Chapter 24 - The Certainty of Victory

“The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.”

- Henry IV, William Shakespeare.

The stone imitation of Jean abandoned its wounded original and turned fully toward me. I regarded the thing for a moment, still savoring the strange warmth left behind by what I had consumed, and smiled a serpent’s smile beneath my helm as I advanced to meet it.

Yet there was something else now, something newly formed within the architecture of my being. The sensation was difficult to define. Void Clone felt different to the magic I housed within me. It felt like a missing limb I had only just discovered.

Like all of my spells, my magic, the knowledge of how to use it came without instruction, I simply knew there was something inside me that could be placed outside. So I did, speaking syllables no mortal ear could hear. Each word’s meaning tickling the edge of my consciousness.

I am the reflection of that which is not…

The darkness beneath my sabatons thickened, and at first, I thought it was merely a trick of the blue light filtering into the arena through the broken roof. Then the shadow spread against the pale sand, becoming blacker. Something rose from that impossible darkness with the unhurried certainty of a corpse climbing from a shallow grave.

A serpent helm appeared first. Then broad pauldrons. Then the black-and-gold armor of Gilgamesh of Uruk emerged piece by piece, except there was no true gold upon this imitation. It carried my halberd in both hands, reproduced down to Gaston Vries’s cruel axe blade, armor-piercing beak, spear point, and heavy counterweight. Elegant swords of Elven make hung at its hip in imitation of my own, while a dark copy of Zariyah rested opposite them.

For a moment, I experienced the exceedingly unusual sensation of standing beside myself. A darker version of myself, if such a thing were possible. An ultimately inferior version.

Jean, still kneeling behind the stone construct, stared between us. “Oh, that is just unfair.”

“If the enemy can play this game, so too, can I,” I replied pleasantly.

The clone moved and there was a difference between us. I saw it immediately because no one understood the measure of my own body better than I did. Had seen my body move with Sage’s Sight. Slightly weaker, and slightly slower.

No magic stirred within it, I knew in my bones. There was no Greater Drain waiting behind its hands, no Holy Strike sleeping inside its weapon, no Greater Heal that could grant it even more effective Health. It possessed none of my magic, none of that greater collection of impossible tricks accumulated throughout my travels. A slightly weaker Gilgamesh remained an obscenity.

The stone Jean swung first. Its rocky mace descended toward the clone’s head with the confidence of something that had spent the better part of the last several minutes battering its origina. My imitation did not attempt anything elaborate. It shifted a single step aside, allowed the mace to pass beyond its shoulder, and drove the beak of its halberd through the construct’s elbow and the stone of it exploded.

Before the stone copy could recover, I arrived from the opposite direction. The counterweight of my halberd struck it squarely in the chest. There was no satisfying resistance, and the stone torso simply ceased being a coherent object. Half a heartbeat later, my Void Clone turned its weapon and sheared through what remained.

The construct fell in several pieces, and stone grains immediately began flowing together between the fragments.

Oh no, you do not, I thought with much malice. And through me, my own clone apparently shared the sentiment as we attacked the remains simultaneously.

Its spear point punched through the stone head just as I brought my axe blade down through the center of the torso. Whatever force animated the thing attempted to reconstruct it, but there was simply too much damage being inflicted too quickly. Every piece large enough to move was broken again. The head tried to reform, and my clone crushed it beneath one armored heel. An arm dragged itself toward the torso, and I reduced it to gravel with the rear spike of my weapon.

Within moments, the last coherent fragments collapsed. And this time, they did not return.

No experience, however, was forthcoming. The game certainly enjoyed cheating me of my due.

The mirror assigned to Jean produced a sound like ice breaking across a winter lake. A fracture appeared down its center, branching outward into a web of thin silver lines. The magical barrier enclosing his section flickered in answer, hundreds of purple hexagons dissolving one after another.

Jean remained where he was, kneeling behind the two broken halves of his shield. He looked down at the gravel that had spent several minutes trying to murder him, then at my clone, then finally at me. The other man struggled upright, favoring one leg as he did so. His face was bruised beneath the edge of his helm, and blood had dried from a cut near his temple. More troubling to him, judging from the way he looked at it, was the ruin of his shield.

Words had left him, as he looked toward the nearest remaining barrier.

Lorn was in considerably worse circumstances. The archer had lost his weapon at some point during my struggle with the shadows. Half of the bow lay near the edge of his compartment while the other half remained several paces away. He held a knife now, which would have been a perfectly reasonable weapon if the stone imitation of himself had not retained a fully functional bow.

The construct drew, and Lorn threw himself sideways just in time. The stone arrow passed through the space his throat had occupied and struck the barrier behind him.

Hungry for blood, my Void Clone was already moving. An extraordinary sensation followed. I did not see through its eyes, not precisely, but I possessed an awareness of its direction and purpose. It understood what I wanted, the clone simply acting upon my intent.

It crossed the newly opened section and struck Lorn’s barrier, causing purple hexagons to blaze beneath the impact. The clone recoiled half a pace.

Jean blinked. “Can it break those?”

I did not bother giving him an answer as my eyes roved over the impediment. The barrier had already begun flickering around its edges. Not because the clone had damaged it, but I surmised because the destruction of Jean’s opponent was a catalyst, of sorts, for its opening. 

Soon enough, the section opened, and the barrier disappeared. Smiling grimly, I stepped through to distract the archer’s opponent. Lorn, surprisingly, did not waste the opportunity as he scuttled back, placing as much distance as he could from his own opponent.

Now the stone bowman turned toward us. Or rather, toward me, as it aimed its next arrow at my face. Sage’s Sight blossomed behind my eyes, and I caught the shaft in an Adamantine grip. I crushed it in my grip without a second thought.

“Oh,” Jean began. “That works too.”

Again, I did not deign to give him a response as my Void Clone, and I walked toward our new would-be opponent. The man’s quips were getting irritating, no doubt a sort of defensive mechanism to keep his psyche intact and to stave off panic.

In a mirror of Lorn’s own actions, the stone archer abandoned the bowman and attempted to create distance, but the arena section offered nowhere useful to retreat. It fired twice while moving. One arrow struck my clone’s cuirass and shattered. The second caught the edge of its pauldron and skipped away.

The clone did not slow. Instead, it ate up the distance between them with its inexorable stride. The copy of my halberd swept sideways, snapping the stone bow like a twig. The return stroke removed both of the construct’s arms.

I reached it a moment later and drove the spear point through the center of its chest before lifting the entire imitation from the ground. Stone ground around the weapon as it attempted to reconstruct itself, but my clone stepped forward, caught one of its legs beneath the hook of its halberd, and pulled in the opposite direction. It simply came apart, and I slammed what remained against the arena floor. My clone did the same to the lower half, and another barrier lost its light and died.

Again, no experience was gained.

Lorn remained sitting in the sand for several seconds before slowly retrieving his knife. “I preferred it when there was only one of you.”

I did not give this attempt at humor any dignity, but this did not stop Jean from laughing. Karma struck, and he immediately regretted doing so, pressing one hand against his ribs. For the briefest of moments, I wondered if killing Lorn and Jean would make up for the deficit in effort. The lack of experience gained.

We continued with the test.

Roberts’s stone imitation had managed to wound its original badly enough that the man favored his left leg and kept most of his weight upon his spear. His axe remained in hand, but every movement had become slower. The false Roberts, naturally, possessed no such inconvenience. However, it did not possess the advantage for long. When the barrier opened, we rushed the false Roberts, my clone entering low while I went high.

The construct reacted correctly to me, but that was its mistake nonetheless. It raised its spear to catch my halberd, committing its strength to the block. It didn’t matter. Trying to block one of my strikes was like trying to deny a falling mountain, and simply blew past it. At the same time, my own clone struck the side of its knee with enough force to reverse the joint. The stone cracked, and the imitation dropped. Roberts himself understood immediately. Injured or not, he stepped forward and buried his rune-marked axe in the creature’s shoulder.

For the first time since leaving my section, one of the Crimson Blades fought beside us. The three attacks arrived from three directions, and the construct simply disintegrated beneath them.

Again, no experience.

Roberts leaned upon his axe afterward and looked toward my clone, but blessedly said nothing.

Kristoff called from where he was engaging his mirror. “A little help here when you finish with your little ladies' chat.”

In my estimation, the Rogue had apparently retained enough comfort to be irritating. His own contest resembled something from a particularly murderous comedy. Both Kristoffs were bleeding, although the stone imitation did so only in the metaphorical sense. Knives lay everywhere. Several were embedded in the arena wall, one had shattered against the barrier, and another protruded from the real Kristoff’s upper arm.

He saw us approaching and immediately raised his free hand. “Take your time.”

The stone copy lunged. Kristoff twisted away, caught its wrist, and received an elbow in the face for his trouble.

We did not take our time. The clone crossed with me like an executioner late for an appointment. Kristoff’s imitation was fast. Exceptionally fast, by the standards of ordinary men. It slipped aside from the first halberd thrust, rolled beneath the returning axe blade, and drove a knife toward the gap beneath my clone’s arm.

The blade struck, and simply pinged off the false armor.

The stone Kristoff seemed to share the original’s instinct for self-preservation, because it immediately attempted to retreat. My clone, however, caught it by the face. Clone against clone, but some things are made from a stronger base. The void clone introduced the stone construct to the arena floor.

Kristoff stood nearby with one hand still wrapped around the knife in his own arm.

“Thank you,” he breathed, reaching into one of his pockets and quaffing a red potion.

Soon after, another barrier fell.

The leader of the Crimson Blades was bleeding from beneath one arm, where the edge of his duplicate’s enormous sword had found the weaker articulation between breastplate and side plates. He still fought with admirable discipline, but his usual economy had begun giving way to fatigue. His stone counterpart suffered from neither blood loss nor exhaustion. It was in its own, inexorable, and unstoppable.

Vaska caught its descending sword against his own, boots digging into the sand.

“Gilgamesh!” he shouted.

“Yes?” I replied, as if I were going about for a stroll.

Jean shouted from behind me. “Just bloody help him!”

I shot him a look that could have stripped paint, hidden as it was by my visored helm. Together with my new servant we pincered Vaska’s reflection.

Vaska immediately withdrew. And this alone demonstrated why he was not entirely incompetent. Lesser men might have attempted to preserve their dignity by remaining in the center of the fight. Vaska understood that when two armored monsters shaped like Gilgamesh advanced upon something, the sensible tactical position was to be elsewhere.

His copy attempted to follow and give chase. It was made to argue with my own copy as my clone intercepted the great sword with its halberd. It would turn out that my clone could was a very convincing debater. The impact of the great sword drove its boots several inches through the sand. There it was again, a measurable inferiority. Had I blocked the same strike, I would have yielded less ground. The clone possessed enormous Strength, but enormous was not identical to mine. Still, it held. A shadow of my glory was still formidable.

Ruthlessly, I struck the construct from behind, and the axe blade entered at the shoulder and continued through half its torso. Vaska’s imitation twisted impossibly, attempting to bring the sword back toward me, only for my clone to hook the weapon and wrench it aside. I reversed my own halberd and drove the counterweight into the fracture I had already created, causing it to explode in a shower of stone.

Vaska watched fragments rain around him. “I dislike this.”

“You are welcome.”

The next mirror cracked, opening up the final area. But, by the time we reached Clara’s section, it looked like there was almost nothing left for us to do.

Her stone imitation had already collapsed into an inert mound of gravel. She stood in the center of her compartment with both hands wrapped around her staff, visibly exhausted but otherwise intact. Sweat darkened strands of hair against her forehead, and the sand around her had been churned into ridges, trenches, broken pillars, and half-formed shapes where two Earth Magisters had attempted to impose contradictory intentions upon the same material.

And now that Vaska's copy was defeated, her barrier had dissolved.

She looked at my clone with far greater interest than anyone else had managed before stepping through, her eyes remaining completely fixed upon my imitation. It turned its serpent’s helm toward her. She stopped and the clone stopped as well. For several breaths, the two simply regarded one another.

“Do not touch it,” I advised.

Her hand, which had begun rising toward the construct, immediately lowered.

“I was not going to.”

Jean snorted, but Clara ignored him and continued examining the clone from what she apparently considered a scientifically respectable distance.

Without fanfare, the last remaining barriers collapsed almost together as purple light washed across the arena before fading into nothing. The mirrors stood cracked and black, their once-perfect surfaces filled with fractured reflections. Around us lay heaps of broken stone and gravel from the various imitations

Blessed silence returned. 

My Void Clone stood beside me. And now that there were no enemies remaining, I had the opportunity to study it properly. The resemblance was unsettling only because it was so complete. Its armor carried every line of mine. Its proportions were identical. Even the minute decorations worked into the edges of my plates had been reproduced in dark relief.

There was no breathing beneath the cuirass. No subtle shifting from the Mimic, no sign of Mana, and it was free of exulting presence of Zariyah within the copied sheath. It was myself stripped of everything except physical potential and violence.

I found the concept rather appealing.

Then a crack appeared across its breastplate, and black dust leaked from the line. A flaw. A hated flaw. The clone looked down at itself with no discernible concern as another fracture traveled across one pauldron. The edges of its armor began crumbling, not into metal fragments but into a fine dark powder that fell through the light and vanished among the pale grains beneath our feet.

Its fingers went next. Then the copy of my halberd dissolved from the spear point downward, its weapon losing shape as it turned into nothing more than dust. The clone made no attempt to resist. It merely stood beside me while its body surrendered piece by piece. Within moments, the lower half collapsed. The upper body soon followed. The serpent helm was last. It regarded me until its empty visor cracked down the middle, after which the entire head folded inward and scattered into black dust until nothing remained.

It was not gone. Not gone forever at least, it felt on some instinctual level like merely becoming unavailable for the moment, like a muscle after a particularly demanding exertion.

Clara spoke first.

“What kind of spell was that?”

Roberts looked toward the dark dust rapidly disappearing among the sand. “Was it even a spell?”

“Magic, then,” Vaska said with a shrug. He had seated himself upon the lower edge of one of the mirror frames and was inspecting the wound beneath his arm as if this were an everyday affair before he quaffed a Health potion. “What kind of magic makes another one of you?”

Kristoff, having finally pulled the knife from his arm, wrapped cloth around the wound and poured a glowing unguent over it. “More importantly, why would the universe permit such a thing?”

Lorn had recovered what remained of his bow and appeared to be mourning it with the solemnity usually reserved for dead relatives.

I regarded the company. “Do you actually want to know?”

Clara opened her mouth, but Vaska pointed one finger at her without looking away from me. “No.”

She frowned. “I merely wished…”

“Clara,” he warned again, causing the young Magister looked profoundly dissatisfied.

Roberts lowered himself against the base of a mirror with considerably more care than usual. “Whatever it was, it saved us.”

That brought a different silence, not an uncomfortable one exactly, but one carrying weight nonetheless.

Jean looked at the remains of his shield. Lorn ran his thumb along the broken end of his bow. Vaska stopped examining his wound and raised his eyes toward me.

Clara moved among them after that, inspecting injuries while Roberts produced bandages and a collection of small bottles from one of the pouches at his belt. Their supplies had survived the earlier fighting better than some of their equipment. J

The mirrors had gone completely dark, and now nothing moved beneath the sand. And, beyond the broad archway through which we had entered, the creatures that had herded us here were gone.

I walked to the entrance and looked into Atarantu. The city waited beneath its impossible blue illumination, ancient streets running between ruined buildings toward the great structure at its heart. No creatures crawled over the walls. No many-legged horrors watched from the intersections. Nothing disturbed the strange vegetation growing through fractures in the stone.

Behind me, Vaska finally rose. “We should move.”

I glanced over one shoulder. “Agreed.”

Vaska gathered his sword and rested it against one shoulder. His movement was slower than before, but whatever potion he had taken appeared to be doing its work. “We find the exit. Whatever this place considers an exit, a completion chamber, a gate, divine staircase, glowing hole in the floor, I do not care. We find it and leave.”

Vaska pointed toward the streets beyond the arena. “We have survived the lake, the city, several hundred things that should not exist, and now ourselves. I am prepared to call that sufficient adventure for one Trial.”

“The Guardian remains to be defeated. Mere survival is not reward enough,” I proclaimed.

Everyone stopped, and Vaska closed his eyes. It was the expression of a man who had discovered that a headache he believed cured had merely been waiting patiently.

“No,” he whispered. “Please, no. This way lies madness.”

“Then madness profound it is. We discussed this already. The Guardian exists to be defeated. That is its purpose,” I said in a voice that would brook no disagreement.

Roberts leaned more heavily upon his spear. “The potions took the brunt off it, but we are injured, and Jean has no shield. These are not optimal conditions.”

“My bow is destroyed,” Lorn added.

Kristoff smiled. “I still have several knives.”

Clara watched the exchange without participating. She looked tired, though her eyes had recovered some of their earlier sharpness.

Vaska approached until he stood several paces from me. “Listen carefully, Bronze. We nearly died in there.”

I looked at them all coldly. “You nearly died. You believe pursuing the Guardian would be suicide. That is merely evidence of a lack of imagination.”

“Just listen to yourself! I know pursuing the Guardian would be suicide,” he blustered, continuing with his inane drivel.

“For you, perhaps.”

Vaska stared at me, and behind him, Jean groaned.

I continued before their collective lack of ambition could interrupt. “For all of you, attacking it may indeed constitute suicide. That was true before we entered Atarantu and remains true now. You are wounded, fatigued, and deprived of some of your equipment. If the Guardian is proportionate to the dangers already present within this Trial, there is every possibility that it will kill you.”

“Wonderful,” Roberts said.

“But that assessment does not apply to me. I only need the opportunity to fight it,” I stated with a shrug. “We came here, and if we leave with less… lower tier rewards, then this whole thing is meaningless. You can cower from behind, or hide like frightened children, it matters not. ”

Vaska rubbed at his forehead. “Of course it doesn’t.”

I held all of their eyes for a moment, turning to each in turn. “No it does not.”

Then, I turned toward the distant heart of Atarantu. The central structure was visible even from the arena entrance, rising through the ruined city like the exposed spine of something too large to bury. Blue stone covered portions of it, while broad ribs of black metal emerged where the outer structure had collapsed. Its upper reaches disappeared into luminous haze.

Somewhere within, according to the old tablet, something remained. The Guardian. The boss creature. An obstacle placed to both challenge and reward. Perhaps it would be a monster. Perhaps a construct. Perhaps another shining servant of some tiresome Divine. I did not care.

“For me,” I repeated, “this is not suicide.”

Jean leaned one shoulder against the archway. “What would you call it?”

“Inevitable.”

Kristoff tilted his head. “What is?”

“My victory.”

There was no boast in the words as I understood boasting. A boast implied uncertainty disguised by confidence. One boasted that one would win a tournament, seduce a woman, return from a battle, or accomplish some other thing whose result remained undecided. This was different. I had been broken before, beaten, cornered, and manipulated.

Thrown against creatures stronger than myself, trapped beneath the earth, forced to accept aid I despised, and repeatedly found myself at Death’s door. Yet here I remained. I had surmounted insurmountable odds. The universe had tried education through pain and discovered me to be a stubborn student.

Vaska studied me for several long seconds. “That,” he eventually said, “is possibly the most arrogant thing I have ever heard.”

Roberts looked toward the central structure. “Assume for a moment that we collectively suffer an attack of madness and agree. How do you intend to find it?”

I shrugged, the motion shifting the heavy plates of my armor with a familiar scrape. “I do not. We have frozen its lake, crossed its city, killed its creatures, survived its attempt to turn us against ourselves, broken its arena, destroyed its constructs, and damaged whatever system governs this place.”

I looked at the cracked mirrors behind us.

“If something rules this Trial, I suspect we have already attracted its attention.”

Jean looked uneasily toward the empty streets. “So your plan is to walk around until the largest thing in here decides to murder us?”

“Essentially.”

“That is not a plan,” he scoffed.

Vaska looked toward Clara, perhaps hoping the only Magister among them might provide some argument sufficiently technical to penetrate my supposed madness.

She did not appear to notice. The young woman had turned away from us. Her attention was fixed upon the distant central structure.

“Clara?” Vaska asked.

“I feel it, the Earth speaks. It is there and it is hungry,” spoke the Magister.