Chapter 275: The Grey City
Amarena gripped her sword.
In the time since she’d come to Isegart, she’d adopted a new blade, since her old one was presently lodged in the horn of the massive lake beast, below the frozen ice of Lost Lake, which was hardly lost, since everyone in Isegart knew where it was, but it did tend to disappear at times that weren’t summer... which Isegart would not see for a long, long time thanks to the Eye of Hell’s ash plumes, which were darkening the whole of Ayther.
Beyond the crenellations of the wall upon which they trained, a vast stretch of white spread unbroken - winter, come early because of the Eye. The sky above was clear, with the majority a semi-permanent orange and yellow, the only blue far to the south. Neither the red-black moon of Hell nor the green moon of Heaven were visible, and the darkened blue-purple far to the south indicated that it should have been night, if not for the perpetual day this close to Ayther’s axis.
"Quit cloud-watching and fight!" her instructor, a Warmancer of the Order Justiciam, the giant named Demon Breaker Halie, shouted.
The shout came from below, and Amarena sped into a forward step, throwing a backward kick into the mace-staff that came from below.
Halie popped out of the ground a moment later, or rather out of a portal just above the ground, the strange conjunctions of gravity slightly disorienting her as she landed, the portal closing between her legs.
"You should forgive me for watching for your preferred vectors," Amarena scowled. She was a demon with a smokey voice and a body covered in spines and scutes.
Halie, giant though she was, liked to attack from the air, since as an earthbound demon, Amarena was especially vulnerable from above. Trying to take advantage of the half-second Halie took to orient herself after passing through her portal, Amarena put some rage into her strike, drawing on her mavenry for added speed as she tucked her shoulder in for a tackle...
Only, she missed, as Halie put her legs together and jumped back down into a new portal, one that put her directly behind her pupil, where she laid her mace-staff across Amarena’s back.
"That’s good for today," she said, withdrawing the mace-staff from Amarena’s back and storing it in her dimensional storage.
"You need not be afraid of injuring me," Amarena scoffed.