Aether Engineering

Chapter 73

Bandit Camp

The Voidlands near Emanfall

Myles felt his stomach eating itself. Not from hunger, they had plenty of rations to last them as they staked out the bandit’s camp. It was nerves, horrible, horrible nerves. Hidden on top of the cliff the bandit’s cave was set into and only blocked from view by a few boulders, they were close enough to ensure none of the bandits abandoned camp by the morning. But that also meant each moment was tense. They couldn’t justify talking about anything except essentials, and their plan had long been laid out.

The night ticked by so slowly, it felt like it would never end, like they would be stuck waiting for morning for years, afraid of making any noise. Even still, the hours moved along. As the sky began to get lighter, the pressure Myles felt grew and grew.

“There it is.” Kate finally whispered.

In the dawn’s light, a pillar of green light cut through the sky, visible even across miles of terrain, toned red from the sun’s rise. In the background of that light, the mountains of the ravine rose closer than Myles remembered them being.

Myles turned around and made the movements he had been preparing for the last several hours. He sped over one of the boulders, reached the edge of the cliff and then dropped. Normally, the fall would be too far to come away from without injury, but as they fell, Dresden evoked a thick sheet of pure mana beneath them.

Myles made sure to adjust the pattern he was commuting armor with to ensure the soles of his feet were clear of pure mana. The last thing he wanted right now was to start slipping. They landed directly behind the bandit’s sentry who had been pacing for the last few hours and was staring at the green light in the sky.

Primrose had been adamant about them learning to commute mana at all times; the sentry had not learned the same lesson. The moment Dresden landed; he drew the curved blade at his side and drew it across the man’s throat. The sentry staggered on his way to the rough almost clublike sword he’d left leaning against the cave mouth, falling in a pool of his own blood. Dresden hadn’t even used any mana.

It was at that point that Myles started evoking wind mana. Inside the cave, he felt not the sleeping forms they had been hoping for, but a group rushing for weapons, commuted armor already spinning up. That didn’t change the plan though. A dozen paces in, the cave’s entrance narrowed into a tight bend that limited how many could rush in at once. It was probably why they had chosen the place as a hideout.

Unfortunately, the bend was only defensible from the bandit’s side. If they rushed to the bend to seal their opponents in, they would be met by a series of murder holes and traps. And so, they were at a stalemate. The bandit’s little fortress gave them an advantage, so they were shuffling around in there, ready to defend it, but Myles’ whole team could use wind mana, and none of them were foolish enough to charge in.

The stalemate could have lasted days, but Dresden had other ideas. Myles dropped the pile of brush he had spent much of the previous day gathering onto the ground in front of the entrance, and the others followed suit. Leaning down, Dresden used a spark of fire mana to set actual fire to the brush.

They didn’t need to worry about what direction the smoke was going. With the amount of wind mana the group was evoking into the cave, there was an almost palpable breeze, and it took the smoke right into the cave, and down to where the bandits were positioned.

They hadn’t been sure how long the bandits would choose to last in the smoke, but the answer was not long. Myles could feel through his wind mana as one of the larger bandits raised his thick sword, motioning for the others to follow him.

It was a quick decisive choice, and the bandits rallied together behind this leader. For Myles and his friends, this was the worst-case scenario. They had been hoping their opponents would come out coughing and wheezing, instead when they emerged from the smoke it was with a coordinated charge fueled by war cries.

The first few moments were chaotic. Dresden evoked a mighty fireball, launching it at the charging bandits as they pulled out the cave entrance. A solid wall of pure mana was the response, dulling most of the attack. Some of the flame still bled through, licking at commuted armor, evaporating and thinning defenses. A particularly dense gout of the remaining flame reached clear through the mana around one of the bandit’s legs. The woman fell to the ground with an anguished cry, but quickly began pulling herself to her feet.

At the same time Dresden had launched his fireball, six of the bandits evoked their own much weaker attacks. Dresden, with impressive awareness, was able to manipulate the two fireballs out of the way, but four bolts of force mana whipped past him.

One of those bolts came right for Myles, and unable to dodge, he was forced to evoke nearly a third of his pure mana to cover himself. The bandits continued their charge, and Myles was forced to snake step to the right. That step caused a blade to miss, and a man, maybe four years older than Myles staggered past him. Dropping down with a practiced motion, Myles swept the man’s leg before he could recover.

Another bandit, this one with a scraggly beard, swung his blade at a low slant from the side. Myles never would have blocked the attack if he was fighting with just his eyes. With the information from his evoked wind mana though, he was able to shift position into the iron turtle just in time to block the attack, evoking more pure mana in the process. The scraggly man wasn’t bothered, his other hand curved around, accompanied by flame mana and struck Myles in the stomach.

The heat was awful, melting his commuted mana there to nothing. Thankfully, that took most of the flame’s strength, but a crawling sensation on his skin meant some made it through. That was a lesser concern compared to the fist that followed, knocking the wind from him, and lifting him into the pure mana he had just evoked to block the man’s sword.

As he was rebounding back to the ground, Myles heard the start of a shout in Jane’s voice. “Myles! Your…”

At the same moment, something was disturbing the wind mana to his left, and he could see a shock of bright, blond hair coming at him quickly. Myles evoked more of his pure mana which he was rapidly running out of to block a thrust that stopped mere centimeters from the side of his head.

“…ears!” Jane finished.

It took Myles nearly half a second to process that, in which time, he evoked two more chunks of pure mana, rapidly draining his mana well. The first guided a second thrust from his blonde assailant to the side. The second went into a thick shield on his right aimed to block a follow up slash from the bearded man. The blade stopped again, but the man’s offhand shot forward once more, seizing around Myles’ throat. Fire mana melted the defenses around his neck, and by the time he registered Jane’s warning and pulled pure mana over his ears, the heat had chewed through most of his reserves.

A cloud of something rocked his pure mana with force, and the grip on his neck loosened. Myles pushed backwards, and then felt the expected cold, digging through his remaining wisps of pure mana in places.

The scraggly bandit fared much worse. His mouth was opened wide. When the sound mana hit, the shock of it must have collapsed his commuted mana because his beard was coated in patches of frost. Myles could see blood dripping from one of the man’s ears. Only his eyes moved, peering between Myles and the hand that had fallen unbidden to his side.

Myles moved forward partially out of instinct partially from fear-fueled anger, his body moved the right way, drawing him into the first step of the core arcaner’s way of the fist. With a twist, he brought his palm into the man’s throat, evoking lightning mana as he did so. The man’s eyes stopped moving and grew dim.

A sick feeling came over Myles, but he shoved it down. Beside him, a foot and a whole load of evoked basium mana slammed into his blonde attacker’s head, caving it in.

“Are you okay?” Jane’s voice shook like crazy.

Myles gave her a brief nod. He didn’t really feel okay, inside or out, but the fight wasn’t over. The man who Myles had knocked down earlier had been shielded from most of the shuriken’s effects and he was levering himself to his feet.

Beyond him, Dresden was fighting off three attackers of his own, including the woman who had been burned earlier. A body lay nearby—one of the bandits. Silas, Kate, and Mercy were exchanging blows with another two bandits in close quarters while Myles saw Seth being pounded from two directions by force bolts.

“You’re not using your cursed toy again.” The man, pulling himself up from the ground, kicked the shuriken construct behind him. “Let’s see how tough you are without it.”

The answer was not very, and Myles could tell the man knew that. His commuted mana was thick around him, and Myles and Jane had no answer for that. His lightning mana was spent along with the vast majority of his pure mana. Jane had most of her pure mana still, but not much they could use offensively.

The man swung his blade in front of him, and Myles retreated backwards. Jane tried to make a break around him, but the man launched a small force bolt at her, and she snake stepped away. Myles tried to snake step to the side, but the man predicted it, swinging his blade like a club, evoking enough force mana to break through what little pure mana Myles had left. He would’ve died then and there if Jane hadn’t evoked her own pure mana to his defense.

The man let out a focused growl, moving to cut Jane off again. She ducked under his attack, moving into a leg sweep, but the man wasn’t off-balance this time, and he let his commuted pure mana absorb the blow without a problem.

Another blow came down, and Jane dodged out of the way again. She wouldn’t be able to do that for long though. Myles thought over his options, desperately, but he didn’t have many. All he had was wind mana, and the few scraps of pure mana still commuting around his body.

Jane used her pure mana to divert the bandit’s blade and sent an elbow into the back of his head. This too was absorbed by commuted armor. A moment later, she took a force bolt to the leg and cried out. It was then that Myles stopped commuting the last of his pure mana, instead evoking it, not in Jane’s defense but in a thin bucket around the man’s head.

Plunged into darkness, the man frantically tore the bucket apart with force mana, but Myles was already making a dash for the shuriken construct. He barely made it in time. The man’s stride was much longer than his. He launched force bolts, but Jane poured what had to be all of her pure mana into evoking a series of barriers.

The moment he felt the wooden grip in his hand, Myles spun around, yanking the construct up in a guard. The bandit’s blade slammed into the shuriken’s, hitting with force mana behind it. Myles clutched the grip, holding on for all he was worth. The pure mana running around the construct proved sufficient and the blade was stopped.

From the harness on his chest, Myles loaded a battery into the construct, intentionally choosing the one he knew was lowest on mana. He waited a second, an eternity with sword blows raining down on him. The pure mana being commuted around the construct was his only lifeline, and with each blow, more and more of it vanished. With a squeeze, Myles moved the handle into position. More sword blows rained down, and the pure mana flickered and gave out.

Right before the final blow landed, the loudest noise Myles had ever heard rang in his ears, then he was overcome by cold. His muscles just paused. He tried to command them, to move them, but nothing happened. Across him, for the second time in as many minutes, Myles saw a bandit stunned and frozen in place centimeters away. He heard a crunch and a thud, and the bandit was gone.

It took nearly a fifteen count for Myles to start regaining control of his body. When he did, he turned to look at the rest of the fight but by then, it was already finished. All that was left was the burning brush that had somehow been kicked around the whole area, and the bodies of broken bandits.

His friends were scorched, bruised, and bleeding, but they were all alive. Myles fell to his knees.