The stick slipped past my attempts at magically blocking it, striking me in the cheek and knocking me back a step. I felt it coming in, but my attempts to conserve my energy meant that I hadn’t used enough force to redirect or stop it, so it only managed to lose around a tenth of its speed on the way through my shield. However, I now knew where my opponent was standing and how her body would be positioned, so I stepped in, grabbed her weapon arm, and flipped her over my shoulder, slamming her to the ground. Only then did I open my eyes to see Vaozey coughing, partially laughing, and trying to catch her breath.
“When you asked me to try to beat you with a stick while you had your eyes closed, I didn’t think you’d be able to fight back this well,” she grunted, getting back to her feet as I released my hold on her. An entire day had passed since the incident wherein she made a number of knife scars on her face, and she still seemed much more relaxed than before. Is the effect temporary? I wondered, Surely, it can’t be that easy for a human to change their baseline emotional disposition. “Again?” Vaozey asked.
“Again,” I confirmed, closing my eyes and raising my hands into a fighting position. I heard her approach from her footfalls but tried not to do too much prediction of her movements, as that wasn’t the point of the exercise. Still, I knew she would begin with a right-to-left horizontal swing for my face, as she always did, and I caught the stick in midair with magic before it could make an impact. “You need to vary your attacks more,” I advised, letting the stick go once I could feel that she was no longer pulling at it.
“If I used my mace-” she began.
“You would end up knocking me out the first time you landed a hit,” I finished. “A stick isn’t much different from a mace, just lighter and with a less purposeful shape. You can use the same general movements, it will be fine.”
“Yeah yeah,” Vaozey grumbled, stepping back and starting again. Since I knew she wasn’t going to attack horizontally, but she also had a preference for hitting the head, I arranged my constructs to help block the front of my face instead. I had found that, because they were technically just an idea in my mind, I could rapidly move them around at virtually no energy cost. “Moving” might not have even been the correct word: I could cycle through pre-arranged defensive setups in an instant, the only delay was the time it took to change what I was thinking.
Vaozey’s stick came for my forehead as predicted and I deflected it, ducking to the side and swinging a punch out for where I thought she was. She had insisted that I actually fight back during this test so she could also gain something more than “amusement” from the experience, but I opted not to use my full strength since it was wasteful. I made contact, likely with her ribs, and she swung for my head again, missing because I forced her attack upward and over my head. I could have thrown her, but instead I opted for a kick, which was slow enough that she managed to get out of the way.
“You know, I’ve never heard of a place where they train fighters in unarmed combat,” Vaozey said, then she swung for my left shoulder, making contact because I was expecting a thrust. I responded with a straight right punch, missing her, then a quick duck to avoid the counterattack. “It just seems like a waste of time when swords and maces exist.”
“There are plenty of uses for unarmed combat, even if healing magic makes it less effective than other types,” I responded, throwing out two jabs and a cross, hitting nothing but air, then blocking a thrust to my abdomen.
“Well, if you use force magic, it’s just as good,” Vaozey scoffed, and I caught something much heavier than I expected in the shield around my upper chest. Her fist, I assumed, and I shocked it to make her pull it back. “Can you not do that?” she hissed as I heard her stepping back.
“I can’t shock you through the stick,” I shrugged, closing the distance and throwing out a few more punches. One connected with her cheek, and though I heard her stumble, she didn’t fall. Instead, her footsteps became unreadable for a moment, then the stick came at me from the opposite side that she should have been holding it on. A spin, I realized as it slammed into my ear and likewise sent me off balance for a moment.
“That hurt?” Vaozey taunted.
“If you ever spun around like that in a real fight you’d be dead in a second,” I replied.
“Yeah, but my opponent is blind,” Vaozey retorted. “Which begs the question, how did you know I spun?”
“I can hear your footsteps, you are aware of that, right?” I asked.
“Just the footsteps were enough?” Vaozey asked back.
“Less talking, more fighting,” I replied.
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“What if it gets away from you?” Vaozey asked.
“It won’t,” I replied. “Since you aren’t as fast as me, just try to keep up. I won’t kill it, but I might need to break its neck to keep it immobilized.”
“You know they can shock you if you get near their horns, right?” Vaozey scoffed. “Not some little shock like what you did to my hand either, it’s like small bolts of lightning.”
“I can insulate myself,” I replied, and the deer raised its head, looking in our direction. I was surprised that the animal hadn’t become alert from our conversation before this point, but I supposed it was just used to hearing the sounds of humans speaking from living so close to a road. I locked eyes with the animal for just a moment, then we both sprung into action. Though its legs and build were much better for running at speed, magic could make up the difference, and the forest turned into a blur as I pursued it.
I couldn’t quite walk on walls or up vertical surfaces like the assassin in Kahvahrniydah could, but my control improvements allowed me to do a few things that I found too difficult before. At points in the pursuit, instead of running along the ground, I would jump into the air and then kick off of nearby trees, avoiding the underbrush entirely. Not being able to change direction quickly without touching another object was a problem with the technique, but the deer wasn’t very smart, so it was mostly moving in a straight line. The distance between us shortened from fifteen meters to ten, then five, and then finally I tackled it, wrapping my arms around its neck and forcing it to the ground.
The animal tried to gore me with its horns, the backward-facing protrusions being much better suited to the job of throwing off an attacker than an American deer’s antlers ever could be, but it was a relatively simple matter for me to just grab one of them and hold it still. Through my insulation magic, I felt rapid shocks trying to climb up my arm, but they failed to do much more than sting me. As a test, I shocked the deer back, but it didn’t seem to feel it at all. I suppose the structures around the horn base might be a form of natural insulation, I thought.
As the animal heaved out breaths under me, I heard Vaozey sprinting over to us and looked back at the direction she was coming from. I hadn’t realized how far the deer and I had traveled and how quickly, but it looked to be almost half a kilometer of distance. That would have made our land speed at least… sixty kilometers an hour? I calculated quickly. I wasn’t sure exactly how long the chase took, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute.
“Seyt,” Vaozey swore, huffing a few breaths. “I tried to keep up but, wow.” At the sound of her voice, the deer started to thrash again, and I yanked its head from side to side a few times painfully to keep it still.
“Now, put your hand on its head, right here,” I directed, briefly igniting a ball of light over the spot where the deer’s braincase was, using my elbow. Vaozey approached, looking strangely cautious, and put her hand where I had directed. She hadn’t been wearing gloves since the incident with her new facial scars and the deer seemed started with its appearance, if such an emotion was possible for an animal.
“I’m going to do it,” she announced.
“Then do it, before it realizes what’s about to happen,” I said. Vaozey gritted her teeth and concentrated, then a moment later the deer started to thrash around, kicking out wildly with its legs. Still, Vaozey kept her hand in place, and before long the animal stopped moving, oozing blood from its eye sockets.
“Gods,” Vaozey breathed. “It’s that easy,”
“It’s that easy,” I repeated, letting go of the corpse and standing up. Looking at the sky, I saw that it was late afternoon, so we still had a few hours of walking to do.
“Even for people?” Vaozey asked.
“Easier,” I replied. “They lose consciousness faster, assuming you were using as much energy as I do.” Vaozey, surprisingly, looked at her hand with a complex expression. “Is something wrong?” I asked.
“It’s just so… unfair,” Vaozey remarked. “If I had to fight that thing with a weapon, it could have at least had a chance, but a few seconds of magic and it’s dead. It makes even having a weapon seem stupid.”
“You wouldn’t have caught it,” I replied. “And besides, it’s not like opponents will just sit still and let you grab them to kill them. Healing magic can correct minor brain damage, and humans can stay conscious during minor brain damage, depending on the areas affected.”
“Yeah, but you caught it,” Vaozey replied. “And really, what’s the difference between you and me, in terms of power?”
“Not counting magic, I would say I’m one part in eight or ten stronger than you,” I replied, awkwardly converting the percentages to fractions.
“But that’s just my point,” Vaozey replied. “The biggest difference is magic. Honestly, with enough magic, I don’t think people would need swords or arrows at all. What would be the point?”
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Vaozey didn’t know how to smoke or preserve meat any more than I did, so when we butchered the deer that night we just cut off as much usable meat as possible, cooked it all, and wrapped the leftovers in two layers of leaves, with the outer layer coated in ant “repellent”. Vaozey’s mood had slumped after killing the deer, but her behavior wasn’t like it was during her insomnia. Instead of being angry, or troubled, she simply seemed distracted, quickly slipping into her own thoughts when she wasn’t doing something that required her full attention. I didn’t want to argue, but I was curious if her baseline emotional state was returning to where it was previously, so I decided to just subtly observe her. The next day, finally, she voiced what the source of her trouble was.
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“I don’t want to sound like I’m asking for too much from you,” Vaozey said as we swam through a small stream to wash off in the late morning. I expected her to follow the statement up with something, but instead, she just frowned.
“What?” I prompted.
“I need to learn force magic,” Vaozey said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and it’s the thing I need the most as a warrior. A soldier can get by on just muscles and tactics, but a warrior needs magic. I’ve been trying to make up for it with armor and weapons, but it’s not enough. I always thought it was impossible so it wasn’t worth thinking about, but it’s not impossible, is it?”
“I don’t know for certain,” I shrugged, stepping out of the stream to start drying off. “If I had to guess, I would say it’s very likely you could learn force magic, but external force magic in particular might be exceedingly difficult for you.”
“That’s not the kind I need anyway, not much,” Vaozey replied, walking out after me. “It’s the strength, the ability to move faster and hit harder. I can get by with muscle, but as you said, you’re only a bit stronger than me without magic. With magic it’s like the gap between a child and an adult. Most Rehvites, the civilian ones, aren’t more than twice as strong as I am with magic, but we’re not going to be fighting those. We’re going to be fighting people more like you, so I need to be able to keep up.”
“Koyl once told me that humans can sometimes use force magic by accident when under high stress,” I said. “I’ve experienced it myself, hitting something harder than I meant to because my magic interpreted my intent and acted automatically.”
“Yeah, but you can use it on purpose as well,” Vaozey huffed, squeezing out some water from her hair.
“The first time I ever provably used force magic, it was external and subconscious,” I replied. “I was about to be shot with a poisoned dart and all I could think of was the desire for a plate of armor to cover my chest. The dart was thrown away by magic before it hit me. I wasn’t even sure what happened at the time, but later on, it was obvious.”
“So there’s hope then,” Vaozey grunted in amusement.
“The visualizations for force magic can be exceedingly complex,” I said. “I’m not sure, even now, that mine are truly ‘correct’ in the sense that they reflect the reality of the process. However, using force magic internally is quite easy once you get used to it. I think the human mind is biased towards thinking about force magic in a way that facilitates internal use, which would explain why it can be used by accident and subconsciously.”
“You sound like a scholar, talking like that,” Vaozey remarked. “So anyway, do you have any ideas about how I might be able to use it?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “When we stop for the night, find something that’s just too heavy to lift, then try to lift it.”
“And if I can lift it, I used magic,” Vaozey grunted, showing a hint of amusement. “I’ve tried that sort of thing before, it didn’t really work.”
“There’s a difference now,” I reminded her.
“What?” Vaozey asked.
“You know it’s possible,” I said. “Magic is mental, if you don’t think it can work, it usually won’t, but if you know it can work…”
“Then it’s possible,” Vaozey finished.
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Later in the day, as we were eating some of the deer meat from the backpack, Vaozey stopped abruptly in the road, looking off into a group of trees. I was ahead of her, so it took me a few steps before I realized she wasn’t behind me and turn around. I tried to follow her gaze, but from where I was standing, whatever had caught her attention wasn’t visible through the trees.
“What the seyt is that,” she finally remarked, pointing through the trees. Walking back to where she was, I glanced in the direction, not seeing anything unusual at first. The interior of the forest was just a mess of green and brown like usual, but about twenty meters back there was something just barely visible through the trees. It looked almost like a pile of dung, too high to be made by any animal on its own, but upon closer inspection was actually a structure made of dirt.
“The brown thing, right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Vaozey replied. “Looks like a god took a shit or something, what is that?”
“Animal nest of some kind, probably,” I replied. “It would be best to ignore it.”
“What kind of animal makes a nest like that?” Vaozey asked. “This deer meat tastes foul, to be perfectly honest. I think we contaminated it with the repellent. If whatever lives there is edible, we should check it out.” I hadn’t thought the taste of the meat was overly bad, but I wasn’t exactly looking forward to going back to the hard jerky rations once we ran out, and we hadn’t managed to prepare very much of it.
“Fine, let’s go,” I replied. “Just stay behind me and try not to step on anything that will make a noise.”
“We’re in the forest,” Vaozey scoffed. “I’ll try not to step on any sticks, or whatever.”
“This isn’t really a forest, It’s not dense enough on average,” I replied. “Now, quiet.” We approached at a slow walking pace, with Vaozey managing to avoid making much noise, until I stopped ten meters away. It’s not just a nest, it’s a mound, I thought as I saw the telltale holes along the base and top of the structure. There aren’t any termites in his country as far as I know though, so it must be filled with…
“Ants,” I said quietly.
“What?” Vaozey hissed.
“It’s an ant nest,” I replied.
“But there aren’t any ants here,” Vaozey replied. It was true, we had been looking out for them and found none in the last few days, at least of the dangerous variety. Instead, the area seemed to have more centipedes and beetles than anything else. Even factoring in the repellent, we would have encountered at least a few ants if they were present in the area.
“Regardless, it’s an ant nest, most likely,” I said. “I’m surprised, usually they prefer to live underground.”
“We should burn it,” Vaozey suggested.
“I think it might be dead,” I realized, standing up straight and speaking a bit louder. “There are some husks along the outside.”
“More reason to burn it,” Vaozey replied.
“Why?” I asked.
“Those things might as well be Rehvite soldiers,” Vaozey growled. “They don’t deserve a grave site.”
“Okay, firstly, that’s an absurd reason to waste time burning something,” I countered. “Secondly, we have no idea if these ants were trained or not. This nest is in the middle of nowhere, why would the Rehvites bother with it?”
“You’ve mentioned training a bunch of times, but what proof do you have that they’re not just evil?” Vaozey asked back. “Even their book says the ants are their god’s favorite animal, how do you know they aren’t Rehvites of their own accord?”
“Because they’re insects,” I replied, raising an eyebrow. “They’re not smart enough to have a religion.”
“But they’re smart enough to be trained to track and kill people,” Vaozey scoffed.
“Despite what you may think, that task requires significantly less intelligence than belief in a god,” I replied, picking up a rock. With a light toss, I used it to punch a hole through the outside of the nest, then watched for any signs of activity. “Definitely dead,” I added.
“What if they had attacked us?” Vaozey snapped.
“Ants aren’t that fast,” I replied. “In an open field, we would be able to outrun them easily. You can stay here, but I want to take a closer look.”
“Why?” Vaozey asked.
“Might be some clue as to how to kill them, or manipulate them,” I replied, walking towards the nest. Begrudgingly, Vaozey followed along, but she stopped a meter or two short when I approached the mound to make contact with it. The entire structure was roughly hemispherical with a radius of three meters, making it quite large for any sort of insect hive. As I widened the hole made by the rock I tossed, I saw the telltale signs of ant architecture: flat chambers with now-petrified food and networks of tiny tunnels connecting them. No workers though, I thought curiously, It’s like the whole nest is empty.
As I dug through the mound, being observed by a disgusted-looking Vaozey, one thing didn’t change: There were almost no workers inside the nest at all. Occasionally I would come across a head, or a thorax, or a few legs, but nothing else. It was only once I got to the center of the nest that I found the first complete ant corpse since I started digging. The queen ant, near-perfectly mummified, sat in the middle of a birthing chamber. The squirrel-sized insect husk was curled up over itself, surrounded by countless pieces of other ants.
“Disgusting,” Vaozey remarked as she looked over my shoulder. Despite her reluctance to admit it, she was also clearly curious. “That’s the one that shits out all the other ants, right?”
“The queen, yes,” I replied. “It’s surprising that it’s so large.”
“Aren’t they usually large?” Vaozey asked.
“Yes, but this one has…” I began, running some quick calculations in my head. “Fifty times the internal volume of the worker females, at least. It’s extremely strange.”
“Wait, the other ones are females?” Vaozey asked. “How do you know?”
“Actually, I don’t,” I replied. “It’s possible they aren’t, but usually most worker ants are female, they’re just sterile so they can’t produce young.” Carefully, using force magic, I floated the queen ant’s corpse out of the nest and brought it out into the daylight, making sure not to crack it. I wasn’t sure how long it had been dead, but if the other ants were any indication, anything more than a light touch would shatter its exoskeleton like glass.
“What now?” Vaozey asked, watching as I rotated the ant above my hand to examine it.
“Autopsy, anatomical analysis,” I replied, noting the strangeness of its features. Besides its size, the queen ant didn’t appear to have a mouth large enough to consume food that would be able to sustain it. Its jaws and throat were one-quarter as large, proportionally, as the other ants’. Additionally, it had a number of strange nodules on its head around the antennae, which I initially took to be tumors or damage before realizing they were bilaterally symmetrical.
“Having fun?” Vaozey asked, and I realized I had been staring at the creature for ten minutes.
“I wish I had an X-ray machine,” I replied.
“I won’t even seytoydh ask what that is,” Vaozey sighed to herself.
“It would let me see inside it,” I replied, answering her unasked question.
“Ah yes, another impossible machine from your mysterious homeland,” Vaozey replied sarcastically. “Why not just cut it open if you want to see its insides?”
“Any touch would break it,” I replied. “I would need a blade much sharper than I have.”
“Can’t you use magic?” Vaozey asked.
“No, it doesn’t-” I started, but then I paused as a thought occurred to me. But why can’t it? I wondered. I had tried to cut things with force magic before in my spare time, but the best I could usually manage was just ripping them in half. Cutting doesn't just produce force in two directions, it’s more like three or even four forces at once, I thought, I probably couldn’t have managed that in Kahvahrniydah, but now, maybe I can.
The cutting construct I made was complex, and I was sure it wouldn’t be particularly efficient. One volume would produce pressure on the object along a line, two more would rotate the edges of the first volume’s contact line away from each other, then two more would pull up and down to shear along that same line. When I tried it on my hand, it felt like having something sharp pressed into it, but it didn’t break the skin. Not wanting to risk the head, I moved it over onto the queen ant’s thorax, then slowly started to add energy.
“It actually works,” I remarked. There was no way I would be able to weaponize the structure without draining myself in its current form, but it did manage to make a perfectly straight cut along the exoskeleton without causing extra damage.
“Told you,” Vaozey replied, as though she had any idea I would succeed. Responding with a snort, I moved the force magic cutter over the ant’s head, then slowly cut it in half, separating the two pieces from each other as they came apart.
“Wow,” I said, vocalizing my shock at the inside of the queen’s head. Unlike a typical insect, the queen’s braincase was extremely large and bulbous. The flesh had long since rotted away, but simply from the size and shape of its container, I could tell that the organ was massive and centralized. Keeping the two halves of the head near my wrist, I began dissecting the rest of the queen, looking for the other organs and finding them similarly rotted away, to my disappointment. “This is just odd,” I said.
“What?” Vaozey asked.
“It had a centralized brain,” I replied. “Normally, insects have multiple brain-like organs throughout their bodies, so they don’t have a ‘brain’ this large. However, this queen ant’s brain is about the size of a rat’s. It’s very unlike what I would have expected.”
“So it’s as smart as a rat?” Vaozey asked.
“No,” I replied. “Insect brains aren’t structured like rat brains. This queen was very smart for an ant, but it was still an ant. A rat would be far smarter, even with a similarly-sized brain.” As I looked through the interior of the queen’s head again, I noticed some small tubes in the frontal part that appeared to line up with the nodules on its exterior. “Some kind of sensory organs?” I wondered aloud, muttering. Picking up one of the workers’ heads nearby, I noticed that it also had two nodules, one just below each antenna.
“We’ve been here for an hour,” Vaozey remarked. “We should probably get going.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, putting down most of the queen’s corpse. “I’ll take a better look at this as we walk.”
“It’s that interesting?” Vaozey asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“I’ll take your word for it,” she muttered, turning and walking back to the road.