Book 3 Chapter 18: Fierce Competition

++The benefits of family are not felt every day. They are felt on specific, far-spaced occasions in which they avert disaster.++

- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.

The shockwave was huge, screaming out across great stretches of my land and rattling ears for hundreds of yards in all directions. Despite that, it was not especially powerful. Whatever was causing this boasted a great yield and a vast sum of energy, but clearly was not releasing it too violently.

But that was of little consolation compared to the disaster now unfolding.

I whirled around to the source of the blast and saw a great fire raging at the refinery, flames rolling out and licking the expensive machinery and curling over the great tower it had been constructed into. All around, patches of oil were racked by heat. Some had caught ablaze themselves, most, less pure, were simply bubbling. Everywhere was destruction.

“What’s going on?” Alira gasped.

“I do not know,” I snapped, already moving forward. “Stay here.”

She stayed for all of one second, then started rushing after me.

“No!” she yelled. “Fuck that, I’ve got my life riding on this place too.”

We drew closer to the refinery fast. My shield was up without me even thinking about it, while Alira, a less deft-hand with enchantments who had evidently not gotten into enough fights to necessitate a permanent enchantment, was lagging behind as she focused on projecting her own. Regardless, we were soon near enough to see what was really happening.

Around the warped metal and leaking, burning oil I saw several figures with hands splayed out and magic burning in the air, hurling magic missiles at the machinery. It was an act of concentrated vandalism and I knew without even thinking that these were the ones responsible for the initial explosion.

Not just sabateurs, attackers. Men willing to expose themselves openly if it meant damaging the project here. And if they were willing to do that, it meant they were ready to fight and kill in order to escape with their own lives.

A lot of conclusions to draw from such limited information, I had to admit, but there was no time for long deliberation. I simply drew myself close to the first of them and prepared a magician-killer. It shredded right through his shield and struck…something harder than I had expected. His clothing screamed as the bolt exploded. Blood misted free of the impact, but not nearly as much as I would have expected. His body did not even explode into pieces.

Before I could ponder this further, the other magicians were rounding on me as one.

Magic missiles screamed through the air at me, and a few brief weeks ago I would have responded by promptly getting shot and blown off my feet. Now I just took to the air, hovering over the projectiles as they streaked by my feet. A momentary shock followed as the magicians saw me, a girl half any of their ages, hovering like a Voret. I ended that shock with another magician-killer, this time weakening the anti-shield element of the spell to free up mana for a guiding matrix that saw it strike my next target directly in his head.

There was no fabric there, and the skull and brain burst apart like overripe fruit struck by a hammer. One blast and I had simultaneously removed an enemy and confirmed my previous suspicion.

These men’s clothing was being magically enhanced to withstand my attacks.

Alira engaged one of them, which still left close to a dozen. I began soaring through the air and twisting around as more projectiles came for me, irritated and cursing. These magicians were skilled and powerful, but far from extraordinary talents. If it weren’t for those enchanted uniforms I could have fought them twelve-on-one and been certain of victory.

Even with them, if I called on the power of Lord Dread I could kill them all with a wave of my hand and an idle thought.

But limited as I was, and protected as they were, these petty casters posed a serious threat. To get past their defenses, I needed to dedicate more time, power and focus into my attacks. That left less to defend me, and provided them with ample opportunities to retaliate.

As if to illustrate the point, two magic missiles hit my shield at once with the force of exploding dynamite and sent me spinning off-kilter.

I was actually in more danger from hitting the ground than I was from any magic they could hurl my way, the speeds I was moving at made being targeted almost a non-issue, but made the prospect of a collision terribly lethal. That realisation, made as I managed to pull myself out of an unpleasant reunion with the ground, sparked a new idea.

So I turned in the air, expending precious mana to banish the sensation of decelerative forces on myself and keep from rupturing every blood vessel in my body, and twisted around to accelerate into one of the magicians while thickening the shield in front of me.

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He was very far back, and had a clear sight line to my approach. This, alongside my initially low speed and gradual acceleration, gave him just enough time to realise what was happening and pull a stupid face before I collided with him roughly as fast as one of the magic missiles we had just been exchanging.

My shield had been reconfigured for such impacts and was made with several times his maximum mana output, it held.

His did not.

In moments I was blinded by the spray of crimson gore washing over the front of my shield and blocking out the light, in moments more I could see again as the winds of my flight cleared it all away to trail after me.

Then a whole barrage struck me. My shield, reinforced from the front, was hit in the sides and I felt its mana reserves drop precipitously as I spun. Plowing through the magician had slowed me, but not enough that hitting the ground was not uncomfortable. I ended up churning a trench deep into the earth before bouncing from it and flying another twenty paces to hit a rock. The first impact would have turned me into paste, while the second would have broken every bone in my body. With my dwindling shield still active, I escaped with a few bruises and blurry vision.

What was worse was the magic missiles that soon followed suit. I threw up a wall of aether on sheer instinct, which was all that saved me, but stationary defences are no match for the kinds of firepower a squad of magicians can output when cooperating properly. Their magic missiles hit my wall with a sound like hailstones striking a tin roof, cracks spreading along the steely-hard structure.

I threw up more aether, another layer to replace the first, then another after that. After a few seconds it became clear that they were breaking through my defences marginally faster than I was replacing them.

This was not a good position to be in.

I had moments before the only thing between myself and death was my personal, weakened shield. I would be lucky to last a second after that. Any mana I did not spend on replacing my destroyed walls was going to speed up that eventuality. If I diverted power to fly away, the barriers would fail and I would be shot before escaping. If I tried to tunnel away, I would be shot. Try to do anything else I could think of and I would be shot. It seemed an impossible situation.

Then I remembered that using my legs did not require mana.

In the long history of Lord Dread, overlooking the fact that I could walk was, I must admit, something of a low moment. I decided to attribute it to the head trauma and never speak of it to another.

As the projectiles continued coming, I slipped around them by widening my barrier in one direction at the cost of another before circling around the rock I had impacted. It was no mountain, but the jutting stone was at least three or four yards thick and would have held off sustained cannon fire for a few moments. I fancied that it would buy me half a minute now.

That turned out to be all the time in the world.

I focused on recharging my shield enchantment first. It would do so on its own eventually, without being continuously strained, but with my own mana reserves redirected to aiding the process it happened in mere seconds. Then I re-cast my flight spell and made a few choice adjustments to my other active combat effects.

When I finally emerged from over the boulder, it was with a spray of homing magic missiles. Three struck my enemies directly, breaking against their armoured clothing. The magic within them, though, carried through into the skin, and in moments each magician was a raving lunatic, spasming and hurling his magic in all directions as my illusion effects sunk into them.

As I had suspected, whatever magic reinforced their clothing was keyed to physical attacks, not pure mana. A magician-killer to get through the shields, then illusion magic to disable the men. I had just worked out how to win this fight.

And that was not even the most damning shift against my enemies’ favour. Before I could muster a second attack, a wave of flames descended on one of the men with an intensity that stung my eyes just to look at it. I could not feel the heat through my shield, but I saw how steam hissed up from the ground around it and knew there was only one magician here except for myself able to produce such power.

Sethira strided into the battle with a face like thunder. She was not calling on her lich’s power either, but with two of us now present the attacking magicians had little hope of victory.

It was, after all, only eight-on-two. The ratio would need to be three times as skewed in their favour for an even fight.

While Sethira continued wreaking havoc on their flank, I took the chance to strike more men with my illusion projectiles. Some proved surprisingly resistant, evidently skilled at illusion themselves, but most went down to the ground screaming after being hit.

If it were just me and her against the magicians, things would have been fine. But I soon realised there were other men attacking us too. Not magicians, but a few warriors and many gunmen wielding pistols and rifles, running around planting explosives or just taking hammers to the machinery.

This was obviously planned, and even more obviously targeted at my infrastructure. I redoubled my attention on the fighting, hoping to get past the magicians and loose my wrath on the mundane imbeciles now doing the bulk of the damage.

With Sethira’s help, they were barely even a bump in the road.

Massacring large numbers of such weak enemies was actually something my current arsenal was poor at managing, but I quickly improvised a new spell to take care of the problem. Blades of aether formed up along an aetheric disk, hovered in front of me, then rotated at near-sonic speeds and flung ahead of me. It moved around with mental nudges on my part, changing direction to strafe right through the masses of enemies and reduce all of them to crimson mist. It did not take me more than a few seconds to kill roughly one hundred, which left the remaining few quick to surrender.

I dropped down to land before them as they prostrated themselves.

“You have all been caught attacking Vornholt property,” I declared. “And we are in our full rights to kill you right now. However—”

I was interrupted by a gunshot, and whirled around to see that I had missed one of the attackers. He had been levelling a rifle at someone, perhaps me, but his shot had gone wide and the gun now fell from his hands. I realised why a moment later. His stomach was distended, the spinal column visibly bulging against the skin from beneath, and as the spasming corpse dropped, Qaigor was revealed behind him, his fist drawn back ready for another punch.

The boy was grinning.