Out of Control (4)
A shrieking gale tore across the field. Razor shards of magically wrought ice ground against everything they touched, chewing steel and flesh alike into white powder.
For tens of seconds the ice storm raged, then spent itself in a last, exhausted breath. In its wake, nothing remained but a thin, futile fall of frost.
And beneath that frost, the Sword Master stirred.
She coughed, a wet, wrenching sound, and a great spray of blood burst from the Eastern Knight-Commander's lips.
That final Blizzard had been too much even for a Sword Master. Somewhere in the act of holding it off, her mana circulation had snarled, and the internal damage looked grave.
From the air, the Vice Master of the Blue Magic Tower descended and settled at the Knight-Commander's side. He drew something from his robes and tore it open. A potion, almost certainly.
"Fire Javelin!"
⟨ Fire Javelin ⟩
The lance of flame streaked in and burst. The unknown barrier still wrapping the Vice Master held firm.
No—if anything, the radius looks bigger than before.
Cover for the Eastern Knight-Commander, no doubt.
A crisis? …No. This is an opening.
"Dragoon Unit! All hands, open fire!"
"Eh? All of a sudden, sir?"
That was Bruno. And he had a point. Some of them had been so busy dodging the Blizzard they hadn't even kept hold of their horses. More than a few had failed to get clear at all, and now lay insensible from their wounds.
"It's now or never! Shoot, damn it! If you haven't got an Altar Cannon, dump your own mana on them!"
"Y-yes, sir!"
What followed was a mad, howling barrage. Those who still had a Saddle-type Altar Cannon poured fire through it. Those who'd lost theirs, myself included, simply hurled Fire Balls with their bare hands.
Chunk by chunk, the Vice Master's mana was being shaved away. It looked ready to bottom out.
They'd barely finished a large-scale working before this fight even started, and then they kept stacking high-grade spells on top of that.
Now they had someone they had to protect, and nowhere to run. If we could force a decision before the Sword Master recovered completely—
A sudden detonation of mana erupted from the point of our barrage. A pillar of light, painfully, piercingly bright, unfurled and burned every spell in its path to nothing.
No. That isn't a simple mana burst—
A second pillar flared. The Sword Master had released her hold on her Aura Blade and let it explode.
Damn it. The thing was compressed to an insane density to begin with, so just dropping the control and dumping it raw is enough to hit this hard?
It was a technique that called to mind a certain famous King of Knights from Britain. The yield wouldn't have compared, of course—but still.
That's looking like a solid 5th or 6th Circle working, at least.
Fortunate that she'd used it defensively. Aimed at a person, it would have unmade them on contact, standing there one moment and dust the next.
That overwhelming discharge swept the field, and the fireballs we'd thrown died as if they'd never been. Everything we flung afterward met the same fate, snuffed against the lingering release, utterly ineffectual.
Slowly the light thinned, and the one who had loosed her Aura came into view.
She coughed, hacked, and spat a wad of bloody phlegm onto the ground.
She looks better than she did right after the Blizzard, but the internal damage still hasn't healed.
That last discharge had probably set her recovery back as well. The Eastern Knight-Commander planted her sword like a cane and barely kept her feet. Burns, frostbite, and a lattice of lesser cuts mapped her body, and the armor she wore was in tatters.
And yet—perhaps because it was a Knight-Commander's plate. The armor, some kind of artifact, was already trying to knit itself even in that wrecked state, a faint wash of mana light seeping through the rents as it slowly repaired.
It'll still be a long time before it's whole again.
The enemy was not fully recovered. I had to decide, fast and carefully, whether we could land a finishing blow.
I swept the field. Of the forty Dragoons we'd started with, maybe twenty were still standing. Some had been caught in the first Blizzard and ground so thoroughly there wasn't even a corpse to find. Most of the rest had emptied themselves spraying magic without an Altar Cannon and were down from mana exhaustion.
The twenty we have left are out of magic stones, too.
That was the end of the Altar Cannons. From here on, everyone would be casting on their own mana alone. Aside from me, they were all 3rd Circle Mages. A drawn-out fight was as impossible for us as for them.
We haven't got the mana for a long engagement.
That went for me as well. The aerial duel with the Vice Master had already taken a bite, and the last evasive burst I'd used to outrun the Blizzard had cost me dearly—I'd poured everything into speed. Then I'd been dumping spells without an Altar Cannon on top of that. My own well wouldn't last much longer.
I led by example and started casting again.
"Hem them in however you can! And hit them however you can!"
"Easy for you to say, isn't it?"
Bruno grumbled, but he put his heels in and started circling the Sword Master in a tight loop. The others still mounted fell in behind him.
The Eastern Knight-Commander, perhaps looking for a way to break the ring, lunged at the troopers who weren't on horseback. She staggered—and still came on as fast as an ordinary knight at a full run. Wounded, slowed, and she was still matching a horse at the gallop.
"Damn it! Fire Ball!"
The man she'd marked threw magic until the last instant. She slipped it as if it were nothing and took his head off, then drove toward the next target.
"Eat this!"
Bruno's shout, and dozens of Fire Balls came screaming in, slamming dead onto her line of advance and forcing her to stop. She bled the impacts off with her Aura Blade, the kind of swordwork that sat at the absolute peak of the craft, and took no real harm.
But she'd stopped. That alone was enough.
The 5th Circle spell I'd been holding finished.
"Blaze Shot!"
⟨ Blaze Shot ⟩
The car-sized sphere of concentrated flame leapt straight at the Eastern Knight-Commander. Spells she'd been flicking aside without effort; a 5th Circle working in the teeth of her was another matter. She couldn't shed it. The two forces locked.
With her specialty—deflection—sealed, I started casting a Fire Javelin aimed at her head—
An ice spear came in from my blind side and punched through my left arm. The aim went to pieces.
"Don't get careless, young man."
The Vice Master's work.
I screamed. My left arm was hanging by a thread, all but torn away, and the sound tore out of me on its own.
Ghk—damn it! Wasn't she already out of mana?
I forced my pain-blurred eyes open and looked at him. The staff in his hand jumped out at me.
Hell. He's been drawing mana through that thing the same way we do with an Altar Cannon.
I'd written him off, assuming he'd burned himself dry covering the Knight-Commander, and bumped him down the list. That complacency had just come back as a bone-deep mistake.
Because I was hit, the follow-up never landed. The Eastern Knight-Commander finished her contest with the Blaze Shot and broke free.
Then she was moving, a blur, carving through every Dragoon in sight without a shred of mercy. I tried to get a bead on her, to stop it somehow. It was close to impossible. Speed was one problem; after taking the Blaze Shot she'd been watching me the entire time, and she never once gave me a flank.
The only thing that might still check her is—
The world went black.
Damn it. Mana exhaustion already?
The dizziness of an empty well. A mistake I would never have made under ordinary circumstances—but the fight had been moving too fast, and the fatal error had slipped out anyway.
Losing the Vice Master's movement. This burnout. Ha. Damn it. So this is as far as it goes.
I had hit the wall. The Dragoon Unit that had numbered forty was down to a little over ten, and even those the Sword Master was cutting apart as fast as she could reach them.
Then her blade turned toward me.
The composure she'd worn at the start was gone. What looked out of her face now was pure killing intent—nothing in it but the will to erase me.
She came on staggering and still terribly fast, and it felt like a timer counting down whatever life I had left. Each step she closed, each yard she ate, I felt the reaper arriving for me, clear as a hand on the throat.
And then the Aura Blade filled my vision—