Act 1, Chapter 3: Grounding experiences (Patreon)

I was about to activate the emergency fall-arrest system in my suit, which would inflate it and rapidly warm the air inside to slow my descent, when I felt Magnus’s Authority brush against mine. I nullified my natural defenses and allowed him to do as he pleased, accepting his will.

At once, my fall slowed dramatically, becoming little more than a featherlike drift. We hovered above the street, where the wreckage of battle and the bodies of both friend and foe had already wrought considerable destruction. What had once been, most likely, a broad thoroughfare for wheeled vehicles was now a smoking ruin of shattered concrete, twisted metal, and broken glass. Close by, one of our brothers lay sprawled across a crumpled metal plate atop a vehicle he had crashed into during his fall. Behind what appeared to be a steering apparatus, another person sat trapped inside, their life slipping away.

Some of the dying were ordinary people, unmistakably un-Spirited, caught in agony in this Goddess-forsaken place. The sight reminded me of my own long-lost family, trapped in the crossfire of warring mages. I pushed the memory aside. This was not the time to dwell on the past.

The moment my feet touched the ground, my sire stopped his power, landed himself, turned around, and came back to me, where his gaze lingered for a while.

“Be not bothered by the innocence lost, big brother. Such is the nature of the war we wage, that it comes and takes the souls of those who never asked for it. We must be decisive in our moves, not by the demands of the Domain, but by the virtues of our hearts.” He caught my shoulders and squeezed them while keeping his black-and-white eyes leveled with mine. I knew he believed what he was saying, but deep down my stomach twisted into a knot. “You may wonder where the virtue lies in that bloodshed, but ponder no more, my page. It comes with victory of the offense, for in attack you need only win once, but properly. On them,” he pointed at the negative tower in the distance, “lies the heavier responsibility. They need to win each and every time in their defense—”

“Or the attacks will continue,” I finished his thought, clenching my jaw. I hated that, but I saw the reason behind his words. If we became the victors swiftly, this fight would be the last those who survived us would have to endure. “I see it, my sire.”

An explosion from a nearby building shook us right after my last words left my mouth. The force pushed us toward the ground, throwing me away from his embrace and onto the pavement, while he remained still, accepting the energy that came with the shockwave in a brilliance of Illight.

I watched metal shatter away from the buildings on the left side of the street. Concrete rubble fell toward the ground along with the bodies of people unfortunate enough to have been caught in the destruction.

Sitting on my ass, I realized that this whole section of the city revolved as well, around some singular point deeper toward the center where the mage guild stood proud and tall.

“Exactly,” he said, sighing and extending his arm.

I grabbed it, squeezing around the elbow, while he caught mine and yanked me back onto my feet.

Only then did I notice a few pairs of eyes observing us from behind the glassy windows. Their skin carried a slight green tint, and their hair looked more like weeds than anything human.

An explosion of light appeared around the negative tower. Then another. Then a few more. The first salvo launched from orbit struck the shield raised around the building. Our cosmic navy had decided to join the party and started bombarding it with their own railguns, while atomic explosions dotted the sky.

“Weren't they supposed to be occupied elsewhere, big brother?”

I broke into a run, following his example as we moved closer to the side of the buildings that still stood to our right. Our sprint was interrupted only occasionally, when we had to jump over a crashed vehicle, debris, or a body.

“You mean their ships? They most likely are. The whispers of Intelligence are rarely slow. So, assuming they were fast enough, what our forces encountered up there, above the film of air, are merely the remains left behind in case something like this happened, my page.”

We ran across a relief effort—some people in civilian clothing trying to pull others from beneath fallen rubble. Around thirty people in total, along with heavy machinery in the form of mechanical arms mounted on wheeled vehicles. One of them noticed us, patted another man on the shoulder, and pointed in our direction.

Before they had time to properly respond, whether by flight or by fight, two Arachneo’Saps jumped from the roof of the building at the corner of the intersection where all of this was taking place.

Wielding their Vibruses in two of their leg-hands, they skittered forward, pushing, thrusting, and slashing with a coordination available only to their kind. In a matter of efficiently used seconds, they killed most of those people.

Two managed to escape, trying to gain distance by moving off to the side. One of the arachnids dealt with them, jumping off a machine, then off the rubble, and then run along the wall of a building, accelerating his own movements only to launch himself practically through those people. He cut them to pieces, taking a solid bite of one person's flesh with his mandibles before turning back toward his teammate.

In the meantime, the other skittered across the wreckage site, trying to dodge a machine's claw operated by a person inside some kind of armored cabin. Magnus leapt toward that metallic cage in one hell of a swoop and landed on it, sucking it dry of movement and bringing the machine to a halt. At the same time, he used the power he gained to tear the closed metal doors asunder and throw them aside.

The spider used that moment to push himself over my sire's legs and drag the human occupying that safe place out into the open. It was a woman. She screamed as if her lungs were on fire for the briefest of seconds before her skin covered itself in a thin mist of the arachnid's Soullight, and every movement within her body was stilled in an instant.

She too was discarded onto the ground—with her brain ceasing to function and her heart stopping. Knowing how potent our magic was when used against the un-Spirited, the Arachneo’Sap had probably stopped even the blood in her veins for good measure.

“I warn, ene—” The spider's speech was cut short as his body was impaled to the ground by a spear made of whirling, shifting metallic parts.

My head immediately tilted upward to see a green-skinned person in torn clothes, his exposed chest bloody and lacerated, moving toward us on an anti-grav platform. He already lacked one arm and held the stump with his remaining hand, and yet Soullight engulfed him in a protective coating and connected him to ten moving, rearranging mechanical parts circling around him like celestial bodies caught in orbit.

Two of those parts shifted into some kind of cannons—or rifles—with long barrels and immediately began tracking members of my chapter.

A rain of bullets screamed through the air as they tore in two separate lines, trying to get rid of both Magnus and the spider, who, if I wasn't mistaken, was called Seventieth Bridge Builder.

The arachnid skittered across the ground in a frantic rush, accelerating himself and stripping the bullets of their momentum. But such an effort proved too much for him, and his exoskeleton, struck again and again by metal, finally gave way and sprayed everything around him with yellow hemolymph.

In the same instance, Magnus grabbed both of his Vibruses and used them as an improvised shield to destroy the bullets that struck them while he ran toward the opposite side of the intersection. The maneuver forced the mage above to turn toward him, exposing his back to my potential retaliation.

I, however, honestly had no idea how to approach an opponent like that.

The Soulmarks I had access to were Redirection and Feeling, and I hadn't even begun to explore the latter yet—not that it would have helped me in that situation. What I could do was absorb kinetic energy and place it into another object, including myself or parts of my body, but only through touch, as I had not yet begun any aura-control training. And touching that man, hanging ten meters above the street, was entirely out of the question.

While I was considering my limited options coming into conclusion that redirecting my own energy into motion of objects that lay scattered about was the solution to follow, the fight continued. Magnus took cover behind a wrecked vehicle for a few heartbeats, only to launch it at the hovering mage the moment the man moved closer in search of a better firing position for his weapons.

The Mechanics mage's three orbiting contraptions collided with one another and rearranged themselves into an emitter that he positioned in front of himself. With a sweep of a laser beam, the quickly approaching improvised missile was cut in half and caught on either side by two other gizmos that extended mechanical hooks. They reeled the flying vehicle fragments toward themselves, leaving the mage in the same position but completely untouched by Magnus's attack and dropped them to continue their now changed fall pattern.

Having abandoned the previous plan, I was already sprinting toward that vehicle the moment it had been thrown into the air.

As the wreckage began falling off to one side, I barely passed beneath it, brushing it with my hand as it fell and stealing its energy. The vehicle hovered briefly in the air, illuminated by my illight, before dropping once more, robbed of what had made it move in the first place and reclaimed by the gravity that remembered its duty.

I had already transferred that stolen power into my legs and jumped high and fast, straight toward the bleeding mage in the air. Only during my flight did I notice that my sire had launched not only the vehicle, but himself at the opponent as well. In the commotion, he had managed to land on the man's platform, catching the back of his head with a massive hand and planting a vibrating Vibrus into his abdomen.

I passed behind the mage, using my own weapon to cut through his spinal cord before continuing my fall toward the other side of the street.

Another explosion rattled my bones before I had the chance to plant my feet, changing my trajectory and sending me sideways into a wall.

I hit the stubborn matter with my shoulder and rolled onto my side amidst a burst of pain, while the building that had been struck crumbled under the weight of the machine thrown into it. The remains of a twelve-meter battle mech embedded themselves into the rebar, steel, glass, and concrete, while the structure was quickly devoured by flames and smoke.

“Page?” Magnus's voice pulled me away from the mesmerizing sight of technology being destroyed as though it were a toy made of twigs. I craved wielding power like that, while another quieter part of my mind prayed for a life taken.

“Still alive, big brother. Still...” I coughed blood with a violent jerk of my head to the side as another explosion pushed me over the debris-littered ground. “...alive,” I whispered, keeping my hands pressed against my chest.

The shadow of a giant fell over me, obscuring my vision, before Magnus's ugly face appeared above mine. He dropped onto his ass beside me and placed a massive hand on my chest.

“Listen carefully, as my old man is calling me. I can hear his voice loud and clear now, my page. Time is short for me.”

“What?” I asked, pushing his arm away and slowly forcing myself into a sitting position. Only then did I realize that a large chunk of his torso was missing, cut away like a piece of meat. I should have been happy about it, but somehow, in that moment, I wasn't. “You are dying,” I stated the obvious, without any honorifics. There was no place for them when a person was no longer fit to fight.

“Yes.” He spat a mouthful of blood onto the ground. “Get the glory and triumph for me, my page.” I nodded in response, my eyes darting from his pain-ridden face to the wounds on his body. Part of his thigh was missing as well. “I can't move anymore. I'm slow already, but there is something you might use.” He lost consciousness mid-sentence, his head falling back against the wall. I caught him and slapped him across the cheek with an open palm. “Oh...” His eyes regained clarity as he focused on me. “I carry an artifact embedded in my torso. Cut it out. Use it. Farewe—”

My Vibrus plunged through the underside of his jaw and into his brain. His body twitched for a time, the final dance of a man who had commanded motion itself, now robbed of control over his own.

When he finally went still, I let him slide off the blade. I cut through his underarmor and found the thing he had spoken of. It was a metallic oblong—an egg-shaped object beneath a thin layer of skin.

I plunged the Vibrus farther from it and carved away a large chunk of flesh, throwing most of it aside. I did not want to risk damaging the artifact when I knew not its size. It was only as large as it had appeared beneath the skin—a finger-sized object that I grabbed and hid in my fist.

Then, holding the thing tightly, I focused briefly on my Augur stone, probing it with the Illight within myself.

What is it? I asked.

This is an Authority-based recall device. You can use it to bind one item at a time and recall it with a your Authority to the location of this device. Authority distribution: 77% strings, 18% memory, trace quantities of space, command and stabilization. I opened my fist and looked at the small bullet-like object. For someone on the level Magnus had been, this thing was borderline useless. But for me, it was exactly what I needed to make use of my limited control over movement.

Explosions continued in the distance as the ground fighting raged on and the space-to-ground bombardment entered full swing. Every few seconds, another hyper-accelerated metallic rod struck the city, folding buildings inward and sending waves of debris racing alongside the shockwaves released by the impacts.

I took this brief moment of reprieve, threw my Vibrus into the air, and caught it upside down by the handle. Keeping the artifact pressed against my palm with my two smallest fingers, I rolled up my battle garment underarmor around my ribs, gritted my teeth, and made an incision in my skin, creating a small pocket.

Heaving and exhaling through the pain, I slid the oblong into the opening, pushing it deep enough that it would not accidentally slip back out.

“Fuck,” I whispered, leaning my back against the remains of a wall behind me.

Cold metal pressed against my temple the same second.

Instinctively, I sucked away all the tension, movement, and kinetic energy from the person holding it there. It was only a small jolt of stolen power, but enough to stop the finger from pulling the trigger, and enough to redirect that energy into myself, letting me rebound from the wall, roll over my shoulder, and spring to my feet.

Only during the maneuver did I realize I was still holding a Vibrus. So I threw it at my would-be assailant. The blade struck him square in the chest. He looked down at it for the briefest heartbeat—mine more than his, as his heart had already been ruptured—then his body gave way. The gun slipped from his hand, and he collapsed.

Only then, in the haze of the suddenness of it all, did I realize it wasn't really a man. It was a boy. A teenager, with only the slightest green hue to his skin. He had wanted to end me there. So close to the head, a single bullet—even an ordinary lead one—would have killed even an archmage.

I walked over to him, turning my head to watch for anyone trying to sneak up on me, clutching my left side, where my ribs hurt like fuck of at least twofold magnitude. I spat blood and tasted iron as I licked my lips and ran my tongue over my teeth. The air here tasted salty, and it made even the smallest wounds sting without mercy.

Yet despite the physical toll the fight had taken on me, it was the boy I'd killed that made me stop. I moved his body into a sitting position, carefully setting his arms at his sides. Then I straightened his head, pressing his forehead with two fingers until his face was level with mine.

He had freckled skin, like I did on my left side. His cheeks were fuller than mine, his jaw broader. And yet I saw myself in him. I could have ended up just like him years ago, if not for my stubborn determination and Death's uncanny avoidance when her duties concerned me.

“I'm sorry, unknown brother,” I whispered, pressing my forehead against his. “There is no consolation in those words of mine, words you will never hear where your spirit has departed. Yet I say this prayer more for myself than for you. I am but a selfish creature, set upon a path by events not unlike this, bound by a promise to ghosts and memories. There was no malice in my reaping of you, only necessity. Killing engenders killing. I know this in my soul. I welcome the burden of conscience. I am ready for it. I will use it as the fuel that sets the conflagration ablaze. For your sacrifice, I thank you.”