Chapter 54: Volume 2 Chapter 16 – Decisive Action (Part 4/4)

Asgeirr Vintersvend struggled to hang onto the bulwark as his skywhale fell through the skies. It would have been easier if he could use both hands, or if his dead familiar wasn't plunging towards the ground listing at nearly fifty-degrees.

Physical prowess had always been his brother's domain, not his. Furthermore, he also wasn't as young as he used to be...

Finally!

His other hand extracted the Air Glide Boost tablet from a belt pouch, which he promptly activated by pressing it against the gondola deck. He had prepared the runestone as part of his contingencies for an emergency. However he had never expected to actually use it.

Certainly not today.

They had been winning too! The Wickers' boarding troops might have had momentum after their charge. However the opening volleys had left too few of them to actually seize the whales! The attritional melee that had broken out played to Skagen favor. They were on the verge of shattering Weichsel's air cavalry corp and securing air dominance for the remainder of the war!

Then, in the span of less than a minute, everything had been reversed.

The hammer blow had come too quick, too fast. By the time the Admiral realized what had happened, the damage had already been done:

Four heavily armed and armored skywhales -- the pride of the Skagen navy -- defeated in mere moments.

The mighty Drake Outriders had been thrown into disarray, then pressed into a desperate defense -- predators pounced upon by packs of angry prey.

Over a thousand veteran marksmen, runescribes, engineers, and other experienced specialists found themselves crashing toward their death. Those who managed to stay airborne found little mercy as roaming squads of Phantoms hacked them apart.

It was a disaster. A calamity that he had walked straight into. A catastrophe that he had no possible way to overturn.

The battle is lost.

Faced with the grim reality, Asgeirr had no choice but to admit it. All that remained was to see how many survivors could still be saved from his fatal mistake.

"Milord, we must leave!" His flag lieutenant, a young Wayfarer tasked to be his personal aide, shouted. "Once the Wickers see us glide, they'll hit us with concentrated force!"

To effectively place a spell, even a simple Air Glide, across a monster of such colossal size was no easy feat. Asgeirr doubted any of the other skywhale captains had prepared a rune of similar strength. This meant he had just painted a bullseye on his own sinking ship. Yet at the same time, it offered the only real hope of survival that his men had.

"I am NOT leaving my men behind to die!" The Admiral yelled back in fury.

He had known most of the Polarlys' crew for decades. The thought of abandoning them in this critical moment was unthinkable. It would be cowardice beneath the dignity of any man alive, an act of treachery for which he would never be able to forgive himself.

"But Milord...!" The aide cried again, his earnest blue eyes almost begging.

"Sir, Skagen cannot afford to lose you in this war," The voice of his first mate came from the communication tube.

As the Air Glide took hold and returned the flight deck mostly upright, Admiral Winter released the bulwark handle and dug into his pouches for two more tablets. The Gustcloak spellword was another one of his personal creations, and he reached out with both hands to project wind barriers onto the hangar deck entrances on opposite sides.

His falling skywhale familiar became a bunker gliding through air. Its armored mass was now charged with delivering several hundred crew members safely to the ground.

"No! We're all going back!" the Admiral set down his proverbial foot. "Now both of you shut up and organize the men for defense!"

Asgeirr could already see a squad of Phantoms riding towards them from beyond the wind wall. He reached into more pockets to pull out handfuls of lightning stones, before hurling these into the gust barrier that bulged outwards from each entrance, where cycling winds trapped them in the hurricane gales.

With one hand outstretched towards the barrier, Asgeirr concentrated his magic to manipulate his spell. The gale barrier spat out a horde of runestones with ballistic accuracy, and the delayed-action electrical bursts called down a lightning volley to blast the Phantom squad.

However the thunderous barrage also caught people's attention. Spell rays began flying toward the entrance in the dozens, but the arcane volley never made it past the wind. The barrier detonated spells as though solid matter. Elemental and antimagic blasts rapidly weakened the hurricane gales, yet they were hastily replenished as the Admiral poured more mana into his specially crafted stones.

Asgeirr was soon breathing hard as he strained his magic reserves. No individual archmage could match mana endurance against dozens, hundreds of battlemages and win. He still carried plenty of runestones for combat use, but he had to hold these barriers firm with his own power -- at least long enough to persuade the Wickers to cease their 'worthless' bombardment.

It took half a minute before they stopped. Then, as the Admiral finally took a calming breath, he saw a single armiger in glowing white-blue peel off from the Oriflamme's formation. The Lotharin flew in with nothing but a Levitation Flight spell, charging in the wake of the barrage.

Asgeirr focused on the barrier again to have it hurl out a dozen more stones. However the armiger vanished in a bolt of his own lightning before the salvo struck. Then, just before striking the wind wall, the attacker rematerialized into physical form once more.

The Admiral's eyes swelled with astonishment as he watched the intruder fall into his hangar. The gale barrier had torn the armiger's uniform into bloody shreds. Without the man's enchanted steel half-plate, the cutting winds would have ripped him apart.

The sheer audacity of this... this boy!

The Admiral stared in near disbelief as the armiger crashed hard onto the gondola's metal floor and rolled to a stop merely five paces away. A dozen gashes had cut the attacker's face into a bloody mess beyond recognition. Nevertheless Asgeirr estimated that the short redhead who appeared to be a teen was in his early twenties at most.

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Was it bravery? Overconfidence? Or outright stupidity? Asgeirr didn't know what compelled the boy into such a foolhardy stunt. But it hardly mattered anymore.

A handful of his huskarl bodyguards were rushing over from the entrances. The heathen boy would never be allowed to stand up again.

Yet as hateful, blood-covered eyes turned to glare at the Admiral, Asgeirr realized that the kid wasn't finished. The redhead tossed a kukri still held in his hands, hurling out the curved steel like a bladed boomerang.

However the kid was too badly hurt. His aim was terrible even at so close a range. The kukri merely tore the edge of the Admiral's billowing cloak.

No... it had also grazed his layered wards, and the weapon's discharged Catalyst Dispel overwhelmed them with cascading failure.

With a jerk of his hands, the Admiral summoned runic pebbles between his fingers to replenish the wards. But a sharp, slashing pain from his right forearm caused him to drop the stones.

"Armor Screen!" The bloodied boy spat out, curving the protective bubble around the Admiral and enclosing his space against the steel bulwark.

--Which happens to include the thrown blade.

What-- Asgeirr puzzled in confusion before he saw the re-emerging threat.

The kukri had bounced off the wall and came back, somehow tripling itself in the process. Then, with another rebound off the translucent bubble, two more copies duplicated into existence.

They cut across his shin, slashed his bony shoulder, even sent a hacking stab deep into his back. The whirlwind of steel escalated in mere seconds, and agonizing pain drowned out all coherent thought -- let alone any deduction that could devise a suitable counterspell.

...

Reynaud never found out if the Admiral lacked the right prepared spell to deal with the unusual threat, or if he simply didn't react fast enough. Within seconds, the swarm of flying steel created by the Bladestorm Kukri -- a 'gift' from the Imperial Mantis Blades weeks ago -- had cut the old man apart.

Which left three armed and now outraged Northmen surrounding him.

Too bad... I won't get to show Gerard my medal for this...

Lying face-up on the floor, Reynaud tried to laugh at his situation yet he only coughed up blood. His eyes glanced sideways, not at the swords about to end his life, but the fading winds that once protected the entrance.

My first battle... what a blunder...

Regret seeped into his mind as he thought of his hasty action. Second thoughts have never fitted him, but for once, he wished he had made a different choice.

Reynaud tried to raise his arm again but it wouldn't budge. He tried to cast another spell yet his body wouldn't listen. Every part of him was aching numb as a precast Desensitize spell dulled his pain. But even with it, throwing out that kukri and the spell that went with it had cost every last strength he had.

Trying to reconcile himself to the inevitable, Reynaud closed his eyes. Yet even as his eyelids met, hot tears rolled down his cheeks from the corner of each eye.

I don't want to die...

However, as Reynaud braced himself and the seconds rolled by, there was no sharp, burning agony. No ending of consciousness.

Instead, Reynaud heard cries of agony above him, accompanied by the clanging of steel and swishing of chains.

He opened his eyes once more. And there she was, the Princess of Rhin-Lotharingie. Her meteor hammer spun in her hand, while her surviving armigers crushed the remaining foes with maces in their hands.

Her Highness... came after me...

As he coughed and another spatter of blood flew out from his lips, Reynaud watched the Princess wrap her meteor hammer's chains around her arm. She then rushed over to him, while her hands withdrew several runestones from her belt pouch along the way.

"Are you OUT OF YOUR MIND?" The glowing-haired Princess cried out in visible anger as she activated the healing runes. The stones took positions around him, and a hemisphere of turquoise healing magic -- the same color as Pascal's -- flared into existence.

Without even the energy to lift his hand, Reynaud could only lay there as he stared, crying, smiling, all at the same time. He looked at the Oriflamme whom he had sworn, just before the battle, to follow, to serve, and to protect.

"It worked... didn't it?" His bravado re-emerged as he tried to put on a normal face.

"YOU IDIOT!" Princess Sylviane shouted. "There's a difference between taking risks and commiting suicide!"

"I'm not dead yet." Reynaud joked with a faint, coughing laugh.

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