Chương 80: Chapter 76: Terminal

++Magicians have no weaknesses, none. What people typically refer to as our greatest weakness, our fragile bodies, is actually a weakness in wider humanity. It simply stands out more when the person carrying that shortcoming has the ability to blast apart buildings with a gesture. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. The rest of our companions woke back up shortly after the cloudscraper took to the air, perhaps from the turbulence, the magic or just from enough time passing.

None of them were happy to have lost consciousness, but the particulars as to why varied. Korig seemed guilty, actually apologising to me for having left me undefended. I made fun of him for thinking he could do anything but distract a creature powerful enough to threaten me, which worsened his mood. Varnel did not so much as glance my way and just mumbled about having missed the fight with the necromancers, whilst Bagran seemed furious and humiliated.

"I didn't need you to drag me out of there!" he snapped, glaring predominately at Agrian, who simply looked like he was trying not to laugh. Even Aryqatan gave Bagran a look at that.

"It doesn't matter what happened in the ruins," she cut in sharply.

"Save that Sakhent has arisen. This is… this is bad." She looked to be torn between feeling her worry and keeping it to herself, clearly aware that the eyes watching her now were, like all eyes in the human race, far from apolitical things. How she conducted herself around us would take a chunk out of her reputation. I was well used to being cautious of that myself. Aryqatan paced as we waited for the cloudscraper to finish its journey.

The interior did not have any built-in way of viewing the world outside, but it did not take me long to improvise a half-measure. Projecting raw mana against the walls allowed me to seep some of it through, and I could judge speed by how quickly that magical energy was left in our wake as the vessel moved on. A few mental calculations, and I estimated us to be travelling a good five hundred feet each second.

That was a sizable fraction of the speed of sound if my new natural philosophy—or as it was known in the modern age, 'physics'— lessons were to be trusted. But I could not bring myself to relax just yet. This new enemy, Sakhent, had boasted power enough to outmatch a Demigod, and I had known them to fly much faster than this. We would not be safe until we were united with the larger force we headed towards. And even then…

"What sort of units are awaiting us at the larger force, your Divinity?" I asked Aryqatan. She rarely answered questions, but this time was an exception. Perhaps her own nerves were frayed enough that she just wanted the distraction.

"From what I recall," she began.

"One hundred thousand ordinary men, roughly. Four thousand Godtouched of mixed power, half a thousand battlemages and ten thousand low-grade warriors. One other Demigod. This force was assembled by him, their leader." She practically winced as she pronounced his name.

"Nu'chishta." Nu'chishta. I had actually heard of him already myself, though only as a distant celebrity. My particular knowledge was limited to being aware that he was a child of Nglaru, and that he was considered one of the more powerful Demigods currently active in Garamon. His role in the previous Estalian fighting a generation or so earlier was well recorded, though my father had never said much about him.

It is rare that I feel comfort at the thought of approaching that sort of enemy, but for the time being he would provide a level of security that Aryqatan by herself, clearly, would not. There were vast differences between the weakest and strongest Demigods, and the fact that this one could at least slow Sakhent implied that a truly mighty one could fight the necromancer off entirely. Agrian interrupted my thoughts by planting himself down beside me and fixing me with a glare. He looked like our father, normally.

Tall, covered in muscle whether he exercised or not, sharp featured and intense with hair as black as night. But not now. The look I saw aimed my way was pure Elizabeth Vornholt.

"Don't do that again," he told me. His voice was low enough that I knew nobody else in the cloudscraper would have heard it, not on flat ground and certainly not with wind currents smashing into the vessel around us handgun-fast.

"Do not do what again?" I asked, innocently.

"I know you could hear us when you wandered off," he pressed.

"And I don't want you to do it again. You put yourself in danger without a second thought."

"I do not need you to protect me," I told him.

"Apparently you do."

"Apparently you need me," I shot back. This was a jet of masculine ego I was being hit with, so I decided the best way to stop it was to break that ego.

"I was the one who ended up rescuing you, perhaps you should take more care of yourself and I will not need to endanger my own life in doing it for you." I expected him to grow angry and storm away, but the words just bounced off him with a sigh.

"You're not wrong," he admitted instead.

"I'm not as powerful as you, I can't do as much as I'd like to protect you. But you're still my sister." Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. I did not know how to respond to that, I simply had not been given enough exposure to practice.

"I do not need protecting," I repeated.

"Then why did you spend so much of our childhood helping me learn magic?" he countered. I was speechless for once, it is not often I have my plans pierced so easily. Let alone by a— …But he was not a child, not anymore. I should not have overlooked this. Agrian smiled as I floundered for words.

"You're not the only person with a brain, Isabel," he reminded me.

"You tend to overlook people and dismiss them too easily. It makes you ridiculously easy to pull one over on."

"No it does not," I snapped. He snorted.

"It does too. You hardly even remember other people exist sometimes, just breeze around like we'll do everything according to your plans. I'm not saying you don't have a knack for predicting people, I'm just saying you're too eager to assume those predictions will work out." My eye twitched. It did that sometimes, I did not know why. Was that where annoyance was stored in this new body, in the eye? It made me want to cut it out and stamp on it.

Agrian seemed to take notice of my irritation and drink it up, not even bothering to hide his amusement. And that would not do at all.

"You know—" my words were interrupted when the vessel exploded around us. Or, to be more precise, when it imploded inwards and sent jagged metal screaming for the occupants. Magic was faster than thought, and my instincts had already thrown up a barrier by the time my mind had recognised danger. Steel met aether with a sound like fingernails dragging on a chalkboard.

"WHAT THE FUCK!?" I heard Agrian scream, then we were spinning and flying and twisting in the air. Up became down, then was up again, and this change in direction happened several times per moment. I felt my brain shut off as the blood rushed to all the wrong places. It took me a long, wasteful moment to shift my consciousness around and disalign it somewhat more from the human vessel I was puppeting. By then I had already started falling.

The ground was miles below me, if gravity had its way I would impact the sand hard enough that it may as well be stone. I did not want gravity to have its way. Desperately searching around myself I saw the remnants of the cloudscraper, or rather the largest piece that was still halfway-supporting itself in the air, and sent myself flying for it with a burst of force. Before I reached it, I saw what it was that had attacked us.

Great tendrils of necromantic power, black smoke tinged with green, deformed by shapes pressing up from within it. Human faces, pushed against the exterior like they were trapped within. I would have preferred to take my time and truly admire the display, but unfortunately circumstances were forcing my hand. I shot the rest of the space between myself and the cloudscraper and found my aim slightly off, flying wide of my target and almost hitting one of the great tendrils attacking it.

Fortunately, they did not seem to care about me. Either they were guided by magic, and thus drawn to Aryqatan above all else, or they were simply focusing on destroying the physically largest parts of our vehicle rather than any individuals among it. Either way it let me course-correct without being mutilated mid-flight, and I was clumsily slamming into a section of deckplate less than a second later.

My personal shield was already up, coming far faster with a mental tug on my amulet than I could have woven the spell matrix by hand. It shuddered and absorbed the impact that might otherwise have broken my bones, leaving me disoriented for only a moment before I produced great aether hooks and slammed them into the steel. Cloudscraper bulkheads are not thick, but they are solid. It was only with a bit of magical force that I drove the tips into these ones.

I stuck fast and just hung there for a few moments, feeling the wind rip past me. Our speed had dropped explosively, that did not mean it was not still great. I might have been blinded, staring into the gale, if it were not for my shield. With it I could easily see my allies scrambling for purchase themselves. Agrian was the most precipitous, having been close to me and almost fallen through the same rip in the hull that I did. Korig and Varnel were both struggling, but helping each other.

Bagran alone seemed to be doing fine. But it was Aryqatan I found my eyes fixated on. She was torn free from her own section of bulkhead, kicking and writhing in the air with force enough that I thought the shockwaves of her movements were actually rivaling the feeling of wind on my face. One of the magical tendrils came apart in her grip as she tore free of it, then she dropped down a single yard to be seized by two more.

They were trying to smother and crush her, and I realised apparently before they did that it was not working. I realised, too, what their natural next move was. And so I had braced myself for impact when the tendrils smashed Aryqatan into the hardest object they could find. The chunk of cloudscraper I was clinging to. This time there was nothing sizable left, the vessel just burst apart and sent scraps of metal flying out in all directions like the casing of a bomb.

I went flying again, spinning more violently than before and tasting salt and iron in my mouth. Blood. That demanded my attention, it would not do to have this new body's tissues rupture. My aether came out first in wings, then, after they were torn apart by the air, in shorter flaps that caught the currents and served to slow my spin. I found myself easily half a mile from the rest of the raining debris, and with no sight of my allies. Bagran would live; Agrian, Korig and Varnel would surely not.

They were my priority for the time being. I shot back to the wreckage. We had perhaps a mile before impact with the sand. I threw myself over as fast as my magic could propel me, and was probably moving faster horizontally than I was vertically by the time I reached Agrian. The boy panicked when I first smashed into him, thrashing around, mouth moving but no sounds coming out. Or rather, no sounds I could hear over the winds around us.

I did not have time to explain anything to him, and settled for simply coccooning him in aether made soft and springy and several feet thick, then sent an illusory blast through his mind to leave him incapacitated so he did not try to tear himself free in a panic. Korig was my next target. He was doing better than Agrian, though still unable to save himself as he spun around uncontrollably. I settled for levelling him out as I breezed past towards Varnel.

Either the boy would take care of himself, leaving me with more time for our last comrade, or he would not, in which case I would make a second attempt to save him and not care very much if he died on impact before I could. The final novice was easiest of all, save for his reflexively trying to kill me as I reached out to steady him. I got a bit annoyed at that and lashed out, possibly giving him a head injury and definitely keeping him from interfering more as I saved him in the same way I had Agrian.

I turned back to see Korig had succeeded in righting himself, while my brother remained safe in his cocoon. Only then could I take care of myself; forming up great flaps of aether and reinforcing my connection to them with more bands of the substance. For a moment I felt as though I weighed twenty times more than normal in the wrong direction, but my speed dropped fast. Then I struck the ground, and it dropped even more.