Just a Guy and a Gate to the Multiverse - Chapter 22 (Patreon)

Chapter 22 - Of edgeless Blades and golden Arms

Eragon came for my throat as if he meant to end me.

There was no warning shout, no courteous dip of the blade, and no breathing space to gather my concentration. One moment, he stood across from me in the green twilight beneath Ellesméra’s trees, his sword held low and his face pale and still. The next, he was upon me, steel flashing like a strip of red moonlight.

I threw myself back, barely reacting in time, thanks only to my slightly superhuman senses. His blood-red blade hissed past my jaw, close enough that every hair on my neck rose. I replied with a quick cut at his ribs, but he was already gone, turning aside with a pale imitation resembling the unnatural grace the elves had begun to teach him. My sword met only air.

Even though he was physically a little weaker than I was, his Dragon Rider physiology clearly placed him at peak human levels.

Again, he struck—high, then low, then with a thrust toward my heart.

I caught the first blow, slipped the second, and barely beat aside the third. The force of it rang down my arms and into my teeth. I had fought against the elves with the sword before, but Eragon was different. While they moved like water or the wind, playing around me with their superior speed and strength, he moved more directly, like a rock. His style was far simpler, yet his eyes never left mine. They were intent, almost cold, and for a few desperate heartbeats, I forgot that he was younger than I was.

And I didn’t mean that he was unskillful with the blade. He was absolutely better than me. But he fought differently from those elves.

I forgot everything except the need to survive.

Leaves scattered beneath our boots. Somewhere beyond the circle of trees, a stream whispered over stones. The elves who watched made no sound.

Eragon drove me backward step by step.

I tried to turn him, to force him toward the roots where the ground rose unevenly, but he sensed it before I could press the advantage. His sword snapped toward my wrist. I jerked away, lost my balance, and felt the tip strike my forearm.

Pain bloomed, sharp and startling, but no blood came.

The blade should have opened me from wrist to elbow. Instead, it left only a stinging line across my skin, hot as a whip mark. The sword in Eragon’s hand gleamed, but a faint silver haze clung to its edge. Mine had the same enchantment, a handy spell for sparring that blunted the edge of a blade.

It was still the real thing, and it would still hurt like hell. But it would not cut.

Safe enough, yet real enough for good training.

But when Eragon nearly took my head from my shoulders, safe did not seem like the right word for it.

“Too slow,” he said.

The words were quiet, not cruel, but they struck nearly as hard as his blade.

I gritted my teeth and came at him. Who did the cocky kid think he was, just because he had a few more months of training with the blade under his belt?

He yielded a pace, and I felt a surge of hope until I realized he had given it to me. Now he was getting crafty… My strike fell exactly where he wanted it. His sword slid along mine, turned my point aside, and his shoulder slammed into my chest. I stumbled, gasping. Before I could recover, his blade touched my stomach.

Another welt. Another point to him.

One of the elves murmured something. Approval, perhaps. Or judgment.

Eragon stepped back and reset his stance. He breathed through his nose, slow and measured, but I saw what I had not noticed before: the tightness around his mouth and the sheen of sweat at his brow despite the cool air. His left hand flexed once, then closed again around the hilt.

There was a tremor in it.

Small, almost nothing, but I saw it.

It was starting.

“Again?” I asked.

His eyes narrowed, not in anger, but in determination. “Again.”

This time, I did not try to match his technique. Instead, I simply started to push him with my superior physical abilities. Right now, that was enough to make a difference.

I gave him no clean line.

He needed to experience this.

I circled. I kept my blade close. I forced him to chase openings that closed before he reached them. When he struck, I retreated instead of meeting him, relying purely on my better speed and reaction time. When he feinted, I did not answer.

For a while, he still kept pushing me.

His blade grazed my shoulder, my thigh, and my ribs.

Each time, the enchanted sword came dangerously close. Each time, his face hardened, as if every missed point cost him more than my stalling tactic.

Then his right foot dragged.

Only an inch.

The movement was so slight I almost missed it. But Eragon missed nothing, and he knew I had seen. His next attack came twice as fierce. Steel clashed against steel. He forced my guard open, then closed it for me with a strike so fast I had to leap aside. The flat of his blade cracked against my upper arm, numbing it all the way to my fingers.

Another feint. That one was costly.

I nearly dropped my sword.

Eragon followed, pressing me hard, and the old fear returned. He was still better. Injured or not, tired or not, he could read me as easily as a hunter reads tracks in mud. Every clumsy thought of mine seemed to show in my shoulders before I acted.

Fighting in any manner could be really complicated.

But I was slowly getting used to it. At least I had started to read him, unlike those blasted, overpowered elves.

When he turned left, he guarded his back. When he lunged too far, he recovered with his jaw clenched. When I forced him to lift his arms high, pain flashed across his face and vanished behind pride.

That cursed wound Durza had given him on his back had to be a real pain in the ass.

The elves had sung over it. Herbs had been ground. They had tried everything to make it better, to heal their precious Dragon Rider, their only hope. Yet all of them knew there was no real way to heal a wound infested with the magic of a Shade. They could only lessen the pain.

I began to push harder. This was a training lesson, after all.

I put everything I had learned into this fight. I used my feet, distance, and timing. I made him turn. I made him reach. I made him choose between stopping and admitting the pain, or continuing and letting it devour him.

He chose to continue.

Of course he did. He was stubborn as a mule.

“Yield,” I said after he stumbled the second time.

He struck at my head.

I ducked beneath it and slammed the guard of my sword into his forearm. His weapon dipped. I could have touched his chest, but he twisted away, and the movement tore a sound from him.

Not a cry. Not yet.

It was a breath, sharp and broken.

The elves shifted at last.

Eragon’s face had gone white. His back bent despite his effort to keep it straight, and his sword point wavered between us. Sweat ran from his temple to his jaw. He looked furious, not with me, I realized, but with the body that had betrayed him.

“Enough,” I said.

“No,” Eragon said.

“Eragon—”

“I said no.”

He came again.

For one blinding instant, he was magnificent. Pain stripped away his caution. He crossed the space between us with a speed that made the world seem slow. His sword struck mine once, twice, then a third time, each blow placed perfectly. My guard broke. His blade rose toward my neck.

Then his back seized.

I saw it happen. His whole body locked, as if an invisible hook had caught beneath his shoulder blades and wrenched him backward. The sword fell from its line. His eyes widened, and all the breath left him in a strangled gasp.

I moved without thinking.

My blade touched his chest.

It would have been a killing blow if the edge had been true, but under the spell, it was only a hard tap.

Eragon froze. For a heartbeat, we stood that way: my sword resting against him, his face twisted in pain, and his hand still raised for the strike that would never land.

Then he dropped to one knee.

“You lose,” I said calmly, hiding my disappointment in myself. I had let my guard down at the end.

Eragon pressed one fist into the moss. His other hand clutched at his back. He breathed in small, ragged pulls, each one a battle he did not want anyone to see.

I wanted to say something. That he had fought well. That I had only won because of the wound. That no one could have endured what he did.

But all of it felt thin.

So I knelt across from him and laid my sword flat on the ground between us.

“You had me,” I said.

His eyes flicked up. Pain clouded them, but behind it burned the same stubborn fire that had carried him through the match and, I suspected, through far worse.

“No,” he whispered. “I lost.”

“Maybe,” I said softly. “Today, but we are both getting better. The day after tomorrow, we will have our rematch.”

Eragon bowed his head, and for the first time since the match began, he looked not like a Rider, nor a hero, nor a legend half-made.

He looked like a wounded boy who refused to stop standing.

“I will have to fight Vanir again tomorrow. He shows even less mercy than you. Against you, there is at least a chance for me to win, but against someone as strong as an elf? How am I supposed to fulfill my duty while I am a cripple?”

Knowing that I couldn’t reveal the future to him, I simply said, “I believe you will get there.”

We had been sparring for over a month now, ever since he and Saphira arrived at Ellesméra. Every other day, it was my turn, while on the other days, Vanir was responsible for him. And Vanir was a hard fighter. He didn’t hold back.

I had been learning from him a few times, too. He was one of those elves who resented Eragon for becoming a Rider while only being a human, and what made it even worse was the fact that he was a cripple.

“Will you be joining my lessons with Oromis again today?” Eragon asked after catching his breath.

“Not today, but I will come by later to see Glaedr.”

“Master Glaedr? I haven’t seen you interact much with him. Why would you visit him?” Eragon couldn’t help but wonder. “Wait, does it have something to do with those strange tests you performed on Saphira, the ones you refused to tell her about?”

“She is still upset about that, huh?” I couldn’t help but laugh. Honestly, I would never have expected there to be a day when I would see a dragon pout.

“Yes, she is. I had to stop her from ripping up the wall of your house just to see what you were doing in there with that old elven smith.” He sighed.

“Well, you can tell her that she will learn of it today.”

“She says she is looking forward to it.”

———

“Oy, be careful with that chest!” Rhunön barked at Orik and me as the wooden crate almost slipped from our hands, thanks to our difference in size.

“Then how about you help us carry it? It’s not too heavy, but it is still unwieldy. An extra pair of hands would help a lot!” I snarked right back at her, while our dwarven companion began to chuckle.

Meanwhile, the other elves accompanying us, mostly experts in healing, simply looked regal while ignoring our antics. Master Rhunön really was an exception among elven-kind, much rougher and freer than the rest of them.

No wonder Orik got along so well with her the moment I introduced them. A dwarf and a smith of any kind had the perfect foundation for friendship. He spents most of his time here, at her smithy.

The moment the dwarf learned what Rhunön and I were working on, he eagerly offered his help. He mentioned something about how a piece of work like this would enter the history records of the dwarves, if not the entirety of Alagaësia.

And honestly, I understood where he was coming from.

We soon reached Oromis’s lone home on the outskirts of the elven city. He was already waiting for us, together with his dragon, Glaedr, whose missing stump shone in the sunlight. And they were not alone. Not only were Eragon and Saphira waiting with them, but so were the queen, Arya, and several high-ranking elves.

“You lot are far too early. We still have an entire surgery to perform before we even know if it works.” Rhunön rolled her eyes at them before turning toward Oromis and Glaedr. “It has been a while, you two. Are you ready, hatchling?”

Something resembling a snort escaped the old golden dragon before his voice resounded in our heads. You are never going to stop calling me that, are you, Rhunön-elda? Yes, I am ready.

“Are you not a hatchling to me?” Rhunön laughed at the big dragon as she approached the crate Orik and I had set down close to the spot where the surgery would be performed. Then she opened it, revealing its contents to the world.

Eragon, besides his dragon Saphira was the only one present who did not know what was happening, spoke up first. “A piece of golden dragon armor?”

“Oh, Eragon, this is no mere armor. This may be one of the greatest works our clan has ever had the honor of aiding in its construction!” Orik boasted proudly. He had helped Rhunön with the smithing parts a lot, while I handled the very precise details with alchemy.

Both of them were the only people in this world who know about my alchemy now.

What is it? Is that why you used your strange tools on my body, especially my foreleg? Saphira asked impatiently in our heads.

“It is what I needed your help for, Saphira,” I said with a nod. “Without your help, I wouldn’t be as confident that this would actually work. This is a replacement for the foreleg Glaedr lost. While I had already studied Glaedr’s body in detail, only thanks to you was I able to map out the exact structure of a dragon’s right foreleg and craft a perfect replacement. Thanks to the excellent combined craftsmanship of elves, dwarves, and humans, this replacement is even stronger than your natural flesh.”

It was an Automail! The first real one besides all the prototypes we had crafted I have eveer made. It hadn’t been an easy task to make, since I originally only had the blueprints and information for human ones from the Fullmetal Alchemist Universe.

But Saphira and Glaedr allowed me to map out their bodies with positron emission tomography and X-ray computed tomography I specifically build for this task, giving me an exact map of their muscles, bones, nerves, bloodstreams, and every minor detail of their bodies.

The magical smithing of Rhunön and the masterful skills of Orik made this Automail more durable than any Automail ever created. It helped a lot that it was actually made out of the same metal as an Dragon Riders’ sword, some very rare metal that had fallen from the stars and was not part of the periodic table I knew of. A sword said to be indestructible.

Rhunön only had scraps of it left, not even enough for a new Rider sword. I knew where a bit more was hidden, but that was fated to become Eragon’s own Rider sword in the future. Instead, I had to synthesize more of it.

I only managed to do so after Rhunön started helping me out. She was the one person in this world who knew that metal best. Even that had taken most of our time for this project.

As for how it was supposed to hold up under the strength of a dragon? Well, for this Automail, I didn’t rely only on bioelectricity produced by the body. It was big enough to hold one of my Infinite Fusion Cores.

Like Orik said, it was a masterpiece that would enter the history books.

“Now then, we need space and quiet. I am doing this for the first time in my life!” I glared at the uninvited guests.

“We will give you your space. We are just eager to witness such a sight!” the queen apologized.

Only the elves helping with the surgery, Rhunön, Orik, Oromis, our patient Glaedr, and I remained behind.

“Now, let’s get this started,” I said with all the confidence I could muster.

[ End of the Chapter ]