Starbreaker

“Mobility, mana retention and spell selection are the key components of magical combat. Of the three, the most important is mobility because it allows for better mana retention by virtue of not needing to counter opponents spells. Mobility also matters because it informs the spell selection at your disposal. The more positions you can place yourself in, the more targets you can acquire and the wider a variety of spells you can bring to bear.”

—Magical Combat Manual 1, Haxan Shaelar

 

“The key components of magical combat are?” Instructor Shaelar pointed at Sylvas.

He rattled them off by rote. “Spell selection, mana retention and mobility.”

“And of the three the most important is?” She pressed him.

“Mobility.”

Her quicksilver eyes narrowed. “Because?”

“Because you aren’t wasting mana countering spells that aren’t going to hit you.” He wasn’t trying to show off, but neither was he going to pretend that his newly perfected memory was failing him just to seem more likeable.

“And?” Shaelar paused in her pacing about the room.

“Your positioning on the battlefield informs the spell selection at your disposal.”

She clapped her hands together, making everything metal in the room chime in concordance. “Correct on all counts, Recruit Vail. You may give yourself a firm pat on the back for not falling entirely behind during your imprisonment.”

There was some soft laughter from among the other recruits in the hall, but not as much as Sylvas might have expected. It seemed that he wasn’t entirely loathed despite Hammerheart’s best efforts to spread rumors about him. Sylvas knew that most of the laughter had come from the section of the room where the officers sat, specifically from the region surrounding Hammerheart himself. He wasn’t going to let it get to him. The immaturity was all that really troubled him. He would have rather dealt with an assassination attempt, because at least he knew how to resolve that situation.

The basics that this class covered had also been more thoroughly addressed in the textbook that Instructor Shaelar was teaching them from, a copy of which had been in the library, and was now lodged firmly in Sylvas head. He could give textbook accurate answers to anything she might ask because he had immediate access to the textbook. At some point in the near future he would have to point this out to his instructors, but for now he was more focused on not making waves while trying to get his next attempt at Affinity Testing go a little smoother.

Everything that he had read about the process spoke about it in the abstract, as if anyone put in that situation would just instantly know what affinity they were drawn to, but nothing in that room had called to him at all. He knew that there were other affinities that they couldn’t possibly test for, just because of the variety of affinities that were documented, but the majority of those were so obscure that nobody had written spells for them either. It would be like Croesia all over again, with him having to build himself up from the ground up, inventing magic as a discipline for himself. Nobody with these obscure affinities made anything of themselves outside of academic circles, or as niche interests for more seasoned researchers. I have not come all this way to be a sideshow attraction, I did not survive the death of my world and sign my soul away to the Empyrean so that I could be quietly shuffled off into some secluded laboratory to be poked and prodded while my own power eludes me. He would make one of the affinities bend to his will, no matter what it took.

“…a height advantage preferable in arcane combat, Recruit Runemaul?” Sylvas attention was drawn back to the room.

Kaya didn’t flush with embarrassment the way that some dwarves did when someone made a reference to their height, but Sylvas could tell that she was quietly adding Shaelar’s name to a list of people who would soon be without kneecaps if the opportunity presented itself.

“Splash damage. Firing up, you miss and you’re done. Firing down, an area of effect spell still has a chance to catch the target when it hits the ground.”

“Correct, and of course, it is always easier to adjust position to a lower one with the assistance of gravity than to fight it. Something that we will be delving into further in Introduction to Interplanetary Combat later in the week.”

Sylvas had absorbed that textbook too. Mages are always vital to space travel as they cast the spells that made the ships move, and used Spatial Magic to operate the Jump Gates that allowed inter-system travel. But they became even more essential for ship-to-ship combat. If anything, it was there that they excelled anything that traditional military could achieve. Given the distances and speeds involved, there was very little that a person with a conventional weapon could hope to do, but a mage might ward against incoming attacks and launch their own spells most effectively.

Spatial Magic had caught Sylvas attention. It was something that all of the higher circle mages seemed to have some aptitude for, even if it was well outside of their affinity, and it was what allowed for teleportation and the summoning of objects from the pocket dimensions that regular casters casually referred to as ‘Cold Storage’ and used frequently. It was where Fahred had stowed his chair, where the elf back on Croesia had summoned her staff from, and seemed to serve as a general workaround for many of the problems of materials that any mage might suffer.

Kaya grumbled, “Khltun,” under her breath and Sylvas resisted the urge to ask what it meant, already fairly certain it was something derogatory about their Instructor. Sylvas still hadn’t found a primer for the dwarven language to add to his Lockmind library.

Sylvas turned his attention back to his slate. He had found a way to adjust the enchantment so that he no longer needed to flick at the screen to make text scroll by. Now, each time that he selected a text, it would roll by his vision without risking him straining his wrist to keep the pace up. The only downside was that he’d occasionally look away at the wrong moment and needed to restart the book, as he did now.

“Sigil.”

A Mage’s Guide to Affinity and Advancement was as dry as books came and much of the theory outlined in it was stuff that Sylvas had already worked out for himself, but just because he was memorizing all of these books and could draw on those memories, it didn’t mean that he fully understood them or could integrate them into how he thought about things, that took time and analysis, and having the correct language to describe all of the things that he only knew instinctually was extremely helpful in deciphering the more complex material that he was now trying to dig into.

“Hey, Sigil!”

Kaya may have been content to learn spells by rote, but Sylvas couldn’t stomach it. Not when some fundamental truths about how the universe worked were lurking just out of sight. He supposed it might be a difference of their upbringing. For her magic was a tool to be used, for him it was… everything. His obsession, his identity, his destiny. Or at least, that was what he had been told.

This time, the interruption came in the form of a shove. “Sigil, class is over!”

He blinked away the afterimages of the speeding text zipping up the slate, and turned to see the Fiend girl that had attached herself to him and Kaya. Her name eluded him despite his inescapable memory, because everyone referred to her exclusively by a series of lewd nicknames that she seemed to encourage with winks and giggles at every opportunity. Since Sylvas refused to refer to anyone as Hot Lips, he was left in a nameless purgatory, despite spending so much of his day with her every day. It seemed that courtesy was not going to be extended both ways, however. The nickname Sigil had outpaced his real name easily, and now even some of the Instructors were calling him it.

She hooked an arm through Sylvas’ and pulled him from his seat. “Come on, its combat training next. You love combat training.”

“Love is a strong word for how I feel about being brutalized by the officers three times a week.” He grumbled as he was hauled from the room.

Kaya was waiting outside for him, tapping a mechanical foot impatiently, she caught the tail end of the conversation. “My boy loves it. Don’t let him tell you different.”

“Surely to love something, you have to actually enjoy it in some way? Look forward to it? Desire it?”

The fiend who remained nameless batted her eyelashes at that last word, but Kaya vigorously ignored any flirtation with an obliviousness that Sylvas envied greatly. “You do though. It’s like a puzzle you’re trying to solve. I see your face light up every time you think about it. You ain’t worked it out yet, but you love working on it.”

He grumbled, stowing his slate away in the inner pocket of his new jacket. “Well it is a school for training magical combatants, it makes sense that I’d want to do well in magical combat.”

The two girls met one another’s gaze around him and agreed. “He loves it.”

Sylvas didn’t bother to argue further. Their minds were clearly made up. Instead he turned his thoughts to the battle ahead.

Since establishing something of a reputation for himself, he had now become a central component in Kaya’s little army that she’d been putting together among the other recruits. Having seen the success that the officers had working together, compared to the uncoordinated efforts of the regular recruits, she had pulled everyone in their social circle into an alliance, or as she called it a ‘union’ where none of them would work against any of the others, regardless of what was demanded from the officers, or instructors, who she referred to as ‘the bosses.’ There was some context to all of this that Sylvas was missing, but so long as the alliance held and was effective, he didn’t much care about the terminology.

In the first few mock-battles since that alliance was formed, they’d been trounced repeatedly. Identified as a threat by the other groups, and targeted right from the beginning. A single recruit posed no real threat to the higher circle officers, but a group of them could take down several mages of greater power, just thanks to having more casters available to counter and cast simultaneously. Sylvas spell book had not been expanded officially in any capacity as he waited for his next opportunity to take affinity testing, but informally, he had picked up the details of Gharia’s flight spell. Like most of the low-level magic learned before affinity testing, it was extremely inefficient. The mana cost for staying in the air was massive, as the spell constantly fought against gravity, and while Sylvas still had an above-average core of mana to draw on, it drained rapidly when he took to the air. On top of that, he had essentially expanded his spellcasting ability by what all of his allies were capable of casting, and with each exercise, they were becoming more effective at covering for one another as the right caster prepared the right spell. It still wasn’t perfect. Sylvas had read up extensively on group tactics for mages, even though that was meant to be exclusively on the officer’s curriculum, and he still didn’t feel like they were coming close to their potential. In desperation, he’d started issuing commands, expecting to be completely ignored by the more senior students, and had been surprised to see them all jump to attention and obey. He would never claim to be their leader, attempting to make such a claim would likely have ended up with his head in the latrines, but in the heat of battle when they needed a clear head to make decisions, that fell to him more and more often nowadays.

Which is why when they arrived on the field beyond the ward lines to meet Vaelith and whatever battlefield she’d settled on for the day, there was no real surprise that the others turned to look at him. The fiend and Kaya’s dwarf friend Ironeye were already third circle. She had a fire affinity, he had an affinity for electricity that would have made him part of an engineering corps somewhere if the Ardent hadn’t scooped him up first. The rest of them, Sylvas, Kaya, and the pair of humans – Luna and Orson – were in their second circle.

Kaya and Sylvas had both tried to surprise the other with news of their advancement once the circle had settled, and while Sylvas was happy for her, he couldn’t help but seethe ever so slightly with jealousy at how easily it had come to her. She’d picked up Quickthought as her paradigm to balance the slow and methodical nature of Clockmind, and as for her embodiment, he couldn’t really begrudge her that. It was a special embodiment called Steelmeld, one that had been the temptation that had drawn her into the Empyrean to begin with. It integrated her prosthetics into her body-sense, so that they felt like a part of her once more, and benefited from the same enhancements that her flesh and blood parts did. She had spent the first few nights after his failure in the affinity testing chamber while he was spiraling into despair and panic touching her toes and giggling without explanation.

On arrival, the officers had already been arrayed at the far end of the field, behind fortifications that Vaelith had raised for them. Between there and the recruits there was nothing but open ground. A killing field. Sylvas looked expectantly to their instructor, waiting for her to raise a matching set of defenses for them to protect, but as the moments ticked by, it became increasingly apparent that there would be no such rescue from what was to come.

“Today we are practicing assault on a reinforced position.” Vaelith told them, without a hint of sympathy. “Your task is to remove the entrenched opposition. When one side of the conflict or the other is disabled, we stop. You may begin when ready.”

It was a massacre waiting to happen, and worse yet, it was stupid. Sylvas had no problem with the pain that came with defeat, he accepted it as his lot in life at this point, but there were no records of Eidolons constructing fortifications and defending them. It was fundamentally contrary to their nature. They were, almost exclusively, beings of destruction. This would be wonderful practice for the entrenched officers, who would likely face eidolon charges just like this many times in their service, but for the normal recruits this tested nothing useful and proved nothing useful except for their willingness to follow orders to the point of self-destruction.

That thought gave Sylvas pause. Maybe that was exactly what was being tested here.

The others in his little social circle had all turned to look at Sylvas the moment that Vaelith had stopped talking. Even the other cliques of recruits seemed to be looking this way and listening in, as if hoping Sylvas could pull a miracle out of his hat.

“We need to make our own cover. Directly shielding against their attacks is going to bottom out our mana before we can close the distance, we need… ideas.”  He started talking, mostly to himself, mostly hoping that somebody would volunteer a spell that would solve all their problems. “Crossing to their fortifications is going to be the hardest part. Tearing them down, fighting, that’s our bread and butter.”

“Why aren’t they blasting us already?” Kaya grumbled.

“Because they think we’ll be easy pickings when we run at them.” Gharia’s tail lashed. She might have been here longer than most of them, but it seemed this was her first time being thrown into this particular scenario.

“If we spread out wide to avoid area of effect spells, some of us might make it through.” Luna suggested.

At more or less the same moment Ironeye suggested, “If we group up tight in a spearhead, we can shield together and punch through.”

Neither option held much appeal. The former would deplete their numbers and ability to deal damage massively, spreading them too thin. The latter would just accelerate the rate at which they burned through their mana supplies.

“What can we do to raise cover?” He asked the dwarves.

They glanced to one another, either considering their combined capabilities or rolling their eyes at his assumption that just because they were dwarves, they could raise stone. Eventually Kaya answered, “Reckon we could toss up a few walls along the way.”

“What if we went the other way, could we tunnel under?” He was still thinking, but none of the options seemed good.

“All the dust, it would just fill back in.” Kaya said.

Ironeye amended, “Unless we went real deep.”

“How deep?” Sylvas glanced at him.

The two dwarves considered it for a moment then admitted. “Too deep.”

“Sigil, I’ve got something.” Hot Lips piped up. All eyes turned to her. “I’ve got a blast, real wildfire stuff. Wide dispersal, weak as the day is long. But it would block line of sight the whole time its rolling out.”

If they only had someone with a water affinity, they could have combined it with that spell and made a thick enough fog to conceal their movements entirely, as it was, it could buy them perhaps a second before it was dispelled or dispersed all on its own.

If Sylvas had the time to think, the time to examine the spell, he could have picked it apart, turned it into something useful, a directed beam of heat to punch through the enemy defenses at a distance or a solid wall of flame that would obscure them all the way across, but it had been made very clear to him that modifying spells again would be punished severely, now that he knew it was against the rules. Which leaves me with nothing.

He wet his lips. “Ironeye… what’s your effective range?”

The dwarf squinted, “Couldn’t hit a man at this distance…”

“But your lightning would hit?” Sylvas pressed him. “Even if you couldn’t aim?”

“Aye…” The dwarf looked puzzled.

“How wide a spread can you cast?”

“With a Thunderchain, I’d cover half their line,” Then added, “But it would be like a static shock when it landed.”

Sylvas had seen him casting that spell before, he knew the casting time down to the millisecond, because he’d been trying to work out the best way around it, beyond a shield that would likely be washed around.

“I think I have an idea.” Sylvas said carefully. “But it’s going to be rough.”