Chapter 14: Chapter 14: One Against Many

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

One Against Many

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Liara was back to being my guide the next day, and I couldn’t help but notice the dark circles under her eyes or the sluggish way she moved while we strolled out of the tower.

“Pulled an all-nighter, huh?” I teased.

“Don’t start.” She stifled a yawn. “It’s too early in the day for complaints.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to tell me off for leaving you in the tower while I—”

“Went out to train by yourself?” I shrugged. “Nah, I wouldn’t do that. We both know you need the training more than I do.”

Liara showed me an inverted peace sign which was the elven equivalent of the middle finger. I responded with a wet willy into her right ear—an act that annoyed most pointy-eared races—and then ran away from the she-elf before she could retaliate.

“That’s it. I’m turning you into a popsicle, Wisdom!” she threatened while she chased after me.

I laughed over my shoulder and yelled, “You snooze, you lose!”

As I ran away from Liara, a wide grin grew on my face. It felt refreshing to have someone close at hand that I could tease and rely on who wasn’t Divah. And, it’s only been a couple of days, but all this time I’ve spent with Liara might mean I’d finally made a friend. My first one since that first death.

Our fooling around continued all the way to Fighter’s Pit Three, which was that same large open-air venue I’d noticed back when Draken and his lackeys picked a fight with us three nights ago. It was built like an old amphitheater; raised seats encircling a sandy pit with wooden pillars covered in protective runes rising out of the pit’s four cardinal directions.

Within this sandy arena, teenagers in the barest of clothing trained together in pairs while pitting axes against shields, swords against spears, and fists against well-toned abs. Seriously, they were wearing zero protective gear with only their undies and their cloaks to shield them from the chilly morning air.

Every one of these apprentice novices turned their heads in our direction the moment Liara and I appeared which was also when she’d caught me in a headlock. Funnily enough, most of the males in the pit sent me looks of deepest loathing, which I guessed was because the pretty elf maiden had my head wrapped between her arm and her, well, you got the picture.

“Someone’s popular,” I teased.

Liara squeezed my neck some more. “Maybe they just don’t like you. I can relate.”

“You’re late, Mr. Wisdom.” Doomsday’s eight-foot, oversized frame appeared between me and my view of the pit, blotting out the glares that had been aimed at me. “You should tighten your chokehold around his larynx some more, Ms. Lockwood. Wouldn’t want our newest apprentice to slip away again.”

Doomsday’s half-naked students laughed, although I didn’t think his joke was very funny. For her part, Liara did as the ‘Master of Physical Education’ instructed, and I found myself turning red from lack of air and not just because the brazen display of skin around me was making me blush.

“Tap… out!” I gasped.

A short while after she let me go, Doomsday instructed me to strip down to my undies too, which I was forced to do in front of Liara whose cheeks got slightly redder than normal.

“This is becoming a regular thing for us, huh,” I joked.

She sighed. “Please don’t remind me…”

“Not that I mind this Spartan-style training.” I placed my pile of clothes on the seat next to hers. “Fighting without armor’s kind of cool too, isn’t it?”   

She eyed me curiously. “Based on your performance at the Crucible, I expected you were the kind of hardcore spellcaster who avoided physical confrontation.”

This was a bias that existed only because Liara and everyone else couldn’t remember my first and second turn on the Crucible. “You should have noticed by now, but I live to defy expectations.”

“Just don’t go getting yourself maimed before we finish raiding the rest of the Academy’s secrets,” she instructed.

“Wow, I felt genuine concern there,” I chuckled.

Liara’s playful smirk shifted into an encouraging smile I’d never seen before. “Go get ‘em, tigersaurus.” 

While Liara yawned in her seat like she had nothing better to do but to hang around and watch Apprentice P.E., I was given a round wooden shield and blunt-edged sword by one of Doomsday’s assistants and then told to join the group of scrawny, miserable-looking blue cloaks who stood opposite a line of buff, enthusiastic-looking red cloaks in the sandy pit.

“Whether you be a mage, rogue, or warrior, it is necessary for all would-be adventurers to be competent in the tactic of a shield wall,” Doomsday’s voice boomed from his referee’s seat, the XXXL size wooden chair that was barely enough to fit his massive bulk. “The shield wall is the first line of defense against the hungry hordes of monsters waiting to tear you apart and feast on your rotting corpses!”

This earned him a cheer from the warriors while groans escaped my companions’ lips.

“It is the stratagem that will keep you, mages, alive long enough for you to cast your spells in support of the warriors who protect you,” Doomsday added, and I couldn’t help but hear just a hint of bias in his tone. Pure warrior builds were often derisive of the more delicate style of the arcane arts. 

I glanced sideways at my fellow mages and noticed how pale their faces got with each passing second of Doomsday’s speech.

“Who lives and who dies—your shield wall shall decide,” Doomsday finished.

Master Doomsday wasn’t being literal, of course, but that didn’t matter to these apprentice mages who were now shaking in their boots.

Great, this will be a slaughter… I grinned mischievously. “Or not...”

Apart from simply understanding the value of a shield wall, I realized Doomsday was trying to teach our mage class a lesson on physical confrontation too. At least that’s how I justified this one-sided bullying that was about to occur. Still, while the nine other apprentice novices on my line wore varied expressions of dread on their faces, I was all giddy and bouncing on the heels of my feet. This was exactly the opportunity I was looking for—an underdog challenge that would allow me to show off my fighting skills in a way that would break the bias people were beginning to form about me. I’m all about the disruption after all.

The gong sounded, and a cry of “Shield wall!” rang out.

While the ten red cloaks set their shoulders against each other and raised their shields in near-perfect sync, my companions scrambled to follow a step too late, with most of them barely managing to raise their round shields high enough to cover their necks. This earned our group some nasty jeering from the sidelines. Words like “Cannon fodder,” “Draugr meat,” and “Veslingr,” reached our ears, sapping away what little courage our group seemed desperate to hold onto. 

“Don’t worry,” I said to the blue cloak next to me. “I’ll shut them up good for you.”

The red cloaks moved as one, with each of their steps bringing their well-formed shield wall closer and closer to our messy line with cocky leisureliness. As if they were giving us ample time to get more nervous, which worked. Seriously, the teen mages on my line were seconds away from bolting right into a failing grade.   

“Quickness is the essence of warfare,” I recited one of my favorite Sun Tzu quotes, which was also the only war cry to escape my lips before I broke our shield wall and charged the enemy on my own—a single blade against a tide of raised shields.

“Baldr’s balls!” Someone behind me cursed. While the blue cloak I’d spoken to earlier yelled, “What are you doing?!”

The laughter from the sidelines rang out. They were accompanied by jeering such as, “Pulling a Leeroy,” and, “Crazy vargr,” plus, to my delight, a cry of, “Show-off!” from a honeyed voice that I’d gotten used to these past three days.

See, the advantage of a shield wall was focused entirely on the sturdiness of its front side. This meant that someone crazy enough to attack it head-on had two ways to counter the shield wall’s strength. The kind of acrobatics necessary to vault over the damn thing to get to the formation’s unprotected backside, or, as in my case, the use of herculean strength to dismantle the shield wall by attacking the one thing they needed to keep their sturdy formation strong—and that was the ground at their feet.

No, it wasn’t cheating. Doomsday didn’t specifically say we weren’t allowed to use magic. Or if he did then I wasn’t paying attention. Anyway, I moved right up to the front of their shields, ducked under the spear that came hurtling at my face, and then stomped my left foot hard on the ground. The magic I’d been accumulating into the sole of my foot sent fiery elemental energy into the earth and turned the ground beneath me into a bed of lava that exploded outward in a spray of fire, molten rock, and ash reminiscent of a volcanic eruption.

Even weakened by the protective wards surrounding the pit, ‘Volcanic Step’ was extremely effective, not just in crumbling the red cloaks’ formation, but also in causing the kind of panic that would leave these novice warriors vulnerable for me to pick them off one by one.

“In the midst of chaos, there is also an opportunity,” I recited another Sun Tzu quote, but then I finished with, “Fortune favors the bold!”  

Yes, yes, that did sound braggy, but I believed I’d already established that I am a teen that likes to show off in moments of great stress. And yes, despite the ‘Teenager Without Fear’ title I’d coined for myself, I was still prone to the heart-pumping, tunnel-vision-inducing anxiety that plagued my age group, a fact made more apparent by my focus momentarily drifting off to the sidelines so I could see Liara’s reaction to my new grimoire’s power.

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She looked mildly impressed. Maybe even a little threatened.

A glimpse of her expression was all I caught though as my momentary lapse in judgment nearly cost me my advantage. Several of my targets were already beginning to pick themselves up from the hot ground and rallying for a counterattack. It was a feat worthy of praise because I’d turned the surrounding sand into ‘Scorched Earth’ which was an area-of-effect condition created by Volcanic Step that temporarily increased all my stats by three while weakening my opponents’ abilities while they were within ten meters of me.

“Frigid Hel”—I swung my blunt sword down on the nearest red cloak’s head—“I really should focus more, shouldn’t I?”

One, two, three, four—each swing of my sword struck at their legs, causing the two biggest and meanest looking novices to drop back to their knees. These two losers stumbled over their fellow red cloaks, making a bunch of them fall like a line of dominos.

I heard a cheer from behind me and guessed that my fellow blue cloaks were enjoying the view. Now, if they would only make the effort to join me in my fight, that would have been great.

“Less cheering, more fighting!” I yelled over my shoulder.  

Despite my achievement of knocking down the red cloaks’ shield wall, Doomsday’s whistle hadn’t sounded, and so I steeled myself for a much tougher fight than I initially calculated.  

I push-kicked the shoulder of one of the two big guys who’d gotten back up again—a yeti with light gray fur like Zen but smaller in size—and forced him to collide with the other big dude—this muscular, wavy-haired blonde human channeling that ever-popular Viking style—putting them both out of commission long enough for me to deal with the first of the red cloaks who’d managed to disentangle herself from the mess of fallen bodies to attack me. It was Desdemona Dewleaf.

“Yo, it’s you again!” I called, but the fairy didn’t respond to my cheery greeting. 

Acting like I was a total stranger, the raven-haired fairy with the single long braid falling off her shoulder charged at me with her spear aimed at my face, but I deflected the telegraphed attack with my shield. That’s when her shield bashed against mine at just the right angle to make my shield arm freeze up from the impact.

With my defense broken, I was vulnerable to Dess’s spear swinging upward for a second strike—or so I made her believe.

I noticed from that well-performed tactic that Dess had read the book I recommended to her. But I’d read it too. Cover to cover. So, I knew exactly how to handle the numbness in my shield arm. It’s why I chose to ignore it, opting instead to sidestep her rising spear so I could counter the shield bash I knew would hit me on my vulnerable side.

“Did you like”—I smacked her shield down from above with the flat of my sword, driving her momentum downward where my foot was waiting to kick out at her—“Lagertha, the Shieldmaiden?”

Dess was too busy staggering backward to respond, but I wasn’t offended as I was already squeezing into the bit of distance between us and ramming my sword’s pommel into her exposed gut. The fairy girl cried out in pain, but I was too caught up in the fight to take pity on her. I rammed into her with my shield, forcing Dess to fall back on her butt.

“I guess you haven’t read chapter seven yet,” I recalled the book’s words and recited them back to her. “A fairy with a shield need not be limited by gravity. Take flight and use the advantage of three-dimensional combat to waylay the enemy from above.”

“But I only just started reading it,” Dess frowned. It was a frown that barely lasted a second though, and then the fairy flashed me a grin that widened from one ear to the other. “Have you read the chapter about shield throws—I’m so excited to try it and be like Captain—”

“Hold that thought,” I interrupted.

A new opponent had just arrived, and he seemed very eager to hack and slash at me too.

He was a scrawny kid with fiery red skin and curved horns along the side of his head. The ink patterns on his face shone like hot coals but his eyes were black as a starless night sky.

“Groovy, I’ve nerve fought an infernal before,” I said excitedly while I ducked away from the swing of his scimitar.

From what I knew of them, Infernals were like the cousins of satyrs. But, while satyrs were well-regarded for what Divah claimed was a very high sex drive—which I think is a weird measurement for being popular—infernals were reviled even worse than half-orcs just because they were immigrants who’d been thrown out of Muspelheim, the realm of flames, ash, and molten earth that was home to fire giants and greater daemons. This made infernals untrustworthy in the eyes of the other races, which left them isolated and loathed in many of the realms they traveled to. None of that adult stuff mattered to me though. The only thing that mattered was that this infernal teen I traded sword blows with seemed just as eager as I to prove himself in front of everyone.

He charged at me with reckless abandon, the blade of his scimitar slicing through the air my neck had been in only a second ago. I ducked to avoid that attack and then slid underneath his sword arm to slam my shield into his chest.

“Ugh—”

The infernal’s cry of pain was cut short by my sword’s pommel bashing against the side of his head. He tried to pull away, but I was quicker and my sword’s blunt-edged blade pressed against his neck.

A flicker of fear flashed on his face. Seeing it made me hesitate, which I realized in the next moment was incredibly stupid of me.

I felt the prick of his sword’s pointy end graze my side, forcing me back a step so I could avoid the thrust that might have skewered me in the gut.

“Vargr!”

Enraged, I threw myself at him like a berserker, hacking and slashing at his smaller physique until I forced the infernal to his knees. I finished him off by bashing the side of his face with my shield. His eyes rolled back and then he toppled over into unconsciousness.

By this point, I was pretty gassed out, my sword arm was beginning to feel like it was encased in lead, and Scorched Earth was back to being just regular hot sand. The battle was far from over though, and, like Divah often pointed out, “The fight’s not over until the fat lady sings, kiddo.”

In this case, the fat lady was a half-giant who didn’t seem eager to blow his whistle. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Master Doomsday was hazing me for missing his class the other day.

“It’s fine,” I huffed. “I can do this… all day.”

As if on cue, the red cloaks who’d gotten back on their feet were beginning to surround me, and I was too busy reclaiming my breath to do anything but watch their encirclement come together.

Now would have been a nice time for reinforcements, but a glance over my shoulder showed a sight that made me laugh out loud. My fellow blue cloaks had already thrown their shields down in surrender.

“I’m going to beat those guys into shape later,” I sighed. “I’ll ask Zen and the Grimm brothers to help.”

“You won’t be able to do that,” claimed the Viking kid I’d knocked out earlier. He even managed the low octave growl I imagined an old Norse Viking might make. “We’re putting you down, seidr magu.”

“Ye-yeah!” his fellows agreed, although none of them sounded as confident as him. As for me, well, I wasn’t exactly shaking in my boots after being called a ‘magical boy’ like it was an insult. Seriously, these apprentice warriors needed to take lessons in flyting. Maybe watch some SNL for new material? 

“Um, guys, I don’t think we shouldn’t gather around him like this…” Dess suggested, but her voice was drowned out by the impotent threats her teammates flung at me.

They should have listened to Dess. Because she was right. They shouldn’t have gathered around me like this.

See, I may be a little tired from all the physical exercise, but I’d barely used my magic in this battle. It was a fact I was quick to point out to them, and it was super satisfying to watch the horror fill their faces afterward.

“You guys lost the moment you grouped up again.” I grinned. Then I whispered, “Boom.”

They all ran at me with their weapons raised in an attempt to stop me from casting Volcanic Step. Too little too late though. I raised my foot high—and with a cackle worthy of a mad scientist from those spy movies Divah made me watch—I stomped hard on the ground. The earth turned molten red beneath my feet and then my surroundings were covered in fire and ash.

 

Glad tidings, fellow novices!

Ah, Will, showing off is really fun to write, although he probably doesn't win this fight in the end. Or does he? Find out in the comments!

BTW, I'm looking for ideas on elective courses to add to Adventure Academy's curriculum. So if you have suggestions like 'War Chant' and 'Hexes and Charms' then let me know in the comments, and you may just be shaping the future adventurer that Will becomes. ;)

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