Volume 1, Chapter 27: Let There Be a Fire (Patreon)

There were two orcs and two goblins on the tower, if I understood the distinction between the two races correctly. The orcs seemed slightly shorter than me, and both were currently drawing long, fairly heavy bows. Their muscles strained close to their limits, and their biceps were at least three times the size of mine.

They leaned over the edge of the tower opposite me and released their bowstrings, sending arrows flying.

One after another, the arrows shot forward under the force of the taut strings, because the burly humanoids needed only seconds to draw their bows and send them down. They also grabbed several arrows at a time, which cleared up my doubts about how just two archers on this tower, and apparently three on the neighboring one, had managed to literally rain arrows down on us earlier.

The smaller creatures resembled the larger ones in their general appearance, including their builds, skin color, and proportions. They handed the orcs tied bundles of missiles from a large pile scattered  across the top of the tower, while their bigger cousins reached for them without even looking at their smaller companions and continued shooting.

The bindings came apart immediately after the arrows were fired from the massive bows, and from there they continued flying as individual projectiles clustered together in a larger group.

While the orcs fought with passion, the goblins were visibly excited, bouncing around like amused chimpanzees whenever they had the chance and trying to peek over the edge of the tower to see what was happening below.

Completely absorbed in trying to kill my companions from a distance, they didn’t even notice when I swung my body over the wall and entered their little territory.

The floor was made of stone, with an opening along one wall leading to a staircase descending below. Most of the arrows were stored in half-full sacks on the far side of the wall, while three of those sacks had been dragged closer to the firing position.

There was also a table in the middle, with some playing cards scattered across it, several small pieces of bone, four wooden cups, and two bottles filled with some kind of greenish liquid. Similar bottles lay scattered around the corners of the floor as well.

Whoever used the table must have done so while sitting directly on the ground, because I couldn’t see any chairs or stools anywhere.

My potential opponents were standing far too close together for killing them one at a time to have any chance of working. The moment I took down the first one, the rest would notice and either turn me into mincemeat or throw me off the tower.

Slowly and quietly, I crept toward the stairs and looked down. I couldn’t see anyone in the narrow stairwell. There wasn’t even any lighting down there, but the entrance could be closed from above with a trapdoor, which was currently thrown wide open and resting against the wall.

I quickly came to the conclusion that the best plan would be to set fire to everything wooden on top of the tower and hide beneath the trapdoor that could be locked from below with a big latch. Therefore I lit my lighter and, dragging a line of flame behind it with Pyrography, began drawing a connection starting near the table and stretching toward the arrows stacked in the sacks.

At the same time, I got a chance to test how the spell actually worked, because at one point, the orcs’ movements created a gust of wind that snuffed out the lighter’s flame. It forced the subsequent Pyrography lines to be drawn from the source provided by the lines I had already cast into the air and was sustaining with my Psyche.

That made drawing considerably easier—as I did not have to keep the lighter in one place—but I could also feel the strain it put on my soul. I realized that it hadn’t been nearly as exhausting before because the existing fire had served as the source for the new one. Now that I had to become that birthplace myself, my Psyche was compensating as best it could.

My body responded to the new burden on my spirit by breaking into a sweat from the exertion, but more lines continued appearing in the air behind my hand.

After circling around the sacks of arrows on either side, I began sneaking toward the center. That was when my plan fell apart, because one of the goblins, for no obvious reason, turned in my direction.

Years of thieving had taught me that even the smallest fraction of a second spent hesitating could decide whether an improvisation succeeded in situations like this, so I ignored the little creature’s widening eyes and, without interrupting the spell, broke into a short sprint toward the orcs who were still shooting.

I slammed my shoulder into the middle of one orc’s back, throwing him off balance just enough to send him over the edge of the tower.

The second orc and the goblins reacted after that just as quickly as I had. The larger humanoid swung at me immediately after firing his arrows, first with his free hand and then with the bow itself. I managed to jump backward, pushing off the orc I had just thrown over the edge, and avoided the first swipe, but the bow struck me across the face and sent me corkscrewing toward the stone floor, where the goblins were already waiting to pounce.

Rolling across the floor helped me avoid only one of them. The other landed on my chest, claws poised to tear through the muscles of my face and straight into my skull and brain.

I grabbed him by both wrists, stopping the first attack, and realized that I was still dragging fiery lines through the air behind my right hand’s fingers. They were now burning both my skin and the goblin’s, because I had kept my hand inside the lines I had drawn for too long.

Taking advantage of how light my opponent was, I twisted my body and hurled him into the other goblin, who was already preparing to leap at my face again.

As the two of them collided into a rolling brown-and-green ball of muscle and teeth, I planted my hands on the floor behind my head, arched my body, and kicked myself upward, landing on my feet just in time to avoid another attack from the orc, who had been waiting for the chance to crush me from above with his bow.

When his weapon struck the ground, cutting through the fiery lines I had concentrated near floor level during the fight, I did two things. I sprinted toward the edge of the tower, and as I jumped over it and twisted in midair, I used Stoke, amplifying the intensity of the fire I had drawn across the tower.

The explosion was so violent that the blast of air displaced by the flames suddenly erupting and devouring the wood instinctively made me break off Pyrography and pull my hand away from the line I had drawn. As I dropped, I heard the screams of orcs and goblins and the crackle of wood catching fire.

For a moment, hanging from the edge, I could feel tongues of flame licking toward my fingers, but I quickly found a foothold lower down and descended, climbing toward a position that gave me more protection from the fire.

My head was spinning from the burden Stoke had put on me after amplifying the flames across such a long line. I barely managed to get one hand into a crack, and missed the next hold entirely with the other. For a moment, I hung there by one arm, watching one of the burning goblins sail over me, spinning through the air toward the equally spinning ground below, where dozens of orcs and humans were fighting in a battle that had suddenly grown several times larger. If my mind—strained by the way my soul was coping with forcing changes upon reality—wasn’t deceiving me, the grass looked as though the flowers were moving across it, stretching vines and roots forward like tentacles.

I shook my head in disbelief. My brain struggled to cope with the overlapping, drifting images swimming across my vision.

I had climbed down far enough that I couldn’t see the other tower anymore, but it seemed like the barrage of arrows had stopped for the moment, so they had probably noticed the inferno raging across the neighboring platform.

Unfortunately, even though my soul was screaming at me to call it quits and my body dreamed of resting beside a beautiful woman beneath warm sheets, my task wasn’t finished yet.

So I reached deep into my soul, where I could still feel the lines I had drawn through the air, now glowing more brightly and consuming my own energy, and with sheer force of will, I made them disappear.

Once I had done that, and the heat radiating from above had eased, I began climbing back up, relying more on feeling for gaps in the wall than actually seeing them.

When I hooked my left forearm over the cornice and grabbed the far side of it, I managed to peek over the wall for only a moment.

The entire surface of the platform had been scorched black. The charred body of one orc lay on the ground, still clutching a smaller creature by the ankle. It appeared the same fate had befallen them both just before they could make it down the stairs.

The table, along with the sacks of arrows, was still burning, consumed by open flames, but it was far enough away from me that I pulled my entire body over the edge and onto the tiles. I lay there on my back for a moment, hands resting on my chest, breathing with my eyes closed as I listened to the sounds of the battle.

Khufu’Ri was shouting something in his booming voice, which now sounded more like a lion’s roar than actual spoken words.

The impacts of Milo’s baseball bat no longer thundered as loudly as before, but I still thought I could hear the faint crackle of electrical discharges, so he was probably still alive. Either he had run out of targets to attack, or he had pulled back from the main fight.

I also thought I could hear the soldiers—Plasario shouting orders and two others calling back in response.

The orcs on the neighboring tower began yelling something in a language I didn’t understand, so I opened my eyes, rolled onto my stomach, and started crawling toward the low wall closest to the second archer position.

I slowly peeked over the edge so I wouldn’t catch an arrow in the head, but it seemed there were only two orcs and one goblin left on the other side. The rest must have gone downstairs, which suggested that they were either joining the fight in the courtyard or rushing toward me, and neither possibility sounded particularly appealing.

So I rolled over to the open horizontal door, grabbed it while still lying down, and pulled it just enough for gravity to do the rest.

The huge metal plate slammed shut, sealing off the only direct entrance to the platform from inside the building. If anyone decided to honor me with their presence, they would first have to lift that weight back up, which would buy me a few moments to make their life more difficult.

Having done that, I had to think about how to make life less desirable for the ones on the other tower.

At a glance, each tower looked to have sides about forty feet long, with roughly fifty feet between them, so jumping from one to the other was out of the question. From experience, I knew my maximum leap was around twelve feet, and since I had no desire to scrape my crushed body off the roof below, I needed to come up with something else.

Lying there, calculating and thinking through the problem, I noticed a fragment of one of the table’s legs still being consumed by fire and thought about using it as a spear.

I crawled over to it and activated Pyrography, drawing only a thin, single line of fire extending a few inches from the source flame. Then, continuing to draw, I nudged the burning fragment away to see how the fire I had created would behave.

The line immediately followed the source of the flame across the floor, but my attempt to draw it in the air was interrupted because, as I suspected, it was not the movement of my hand that caused it to form, but the escape of the fire itself. That meant the connecting line would have to be long enough before I threw it.

“Fuck. I’m doing this,” I said to myself.

Grabbing the unburned end of the wooden leg, I carried it in a crouch to one corner of the tower, leaving the burning end jutting out over the edge, and quickly began sketching a fiery line through the air diagonally across the tower toward the opposite corner. At the start, I tried to make it into a wide upward arc, because I didn’t know how the wall would affect it or whether the line would be broken if it passed through it.

I drew three such arcing lines, each veering in a different direction to account for the possibility that the thrown piece of wood might spin in the air and land at a different angle. After a few feet, I joined them together, when my return movement came to the meeting point the second time and continued pulling the line in a straight path toward the far corner of the tower.

Because I had real fire as my source, my Psyche didn’t strain very much, and it spared me from adding any new pain to the doubled vision and dizziness that were already consuming me.

When my creation was ready and looked like a spear made of pure fire, I quickly stepped up to its wooden tip and, being careful not to bury the tail end in the ground, lifted it slightly so it lay parallel to the earth. At the same time, I turned toward the second tower, drew back, and hurled the burning fragment into the air.

Even that brief contact with the fire burned my hand, but I couldn’t afford to protect it with Cinderhide.

The instant it left my hand, however, that incredible fiery construct caught the attention of the creatures on the opposing platform. Unfortunately for them, they only had a moment to watch the flaming spear, dozens of feet long, flying toward them before it landed in the middle of their tower. Luckily, one of the arcs I had drawn passed over the wall—the others did not—confirming my theory that fire would not pass through anything nonflammable.

I quickly ran to the end of the line I had drawn, ducked behind my wall, and, extending my hand past the edge until I felt the heat of the fire, forced my Psyche into one more use of Stoke.