Act 1, Chapter 2: Freefall (Patreon)

Dozens of our ships were already on the ground, about twice as many still in the air, and half of those already in shambles, their Magnights either dead or falling through the wind to meet the ground on their own terms.

Above us, the Breakdam-vessels were just a dot in the far sky, and below, the mechanized ground was still a target minutes away in an unaided fall.

The city did not take kindly to our trespassing into this realm, and the swarm of machines was on its way to kill those the railguns had failed to cull.

We were not defenseless. Even as gravity tried to claim us, we were all mages, and through our shared Authority we each commanded movement itself. In our group, Bronco, his brother and Thif were of the highest station, so when the first drones reached my arachnid teammate, I was in for a visual treat of destruction.

The shots came first. Smaller rods were ejected with magnetic force toward the spider, meant to destroy his armor and expose him. The air around him looked like a mirage cast upon the horizon, shimmering with a vibration that was already active. Anything that hit him would do so with greatly diminished—or outright nullified—force.

If they hit him at all.

As those greatly accelerated projectiles came close enough to enter his aura, each shone briefly with Soullight illumination and almost instantly lost all the momentum it carried. It was as if they had struck an invisible wall, stopped, and begun falling toward the machines that had fired them.

But Thif would not be satisfied with stopping. He thrived in the opposite—the movement.

Having stolen the speed, he launched himself at the incoming force, landing on the first of the drones. They looked like quadcopters armed with four topside and four underside telescoping tentacles, and a centrally mounted railgun.

The moment his eight armored legs struck the machine, thrice his own size, its tentacles were wrenched to their maximum extension in opposite directions, as though invisible hands had seized each of them and pulled. Then the entire thing broke apart, pieces flung away by the force of movement itself, and he leapt toward the next one.

It tried to catch him, but he rolled through the air, avoiding the tentacles, then extended one of his legs toward them, throwing the machine into a circular, uncontrolled spin in a burst of silvery-blue Soullight that engulfed it. Using it as a springboard, he jumped toward another drone, only to quickly find himself surrounded by many, when the one he touched fell toward the ground.

Too many to deal with in melee range.

Instead, he caught them all within his aura, reaching for the connections hidden within movement and binding them together. In this way, he created pairs of machines dependent on one another for the direction they traveled. When one extended a tentacle, the other had to do the same. When one banked low, the other followed.

Their programming clearly had not accounted for such co-dependency, because within seconds of this imposed kinetic chain, they began crashing into one another.

In the meantime, Bronco, in his armor painted to look as though it were eternally smudged with both the red blood of humans and the pale yellowish hemolymph of Arachneo’Saps, fought in a different manner. He was more of a brute in his approach to Kinetism.

He started by swapping his own momentum with that of one of the machines, sending it downward with the force of gravity in a movement so sudden it broke apart under its own inertia. By doing so, he halted his own descent and actually moved higher.

From that vantage point, he found the closest target, which happened to be firing at him. The rod that was supposed to leave the barrel, sped up by magnetic coils, was stripped bare of its force, and the machine responded by trying to latch onto Bronco’s armor with its appendages. Instead, with his strength increased by the force he had stolen, he grabbed its tentacles in massive armored hands and pulled hard enough to tear them off.

The motion, sent the machine flying toward him, crashing against the fist he extended. All of that happened before he took a nosedive toward another machine in the distance below.

Fights like this happened all around me. Some mages used their Authority itself like those two, saving their weapons for other occasions. Others fired their grav-rifles, turning the paths of their shots into brief, localized lines of gravitational pull that made the machines fold onto themselves in implosion.

I was nowhere near the level of my team, my small and big brothers-in-arms. My Authority over movement lagged behind theirs by years of training, but I wasn't defenseless anymore, and I wasn't a coward either. No more.

I fell toward the group of ten machines.

Nine. One was just sniped by a well-placed discharge of a gravity line, its metallic carapace folding inward and, in doing so, triggering a small explosion that took another one with it.

Eight, then. Enough for some damn battle glory to be earned.

I turned off the halting plates, adjusted my position to fall feet-first into the swarm, and waited, counting seconds. By the third, I saw the mounted cannons rotate to aim at me. I responded in kind by pointing my rifle and shooting just close enough between two of the drones to force them toward each other. When they hit one another, their rotors were damaged, and they danced through the air briefly like a pair of falling leaves.

“With speed!” I wished them through my armor, watching them fall, right as I hit the next one with my heavy boots.

Landing on it, I reached through our connection and, with a touch, stole whatever kinetic energy it carried. I turned, took a step, and jumped off its carapace toward the closest drone, mounting the rifle to a holster on my thigh.

I felt lightweight during the brief leap, even though, with the armor, I weighed close to three hundred kilos.

Five more, I counted in my head as a machine extended its tentacles toward me. It burst into a fuckton and one fuck pieces as Bronco dove through it at full speed before I could even form a mental plan for dismantling it.

“This one was mine, big brother,” I unmuted myself and said to Bronco.

“To that,” he replied, then heaved while performing a maneuver that would have splashed a normal human with twenty gees of force. “I say, my big brother, get fast or get lost!” I did not dignify his boasting with an answer and instead grabbed my Vibrus.

The gem embedded in its guard accepted the infusion of my SoulAu, and the blade shimmered like a mirage, seemingly out of sync with the real world and yet vibrating with the very melody that made it. When the next machine reached for me, trying to grab me, I slashed through the myriad of appendages, cutting them cleanly as if I had met no resistance at all.

Someone else finished what I had started by yanking the machine away from me and into another drone, with a flicker of their own will sent through an aura.

When I landed on yet another one—the last of my cluster, as the rest had inconveniently not been left to my own hands but promptly dealt with—I thrust my sword downward into its rotor and jumped off immediately after.

“I inform with urgency, beware the mages now.”

As I fell through the last remains of the swarm, I was quickly made aware of what Thif had meant. The opposing mages, seeing that their machines were not enough to stop all of us, took it upon themselves to deal with the men falling like rain toward them. Dozens of them launched into the air, clad in armor similar to ours and standing on platforms built with antigravitational properties.

“I suggest, who can, this is the time, to drop out of the armor. I ponder, unfortunate but necessary.”

Thif's armor released a puff of steam through its seams before opening at the front. In his case, it looked as though he were molting an additional layer of protection. His small arachnoid body jumped free of the deadweight, spinning through the air with all eight legs spread wide for a second before he pulled them together beneath himself and dove like a bullet toward the opposing mages.

His black carapace, marked with teal stripes, glistened in the green light of the suns of this planet as he covered himself in a thin film of Soullight.

“I loved you, baby,” Bronco said through the comms—not to us, but to his own Magnight’clad.

As it opened at the front with a set of folding plates, he turned around, kissed his own palm, and gently pressed it against that piece of technology before sending it toward ground at bullet speed.

We could not fight mages whose Authority lay over mechanical objects while wearing those suits. It would be like fighting in self-made tombs. Yet we needed them in the unfortunate case that a Realm Reave placed us so deep in the space around a planet that the destruction of our ships would leave us to fight in the vacuum of that abyss. In those circumstances, it would have been better to be able to breathe and move at all, even if trapped inside a ticking bomb.

Fortunately for us, that did not happen.

So I took a deep breath, selected dismounting, and shed that additional layer of mechanical muscle and armor. It opened to biting cold air that pinched at my skin and to the howling of the wind.

As I jumped off the platform of my boots toward the ground, I smelled burning metal in the air, the scent of blood and intestines freed from their bodies, and something arid that I could not place. I heard shouting, explosions, whirring machinery, and the distant cackling of strange flying creatures desperately trying to gain distance from everything happening here.

A thin line of blood ran down my forehead too, something I had not noticed until the air, which felt as if it were laced with salt, brushed against it and made it sting. I must have hit my forehead against the inside of the helmet at some point. Something I had not thought possible before.

I wore a typical battle garment, tight yet breathable. It was light blue, colored like the sky I was falling from and laced with metamaterials that made it more durable and able to warm me when it was cold or cool me when it grew hot.

Smaller versions of Vibruses, made for a typical human hand rather than an armored one, lay waiting in the scabbards sewn into the shin area of my legs, one on either side. My only weapons beyond my body and my Authority.

“Brother!” a voice shouted through the noise of the fall to my right, as another Magnight, Magnus kin Tiller, adjusted his position to match my falling speed. “Be my shadow, Page. I shall get us through!”

His brown skin with white stripes glistened in the sunlight, along with his almost entirely clean-shaven head. Only the ponytail at the back of his head wavered in the wind. He was a big man, around 210 centimeters in height, dwarfed within our chapter only by his brother, Bronco.

The blow that had fractured his skull years ago had healed, but it had left him with a deformed face, his left eye misaligned and sitting lower than it should have been. He was the Magnight I had trained under.

“Leave some glory for me to earn, fast sire!” I shouted back to him, turning my face away and toward the approaching enemies.

Somewhere farther toward the negative tower, part of the city answered the calls of the mechanical mages and rose in a storm of moving cogs and mechanical parts. Another section rearranged itself to form a giant snake-like creature that attacked our forces.

I couldn't wait to wield power on that level, to shape the universe to my whims.

“There is no leaving, Eun-woo! If something is to be taken, it has to be earned!” He called me by name and did not address me with a proper honorific, which meant my request had disappointed him.

He turned away from me, briefly illuminated himself with Soullight, and increased the speed of his descent to move ahead of me toward the mages. Somehow every time him and his brother coated themselves with the illight it gathered at those natural white colorations of their skin, giving them even more intimidating looks.

I caught a glimpse of a few of the small brothers of our chapter already fighting the foreign mages, tangled among their armor with all eight legs skittering across metal. They punched them as they gathered their energy, or forced them to move in uncontrollable ways when they won their contests of will. The opposing mages, meanwhile, turned their armor into something akin to liquid machinery that flowed around them, attacking my arachnid teammates.

The metal showered over them, puncturing their exoskeletons wherever their Soullight coating or agility was not enough to stop it—if they deployed the coating at all. Some of them, just like me, did not possess that ability yet.

And among those fighting, I noticed Thif too. He was easy to spot, not only because of his teal coloring, but because of how well he dealt with the opposition.

I watched him jump from one mechanical whirling blade to another, halting them the moment his skin made a contact, then run along a railing that changed mid-flight into a nailed board. He used it as a springboard to get close to his opponent, while simultaneously sending the same board hurtling at high speed toward another mage. All the while, he left strands of silk connected to the various elements he frog-jumped over.

The mechanical mage quickly created a metallic shield of overlapping plates in front of itself. The moment the arachnid touched it, parts of the shield launched outward in every direction, each trailing a strand of silk glistening in the sunlight. And each piece was aimed at a different mage fighting nearby.

He skittered across the shield as it morphed into something resembling a chainsaw, but by then he had already leapt onto the mage’s shoulders. Two of his hands thrust his already-vibrating blades into the man—one through the neck, the other through a shoulder—while another pair clamped around the armored head. He squeezed until the helmet caved inward and the skull within burst like overripe fruit.

Then he pulled taut the strands he had left behind and sent Soullight racing along them, commanding the attached elements to move according to his will far beyond the reach of his aura. Throughout it all, he simultaneously disabled the vibration fields of his enemy’s armor through his power over movement alone.

After dislodging the Vibruses, he launched himself toward someone else, seemingly unconcerned by the battle raging around him.

“Amazing,” I whispered, watching his prowess.

Then five discs, stacked one above another, each revolving around a different axis, shot past me at tremendous speed. I dodged by instinct alone, turning my body just enough to get out of their path at the very last second.

The mage that had sent them was rising rapidly toward us on an anti-grav disc, his arms directing the various mechanical parts that flew around him. Magnus sped up to intercept, sucking away the momentum from all the revolving elements to supplement his punch with additional force. But as he swung, a large chunk of the enemy mage's armor unlatched and turned into a shield in front of the man, who stood there with only his legs covered, wearing some kind of long greased robe and overalls.

The fragments he controlled still vibrated, and Magnus's attack bounced off. He shook his hand, briefly catching it with the other. His shout of pain sounded like a banshee's shriek, but he rolled around the mage in the air and continued the fall, latching onto the other man's movements and somehow pushing through his spiritual defenses. He switched their momentums, sending the mage plummeting downward while launching himself upward once more.

While they were tangled in that dance, I pulled my arms close to my body and dove toward the man. At the last possible moment, I unlatched my Vibruses, activating them with my SoulAu—it flowed like colorful strands of light into the crystals as it left my skin—and cut straight through the mage's exposed back, just in time to stop him from entombing Magnus in pieces of his own armor.

And thus another life ended beneath my hand.

For a fleeting moment I remained still, watching the last traces of motion abandon the body before offering the only prayer I had ever found worthy of speaking. It was not directed toward a goddess whose favor I neither sought nor trusted, nor toward some distant spirit deafened by the countless pleas of countless dying souls. It was offered to my own.

Of every witness to my deeds, it alone was certain to remain until the very end. So I entrusted it with another burden. Another face and another life extinguished because I had chosen that it should be.

I wondered, not for the first time, how much weight a soul could bear before it began to bend beneath its own memories.

Perhaps I was a hypocrite.

I despised those mages who extinguished lives with all the thought one gave to swatting insects from the air, condemning them for the effortless cruelty that accompanied power exercised without reflection, and yet here I stood upon the same road, my own hands no cleaner than theirs for all the noble reasoning I wrapped around what they had done.

The difference, if one truly existed, lay not in the blood itself. Blood cared little for intentions. It lay in choice.

Every death I dealt was one I accepted before my own spirit, one whose weight I claimed without seeking absolution from gods, commanders, or causes greater than myself. If I ever reached the day when killing became effortless, when another extinguished life ceased to trouble the quiet hours of my mind, then I prayed—not to the heavens, but to the man I still hoped to remain—that someone would end mine before I wandered any farther down that path.

I glanced around wrestling with those thoughts, looking at the other fights still raging in the air, but it seemed that, for now, we were clear and only moments away from hitting the streets below.

The city rose beneath us like a giant mirror, reflecting all the chaos happening above: the smoke, the bloody fights, and the lightshow of magic. Farther away still, a battle raged in orbit, where a nuclear explosion sent God's wind through the upper reaches of the atmosphere, vaporizing the clouds.

Lights flickered everywhere while I tasted blood in my mouth—my own, for now.