Chương 139: Chapter 136. The First Mission - Part I

"Sam, have you found something?" Sam held still on the ridge with his fingers curled to a circle in front of his right eye, the magnifying spell threaded through the space between his thumb and forefinger, doing its careful work against the wind. The snow was coming sideways now, hard enough that his eyelashes had begun to freeze together on the side of his face Karion's voice wasn't in, and he answered without lowering his hand.

"Yeah. I think I found what we're looking for." Karion came back through the crystal at his collar after a half-second of static.

"Wait, really? So the rumors were true?"

"I suppose so." Sam adjusted his fingers a fraction, and the spell adjusted with them. The shape in the valley below resolved more clearly: tents in disciplined rows banked into the wind shadow of the eastern cliffs, smoke rising from cookfires kept deliberately low. Twenty-six tents before he stopped counting. Whoever had pitched them was a soldier; the spacing was wrong for civilians, the angles too consistent, and the latrines had been dug exactly fifteen paces clear of the mess line.

"Otherwise we'd have a hard time explaining why there are Farmusian soldiers sitting in Sundarian territory eight days past where they have any right to be." Static again, then...

"Okay. Okay." Karion's voice came back firmer.

"Stay where you are. Don't engage, don't get clever, don't do anything heroic. We're moving now. Ten minutes, give or take, depending on how the southern pass is holding up."

"Yeah," Sam said.

"About that—" The sound arrived before he'd finished the word. It was not a crack so much as a long sustained tear, like a sail giving way along the seam, except the seam was the sky itself. Sam looked up just in time to see the air above the ridge split clean down its length.

Something passed overhead at a speed his eyes were not built to track, the blizzard parting around it in a displaced channel that closed behind it half a second later, and the air that channel had pushed sideways came down across his shoulders as a single pressing wall that nearly took him to his knees. The thing in the sky was heading straight for the valley. Karion's voice in the crystal had gone quiet.

"... Sam. What was that?" Sam wiped the snow off his glasses and rebraced himself against the cliffside.

"I think," he said, watching the streak narrow toward the line of cookfires below, "Adom's gonna take care of it."

"What? Wait, th—""Harbinsky." Damus's voice cut across Karion's.

"Tell Adom to be careful. Whoever they have in there will not be ordinary, and the rumors put at least two senior mages with that detachment."

"Right, I—" The valley took the impact before Sam had finished speaking as a boom rolled up the cliffside and through his boots, a deep dragging concussion that traveled through stone more than air. The first shouts reached him a second later, they were short, surprised and cut off mid-breath.

"Yeah." Sam adjusted his fingers another fraction.

"I think you guys should be worrying about the Farmusians, in fairness." He squinted. Something was hanging in the air above the ruined center of the camp. The storm had gone thin around it, the wind and snow both pulling back, and for a moment Sam could not quite resolve what he was looking at.

"... Is that a person?" It was. One of the mages Damus seemed worried about, by the look of him. He'd been tossed clear across the camp. Sam sighed, lowering his hand.

"Guys. I think Adom's got this. Take your time."

"WE'RE UNDER ATTAAACK!" screamed a soldier from the third tent in the eastern row, who was, two seconds later, no longer screaming. Adom had taken him out of the air on the way down. One open palm to the side of the head, threaded with just enough force to make the man's eyes roll back in his skull before his knees buckled. The soldier hit the snow without a sound, and Adom was already moving. He went through the camp at a working pace.

The first three came at him with swords drawn and shields half-raised, which was, by his estimate, the most coordinated response he was going to see from this side of the field. He stepped past the first blade with [Wind Step] before the man had finished his cut, set a [Pulse] into the inside of the shield as he passed, and watched the soldier go over backward as his own weight was redirected against him. The second sword arrived where his shoulder had been a half-second earlier.

Adom caught the wrist behind it, twisted, fed a small thunder weave through the contact, and the man dropped twitching. The third swung high. Adom stepped under it, set his palm against the breastplate, and let the spell he had already half-built complete itself. There was a flat percussive sound and no flash, and the soldier left the ground in a clean horizontal line, hitting the next tent down hard enough that two more men inside it lost interest in coming out. To his left, a spell came in fast.

White-edged, close to his head. He read it as it left the caster's fingertips, found the single inversion at the third bracing rune that made the whole thing structurally brittle, and reached out with [Mana Disrupt] to pull the inversion straight. The spell collapsed back along its own thread. The caster's hand went red and he sat down quickly in the snow without seeming to decide to. Someone was running. Several someones, actually.

Through the gap between two tents Adom could see a pair of soldiers heading for the southern tree line fast and without looking back. He was still deciding whether it was worth spending the time to stop them when two spells crossed the camp from the ridge in quick succession, pale lines of force cutting through the snowfall cleanly. The first struck the soldier on the left between the shoulders and dropped him face-first into the snow.

The second caught the other at the back of the knees a heartbeat later, hard enough to take his legs out from under him and send him sprawling beside his companion. Neither of them moved afterward. Both were unconscious. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Adom looked toward the ridge despite the chaos of the battle.

It took him a moment to find Sam through the storm, but there he was, small against the white slope and almost lost between the rocks, one hand still raised from the weaving. When he noticed Adom looking, he gave him a thumbs-up. For their first real mission, Sam was considerably more composed than Adom would have expected.

Not calm, exactly; even at this distance, there was a stiffness in the way he stood that made it clear he understood the difference between dungeon practice and men trying to kill you in the snow. But he was watching the field, choosing his moments, and weaving cleanly under pressure. That was good. Adom was suddenly very glad they had spent as many hours in the dungeons as they had.

He lifted his own hand and returned the gesture when a spell hit him in the side hard enough to throw him through the remains of a collapsed tent. He struck the ground, rolled once, and came up on one knee with snow clinging to his coat, and for a second, he simply stared. Across the camp, an enemy mage stood half-hidden between two supply wagons, one hand still raised and steam curling from his fingers. The man's eyes widened the instant he realized Adom was still conscious. That was on me. Adom thought.

He had been distracted in the middle of a battlefield. He should not be angry at the man for taking the opening. That was, objectively, the correct thing to do. Unfortunately, Adom had not grown any less petty with age. The mage seemed to reach the same conclusion a moment later and ran. Adom went after him. The man made it nearly six strides before Adom caught him.

He turned as Adom reached him, another spell already forming between his fingers, but the casting broke when Adom struck him once beneath the sternum with two fingers and released enough force to empty the air from his lungs without breaking anything important. The mage folded over the blow, eyes rolling back, and dropped unconscious into the snow. Another two spells came at him immediately afterwards.

He caught them on a thinned [Barrier] held only at the points they were aimed at, which took less mana than a full shield and let him keep moving through. The barrier closed itself behind him as he stepped past. Then something at knee height made a small choked sound, and Adom looked down.... Is that a goblin? It was.

A small green one, hood pulled tight against the cold, crouched against the side of a supply crate with both hands over the top of its head, trembling so hard the loose snow on the crate was vibrating.

"Hey!" Adom crouched beside him without breaking line of sight on the rest of the camp.

"What are you doing here?" The goblin looked up.

"Cap— captive, sir!" His voice was small, and his Common was rough at every joint.

"They take poor me from forest. Many days. I no fight, sir, I no—" Adom did not catch the rest because three more weaves came in simultaneously, fanning out from the central command tent in a wedge, and he had to put his attention back where it was needed. He held one hand over the goblin's head as he stood, set a small dome on it, and went. Thunder this time. An open-handed strike that traveled through three men in a row, jumping each contact, and they went down in sequence like a chord resolving.

He cleared the gap to the command tent in two long strides, took a heavy axe out of the air with a sideways [Push] that bent it into the snow point-first, ducked under a fireball aimed at his head with more enthusiasm than aim, and arrived at the tent's mouth still moving. His fist was already on the way, then it stopped. The fist had gone into a man's open hand, and the spell in Adom's arm dissipated without finding anywhere to go, the whole weight of the blow pushed into something that simply did not move.

So, naturally, he looked up. The man holding his wrist was a head taller than he was and wore black anti-mana armor, segmented at the joints and etched with runes along the collarbone and wrists. Adom held the man's eyes for a moment, recognising him from the report.

"I presume," he said, "you're the one they call the Northtking, yes?" The man did not answer. Instead, he brought his head forward in a single hard movement, and the air between them detonated. The shockwave went out from the point of impact in a dome that scoured the snow off the ground for ten paces in every direction, lifted the canvas of the command tent off its frame, and threw the loose contents of three supply crates into the storm.

The displaced air came back as a hard ring of pressure that flattened the smoke off the cookfires. The wind, briefly, was no longer the loudest thing in the camp. When the white settled, Adom was still standing where he had been. He had not moved. His head was tilted forward an inch from where it had been, and that was the only sign anything had happened to him at all. He felt fine.

The artifact on the man's head had given out under its own discharge, and the helm that had been hidden by it was now plainly visible, dark, segmented and ridged at the brow, narrow at the eye-slit. The eyes behind the slit had been ready a second ago. They were not, now.

"... Zis is not possible," the Northking said, voice dragged through a heavy Farmusian accent.

"That is quite something." Adom said as he stepped back half a pace to look the armor over more carefully, after the man released him. The helmet, in particular, had caught his interest. He had not been able to see it before the headbutt, and he had assumed the man was simply bare-headed, which had been, in retrospect, an obvious thing to be wrong about.

"What are you using? The rune on the helm is finer than anything I've seen outside the eastern academies, and the armor's reading as a layered anti-mana lattice with something else laced through it. Which is interesting. What's the material? Is it..." He stopped himself.

"I talk too much," he said, mostly to the Northking, who had not spoken further.

"Apologies. I am not like that usually, honest." He then brought his right gauntlet up. The plating along the back of the hand caught what little light there was through the snowfall. The Northking saw the motion and brought both hands up in a guard, and then... WOMP! Adom's fist landed in the man's stomach, and the entire weight of the man left the ground.

The shockwave came out of the impact in a second clean dome, larger than the first, scouring the snow off another twenty paces of ground and bringing down the two tents still standing on the eastern side of the command line. Adom took a moment to look down at the gauntlet, noticing a seam along the knuckles had buckled, and one of the plates sat slightly proud of the rest now, knocked out of true by the hit. He sighed. It wasn't only that the spare pair couldn't take a real punch without complaining.

It was the sound. Wam and Bam landed like the end of an argument, but this thing went womp. Like a sad door. He'd handed his proper gauntlets to Filli for repairs months ago and had been making do ever since, and every single time he hit something, he missed Wam and Bam.

Still, Womp did its job because the Northking went backward in a long shallow arc that took him through the broken supply crates, past the iron picket line at the edge of the camp, into the tree line beyond, where he came down hard against the trunk of an old pine with enough force to take six feet of bark off it on the way down. He did not get up, but after a second, he rolled onto his side and was sick into the snow. Adom then turned, and took stock of what was left of the camp.

There were eleven men still standing within his line of sight. Some had weapons and most did not, anymore. All of them had seen the arc of the Northking through the air and had arrived at the same conclusion at roughly the same pace, which is why the sound of dropped steel was, for a few seconds, the only thing in the clearing louder than the wind. Adom watched them drop their swords and let out a long breath, the first easy one since landing.

The soldiers had surrendered, the Northking was face-down in the snow at the edge of the trees, and nothing else in the camp seemed inclined to start anything further. Quite good, for the first mission he had ever led. He stood there for a moment longer in the wind, and wondered, as he had wondered after every real effort these past two years, whether he had gained anything from this one. He checked. [Mana pool: 8967] Adom sighed again, this one coming out less easy than the first.

The Second Circle was still just beyond his reach, a thin membrane of resistance in the mana currents, present and stubbornly closed, and not in the slightest moved by the fight he had just had. Thirty-three mana short of the threshold, a problem he's had for the past two years.

He had spent the better part of those years testing his own theory of why the wall would not give, and Biggins, when asked, had nodded once and confirmed it without ceremony: there was no breakthrough without a challenge hard enough to demand one. Adom would have happily walked into one. The trouble was that, at his current level, there were not many of them left in the world to find. Oh well. He looked up.

Sam was pulling out of the southern pass with Karion close behind and Damus at the rear, the three of them moving fast through the snow. So Adom set his attention on the work that was still in front of him.