But Anahita took that chance away from our enemies.
The woman reached into her tunic as she flapped her cloth wings. She pulled fistfuls of something small, sharp, and metallic out of invisible pockets, made another gesture with her clenched hands, and flung them open.
Dozens of extremely small blades spun through the air. Each looked to be no bigger than the blades in my dad’s old shaving razors, but they shimmered with Air magic as they flew unerringly into a Cur’s eye, neck, wing, or armpit. They landed with almost as much force as one of Weylin’s or Salima’s arrows, creating explosive wounds on the already-injured gargoyles.
A flurry of magical fairy darts blasted out of Breena’s wand, finishing off the handful of survivors, and then the air was clear of everything but ourselves and the three Spawn blazing toward us.
That was surprisingly easy, Anahita said as she dipped one wing and glided for another pass. You are much stronger than I expected. And Breena is much stronger with you, than she has been in a long time.
Aww, thank you! my bonded sprite sent happily. I’m glad someone noticed how different I am this time!
Both of you deserve the credit for that maneuver’s success, I said as I floated to a stop and began refreshing my fingerbolt spell. Breena set that whole thing up, and those throws of yours looked like they should have been impossible.
Air magic is my only Ideal, and Air magic aids in accuracy, the almond-skinned woman said as she continued to glide through the air. It’s why so many of my signature spells involve either cutting in the right location or letting me move exactly where I need to with as little force as possible.
She actually sounded pleased, which was a very good sign considering how mad she was at me earlier. But then I realized something.
Wait, I said, did you say ‘many’ of your specialty spells? I thought you could only have like two per Ideal.
Panic swept out from Breena.
Oh, no-no-no-no-no—she began, but Anahita didn’t take the hint.
It’s much harder to have more than two if you have multiple Ideals, Stell’s local Satellite explained, casting another spell that caused the blades she had thrown to float back into her pocket. That should have been a difficult feat to pull off, but the way her hands moved told me she had probably practiced that exact spell for decades, if not centuries. But the more you advance any one Ideal, the easier it is to develop new signature spells, or even combine the signature spells you already know. You’ll find it tough to do so, since you seem to have at least two, but Ice and Air aren’t opposed to each other, and you’re clearly already halfway through the Practitioner level at Air, so it shouldn’t be too har—wait, she added, and I could feel her eyebrows narrow even through the mindlink. Was that you who threw the fire and lightning back there, or was it Breena—no, it couldn’t be Breena, unless you gave it to her. Breena can only do Water and Air on her own.
That was me, actually, though Breena and I have shared Water and Lightning with each other.
Wes also gave me Wood, technically, the little sprite offered innocently. Though I have to handle it, because he can’t use it himself. Not yet, anyway.
Disturbed confusion radiated out from her sister Satellite. I felt her purposefully push past it to handle another shock.
Four? the beautiful acrobat demanded incredulously. He can use four Ideals?
Um, it’s actually more than four, I sent uncomfortably as I finished my fingerbolt spell and tried to figure out just how far away the charging Spawn were. Hold on, let me count…do you need SubIdeals too? No, wait…
I was about to just send her my status sheet when she starting mind-shouting again.
More than four? And you’ve bothered to train all or most of them? How? How did you even find the time? You’d have to be practicing, learning new spells, occasionally modifying or even inventing one just to reach the Practitioner level—
Exactly! Breena shouted, and I winced now that two women were shouting into my brain. Someone finally gets just how hard my job is this time!
No, this is good news, I pointed out, because now I can find a way to get some more signature spells. Those are already super-useful. So if I can get at least one more for…hold on…all six?
Anahita sputtered. Breena wailed.
And then we got our act together, because the remaining Spawn were finally upon us.
CHAPTER 23: CONCEALED WEAPONS
A moment later, I learned that these Spawn were even more powerful than the plate-clad giants I had fought at the last Pit. These three were just as heavily armored, but as they saw me, new scripts flared into view all over them, and a single slash of their flaming blades sent curtains of green fire hurtling towards us.
This is one of the many traps I tried to warn you about, Anahita sent to me as she tucked herself into a ball and dove out of the way of a wave of green fire. It is not merely the Pits themselves that have precautions against you. The leaders and champions of the Horde now have tools to empower themselves against you. I just didn’t expect them to be able to use their abilities outside of the Pit.
No worries, I replied as I shot above one horizontal sheet of green fire, then barely twisted out of the way from a vertical sheet that the last Spawn had timed to follow directly behind the horizontal curtain. The heat of the spell was both uncomfortable and familiar, but not enough to harm me without the fire striking me directly. Surprises have kind of been one of the main themes of the relationship I have with these things. That and mutual, unbridled hate, I growled as I calculated the distance between myself and the leftmost Spawn flying toward me. Speaking of which…
What do you mean? the golden-skinned woman said as she arched around me to intercept my charging attacker. And I will distract this one, since you are primarily a magical fighter—bloody sand grains!
The mindlink allowed near-instantaneous communications of intent, though it was still hard for us to realize just how precise we could be with it. My intentions had taken Anahita by total surprise, but even then she had the presence of mind to tuck her wings and dive out of my way, because I had finally sent her a truncated picture of my mindscreen.
I dove toward my enemy at full speed, burning mana in exchange to try and get an instant kill. It made the armored Spawn and I close almost instantly, but with over five hundred points in my Intellect Trait by now, I was able to take that into account easily.
The horse-faced monster reached for me with a clawed gauntlet, probably believing he could use his superior size and reach to grapple me in midair. I had no idea whether that would work or not, because I almost never fought in the sky these days.
At any rate, Shard appeared in my hand exactly when I needed to, couched against my elbow as a silvery-blue lance.
The tip slammed into, and then right through, the monster’s snarling, unarmored mouth, puncturing his helmet as it exited the bottom of his helmed skull from the other side. The ugly creature gurgled in pain and surprise as his vital guard struggled to overcome the massive wound, but Shard’s magic was already spreading its freezing magic.
He gave another jerk the next moment, when my Lightning magic triggered up Shard’s haft and detonated the ice inside the wound, sending the now-steaming chunks deep into the bastard’s brain.
But his two companions reacted quickly to the sight of their dying packmate spasming off of my weapon. They both swung their massive swords again, but this time they each sent a swarm of giant, green fireballs at me.
I dismissed my weapon and dove down immediately, cursing in my mind. The Spawn usually took a good bit of time to hurl even one of these burning orbs at a time.
But apparently because of their new hey-fuck-Wes-Malcolm protocols, they could now throw three larger fireballs in half the time it used to take to hurl a smaller but still painfully impressive orb of explosive pain at my face.
The first orb from each of the monsters impacted uselessly against the corpse of their friend. The next two came much closer, but they were b
oth intercepted by twin lightning bolts from Breena’s Boomstick.
The last two both impacted directly against me. Their initial force was blunted by my Script shields, then by my multiple layers of enchanted armor, and then blunted further by the Ice and Earth magic forming a now-invisible layer over my skin. Then it still had to get through the spells I can cast on myself to resist heat and attack magic in general, as well as the innate resistances my body had developed against fire and other magic thanks to my many Rises and Ideals.
In spite of all of that protection, there was still plenty of unnatural fire left to burn its way into my body and hurt like hell.
Alarmed cries from Breena and Anahita matched the pained snarl of rage escaping my own lips. I plummeted downward to escape the remnants of the green, blazing bloom as I felt my vital guard struggle to overcome the cooking of my muscles and skin.
I smothered my own alarm as something accompanying the flame tried to burn its way down spiritual and magical channels that I didn’t even know my body had. Teeth growled in outrage, and the next moment I felt him throw his snarling conscience at whatever was trying to scorch, kill, and corrupt all the magical parts of myself.
If I hadn’t had so many protections, those two fireballs might have killed me right off the bat. All six of them definitely would have.
But thanks to my monstrously powerful vital guard, and my even more monstrous, over-exercised threshold for pain, I was hurt, angry, and nothing more.
Teeth finished beating back the dark essence of the Horde’s fire. I turned my descent into a slow curve that let me rise back up into the air.
Breena had engaged one of the two Spawn directly, twisting through the air as she traded fire with the armored monster. Smoke rose from the horse-faced Hordebeast’s back as he snarled and launched a storm of fireballs at my bonded familiar. She dodged them easily with her tiny, agile body, and then launched another stream of small lightning bolts and fiery faerie darts into an enemy a hundred times her current size.
But the monster’s armor flared again, and a green shield absorbed the sprite’s magical barrage. The Spawn growled as he narrowed his eyes at her and began working a new spell, but I didn’t give him the chance to complete it. I had been working my own spell as I gained altitude, one I had stumbled onto in my last fight with Cavus. Blood magic rippled through my body, finding the bolt of lightning I still stored inside of my pool of magic. As soon as it finished merging, I fired it into my enemy.
The red, rippling bolt of energy hit my enemy almost instantly. His shield flared to deflect it, but unlike most of my other Lightning spells, this one didn’t dissipate instantly. Instead, my Blood magic allowed me to prolong the attack easily. I didn’t have to use both hands, most of my mana, and all my concentration to maintain the spell. I just held out one hand and let the ambient mana from my blood vessels prolong the spell on their own.
Meanwhile, I continued to fly closer to my enemy.
As I approached, my red lightning bolt kept rippling against the Hordebeast’s shield until a small crack formed along the front of the green sphere. Then my spell wiggled its way toward it, forced its way inside, and blasted through the fissure into the shocked, armored Spawn. The plates of its armor flared again, but they snuffed out less than a moment later as the red lightning crackled its way along the seams and openings of the now-useless protection.
The horse-faced freak arched his back, opened his mouth in a silent scream, and went completely rigid.
Tiny, translucent traces of power rolled off his body and into my lightning bolt. Then I heard Teeth growl, and pull on something within my lightning bolt.
Feedback passed into me. For the first time, my lightning bolt circulated back to me. The electricity passed harmlessly back into my body, but I felt Teeth grind and refine whatever he pulled out of my target.
My vital guard began to refill.
Epiphanies regarding both lightning and blood darted through my mind like a child turning on the lights before running out of the room.
Lightning moved in currents. Blood moved in currents.
In both cases, the currents returned something to its source. The original source of the lightning bolt received a different charge of energy when the electricity circulated back, and the heart was actually the first organ to receive blood from the lungs in the middle of every heartbeat.
This time, my blood lightning was circulating the vital guard it burned from the Spawn. Then, my inner dragon filtered it somehow to be usable for my own body.
But the connection only lasted for a few moments. My red lightning dissipated as the Spawn leaned forward and clutched at his chest, as if having a heart attack. The green runes in his armor had flickered out, and several plates looked to be scorched and warped.
I suspected his actual body was in far worse shape, but I didn’t get the time to find out, because Breena had been charging up a lightning bolt of her own, and when my spell finally ended she pointed her boomstick at the Spawn’s face and let loose.
The sky flashed and cracked with the power of her attack. When my vision returned a split second later, the Spawn was tumbling out the sky, with a smoking hole where his face used to be.
Wow, I messaged her. Nice work.
He was already half-dead from your weird bolt, Breena explained, but yes! This new wand makes it sooo much easier to charge lightning bolts!
We were already looking for the last Spawn as we talked. The final armored giant was hovering in mid-air spinning, snarling, and flailing, reaching for something on his back, and burning his hands on his own fiery wings as he did so.
He looked for all the world like someone trying to fight off an irate house cat.
Anahita flickered briefly into view, her scarf back over her face. The woman looked pitifully tiny compared to the nine-foot-tall beast, but she climbed along the monster’s armored body like it was a set of monkey bars in a playground. The black-clad woman would stab at a joint with some blade I could barely see, leave it in the wound, then twist, tumble and grab at another part of the Spawn’s body and repeat the process.
She dodged the Spawn’s burning wings and other magical defenses with ease, climbing, and stabbing until every single limb of the armored beast hung limp and useless from his torso.
Then she looped her body around to grab the top of the monster’s breastplate, hauled herself up to his eye level, and then punched him in the face.
Something metallic and sharp flashed out of her sleeve and into the Spawn’s eye. The creature twitched again, and then his fiery wings dissipated completely as his body tumbled out of the sky.
Anahita leaped clear of the corpse and unwrapped her scarf again. Her wings reappeared and her scarf flowed behind her as she glided back towards us.
Nice work, I replied, hovering in the air as I waited for her. Ready to get the ones on the ground?
The beautiful assassin radiated relief.
Good grief that was amazing, she said, as if she hadn’t just done a similarly impressive feat. And you don’t even feel tired…I see now why my primary body has put so much confidence in you. Perhaps things are not nearly as dire as I thought.
I fruiting told you they weren’t! Breena complained. I mean, yes, Anahita, they’re probably really-really bad, but really-really bad is literally the only kind of problems we’ve been solving for the past few months! I mean, good grief, Anahita! Before we got here, we were dealing with winter apocalypses and giant, fanged, tentacle-cities!
That was true, I reflected as I stared at the ground-bound army struggling to keep up with us. Everyone kept acting like the only thing we’d done before showing up to fix their problems were nursery rhymes and crossword puzzles.
But then the shadows beneath us caught my eye.
They were slowly, ever so slowly crawling across the sand, moving further and further away from us, and widening as they did so.
That wouldn’t have bothered me if Breena and Anahita weren’t hovering in place,
almost perfectly still, and if Anahita’s shadow was trying to keep pace behind her, instead of morphing into a weird, widening circle underneath her.
I felt Anahita stiffen with grim awareness, but I was already diving downward, drawing Colada directly from Breaker’s scabbard. Blood and Lightning magic crackled in my other hand as I shouted out in rage at the enemy I had battled almost a half-dozen times in defense of my friend.
Then I gripped Colada with my crackling hand, let the bloody lightning sizzle up the blade, and swung the sword that frightened unworthy opponents into the shadowy magic of my (arguably) least favorite asshole.
“Knock-knock, you Umbra basic-bitch!”
But Anahita’s false shadow vanished the moment before my blade stabbed into the sand and discharged its bloody lightning, kicking up a small puff of sand and turning most of the ground beneath me into red tubes of fulgurite.
Knives in the Night Page 35
