Chapter 3: Chapter 3 – Paladins Aren’t Just Pretty Faces

When she walks through that door, it occurs to me that I haven’t actually been in a real fight in a couple of weeks. I’m not usually into the kinds of fight where both sides are trying to kill each other with comparable methods; I’m really more of a run around wildly while my enemies melt into puddles of toxic goo kind of guy.

Amber, Reca Amber Ashborn, is not a puddles of goo kinda lady. She strides into the kill-room with her shield forwards and her sword drawn back to strike, looking like a fucking warrior-goddess. The sway in her hips is gone, all of her mannerisms wiped clean and replaced with straight lines and movement I can barely follow. By the time my eyes have even really recognized the creatures her sword has already more or less bisected one of them in a smooth lunging strike, and by the time I’ve launched my first volley of spells to hover by her flanks she’s cutting through another.

Rodents of unusual size. Two gigarats, both dead; she’s still moving forward, having barely slowed down after killing them. There’s five monsters left in the room - five monsters left in this wave, that is; that was a surprise, the first time I found out the fun way that they didn’t all come at the same time - and she’s heading for the casters. Brain-bats, one big one and two medium, and I can see her stagger as they let loose some sort of psychic assault.

I don’t get involved. They’re in front of her, so they’re hers, and anyway, Adaptive means in a few seconds she’s going to shrug off whatever they’re throwing her way even if she doesn’t have any other juggernaut-style … Skills, Traits, Perks, Titles, Class Features, Variant Attributes, or whatever other stuff I haven’t come across. No, I’m on flank duty, and conveniently her… not exactly wide open, given that it was covered in chain mail, and anyway let’s not get distracted… her sides, no attributes specified, are attracting the attention of the last two critters.

Beetles, kind of, and the way my nose was twitching suggests they’re brewing up some kind of acid in their bodies to spit at her. Easy enough to deal with that; with a mental command, two crackling balls of power speed in Amber’s wake and split to the sides to hold position in front of the beetles’ mouths. I’m barely in time, so it’s a good thing that inputting the logic into them is basically a free action; if I’d gawked any longer, she’d have taken a hit. Instead, when the beetles open their mouths to spit, the electric orbs zip inside and bury themselves in the nearest soft bits.

I’m not watching when the half-ejected acid eats their brains out from the inside, mostly because I’ve used this attack against these same beetles before and I don’t need to be distracted by how gross it is. Effective, sure, exactly the sort of maximum-impact minimum-investment kind of thing that is how I’ve had to fight, but I have better things to do than preen and if I was going to ogle something, it’d be Paladin ass instead of my own handiwork. I don’t ogle anything, to be clear; I put my hands in front of me, letting the feeling of one of my first Skills flow through them.

[Conjure Interface: Visor]

The thing forms slow, maybe three seconds all in all while I keep my attention focused on the activation. It’s improved, from ten seconds when I got it, but still not nearly enough for me to be comfortable using it like this. Need it, though.

Everything’s blurry through the visor. The beetles are still actively dying, and I ignore them, and Amber is a torch of green flame in a distinctly curvy but sort of indistinct human shape. After one glance over at her, I turn my attention back to the glyphs scribed into the walls around the doorway, and my hands flicker around and summon a series of recordings. Swipe, swipe, and they’re arranged to cover most of my vision, and then I start running the comparisons.

Here’s the best thing about this fucked up world I’ve wound up in: it’s not just that the System does computation in some sort of near-instantaneous-or-never-at-all binary way that I’m definitely going to abuse, it’s also that it turns intent into working programs better than any Coder, whether Volite or just Interface, I’ve run into. So between the two I run through about thirty comparisons by reflex in two and a half seconds, and then the interface screens surrounding the glyphs shift and show them instead of the glyphs I’m comparing them to.

Bingo. I don’t have a language or anywhere near a complete translation yet, but I’ve figured out the energy storage bits of the runework. “Three waves,” I yell in Amber’s vague direction, putting in the requisite effort needed to dismiss the visor. “Next one’s got twice the footprint as this one, third one’s three times this one.”

“You don’t have to yell, my lord.” Her voice carries back to me with dry humor. “It is not so large a room as that.”

I turn to look at her. She’s in a lunge, sword slowly sinking through a shield around the bigger of the brain-bats. The other two are very dead, and the last one seems almost resigned to its fate in that way that monsters seem to get sometimes, just going through the motions before the end. “I can’t actually think of a good comeback to that, which feels like a failing.” I’ve got a few seconds before the last bat goes down, and there’ll be maybe two or three seconds at the most before the next wave lands, so I focus on siphoning the ambient mana into some motes. I get the mana moving in a sort of tornado, grinning as even just a little bit of it fills up my personal reservoir and the rest starts to condense all over the room. “Ready.”

I don’t know if she was waiting for me, but right about then her sword punches the rest of the way through the shield and spears the bat through its gigantic, open-topped skull, with the attendant gross explosive failure of the membrane keeping it all together. About two seconds later, the smaller of the remaining glyphs flares to life with a blue-purple light, and the world goes white.

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Two seconds after that, I’m blinking the afterimages of the lightning cascade out of my eyes. Amber is almost leisurely cutting the heads off of the goblins, back ranks first, and when she sees me looking her way she raises an eyebrow in a sort of that was mildly surprising look. I’m surprised too, until I see the goblins’ gear.

Metal. They’re covered in metal. Not just in the form of armor, which they had plenty of, and weapons, likewise; their bodies, ranging from a meter and a half for the flankers to one towering two-and-a-bit-meter brute, are studded and pierced and laced with iron and copper. A lot of it shines with a variety of glinty colors, and I watch the blood pooling from Amber’s quick, decapitating cuts evaporate into mist in less than a second.

“Cleansing enchantments on all the trinkets.”

I nod at her in acknowledgment. “The dungeon’s a sort of adaptive thing.” It had been ramping up its attempts to defend against my bullshit as I progressed through the three and a half floors I’d cleared. “Kind of a chump, though.”

“Until it gets but one trick past you, my lord. I seem to remember broken bones and a curse?”

I snicker at her tone. I’m not ready to tell her or anything, but I’m loving her sassy attitude. Not just as a contrast to her formal, respectful tone when I made… when we first met, but also it’s just really funny in its own right. “Yeah, I know.” I sober up a bit as she finishes doing the loop. There’s a couple of goblins left, but they’re a hundred percent out of it, since she started with the ones who were likeliest to stir. “It gets one trick past me, or I fail to land two tricks in a row, and I’m just flat dead.”

“Two?”

“Yeah. I have a trick up my sleeve.” It’s a good one, but I’m really hoping not to use it. Ever. It’s got sort of a downside, one whose floor is really bad and whose ceiling is somewhere in the vicinity of beyond mortal ken. “Think there’s enough ambient mana left to do that again?”

Amber shakes her head, flexing her hands around the grips of her sword and shield. “I don’t know enough of wizardry to understand what you were doing.” I open my mouth and she gives me a look through the helmet, somehow. Well, her eyes are still visible, and they crinkle, at least. No idea what it means. “You can explain how you did this after we finish the third wave.”

“You sure?” I try to make it clear there’s no obligation. I was a giant nerd when it came to hyperdimensional navigation and mathematics, and I don’t have any expectation that I’ll be less of one about magic, but not everyone is. Case in point, she can’t recognize a mana-condensation cascade.

“Adam.” Her voice is a low growl. “I am impressed, and want that explanation, after the third wave. Because, my lord, I need to understand how you fight, and because that was beautiful.”

Her tone puts a flush through my entire body, and I’m grinning when the third rune flares.

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