Starbreaker

“Discipline within the Ardent is a matter administered to by the first superior officer to the offending party, escalating to the next in rank only in marginal cases. Common procedures include confinement to the campus, confinement to the brig, removal of privileges, demotion, expulsion and execution. Summarily dispatched as needed.”

—Keeping the Peace Among the Peacekeepers, Gorgan Wartback

Despite his hard work, the truth was that Sylvas had no idea how many more eidolons they were really facing. There could still have been any number of Drifters on the ground, charging along like the first armored centipede they’d encountered, and the swarms of Chargers seemed to be endless. Combined with the limited visibility now that the storm had washed over them, the battle could have already been over without them knowing it, or they could have still had days of foes to face.

He tried to tell himself that the Instructors wouldn’t have sent them out here to face such an overwhelming force, but all of his experiences with the Ardent so far seemed to suggest otherwise. They’d send them out to face an impossible enemy, just to see how long it took them to fail, then rank them on who’d been the last one standing, assuming there were survivors.

Within the storm, Bortan’s orders finally made some degree of sense. There was no time now for clever tricks, no time for anything except to react. The great red jagged blade of a Charger came into view for only a fraction of a second before an icicle from Bortan’s fingertip sliced into it and pinned it to the ground. When another loomed large behind Gharia, Sylvas cast his own arcane arrow on instinct, clipping it off course to crash blade first between them and their officer.

It was difficult to tell in the chaos, but he suspected that she winked at him.

Then she was casting again, flinging out those neon pink bubbles once more. They vanished into the cloud, sizzling as they went, but the distinctive sound of their detonations came soon after as they made contact with the enemy. Or at least Sylvas hoped it was the enemy and nobody had wandered out of position.

There wasn’t much time to worry about it though, not when there were still more of the eidolons coming.

In better circumstances, Sylvas would have relied on his ears for guidance, listening for the approach of enemies when his eyes didn’t help, but out there on the field of battle, even discounting the steady shriek of the wind within the storm, it was impossible to hear anything over the sounds of magic. Spells detonated loud and close. Crackling lightning tore through the storm, briefly illuminating oncoming enemies as shadows before leaving them all blinking away the afterimages.

Sylvas cast and cast again, ending up back to back with Gharia, with Bortan lost from sight behind the fallen eidolon between them. As a Charger came into sight he’d knock it down, making the terrain just that little harder for the next one to surmount, raising them up as they clambered over the bodies of their dead so that their legs, their weakest point, were directly in his line of fire.

All he could do was cast, all he could taste was blood in his mouth. Iron from the air, or some channel in his body rupturing, he could not guess. Clearmind took away his distractions, but it did nothing to accelerate his responses. Which meant he didn’t have attention to spare for speculation. He cast, and he cast, until there was a veritable wall of dead eidolons all around them, and still they came on. Gharia dropped to her knees, trying to meditate in the midst of the chaos, and Sylvas had to turn then to fire over her head, covering both sides of their little fortress of corpses alone while Bortan handled the front point where the worst of the charge must have been hitting.

The only good thing in all of this was that the moment that the eidolons were aware of the recruits they went for them. There was no Charger attempting to skirt by and head for home base, not with prey available here.

The night could have gone on for minutes or hours, and Sylvas, so lost in the fighting, would never have been able to recall which, but slowly the storm began to clear, the thick red dust that had been thrown up became finer and finer, until at last he could make out the next set of recruits along, surrounded by their own tally of the dead. Looking to the other side, he could make out three dwarves working together in harmony, one raising fortifications of stone while their officer stood atop a pillar, blasting fire down into every Charger that still had enough life left in it to twitch.

“I think it’s over…” His tongue felt swollen and sluggish in his mouth after casting for so long and taking in so much dust. Gharia had returned to the fighting, but the showy spreads of glowing orbs that she’d been casting before had become much less frequent, and the majority of the little specks of light had faded away before they made contact with anything at all.

“Looks like it.” She staggered over to the downed Charger where it lay in amongst them, and planted one boot on the flat side of its bladed body to hoist herself higher. “Alright, smooth-skin?”

“I do have other features, you know.” Sylvas was surprised to breathe a sigh of relief when he heard the other man’s voice. He hadn’t felt any particular attachment to the officer they’d been assigned to but he supposed that in the face of a monstrous enemy, it was hardly surprising.

Bortan rounded the corpse to get a proper look at Sylvas for the first time since the fighting began. “What was that with your arm?”

Sylvas didn’t have a ready answer for him, but he attempted some sort of explanation all the same. “My embodiment…”

“Sigil just does that when he casts.” Gharia gave Sylvas a sly smile as she cut him off. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Sigil.” Bortan chuckled. “Right.”

They made their way back across the dusty fields of Strife at a much more reasonable pace. The temperature began to climb as the suns approached the horizon, and the missing arm from Sylvas jacket soon became a minor blessing, even if he did have to keep on wiping crystalized salt from his sweat off the scars that still felt tender.

Gharia didn’t ask him any questions even if she probably had them, and it was already obvious to Sylvas that telling things to officers was not in his best interest after the brief interactions that they’d had so far. He’d have to thank the lizard-woman for covering for him once they had some privacy.

Casting his gaze sideways, Sylvas could see that the three dwarves that had been manning the next station along were Kaya, their friend from the mess hall and that their officer was Hammerheart. The dark-haired dwarf strode ahead of the two other recruits sullenly, but Kaya was ready with a wave, and the other dwarf, whose name Sylvas never caught, gave him a nod when he noticed him. To their other side was a human officer that Sylvas didn’t know, the fiend who had been whispering in his ear and another human recruit who looked a lot worse for wear, stained with red dirt all across the white of his uniform and nursing a shoulder that looked to have been dislocated, judging by the way it dangled.

As they finally passed over the ward-line around the base, it felt like a weight had lifted from Sylvas shoulders. As though he hadn’t really believed that it was over until then.

Vaelith stood waiting for them, looking entirely unbothered by proceedings, as if nothing had happened at all and they hadn’t just spent half the night fighting for their lives. As they crossed the line of the wards, white shields began to manifest all around them. Sendings from their instructors. Gharia brushed her claws across the one that had appeared before her and nodded along to whatever was being said as she proceeded to turn on her heel and make her way towards the cliff-face. Bortan did much the same heading towards the officer’s bunks. Relieved to finally get a chance to use his own bunk, Sylvas touched his shield.

“Recruit Vail, report to Instructors Vaelith and Fahred for debriefing.”

Sylvas frowned. Nobody else seemed to have to go to the instructor, they were all heading off for some well-deserved rest. Kaya and the other dwarf were caught up in some sort of roaring argument in their own tongue, which Sylvas was starting to think was the dwarf version of flirting. Regardless, they too headed off, leaving him to plod over to the Instructors alone.

Fahred teleported into place beside Vaelith as Sylvas approached, and both of them turned their gaze his way. The scrutiny was uncomfortable, but he guessed that this was something to do with whatever his scars had done on the field. There was no point in worrying about it now.

There was an odd tension between the two instructors as Sylvas closed the distance, neither one of them looking at each other, but both simmering away. It was more obvious in Vaelith, who constantly looked furious anyway, while Fahred, for all his over-the-top affectations normally had a certain calm about him. He fidgeted now. It was Vaelith who gave Sylvas some greeting, “Welcome to Strife, recruit. I am pleased to see that despite this exercise being something of a surprise, you treated it with the respect that the task deserved.”

Sylvas opened his mouth to thank her for the kind words, but Fahred was too impatient for niceties. “Yes, yes, that wonderful do or die attitude the Ardent are so obsessed with. Enough about that, tell me Vail, what was that spell that you used?”

Sylvas wasn’t sure how to answer. He’d known that the magic that he’d learned back on Croesia differed wildly from that which was taught here, but he hadn’t expected any one of his spells to be worthy of comment or ridicule. “I used several spells, sir. Which one do you mean?”

“Oh good, he’s sassy.” Fahred muttered to himself before snapping, “The spell that you used to pull the eidolons out of the sky. Obviously.”

Sylvas blinked. “Kinesis?”

“Kinesis.” Vaelith repeated back, as if unsure she had heard him correctly.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Kinesis is a minor cantrip for picking up your laundry, not a spell that can entirely change the direction of a battle. You use it when you’ve dropped a pen. Not to drop an eidolon.” There was an edge to Fahred’s voice that Sylvas didn’t recognize, something slow but inevitable like the turning of the tides. “So pretty pretty please tell us the actual spell that you used, and how you used it as a first circle mage without completely draining yourself to death.”

“I have no reason to lie to you sir, it was kinesis,” Sylvas had no idea what all the excitement was about. Yes, there had been a danger that he’d tap out his mana reserves if it weren’t for the new supply that he’d inexplicably been drawing, but apart from that, everything went perfectly according to plan. “I just adjusted the parameters a little.”

“Adjusted the… Vail, that is spell-craft.” Fahred was shouting now, loud enough that the other recruits at the tail end of the march home were glancing over to see who was getting read the riot act. “That is the kind of work that wizards do, mages of the fifth circle with a lifetime of experience and theory under their belts, not first circle trainees from beyond the outer edges of known space… do you have even the faintest inkling of how dangerous what you just did actually was? You could have killed yourself. You could have killed everyone around you.”

Sylvas had known that there was a danger involved in adjusting the spell like that, but he had felt that he had a good enough grasp on the fundamentals of such a simple spell that he could achieve the results he wanted safely. And even if he hadn’t had that confidence, he would have committed to casting the spell all the same. “The eidolons were going to get through, sir.”

For a moment it seemed that Fahred was at a loss for words. He looked to Vaelith, who shrugged one shoulder almost imperceptibly, then back to Sylvas. His water-slicked brows drew down. “You clearly cannot be trusted to make rational decisions, I’m going to recommend your immediate expulsion from the training program.”

Sylvas stomach dropped.

“And I’m going to put you up for a commendation.” The elf piped up from behind Fahred.

The instructor spun on the spot to gawk at his coworker instead of Syvlas, which was something of a relief. “Vaelith?! You have got to be joking, do you have any idea…”

“How dangerous eidolons are? Yes, I’ve got a century of dead friends to remind me.” She nodded at Sylvas with something like a smile playing over her thinned lips. “This recruit did what every one of the Ardent should. He took the enemy seriously.”

“If his little ‘adjustment’ had gone wrong he would have died, he would have killed those around him, the risk that he took...”

“Outside your ivory tower, on the battlefield, things aren’t clean. We take risks.” Vaelith cut him off.

Fahred crossed his arms. His robes lapping up around his legs as though storm-tossed. “I am summoning Aurea. We will see what she thinks of this.”

Vaelith did not need to cross her own arms to look defiant, the green spirit wolves growling at her sides conveyed her feelings well. “Do it.”