Ensharia swung down, sending the edged metal to bite hard into the chain connecting Fall’s bound wrists to the great fixture by his feet. It was a thick thing, close to an inch of cold iron, but she drove the metal with strength enough that the axe broke apart on impact, and the robust links of chain followed suit. In an instant the magus was on his feet, body aglow with power, air rippling around him as atmospheric currents danced and congealed in accordance with his will.
It took one second for the pressure to coalesce about his shackles, crushing and snapping them harmlessly from his wrists to fall empty. One more second saw a barrier of stone-dense air compressed around them, and it was the third second in which a sizzling lance of energy crunched into it, delivering power enough that Ensharia felt the hairs curl on her skin even as its heat was blocked feet shy of reaching her.
“Treacherous whore!” One magus roared.
“Teach us to let the bitch do a man’s job!” Cried another.
“Only thing you can trust them to cut is a fucking steak!” Snarled a third. After that, the slurring came in such volume that Ensharia found it all blending incoherently together. Then even that was buried by the blasts of magic.
Ensharia found herself thrown to one side of the room, and took a moment to realise it had been Arion Fall, the windmage, who had done so. He didn’t glance at her as she stared up at him, focusing instead on defending himself from the fusillades of magic still being thrown across the room.
Not one of the Arcane Councilmen had stood to contribute their own power, yet, and most of the similarly aged men appeared content to sit still and observe as well. Indeed, Ensharia realised it was largely the younger, and thus less trained, who were so vigorously throwing themselves at him.
But that did not give her new ally any sort of advantage, merely provided an explanation for why he had yet to be torn apart.
His barriers were like castle walls, but his enemies were like trebuchets. Arcs of propelled acid, shaped stones, metal barbs and fireballs hurtled for him, deflecting and breaking on his shield to leave the ground around him fractured and glowing with molten agony. Even while magic was turned to solidity in their offence, others took less direct measures. Poisonous gases coiling about Fall, energies running through the ground beneath his feet and heating it to molten slag.
Ensharia was no magus, but she was a warrior, and she’d been in enough battles to recognise the tide of one when she watched it from so close. Fall was losing, and losing faster with every moment that passed. She got to her feet.
Closest to her was a younger magus, who fought by directing arcs of lightning at Fall. The static discharge seemed unable to penetrate its atmospheric barricade, glancing and deflecting off in all directions, blasting fist-sized chunks of stone from the ground in a dozen different places with every forked refraction. He didn’t look up in time to see her close in, and Ensharia’s mace caught him clean in the chest.
She held back, still a Paladin, but a magus was not a warrior, and his body had not been rebuilt to a steely hardness by the same training hers had. His ribs broke and he fell, coughing blood. Ensharia moved on to the next.
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There was magic on the air, war magic. Silenos could feel it. Magi were nothing compared to the Named of House Shaiagrazni, only the greatest of them would have even managed to progress that far within Silenos’ people, but he sensed many turning their power to violence. Dozens, scores, perhaps close to a hundred in all. Such a sum of magic was more than even he could scoff at, even without any of the less modestly powerful Councillors contributing to its sum.
Obviously, Ensharia had made a mistake. He reminded himself to chastise the idiot later as he advanced through the city. Provided she lived, of course. One couldn’t take that prospect for granted, with idiots.
Had Silenos been advancing through a city held by House Shaiagrazni, there would have been ample defences to impede him. Fleshcrafted servitors of preternatural sensory potence and deadly combat effectiveness, runes and wards made to shatter upon contact with his magical presence and thus alert their casters. If nothing else, the occasional tripwire. Instead he found very little to halt him.
That changed, however, as Silenos moved closer to his destination.
He flew across Magira upon great Fleschrafted wings, their flesh made of keratinous compounds able to withstand the lifting forces generated by bundles of efficient, spring-coiled muscle fibre. The decades had long since made Silenos an adept at flight, but he still spent most of his airtime gliding, all too aware of the surprising volume generated when a creature of his mass held itself aloft through Newtonian principles.
Years ago, Silenos had enjoyed the sensation of flight. Enjoyed it like nothing else. He had since outgrown such juvenile sensations, these days the wind upon his face and moonlight on his back was of tertiary concern. His power was but a means, and he closed in, quickly, on the ends.
The magus Walriq’s corpse was not stored in the university, as Silenos might have guessed, but rather a more secure building just half a kilometre from it. The thing was of diabase, as much of Magira was, and constructed squat and stout for defence. Its outer walls were thick enough to stop cannonfire, threaded with barriers of magic that might turn away any attempts to transmute their substance, and guarded on all sides by more of the unfeasibly potent physical specimens who had lined the corridor of the holding cell.
None of which was quite sufficient to truly impede him, of course.
Silenos dropped down, reconfiguring his body as he did. He did not choose to take his combat form, such a shape was ill suited for any form of subterfuge. Eleven feet and four thousand kilograms of supermaterial tended to attract attention. Instead he let his body fall into its standard form, having long since enhanced his humanoid visage as much as could be managed, and chose to engage his obstacles more magically than physically.
The first didn’t even see him approach, simply felt the touch of Silenos’ fingers on his neck, then dropped to the ground convulsing as his spinal cord was insulated past the point of transmitting nervous impulses. The second and third noticed Silenos as one, charging in to attack him, mouths widening to cry out a warning for the rest. It never came, for Silenos had already extended his focus to envelope them.
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Fleshcrafting was a delicate art, and its range was limited. If a caster were to empower their magic enough to make the jump of dozens of metres, as was often done to target far-off areas with other forms, then the excess energy would destroy whatever fine precision allowed for the truly formidable uses of it. Silenos was not so distant as that, however, and his mastery allowed a degree of surgical sleightness over the five or so metres separating him from his targets now.
He caused vocal convulsions, first, letting neck muscles squeeze their own windpipes past the point of making any sound at all. Then he targeted his enemies’ pineal glands, flooding their systems with the levels of melatonin that might be present from days without rest, while simultaneously purging them of any adrenal stimulants that might fight its effects. Both were unconscious within a minute, and would remain so.
Silenos stepped irritably over them. It would have been far easier to simply kill the savages, but also politically inconvenient. It was customary for a caster, and, he had learned, this world’s magi, to allow minor assaults to their retainers, but to destroy their property outright would be an insult too big to ignore. Silenos hadn’t the time to be making grave enemies like that, and so he limited himself. Fortunately no more guards stepped out to slow him as he slithered further inside.
There was death on the air, clearly smelled, so close, and Silenos followed it. Soon finding the corpse tucked safely away inside. He hadn’t a clue what the magus Walriq looked like, but he recognised the robes and age of him, and didn’t waste time humouring the idea that there may have simply been some other, unrelated senior caster killed at a similar time. The man was laid back across a stone slab of the sort that might have found use in some ancient-age empire. His clothing was identical to the others of his kind, dark robes signifying power and seniority, and his hands were folded over one another atop his stomach.
A beard flowed down from the magus’ face, mixing above with long, grey hair, framing a squat face covered with lines that told of much time spent frowning in his life. Silenos moved quickly, extending his magic for the corpse.
Fortunately, it seemed the savages of his city had possessed some knowledge of preservative measures for a dead body. Silenos detected no progressed rot within the lifeless tissues as he probed them, that was good. A desiccated or decomposed corpse could be repaired during reanimation, but doing so was difficult, time consuming, and would have added further points of failure to what would already be a taxing piece of spellwork.
Silenos felt a snag, and ignored it. Easy to grow paranoid, to procrastinate, when working such a spell. He had to make himself act or else burn up what precious time remained for his distraction. Substituting Fleshcrafting for Necromancy, he flooded the corpse with his magic.
He should have used his arcane sight to examine the corpse. Silenos realised that the moment he felt his necrotic power touch the core of its target, for there was already magic within it, waiting, coiled up and doing its reanimative work in subtle silence. Walriq twitched, shifted, then sat bolt upright with a blast of overpressure that left Silenos’ teeth rattling. He hurtled backwards, shoulders crashing hard into the stone wall behind him, vision blurring as he stared at the magus now standing up just ten metres beyond.
Wind coiled around Walriq, hurricane in its intensity, surgical in its precision. Great scything blades of pressurised air that scraped gouges into the stone floor like the clawing limbs of a great beast. The magus’ eyes were empty, vacant, mindless, but the power within him was organic and without diminishment. Silenos recognised in an instant that he was staring down every ounce of magic the caster had managed to gather across his own life.
And he hadn’t taken the opportunity to prepare his combat form.
The wind came for Silenos as a concentrated jet, powerful enough that he saw the air ripple with its intensity. His magic was immediate in answering, spasming muscles into throwing him aside far faster than mundane nerves could have managed, just barely letting him roll from the path of destruction. Where he’d been an instant prior, the stone wall surrendered into a foot-deep hole just as jagged and total as if artillery had impacted it. He was on his feet in an instant, and running the next.
Silenos had been in this new world for weeks, and his transit to it had broken every one of the protective precautions that might stave off death were his physical body destroyed. Such things were complex magics, demanding months or longer to replace, and that time would not be available to him for a while. All that kept him from death, now, was the preservation of his physical flesh.
Soft tissues strong enough to halt a bayonet, bones of natural carbon fibres that might withstand a thousand times his weight, superconductive neurons and magical stimulation of muscular tissue to allow for reaction time beyond the limits of simple meat. It was all dust compared to his full might.
He was not a direct combatant, not without the precious minute needed to transform himself, and he’d let his battle begin without it. It took a very young or very stupid caster to die, perhaps today would be the day Silenos proved himself the latter.
A pressure differential at his back warned Silenos of the wind current arcing for him, and he spun, transfiguring the oils and sweat of his body, the subcutaneous water within his arm, into a protean shield just in time to feel the current strike it. Energy transfer was near-instantaneous, and Silenos flipped almost upside-down before stopping against the far wall of his corridor, dozens of metres ahead of where he’d been.
Something sprained on impact, one of the vertebrae in his lower back cracked dangerously close to paralysis, but he was moving without even paying heed to the injury, taking advantage of his being launched to dive through the door.
Silenos knew he had seconds before the magus was back in pursuit, and still far from the building’s exit, so he worked quickly. He could not create matter from nowhere, but he had sufficient waste material to be used for…Something. Undigested food in his gut, flaking skin from his epidermis, plant matter growing beneath the stone underfoot. He took it all in, then reshaped it to a limb of elastic cartilage, affixing a block of iron-dense bone to a place at its top and binding the entire thing into the ground.
Walriq turned the corner, and Silenos stepped back to let the great, flat wings protrude from his creation. The wind struck it, catching the broad planes of flesh as they billowed out like parachutes, concentrating all of the attack into dragging the entire limb back against its own near-insurmountable tension. Force exhausted itself in the construct, kilonewtons transferred by the score until it was finally bent almost all the way back, wind nearly completely subsided. That was when Silenos sent forth another wave of power, letting the construct loose.
It snapped back so quickly and violently that he heard the audible crack of supersonic velocity as its osseous fixture released it right at the peak of their motion.
The magus was quick, for an outsider to House Shaiagrazni. His magic already moved to produce, then reinforce a barricade long before Silenos’ creation could turn his own strength back at him, but there was nothing he could do.
A bow’s power was greater than the arms needed to draw it, and so was this bullet of bone. Simple physics sent the projectile clean through Walriq’s shield, hardened composition letting it survive the penetration intact to clip the man’s side. Ribs shattered, jutting visibly out from his body as death moved past to obliterate a wall behind him. Silenos’ follow up was already prepared, a writhing jet of shadestuff.
But shadestuff was a physical material, once conjured, just barely less dense than water and fluid in its composition. Walriq caught it with a jet of air that halted, then reversed its momentum, sending the deadly material right back at Silenos just as he had his enemy’s wind. He dove aside, hearing the stone sizzle and scream where it was eaten by the magic, then rolled to his feet just in time to be blasted off of them again.