Chapter 146: Champion, Chapter 76: Antipyretic

Zurai

Eldrid

The Realms

Fifthday, 2nd week of the 11th month, Age of the Chosen 1

Early Afternoon

Caellach Macht, Mistvale Highlands

The only thing that saved Eldrid from being flash-fried was the thickness of the ice around her. In the first heartbeat of Aidan's flashy battlefield spell, she felt several inches of the three-foot-thick barrier sublimate straight to steam. Eldrid focused on pulling the water back down into her impromptu igloo as Aidan's onslaught went on and on and on.

Then a fucking lightsaber plunged straight through her defense like it didn't exist. The first searing blue-white blade missed her by a hair's width, passing under her left arm. The second did not. Eldrid felt a tug, the tiniest hint of resistance, on her right wrist. Acting on instinct, she jerked her arm away. Then she stared at the stump on the end of it where her hand should be.

The pain hit her a split second later. Agony crawled up her arm and across her spine. Eldrid staggered, her whirling dance disrupted, her concentration hanging on by a thread. She curled up into a standing fetal position and clutched her arm to her belly as if the pain would stop. The two lightsaber-like blades crossed an inch above her head, her life saved only by her instinctive reaction.

This wasn't fun anymore. Eldrid was a sitting duck here. Her icy dome might be able to protect her from the inferno outside, but it didn't leave her much room to dodge physical attacks. Not for the first time, she regretted that her Vapor Form only transformed herself. Her enchanted equipment lay in a pile where she'd been when Aidan surprised her the first time. She wasn't confident it would have protected her from this new spell, but it couldn't have done worse than her bare skin.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Aidan better give the best fucking massages in the world. This is gonna hurt. Eldrid opened a hole in the ice and sprinted out of it. The protective spell melted back into water and covered her as she passed through, but not before the conflagration made its presence felt. A scream rose from her belly and out through clenched teeth. It felt like she was running through Satan's own fires. She could feel herself being cooked alive.

Knowing the lightsabers couldn't be far behind her, Eldrid offered a silent prayer to God and her Patron. Please let this work. Marshaling her tattered concentration, she threw herself into a front handspring. A one-handed front handspring, something she'd never had much reason to practice.

Between her pain, unfamiliarity with the motion, and inability to see through flames, Eldrid almost overshot the first block. However, desperation and long years of disciplined practice saved her, allowing her to correct for the bad angle. She launched into a shorter, tighter, more dangerous, but most importantly, still moving second handspring.

Then, as if in answer to her prayers, the fires around Eldrid died out. Once again able to see the ground in front of her, she landed one more handspring before launching into a twisting leap. The first rotation provided a fleeting glimpse of the battlefield. Still encased in his silvery defensive spell, Aidan stood out like a sore thumb—as did the two blades speeding toward her. She couldn't dodge or outrun them forever. It was time to bring out the big guns before Aidan managed to finish her off.

Eldrid gathered the thin layer of water around her and the billowing clouds of steam from the air and shaped them into long, thin threads. Then, she anchored one end of each to her body. As she spun, they followed, lashing out like a thousand near-monomolecular whips. Aidan's blazing swords—was that a third one now?—proved immune to the attack. For a heartbreaking second, Eldrid thought Aidan was as well. The first several dozen strands to connect with him fragmented upon contact.

Then the silver glow shattered, and Aidan's blood spurted from hundreds of cuts across his body. Eldrid couldn't maintain cohesion in watery tendrils this thin for more than a fraction of a second after they encountered resistance. It was still enough to carve inch-deep lacerations through Aidan's armor and into his flesh.

Eldrid landed poorly, a jolt traveling up her left leg and making her stumble. Heart in her throat, she spun to face the attack she knew was coming. Halfway through the turn, her leg gave out. Eldrid toppled to the ground face-first. She reached with her hands to arrest her fall, forgetting she was playing the part of Luke Skywalker at the end of Empire Strikes Back. The pain of her stump jamming against the hard-packed soil was a savage reminder.

Struggling through the agony, Eldrid raised her head to watch the attack that would spell her loss. Supine like this, there was no way to dodge all three of the swords. One would strike true. That would be the end of it. Nonetheless, even as she watched the three blades separate to hit from different angles, she struggled to her feet. In all her life, both here and on Earth, Eldrid never quit.

When retinal dystrophy claimed the last vestiges of her eyesight two months after her eighth birthday, Eldrid—Hazel, at the time—didn't cry. She'd known it was coming, already learned Braille and familiarized herself with autoreaders and text-to-speech tools. But, most importantly, Hazel enshrined the mental photos she took of her parents years prior when she learned that, one day, she wouldn't be able to make out their faces.

Blindness shaped Hazel's life, but it didn't rule her. She diverted the attention other children spent on visual media into other pursuits. The first four dance teachers her parents approached rejected them out of hand, unwilling to take on the extra work a blind student would require. It took six gymnastics schools across three cities and two states to find one who would accept her. The whole time, Hazel wasn't idle. She read books on the subject, sought out videos and podcasts to listen to, and taught herself the basics.

Hazel never excelled at either of her chosen disciplines. She was never the lead dancer or the premier tumbler. Her unfailing determination to succeed, however, meant she was far from the bottom. Hazel never won an event, but she had more silver and bronze medals and runner-up trophies by the time she started college than years of age.

At Tulane, pursuing degrees in dance and psychology, Hazel first encountered immersive virtual reality. Normal VR was of no interest to her since it relied on vision. IVR, however, bypassed the retina and acted on the brain itself. While nothing within the simulated worlds was real, it was still a transformative experience. Faced with the prospect of being able to see again, Hazel finally had a goal.

It took her a year after graduation to save up enough money to buy a top-end IVR rig and another six months to afford a more budget-oriented pair for her parents. That night she walked her parents through installing the units and software, running the launcher, and creating their avatars. When she logged in and saw their faces, the same as the ones she'd held in her mind's eye for almost twenty years, she couldn't hold back her tears.

Then came The Realms. Boasting a new level of sensory and kinesthetic fidelity and artificial intelligence, it proved irresistible to Hazel. She applied to the alpha test program and, when she received her copy, spent all her free time playing. She worked her way up from a newbie character with few skills to becoming a respected tradeswoman over an in-game year.

It was on a purchasing trip that joy turned to horror. It was always Eldrid's habit to switch her respawn point to the nearest one to her present base of operations. So when a local merchant she'd done business with before invited her to stay at his manor while she conducted her business, she accepted without putting much thought into it. Gorry never leered at or propositioned her like most other men she met, so Hazel felt comfortable in his presence. When his home registered as a spawn point, she thought it was the game's way of telling her it was a safe zone.

How wrong she was. Gorry turned out to be another Chosen, and his home was a trap for the unwary. He killed her the first night, swift and silent. When Eldrid woke up, the death notification came as a total surprise, but she had no chance to make sense of it. Gorry was there waiting, knife in hand.

The subsequent fight was short. Naked and disoriented, it only took a few seconds for Gorry to overpower and restrain Eldrid. He took his time with her then, torturing her in unspeakable ways. Never sexual, thank the Lord, but no less terrible for it. And yet, Eldrid never stopped fighting. Gorry killed her twice more with a special dagger granted to him by his Patron, each time siphoning some of her soul.

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When she woke up for the third time, something inside her told Eldrid this was her last chance. If Gorry killed her again, she would stay dead. Spurred on by necessity, she struggled tooth and nail. The other Chosen seemed to revel in her resistance, cutting her several times in exceptionally painful ways that nonetheless left her able to continue to fight.

That proved to be his downfall when, in her desperation, Eldrid learned to Invoke spells. She used her own blood as a source and impaled her murderer on a dozen sanguine spikes. Then she wrenched the dagger from his grasp and stabbed him with it, once in the chest, then again under his chin.

Even with Gorry dead, Eldrid knew it wasn't the end. He would revive, just as she had. A small part of her wanted to do to him what he'd done to her. She might have if she wasn't afraid of him turning the tables on her. Instead, she worked through the night and the next morning, redirecting water from the nearby river to Gorry's manor.

Eldrid flooded the basement, where the murder chamber was, clear to the ceiling. Then she rusted the door's hinges and lock, hopefully trapping Gorry inside when he respawned. Next, she piled furniture against the door, just in case. Finally, she used water pressure to undermine the house's walls, collapsing the upper floors and leaving behind a pile of rubble housing what she hoped was Gorry's final, watery grave.

So, when Eldrid saw Aidan's three lightsabers start their swings, she didn't give up. Instead, she bent backward and twisted to the side, causing one to pass an inch above her nose and a second to burn a trench in the ground. The third plunged straight through her abdomen and out the other side. Eldrid tried to jump away, but her legs refused to cooperate. Her back hit the dirt a heartbeat later.

The pain was overwhelming. Her missing hand, scorched skin, and now severed spine. Tears sprang unbidden to Eldrid's eyes as she watched the blades swerve in the air above her. This was it. She was going to lose. Eldrid watched the bars of blue-white fire come for her, refusing to close her eyes. Aidan won fair and square. She wouldn't avert her gaze from his victory.

As she watched, the swords wobbled to a stop in mid-air, then vanished. Confusion reigned in Eldrid's mind. What happened? He'd better not be going easy on me. A moment later, the world around her shattered, and she found herself, armored once more, staring at an uninjured Aidan from across the dueling ring.

"And with Lord Aidan reduced to unconsciousness by blood loss, the winner is Captain Eldrid!" Valmai's exclamation washed over Eldrid. Her mind reeled at the sudden cessation of the various agonies inflicted on her during the duel. Aidan appeared the be suffering similarly, judging by the way he swayed on his feet.

Eldrid ignored the raucous crowd noise and walked over to Aidan, step by ginger step. Her brain was still screaming that she was paralyzed, while another part reminded her she'd sprained or broken her left leg. The paradoxical nature of those phantom complaints just made things worse.

When she reached Aidan, she pulled him into an embrace and rested her forehead against his. Eldrid stared into Aidan's eyes for a long moment, both of them panting with the effort to resist phantom pain. Finally, she mustered a grin. "I know you think you're hot stuff, Lord Aidan, but you should really be more gentle when you shove your sword into a girl."

Aidan's eyes widened at her joke. He let out a wheezing chuckle, then said, "I dunno, you seemed plenty wet to me."

Eldrid snorted out a laugh of her own. "Another myth. Water is a terrible lubricant. Believe me, I'd know." As it turned out, sex in a jacuzzi was a much worse idea than it sounded like.

They both laughed. Then Aidan's head tilted, and his lips pressed against hers. Caught up in the moment, adrenaline still pumping through her system, her body still telling her that she should be dead, Eldrid did not resist his touch. She opened her mouth with a needy moan. Their tongues met between their lips, fighting a miniature duel of their own.

Only the sound of Valmai repeatedly clearing her throat nearby brought Eldrid back to her senses. She jerked her head back and pushed off Aidan with her hands. Both hands, thank the Lord!

"What was it I said about exhibitions, Captain Eldrid?" Valmai's voice was dry as a desert.

"Yeah, yeah. No plan survives first contact with the enemy and all that," Eldrid responded. She took a step away from Aidan, shoving the feelings his hungry gaze brought forth into the back corners of her mind. "Vapor Form has its restrictions, and I'd have lost the duel then and there without it."

"I have to admit," came Aidan's wry response, "I didn't even realize you were naked until the very end. Something about us trying to kill each other distracted me." Golden truth flared around him.

"Oh?" Eldrid crossed her arms beneath her breasts, pushing them up and framing her exposed cleavage. As always, Aidan's eyes dipped to her chest and lingered for a moment, sending a warm surge through Eldrid. Seeing the effect she had on men never got old. "Such a shame. It might have been your only chance. Tragic to have squandered it so."

"You intend to be clothed when I give you your massage?" Aidan asked when his eyes returned to hers. He arched an eyebrow.

Eldrid smirked. "Maybe, maybe not. That's for me to know and you to anticipate." She took note of the way Aidan's nose flared and jaw clenched. Now, every time she mentioned it, he'd have to wonder just how much she'd let him see. It would be fun teasing him for the next few days before she let him off the hook.

"Now then," she continued, "I believe we need to clear the field for the next demonstration. I find myself desperately in need of another drink. Care to join me, my Lord?" Eldrid offered her hand to Aidan, who hesitated a moment before holding out his elbow for her to take hold of. How cute. He was still trying to resist her. That was a concern for tomorrow, however. Right now, she needed to forget how it felt to have third-degree burns over most of her body.

Zurai

Eldrid's status screen:

Pronunciation Guide (infinitesimal spoiler warning, names only without any details)

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