Book 3 Chapter 48: The Survivors
Book 3 Chapter 48: The Survivors
++There was damage to both sides during the refinery assault, and in theory we could have mounted another attack before Vornholt recovered her defences. It was fear of her, in light of what we saw—or didn’t see—at the end there that stayed our hand.++
- Commentary by Maria Voret. 1,938 A.E.
Things had degenerated further by the time I returned to watch the fighting, and it was clear that my own side, the defenders, would not have held out for more than a few more minutes. From there, the refinery would have perished the moment a Voret magician came close enough to start bombarding it, and been left beyond repair as soon as a dozen did.
I could not have that, obviously. Far too much of my time and energy had gone into setting the place up, and I was just starting to finish paying off my debts.
I directed the chimera at the rear of the enemy, trusting in its sheer speed to keep it obscured. That was the one, critically good thing about having it so heavily engorged on physical power. Warriors were faster than magicians, Demigods faster than warriors, and this chimera, for the brief window it would continue to exist, was faster than a Demigod.
Most of them, at least.
Trailing molten flesh behind it, the thing moved so swiftly that it seemed to simply disappear with each bound before briefly flicking back into existence dozens of feet ahead. I was watching it directly with a wide angle of view and prior knowledge as to where it would go, and even I could barely track its movements.
I was increasingly confident that there would be no security problems from witnesses among the confused, mid-combat mass of men it was attacking.
The ground shook as it struck the enemy’s flank and simply burst through, grinding human bodies to paste, digging trenches in the terrain just with movements and spraying blood high into the air. It was already half way into the rows of bodies by the time anyone seemed to realise they were being attacked anew, and by the time gunshots started flying inwards, aimed always in the wake of the monster rather than directly at it, I fancied that hundreds had already fallen.
I had barely followed the chimera’s path along the terrain, and now that it was locked in combat I simply lost it entirely. I could not even vaguely follow its position. At best I had it approximately, down to the nearest thousand square yards, by looking for where the great shockwaves ripping apart the air were at their most intense. They weakened by the moment.
I realised the chimera was still eating, still devouring humans and absorbing their power. Warriors and magicians, tiny, almost imperceptible strain compared to the great mass of divine energy now tearing it aside from within, but from the moment it ate Nu’chista this creature’s lifespan had plummeted to little more than minutes, and every second it lost from that was keenly felt.
In the end, my enemies never did manage to kill it. It simply died on its own, falling apart and melting into a bubbling, churning, hissing puddle so rife with arcane energies that I saw magicians falling back from it and gushing blood from their noses at the strain of being in its very presence.
By then, I had already flown back over to my own forces and drifted down to land beside them. Sethira shortly found me and reunited. She was dirty. Caked in blood, some of it surely her own, and looking more exhausted than I had ever seen her before. But she was smiling.
“That went quite well,” she beamed.
I kept my gaze aimed at her, letting my displeasure bleed across and waiting to see how she would react.
Sethira was weaker than me. The gap had been smaller when we met than it was now, and it would continue to grow, sliver by sliver, for the rest of our new existences. That was the gift of talent. She was also more exhausted than me, and if we both came to blows I knew neither of us had any doubt about what the outcome would be.
It was, I had to admit, admirable how steady her face was in spite of that.
“We will discuss your failure later,” I told her evenly. “We have work to do now.”
Sethira smiled wider. “Right. The warriors?”
Warriors were, after all, faster than magicians. The most powerful among my enemies would be the ones most equipped to notice what was truly happening when the chimera attacked.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
The most powerful among my enemies, and the most powerful among my allies. I would have to pay Qaigor and my father a visit later to see what they knew and…decide how to deal with that.
For the time being, I had some cleaning up to do.
***
Agrian lay on the cold dirt and felt his lungs heaving inside him. He felt his left leg burning with pain, a great forked gouge down one side where a warrior’s blade had caught it and cut nearly to the bone. Was he dying?
Good.
He closed his eyes. His right leg, that didn’t hurt at all. A brief look down told him why; the limb was completely gone. He’d caught some magic attack from a direction he wasn’t facing and by the time he realised, he had three quarters his previous amount of limbs. If he lived, he’d live as a cripple.
Somehow, as if it were activated by that bloody thought, his leg hurt again and Agrian was left to lean back writhing and groaning. There was apparently no pain like missing limb pain. He’d seen it in enough men over the years, now he was feeling it.
Not for much longer.
Elizabeth, I… Even in his own thoughts, he couldn’t formulate the words. He…what? Was sorry? Loved her? Wished he’d been different?
He wasn’t stupid, he’d seen the slow delight cracking through for all those years after he stopped hitting her. He’d felt the lack of her fear, and its absence had made him realise what a dark cloud had always hung over them before. What he’d been doing to her.
The damned leg flared up again, and Agrian snarled out some deep animal noise that came from the same place all that old nastiness once had. How much longer would this fucking body of his cling onto life? That was what people didn’t understand about warriors, the sheer tenacity of their corpus. Even now Agrian’s lungs, his heart and organs, they were all working with superhuman exertion to hold him together, to make do with the dwindling dregs of oxygen in his leaking blood, to sustain him through the ruination he’d suffered.
It was all too little to save him, and just enough to drag out his end.
Agrian felt strong hands on him and looked up. Oh Gods, an Estalian. He felt the bile rising as he saw that they bore the jewellery of a damned magician as well.
“Off me,” he growled weakly. “Fucking…sand…fuck…” he raised his arms to try and force their grip away, and to his utter horror he found that he was very slightly weaker. Just operating his fingers took almost all of his will, the arms attached to them? That wasn’t happening.
“Going to…to kill me you…fucking…cunt.” Agrian had to admit, his wit was somewhat diminished right now on account of the blood loss. Unfortunately his brain, at least the conscious parts, lacked the superhuman endurance of the rest of him.
All he could do now was wait for the end. It was fitting, he had to admit. He’d fought and killed in Estalia, now, it seemed, he’d get killed by an Estalian. Served him right for being caught in a moment of weakness he supposed, that was just sloppy.
But how would they do it? Magic would be ideal, but magicians could be stingy about using it. He did hope they didn’t try to cut his throat, they’d be sawing away at it for minutes on end.
“Hurry the fuck…what…what are you doing?” Agrian felt something pressing at him, and it was certainly magical, but the intense, supernatural influence didn’t seem to be in any way hurting him.
No, it was the opposite. The pain was subsiding from his body, the weakness dwindling. It wasn’t that he was fully recovering, far from it. More like he was healing an hour for every second that passed, being repaired to the very greatest extent his body could have managed on its own.
And that was already pretty damned far itself, as a warrior of the Third Order.
Still, there was apparently a lot of healing to be done. By the time Agrian’s wounds felt even one quarter receding, the magician cut off their power and leaned back, now glistening with sweat. Agrian was easily able to sit up under his own strength, feeling like he could wield perhaps a full twentieth of his normal physical power rather than the fiftieth he’d been stuck with before.
“You…saved me,” he croaked.
The magician smiled. Agrian wondered for a moment if they spoke common, but they answered that question by responding in his tongue a moment later.
“Not by choice, murderer,” they coughed.
Agrian didn’t really have the strength in him to argue. He just lay back and felt hollow.
“You know that leg isn’t coming back?” the magician asked him. He bristled. Being reminded of that was the only thing he’d felt so far that registered more strongly than the new emptiness.
“Yes, damn it,” Agrian snarled. There were magicians who could regrow severed or destroyed limbs, and there were magicians who could heal people wounded by great magic. Magicians who could regrow a limb destroyed by great magic, though, were as rare as ones who could fly. Perhaps rarer. Agrian would never walk or fight again.
He glanced over to find the Estalian magician grinning. Even that didn’t draw a reaction out of him.
Baron Agrian Vornholt; failed husband, failed father, failed warrior, cripple, imbecile, force of destruction for all he cared about and all he loved, lay there on the sodden sands of his daughter’s refinery and wished he could just have been killed in the fighting. At least that would’ve made for a good fucking story.