Knights Apocalyptica

A shockwave of electricity twisted through the air, its violet glow lighting the space around it, leaving a faint scent of burning ozone as it snapped into a rock. Not more than a split second later, the rock shattered into a rain of dust and gravel. Garin winced. But the caster of the spell, Colin, only scowled at his results.

Erec rolled his shoulders, appreciating the destruction, but his gaze traveled to the actual target. A foot away was yet another rocky outcropping. Only, this one had a bottle on top of it. A bottle that was still perfectly intact; the missed target.

“Damn it all,” Colin complained.

“It was close,” Erec said; magic was difficult to control. And that wasn’t just because he sucked at it. Those forced lessons in the Academy about glyphwork had taught him about the difficulty. Every line in a glyph informed the spell. It constructed how the lightning strike was formed; it directed how it would flow through the air; and the caster had to carefully regulate the channeled mana inside of it to prevent it from exploding in their hands.

Even worse than that, subtle differences in the environment could alter a spell. But that wasn’t applicable to most of the simple glyph work taught to students, which was made to be robust and not need that type of specification.

This kind of magic was not the same. Lightning-based magic in particular was notoriously difficult to master and aim. Given how far his friend had come… well, Erec wasn’t surprised he’d earned the mantle of Kay; but yeah. Hitting a target about a hundred and fifty yards away with a spell like that? He was shocked that Colin even got as close as he did.

“Are you sure that you don’t want to try this?” Garin asked, slipping a rifle off his shoulder. “It’s your bachelor party after all. If all you wanted to do was head out into the barren wasteland and kill time destroying stuff, might as well mix it up.”

Erec gave the weapon a critical look; it was a Pendragon armament. And this was the first day he'd seen his friend walking around with it. The sight of a Knight with a weapon like that still rubbed him the wrong way; after so long growing up with it being forbidden by the church, it left him with an odd feeling in his gut. Even if he hated those red-robed bastards, he still couldn’t fully put the feeling away.

"I will not lower myself to use such a barbaric weapon. It's obvious you're itching to show it off; so fine, I'll allow you to take a shot while I recover so we may mock its inaccuracy. Bah. To think you'd resort to such a tool over a blade or magic. Even Tin Can's axe had more nobility," Colin complained and sat down on the dirt below. Not that there was much more than dirt and rocks out here. They were a good mile from the farms of the Kingdom; much of the land inside the Kingdom's wall was still wasteland, and this patch was no exception, thankfully.