Chapter 31: 12.4: Trouble in Dakheng IV

The jester had told us that we were under attack by multiple enemies, and it was quickly becoming clear that he had been correct.

Another impact resonated through my shield, and this time it was different from the sudden shock of the projectile before. The closest sensation I could compare it to was Alex’s magic missile from our spar last week. Whoever had been launched at my shield at bullet-level speeds had barely been fazed by the impact, and they were already back on their feet and attacking.

We had a situation on hand. I took a moment to take stock of it, considering what our ambushers had brought to bear.

The wind was an area of effect, movement-restricting effect. Given how intense it had been at the edges of the plaza, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had also been the force that had launched the oathholders at us. An area of effect spell fit an Und oath, and its movement based nature meant that there was probably a Caël oath involved, be that directly or through an Aedi oath’s gadget.

At least one oathholder had been tossed into each of our shields at sonic speeds, and as far as I could tell none of them had splattered across them, so that likely meant at least one Ditas oath on their side.

Speaking of the oathholders that had been shot like so many bullets, the one that had just barreled through one of the married couple had fully stood up. I could barely make out the glint of the light against their armor, the blood and viscera from the ex-adventurer that they’d killed dripping from their body. The armored figure brought a hand to their shoulder, brushing what looked to be the mangled remnants of an arm off of themselves.

They stood for a second in a growing pool of blood that wasn’t theirs, their height painting a menacing figure in the windy plaza.

One of the nobles screamed, and another voice joined them. I recognized it as Samar a few moments later.

Back at the entrance that our new enemy had broken in from, the remaining pieces of the couple’s spell dissipated, and a blood-splattered Samar screamed in rage so loudly that it carried to me even through the wind.

He turned towards the other oathholder, who had begun to slowly advance on the center. Still somewhere in the realm of ten or twenty meters away, and after the flight granted to them by the gale had ended, it appeared that they had no further enhanced ability to move.

The enemy oathholder didn’t even turn to meet Samar as the latter cast a classical fireball at them. Samar’s effort was to no avail—his shot was imperfect, and though it blossomed impressively upon hitting the armored oathholder’s back, it dissipated without leaving so much as a scorch mark on the metal plate.

Samar was pissed, and the way that the armored oath ignored him was exacerbating that. Another scream of rage came from his direction.

“Samar, fall back,” the jester said, a note of tension in his voice now. “That’s a Ditas oathholder or similar, you really don’t want to—“

When the man in question shouted, it was loud enough that I could make out the shape of the words over the squalls surrounding us.

“Fuck off!” he snarled, and he started sprinting forward, slinging spells at the armored oath.

Samar had a veritable barrage of spells firing at the armored person, magic missiles interspersed with fireballs, spiked projections of purple energy, and a few more esoteric curses that I found vaguely familiar but couldn’t quite place the name of. He cast with no regard to his own safety or magic capacity, forming his next spell in the same breath that he released his first. Samar was coated in the blood of his wife, and in his fury he painted a frightening picture.

It wasn’t going to work. Anger was driving him, and perhaps hate, but it was by and large the former emotion. Rage was oil on a flame, a hot surge of energy that gave one the power to burn intensely bright, but just as oil faded out in moments so did anger. A sudden burst of fire would be enough to overwhelm a weaker opponent, but not somebody trained to deal with it. Beyond that, while it could get you through a tough spot, it was uncontrolled and sloppy. While hatred was cold and methodical, able to sharpen one’s focus, the power that anger granted was the same that a raging forest fire could offer in the moments before a rainstorm—wild, destructive, and ultimately futile.

And on top of it all, Samar looked to be either an Aedi oath or one of the rarer but still ubiquitous oathholders of Bahu, God of Shields. Neither of those gods were ones that rewarded a mindset of blind rage.

Samar was getting closer to the armored oathholder now, twenty meters becoming ten, and yet the person he was flinging every spell in his repertoire at had still yet to even flinch.

“Alright, you’re not listening,” Kyle sighed. “Incoming.”

Another impact at my shield stole my attention away from the developing situation.

I’ll get back to you later, I thought, tearing my attention away from the plaza center.

A flash of red light emerged from the opposite side of the plaza, but I had my own fish to fry. Over the deceptively short amount of time that this engagement had occurred, I’d been building up my own magic, but I had yet to fire it, unsure of whether to support Samar in his futile barrage or to protect myself. The jester had just made that decision for me.

The shield was about to break, I could sense. One or two more solid hits from this magically enhanced strength and my enemy would break through.

Rather than allow that to happen, I took the initiative. Dissolving my own spell was easy—I stopped focusing on the frame and ceased the flow of magic from myself to the construct, revealing a moderately surprised oathholder behind it.

Aedi oathholder, judging by those gauntlets. Man. Very tall.

His body was covered by leather armor that shimmered. If that wasn’t enchanted in some way or another, I would apologize to my father’s headstone.

Fortunately, his face was unshielded. I threw forth my frost-knife with my right hand and a mass of unstructured magic with my left, targeting the only exposed part of his body.

The momentary surprise that had come with the sudden dissipation of the shield cost him, and he barely made an attempt to dodge. The knife made contact with a hard surface and bounced off his face, a distortion appearing in the air in front of him.

There was armor there, after all.

Still, it wouldn’t be enough to block the still-growing chunk of power from my oath, not unless he was or had access to an exceptionally powerful and talented tinkerer.

A wave of my dark energy collided with his head, consuming and ruining all that it could, and he fell to one knee with the force of the impact. Unfortunately, when it dissipated he did not fall, instead slapping at the air around him with his gauntlet.

A stab of fear shot through my heart. Had he blocked it?

No, I realized, he hadn’t. Off to one side, distortions in the air were beginning to resolve into the shape of a helm, already more than half-destroyed. Inome’s magic devoured it hungrily, reducing it to nothing in a matter of seconds.

This enemy was dangerous. All Aedi oathholders were, if you gave them long enough to set up, and this man had possessed a helm that was not only invisible to the naked eye but also powerful enough to prevent its user from instantly dying to the disproportionately high destructive power of my oath.

It didn’t matter. All I had to do was make sure he wouldn’t manage to pull out another trick. I drew two knives from my belt, infusing one with power even as I flicked my wrist and threw the other one.

The dagger sailed straight and true, until it didn’t. The other oathholder wasn’t that far from me--maybe four or five meters at most--so he hadn’t had time to dodge, but he hadn’t needed to. Just a little over half of the way there, the dagger’s trajectory had curved up, and it flew harmlessly into the air.

“I… tricks too,” the man rumbled, the middle of his sentence drowned out by that damned wind still blowing in our ears.

An Und oathholder? Doctrine for fighting them dictated never entering their area of influence. He had some way to redirect things, and if I got close he might be able to redirect even my own movements. I elected to stay back, pulling on the twanging strings of reality to form another blast. Even a magic missile would do, but forming a frame while actively avoiding him would be a problem.

Almost as if he’d predicted what I’d been thinking, the man dove forward with startling speed, almost collapsing into a sprint. I jumped back, but I wasn’t fast enough. The influence took hold of me in the air, and suddenly I was falling upwards.

All my blood rushed into my head, and my sense of down was not where it should’ve been. A rush of terror permeated my body for the briefest of moments as I fell towards the sky, but the effect wasn’t permanent and it didn’t stretch very far. My sense of direction readjusted itself three or four meters off the ground. It was disorienting, and my head spun with the sudden reorientation.

My oath didn’t provide me with any movement capabilities, and I’d just been tossed fairly high into the air.

This is bad.

I didn’t manage to expand on that thought before I saw a massive gauntlet of brass and steel swing towards me. I threw up another shield in my foe’s direction as quickly as I could, shoddily constructed but still functional.

The gauntlet shattered the shield, slowing down a fair bit with the contact. I released the working of unstructured magic that I’d still been creating in the same instant that my shield broke, and then I knew pain.

The blow had been weakened by a lot, and it hadn’t even hit me properly head on, but it was still an Aedi oath’s gauntlet with massive strength behind it. I tumbled through the air, my vision a blur of the sky and the ground and the buildings, and then I hit the brick of the plaza. The impact forced all the air out of my lungs, but beyond the moment of pain that any hard landing on a floor would cause, it wasn’t too bad of a fall.

I’d been hit harder than this when we’d been in the Sinlen Pass. This level of pain, I could deal with.

My left arm was, in a word, fucked. I’d weakened the hit a lot, and the shield had redirected it, transforming a certainly lethal blow to my midsection into a heavy hit to my left shoulder. It felt leaden, and trying to use it was a no-go, the blinding pain that came from twitching it just a little stopping me from moving it more.

My enemy, however, had received the worse end of it by far. I’d attacked him as he’d attacked me, and while not all of my magic had made contact with him, not all of it had needed to. Half his face was a black ruin now, skin and bone turned to ash, and he had fallen prone. Still breathing, I noted, and the contorted expression on the remaining part of his face suggested he was in a rather great deal of pain.

The wind muffled his agonized moans, and I turned back to the situation we’d seen earlier. I didn’t need to worry about the Und oath anymore. It was already too late for him.

Samar had been knocked back, supporting himself on his hands and knees. Blood was pooling around him, but I wasn’t sure how much of it was his. The man was still alive, at least, though his attempts at attacking the armored oathholder seemed to be ineffective.

Kyle was actively fighting the armored form, and he had at least managed to occupy the entirety of their attention. I had no idea what oath he held, and the spells he was firing weren’t helping much either. There were a myriad of multicolored orbs swirling around his head, forming a rough ring around him. I watched as he fired one, its colors morphing and distorting as it diverged from its orbit. As it flew past arm’s reach of the jester, the color-shifting orb solidified its form.

In a matter of moments, the sphere of energy had left the jester’s ring and coalesced from an amorphous ball of undefined power into a bright yellow projectile, crackling with electricity.

That screamed Igni oath, I was pretty sure, but what was with the effect that those spheres had around his head?

Whatever the case, the shot of lightning exploded on impact, briefly creating an intense light that left an afterimage in my vision. It forced the armored oath back a step, and while I couldn’t see the exact point it had hit, I could smell the ozone in the air after the detonation.

It hadn’t come close to taking the enemy down, though, and the tall oathholder stepped forward with irritation in his gait.

“Are you okay, Lily?” Kyle asked, his voice still making its way to my ears somehow. “I saw you take a hit.”

“I’ll be alright,” I said. I could barely hear myself over the wind, but even half the plaza away the jester reacted with a cock of his head. Enhanced hearing, of some sort? “I’m here for support.”

Our enemy’s armor was, on closer inspection, a creation of dark steel. Not a traditional way to make armor, but as carved runes on the legs of the oathholder began to shine a bright red, it became clear that nothing about this armor was traditional.

I glanced around. Samar was still down, and Green was reinforcing his shields, but nothing seemed like it urgently demanded my attention. I would be best suited dealing with the immediate situation at hand, and so I started forming a frame.

“Movement spell,” Kyle announced calmly. “Already tried it once. Won’t work again.”

He reached his hand out, and one of the spheres orbiting him flew into his outstretched palm. The jester gestured, and the sphere flew, a mesmerizing splotch of ever-changing colors drawing my eyes to it even as I ran.

This time, the sphere travelled towards the ground at speed, and I didn’t catch what it solidified into before it impacted the ground underneath the armored oath’s feet. The sphere of energy lost its solid form and spread across the ground like water, a shimmering layer of magic coating the area just under the enemy.

The layer of magic glowed blue, and then the armor left the ground. The gleam of the runes on the armor reached a peak as the person was thrown into the air, and with that their form blurred with speed. It was too late for them, unfortunately—they could be as fast as they wanted, but that mattered not when there wasn’t any ground to walk on.

They were tossed a few meters into the air, at which point the effects of the jester’s spell ceased. It looked strangely familiar, and I placed it almost instantly. The spell that had thrown me had done the same.

Ah. Pieces fell into place, and I realized why I hadn’t been able to nail down the effect of the spheres. The jester was probably an oath to Shanzhai, God of Copies, mimicking the effects of other oaths. It explained the variation in the spheres, then.

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As I finished my thought, the armored oathholder had begun their fall, the runes on their greaves fading in intensity. When they crashed back down to the ground, their limbs were moving at a normal speed.

Don’t give them a chance to recover. A little belatedly, I finished forming my magic missile, and I added the spark, enunciating the command phrase. I tried to hold onto the magic of the spell as it fired, as I’d done in the past, and I partially managed. It wasn’t much more controlled than it would’ve been without my guidance, but there was a difference.

The void-black missile arced as it came forth from my hands, and it collided with the backside of the armor.

A section of the armor glowed red with runes, and I realized that the glow had come from the area I’d targeted.

My magic had been absorbed.

“Armor ate my magic, if you can hear me,” I noted. “That’s unfortunate.”

“It does do that,” Kyle replied, hurling another sphere of magic.

An imitation of Aedi or Tsau, perhaps, the ball exploding into a shower of stone and dirt spikes in midair. The enemy oathholder flinched back as a dozen earthen projectiles impacted them, but nothing penetrated the armor.

“There are runes carved across the entire suit of armor,” the jester commented. “They’re glowing every time they take a hit. More hits, more glow, and it looks like it fades over time.”

I hurled another magic missile, forming it rapidly and tossing it haphazardly. It hit the oathholder in the back again, and the already-fading glow there redoubled in intensity.

“There’s probably a limit,” I said. “I’m going to rotate around, see if I can help you focus a certain part.”

“Works for me,” Kyle said, and I heard half a grunt before the sound cut off. He’d thrown another pair of spheres, emulating a ray of frost of some kind combined with a raw blast of force. “Don’t loop towards the nobles, we’re trying to keep this guy off them.”

So far, Kyle had been pretty successful at that, it appeared. The knight in dark armor had turned almost ninety degrees away from the nobles, prioritizing the only oathholder that had been able to actually do more than irritate them.

I looked at the nobles. Either they had received instructions from Kyle to remain still or they had just been too terrified to move, because they were still gathered around the broken fountain at the center. Orchid was still standing, but the other three were cowering inside the basin of the fountain.

Cowards. The thought was tinged with disgust, and so I banished the feeling. That wasn’t an emotion that would help me fight better.

I did as Kyle had requested, because while it would have been really funny to gain the attention of our assailant and point them at the nobles, I still wanted to get paid for this, and the deaths of the clients probably weren’t the best way for that to happen. I sprinted slightly off to the right, so I’d pass the dark knight on the side not facing the nobles.

As I ran, fighting the wind, I drew a dagger with my good arm. The plaza was large and the wind was strong, so I had more than enough time to amp up the blade with power.

It was going to be an awkward affair, I could tell. Thankfully, the pain in my left arm had been reduced substantially—now, it felt like a numb piece of flesh only incidentally attached to my body. The bit of sensation that I received from it still only amounted to bright white needles of flaming pain, but I was getting better at filtering them out. Still, it left the issue of what I was going to do as I ran by the armor. Stabbing them was going to be a little trickier when the arm closer to them was pretty much unusable.

Still, even after absorbing a spell from me, the other oathholder wasn’t paying an iota of attention to me. That left exploitable openings.

“I’m going to jump on them and go for the neck,” I announced. “It shouldn’t point the knight at the nobles, I don’t think. Can you hit the armor in maybe twenty seconds?”

“I can do that, yes,” Kyle replied. “Stay safe.”

“Sure thing,” I said, glancing down at my mangled arm. Right. Safe.

As I ran, the oathholder began advancing towards the jester, their steps slow and lumbering. They seemed unwilling to activate the speed on their greaves again. Did they have some way to negate the Und-effect that the jester had been using? If they did, and it turned off when the greaves activated, that would give a decent explanation to their current behavior.

Twenty meters became ten became five, and as I was getting close enough to hear the rumbling steps that the knight was taking, I chanced a glance at the nobles, some fifteen meters away.

Orchid was looking at me, determination in his eyes. He opened his mouth, and when he spoke, his words carried just as the jester’s had.

“Armored oathholder! Identify yourself.”

The command rippled through my body but didn’t take hold, faintly reminiscient of the power that one of my professors had wielded a while back.

For the oathholder that the jester and I were currently targeting, though, the command hit them hard, and their head swivelled towards Orchid, ignoring both adventurers attacking them.

“Strike Team Leader Faye!” I was a little surprised to hear a woman’s voice come from the hulking armored behemoth, but then again the armor left a lot up to the imagination.

“Faye, stop moving.” Orchid ordered, and he fell to his knees with the command, coughing. Not that powerful of an oathholder, then, but at least he wasn’t being useless.

This command didn’t take hold as hard as the first one had, that was immediately obvious. Still, it gave the armored woman pause, and it was enough of a pause for me to close the distance between us.

When I had said the armor was big, I had meant it. It was comically large, thick vambraces ending in gauntlets wider across than my torso, their knuckles almost scraping the ground.

I jumped, and I lightly tossed my enhanced dagger upwards as I did so, freeing up my right hand. I grappled onto the middle of the gauntlet closer to me, stabilizing myself with my good arm and wincing at the sudden onslaught of sensation from my jostled left arm.

Set one foot, balance, jump again. The second jump brought me up to the woman’s shoulder, a solid two meters off the ground, and I plucked my dagger out of the air by the handle as soon as I set my feet again. The magic was still burning dark on the blade, and I slashed at the back of their neck, where the skin would be exposed.

There was no skin to be exposed. The helmet was fused to the armor somehow, and my blade found no purchase on the dark metal there. Runes glowed bright, brighter than any of the ones I’d seen caused by my magic missiles, but through it all it stayed intact.

“Heads up,” the jester said, hurling another two spheres. “Avoid the first projectile, take the second.”

What the hell could that mean? Whatever the case, I had to get off. The woman had noticed me, and she was already lifting her right gauntlet to take a swing at me, one that would surely be lethal if I let it connect.

I took another slash for good measure, and then I kicked off from the armor, launching myself toward Kyle’s direction. It was an awkward maneuver, and not one that gave me as much momentum as I would like, but it got me off.

I landed hard, and the impact reverberated through my body.

“Fuck, shit, ow,” I bit out, a wave of needles lighting up my arm.

I could deal. I sprinted out of the way as I saw the first sphere more than halfway done with its flight. This one became a simple fireball, and it sank directly into the oathholder’s nape. Still no impact, unfortunately, but the runes were glowing painfully bright now. The armor was near its limit, there.

The second sphere was aimed at me. I dashed out of the way, gathering unstructured magic as quickly as I could. Why would he betray me in the middle of a—

“That one’s meant to make you faster,” Kyle’s voice rang in my ear. He sounded exasperated. “I did say to get hit by it.”

Oh.

I continued sprinting anyway, and the sphere turned in its flight. It detonated harmlessly as it came near me, dissolving into a mess of magic particles, and the particles flew into me.

My vision changed, the world around me gaining a tint of light orange, and suddenly I was sprinting at twice the speed with double the effort.

“Retreat now,” Kyle said. “We can bombard it from afar.”

I ignored him. The woman was slow and lethal, and I was fast and lethal. I turned on a dime, the temporary magic effect boosting my agility as well as my speed, and I was back to the armored woman’s position in a moment.

“No, don’t—“

I leaped, and it took me higher than I expected, launching me almost up to her head. I slashed out with my knife, and I made contact with the nape again. This time, the glow didn’t grow any brighter, but it started flickering.

I was close, and another slash meant—

I didn’t see the gauntlet coming until it had already hit me, and suddenly I was in the fountain and seeing stars.

Only pain awaited me here, and so I slipped into the welcoming embrace of unconsciousness.

Or, at least, I tried to.

“—nish stabilizing her, you jackass,” Orchid was saying. “You became an oathholder of Nacea by saving lives, don’t let down your god now, of all times.”

The other man had his hands over my belly, a sour look on his face. “Stay still, or this is going to take a lot longer.”

I looked at the area he was treating. I wasn’t in pain, probably from the effects of this Nacea oath, but I still had some semblance of sensation. It was an odd feeling, feeling that the better part of your ribcage had been shattered without it actually hurting.

I hadn’t actually landed in the fountain, by the looks of it. There was a trail of blood leading from the outside of the place, coming in through a broken part of the basin’s wall. They’d pulled me in here.

The noble above me continued his healing process, and I ignored him, electing to watch the fight instead.

Kyle had capitalized on the space I’d made, throwing spell after esoteric spell at the flickering nape. As I watched, he threw a full ring of eight spheres, each of them transforming into a different effect as they flew. The ring made impact, and he infused himself with a final sphere, likely of the same make he’d given me.

The jester dashed forward, blurring orange, and a half-second afterwards his rings impacted the armor. A heartbeat later, he was up at the armored woman’s nape with a shortsword in hand.

Her helmet had fallen off, revealing shaggy red hair and an incredibly angry face.

Kyle held his blade to her neck, crouched on her shoulder. It painted a comical picture, his red clown nose and striped outfit contrasting with the seriousness of his posture and the calmness with which he held his sword.

“Give up,” he said, and just like that, the fight was over.

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