Aether Engineering

Chapter 74

Bandit Camp

The Voidlands near Emanfall

When Myles fell to his knees, he shut down. His stomach hurt badly every time he shifted, but he couldn’t bring himself to check on the burns. Frost still lay in patches on his skin, but he didn’t have the energy to find warmth. His eyes just bored into the ground, with vaguely defined thoughts bouncing around his head, each carrying emotion, but no substance.

“Dead.” Myles heard from somewhere, and he managed to lift his head up. Dresden kneeled down next to another bandit, a young man with distinct amber—almost yellow eyes, checking for a heartbeat. “Dead.”

Dresden made his way around what was until recently a battlefield. The pulse of each bandit was checked and every time, there came the pronouncement of “dead.” Myles didn’t track Dresden’s progress with his eyes, but he could still tell the exact moment when he kneeled down next to the man with the scraggly beard. “Dead.”

Myles sank deeper into himself; his thoughts grew more violent. Guilt wracked him; his own thoughts berated him.

Eventually, Myles was brought back around by someone placing a hand on his shoulder. “Show me.” Kate commanded.

Myles pulled his ruined tunic up, exposing his stomach.

“It could be worse.” Kate gave a breath of relief, “Silas pass me the burn ointment?”

Myles hadn’t even noticed his best friend standing there, trailing behind Kate with the pack that held all of their medical supplies. “Are you two alright?” The words left Myles’ mouth without him thinking.

“Better than you are. They just rushed you…” Silas choked up a little. “Thank goodness you took that onslaught so well.”

“It could have been worse,” Kate said, her face fierce as she spread ointment across Myles’ burns “, but it’s not good. If Jane was even a tiny fraction of a second late in responding, your burns would have been worse than I could do anything for.” She patted him on the back. “I have no idea how bad that frost is for you, but it can’t be good.”

Myles nodded. “I’ll try to get warm then.”

Near the cliffside, Jane and Mercy had started a little fire. Seth sat propped against the rock, his expression pained. A thick bandage was wrapped around the two fingers on his right hand. As Myles approached, he waved it gently. “Messed up my hand.”

From across the clearing, Kate called out. “Your finger’s broken! You won’t be using that hand for at least a month.”

Seth grimaced as he put weight on his left leg, but he stood up, only for Mercy to press him back down. “Take a minute.”

Myles had to agree. Seth was covered in bruises, and his commuted armor was effectively gone. Not that any of their group had much mana left.

Myles collapsed there by the fire, all of his dormmates eventually joining around. At one point, Dresden took a flare, placed it on the ground and launched it straight into the air. A line of green stretched from the ground into the sky. Mission success. It didn’t feel like they had been successful to Myles.

Dresden wandered away a distance, and shortly after, there came the loud sounds of rock breaking. He’s digging a grave, Myles thought, at least we can do that.

The process went quickly. It wasn’t a large grave, or a nice one, but at least it was something. Myles pitched in, working with Silas to gently move the bodies one by one, placing them into the ground. When they were all neatly ordered, Dresden gave their whole group a nod and dropped an enormous slab of stone on top. “Well, that’s that.”

“What about their final wills, should there not be vows made.” The words burst from Myles unbidden, and he knew they were wrong before they left his mouth. How could they know the final wills of these people, they didn’t know them. All he knew was that they had fought for their lives, but that will, he and his friends had been forced to deny. If they hadn’t Myles told himself, there would have been more graves to dig in Emanfall. It didn’t make things feel better.

Myles felt Dresden’s arm wrap around his shoulder briefly. “I’m proud of you.” Dresden said. “All of you. Something like this is never easy, but what you did had to be done.”

The group filtered back to the campfire, and they watched green flares appear one after the other, each seeming a distance away.

“There should be one more.” Dresden murmured.

They waited and waited, but no flare came. Then, nearly two-thirds of an hour after their own flare had been sent up, a line of blue arced through the air from the east. It came towards them, and the whole group watched as its arc finished just north of them.

Dresden began looking around before Myles could process what the blue flare meant. It came to him as he felt Dresden’s appraising gaze roll over their group. A blue flare meant a request for reinforcements.

“We’re in good enough shape.” Dresden turned to the dormmates who were still reeling from their experience, bearing wounds, and still recovering the last of their mana. “Barely.”

Once the decision was made, they moved quickly. Myles had his harness back on in under a minute, and he clipped the shuriken construct to it. Kate and Silas were equipped with the two spear constructs since Seth could no longer wield one with his broken finger. Both of the constructs had been used in the earlier battle.

As they ran, Myles and Jane worked to replenish the spears, moving mana from their remaining batteries into them. It was a balancing act. They kept two batteries each fully charged. If they were fighting more bandits, they would need all of their constructs operational.

The spears themselves had much less mana than they would have liked, but there was only so much they could do. There was only so much mana to go around.

They reached the point where the flare’s trail had ended without incident, and there was nothing there. The whole group went tense. Myles looked around them for places someone could hide, but they were on a flat sheet of rock, nothing around them. His wind mana picked nothing up—wait that wasn’t true. He felt something, and it felt like it was materializing from nowhere.

“We’re not alone.” Dresden called and the whole group turned to the west. Some twenty yards away, the shape of a human figure was slowly coming into visibility.

From Myles’ right, Jane whispered in his ear. “I really don’t like arcaner’s that use light mana.”

Myles nodded, but his head froze when he recognized the form in front of him, and his hand went to the handle of the shuriken construct. Two swords hung from the man’s belt, well crafted, and made in s distinct style. Looking up, instead of a face, there was a mask, eerily familiar to Rufus Lance’s, but this was not the minister of education checking on how his operation was going, this was the Ivory Force, enforcer for a criminal organization, and more recently murderer.

The man held up his hands. “I’m not here as your enemy. I came to provide my sword arm because to be frank, where you’re going, you’ll need it.”

Dresden practically snarled at him and reached for the curved blade at his side. “What do you know!” Myles pulled the shuriken construct clear of his harness.

“Wait!”

The voice cut through the situation, and as one, the dormmates paused, accustomed to listening to that voice in training. All eyes moved to the east where a familiar figure was moving towards them. At first, Myles thought Primrose had chosen to wear some bizarre fashion because her clothes were dyed in red and purple. A moment later he realized it was all blood. “This isn’t the time to turn down assistance, no matter what kind of scum it’s offered from.”

“What happened?” Dresden asked.

Primrose cursed at her feet. “I was with Reah as planned. We took out the bandits, and as we expected, old man Paulo came out to play. We were ready for him, but not the small army of goblins he brought with him.”

Myles was taken aback. The white tiger. That was the nickname he’d heard. He knew she was a former imperial aurora, just like Paulo, and beneath Hydrabridge, he’d seen how powerful, how skilled of an arcaner he was, but that goblin had terrified Myles. The pressure had been so much. There was no possible way all of that purple blood had come from…

“I chewed through them, but Paulo took something from his pocket, and Reah just collapsed.” Primrose looked at Dresden square in the eyes. “I would swear he had a clipping from that bloody tree. By the time I’d put the children out of their misery, he was running off this way.”

“You’ve been too soft.” The ivory force growled from behind his mask. “I despise taking lives, but I do it when it’s needed. Your ‘Reah’ has been a threat to the whole continent for years. Now the tree wants its own emissary. I don’t need to tell you why we can’t have another Salen, no matter the cost, do I? Are you prepared to get your hands dirty, and do what’s necessary?”

“Absolutely not!” Myles pushed into the conversation. He didn’t understand exactly what was going on—what children Primrose had put out of their misery, but he wasn’t just going to sit by as a criminal tried to convince someone he admired to kill his friend.

“The boy’s right.” A new man, decked out in light metal armor coated with runes, sprinted towards them breathing hard. After a moment Myles realized he recognized him as the paladin they had run into in Maston. Had he been with one of the other groups? “If we kill the girl, then we would be committing a travesty.”

Primrose raised her head to look at the new arrival. “If the church is willing to help with this, I won’t complain, but we have to move now. We’ll take sin’s mine, and…we’ll do what we have to.”

With that she took off running and left everyone to follow after.