While the death that lurks in wait does not choose to leave its watery home, it can be induced by sufficient provocation. Do not give it that provocation.
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Eythron was currently staying at hideout number seven. Traveling south from the northern transit platform nearest Qahrvirna’s tower cut two weeks of walking off the trip, but required them to fight their way out of another horde of hungry monsters that came running to the flash of mana.
Since fighting monsters was the entire point, Eythron stood back and controlled the battle with his movement and utility spells while Jair stabbed his way through the monsters one at a time. He checked Maelstrom for any changes after each creature he killed with it, but the sword’s status remained unchanged at eleven percent.
“Eleven gelawings, six octide, three dire boars, a tewik, and an elgrinx,” Eythron recited as Jair stood breathing hard among the eviscerated monster remnants. He grabbed the tewik’s biggest chunk and started fileting it into thin slices. Three of the oversized rodent's six prehensile tails had been severed, leaving its distinctly blue flesh exposed. “Haven’t seen one of these in a while. Anything?”
Jair checked Maeltsrom’s percentage. “Still eleven.”
“Then we need something bigger.” Eythron wrapped the tewik in a chillcloth and tucked it away. He grinned evilly. “Ready to go after the star hydra?”
“No. I’d rather not spend another few years rebuilding my soul from the ground up.” Most pain Jair could ignore by now, but soul damage was something else entirely. There was no ignoring it, no reducing its impact. Soul pain bypassed the mind and body entirely.
“Then brobegs it is.”
“I wonder what Maelstrom would do to your soul.”
Eythron’s sword was between them in a blink. “You touch my soul, and we’re through.”
“I can go back in time after, it’ll be like it never happened.” Jair grinned. “It’s important experimental data.”
“Then go stab the vampire.”
Jair pondered this. “I don’t think I want Maelstrom’s soul to be vampiric.”
Eythron scoffed. “And the fact that it’s eating souls isn’t already vampiric enough for you?”
“We don’t know that’s what it’s doing. It’s just a theory.”
“Then prove it.” Eythron crossed to one twitching octide who’d been dismembered but not quite killed and stabbed it through the skull. “I know where to find a brobeg, and those things are definitely strong enough to have a soul worth eating.”
“Which raises another question. Does it matter which types of monster we kill to fill in the gaps?” He glanced down at the green line wrapped around Maelstrom’s hilt. “How much of the character of the sword is going to change?”
“Of course it matters. You can make a curtain with any number of fabrics, but it’ll hang differently depending on the specifics. It’ll still be a curtain.”
“I’m not sure I like the idea of making Maelstrom a haphazard quilt.”
“Do you know what you want?”
“I don’t know what the options are. And since it’s a soulbound weapon at this point, I can’t exactly go testing—”
“Of course you can. Stop being a coward. Go stab something.”
Jair waved Maelstrom to point at the scattered remnants of monsters. “That’s what I’ve been doing.”
“Not enough.”
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Having Eythron as a traveling companion was nothing like traveling with Qahrvirna. Both were fully capable of holding their own despite the dangers the Oriad posed, and both could protect him and allow him to fight to his limits without overstepping too badly. But both tended to get him injured for very different reasons.
Qahrvirna saw the whole thing as a game. Her life was so difficult to end, she tended to forget how fragile humans could be.
Eythron saw it as a chance to push Jair as far as he possibly could be pushed. Which was a part of why he liked the old madman, but it had a way of grating at times. Perhaps they were too alike, in the end.
In keeping with the expectation of chaos, they didn’t head straight back to Eythron’s hideout. Instead they spent four months on a whirlwind tour of the Oriad’s most dangerous monsters.
Eythron didn’t hesitate to dump Jair into life-threatening danger and stand back to watch.
Jair didn’t hesitate to lead—or chase—the monsters to wherever Eythron was watching from.
Before reaching their first brobeg, they had to go through vylix territory. Ambush felines, the vylix preferred to hunt alone, but Eythron marched them straight through the middle of their land as though determined to rile up every fury of them along the way.
Vylix were a strange mix of heavy plated hide in deep browns with glints of gold fur visible between as it moved. This particular local variant was known as spike-tail vylix, for reasons that were obvious the moment you saw one.
Wicked claw-like serrations ran all the way down its over-long tail, with spikes sticking up across its shoulders and legs and crowning its head like a declaration of violent supremacy. The whiplike speed and accuracy of its tail doubled with its serrations to tear through armor with ease.
Not the biggest predators of the Oriad, but one of the more deadly for a smaller creature traveling alone.
The first vylix they encountered, Jair actually spotted before Eythron. It was lurking in the thick foliage on a tree branch completely obscured from sight, but the serrations on its long trailing tail formed just enough of a uniform pattern against the bark that he spotted it at once.
His many years spent in the Oriad had trained his passive awareness to unprecedented levels, and the ability to reverse his demise meant he had a lot more personal experience with deadly monsters than anyone could possibly obtain without dying a hundred times over.
Jair opened the fight with an abrupt fling of Maelstrom in a spinning horizontal arc, using Lift to defy gravity and allow the weapon to spin upwards instead of dropping. It thunked into the trunk, severing the bottom half of the stalking vylix’s tail.
It jumped to its feet with a pained yowl, half-tail flicking as it hurled itself at its attackers.
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Jair recalled Maelstrom and held it out, point first, between him and the pouncing feline.
The vylix twisted its lower body, trying to slash at him with its tail. The severed appendage was too short to reach Jair before the rest of the monster’s body did.
The vylix’s chest slammed into Maelstrom with the full force of its jump. The sheer weight of the beast drove Jair backwards. Its claws dug into his armor, bending it with a shriek of protesting metal.
Jair threw it upwards with Lift. The strain of lifting something that heavy tore through his manabody, which he ignored.
“It’s hardly fair to the poor creatures,” Eythron commented, “Trapping them in the air like that.”
The vylix slashed and twisted helplessly, yowling in rage as its claw swipes failed to reach its enemy.
“If you’d rather fight it fairly, you’re welcome to take over.” Jair recalled Maelstrom and held it out to the old man.
“No, no, the weapon is yours. You must be the one to test.”
“Then I’ll be fighting it my way.” He stepped forward started slashing.
The vylix managed to score one shallow slice across Jair’s outer forearm as he closed the distance between them, but that was the last hit of its life.
Jair let the monster’s remains fall to the ground and checked Maelstrom’s inspect text. “No change, still eleven percent.”
“It was a young one. We’ll try again.”
“Yes, master.”
“I’m not your master yet, boy.”
“Of course, master.” Jair sliced a few handfuls of vylix spines from its tail and stuffed them in his bag. They’d keep well and he did owe Qahrvirna thanks for her help.
Eythron scowled and pointed east. “Go that way. I’ll be along.”
“On my way, master.” Jair set off at a steady jog, making no effort to conceal his passage. Half a minute later he sliced the next vylix out of the air as it jumped at him. Another minute after that, a third dropped on him from high enough that he didn’t see it until it was too close to avoid.
Not too close to save it from a rapid recall and follow up Lift. The creature quickly suffered the same fate as the first, though Jair’s armor was definitely looking notably damaged by now.
One of the pauldrons was bent inward to dig into his shoulder. Compared to the searing burn of his manabody after pushing into overdraw, the minor irritant barely registered.
This vylix was substantially bigger than the first two, and its higher perch and better avoidance meant it was probably a higher tier creature as well.
“Inspect.”
Maelstrom remained as it had been, both physically and internally.
Jair snagged another few handfuls of tail spines for his collection, then moved on.
He took out another six vylix of various size and strength, each a solo ambusher eager to chomp on a crunchy little mageblade. Unfortunately for them, Jair was the wrong kind of crunchy.
His manabody was getting a pretty extreme workout with all the Lift casts he was putting in. Since they were cutting straight through vylix territory, there wasn’t enough time between fights for him to properly recover.
Continuing at this pace would be good for his overall magical strength, but bad for any attempts to change his active spells. Protect was all but permanently seared in at this point, and Lift was getting closer by the hour.
He considered the question as he traveled from one ambush to the next. He had hundreds of spell imprints available to him, which five would be most valuable to his immediate goals?
He missed having Impose Weight to balance Lift, but Gravity’s Echo let him use Lift at a strength he couldn’t have if he swapped it out for something else. He wasn’t sure the added utility would be worth the change. Without the amplification offered by Gravity’s Echo, he’d be limited to lifting himself or similarly heavy things. He could probably manage two people at once if they weren’t overly large, but something as dense as a vylix would be out of the question.
Trapping monsters helplessly in the air was too valuable of a spell. Slowing them down could be equally valuable in the right circumstances, but there were only a few instances where it would be fully better. Against a large group, the power necessary to Impose Weight on them all was significantly less than what would be needed to Lift each of them.
But he wouldn’t be up against armies any time soon. Perhaps not ever. Without the need to rush for Maelstrom’s components or fight through the plains of Celsin to reach Mount Sanctum, did he even need to worry about mass tactics?
Another vylix jumped on him, and this one brought friends. Apparently he’d riled up enough of a fuss that they were coming out in full hunting furies now.
He held off three of them while dismembering the fourth, but the fifth and sixth got around behind him and made a dangerously coordinated attack. He stabbed one of them, but the other got a solid bite on his leg. Its teeth didn’t puncture his armor, but it gave it a solid grip on him.
Before he could finish with the previous attacker, the monster’s flexible serrated tail whipped up and around his throat and upper body, slicing through armor and clothing alike. He dropped everything to slash off the offending appendage, severing it from the vylix’s body before it could do more than deep cuts.
The tailless feline still had his leg in its grip. It dragged him off his feet and shook him, but if it hoped to disorient him it didn’t know who it was messing with.
He maintained the Lift on the first three while stabbing at the tailless one that held him. The fourth and fifth were dead or near to it, but the fight was far from over. The sounds of battle continued to attract the rest of the fury.
It was the beginning of the end. Another four vylix jumped into the fight, and Jair’s ability to keep up was overwhelmed.
“If you were planning to step in, now would be a good time!”
If Eythron was nearby, he gave no answer.
Jair stopped trying to protect himself. He dropped all his spells and simply dove into the chaos with his sword flashing in every direction.
Two of the new arrivals were significantly darker in coloring than their kindred, the protective plating on their backs nearly black and the occasional glimpses of gold fur so pale it was almost white.
They moved with caution and cunning that their fellows failed to exhibit, only slashing at Jair when he was occupied with one of the smaller ones. Their protective plating wasn’t enough to stop Maelstrom, but it did slow Jair down. He couldn’t simply slice through with impunity, had to get a good swing behind it or hit the same spot more than once to break through.
His armor was slashed to useless pieces, his body significantly more sliced up than he preferred. Without mangling his manabody he couldn’t do anything about the bleeding, but the goal here wasn’t to survive any longer.
He needed to kill one of those greater vylix. If anything here was going to be worth stabbing, it would be them. The smaller ones were no longer relevant.
Jair committed himself fully to the attack. He chased down the slower of the two greater vylix, but its speed was enough to keep it out of reach.
He couldn’t afford to drag things out. There were another four vylix and one greater vylix close on his heels. With an effort he’d not have taken if he thought he’d survive, he grabbed the greater vylix ahead of him and Lifted it clear above the treetops, Jair himself in close pursuit.
For a moment they hung there, two dark figures against the sky. The vylix slashed with its tail, trying to utilize the one weapon that could reach its pursuer. Jair caught the tail in his hand and yanked, pulling himself forward through the air. Since Lift only worked vertically, moving about in the air required some creativity.
That stunt nearly lost him his hand, the serrated tail breaking through the Protect and stabbing deep into his palm, but he dropped it and recalled Maelstrom before the vylix could act on the opening.
Jair’s arm burned, Gravity’s Echo strained to its fullest, Lift flaring bright, his manabody long run dry and running on pure overdraw. He couldn’t keep this up for long. Another few seconds and he’d run out of ambient mana in the region with how fast he was pulling it in and burning through it.
A few seconds was enough.
He grappled the spiky feline, twisted around and gripped it with both his legs, adjusting their relative positions with minor adjustments to Lift. His control was so practiced from years of using it in combat and out that he barely even thought about it.
The cat was twisting and slashing with its every appendage, but flying in the air was out of its comfort zone and Jair had the advantage.
He slashed the whipping tail as it tried to reach him, each time shortening it by another section as the vylix flailed angrily. The clawed forelegs were harder to remove, their protective plating slowing him down, but not by enough to save it.
By the time Jair’s ability to sustain Lift faltered and they began to fall, the vylix was reduced to twitching helplessly with Maelstrom through its skull. It didn’t die quickly, even declawed and missing its tail it clung desperately to life, hissing as it tried to twist around to bite its unwelcome rider.
They crashed through eleven different branches before finally crashing to the ground.
The rest of its fury had scattered, searching for the missing prey, but the yowls of their dying guardian brought them rushing back.
Jair recalled Maelstrom to his hand, leaving the dying vylix to its demise, and staggered upright to face the coming onslaught.
“I’m not going to—” he started, swaying unsteadily. The amount of blood he was losing combined with the extreme shock of extended overdraw left him unable to compensate. The manabody could partly mitigate damage to the lifebody, and vice versa, but when both were in tatters…
Jair wasn’t even aware of the moment it became too much, and simply collapsed mid-sentence.
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