Starbreaker

“Some say that magic leads to madness, but this could not be further from the truth. In fact, the more circles that a mage constructs, the more self-reflection they have conducted. The stereotypical mad-mage seen in fiction is simply that; a fiction. This does not preclude the mentally unstable from practicing magic, of course. They will simply be unable to progress without doing the necessary work on themselves to stabilize their issues through the reshaping of their mind through applications of mana. In short, what a mage does is not out of madness, it is a choice. It is always a choice.”

—The Psychology of the Wizard, Remo Aurea

Almost at once, the sound of spells began detonating. It was probably a bad sign for Sylvas’ psyche that he didn’t even flinch, just remembered to cast a quick ward to protect his ears from the sonic spell that Hammerheart’s cronies had used last time around. It hadn’t been a hard spell to find, or learn, which meant that Hammerheart likely saved that tactic for when there was new blood on the battlefield. A spell specifically meant to hurt the newest recruits. Either that, or meant to punish anyone in the ranks who didn’t immediately go and research a solution when confronted with a spell they couldn’t counter with their own abilities. In essence, he was preying on the weak either way, those who would not have been a threat due to lack of experience, or those who wouldn’t be a threat due to lack of competence. It lowered Syvlas opinion of the dwarf even more.

He took off running, casting his spell of flight as he went. He couldn’t suspend his spells the way that the Instructor could, but he could delay casting by enunciating the words of the spell slowly, and with elongated gaps between them. It sounded silly, but Sylvas cared less about his appearance than the effects at this point. As he rounded a corner, he hurried through the tail end of the flight spell, caught sight of a flash of white and launched an arcane arrow before even pausing to check whether he was up against an officer or another recruit. The spell was deflected easily by a persistent shield – a very wasteful mana sink, but one that made a degree of sense in this sort of chaotic scenario – then he came under fire himself.

Both the officer in the street that he’d taken a pot-shot at, and the second one perched partway up a tower unleashed elemental attacks against him. The one on the ground relying on a rattling rapid-fire spell that launched a stream of jagged stone fragments at him, the one in the tower casting with water, narrowed down to a fine beam of such pressure that it cut clean through the stone behind Sylvas as it swept towards him.

Without the flying spell, he would have been dead. With it, he launched not to the side, but straight up, out of the course of both spells. The stone-caster raised her hands, following after him as he soared, but gravity was fighting against her shots now, and they trailed behind him, curving down to patter across the rooftops. The high intensity spray from on high lasted only a brief moment before the caster had to pause and take aim once more, by which point Sylvas had shot so far up the side of the tower where they were hiding that they were practically nose to nose. It was a male fiend that Sylvas didn’t know yet in the tower, forth circle, judging by the mana radiating off him.

The fiend’s watery attack was quicker to cast than an arcane arrow despite its power, and it nearly sliced into Sylvas shoulder before he arrested his own flight by cutting off mana to the spell that had propelled him up.

For an instant, he hung there in the air, flightless, but not yet falling. He unleashed an arcane arrow before he dropped like a rock and caught only the briefest glimpse of it taking the fiend in the forehead before he had to turn his attention rapidly back to recasting the flight spell before he became a Sylvas pancake.

If that weren’t enough, he had the woman down on the ground to deal with too. She’d abandoned her initial attack and switched to some sort of boulder catapulting spell that would smash him to pieces or pepper him with shrapnel if she missed and hit the tower instead. Splash damage when a direct hit couldn’t be guaranteed, just like they’d been taught.

In theory, a target in the air without any means of propulsion was easy pickings, with no way to change course and avoid the hit. If only Sylvas hadn’t been learning his own lessons by being brutalized by officers at every opportunity.

He kicked hard off the wall that he was falling beside, launching out into the open space, and out of the arching path of the boulder that flew up to meet him. It smashed into the side of the hollowed high block and set the whole thing collapsing. He had a moment to worry that the fiend would be injured by the failure of the structure, but it was only a moment, then the steady stream of rapid-fire sharp-edged pebbles began tracing back and forth through the air, trying to catch him again.

His stomach lurched as the flight spell took hold, jerking him back out of gravity’s grasp as if they were two toddlers fighting over a doll. He careened off to the side to avoid the pebble-stream, almost colliding with the top of a lower slung building before spotting someone else in flight. Gharia was out there, across this risen city, fighting just like he was. Bolts of bright colored magic flying up towards her, but none of them hitting home. No wonder she’d been so mad he tagged her first time out when she could dodge like that normally.

In pursuit of her all-out attack, the officer on the ground had let her persistent shield slip, pulling all the mana back to her core to maximize what was available for spell output. He’d wager she had a physical enhancement that would let her dodge just like the flight spell let him, so the game now became what the combat lecturer had described as “Threat Zones.”

They had to eliminate the different places that the other could escape to, until they were pinned in place long enough to take a killing shot. For her, this would normally have been pretty easy, particularly given Sylvas lack of speed on foot, but with a whole sky to dodge around in, he’d widened out the zones she’d need to lock down considerably. Meanwhile, she had only the flat surface of the ground to dodge around on, plus whatever jumping she could muster.

If he had any sort of rapid firing attack like her pebble-stream it would already be over, but Sylvas only offensive spell was his Arcane Arrow, which took an agonizingly long time to cast in the heat of battle. Luckily, she had already provided him with more than ample assistance.

The rocks that she had been firing up into the air fell beneath Sylvas, and from above he could trace out the exact pattern of where they’d land. The parts of the earth below that would be peppered with them, and the areas that shrapnel inexplicably wasn’t raining down on. He took aim at the first gap in the rain of stone, and fired. The officer dodged into that same space at the very moment his Arcane Arrow fell and it intercepted with her chest. Straight to the heart, like every spell I cast was meant to be, and so few ever were.

He landed hard on top of the low roof of the next block, and flattened himself against it as low as he could. If anyone out there had been looking up at the wrong moment, he’d announced his position to the whole battlefield. He hated it. He hated when things came down to luck, the direction one person happened to be glancing. If he was seen, he had little doubt that Hammerheart, or his lackies, or any of the myriad people on Strife that thought ill of him would coordinate an attack on this position, and that would be the end of his day in the field. His attempts to prove that skill could triumph over raw power proven immediately false.

A tiny bubble of silence surrounded Sylvas that had nothing to do with his hearing ward. He counted three breaths, drew in mana and circulated it through his circles, readying himself for the next burst of action, but it seemed that he’d managed to escape notice, somehow.

Rising slowly to his feet, he took in what he could of the surrounding battle. Intense fighting was happening on the far side of the cityscape, furthest from where the recruits would have entered following their last test. The officers, fighting amongst themselves most likely, as he didn’t expect many of his classmates to have made it that far unless they made a beeline. That was good. The more officers eliminated from the fighting, the fewer of them he’d have to deal with.

Down on the streets surrounding him, no small force of mages had gathered, drawn by the loud and messy destruction of the tower that had been brought down. They found the unconscious officer where he’d left her, but didn’t sift the rubble for the fiend. It seemed to him that there were two distinct groups down there, neither quite ready or willing to commit to attacking the other. A gang of recruits had gathered around a pair of officers. Presumably some pre-existing alliance, and on the other side a trio of officers including Bortan who had their own pact.

If neither was willing to commit to the battle, Sylvas felt obliged to help them along. Taking careful aim, he unleashed an arcane arrow at Bortan, and then dropped to the ground out of sight. Bortan was the only one who was liable to recognize Sylvas distinctive spells, so he was the one that had to be taken out. Sylvas didn’t feel much pity for him. Compared to what was about to follow, he’d gotten off easy.

The other two officers started shouting in dismay almost immediately as their ally fell and started casting a moment after. The streets around the building where Sylvas lay began to glow with excess mana washing back from the spells being cast, and he drew it all in and cycled it into his core. It was rare to find an environment so mana-rich to refuel, and he needed to stay close to mop up whichever side won.

In response to what they’d taken as an uncalled-for ambush, the recruits and officers on the other side of the fallen tower had begun unleashing hell. Sylvas spotted Ironeye in amongst them, firing off lightning bolts, and did feel a slight pang of guilt to draw someone he vaguely considered a friend into the fighting, but at the end of the day, he had been ordered to go it alone, which meant fighting his friends just as much as his… it seemed silly to call them enemies. Rivals.

All five of the officers had managed to take each other out of the fight with wildly mana-intensive and destructive spells. Even if they hadn’t all been knocked out, they likely would have been out of the fight after this. Of the recruits, there were only three left standing. Ironeye, a human Sylvas didn’t know yet, and… he couldn’t recognize the third figure through the spell that they’d cast on themselves. A shimmering cloud, humanoid in shape, hung beside the other two, perhaps crouching, perhaps dwarf sized normally.

Ironeye spotted him on top of the low-slung roof when he popped up to take in the scene as the fighting was dying down. “Oi!”

Sylvas wet his lips. There was probably a way to talk his way out of this, if he thought fast enough. But if he was talking, he wasn’t casting.

His Arcane Arrow streaked across, only to be caught in a thrumming wall of static that Ironeye threw up between them. That whole wall flashed like lightning as the arrow struck, and Sylvas had a half a second to wonder if it was deliberate or not, giving him that window of opportunity to slink away unseen.

It was an opportunity he wasn’t going to pass up, not now that the other recruits knew that he was atop this building block. He sprinted for the far side, dropped down into what should have been an alleyway, unleashed an Arcane Arrow as he was falling at the recruit who was already lurking there, peeking out to see if the coast was clear. It had been Orson. Another pang of guilt touched Sylvas only briefly. This was the nature of the competition. There was no point in crying about it.

He took off in the opposite direction to the fallen mage, rounding the corner of the building and doubling back towards Ironeyes and his team. Taking them head on wasn’t going to work with the dwarf screening my shots, but if I could get around them…

He burst out onto the street again with his spell of flight already taking hold and hoisting him up out of the usual line of fire before he’d cleared a few feet. He readied and cast an Arcane Arrow, and it took the blurred shape of a mage in the back. They had been climbing up onto the rooftop that he’d just fled, relying on their empowered body to get them up there with jumping and pulling. Sylvas was draining through his mana reserves just so that he could gain the kind of mobility that came free to them, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. For him, everything on the battlefield was one of many overlapping spells, while the others’ attention was split between their magic and their body. The blur was so intent on climbing up that they didn’t have a chance to counter his attack, and they fell back down to earth, head hitting the stone beneath the dust with a crack.

Ironeyes and the other mage turned to face Sylvas, hearing his spell, hearing their friend cry out. Sylvas readied another arcane arrow, but the math was against him, they’d have two spells to his one. Countering him and taking him out in the span of a single casting, unless they were so disorganized that they both went on the offensive.

As it turned out, it was the opposite. Both threw up shields against his rather feeble Arcane Arrow, it made it past one before it was fully raised, but caught on the other, deflecting back to hit the first, and the bouncing back and forth between them, sending out sparks and flashes that kept them blind to his position as he went on shooting straight up.

He could see the top side of their shields now, while they were still blinded by his deflecting arrow. Up here, he had all the time in the world to line up an Arcane Arrow for each of them, cast as swiftly as he could manage with just a little more mana than was needed, so that if he did manage to miss, they might still be hit with some splashback.

Whether it struck home or not, he would never know. He had made a target of himself in the sky once again, and this time, someone took a shot at that target and hit.