Book 3 Chapter 47: An Uphill Battle

++The refinery attack was, in general, one of the largest embarrassments my family has ever suffered, perhaps second only to that one time my ancestor was caught with the peacock.++

- Commentary by Maria Voret. 1,938 A.E.

The golems had gotten involved now, each one a towering chunk of metal with limbs like battering rams. The scary thing was they weren’t even slow. Weren’t even average. They were faster than humans and carried all the momentum you’d expect, every blow breaking warrior bones and turning normal folk into red mist.

But they weren’t solving everything, far from it. The enemy’s magicians had gotten stuck in by now, and there were enough of them that even the hulking metal monstrosities couldn’t soak up all they had. One by one, bit by bit, and always with a great pile of corpses surrounding them, the golems were falling.

Dave Blakely did not like that sight. He also didn’t like fighting magicians, for much the same reason that he did not like the thought of fighting giant, sentient sticks of dynamite. Ones with the power to spontaneously generate new, smaller sticks of dynamite from their hands and throw them his way, except throw them faster than arrows rather than…hm. The analogy was getting away from him.

What wasn’t getting away from him was that little twat in yellow, ha! Dave felt a jolt of satisfaction at watching the magician’s head explode just before his shield could reform, then promptly ducked back behind cover.

Unfortunately, cover was a relative concept when you were being targeted by a magician. Dave felt the large chunk of stone he was folded behind heat up just a moment before it became too dangerous to touch, already lunging forwards and scrambling away as the stone started melting. Instinct told him to roll one way and moments later a big, fast something smashed down where he’d just been crawling.

The force of it lifted him up off the ground—actually lifted him—and sent him sprawling, skidding and sliding down into a ditch. His head hurt. He felt like someone had started taking hold of his ribs and rotating them. He couldn’t breathe, his vision was blurry, the skin down half his body throbbed.

But he wasn’t dying. Dave had taken enough hits that he knew what was survivable, what was bearable and what was ignorable. He spent a few more moments regaining his breath and started to sit up.

Then he promptly flattened himself down into the muck when two magicians sauntered over to the spot he’d been launched from.

“Did we get him?” one asked in a painfully thick, aristocratic accent that brought to mind images of a long, proud history of fucking one’s own cousin generation by generation. The man beside the speaker responded with a more sensibly lower-class accent, probably the hired help.

“I wouldn’t bet on it, my lord. This one’s been plugging our men all day. Slippery. I’d try to find a body.”

“What body, you idiot?” the noble snapped. “I threw that blast myself, if it landed anywhere near him there is no body. You’re probably inhaling the fucking body through that stupid, gaping mouth of yours!”

He was right there, Dave had gotten pretty lucky all things considered. There was approximately one pubic hair’s difference between a blast that sent you flying and one that sent you home in a bucket.

His head still hurt, but it was receding. His limbs were responding now. Dave could move if he needed to, but with the enemy a mere ten paces away he didn’t want to risk it just yet. Where was his gun?

“You search then, I’m not re-engaging until we’ve found that sniper,” the noble sighed.

Dave got the feeling he was giving this order for an excuse to miss the rest of the fighting. It’d been getting brutal and painful, finally lumbering into that final stage of combat where it was all mad lethality spraying about in every direction.

Dave wouldn’t mind missing that, himself, except that now there were a lot of magicians who apparently wanted to kill him personally. He wouldn’t last long if they weren’t driven away, it was just self preservation now.

Where was his gun?!

Dave didn’t have a choice now, if the magicians were searching then they’d find him before long. Already he saw one of them looking around the area, probably mapping out where he could’ve been flung to by the blast.

That was the problem with magicians, they were all given fancy edumucations and shit. The arsehole probably knew exactly where a body might be already. Dave started crawling as fast as he dared.

He’d landed in tar, and it now drenched him, which was one point in his favour. It’d leave a trail once he got onto the dry dirt, but right now it was one problem at a time for him.

There were some slopes on the natural terrain that made it harder to see a man lying prone, and the ground here was dark with oil-soakage. Those were probably the only two reasons Blakely was still alive. His question was; did he crawl away or towards the enemy?

Towards. If he got too far he’d be easily picked out, but closer…closer and he could hide right at the base of those slopes. Maybe. If he was lucky.

Where the fuck was his gun?

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Dave scrambled along the ground, feeling his body tense and twitch but still obey him as he went. Getting harder to shrug off falls like that in his age, but not impossible yet. He reached the nearest mound. Then he lay still.

It was the most physically difficult thing he’d ever done, violating every instinct he had in such a fundamental way that it felt harder than lifting ten times his weight. But he knew even a twitch might give him away, and if it did then old David Blakely wouldn’t even be identifiable as bones.

Slowly, the magician approached. Dave waited until he heard the crackling shield beside him, then pass over him. He was still, so it allowed him through just like it did the dirt underfoot.

And it was only when he was inside the shield that Dave’s knife came out and ran right up into the magician’s groin.

Plenty of big blood vessels in that area, and Dave’s knife cut right through them to lodge in the bone. The strength went out of his enemy’s legs instantly and he fell, helped down all the faster as Dave elbowed one knee out from under him, grabbed his leg and dragged him to the dirt. He slithered on top of the man, planted a forearm down over his neck and choked the noise from him while he finished bleeding.

“Boy, what are you doing?” the magician called from ahead. Dave almost laughed. It hadn’t even occurred to the stupid prick that his ally was dead, he must’ve just noted the absence of magical gunfire and concluded there was no way a puny mund could possibly do anything.

That wouldn’t last though. Blakely slowly lifted the man’s arm up and did his best impression of his accent.

“Still here, my lord, I…I tripped, the ground, it caved in.” He made sure to do a lot of grunting and heaving, both to disguise his not-especially-great impression and to sell the lie. Then he waited.

Blakely hated the waiting, and he hated even more that it might well end in his death.

He heard footsteps squelching over, then he heard them stop. Then he realised what was coming and already started moving before the blast of magic hit the mound right on the opposite side to where he was lying.

Dirt exploded out of it and hit him like bullets. If they’d been stone fragments, Dave would already have died. As things were they just bruised the fuck out of him and sent him tumbling back to the tar. This time he landed in a deeper bit, breaking through the surface and falling into the pooling oil below, feeling it smother him.

That was not good. Dave was a warrior, which meant he was tougher, stronger and faster than most men and could go a lot longer without breathing, but he was still ultimately mortal and still needed his lungs to do something if he wanted to live. Instinct told him to emerge out into the air as soon as he could.

But that would also kill him, because there was a magician waiting above-ground to melt him as soon as he did.

So Dave dove down instead, and did the closest thing he could to swimming.

As it turned out, that wasn’t actually very close to swimming. It was more like he was physically wriggling his way through a tangible hold. He was, though, making progress, or at least he thought he was. Slow, miserable progress measured out by the vague feeling of inches moved ahead and the constant, growing burn of his tortured lungs. The time limit was always going to be his need for air, and Dave was proud to last a solid ten minutes before he finally forced himself up through the oil and emerged out into cool air.

He looked around right away, desperately searching the area for his enemy. He didn’t dare hope the man had fucked off, things like that just didn’t happen in Dave’s life, and sure enough he saw the magician standing just twenty or so paces to one side. Quite disturbingly, he was staring right down into where Dave had ended up entering the pool. If he hadn’t had the strength to swim through it…

But there was no time for that, he was still in a fight. Dave’s guns wouldn’t work clotted in tar as they were, but he could still move even with the heavy sludge clinging to him. More importantly, he had something that might work a little better.

He withdrew the bundle of dynamite he kept on him for just such occasions and headed over to crawl around the other side of the mound he’d hidden behind just minutes earlier, holding the explosives tight.

Dave could barely see. Worse, he couldn’t smell. His ears were clogged and clotted too. He felt like a newborn baby, squealing and writhing around, dumb and deaf and half-brainless and useless. He got the distinct impression there was some great, cosmic irony to how much that annoyed him, but then he got distinct impressions that his neighbour’s cat was spying on him so he generally just ignored such things when he was in a more pressing situation.

Fortunately, though the clinging oil left him as close to useless as he’d ever been, he could still navigate well enough to position himself behind the mound just opposite his enemy. Then he started fucking around with the matches.

They’d light. He knew that they would catch fire, because while unrefined oil didn’t burn nearly as well as some of the products you got from it, the stuff was still pretty friendly with fire. The only problem was striking the necessary spark.

And the fact that Dave was currently covered in more of that oil, but he figured turning himself into a human candle was only about the third most likely thing to kill him right about now so, once again, he pushed it out of mind and continued working on the act that might save his life.

It took him long, horrible, noisy seconds, but finally there was a spark, then a flame.

Then a lot of flame really fucking fast. It caught the oil-coated dynamite, then it caught Dave, then it caught the patches of ground around him. He got up and started running, screaming, waving his arms—this was actually pretty convenient. Nothing like being on fire to leave someone incurious about why you might be running like a maniac all of a sudden.

Dave was a warrior, a minor one of the First Order, and on the lower end of it at that. He had something like five times the average man’s strength, and just under double his speed. He couldn’t ‘move faster than the eye could follow’ or ‘avoid bullets after they were already fired’ or ‘cleave through a solid cuirass with one swing’ or anything like that.

What he could do was run like an absolute motherfucker, and right now his options were limited to that, and making a really big, prolonged wish that the magician at his back wasn’t a good enough shot to kill him as he zigzagged away.

A fireball rushed past Dave’s ear just inches from the skin, hit the ground five paces ahead of him and exploded. It was easily a fatal distance for most men, and for Dave it was still enough to halt his run and flatten him out on the ground with ringing in his ears and blood in his mouth. He turned in the dirt, trying to stand but finding his legs suddenly disobedient.

He looked over to see the magician cresting the mound, smirking at him.

“Well, looks like I’ve finally—” the dynamite bundle exploded barely a foot from his legs. It couldn’t have happened more perfectly if Dave had planned it.

Actually, Dave had planned it, and he was still pleasantly surprised.

Once he’d dived down to submerge himself in another tar pool and extinguish the flames, at least.