Reality's Plaything 4: Savants Ascendant

by Will Greenway

  He felt a tingle, the young savant looking out through his eyes.

 

  Bannor growled.

 

  Echoes of combat continued to resound through the halls. Steel clashed and beasts roared. He sensed more of the Baronian monstrosities, a lot more. A cold sensation shot through him.

 

 

 

 

  He sighed and willed himself back into normal flesh. With a sizzling sound, his body crackled and shimmered, metal-hard tissue becoming normal skin again.

  He turned to face Senalloy and Sarai. “Are you two okay? Star, are you hurt?”

  Senalloy’s head tilted to one side and she blinked. “Bannor?”

  He nodded and helped the silver-haired Baronian up to stand. The woman drew a breath.

  He knelt down to Sarai.

  She stared at him. “My One?”

  He reached out and touched the bruise on her cheek, willing the flesh to heal. A tickling feathery sensation played down his arm and a warmth filled his hand. The discoloration faded to the normal milky-tan color of her skin. He dropped his hand to her abdomen, extending his senses to tiny Vhina. The life force of their unborn seemed strong.

  “Vhina’s okay.” Letting out a breath and picked up the blue communication crystal and put it in her hand. “When that went dead it scared the spit out of me.”

  Sarai looked down at it, then back up at him as if unable to believe he was really there.

  “Bannor—is that you?”

  “It’s me,” he looked down at himself. “Big change, huh?”

  “It’s you though,” she said. “More you, the you I’ve always seen in my heart.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yes, I love you too.” He took the crystal, which was forgotten in her fingers, and placed it behind her ear.

  She touched the spot and blinked up at him. Was his appearance so stunning? Was he that ugly?

  He gathered her up in his arms. She didn’t seem to weigh anything. She put her arms around his neck. “All right, let’s get you back to the vault.”

  Bannor listened to the sounds, and sensed where Janai and Ryelle were. He turned to Senalloy. “Is it safe to teleport now?”

  The elder shook her head. “The attackers have teleporting monitored. We’d go right into one of their traps.”

  “Dammit,” he growled. “All right, let’s hoof it.”

  He leaned into a trot, heading toward where Sarai’s two sisters were being kept. Senalloy followed him. “Sarai, if you give Sen a hard time again, I will be very cross with you. If I have to promise to stay safe, you have to do the same.”

  “I didn’t give her a hard time!”

  “You left the vault, and she had to rescue you. That’s trouble in my thinking.”

  “Mother and Father need help.”

  “I’ll help them. This time you’re going to stay there until it’s safe.”

  She smacked his shoulder. He didn’t even feel it. “Keep me with you damn it!”

  He frowned at her. “No. Not this time. These things are too dangerous.”

  “Bannor, aren’t you even going to explain?”

  “Explain what?”

  She smacked his shoulder again. “What happened to you? How did you get here?” She glanced back down the hall. “How did you kill that thing?”

  “Uh, this is my first one body,” he said with a shrug. “We needed them to fight the dreads.” He tilted his head. “As to how, he made me mad and I hit him really hard.”

  She studied his face with wide violet eyes. “You know I can walk.”

  “While I’m holding onto you nothing is going to bother you—at least not if I have anything to say about it.”

  She put her head on his shoulder. “You do feel good. Warm—even through all that armor.”

  Down a flight of stairs, and through several heavy steel and mithril doors that Senalloy locked behind them, they arrived at the safe vault where Senalloy had originally brought Sarai. The elder knocked in a pattern and they heard a bolt clanked back. Senalloy opened the massive door. Ryelle and Janai stood on the other side obviously agitated and concerned.

  Bannor waded through the flood of questions and exclamations and set Sarai down. He wrapped his arms around her and gave her a hug. “Now, stay.”

  He turned to Ryelle and Janai. “Sit on her if you have to.”

  Ryelle blinked amber eyes at him. “Brother?”

  Janai openly stared at him. “Jihkalla.” (Beautiful.)

  The structure shuddered, then a tumbling crash that was the unmistakable sound of something heavy tumbling down stairs. One of the huge vault doors they locked behind them by the sound.

  He swung his senses to the passages above them. More dreads. Why? There was nothing here except the vault.

  “Damn,” he said. “Could they be targeting Sarai directly to get to me?”

  The booming came again, another door being battered down. The silver-haired Baronian listened to the sound and frowned. “You gave Voldrax your name, it wouldn’t take much to find out what she is to you.”

  “Just frelling great, there’s like five dreads coming.” He looked at Senalloy. “Can you do much against these things?”

  She shrugged and pulled out the clear crystalline sword. “I have something that cuts them.”

  “Good.” He turned to the three sisters. He stepped up and put his hands on the shoulders of Janai and Ryelle. “I’m going to try to deal with this, then get upstairs to help your parents.”

  The normally impassive Ryelle brushed back her pale hair, let out little cry and gave him a hug. “Thank you, Brother.”

  “Kala,” Janai said, also giving him a hug.

  He took Sarai by the shoulders and kissed her. Body trembling, she kissed him back. He pushed away. “I have a plan. Do—not—go out there. Remember the boom at Brondheim?”

  Sarai eyes went wide. So, did Janai’s.

  He pointed to the door that was half a pace of reinforced and magicked mithril. “That will hold. It won’t protect you if it’s open. Get it?”

  The three of them nodded with scared expressions. The crash of doors was getting close.

  “We have to go. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He gave Sarai a meaningful look then turned away. He stepped into the hall and pulled it shut behind Senalloy.

  Bannor paused and looked back at the door. Sarai had seemed different. He shook his head. She probably was simply not used to how he appeared.

  He focused on the hall. It wouldn’t take the dreads long now.

  He willed himself into battle-form, feeling the mass harden around his limbs in a crackle of static. Those bastards would not get past him.

  “Shield yourself with your strongest protection, I’m going to try and scramble them up. If it works, you should have plenty of opportunities to work them.”

  The silver-haired Baronian went through the cadences of a complicated spell as the thundering and bashing of the dreads came closer. The incantation ended with a clap and a hemisphere of green energy surrounded her. He examined it in his nola sight. Potent magic indeed, it should hold up to what he planned.

  The dreads came around the corner thundering like a pack of rhinotaurs. Prepared for their threads to be armored, he pushed through the resistance with the immortal strength of his new body and grabbed hold of the first two creatures. As he pinched down, he felt the dozens of mages at ends of those cords of magic—they were all about to get a
very large headache. Like he had done with Tyr and Vidar at the foot of Brondheim peak he tangled the creatures threads of power around each other then planted himself. He didn’t have Wren and Daena to provide the impetus this time. So, he would do it himself.

  “Brace yourself!” he yelled. He set, calling even more mass and potential into himself, visualizing his need, making clear in his will what he needed to do. The stone underfoot cracked, then cratered as he willed his body to diamond hardness.

  One thing about the dreads, for all their horrific powers of mêlée, they were tremendously predictable. They had one goal in mind, and that was to smash him to a pulp. Full headlong charge, mattock-sized hands spread and ready to crush.

  He pushed off, driving forward and focusing all his will and strength through the beast. He aimed at the broadest portion of the chest and thundered his fist home.

  The mystic protections around the charging behemoth shrieked under the strain. The golden skin crumpled inward under the titanic thrust and burst. At the same time, the momentum and inertia smashed the creature back at hurricane speed.

  Threads tangled and mashed down.

  He did not however get the desired effect. Apparently, the threads of the aliens were not like those of the pantheon lords. The same kinds of threads that annihilated Tyr and Vidar because of their strength—snapped.

  While the attack failed to cause the explosion he hoped for, he did disrupt their charge as the lead creature became an invulnerable battering ram, scattering the others like a boulder catapulted into a grove of saplings.

  “Dammit!” He charged forward, whipping his axes from their sheaths, and pounded one of the toppled creatures.

  Powered by the mass and strength of first one’s battle form, the mystic metal cut the gold armor. The creature howled in pain as he ripped huge gashes in its torso. The beast pounded back with incredible strength that he felt even through battleshape.

  Two more of the creatures leaped on him, slamming and battering. Damn, those hits hurt. Nerves buried in a thumb-length of solid alloy and he could still feel those strikes.

  He focused on one. Fighting the thing was like chopping down an ironwood tree, chipping away a little at a time, the thing would just not die! Meanwhile, the other two hammered him with strikes. He simply couldn’t do much to block or dodge. With his mass increased to this level, he couldn’t move fast enough. If he decreased his density even a little, they’d make divots in him like lance hits on a jousting dummy.

  One of the creatures froze in mid-swing as Senalloy’s clear crystalline sword sprouted from its forehead. The silver-haired woman leaped back as the monster thrashed and bucked on the floor in frenetic spasms of death.

  Bannor landed another massive strike upside the creature’s neck and yanked it back. Riddled with cuts like a ten summer old butcher block, the creature finally succumbed and collapsed to the floor.

  He staggered as the last creature redoubled its efforts to pummel him to death. He saw Senalloy swaying back and forth trying to get an opening to land a single killing strike. Anything other than a perfect attack would put her within reach of one of those devastating hits.

  Bannor threw down his axes and caught one of the creature’s massive arms as it crashed down on his shoulder. As it tried to pull away, he twisted its wrist and brought his free hand down on its elbow with all his tons of weight.

  The creature’s arm made a metallic shrieking sound, and somewhere deep in its flesh, iron-hard bone snapped. The monster let out a deafening roar of pain and reeled away.

  Its bellow became a gasp as Senalloy’s sword plunged up through its brain, and its body began to twitch and thrash spastically. The woman yanked the blade free and stepped back.

  Bannor dropped to his knees with a gasp. “Fff—” He panted. “Fff—” He shook his head trying to get enough air and after a few more tries got it. “Frell.”

  Senalloy wiped the blood from her sword, sheathed it, and leaned against the wall. She glanced at the corpses that were beginning to smoke. “We lived. Amazing.”

  “Th-thanks,” he gasped out.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t get quite what you wanted?”

  He shook his head.

  She nudged one of the corpses. “Whatever it was, it killed those first two pretty well.”

  With a huff, Bannor pushed himself to his feet, and relaxed the battle-form reducing his mass by increments, and finally letting his flesh return to normal.

  “Oh, argh,” he groaned. Wincing, he rubbed his chest and shoulders. His body burned. “Damn, feel like butcher has been pounding on me with a meat tenderizer.”

  He turned to the vault door and knocked on it.

  The bolt was pulled back and he and Senalloy opened it.

  The three sisters looked out in the hall with wide eyes.

  “You did it,” Sarai breathed, hands pressed to her cheeks.

  “Barely,” he said, giving her a hug. He ground his teeth together even that little pressure stung. Ow. It hurt.

  “Are you okay?” Sarai asked.

  He blinked away the tears. “It’ll heal. Okay, going for your parents now. Ryelle, can you tell Kalindinai we’re coming?”

  The eldest princess nodded. “She just checked with me, they’re barricaded on the third level, you better hurry.”

  He drew a breath. “On our way.”

  He kissed Sarai again on the cheek.

  They stepped through the door and sealed it again. He looked at the small pond of crimson slime where the creatures had been. “Do you have a way that will keep them out of here while we go elsewhere?”

  “Not for very long, but a while,” Senalloy said.

  “Something is better than nothing.”

  “Agreed.” They stepped back and the Baronian war-mage went through the complex cadences of a spell that covered the hall in a shimmering orange mist. The interplay of magic and forces was odd. To his senses it appeared like a powerful barrier.

  “Can you fly?” he asked her.

  “Sure.” She chanted another spell and lifted off the ground.

  He concentrated and lifted off in hiss of mist around his arms and legs. “We can make better time.”

  “On your tail,” she said with a nod.

  They headed up the hall back the way they came. As they moved, he began to feel better. Apparently this first one body healed fast. He noticed Senalloy’s cuts and bruises from earlier had already vanished. They made good time, flying up the stairs and over the debris from the doors smashed by the forced entry of the dreads.

  “Do you suppose Corim is okay?” he called back to her.

  “I can feel he’s a little beat up, but otherwise doing fine,” she responded. “I would know if he were in real danger.”

  “Aren’t you concerned? I thought you liked him.”

  “Actually, I love the handsome lug,” she corrected with a sigh. She shook her head as if disappointed by her own feelings. “He’s too fast for those brutes to do much to him. He is exceptional with a shaladen.”

  In the upper hall the sounds of battle grew audible again. He recognized the battle cries of valkyries and something surprising—the roar of dragons. That sounded like Tymoril! He heard an answering rumble. That was definitely Kegari. In dragon shape, inside the castle? Where was there enough space?

  He and Senalloy found out. In the main audience hall, the roof arched to a point some twenty paces high, and the chamber width sufficient so that not one but both dragons could stand shoulder to shoulder. The massive draconians hissed and rumbled, their scales flickering in the dark red of rage. The valkyries must have fed them an entire bushel of Idun’s fruit because the auras of the creatures burned like a forest fire.

  The Baronian dreads in their single-mindedness were trying to kill the giant reptiles, but having consumed so much of the fruit either of dragons probably weighed a thousand tons, their already steel-hard scales enhanced to the point they were like foot thick reinforced alloy.

  Ten
of the golden juggernauts flailed away at the dragons. The reddish slime from at least five slain dreads already occupied house-sized craters in the granite floor.

  The two dragons worked together and used their mass, keeping their wings and everything remotely vulnerable squeezed tight to their bodies. Whips of their tails and swats of their claws sent creatures flying.

  Tymoril stomped on a dreadnought, pinning its legs and bellowed to her partner. Kegari whipped around fifteen paces of tail like a lash that cracked with speed and brought it whistling down on the struggling gold-skinned monster.

  Bannor winced as twenty tons of magically enhanced dragon armor mashed down at ten times the speed of a galloping horse. Granite exploded and the shock blew he and Senalloy back several paces. In the crater, the monster continued to struggle. It had survived! Stunned, the creation’s resistance was feeble and only grew more so as the two gigantic ophidians repeatedly struck the tough nut until its golden shell cracked. When it gave, the creature made a squish audible a thousand paces away.

  “Bleah!” He grimaced. “They have things well in hand.”

  “No way can one small objective be worth this,” Senalloy said with a shake of her head. “They lose nearly a hundred elites every time one of these dreads dies. The backlash from such a coven binding is fatal. Eons of experience destroyed in a heartbeat. They can’t be replaced. It’s insane.”

  Bannor lead the way, rising up near the ceiling where they wouldn’t accidentally get caught in the mêlée. As he looked at the bellowing dreads struggling to make some impression on dragons, he, like Senalloy, had to wonder why. Why keep fighting when it seemed fairly obvious that they could never defeat the dragons in a purely physical confrontation? The dreads were obviously a tool for intimidation and demoralization. Perhaps they were a flawed weapon that was being used in the absence of a better one. If so, it was lack-wit solution, because of the resources it cost. Perhaps the Baronians had become so jaded and confident in their ability to destroy the Kriar that they simply didn’t think the defenses of Kul’Amaron could kill them. Perhaps that explained their absence from the second attack on Homeworld.

  Part way across the room, Tymoril looked up at them and let out a bugle of challenge. Ignoring the enemies at her feet, she drew back, the spikes on her back turned crimson with heat.