by Unknown
Matt began running again.
He continued on his chosen route, switching to an energy-conserving jog instead of a sprint. He had a long way to go, and he couldn’t possibly do it running flat out the entire way. Besides, it didn’t matter how fast he ran, the enemy’s weapons would find him; and they were too fast and too accurate to avoid on the strength of his running ability.
More attacks came, each time from enemy emplacements that were too far for him to spot visualy, though sometimes his ears could judge their approximate direction after the attack was finished. Each time, he felt a flash of insight, and he folowed it instantly. Sometimes he stopped, others he went left or right, and each time it was just barely enough to dodge a deadly assault. He dropped his shield to conserve his aythar; it wasn’t doing him much good keeping it up the entire time. Instead he blocked his hearing with a smal sonic shield around his ears. They were bound to start using explosive warheads again, and he had been nearly deafened too many times already.
A few of the attacks came at such an angle that merely dodging wasn’t enough—debris and shrapnel could be just as lethal as a direct hit. In those instances, he erected a shield just before it was necessary; again his prescient talent let him know when he would need it.
Eventualy, they gave up trying to hit him with their hypervelocity projectiles, but after a brief respite he found himself pinned down once more by high-powered machine gun fire. It was just like what had come from the tortus he had fought earlier, almost too strong to shield against and unrelenting. Once they started, they didn’t stop for several minutes.
He couldn’t dodge that, for the weapons tracked his movement precisely, so he was forced to hunker down with a hastily erected earthen
bulwark supported by a shield each time.
Luckily, it seemed that an individual weapon couldn’t fire forever without pausing. After a minute or two, the attack would end, and he would start jogging once more. He guessed the weapons might overheat from continued use, but he couldn’t be sure.
After a couple of miles of this, he began to angle his direction back northward. Soon after, he ran directly into one of the tortus’s that had been firing on him earlier. He didn’t see or sense it until it was almost too late. His magesight was far too limited in this world. Running through a smal copse of trees on a slight rise, he emerged only twenty yards from it.
Like al the machines, it never hesitated. The torso turned immediately and the spinning barrels blurred into motion as it fired on him.
Rather than use earth, since he had no time, he created a softer shield, one that was spongy and elastic, with a hard, solid layer beneath it. He had done something similar in the past to cushion a fal, and he had a memory of his ancestor Tyrion doing something like it in battle.
It worked.
The outer layer robbed the bulets of some of their energy, alowing the harder shield beneath to stop them without putting him in danger of experiencing feedback. Losing consciousness now would be a death sentence.
Pointing his specialized rune channel rod at the thing, he fried its electronics and resumed jogging.
Other than being physicaly exhausting, his journey had almost turned into a sort of obstacle course. Somewhere in the back of his head, he was silently terrified, but he kept that voice far from the front of his mind, where the decisions were being made. By restricting his use of shields to just when he needed them, he was getting better at conserving his aythar in this magic-barren world, and when he did get low, he would take out one of the iron spheres and start replenishing himself.
After an hour, it started to get mundane. Even his fear had dried up, or perhaps it had simply given up from the sheer futility of trying to keep him pumped up with adrenaline. He knew this stage was dangerous, he had heard his father talk about it before. Moments when he had become
too numb to feel afraid, those were the times he had often suffered his worst defeats or made the biggest mistakes.
But Matthew had no choice, or not any choice that he would take. He had to continue. So he did, while trying not to let his growing confidence cloud his judgment.
Then it happened—an overwhelming sense of impending doom. There was nowhere to jump, no direction to seek safety. Everywhere around
him was death, and there were no choices for escape.
It was quiet, and to his normal senses there was no apparent danger, but he knew he was about to die, unless he did something. This warning had come with enough time to choose, but he knew that he had less than a minute. Probably a missile, he thought.
He needed the Fool’s Tesseract. Either that, or he would have to return to his own world and admit defeat.
He puled out the ring-gate, and after activating it, he reached inside with his non-dominant left hand. Again, he got the sense that if he deactivated the Fool’s Tesseract, he would lose his hand, probably to some sort of fire. Withdrawing it, he used the spel he often used in his workshop to protect his hands from intense heat. Putting it back, in he received a different flash of insight. His hand would survive, but he would lose it later.
Whatever was on the other side was something he didn’t know how to protect himself from completely. The choice was white and black; lose
his hand or give up on recovering Desacus’s egg. He hesitated only an instant. Voicing the commands in quick succession he turned off the Fool’s Tesseract and then colapsed the staff into a shorter rod he could draw back through the ring-gate.
His hand experienced a strange warmth but no pain. That alone was unusual, for normaly with his heat-protection spel up he couldn’t feel any temperature at al.
With the staff in hand, he discarded the ring-gate. It was useless now since its counterpart was stil where he had recovered the staff from. He wouldn’t be able to use that trick again. Wasting no time, he extended the staff once more and reactivated the Fool’s Tesseract. Protective darkness enfolded him as the translation panes cut him off from the outside world.
While he waited, he summoned a tiny light to iluminate the interior and examined his left hand. It looked normal, and it didn’t hurt. Flexing it, he could find no flaw or other injury. He almost doubted there was anything wrong, but that strange warmth and the certainty of his vision made him sure that that was only a fool’s hope. Something was wrong with it, and he would pay the price for his choice later.
He had used a larger setting for the interior dimension this time, to avoid the same devastating effects that had resulted before. The Fool’s Tesseract had only been active for a minute, so he was hoping the blast would be smal, something on par with the one that had destroyed his workshop at home.
Matthew gave the command to invert, and then a second later he deactivated it, trusting his precognition to warn him if either action was going to be a fatal mistake.
The area around where he had been standing was torn and charred. Some of the grass was stil on fire, and there were several smal craters
around him. Missiles, for sure, he thought. He kept moving.
An hour passed without further attacks, and he wondered if that was because they had decided to stop wasting ammunition or whether the
disappearance of the Fool’s Tesseract from its spot at ground zero had the enemy scratching their heads. If they have heads, that is.
Either way, it was a welcome respite.
After traveling to the west for a time, he finaly decided he was probably in the right general location to head south. If he wasn’t too far off on his distances, he should be approaching the Whittington facility from the other side now. After traveling with Gary for so long, he genuinely missed the android’s unerring sense of location and direction.
His hand had begun to itch, but he tried to ignore it. There wasn’t much he could do about it.
The land he was traveling through now was lightly wooded, but the ground was level and the underbrush was light to non-existent, so it made for easy walking. He had given up jogging. Without the dragon-bond, it was just
too tiring to keep up such a pace.
Besides, I don’t want to be out of breath when I get to the party, he thought. The long delay between attacks had given his sense of humor a chance to recover. Dad would be proud. He probably made jokes the entire time he was fighting the dark gods.
Or maybe he had just made the stories more humorous when he told them to his kids years later. There was no way for Matthew to know for
certain. For himself, he couldn’t see how he would color his own adventure in laughter later.
Assuming I survive it.
He stopped for a short break, drinking some water from his pack and eating a hard piece of bread that seemed to stick in his throat. His
stomach rebeled. The constant danger and stress had left it in no mood to digest food, but he ignored its complaints and choked the bread down anyway.
His aythar was good. He had managed to absorb enough from the iron spheres to top off his reserves, but his body was another matter. The
aftermath of battle stress was making his arms and legs begin to shake, and his fatigue had reached a new level he hadn’t known existed. Being a frequent night owl, he had thought he knew everything there was to know about being tired, but the constant strain of the past few hours had left him exhausted.
I should go home, he thought. It was the sensible thing to do. If he went into another major battle as he was now, he would die. Alone. No one would even know what had happened.
He wasn’t even sure anymore why he was doing this. Was it al for sentiment, for a demented and now dead dragon? The next dragon that
hatched from the egg wouldn’t know him, wouldn’t remember him. It wouldn’t be thankful. It might be kinder to leave it here. Without a mage to bond with it, would never hatch.
“What if they’re already dead? Say perhaps if we found some that had fallen off a cliff and they were already dead? It would be
wrong to let them go to waste…”
Desacus’s words ran through his head once again. “That stupid dragon was obsessed with trying human,” he said to himself with a chuckle. He packed his waterskin away and stood up. Then he continued walking south, too stubborn to give up.
The ground began to slope gently upward, and he wondered if he would ever reach his destination. It would be somewhat ironic if he had
miscalculated his directions and wound up walking past it. That never happened in stories.
“The hero gets lost and wanders around until he dies of exhaustion,” he muttered. “That sounds about right.” He was starting to wish they
would shoot at him again. At least then he had been sure he was doing something they didn’t approve of—like, say, heading in the proper direction.
As he neared the top of the gentle slope, a vague sense of danger told him to stop. Once he crested it, he would be in view of the enemy. He needed to be ready for the consequences.
Using some of his precious aythar, he cast a spel to temporarily banish his weariness. The consequences of that would be felt later, but he needed to be clear headed. If he was dead, it wouldn’t matter how tired he was. Gripping his staff firmly in his right hand, he tucked the specialized rune channel rod through his belt where he could reach it quickly.
He removed a handful of other smal objects from his pack and arranged them in smal open pouches around his waist where he could get at
them if needed. Then, taking a deep breath, he started walking once more.
As the land revealed itself to him on the other side, he saw a wide squat building a half mile in the distance. It was plain and ugly, composed of red brick and surrounded with more of those odd wire fences that Karen’s world seemed so fond of. If he had seen it in Lothion, he would have been amazed, for it was gigantic for a building of his world, but in this one he had grown used to the vast size of their constructions. It stood perhaps forty or fifty feet in height, which was not so much, but its length and width were too great for him to easily estimate.
Almost as an afterthought, he tilted his head to one side, letting a bulet whiz past his right ear. His attention was now wholy focused on the array of soldiers and tortuses stretched out across the field in front of him, between him and his goal.
They were arrayed in lines. The military androids carried rifles and an assortment of other weapons he didn’t recognize. The tortuses he was wel acquainted with. Al in al, it looked like they were taking him very seriously.
“They realy don’t like visitors,” he observed. Then he began walking down the slope to meet them.
Chapter 52
It was immediately apparent that simply dodging and shielding himself now and then wasn’t going to be sufficient to keep him alive. There were simply too many soldiers shooting at him, and the tortuses were rotating their time firing with those odd spinning machine guns of theirs.
Within less than ten yards, he was forced to hunker down behind another earthen shield, and that wasn’t good enough. Being forced to stay in one spot made him vulnerable to the tortus’s high-velocity weapon, and it was powerful enough to destroy his earth defense, the shield behind it, and stil have plenty of power left to blow a hole through him.
Before that could happen, he activated the Fool’s Tesseract. “Stur maen , eilen kon , sadeen lin , rextalyet stur , amyrtus !” The command he used was highly specific. The enchantment brought only two faces of the Fool’s Tesseract to life—one face that was normal, in that it alowed only matter coming into it, while the second face was inverted, sending that same matter immediately back outward.
Above, below, and behind, he was stil exposed to the open air, but in front of him, the side facing the enemy, the two translation panes met to form a corner that pointed in the direction he was now walking. Incoming fire that struck the normal translation pane passed through the interior dimension before exiting back out the other face at a ninety-degree angle. As a result, some of the weapons fire from the soldiers on his left was sent back at the soldiers on his right.
The soldiers on the left were lucky, since nothing was being sent back in their direction.
He managed fifty yards in that manner, while the enemy ranks were thrown into chaos as the right side of their line was subjected to a withering amount of firepower, thanks to their friends on the left. If Matthew could have aimed it precisely, they would have been decimated, but he had to rely on luck, as the angles of the incoming fire were varied.
The enemy weren’t stupid. The left stopped firing after less than twenty seconds, so he swapped the sides, and the left got a taste of what they had been dishing out to their friends. Soon after that, the entire enemy force stopped firing altogether.
They weren’t giving up, though. Matthew immediately felt the danger above. “Slan maen , eilen kon , sadeen lin , rextalyet slan , amyrtus
!” A third translation pane sprang into existence above him, protecting him from the incoming drone attacks. Their missiles and weapons fire was absorbed through the pane above and projected from the two panes that protected his front.
Matthew smiled as he kept walking. They have to be shitting themselves by now, he thought. Or they would be, if they were human. He quickly put that thought aside. Thinking of them as unfeeling machines spoiled the fun of it.
“Bree maen , eilen slan , sadeen lin , amyrtus !” he shouted, shifting the Fool’s Tesseract into a new mode. The danger was al around him now, so he had activated every face except the one below him, to enable him to continue walking.
Then he knelt slightly; even the smal space at the bottom was too much, and he had to drive the boxlike sides of the Fool’s Tesseract into the ground to save his feet. Since it was stil open on the side beneath him, he felt the ground shake as the terrain around him erupted in fire and fury. A missile strike, probably, but not aimed directly at me, he guessed. He couldn’t fault his enemy’s inteligence. They learned quickly. They had resorted to blowing up everything in his vicinity in an attempt to get around his strange protections.
He stayed in pl
ace until the ground was stil once more, then straightened his knees and proceeded forward. After only ten feet, he was forced to stop again. How many missiles and explosives do these people have? he wondered. It seemed ridiculous that anyone would keep so much destructive firepower stockpiled. What do they do with it all when they aren’t shooting at people like me?
After several more stops and starts, he reached a point that he judged was probably the middle of the front line. With five panes, activated he could only rely on the short range of his magesight to show him the world around him, and that only went about fifty feet out at the moment . There were soldiers and other enemies around him, though, so he knew he must have reached some part of their line. “Talto maen , eilen slan , sadeen lin , amyrtus .”
He was surrounded on al sides now, as wel as above and below. He had set the interior dimension smal, but not smal enough to trigger
another fusion reaction. Matthew waited twenty seconds, and then inverted the Fool’s Tesseract. “Rextalyet , amyrtus !”
Ten seconds after that, he started to deactivate the entire thing, to take a good look around, but a flash of insight warned him not to. There were stil foes present. Changing his mind, he switched it into a three-pane mode, two in front and one above. Swiveling the staff in his hand he surveyed the field, ready to protect himself should someone take a shot at him.
He quickly saw why deactivating it entirely would have been foolhardy. The blast he had caused had wrecked most of the military androids, but the tortuses were made of tougher stuff, and most of them were stil active. They began moving and shooting as soon as they saw part of his protective enchantment go down, trying to circle him so they could fire at him from behind.
There were at least seven of them, and they were too close and moving too quickly for him to hope to protect himself by shifting his shield back and forth. Instead, he let himself fal backward so that the three sides of the Fool’s Tessaract formed a pyramid-like shape over him. Reaching into one of the pouches at his waist, he drew out a handful of his enchanted metal spheres and used his power to launch them outward.
