Starbreaker

“Advances in the field of medical magic have always been at the forefront of every society that eventually reached the stars. Without the ability to heal from grievous injury, much of the experimentation necessary to master magic simply would not happen.”

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

The infirmary on Strife was one of the most visited chambers in the underground complex within the cliff-face. While most of the tunnels were bare stone carved into the solid rock, decorated only with a thin coating of the same red dust that seemed to get everywhere, the infirmary was made almost entirely of pristine white panels and tiles. The only oddity in this sterile environment was that over in the corner of the room, far from the beds, where the doctor dwelled, someone had brought in some sort of antique rug, a wooden desk, and a complex piece of steam powered machinery that apparently made coffee. Its hissing was actually what woke him up, blinking at the bright light shining down on his face from above. He looked around, but Kaya was not in the beds to either side of him, and the others were sealed off behind thin curtains.

Reaching up to his chest, Sylvas could still feel the ache from where the red sphere had struck him. A round bruise right on his breastbone. On the plus side, his face didn’t seem any the worse for wear after having its jaw knocked off. He worked his mouth open and shut a few times, feeling a strange numbness instead of pain. The beds that he could see were all occupied by other students from the same training exercise that he’d just been downed by. The Najash girl that he’d knocked out of the sky was staring directly at him from the bed opposite. She showed her teeth, which might have been a smile or a demonstration that they had all been put back into their correct place, but it seemed more like a threat. “A cheap shot.”

The mistake had been hers of course. She had put herself out in the open where anyone might have struck her down. It was just coincidence that Sylvas happened to be the first one to do so. “I see a target, I hit a target.”

She pushed herself off the bed to loom over him. “Next time, your sithrask is mine.”

The word didn’t translate, but Sylvas had a vague idea that it was a part of his anatomy that she wished to own. He knew so little about the Najashi culture that it was entirely possible that this was flirting rather than death threats, but he wasn’t sure which was more frightening. Either way, the lizard swished her tail in irritation as she left the room, almost colliding with the doctor as she entered, carrying an armful of potion bottles.

For the first time since having access to a slate and the Empyrean’s introductory course to galactic civilization, he could not immediately place the species he was face to face with. There were parts of her features that he would have said were entirely human, but her ears came to sharp points beneath the curls of her hair. A half-elf maybe? Or something else entirely that he’d never encountered in his reading. She wore white robes and a tired expression, giving him a glance before saying, “You’re awake? Good. Get out. I need the bed.”

He obeyed almost without thinking, pausing only to retrieve his jacket from where it had been hung on a hook by the bed and ask, “My friend Kaya…”

Rolling her eyes, the doctor dumped the potions in a heap on a hovering tray and picked up a slate. “Species, sex, circle?”

It took Sylvas a moment. “Dwarf, female, first circle.”

“Recruit Runemaul recovered and released.” She tapped the name on her slate, then snapped. “Now get out.”

Sylvas’ own slate had recovered from being bashed around a little, so he was able to consult with it and learn that he’d missed the only other lesson that they had scheduled for the day but given that 90% of his class had also missed it for medical reasons, the class had been dismissed anyway. Dinner was in the mess hall in about an hour. He had until then to track down his bunk, and Kaya. Hopefully not in that order.

He wished that they’d had time to cover sending spells before they made planetfall, but it seemed that he needn’t have worried. The second that he stepped out from inside of the wards around the infirmary, Kaya’s sending intercepted him. It was not a pristine white shield like the official messages from the Ardent command, but a haphazardly drawn mushroom. Sylvas sighed his relief as he touched the icon. “Shame you got your culgh kicked. I’m back in one piece. See you in the mess. If you’re up.”

That was one thing off his to-do list at least. He turned a corner to head towards the bunks and ran directly into a fist to the gut.

He doubled over. It knocked the wind right out of him. Any attempt to cast was stopped by the lack of air to speak a spell. The next punch was to the face. An uppercut that toppled him over backwards and left him sprawling. The pain hadn’t even arrived before his attacker had seized him by the front of his shirt and hauled him nose to nose with him. The dwarf from earlier. A tightly trimmed beard, a wide nose and eyes narrowed with hate. “You ever pull a stunt like that again, there isn’t going to be enough of you left for the mongrel to stitch back together.”

Sylvas didn’t mean to laugh. He really didn’t. But ever since he’d been picked up off his home-world and launched into space everything had felt wrong, alien and confusing. There was nothing familiar for him to hold onto and find his balance. But this, some petty bully with delusions of grandeur, was so familiar to him that it felt like home.

The dwarf reared back far enough for Sylvas to see his two groupies from earlier lurking behind him. “What’s so funny?”

Sylvas didn’t bother to answer him. There was no point. Not with men like this. Whatever he said, this thug wouldn’t hear him. His words would be twisted around to justify whatever treatment the bully felt was warranted. So Sylvas did exactly what he’d always done when cornered like this.

He drove his forehead into the dwarf’s nose.

The angle wasn’t the best, and he was still weak after his time in the infirmary, but there was a viscerally satisfying crunch as the already flat nose flattened out even more and blood started gushing down the dwarf’s face. He let go of Sylvas and staggered back, reeling from the blow, and Sylvas had enough time to launch himself after the dwarf before the other two could intervene.

The goal wasn’t to kill the dwarf. He was pretty sure that no matter how cutthroat the Ardent were with their students, they still wouldn’t have wanted their ranks depleted. But if he could convince the dwarf that he was willing to kill him over something so trivial, then an ambush like this probably wouldn’t happen again. He rode the other man’s body down to the dusty floor, hammering blows into his face. Keeping him dazed and confused so that he wouldn’t remember that he was about six times stronger than Sylvas and more than capable of throwing him off.

Overwhelming violence hadn’t been the response that the dwarf’s lackeys were expecting. The fiend stood by, stunned, and the elf’s expression honestly looked mostly amused. As though he didn’t want to be there anyway and this was a more interesting development than he could have hoped for.

Still, it couldn’t last forever. Sylvas was still swinging away with his fists when he felt the prickle of kinesis seizing hold of him and hoisting him off. The elf was casting it, even if he didn’t want to be. Meanwhile, the fiend had finally caught on to current events and dashed forward to help his friend back to his feet. The dwarf’s pristine white jacket was stained red down the front as his nose continued to gush blood, and despite the difference in their comparative strengths, Sylvas was pleased to see bruises already blossoming all over the man’s face. Where there weren’t bruises, his face was darkening to a deep red as fury overtook him. The fiend who had helped him up now had to restrain him from rushing at Sylvas all over again while he dangled in the air in the elf’s kinesis’ grasp.

“I’ll have you up on charges!” The dwarf bellowed. “You just assaulted a superior officer!”

The elf was watching Sylvas, watching his expression, trying to work out how he was going to react when the kinesis released. Sylvas raised an eyebrow at him, which was about all the motion he could manage while still being held, but it seemed to be enough for the grip to be released. He landed heavily back on his feet. “I don’t see anyone superior here.”

Once again, if Sylvas hadn’t been watching the elf’s face, he didn’t think that he would have seen the slight smirk that appeared there before a carefully disciplined mask of indifference was put back into place.

The dwarf swaggered forward, pulling at his bloodied jacket to show the blue patches had been replaced with black. Something Sylvas had overlooked amidst all the action. “I’m on the officer track, you’re a nobody. That means I say the word and you spend the night in the brig.”

Both the fiend and the elf wore black trimmed uniform jackets too.

“And you think you’re going to walk away unscathed? You don’t think they’ll want to know why you and your minions were waiting here to ambush me?”

The fiend was whispering frantically into the dwarf’s ear now. Low enough that Sylvas only caught snippets of it. “…really don’t want that kind of attention.”

Finally the dwarf seemed to pull himself together. Spitting blood at Sylvas feet. “Right. I tripped. We both tripped. Got it?”

The swagger was back, the superiority, Sylvas couldn’t stand it. And it wouldn’t make this problem go away. “If you beat me out there, that’s just training. But if you try something like this again, they’ll never find your body. Got it?”

The dwarf snarled, but the fiend was already nodding and dragging his friend away. “Didn’t happen, won’t happen again.”

It was clearly not the end of the matter for the petty dwarf officer, but the fiend had his head on straight, and the elf mostly seemed bemused about the whole thing. They hauled him away without any further comment.

Sylvas debated for a moment whether he should head back to the infirmary and get what little damage he’d suffered patched up, but the pain wasn’t too bad compared to what he was used to, and he couldn’t think of a decent explanation for his injuries that wouldn’t prompt a lot of unwanted questions, so he went back to looking for his bunk.