Arion should’ve seen the trap coming a mile off, but he realised the cause for his missing it. Out of all the places within Abaritan Castle that he might have found himself ambushed, few were worse than the late Prince’s safety room…For the people doing the ambushing.
Fifty feet was cramped, compared to open air, but it was far more room than he’d had back in the gangster’s shop. Arion didn’t waste a moment in using it, throwing himself back and high up into the air, holding his body just ten feet shy of the ceiling as he gathered more winds farther down below.
They were Knights, attacking them now. The best of the best. Not one man in fifty had the capacity to become one, even among the better nourished and trained upper classes, and those that did were trained even better than the rest. Arion had heard accounts as verifiable and trustworthy as any records in the world tell of armies numbering in the thousands falling to just a few dozen.
And there seemed to be about that many attacking him, now. He acted quickly.
His first wave of air caught four Knights at once, sending them crashing back against the rest of their comrades and giving the crowd pause, for a moment, as its constituents stumbled and fought to right themselves. They weren’t held for long though, and so Arion tried concentrating his next blast onto just one, letting that unlucky individual take as much power as could be focused against his body’s surface area.
Three hundred pounds of knight and steel were lifted from the ground and dashed against the far wall, rebounding on it and spinning head over heels no less than thrice before finally landing once more in a heap. Arion saw blood oozing out from under the Knight’s helmet and gorget, and there was no more movement in his limp form. One down, perhaps twenty or so remaining.
The bitch was doing her best, bless, but she was only keeping herself from being surrounded by backing off. She was faster than the Knights, certainly stronger, but she’d not had a chance to don her helmet, and she was rapidly running out of space at her back to retreat into. If she was attacked from all sides, she’d lose fast. Arion moved to take care of that, reaching out with more of his winds, sending an arced blast to sweep along the front row attacking her. They all stumbled at once, and she seized the advantage lightning-fast, bringing her mace down hard on the back of one’s head.
Better to have an anvil fall on him than that, Arion thought. The Knight dropped like a stone and didn’t move again, but more were soon focusing themselves upon the Paladin, forcing her focus to split itself four ways as they struck from every angle they could. Arion decided to try a different approach than just scattering them, wrapping currents of air around both the fallen Knights’ weapons, then hurling them into their allies. They struck like arrows, and with their mass such an impact was far from trivial. Metal ruptured, blood flew, and in an instant the Paladin had just a bit more breathing room.
Most might’ve used that to try and remove themselves from the fight, but she turned it to more practical means. Taking the chance to down another Knight with her weapon and lunging into the space he’d been occupying, furthering her space.
Arion typically preferred to be front and centre in a fight, that was where all the opportunities for showing off his impressive magic lay, but the Knights were stronger an enemy than he could afford to be so dismissive of. He hung back, letting the bitch take most of their aggression, focusing his powers on shielding her when necessary, and crushing another foe or two when the opportunity presented itself. Between the two of them, it didn’t take long for things to end.
Stolen story; please report.
Standing and panting at the centre of strewn-about, unconscious Knights, the bitch was clearly worn out. Even Arion himself felt a shade drained from the combat, having exerted himself more than would likely have been needed, had he been in an area with heavier projectiles to leverage his magic with.
The room was silent, save for her panting, and that silence let Arion recognise their latest problem instantaneously.
“The Hand.” He noted. “Fuck.”
However shortly they’d taken care of the Knights, it had been long enough for a sprinting man to get far. Even carrying twenty pounds of iron.
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Silenos had made the decision to retract his wings and re-absorb the excess matter into his body upon entering the castle. It was no great tedium to do, a caster of his excellence was able to manage it while running with no distraction, and the benefits to removing such inherent a vulnerability as the lightweight and thin structure required of flight-performing limbs was well worth it. He soon found himself regretting the decision, however.
For three minutes and nineteen seconds he roamed the building, navigating through the perception of his arcane sight. Had he known how incandescently the Goblade registered to such things, he might well have tried searching for it by simply flying over the city, for there was an intense flare of magic he could only deduce was coming from the relic, its source deep in the fortress and moving through it at a more than manageable pace.
Manageable enough that it did not take Silenos long to find himself face to face with it.
Of course, it came as no surprise to set eyes upon The Hand. Silenos had hurried back only after learning independently that the man was responsible for the Godblade’s disappearance. What ran through him upon locking eyes with the traitor was a dull concern.
“Where are my companions?” He asked, calmly. Silenos had learned, in his month or so in the new world, that warriors of Ensharia’s calibre required the combination of talent found only in one among every thousand with well over a dozen years’ training. Casters the equal of Arion were, of course, rarer still by a factor of several hundred times. Neither one was an acceptable loss.
The Hand froze, stiffened, stared at Silenos for a good long moment. He could see the simple thoughts flashing around behind the man’s eyes, primitive machinery of his cognition racing as fast as its shoddy construction would allow. Eventually, inevitably, it led him to perhaps the only conclusion it ever would have.
He turned and ran. Instantly men were behind him and before Silenos, barring the path between them with their own bodies, raising weapons and narrowing eyes. He walked through them, barely even noticing what he did to the fools as he bypassed their defences; liquefying flesh, crumbling bone, fusing limbs into unnatural fixtures and boiling the fragile meat of their brains. The Hand had barely gotten a further five metres by the time Silenos was done, leaving less than twenty separating them. And it was then that he tested his new body’s capacity for sprinting.
Silenos closed in on the Hand, surprising even himself with the sound of wind howling past his ears. He reached the man within a half dozen strides, seizing him hard by the back of the neck and snatching his body up off of the ground. Unsurprisingly, the man tried to swing his stolen Godblade around at Silenos’ head. The weapon didn’t even make it halfway, simply falling from his grip as fatigue and poor leverage dragged its weight down more fiercely than he could compensate for.
“You need to let me keep it.” The Hand tried, words spilling out of him fast enough that they almost interrupted one another. “I can do great things for this city, I can make it the world’s crowning jewel, all you need to do is-”
Silenos halted the signals running from the man’s cerebellum to his spine, then deftly lifted the sword up to make his way to Ensharia and Falls, stepping over the convulsive traitor with a curled lip.
He didn’t take long to decide where his presence was most needed, it was obvious. There had been only one reason for his coming to Arbite in the first place, after all, and now he had the tool needed to make it worth doing. Silenos made his way for King Galukar.