Ranvir emerged in a burst of frozen feathers and ice-damaged cloth, threads ripping into dust by the mere breeze. Steam rolled off him, despite the winter chill in the air. Panting and gasping, he descended to the ground, the air boiling around him as if he’d just descended into a warm bath.
Saleema appeared moments later in the sky above him and he shrunk back, minimizing his presence. Her tether-sense flooded the plain, a blanket across the landscape from horizon to horizon. Though he was plainly visible on the ground, his clothes and wings standing out against the ivory snow, she didn’t see him.
She too carried marks of their brush with the ice fields. Frostbite blackened one arm and her eyes had turned red and filmy. A few scant moments within the glacier’s true embrace had done more damage to her body and spirit than he could’ve possibly accounted.
Maybe I shouldn’t have attempted that without testing it first, he thought to himself, closing his eyes. He had a few moments to rest, until she fixed her sight or tether-sense, whichever came first. What now? He wondered. Without the strength to kill or destroy her spirit, he had to endure her. Which was good, since he was good at persisting. Except she was better. His greatest practice was the early years with Frija, when she was a babe, and he had to work and take care of her at the same time.
Somehow, he longed for those days at this moment. They’d been poor. He’d been struggling to make things go around, but eventually he caught ground and fixed whatever the issue was. Things had been simple. Make money, buy food, be there with Frija. Now, he was fighting a woman who, for all intents and purposes, was a goddess. A person who’d single-handedly brought the Ankirian empire down.
Maudlin fool. This is not a time for reminiscing, it is a time for solutions. Refocusing, he drew within himself. There was a stone within, one he’d turned to many times over the years. A whetstone with which he’d turned the rough-edges of his spirit to an obsidian point. He would wield it once more.
Dragging Saleema towards the front lines was liable to get soldiers killed and even if he could get the flesh-torn to attack her, they’d fight him as well. It was a solution too messy and dirty to consider. If they got involved, things would get too chaotic to calculate.
Keeping her away from the desert also became a priority. She might not wield her energy lines against the sun-blights, but the risk was simply too high. Concentrating that much power would obliterate him immediately.
He opened his eyes, focusing his efforts on recovering as much as possible, and watched Saleema. Five minutes later, her eyes cleared, and she saw him. Their fight continued, now pushing southward, gaining distance from the glaciers and ice-fields. Neither party wanted to fight there again.
The danger seemed to have honed her further, bringing her mind to full awareness. A deathly sharpness settling into her workings. Her spirit snapped with agile lethality, and for the first time, he got a sense of what she should have been capable of. Saleema was not a juggernaut, but alacrity embodied.
She’d become whole enough to join spiritual attacks in their combat, making her vulnerable to his own attacks, except he could not touch her. Ranvir’s abilities were not even to hers. They were not even to keep up with her. Defending himself was a strain, pushing him ever backwards.
Generated space pockmarked the sky in a driving trail southward. Ranvir stretched beyond his ability just to stay alive. His spirit trembled as he adapted his Abilities and techniques to combat her ever present aggression. Down across the country she drove him, soon crossing over the remnants of the Tage estates where the school used to be.
She struck with rocks pelting him at speeds that made the air crack, punches that struck hardened space with a clap of thunder. And not once did she draw her sword. Ranvir’s storm mana had mostly recovered, but now he dipped into its reserves once more to stay ahead. The fraction of a fraction, he needed to turn her attacks from lethal to near-misses.
But even as the stresses climbed and her fury heightened, his mind grew distant. Turning inward, his thoughts diminished, lowering the interval between need and action. Space, sand, and storm twisted around him, slashing out.
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Saleema threw three rocks at him, shattering the air. Ranvir slipped around and pushed them to the side, registering the pebble she dropped below them. The stone hit an energy line that directing it upward at him and into a compression field.
Mid-dodge, Ranvir was struck by the fourth attack from an unsuspecting angle. The impact taking him in the side, straining his defenses, allowing the third stone to strike his shoulder.
He fell away, using storm mana to push out her Discipline. His shoulder stained the already ruined coat dark around the fresh injury. Judging from the chill against his side, her pebble, smaller and therefore weaker than the others, had also torn a hole in his jacket. A sharp pain from his shoulder accompanied the dull throbbing in his side.
Gasping for breath, Ranvir stared narrow-eyed at Saleema as she slowly approached. He sensed no spaces around her and she’d run out of stones for the moment. Her approach was deliberate, each meter crossed intentional in pace and speed.
Ranvir hesitated, then dropped Bastion focusing all his sand mana into Sandstorm Rage, empowering his physical abilities. The slow churn of his defensive Ability thinned into a weak pattern that barely obscured his form, yet sped into a rage that whipped his ragged clothes and ground fabric into mulched thread.
Saleema compressed space and rushed him. They exchanged attacks in a rapid, likely lethal exchange, at least for him. Rage empowered his defense, but not nearly as much as Bastion. Under the weight of the whetstone, Ranvir slipped attacks, pushed aside others, and barely stayed on a successful defensive.
Despite the adrenaline flooding his body, his heart seemed to hammer at the slow beat of a ritual drum. Thump. Attack, dodge, deflect. Thump. Strike, strike, strike. Thump. Retreat, graze, catch. Thump.
Ranvir clinched her arm against his side, too near for her to compress space and generate any meaningful speed. Saleema was likely a skilled hand-to-hand fighter in her time. Compared to Ranvir, she would likely outshine him easily. Except, her training was nearly a thousand years outdated. Her fresh twist was part of common training.
Still, she was unperturbed, rearing back a fist and twisting space. Before Ranvir’s eyes, it grew, filling his view until it swallowed all he could see. More than a meter narrowed to less than a pinprick.
Ranvir jabbed.
Barely a punch, little more than a clenched fist pushing into the compressed space. His shoulder wrenched. Air ripped and Ranvir tumbled through the skies. He was no longer holding Saleema’s arm. His shoulder ached and his knuckles felt like they’d been rearranged poorly. Yet it didn’t hurt as much as he’d feared.
Suddenly, his heart caught up to the situation, going from a relaxed to manic in a split second. Blood rushing in his ears, he looked down at the bits of bone struck in his hand. There was hair as well.
A spirit surged below, burning Immortality into the air, and Ranvir knew it would stain the environment forever. Saleema’s body, most of her head missing and her neck wrenched half off, lay in the canopy of a tree staining, snow-covered bare limbs, red.
Compressed space was not a one-way road.
It should take her a while to recover from that. Sand swirled around him as he unleashed Sand Barrage. He kept the Draw restrained, lowering the output significantly, but ensuring he could maintain it for hours without tiring. Neither Dune Blow nor Barrage could stop her from recovering, but this way he could postpone it as long as possible.
Amidst the sandstorm raised by the impact of his Ability, Ranvir scanned the environment absentmindedly. The chill had diminished to a cold that barely held below freezing. They’d descended farther into the country than he’d realized. Where is she pushing us? He wondered.
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Pashar crouched with the rest of the group, hiding behind a hill as sand boiled high on the horizon. Saleema’s power roared like a bonfire, raging to heights that sent shivers down her spine. Distantly, she sensed High-Masters — who’d been watching the fighting — retreat, yet the First Daughter appeared to be doing nothing. It was Ranvir who was on the attack. Sand forming into malformed spears, blasting into the ground, their impact sending new sand up to get caught and reused.
“What do we do now?” one student wondered. “Go around them? How far until we reach the capital?”
Pashar sighed and exchanged a look with Kasos, who crouched near her. “We should’ve prioritized traversal rather than spiritual basics,” she said in Fiyan. Kasos didn’t deign that with a reply, instead focusing on the distance. Unfortunately, that brought her attention back to the fight as well. “I don’t like how his spirit feels.” She admitted. It was… stretched, already straining at its limits, like canvas pulled tight.
Kasos narrowed his eyes, then looked back down at their group. “Can he refashion what he is into something strong enough to win? Can he do it fast enough?” he climbed down the hill and joined the rest of the group.
Pashar shook her head and followed him down, passing by one of the few members who remembered to stand guard. Morphos, the old soldier, unsurprisingly. “Everybody, we’re going around, if move at double time, we’ll be at the city by nightfall.”