Chương 190: Book 3 Chapter 46.5: In Extremis

++It was always when she was cornered that Vornholt was at her most dangerous. This is true of most magicians, of course, but the tricks she had up her sleeve… well, they strained credulity. ++ - Commentary by Maria Voret. 1, 938 A. E. My staff was on the ground, and I snatched it up with tendrils of aether just in time to aim it Aravon Voret's way.

He veered back far faster than the magic could possibly have charged up to full combat strength, the bluff working to buy myself and Sethira time to rise up into the air. Voret seemed to realise what had happened, because he got a dark look on his face.

"Begone girl," he told Sethira.

"I'm not here for you, exceptional as you may be. You're only the secondary prize in this fight."

"I'm more talented than you'll ever be, you inbred sludge creature," she snapped back. I saw a curious look of distilled hatred wash over Voret's face. Apparently, Sethira had touched a nerve. The man's next attack came with more mana behind it than any other so far, an uncontrolled wave of power, aether coiling with lightning, fuelling itself with energy stolen from the sky around it.

An ingenious spell, clearly one made to use in high-altitude combat like this one, and had I been alone it may have forced me onto the defensive. But I was not alone. I threw up a conduction shield and let it shatter, blocking the electrical currents and fragmenting to disperse the energy, practically cutting my enemy's attack in half. Sethira did not need telling what to do next, and her magic missile was aimed with the care of a surgeon. Voret flew backwards, apparently surprised.

We pressed the advantage, closing in as I charged my staff and Sethira drew out some long length of silk that practically screamed with magical power. She was not nearly as fast as me when it came to enchanting, but apparently she had finally finished a piece of personal equipment for herself. I watched it unfurl and roll out ahead as a new magic missile came for her, then ten more. The silk caught each one and let the projectiles deflect off of it like water from a duck's back, and now it was my turn to attack.

My staff came up, snatching Voret's attention my way just in time for the great flash of light I conjured to shine directly into his eyes. His shield filtered most of it out, it must have or else he would have been blinded instantly and permanently, but I still dazzled him for a precious moment that let me ensnare his shielding with my staff once more.

When it was weakened again, this time, it was Sethira and I working in unison that blasted him, and the resulting magic drew blood to stain the inside of his barrier as he tumbled away. We closed like vultures circling a carcass, both splitting up to attack him from different directions. My staff was powerful, but had a charge-up of approximately ten seconds and a range of less than twenty yards.

In aerial combat, where everything was fast and distant, these limitations became far more crippling than normal, and I keenly felt this fact as I attacked. Voret did not know about it, however, and even if he had, he was preoccupied enough fighting a two-on-one battle that he may not have had the chance to take advantage of it. Sethira reached him first, engaging atop a wave of fire. Voret forced the flames apart and cast her down to smack against a boulder below.

In the time he took to do so, I had already struck him with another magician-killer, breaching his shield and sending him rolling to one side. It was remarkable how rapidly his defences had restored their strength, but they were not fully recovered yet. I continued pounding away at them, like a miner driving the pickaxe against stone. Chip by chip, wearing him away. Of course, Voret was not an inert target. He soon regained his bearings and focused on retaliation, and I promptly flew back to prioritise defence.

I felt like a child trying to turn away blows from a professional boxer. Each attack he threw carried close to twice as much power as my own defenses, and even my advantage in pure skill—which was immense—was handicapped by the fact that I had to keep this world's idiots from finding out about my lich-ish intellect and competence. One after another I turned away attacks that would've pierced a castle wall or bifurcated an ironclad battleship, and before long they started to take their toll.

My injured torso was playing up still, despite the lack of physical effort needed to fly, and each time I was buffeted, a new wave of pain cut through me. How odd to fight as a mortal. And how frustrating to be losing as one. My staff recharged, and I aimed it at Voret while building power in my free hand. He focused immediately on the staff, then deflected my magic missile as I held off on using it, aiming to double-bluff him into thinking my real weapon was not yet ready to use.

I waited for another two seconds to pass before I attempted another ensnarement with the staff. He slipped out of it easily, conjuring up a great cage of aether around himself, then letting it dissolve so that the staff's tendrils fell away harmlessly without making contact. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. And then his assault resumed, more forceful and deliberate this time. I staved it off for one second and another, then another, then another.

Each moment felt like an hour, each was longer than the one before it. I simply did not have the raw power to sustain this fight. If I flew at full speed now then the blinding pain of my body experiencing such acceleration left me stunned, if I was stunned I would stop moving, if I stopped moving I would lose. All I could do was shuffle and flit around, buying time but never coming closer to victory. I just had to wait for Sethira. She was taking her sweet time.

Lightning gathered behind Voret and lingered there, a constant threat that kept me diverting power and ready to raise another vacuum shield. In the meantime he was pelting me with mundane missiles, exploiting the difference in raw power expertly. The more he made me expend my mana, the greater the gulf between my defences and his attacks would come. He was struggling to reliably hit me in the air, and that was the only reason I still remained in this fight. It would not last forever.

I just had to wait for Sethira, and the knowledge of my fate being in another's hands was like acid in my mind. As usual, she chose the last, most humiliating moment she possibly could have to aid me. Had she been even a second later the fight would be over and our enemy would have won. But she also chose the moment where Voret's concentration was most fully eaten up by finishing me off, and her surprise attack could not have hit him more perfectly if they had orchestrated it together.

He spun off to one side trailing smoke, then everything became a maddened flash of limbs and magic. Projectiles were exchanged as fast as a machine gun's rate of fire, flying one way and the other as they burst into wide explosions or arcing forks. Stray shots missed upwards to fizzle out into clouds or downwards to scar the ground below, and the air was beginning to grow hot as mana bled into heat and static charge. Voret was slowing.

His body seemed as wounded as mine was now, and the physical strain of flying was sending as much pain through him as it was for me. I had a lich's will, however, and pain was nothing to me. If it meant victory, I would torture my body in any way I needed to. Evidently, Voret lacked this conviction. He began taking more hits, then more still, his counters coming slower and his evasions scarcer as more and more he was forced to rely on that shield of his to soak up impacts.

At this point, Sethira and I did not even waste time on defence, just throwing our most powerful, penetrating attacks at the shield and continuing to push Voret closer and closer to his defeat. He was never going to last very long at that, and sure enough the man began dropping steadily from the sky as our assault continued. Neither of us let up over a little thing like that of course. For all we knew, it was a trick.

Then Voret hit the ground hard enough to dent it under him, and all thoughts of deception seemed suddenly distant and absurd. Sethira landed first, I came next. We circled him like pack hunters closing in on their wounded prey. Voret was, to my surprise, still conscious, writhing on the ground and raising his arms in some feeble attempt at a defence.

His personal shield was still as strong as ever, which told me it was the result of an enchanted item rather than his own efforts, but without a moving target, and no hostile magic to defend against myself, breaching it was easy. I could have torn the man asunder then and there. Reduced him to a stain on the ground, probably even vaporized his body in its totality and left him dispersing through the air as a cloud of heated atoms.

Instead I used the precise amount of power needed to breach his shield, then readied another projectile in warning as I stood over him.

"You are beaten," I told the magician.

"Surrender now and give me your word that you are out of this fight for good. Do not and I will kill you without hesitating. You have three seconds." If he had thought about it, he may have realised that killing him would not be good for me. It would immediately escalate tensions with the Voret family and incentivise a level of dedication in their revenge that this refinery of mine could not possibly withstand.

If he had thought about it, Voret would be able to either force me to expend time and energy to securing him more properly, or simply wait to recover his strength and rejoin the fighting anyway. But Voret was lying prone with his body aching and one of Garamon's more powerful magicians currently aiming a magic missile containing the energy of several mortar shells at his head.

He was not in a situation that was especially constructive towards thinking about anything, and the blind, animal panic that took over his higher cognition was not much good at all.

"I give you my word," he growled. He sounded more angry than scared, though the note of frantic hurry in his voice told me he was very much concerned with death. This man would require a more deliberate effort at securing later. For now, though, he was a beaten enemy, at least insofar as I could still rely on a magician's oath. And with the fighting now as extreme as it was, I would find no use from him as a hostage. I doubted the enemy would even notice if I attempted to threaten his life.

I turned away from him, took back to the skies and focused on the rest of the fighting. That was more pressing, more demanding of my attention, than considering what to do with Aravon Voret. Things had quickly degenerated since I was tangled up in my bout with the patriarch. The enemy forces had formed a strong position on the walls now, and the magical cannons were all but useless.

The much lighter machine guns had been moved from harm's way and continued spraying into their ranks, but there were apparently enough magicians still left among the attackers that this was not doing much at all to force them back. At this point we seemed to have lost the advantage of fortified defences and were just trading numbers. That was a losing proposition, the enemy still had more than two men for each of ours. Sethira hovered up beside me, and for once she looked worried.

"We can't overturn these odds," she told me.

"Not just with the two of us. What's your plan?" I knew what she was asking without saying directly. I thought about it, then I sighed.

"Buy me time," I told her.

"I am going to go and call on our ace in the hole." And I may well end up destroying everything I had worked for in doing so.