“The difference between a soldier and a mage is that the former must accept realities as they are. Terrain is a fixed and unmovable reality, positioning, transportation, materiel and logistics are masters to be obeyed. The only master that a mage serves is their own mind, their only limitation is their imagination.”
—Libio Bellum Arcanum, Frondius Gallweaver
At the foot of the tower, everyone had now spread out, recognizing that any cluster of them would welcome an attack. Even when there were a pair in range of a single spell, Sylvas held off for now. Time was on his side. The longer that they took to decide on a course of action, the more likely they were to get frustrated. The sooner they got frustrated, the sooner they started fighting among themselves and forgetting about him. If he could get a moment to meditate, he could restore some of his mana reserves, which were currently teetering dangerously low.
At this distance he couldn’t make out what they were saying to one another unless it was deliberately shouted up to him, but he could see Bael and Kaya deep in argument already. It seemed more than likely that they’d be the first ones to come to blows, given how argumentative they got even without any outside pressure. Bael strode away from Kaya without a backwards glance. Leaving her fuming, Sylvas assumed.
She summoned a pair of spikes onto her hands that looked particularly wicked and approached the wall of the tower. Even from this height Sylvas could hear and feel the impact as she hammered those spikes into the stone. Then her climb began.
It was obvious that the climb was going to be unsuccessful. There was a pile of bodies beneath her that told her exactly what happened to anyone trying to get up here, but she came all the same. Stubborn beyond all reason.
Sylvas dragged himself over to that side and readied another Gravity Spike. Which was when the rest of the mages seemed to finally spring into action. They may not have had a clean shot at him, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t going to try for some dirty ones.
The oncoming rush of magic was enough to send Sylvas scurrying back from the rim of the tower. That purple beam zipped by, far closer than he would have liked, accompanied by zipping bolts of magic in a rainbow of colors an instant after.
If they thought he could be pinned down like that, they didn’t know enough about him.
Closing his eyes, Sylvas reached out with his gravity sense, building a complete picture of the battlefield around him, sensing everyone and everything perfectly. He didn’t need to see to cast, he knew where everyone was. Besides, even if she had shimmied around to the side a little, Kaya was in too much of a rush to go around the corner of the blocky tower she was climbing and make her approach from another side. If she had, she would have lost her covering fire, or at least enough of it. She was almost halfway up the tower in the short time it had taken Sylvas to fling himself back and get his thoughts together.
It was hard not to be a little bit impressed with her, even as he cast the Gravity Spike that would send her crashing down.
Her progress slowed to a complete halt as the intensity of the gravity hauling on her began to increase. The spikes she had embedded into the stone went deep, and they were all one solid piece of metal with her armor, so the risk of them snapping off was pretty slim. Inside of the armor, she must have been getting compressed lower and lower, her legs swelling as he forced more and more of her mass down. But still she did not fall. Sylvas pushed more mana into the spell. Doubling up the gravity yet again. It should have been more than enough to crush the fight out of her, but he had forgotten that she was a dwarf accustomed to extremes in her environment. The other casters at the foot of the tower seemed to have noticed her predicament and stopped launching their assault, instead shouting up words of encouragement to her. As if words could do anything against the inevitability of gravity.
Somehow, Kaya was holding out. She couldn’t advance any further so long as the Gravity Spike was being cast, but neither was she being cast back down to the bottom of the tower. They were at a stalemate, and one that was inevitably going to result in Sylvas losing. He had only a limited supply of mana to draw on, while all she had to do was remain stubborn and conscious despite the g-forces working against her. When he released his spell, he would have at best a few moments as she pulled herself together before she started climbing again, and once she was up here he did not fancy his chances in close combat with her. Particularly when he was too unsure of using his new embodiment in case he ground all his bones to dust again.
Sylvas came to the conclusion that the dwarf might actually be insane when he heard her calling out. “Is that all you’ve got, culgh?!”
It wasn’t. The spell, as written, could scale up a second time to intensify the gravity even more. The last of his core would be drained to turn up the gravity that far, and while he felt confident it would be enough to pluck her off the wall, it would still leave him with all the other mages to deal with without mana.
So he gambled, and he released Gravity Spike.
Kaya didn’t move for a long moment, still in precisely the same position as before. If Sylvas had been a little closer he might have heard her groaning at the sudden change in pressure, but with the cavalcade of spells still being flung up to keep him pinned down, no sound could be heard.
She pulled the spike that had been keeping her pinned to the wall out with almost a comedic slowness and tried to ram it back in and continue her ascent, but no matter how strong Kaya may have been, even she had limits, and spending so much time being crushed had taken its toll on her. The point of the spike skittered over the stone without making purchase, and the force of the impact was enough to pluck her other spike out of the wall too. Kaya fell, tumbling end over end, back to the ground.
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The crash of steel when she landed was finally something loud enough to be heard over the flurry of magic.
Casting halted when Kaya hit the dirt, covering fire no longer being offered up. Some part of Sylvas couldn’t help but feel sorry for his friend, as that fall really must have hurt, but given how profusely he was still bleeding thanks to her the sympathy was short lived.
In that brief lull in the chaos, he called down, “Is that all you’ve got?”
Kaya wheezed with laughter, tinny thanks to the armor enclosing her. She wasn’t out despite the fall. Sylvas hadn’t expected her to survive that.
In the brief moment before they attacked again, Sylvas had time to assess his surroundings. There were still ten mages arrayed against him, though he didn’t know how effective Kaya would be after that fall, particularly given the emphasis that she placed on physicality.
He hadn’t even seen Bael for the duration of the fighting, though he sensed the elf’s position now as he meandered back around from the other side of the tower block to stand beside the others. He had been casting throughout his wandering, but Sylvas hadn’t really paid it much mind. Most likely the elf was just working on his usual protective magics to keep himself and the others safe from Sylvas vengeance, when he got around to raining it down.
On seeing the elf’s return, one of the other mages, a human grunt Sylvas had never caught the name of, shouted up at me. “We’re giving you one last chance to come down peacefully.”
“I don’t think it will stay peaceful once I’m down.” Sylvas called back.
Kaya growled as she came up to her knees. “You’re damn right it won’t, stanzbuhr.”
He really would need to learn what that word meant one of these days. “Then I’ll politely decline.”
“I told you he would.” Kaya had made it back to her feet but seemed unsteady. If Bael wasn’t there offering her support, Sylvas was pretty sure she’d still have been having a nice lie down. It was odd seeing the two of them together, like a cat and a mouse that were friends. They seemed entirely too easy with each other, as if their earlier fighting had all been an act.
“Very well.” The elf said and snapped his fingers.
Bael had not been wandering around aimlessly while the rest of them fought, he had been laying down a circle of mana around Sylvas’ tower. Its signature had been obscured by the chaotic turmoil of magic overhead. Invisible until the elf was ready to reveal it.
It ignited now from the spark that fell from the elf’s fingers, a golden glow surrounding the base of the tower. This was not the fast and dirty magic that they had been teaching to the Ardent recruits, it was ritual work like Sylvas had once studied back before his world died. The fragments of spell writ in mana and laid along the length of the line had been incomplete, hollowed out spell-forms waiting for magic to be pushed through them. It flooded out to fill them from the circle now as Bael dumped mana into it.
The tower shuddered underneath Sylvas. Whatever Bael had done, it was considerably more substantial than anything the others had managed. The shudder came again, a reverberation of the first, then again, and again, each tremor coming closer on the heels of the last. Magic coiled up now from the circle, great lines of it erupting like fractals from the marking on the ground, they blossomed up around the length of the tower shining bright as the sun in the perpetual twilight of Strife.
Sylvas had no clue what magic was being used, or what he could do to counter it, all he could do was hold on for dear life as the tower beneath him shook and shuddered apart. Fragments of the hastily risen stone began to crack and tumble, each echo of the last reverberation breaking more and more of the stone apart. Bael was doing exactly what Sylvas had wanted to do the first time he saw the conjured landscape of their training grounds. He was changing the landscape to suit his needs.
Throughout the whole thing, Kaya and the others had served as a distraction, to give Bael the time he needed to complete his circle and his ritual. It had all been a ploy, right from the start. A trap.
Sylvas cursed under his breath. He should have known better than to underestimate Bael. The elf had been top of the class, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that it wasn’t because he was riding on Hammerheart’s coat-tails. Quite the opposite in fact. The more time Sylvas spent with him, the more apparent it was that most of Hammerheart’s success as a purely offensive caster was built around Bael patching the holes in his defenses.
The trap sprung with a brutal suddenness. One moment the coils of light encircling the tower were rising steadily and then they fell. Slamming back down into the circle below. The building vibrations came to a sudden halt too.
For a fraction of a second, Sylvas thought that something had gone wrong, that the spell had failed. He let out the breath that he was holding. Then the solid stone beneath him turned to dust.
Whatever magic had kept the red sands bound in a solid form was undone. Countered by Bael’s rite. Sylvas had looked at the problem as though they were trying to change something that already existed, while Bael had seen through it and recognized that there was already magic in play creating their obstacles which he only had to undo.
One moment, Sylvas was perfectly safe atop his tower, the next he was plummeting to his doom. A flight spell might save him if he was quick on the cast. But then he’d be a sitting duck for the barrage that was sure to follow. Inversion might save him, launching him up out of range, but the breakneck change of direction at terminal velocity might literally break his neck. There was only one sensible option that he could see. Angling himself forwards towards the massed mages awaiting their chance to murder him, he cast Gravity Shear.
They saw him starting to cast, launched missiles and beams up at him only for them to curve around the shield he was extending out ahead of him. None of them gave ground, none of them ran, they all believed that he was already beaten.
Because he was.
The Gravity Shear was going to do nothing to protect him from impact with the earth. He was losing this fight, one way or the other. But losing this way meant that he took all of them with him.
As he hit terminal velocity, the air around him began to warp and quaver. Everything outside the shield accelerating as it was whipped past him, spells and air and dust alike. There was a sonic boom as he fell, as deafening as anything that Vel had ever managed to conjure up, but this time Sylvas did not flinch, he grinned. Victory was in reach.
Only Kaya seemed to grasp what was about to happen, dragging on Bael’s sleeve and trying to haul the elf out of the blast radius, but she was too hurt, and they moved too slow. Sylvas touched down right beside them.
The concussion on impact launched every one of the ten mages arrayed against him off the ground. Even the five already felled were tossed around like rag dolls. Every one of them was flung out to batter against the walls of the lower slung blocks. Breaking bones and drawing blood everywhere that he looked. For one glorious moment, Sylvas was victorious.
Then the ground came up to meet him.