Worlds' Strongest

by Simon Archer

  “The move was correct.” Elle nodded. “Here, watch this. You can’t always rely on it, but often you’ll find your enemy signaling. That’s where they indicate to you what they’re about to do, and that gives you extra time to prepare a block or counterattack.”

  “Oh! That’s telegraphing!”

  “What’s a telegraph?”

  “Oh. Uh, nevermind.” I chuckled and shook my head. “So, signaling. Got it. What kind of signals should I look for?”

  “The most obvious is eyes. Inexperienced opponents will look at their target before they attack it, like so.” I watched Elle’s eyes, and they shifted to my right shoulder. Her staff flew toward that side, but I found it a bit easier to block that time.

  “Good,” she nodded, setting down her staff. “Hand to hand is good to demonstrate signaling. See, look at my legs. Which side is my weight on?”

  “Um… I can’t tell,” I frowned.

  “Exactly. My weight is evenly distributed. But…” As she spoke, her body realigned, so that it was almost completely in line with her left foot, “How about now?”

  “To the right. I mean, my right, your left.”

  “Good,” she smiled. “So if my weight is on the left, that means I need my right foot to be free for something like this.”

  I was immediately grateful that she was still a quarterstaff’s distance away as her right foot came at me because it was so fast I was sure I couldn’t have blocked it. It was so fast I barely saw it.

  “So,” Elle said as she returned her foot to the ground and evened her stance, “if you know what to look for, that means you can avoid doing it.”

  I nodded and smiled. “Okay, that makes sense. Now, if you could just teach me to kick that fast, I should be pretty good.” She seemed to hesitate for a second at that before bending down to pick up her staff.

  “Come on,” Elle urged. “Let’s get moving.”

  “Oh, um, yeah.” I strapped my quarterstaff to my back and picked up my bag. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. We’re killing two birds with one stone.” And with that, she continued down the road.

  Most of yesterday, we’d found ourselves in pretty open spaces, but about an hour into our journey that morning, the fields gave way to a forest. I was grateful for it since the trees mostly kept the sun out of my eyes. I wondered if I could teach these people about sunglasses.

  “Okay. What does that mean?” I asked as I caught up with her.

  “Your physical body isn’t the only thing that grows stronger with your class,” she explained.

  “Oh, right.” I snapped my fingers as I thought back to our previous discussion. “Your breath and mental… Mentality, right? What does that mean?”

  “Your mind can do things that your physical body isn’t equipped for,” she explained. “The same energy you breathe through your body to enhance your movement can also go into your mind and spirit. It has the power to affect the things around you, and they can shift or interpret things to your advantage.”

  My eyebrows drew together, and I immediately felt myself getting skeptical. “This is starting to sound like a life guru marketing scam.”

  Elle chuckled. “I have no idea what that is, but I assure you this isn’t a scam. On the contrary, this is what everyone in Solivann spends their lives training. Kaia never needed to know how to use weapons as an herbalist, but she trains to expand her mind just as much as I do. Well, not exactly. She should, but she always finds some excuse to skip training. It’s maddening how she-” I cleared my throat, at which she paused and looked over at me, then smiled. “Right. Sorry. Anyway, what do you know of your mind? What can it do?”

  That seemed like a trick question. “It can… think?”

  “Yes. And…?” she continued, as if trying to draw the answer she wanted out of me.

  “It sends signals to my body to get it to move,” I recalled from my high school biology classes. “That’s about it.”

  “Wrong. Well, sort of right.” Elle took a moment to choose her words. “If your brain can move your body, don’t you think it can do more?”

  “No,” I said simply. “My brain is connected to my body. It’s not connected to anything else.”

  Elle stared at me as though I had begun speaking a different language. Just then, I felt my foot catch on something like a root, and I tripped, falling face-first into the dirt.

  “Ow.” I cringed and sat up, glancing back to see what I had tripped on. There was… nothing. The road was clear. “Um. That was weird.”

  “What was weird?” I jumped at the sound of Elle’s voice. Before I’d fallen, she was to my right, but her voice came from the other side. When I glanced over, however, she wasn’t there. I scrambled to my feet and whirled around. But she wasn’t where she’d just been standing either.

  “Elle?” My chest tightened as I realized I didn’t know what was going on.

  “What’s wrong, Ren?” she asked… but from behind me.

  When I whipped around, she wasn’t there. I took a few steps back and leaned against a large tree, closing my eyes and focusing on the feeling of my feet on the ground. My heart pounded in my ears, my breathing got shallower, and I struggled to catch it.

  “Ren!” she called out. When I opened my eyes, Elle was standing in front of me with her hand on my shoulder. I could feel that. So why hadn’t I felt her put her hand there in the first place?

  “What the hell just happened?” I snapped, taking a step away from the tree and from her.

  “Your mind has a lot more power than you think it does,” she said cryptically.

  “Whoa, whoa, wh- wait, what are you saying?” I blurted out. “What just happened?”

  “You weren’t prepared to block an attack.” More mystery words that I didn’t fully grasp, but my mind was already racing to understand them.

  “No.” I shook my head as things fell into place. “Are you saying that you-?”

  “Yes.”

  That was impossible. If she was implying what I thought she was, that meant she had somehow manipulated my perception and my brain so that I tripped over something that wasn’t there and couldn’t see her when she stood right in front of me. That shouldn’t have been possible in any universe. Still, understanding the cause of the sudden strange events finally let my breath start to steady out.

  “How… How did you do that?”

  “What did you call it? Mentality?” She smiled like I hadn’t just been scared half to death. “I like that word.” Elle turned and continued walking down the path. I was quick to follow her.

  “Okay, fine, call it whatever, but how did you do that?” I pressed.

  “I’ve trained for over a decade to manipulate the mind of an enemy, but there are many uses for mental strength,” she explained. “Like you saw earlier, one is speed.”

  “Wait, you can use your mind to speed things up?”

  “No,” she corrected, “you can use it to slow things down. If things are moving slower, you can react quicker.”

  “Okay…” I started to think I understood what she meant. “So how do I do that?”

  “You have to work up to it, like anything. With mental exercises, after you’ve applied your breath, the first thing you’ll have to work on is awareness. Be aware of the things around you. Close your eyes.” Elle sounded like a Jedi or, well, someone out of an old kung-fu movie. While it sounded crazy, well, I realized I essentially was in a kung-fu movie.

  With that in mind, I followed her instructions and stopped moving.

  “No, keep going.”

  I opened my eyes to look at her in confusion. “Elle, if I can’t see, I’m going to fall again. I didn’t like that very much.”

  She rolled her eyes. “This is much easier to teach children. They have less of a sense of disbelief. Close your eyes, breathe, and try to expand your mind to sense your surroundings. You should be able to form a picture in your head that matches what your eyes see, and that’s how you avoid trip
ping or running into things.”

  I considered arguing for a second, but then took a deep breath. If I had somehow fallen through a portal into an alternate universe in the first place, who’s saying I couldn’t also see with magic mental x-ray vision?

  If I ever made it back home, this would make a killer sci-fi series.

  I closed my eyes and tried to focus on expanding my awareness, whatever that meant. Nothing.

  “Try to bounce off of your memory,” Elle’s voice came from beside me. “You saw what the forest looked like before you closed your eyes. Recall that and let your mind expand from there.”

  I sighed and tried to picture the forest in my head as I remembered it. The sun was to my right, so there were more shadows on that side, with the left brightly lit. It seemed like there were more trees on the right, or at least I noticed more. They were all the regular forest trees with tall trunks and green leaves, with the colors still brighter than they were at home. There were bushes and other greenery around the forest floor in between the trees, with fallen leaves in between those. Plenty of thin weeds poked their way through the larger plants.

  Then something was no longer static.

  Out of the corner of my eye, or my memory, I saw something shift. I could hear the rustle of bushes and leaves, but more importantly, I swore I could see the thing causing it. It looked like a person riding a horse.

  “Get down!” Elle hissed in my ear. The next thing I knew, she had pulled me over into one of the bushes behind an especially fat tree. I blinked and saw her peering through the leaves on the bush.

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  “Shh! Stay quiet,” she urged. “I don’t know. I think it’s a hunter.”

  I leaned forward to peer through the bush, careful not to expose myself. Now I could see the hunter in full detail rather than the blurred image that had walked into my mind. The horse was the tallest and largest I’d ever seen. I had friends with pickup trucks smaller than that thing. It had tan fur the color of light honey but a dark, golden-brown mane littered with small thin braids, just like the person on its back.

  Once I got past the sheer size of the horse, my eyes focused on its rider. The long hair was no help since everyone here wore their hair long, but the figure looked fairly feminine, though not necessarily petite like Elle’s. The huntress looked taller from what I could tell, and she wore some kind of leather armor very different from the light silk and cotton garments in Eon. It did have symbols embossed in the leather, however, but they looked entirely different from those I’d seen yesterday and the day before. In Eon, everything looked angular and sharp, but these characters, if that’s what they were, looked more organic.

  “Who is that?” I muttered to Elle.

  “I have no idea, but she has to be Platinum Class at least.”

  “What is she doing?”

  “She looks like a hunter, but I didn’t think there were many animals worth hunting here.”

  As we watched, the hunter placed one hand on her mount’s head to steady herself as she stood upright on the horse’s back, all while the beast was still moving.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered. Just then, I realized she wasn’t riding with a saddle. I’d never ridden a horse, but I’d heard that it was painful without the cushion of a saddle.

  Standing up, she was easier to see. If everyone else here looked like period actors in a performance art piece, she looked like she came straight out of a video game. Her leather armor looked like it had been molded to her body. Her skin was a tanned olive color, and her long hair, pulled back with intricate braids, was a similar dark brown shade to her horse’s.

  She didn’t wobble or lose her balance in the slightest as the horse galloped, even when it leapt over a bush. No, she was perfectly upright as she pulled a decorated longbow from her back along with a silver arrow, aimed it at something we couldn’t see, and shot. Once the arrow left her hand, there was no doubt in my mind she would hit her target.

  A sharp snap echoed through the woods, followed by a roar that shook the ground beneath us. I looked to Elle, wondering if we were even safe, but her eyes remained locked on the huntress. When I looked back, I saw why.

  Her balance wavered ever so slightly as the ground shook. The instant it did, she leapt from the back of her mount, springing higher than should have been possible. She grabbed onto a branch and rested her feet on the side of a tree.

  But what really caused our mutual surprise was the fact that, as soon as her feet left the back of the horse, the animal vanished into thin air.

  The huntress pulled herself up, so she squatted on the branch and began to aim another arrow. I still had no idea what she was aiming at, but it roared again to let us know it wasn’t gone yet. In fact, this time, it was closer.

  “Elle-” I whispered, but she cut me off with a gesture.

  We both watched as the huntress pulled back on the string with an empty hand. Out of nowhere, an arrow appeared, though this one looked more like the blade that cut me: it was made of light.

  The surrounding air shifted. The wind seemed to stop dead in its tracks, and my hair stood on end. The huntress rotated to aim her arrow. When she finally stopped, the light obscured her face. It only took a fraction of a second for me to figure out why.

  She was aiming her arrow at us.

  “Elle!” I tried to warn, but Elle cut me off again.

  “Shh!” she added for effect.

  Everything felt as though it moved in slow motion, but I didn’t attribute that to psychic magic so much as adrenaline. Despite being yards away and up in the trees, I heard the huntress give one final tug on the string of her bow before releasing. The string reverberated as it shot back into place, and the arrow of light whistled as it cut through the air, coming straight for us.

  Elle and I followed the arrow with our eyes, frozen in fear. In what felt like a millisecond, the arrow whizzed through the bush in the space directly between our heads. If she or I had twitched at the wrong second, I’d wager the arrowhead would have landed in one of us. Instead, it pierced a bush behind us, and the ground began to shake once more. Finally, Elle looked at me.

  “Run,” she said, but she didn’t need to say a word.

  I shot to my feet, unconcerned with who or what could see me, and darted back to the worn path on the forest floor, Elle close behind me. We ran and ran, and I have no idea how long we did, but I didn’t even feel tired from the exertion. All I could remember was that violent roar from some unseen beast, and that fueled a new burst of energy.

  Finally, I felt Elle’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Ren, stop!” she shouted to get my attention. “We’re okay.”

  I slowed to a stop, immediately doubling over as a latent stitch emerged in my side.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, my breathing heavy as I looked up at her.

  “Yes,” she said through her own labored breathing. I was comforted by the fact that even Elle seemed worn out from our sprint.

  “What was that?” I didn’t need to explain what ‘that’ was.

  “I have no idea,” Elle gasped out, though her breathing was already starting to return to normal. “I’ve never heard of creatures larger than a wolf in these woods, but a wolf doesn’t make those sounds. I couldn’t sense it either.”

  “If you can’t sense it, couldn’t there be another one?” I asked.

  The look on her face as she hesitated was my answer.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that.” She looked back through the trees rather than address what neither of us wanted to think about.

  “Like what?” It was all insane to me, but as my resident Solivann expert, it unnerved me for her to be so shocked by anything.

  “The horse just disappeared!” Elle blurted out. “And her arrow? She conjured it without a window.”

  “Window?” I finally stood straight and looked back down the way we came, holding my side where the stitch was and trying to steady my breathing. “Oh. Was that t
he thing on the ground? In Eon?”

  I paused as I recalled the moment before I’d been cut. The mosaic on the ground had glowed beneath Kistro’s feet before he cut me. Whatever he managed to do, the mosaic must have helped.

  Elle nodded. “That’s called a window. I’ve never seen anyone do what she did without one.”

  “How did she do that?” I asked as I tried to absorb all this new information.

  “I don’t know,” she mused, “but I’d sure like to learn.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered, “me too. As soon as I saw her coming, I-”

  “Wait.” She grabbed my arm and turned me to face her. “You saw her coming?”

  “Yeah,” I began, “I was looking down the road, and I saw-”

  “Ren, you didn’t see anything,” Elle cut me off, her grip on my arm tightening. “Your eyes were closed.”

  I blinked as the moments leading up to the huntress’ attack flooded back. “I… I remembered how the forest looked. I was picturing it. Then I saw the horse coming. Are you sure I didn’t just open my eyes?”

  Elle grinned at me. “Your eyes were closed until I pushed you in the bush.”

  “What, does that mean I was… seeing with my eyes closed?” It sounded delusional when I said it out loud.

  “Yes!” she cried in glee, despite the dangerous situation we’d just gotten out of.

  I took a deep breath and tried to absorb that. It was one thing when she was just telling me it was possible, but it was an entirely different experience to do it myself.

  Once I got past how weird the whole thing seemed, though, I had to admit, it was pretty damn cool.

  9

  “How big is this forest?” I huffed after a few more hours of walking. Yes, I was tired, but after the magic huntress and invisible monster, mostly I was just anxious to get out of the woods where there were a million places for something to hide.

  “About a full day’s journey,” Elle began, “but Grave is just another mile…” Oh, thank goodness. “Once we reach the edge of the woods.”

  “Fuck,” I groaned and paused to lean against a tree.