necessarily know that — or perhaps he thought I’d been picked up by one of the Children of the Tyrant as one of their personal assistants.
I had a chance to try to throw him off, but only if I was willing to risk admitting I was from Mythralis at all.
The safe route would be to feign ignorance or just ignore him entirely, but I’m sure you know by now that I never do anything the safe way.
When someone comes out swinging, my instinct isn’t to run or dodge. It’s to hit them back harder.
I raised an eyebrow at him, then took a step back and began to walk in a slow circle. He matched my movement. “Taer’vys, isn’t that a poor question to ask in front of such a large audience? Someone might see you, and we both know that could be trouble.”
His signature grin never faded. “Oh, I don’t think I have to worry about anything like that. I have nothing to hide. I want to be seen.”
“Well, I’m happy to help make us more visible, then.” My hand moved, drawing Dawn and sweeping upward with a thought racing through my mind.
Golden Dawn.
Dawnbringer’s blade flashed with blinding light. As the wielder, I was unaffected. I heard some shouts of surprise from the audience, but not from Taer’vys.
He was a professional.
The moment I’d begun to draw, he was moving. The moment my sword began to glow, his shield was up, sheltering his eyes and simultaneously clearing a path for his own draw.
We were still ten feet apart, too far for a blade to reach — at least under ordinary circumstances.
When Taer’vys drew his sword, it changed in shape, the blade stretching outward and shifting into a chain as he swept it through the air. I knew the technique well. I had, uh, maybe possibly stolen it from him.
I reacted on instinct, smashing the Dawn downward against the chain. Ordinarily, that would have been the type of move that would cause the chain to either wrap around my weapon or hit me, but I had something specific in mind.
Brace for it, Dawn.
Break.
Against a swordsman of similar skill, I’ve always found that one of the best ways to improve your odds is to remove your opponent’s weapon from the equation entirely.
When I sent that command, however, I was unprepared for what came next.
Dawn screamed in my mind.
And at the same time, I felt it. Agony, as mana threatened to tear Dawn’s blade into pieces.
Taer’vys was a metal sorcerer, just like I was — and he’d hurled my effect right back at me, reinforced with something else. Something worse.
In my moment of understanding, I shifted the mana and dispersed the effect, but not without harm. Dawn was in terrible pain, and I experienced it right along with her.
Along with that came pain of the more mundane variety, as Taer’vys sword — still unbroken — continued to move. I’d driven it downward, but that just made it slash into my leg.
He pulled the chain backward immediatel
y thereafter, his eyes narrowed with focus. I didn’t know what he’d sensed, but my reaction to the exchange of blades had been abnormal, and he must have picked up on something.
I gave him something else to think about. As he pulled back for another swing, I hurled a blast of fire in his direction with my free hand.
He side-stepped it easily, but that gave me a heartbeat to think.
Dawn, are you okay?
My heart broke a little bit just hearing how she sounded. I could feel it, too, but I doubted I experienced it with the same degree of intensity that she did.
I focused, trying to find any structural damage in her blade. I didn’t find any physical harm — the metal hadn’t been moved or destroyed. It was far worse.
Her spirit was bleeding, and I didn’t know if I could staunch the wound.
So, when Taer’vys struck again, understand me when I say that I was angry.
As the whip-like blade neared me, I didn’t parry this time. I didn’t dare risk allowing Dawnbringer come to any further harm.
Instead, my left hand shot out with light-infused speed.
Body of Iron.
I caught the chain, ignoring the cutting edges along it, and pulled.
Taer’vys stumbled forward a single step, showing only the slightest surprise, and then I felt the hint of a command pass through the metal. It began to melt in my hand, then split in half in the center.
I hurled the now-molten half of a sword away just in time to see Taer’vys hurling something on his own — a dagger with a glistening black-stone pommel.
I jumped out of the way just as it exploded, producing a cloud of darkness that swept across the arena.
A moment later, I was alone in the dark.
It was only at that point that I’d realized that Dawnbringer’s light, once ever-present, had completely gone out.
My mind reached out to Dawn again.
I didn’t hear any words from her, I just felt the quiet impression that she was sobbing.
My hands balled into fists, and I pushed Dawn back into her sheath. She was in no condition to fight along with me.
A moment later, something hit me hard in the chest. Metal. I should have sensed it long before it struck me — meaning that whatever this darkness was, it wasn’t just blocking out my sight. It was something that could block my senses entirely.
Void sorcery, perhaps, on a tremendous scale. I didn’t have time to speculate, though. Even with my Body of Iron spell active, whatever had impacted my chest had left a bleeding mark. It hadn’t cut deep, but it had cut me. An enchanted blade, maybe — either that, or an ordinary one, and my Body of Iron wasn’t working properly in the darkness.
I kept my Body of Iron spell on, just in case.
The first thing I did was move. I didn’t know if Taer’vys could see in the dark. I had to hope that he couldn’t, and even if he could, a moving target was harder to hit.
Then, I tried to conjure a flame around my right hand. Nothing happened. Intensely powerful void sorcery was the most likely answer, then, or something similar.
Something hit me again, this time across the jaw. It left a shallow cut.
This isn’t working.
I’m here, Dawn. It’s okay.
Another cut glanced across my chest. My jaw tightened.
There were clever ways I probably could have handled the situation I was in, and even a few obvious ones.
I didn’t want to try using Radiant Dawn again, or using Dawnbringer’s magic in general, because I was worried that I would hurt her further.
And, of course, I had a ring with light magic on my hand. Maybe it would have worked, chasing away the dark.
I didn’t even try it.
Sometimes, when you’re angry enough, there’s no room for clever tricks and rational analysis. There’s only instinct.
And in that moment, my instinct was to do what I’d been resisting my entire life.
Destroy.
A wave of annihilating force rippled out from my body.
The darkness clinging to me didn’t fade — it tore. And as I breathed outward, the obliterating wave spread. I felt as it annihilated another metallic projectile that was flying through the air toward me, then I felt as it reached the edge of a shield, extended in front of a body.
I let it burn a little further.
As the edges of the shield disintegrated, I pulled my aura back inward, turning toward my opponent.
Taer’vys looked downward at the damage for just an instant, then back up to me. “Now that’s unusual.”
Then he pulled his arm back and hurled the damaged shield at me. It shifted in mid-air into a spinning blade, like a giant fan with razor cutting edges.
I caught it with a single hand. “No.”
Then my hand tightened, and I felt the metal crunch.
I tossed the shield aside and advanced. As I walked, the stone beneath me cracked.
Taer’vys didn’t show the slightest hint of concern. He reached down and put his hand on the sword at his hip. The blade had been separated earlier, but I knew he could easily form a new one.
I had two legendary weapons on my hips, either of which could have ended kingdoms with their might.
I didn’t draw either of them.
I walked forward, drew in a breath, and focused on my aura.
Taer’vys cut.
It was a technically perfect execution of the Aayaran Instant Striking Style, a draw straight toward a vital point on an opponent’s body. In this case, he’d aimed straight for my neck.
I never found out if he would have deliberately stopped the strike short of making that lethal cut. His arm stopped for an entirely different reason.
I’d taken every bit of mana from Body of Iron and pushed it into my aura. I was no longer destroying everything around me — I was magnetic. And, having clashed with his sword before, I knew which polarity to push against.
A less experienced swordsman might have found their blow going wide — Taer’vys simply stopped the moment he felt resistance and jumped back.
If I gave him a moment to process, he probably would have come up with something clever to get through my magnetic defense. I had, however, run out of patience.
Fire surged around both of my hands, and I hurled blasts of flame at him in rapid succession. Taer’vys dodged the first, but the second clipped him. That got little more than a wince, but while he reacted, I rushed forward.
Rushing toward an opponent with superior reach is, under most circumstances, an awful idea. But I still had an aura active that was magnetically pushing his sword away, and as I closed in, it just threw off his grip further.
I smashed a fist right into his chest, and when I felt the metal plates inside his brigandine coat, I detonated them.
His armor exploded into pieces. There were leather portions of the armor underneath the metallic plates, preventing the shrapnel from causing him any serious harm, but I’ll bet some slivers got through. And, of course, let’s not forget that I’d been strong enough to punch through solid stone when I was a small child. When I really wanted to hurt someone, I hit hard.
If he’d been an ordinary soldier, I might have punched right through his chest.
As it is, the force of the punch carried him backward several steps, but I didn’t feel the telltale caving of any bones. My fist met with extreme resistance, enough that I felt a surge of pain shoot through my knuckles on impact.
In an instant, I understood why.
Taer’vys was using Body of Iron.
He had the same spells I did, and he was quick enough to brace for the punch. When he recovered and took a swing back in my direction, his own Body of Iron might have given him the strength to cut through the resistance of my aura, if I hadn’t blinded him with a blast of flame across his face immediately thereafter.
Even as it
was, he managed to shut his eyes and counter. He swept his sword at me and it separated into pieces, with each of them flying toward me at a different trajectory. In the moment it took me to evade the fragments, he was falling back and had formed another entire sword and shield.
His half-opened eyes showed none of my anger, only amusement. “Not even going to draw your swords?” He stepped back further, then shifted to a defensive stance. “You’ve got such an interesting collection.”
“You hurt her.” Flames appeared around my hands. “I won’t let you do it again.”
That wolfish grin returned to Taer’vys face. “That’s an interesting turn of—”
I hurled the blasts of flame at him, but he blocked with his shield easily.
The moment I’d let him back away, I’d lost the advantage.
Taer’vys continued to back away, heading slowly toward the ring of darkness that still coated the edge of the arena. I’d obliterated a large portion of it, but my aura hadn’t extended nearly all the way across the entire ring.
If he disappeared into that darkness, he could maneuver freely, and I’d be useless inside.
And if I tried using my destruction aura again...I didn’t like my odds of being able to pull it back in. It was very likely people would be hurt, and not just Taer’vys.
Dawn?
He hurt you, Dawn. He could do it again.
I grimaced, but I couldn’t argue with that. My hand moved to her hilt.
“That’s more like it.” Taer’vys gestured. “Go on. Draw.”
I did draw, but not in the way he expected.
My hand shot to the sword on my other hip. And, with an old trick, I separated the metallic scabbard and drew my sword straight through it.
