Three stories to the ground. The manor was expansive, its size befitting the arrogant noble family occupying it, so each story was a solid six or seven meters high. Eighteen to twenty-one meters to the ground, much of which was paved over with brick. Enough to kill many an unprepared soldier.
I wasn’t just anybody, though, and I started casting even as I fell. A loose-frame shield formed behind me at an angle, travelling with me and redirecting my vertical fall into more of a slanted slide. The loose frame style was really serving me well. I’d only started seriously using it today and the days before and yet it already felt more natural than the structured spells ever had.
It was a careful balancing act, ensuring that the shield redirected my momentum without suddenly stopping me, but I managed, slowly increasing the angle of the shield. Soon enough, I was no longer simply falling at an angle, the moving plane of force slanted enough that I was actually sliding on it. The brick walkway through the maze of flowers was fairly wide, at the very least—aiming myself at somewhere where I would not get stuck wasn’t too complicated of an affair.
The squad of oathholders I’d just escaped didn’t seem to want to let me make it down safely for some reason. Spells rained down upon me, bolts of blue and red and green that I rather disliked the idea of getting hit by. I cast another shield directly above me, still maintaining the gradually sloping path of the shield I was functionally riding on.
All too suddenly, I was right above the ground. I’d been falling directly next to the wall of the manor earlier, but the sloping path that I’d forced myself into in the air meant that I was almost twenty meters out now. I hadn’t wanted to open up a path for the people behind me, so I hadn’t constructed a simple ramp or staircase, opting instead for a method that would allow me to evacuate myself from the immediate area, but that came with the side effect of hitting the ground with a lot of speed.
I eyed the ground carefully, feeling the burn in my shield. I fed it more magic, but I could sense the frame was growing unstable as I skirted above the ground, using it as an impromptu magic carpet. The Ceretian shield spell really hadn’t been designed for this use case. Even with the modified frame, it wasn’t taking the unusual use well.
Fuck it. The spell was going to go haywire on me soon anyway. I let the shield dissipate, and I made hard contact with the ground a moment later. My foot touched brick path, flower bushes half my height on either side of me. I sprinted a step, trying to keep my own momentum from bowling me over, but it didn’t completely work. My feet left the ground and didn’t find purchase again.
I accepted the excess speed, hitting the ground in a roll. I’d been going faster than I’d thought, and one roll became two became three before I finally stopped. In the process, I hit almost every part of my body a few times, the velocity of my impact too great to be fully ignored even if my combat roll’s form was perfect.
“Ow,” I muttered, brushing off my arms. It wasn’t anything too major, but my arms and legs were banged up to hell. I was definitely going to feel this tomorrow.
I looked down at myself. There were a million tiny rips in the tunic I was wearing, most likely originating from where I’d scraped the ground as I rolled. I silently thanked past-Lily for having the foresight to change out of that beautiful dress before entering combat.
The sound of more magic being cast from the glass wall I’d shattered alerted me to look up. The other oathholders were following, those fuckers. For their part, they’d bothered with spells that were actually designed to transport them, golden forcefields encapsulating armored figures and sending them on a straight path towards me. They were noticeably slower than I’d been, though—probably because they hadn’t decided to simply risk a controlled fall down—and that gave me a little breathing room. Maybe twenty seconds before they would reach me.
Alright, so they weren’t going to be content with leaving me alone. That was problematic.
I built raw magic in my hands, not even bothering to visualize the world’s threads of magic. It came easily, a mere thought summoning more.
I could work with this.
My surroundings weren’t the most optimal for a fight, but they weren’t the worst, either. The brick path was three or four meters wide, the flower bushes on each side half that in width and a quarter that in height. Not thick enough or big enough to use as proper cover, but their leaves and buds were packed together densely enough to provide visual cover if that became necessary. Not relevant at the moment, since all of the slowly descending oathholders had already established line of sight, but maybe if they called for reinforcements.
I counted nine of them. If they were all as powerful as Faye had been, this would be a genuine problem, but they weren’t all Strike Team Leaders and I wasn’t as weak or uninformed as I’d been just a couple days ago. As unfortunate as it was to know, I was fairly sure that knowing that all might be lost for me soon was giving me a temporary powerup.
What a shitty mindset to be in for oath alignment. Then again, while I could perceive that my power was increased to far beyond its regular potential, I felt like there was more. Something deep inside me told me that this was not the most aligned I could be, that my god liked what it saw but wanted just a little more.
That was a problem for later, though, assuming I made it out of here alive. Cover was nonexistent, escape paths were made complicated by the fact that this was a fucking maze, and I was out of time.
Fine then. I would fight.
They started landing in waves of three, spacing themselves out so that they weren’t all the same distance from me. The second group landed on the opposite side of me from the first, then split up, encircling me. The closest of them was within striking distance if I had had a longsword, standing in a ready position just off to the side in what had once been a flower bush.
They’d formed a rat trap, slowly closing its maw.
The third group was going to land on me, I was pretty sure, though one of them split off to the side to join their comrades in preventing my escape.
The last two still in the air moved towards me, the magic turning what would have been a lethally fast fall into a lazy glide. I had more than enough time to prepare my magic, so I had to wonder what they were—
Their magic cancelled midair when they were hovering a few meters above me, and then they were falling, thick maces readied to strike.
I reacted later than I would’ve liked but earlier than I needed, blasting my magic upwards while simultaneously forming a new shield above me.
My burst of unstructured power wasn’t distributed perfectly evenly, my surprise throwing my aim off. I worked with it, controlling the magic in the air to primarily target one of the oathholders.
It connected, and the force of my mass of ruinous power forced one of my enemies off a crash course with me.
The second one slammed into my shield, and the mace decimated it. I felt the reverberation in my magic physically, the shattered force resonating through my bones. My teeth chattered with the impact, and I was vibrating all over like a bell that had just been struck, but despite the fact that it’d been broken, my shield had done its job. The mace lost its momentum and I was able to roll out of the way of the falling oathholder.
I winced as I got back onto my feet. If I looked at myself in a mirror right now, I would probably find a mess of bruises and scrapes looking back at me.
I’d survived the initial onslaught, though, and that was the important part. I’d put just a little space between me and my closest opponent, and a glance at the one I’d downed confirmed that my initial sphere—I really had to come up with a better name for them—had penetrated their defenses. They were leaking pure black magic from their insides, the power seeping through a massive hole in the armor, making the black steel look like it was positively bright in comparison.
Another one down.
That left eight to go, but those eight had largely encircled me. This was… not an optimal situation.
Magic crackled, the oathholders under Alzaq employ forming new spells. From bad to worse, huh?
I thought hard and fast, recalling the last time I’d had an oath alignment. It had been stronger, then, and at the time I hadn’t totally been in my right mind. Not quite the same situation as I was in now, but I remembered one of the tricks I’d done to clear out those oathholders at the Sinlen Pass.
These oathholders were likely more powerful, but I was more powerful now too. My reserves opened to me like a dam bursting, and I formed and cast magic in the span of an instant.
I’d managed to kill a few of them so far, but every time I’d had to use the entirety of what I’d been building up. There wasn’t going to be a way I could take them all down at once, and they weren’t going to sit around and politely wait for me to kill them one by one.
That meant my first priority was zoning.
My magic hit the ground, and it knew ruin.
A mass of my power expanded explosively, consuming the ground around me. The sphere stretched all the way to the flower bushes to either side of the path, I was pretty sure, and it swallowed all that it entered.
Or it tried, at least. Within the darkness of my magic, I possessed a sight that wasn’t sight, the effect not obstructing my vision like it might for someone else. There were still eight living oathholders in here, their magic-resistant armor taking the brunt of the hit.
I held no illusions that this trick was going to kill anyone, especially since I could feel it was weaker now than it had been at the Sinlen Pass, even taking my growth in power into account, but it blocked vision and it would deal a bit of damage. It was an opportunity to reposition, and I used every bit of it I could. I was sprinting even as the ground beneath my feet disappeared into the void of my oath, my footing steady even when the brick wasn’t.
The burst wasn’t going to last for very long, so I made sure every step counted. I couldn’t quite recall how the maze had been built, but running away from the manor was probably the best plan of action in any case. If a wall got in my way, I would just blast it away.
I made it almost ten meters before my magic faded, a newly formed divot deep enough to fit a full carriage carved into the ground. It would be clean-cut, I knew, perfectly circular in a way that no other oath could replicate. The ground was gone behind me, but the oathholders certainly weren’t.
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It bought me some time. They’d gotten rather close to me, so they’d all been in the area of effect of the magic. I chanced a glance backwards, and there climbing over the edge of my brand new crater were armored figures, their black steel now entirely covered in glowing runes. Bits and pieces of armor were flaking off from some of them, runes smoldering with light on them. Pieces that had overloaded, perhaps, unable to fully take on the blast of ruin I’d hit them with.
They’d shown clear movement capabilities earlier. Was the hit from my magic preventing them from utilizing the full extent of their armor’s abilities? Lucky for me, if that was the case.
As before, a battle that involved one against many was one that could only be won by isolating fights, especially when the many were also oathholders. I’d just killed one, so there were eight fights to be isolated.
Unfortunately, these soldiers were more organized than the commoner mob I’d dismantled earlier tonight. They moved in groups, ensuring that no one oathholder could be cut off from the rest.
For the time being, I cast a shield behind me, aware that spells were going to be thrown my way soon.
Nothing hit it. I looked back again, willing to trade the valuable time for information. The eight remaining oathholders were all running towards me now, their armor still glowing. They had definitely been able to cast earlier—was their armor so limited that it cut their casting ability off when it took a heavy hit?
Unimaginably lucky. I might actually be able to kill them all like this.
A flash of memory passed through my mind, reminding me of the Strike Team Leader that I’d so brutally lost against, and I brought my expectations down. Their armor still augmented their strength like nothing else, and they were trained killers. They wouldn’t go down easily.
I’m going to have to get creative.
Ahead of me, the path ended at a crossroads. The three-meter brick walkway I’d been sprinting on opened up into a square that reminded me of a fancier, better kept version of the one that we’d been ambushed in a few days ago. The fountain at the center of this one was functional, a marble masterpiece that must’ve cost hundreds of suns to install. More importantly, there were three more paths splitting off the square. One to the right, one to the left, and one down the middle.
I looked behind me again. I wasn’t a slow runner, but these oathholders were faster. Their armor must have been providing some level of benefit to their speed, because there was no way that actual people would be able to sprint that fast while wearing full plate. I refused to believe it.
They were gaining on me, but I still had a few seconds before the first group—only two in this one, the last one presumably the one I’d most recently killed—would catch up to me.
I made it into the square, and as I did I instantly started casting, once again working with the loose-frame Ceretian shield. This time, I changed the properties of the fuel I was giving, making the shield large enough to cover the entire pathway while also being a good deal more opaque than usual. I tried to visualize the true darkness that I’d used in lieu of an oathlight before, giving the darker-than dark property to my magic.
It didn’t take fully, but it was enough. I couldn’t see through the shield, even with my enhanced sense of my own magic. It would serve as a solid wall.
I got down on my hands and knees as soon was I was done casting, and I crawled to the right as quickly as I could. My aching limbs protested at the scraping contact with the hard ground, but I ignored the pain. If nothing was falling off yet, I was fine.
I flipped myself over onto my back, my legs pointed towards the shield I’d made at the square’s entrance, and I found myself staring straight up into the sky. Cloudless, tonight. The stars twinkled, a blanket of light against the blackness of the night.
I wish I could’ve watched them with Jasmine.
No. I needed to focus, and thinking about Jasmine was exceptionally counterproductive to that.
I tilted my head left. The foliage here was thick, the lower branches of this particular flower bush dense enough that I couldn’t even get a glimpse of what laid behind it. It wasn’t very high—maybe a meter at most—but my prone body would be well-hidden by it.
I formed unstructured magic, once again not physically pulling on the threads. I could still feel the threads, but they felt more pliable today, a single thought enough to bend them to my will. I was on the cusp of something, I could feel it.
Like I’m on the edge of a cliff, staring down into an infinite chasm. The secrets lying behind my magic were dangerous, every fibre in my body screaming that it was a bad idea to poke at them, but what Nishi had told me indicated that I might be getting close to truly important information.
That could wait for later, though. Now, I used that dangerous pliability to create twin masses of magic. One of them remained in the simple form of a sphere, while the other grew over the still-bloody hairpin-knife that I’d killed Alto with. As much as my unstructured magic was growing powerful enough to use without anything guiding it, it still felt right infusing a blade with it.
Shouting rang out as the first oathholders hit my shield. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel their attacks on more than one level. They were hitting my impromptu wall hard enough that the air itself seemed to be vibrating with every strike, a pressure I could feel even laid down behind a bush five meters away from it. On a less physical level, the magic I had sustaining that shield was beginning to run out, and the frame was slipping from my grasp. With the general state of my reserves, it wasn’t a great idea to feed more energy into the shield, but that was fine. I hadn’t been planning on it.
More voices sounded from the path where I’d just been, mixing with the attacks into a senseless blend of noise that I couldn’t make heads or tails of, but they seemed to come to a decision. A moment later, as the next earthshattering strike hit my shield, boots trampled through bushes and flowers, the crack of branches breaking just barely audible through the sound of the strikes.
They were going around it even as they destroyed it.
Alright, that was bad but it hadn’t been unaccounted for. I lay patiently, controlling my heartrate. I’d been through worse. I would not let this faze me.
Footsteps from my immediate left—behind the flower bushes that acted as this maze’s wall—grew closer and closer, until I was fairly sure that they were literally right next to me.
I was proven right a moment later as someone kicked down the bush right in front of my feet. An armored oathholder smashed through it at a sprint, their armor still glowing orange all over.
My heart leapt into my throat, but I kept myself from moving, forcing myself to keep every muscle in my body still. The armored oath ran forward a few steps, and I tracked them with my eyes.
The figure looked left, then right, then left again. My potential discoverer turned around all at once, their line of sight briefly passing over me.
“Clear!” the woman inside shouted. I almost breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t seen me.
She started walking further into the path, her steps taking her straight past my head, but I still didn’t make a move even when her foot very nearly made contact with my ear.
On the other end of the square, nearly twenty meters away, another group was doing the same, clearing the immediate area and fanning out into the path.
I only heard one more set of footsteps to my left. Another group of two. Did they rearrange themselves?
The other oathholder crossed through a moment later, jogging to keep up with the woman ahead of them. I remained still.
The second oathholder’s path took them right next to me, unaware of my presence.
I attacked, rising like a coiled snake to strike at the second oath. I kicked up, using the momentum of the movement to force myself to my feet, and I whirled my enchanted knife around in a wide arc.
The black steel armor was enchanted to stop hits from magic, and I remembered Strike Team Leader Faye’s specialized set adapting to hits. According to the jester, that armor got stronger the more times the same spell hit it.
These sets, however, were not those of an elite Strike Team Leader. Faye’s had been able to utilize complex spells even while under attack, while these apparently restricted their owners from even casting from their own oaths after getting hit hard. I was banking on their protection being weaker than Faye’s had been.
I need not have worried. The oathholder was caught completely off guard, having trusted their teammate’s call that this area was clear, and they didn’t even react as I brought a sweeping slash down into their back. My blade made contact with black steel that glowed like it was on fire and it annihilated it. The thrust went through the rune-protected armor like it was a thin tree branch, and I felt the change in resistance after it fully penetrated. If the armor had been like a twig, the oathholder underneath offered about the same resistance as a half-melted piece of cheese.
Inome’s power flooded into the oathholder, and he started screaming. I ended his misery before he could get too loud, my second slash destroying most of his neck.
Significantly weaker armor than Faye’s. Granted, I had a powerup now that I hadn’t had with Faye, and I had been preparing that particular piece of magic for a decent amount of time, but the difference was still clear. I was mostly sure that the same hit wouldn’t have done more than aggravate the woman who’d managed to out-and-out defeat me.
The first oathholder—the one who’d misidentified this area as clear—whirled around to face me. I hadn’t been fast enough to silence her partner. Damn it.
“I have her!” the armored woman shouted, loud enough that everyone in the immediate area would be getting an earful. “Friendly down!”
Her shout of alert was accompanied with a wild charge towards me, fists drawn back.
She still can’t use her magic, then.
My opponent’s gauntleted fists glowed bright blue as she ran, energy building up with each passing second.
Scratch that. She can’t use ranged magic. What an interesting limitation.
There wasn’t that much distance between us, but we weren’t quite in hand-to-hand combat territory yet. I fired my sphere at her. These were high level oathholders, and while their armor was strictly inferior to Faye’s it was still of Aedi oath make. I didn’t want to learn what those gauntlets did firsthand.
My sphere flew towards her, its path straight and fast enough that there was no way she could dodge, and—
And she punched the embodiment of ruin out of the fucking air. Blue light flared, meeting my darkness to create a maelstrom of magic that hurt to look at. When it faded, the gauntlet was sparking, the blue glow replaced by massive cracks running through it, but the sphere of power I’d hurled at her was gone.
She’d come out the loser in that exchange overall, assuming that damage meant she couldn’t use that gauntlet again, but she was still sprinting at me and she still had another gauntlet left.
I formed a loose-frame shield, frantically fumbling with the fuel and spark. I didn’t manage a proper one, but a simple frame just large enough to cover my face and upper body was doable in the span of a heartbeat or two.
It popped into existence just as the other oathholder went for a massive haymaker. The punch connected, and once again I witnessed the painfully bright sight of magic struggling against magic. This time, my magic unequivocably lost, the shield breaking like so much glass.
While the punch had been slowed some by the barrier, it still connected, socking me in the gut. I relaxed my body as much as I could, trying to minimize damage from the impact, but it didn’t do much. An object that felt more like a freight train than a fist slammed into me, and I keeled over, the wind in my lungs knocked out in a sudden huff of air. I choked, gasping for air despite the fact that my throat hadn’t even been hit, and I had to suppress the urge to vomit.
Something cracked inside of me, and then another crackle sounded outside. I was doubled over, my vision unfocused, and it was only when the effect hit me that I realized I hadn’t been knocked back, her fist still embedded into the soft fleshy part of my gut.
My body went numb in an instant, my muscles clenching involuntarily, and I grit my teeth in preparation for the—
Fire. I’m on fire.
No. I wasn’t, but my nerves were screaming at me that that was the case. This kind of pain, at least, I had some experience with. Burning and shocking had been fairly easy for good ol’ Lord Byron to administer when I’d been a child, and this was definitively a nasty case of the latter.
It was getting hard to think, but I’d been taught how to handle this as well. I’d been through worse, even as an adventurer—memories of my ribs breaking through my skin came to mind—but this was still a motherfucker of a hit.
I formed magic, wild and unsure, and the oathholder backed up, recognizing the power I wielded.
Shit, this was incredibly bad. I could put the pain away for the time being, but the injury would slow me and everyone was alerted to my presence now.
The rapidfire breaking of my shields was an additional problem. I felt the loss keenly in my reserves. I still had enough to put up quite a few more, but casting the same spell over and over was giving me a level of fatigue on top of the pain from the injury.
Last and certainly not least, every damn oathholder in this place had been notified to my presence. I’d meant to take both oathholders down in a flurry of violence, then move on to isolating the next fight, but I hadn’t counted on them being so damn competent.
Fuck, I was inexperienced. I’d had a more than thorough education on how to fight, and I’d even practiced fighting against oathholders, but these oathholders had had their skills honed through years on the battlefield. Compared to them, I was a rank newbie. Skills learned in a classroom—or something approximating one, at least—were never going to compare to those learned and refined through actual combat.
The seven surviving oathholders moved towards me as one, and I readied myself for what was sure to be an unforgiving fight.
And just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did.