Heroic Advent
Kristel peeked atop one of the dunes a hundred paces away from the marching Vyndival Army. Not too far from the march, the moving fortress moved ever so slowly, the Jaws Lurking in the Forest hauling it along with every screaming effort.
Kristel couldn’t imagine walking for days with a Nightmare that noisy for a companion, never mind the its grotesque and acidic appearance.
The Forest Jaws’ head tilted with an abrupt jerk, facing her general direction, and screamed. The Princess’s heart skipped a beat, alarms blaring danger for an instant, but she doused them all. It just so happened the Nightmare turned her way; it could not have possibly spotted her. Even if it did, none of those soldiers could understand the monster.
After confirming their destination, the Princess sneaked back to her companions, careful enough not to slide and kick sand into the air. They still had a few things to prepare and giving away their position now wouldn’t be ideal.
“Alright, it’s not too far now,” she began. “Our plan is simple. We force our way to the moving castle, slay whatever that monster is if it gets in our way, and then kill King Urzic.”
“Simple, she says. I’m the one who has to go first,” said Flimeth, smiling as she affirmed the tightness of her bracers.
On her right arm just underneath her Cross Irista epaulet, her meiyal core gleamed a pentagonal shape surrounded by lines of meiyal marks—oriented like echoes of the core’s sides—wrapped in a circle like a permanent armband around her bicep. “Like I said, I only have sixty marks, but that should be enough, right?”
“That should be enough, I think.” Lor activated his meiyal core as he rematerialized his meiyal bow.
The core on his wrist had a shape of an arrowhead with extremely thin meiyal marks originating from the core’s base and looping around his wrist to depict the illusion of a wristband. The marks were so thin it was difficult to count how many he had activated, but Kristel knew Lor had a total of sixty of them unsealed.
“It’s not about the marks,” Kristel said, repeating her mantra. She activated all eighty marks from under her battle gear and materialized a short blade for each hand. “Frill only has nine and she’s a league stronger than we are.”
“Can’t argue with that.” Flimeth meditated, causing her half-plate armor to glow slightly. “How can she Draw those Meiyal Arts anyway?”
“Beats me. All I know is that her meiyal system is a lot different from ours. Obviously.” Kristel stood and breathed in meiyal as she closed her eyes for focus.
“Freemesia.”
She opened her eyes with a flash of light. A stroke of white line crossed both her pupils and her vision changed dramatically. Paths of light appeared in the air, tracing and suggesting her way.
From her sight, Flimeth and Lor were enveloped with red aura varying in volume. Around these auras were spots of white intended to be their weak points.
Their weak points were all over the place, appearing and disappearing based on where their attentions were directed. Those points gradually reduced and minimized as the two finalized their preparations and placed their focus on the task at hand.
Kristel lowered to the ground, focusing her meiyal to her lower body.
“Ascensia.”
Air spiraled around her legs all the way up to her head, fluttering blue blurs of her hair and clothes in the process. The sands remained away from her, pushed away by the wind. She raised her blades across her face and focused her meiyal around them.
“Kaimera.”
Kristel’s meiyal enveloped both meiyal blades with an azure hue, strengthening them further for the purpose of piercing through the resistant armors and the general physical makeup boasted by most Vyndivalians.
“Ready?” She turned to her companions.
“That’s four Arts you’re trying to maintain, you sure you can afford those?” Flimeth asked. She hopped off the sands and faced the dune covering them from the marching army.
“I can hold up to five now, easily. Besides, I barely have to count Siffera at this point. I have it maintained all the time anyway.”
Siffera, the body enhancement Meiyal Art, in its most basic form, allowed the practitioner to amplify their overall physical capacity. The most apparent effect of this Art would be improvements in the practitioner’s strength. It made them stronger, faster, quicker; their sense of balance firm, their reflexes agile.
The Art proved to be such an all-rounder that it became the basis of a slew of advanced Meiyal Arts. Such examples were Kristel’s Freemesia which utilized Siffera’s increased awareness to make predictions, or her Ascensia which imbued the neutral Siffera with the element of air to further increase her speed and balance. Even Kaimera was influenced by the foundation of the body enhancement Art by transferring its strengthening aspects onto held objects.
Siffera was the starting point; the first to be learned, and the first to be mastered.
But if Katherine had something to say about how a practitioner should consider defining mastery of this one specific Meiyal Art, she would argue that no one in the entire history of its conception was close to even achieving it—including herself.
“Everyone’s too quick to get to the fancy stuff. They forget the basics. Siffera’s more than just a body enhancement Art.”
Kristel, she admitted, was one of everyone. Her maintenance of Siffera was minimum at best, trickling meiyal over the Art to simply justify its activation and only ever paying attention to it when needed.
Flimeth’s tsk brought the Princess back to reality. “See, this is why you should listen to Katherine when she comes back. Bet she’ll give you a good scolding.”
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“That doesn’t matter right now, ladies,” Lor interrupted. “We’re on schedule.”
“I’m on it, big guy. Chill.”
The Guard Knight settled on a strong pose, stretching one arm towards the dune—a slope of shifting sands about five stories high—and clenching a fist with the other near her face as if to aim a punch. Meiyal swirled around her body as a small halo of light manifested behind her shoulders.
Flimeth’s Display.
The Display—a small circle of light no larger than her back—projected five distinct items settled around within the borders of the halo. Each item depicted a Meiyal Art settled inside her Exhibit, anchored by real world items charged by meiyal and absorbed within.
The anchors themselves varied and were usually only known to their owners—Flimeth in this case—but the Art shown on their Display could be easily recognized by a fellow practitioner.
Flimeth Displayed an Exhibit of Siffera, Spatiera, and three other Arts Kristel guessed were from a specialized style.
It took the Princess a second, but everything clicked into place and she poised herself low, concentrating on Ascensia. Lor had been in position the entire time.
“Estura Style: Dai-Siffera,” the Guard Knight invoked. The meiyal around her froze as her power reached a critical point. A second of silence passed. Then, as she shifted her pivot to send a straight punch, her Display burst with intense light. “Grand Fissure!”
The dune exploded into a tsunami of sand as Flimeth Estura’s Meiyal Art created a great shockwave that blasted it away. The force travelled with blinding speed as it reached the marching Vyndivalian army within seconds, catching them unaware, breaking their formations, and sending a great number of them high in the air.
“Go!” the Guard Knight called and dashed straight into the enemy army.
In a sudden burst of air, Kristel followed into a sprint, barely catching up to Flimeth’s tail.
“Estura Style: Break Wave!” Flimeth Drew a Meiyal Art as she spun in the air and kicked, blasting another shockwave with a wider frontal range than Grand Fissure. Screams of helpless soldiers echoed in the air as they flailed frantically in their fall.
A few of them held their ground, successfully resisting the Art, but they were too busy balancing themselves to defend against the Guard Knights knuckles.
One jumped at her, plunging a needle-like spear aimed at her neck.
Two streaks of meiyal arrows sped past Kristel, barely missing her hair. The first collided with the spear, sending its trajectory out of Flimeth’s way. The second struck at the soldier’s arm, knocking him off the air.
Lor was closely behind them at work, incapacitating waves of soldiers with barrages of arrows.
They forced their way into a sea of enemies none of whom had any mettle strong enough to challenge them. It felt like swatting away kids who did something wrong.
Kristel suppressed the desire to puke.
Before long, the soldiers realized that to approach is to invite the risk of death. They parted and gave way; the sea of enemies opened their path forward but closed the one behind them. As a result, they made good progress, until another chose to block them.
A gang of giants faced them. Two of them were of the same height and a third about an entire man taller standing behind them.
Though with a slightly reduced overall intelligence than the smaller, bipedal folk, these brutes with heights ranging from at least eight to a mind-boggling twenty men were nothing if not raw, absolute strength. They gathered in small gangs in isolated caves and forests.
They were smarter once, sophisticated even; known for their refined control of the elements, their dazzling treasure-riddled clothes fitting a monarch’s wardrobe, and their impressive exploration prowess as pioneers of the frontier. So much so that a group of them was once referred to as a magnificence of giants.
But alas, the Divine Severing.
Now, they were nothing more than ragged slaves to the Monarch’s Law, their treasures and knowledge stripped from them along with their bonds to their gods. Their communities reduced to mere gangs.
Kristel had no time for them. She stepped forth, allowing her Freemesia to dictate her path. A giant’s weak spots were their ankles, this was common knowledge further evidenced by the indications of her Meiyal Art.
“Keep the others away,” she said. Her companions immediately guarded her flanks.
Channeling a hefty amount of meiyal to her Ascensia, Kristel sped through the desert and reached the closest giant’s ankle in a blink. She sliced through, cutting deeper than a short sword would allow through the help of her Kaimera.
A second giant tried to help by swinging a club-improvised tree, but she was already at its ankle. The second giant slammed the trunk against the first’s leg and both of them lost balance in the process.
Kristel shot herself backwards away from the third giant that was at least an entire man taller than the two. She flipped high into the air as the second giant lashed out in desperation, unable to stand and pinning the first one as a result.
The Princess slipped in between fingers the size of her and opened her Display.
She spun at the zenith of her leap Drawing the Display of her Kaimera in reality. Unlike Flimeth’s, hers wasn’t a specialized style, resulting in a simplified invocation.
“Dai-Kaimera.”
Kristel felt a quarter of her current meiyal seep into the Art as the azure Kaimera enveloping the blade intensified and extended into a long blade as tall as the giants.
She pointed the blade towards the sky and allowed her spinning momentum to leverage her entire weight as she pulled down sideways with all her might, aiming at the two shorter giants’ napes.
It was like a double execution of two convicts judged by a blue glinting guillotine.
The cut was clean, too clean. Kristel’s Dai-Kaimera reverted to its base form as she finally landed onto the desert’s uncaring sands. Only then did the giants’ heads fell off and sprayed blood all over the Vyndival army—now looking more as though as onlookers rather than soldiers.
The third giant stumbled in fear as the blood-soaked Princess made her approach. Intimidation was key to dispersing any of the Monarch’s Law’s influence, especially for the easily manipulated giants. Cleaning off the blood was second priority.
As the giant turned in an attempt to escape, a giant muscular claw with vibrating black scales pressed it into the sands.
The Jaws Lurking in the Forest approached, its roar a piercing scream of despair as it crushed the giant to its death, pinning it on the ground as though a broken stick. Acid spewed like a light shower.
Lor and Flimeth joined her as they faced the lesser dragon. Flimeth effortlessly erected a barrier Meiyal Art to protect them from the acid, absorbing it and negating its effects.
“Well?” Lor asked the Princess.
Kristel’s Freemesia stopped right in front of the Forest Jaws which meant risk of injury if she continued. But she already expected this from the beginning.
She took a breath and steeled her resolve. “Let’s go!”
A huge sphere of light emerged between them and the Nightmare. The sphere appeared so suddenly Kristel and her companions didn’t have time to react nor protect their eyes from it, but her Freemesia quickly adapted and allowed her to recover faster than the others. It was the same ominous feeling she had back on Mount Rindea but with none of the vile pressure that had come along with it.
A hand emerged. It was turned backwards, a gesture to stop. As the sphere began to decrease, the arm of the hand began to appear. Then strands of dark-brown hair waved elegantly as the back of the stranger revealed a familiar coat.
Kristel held her breath and her heart skipped a beat.
The woman turned slightly, revealing a honey-sweet looking face gemmed with illustrious blood-ruby eyes that made Kristel certain of her identity.
“Hey,” Katherine spoke as though she had never left. “Great job out there. Let us help.”
Only then did the Princess notice someone else. A man. His eyes spoke of amazement and wonder, but the way he frowned telegraphed a lot of different things.
None of which was fear.
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