Chapter 57: 57: Number Seven will Surprise You!

“Damnit, turn around!” Calvin heard the leader shout from the back of his guar as Calvin’s swarm of fist sized wasps split around him, angling for the back of the man’s army.

Gotta stay spread out and let bad Penny do the work for me, Calvin thought, avoiding the commander and heading for the troops themselves, slamming into their helmets and jabbing inch-long stingers into their faces.

Calvin worked the cold math as he went.

About fifteen percent of his stingers landed, taking roughly two hundred people out of the fight. In exchange he’d lost a little over twenty percent of his initial swarm from Veteran’s enhanced reflexes.

One more push, and he’d be near fifty percent swarm attrition. Hold off until the deaths filled the air with Warp, use Bad Penny to restore the numbers and then push again.

Cal’s swarm pushed deeper into the Ilethan formation, skipping a few places in line and aiming for the middle of the group, where he could sow the most confusion.

In the meantime, his nearby wasps listened to the conversation between Grant and the fish-lipped commander of the Ilethan army.

“Grant. I’ve already told the crown about your treachery.”

Grant chuckled, gliding to a halt in front of the young woman and middle aged commander.

“Brendan. You should have thought I was dead. You must have some kind prophetic vision, or…”

“Someone had to take the blame for Mujenan,” Brendan said with a shrug. “I’m just…kind of proud that my scapegoat turned out to be the right one.”

“The story’s a little more complicated than that.” Grant said. “The Malkenrovian delegate killed princess Nadia.”

“Really? She’s dead?” Brendan asked incredulously. “She’s far more valuable alive.”

“She’s mostly dead. The situation is…complicated, but she’s dead enough that she’s out of consideration for marriage or succession, but not out of consideration for spilling state secrets.”

“That makes no sense.” Brendan said, shaking his head.

“Hi, General.” The blonde woman said, giving Grant a coy smile.

“What’s the deal with the one controlling these wasps?” Brendan asked, leaning on his saddlehorn as he looked down at Grant. “Is it your new boss? Bit of a coward if he’s unwilling to show himself.”

“Yeah…” Grant frowned as he glanced at the blonde. “Well, we should get started with the fighting thing. Can’t let my new boss think I’m a slacker.”

Too late, Calvin thought as he watched them chat while the battle turned into chaos.

Grant’s blades began to pull themselves out of their sheathes.

“Transference.” The blonde woman said, pointing at Grant, putting her other hand on the ground beneath her.

Grant let out a shuddering gasp and toppled backward, stiff as a board.

“There, now his core body temperature is the same as the dirt,” She said, carefully wiping her hand off with a handkerchief. “You’re welcome.”

“Seems like a bad idea for you attack us alone,” Brendan said, his dark leather armor writhing over his skin like a living thing, slowly growing to cover any exposed skin.

“Well, you know how it goes.” Grant gasped, shivering. “New commander, thinks he’s invincible.”

“Anything you want written on your tombstone?” Brendan asked, guiding his guar closer as the sorceress turned her attention toward the wasps.

“Yeah, a list of your relatives who’ve sucked my cock.” Grant said, shivering violently. “Number seven will surprise you.”

“Alright, you’re dead.”

“I’d rather you didn’t, sweetums,” the blonde said, drawing Calvin’s attention to her.

Sweetums?

“He’ll take a few minutes to recover from that. In that time it would be easy to truss him up good enough to take home. The Crown will want to debrief him, and then you have your scapegoat, don’t you? The bigger problem is these wasps.”

She glanced back at the orderly line that was falling apart under the influence of lethal stings dispersed through their ranks.

“I don’t understand why you’re just letting them sting your men, seems like a bad idea, all things considered.” She watched a man fall to the ground, his entire head swelling to the size of a melon, froth dribbling from his mouth as he died.

“My plan to stop them was you, Charlotte,” Brendan said with a hard edge.

“Fine, fine, don’t get upset, it’s unbecoming of an officer.”

“I suppose if I didn’t, you’d accuse me of being too passive.”

“Nonsense,” she said, eyeing Calvin’s swarm, unaware of Calvin eyeing her back.

“These wasps, they can’t have strong Minds. I’ll hit the battlefield with a Lesser Torpor, and that should be plenty to knock out the insects while the soldiers stay relatively unaffected.”

“You don’t need to tell me what you’re doing,” Brendan said, climbing off his guar. “Just do it.”

“So impatient. This isn’t my specialty, you know.”

“What is your specialty again?”

“Shush, I have to concentrate,” she said, the veins of her arms filling with Bent.

Calvin watched the Bent rush out of her fingers, dissipating into an invisible cloud that settled over the entire battlefield. Calvin had to make some assumptions there, seeing as it was invisible.

Charlotte’s brows furrowed as something clicked, changing the fundamental nature of the Bent spread thin across the battlefield.

Calvin felt the urge to yawn, but it passed as soon as he felt it.

Your Stability has shrugged off the effects. Your Will has begun digesting the foreign Bent, ETA 2 seconds.

Let’s keep their ignorance going as long as we can, Calvin thought, moving forward with his wasps, targeting the next row of soldiers, while about two hundred of his wasps began pulling back, aiming to bring his center of mass closer to Grant and company.

“Huh,” Charlotte said, lowering her arms.

“Huh what?” Brendan asked.

“The wasps seem to be sentient. At least enough to shrug off the effects of Lesser Torpor. Fascinating.”

“It not fascinating, it’s killing our men left and right.”

“Your men, nephew.”

Brendan loomed over the slowly recovering Grant, his blade unsheathed, point hovering over the big man’s chest.

“Tell me where The Wasp is and how to get rid of his pestilence.”

Grant chuckled weakly, his face slowly regaining its color. “He’s kind of spread out right now, and if I knew how to get rid of them I wouldn’t be talking to you right now, would I?”

Calvin sent a wasp each after Brendan and the blond sorceress.

Brendan responded with a casual backhand with his sword that split the wasp in two, while the other wasp rebounded off some kind of invisible protection surrounding her.

Interesting. That will make her hard to get the drop on.

Calvin pulled his wasps back and surveyed the battlefield. The rear and middle ranks were in disarray, while the front ranks continued to push up against the wooden wall, their momentum carrying them forward, heedless of the chaos behind them.

It was a mess. About five hundred men were stiff and unmoving, trampled beneath their fellow soldier’s feet, while Calvin’s initial swarm was beginning to rebuild itself.

The swarm in front of the wall had been nearly killed off entirely, but three wasps had survived through sheer luck, and Calvin had instructed them to hide in the slats of the palisade to soak up the Warp and reproduce their swarm.

It might take a while.

Three, six, twelve, twenty-four, it’ll take a lot of generations to make a comeback, but it’s better than squandering them.

In the meantime, the two hundred men on the wall were pushing against the intruders with the long spears laid out against the wall, desperation written across their faces.

“I’ve got it,” the sorceress said, reaching out to the wasp hovering around her invisible barrier. Calvin tried to pull it away, but a force snaked around the fist-sized wasp and reeled it into her hand, holding it still.

“I’ll use Voodoo. It should affect all the targets that way.”

Well, now I need to change the circumstances.

Calvin put his repositioning wasps in full gear and shifted the rest of the swarm toward the rear of the line as he watched the sorceress’s moves through the captured wasp.

She reached into her dress and retrieved a slim silver knife as Bent wound itself around the wasp. In the instant before she struck, Calvin could feel the invisible bands preventing the one in her hand from moving spread to all the others in some kind of sympathetic response.

No time left.

Calvin dismissed his swarm, reappearing directly behind Brendan in a burst of green flame.

He was a couple inches off, but it was good enough.

Brendan went for a similar backhand as he had before, and Calvin ducked beneath it, a knife emerging from his hand and slamming through the living armor into Brendan’s kidney.

Brendan gasped in pain and whipped around with significantly more energy than before. Calvin tried to pull the knife out, but the strange moving armor clamped down on the jerrytanium blade and wrenched it painfully out of his skin as the commander moved.

Calvin kicked himself away, pulled out his spare knife and drew it into his body as Brendan gasped, looking down at the blade jutting from his midsection.

“Oh my,” Charlotte said, ducking down and pointing a finger at him as she reached for the ground.

“transf-

Calvin raced her, putting his fingers on his Fireball component fractions of a second before  she touched the well-manicured grass.

Shaping

13/15 Bent Remaining.

Calvin aimed slightly behind her and to her left, to allow Brendan to shield him from as much of the bloom of heat as possible.

In a flicker too fast to see, the sorceress’s pointing finger changed to an open palm tilted upward. Something caught Calvin’s trajectory and forced it upward.

Calvin’s spell fractured, manifesting thousands of tiny flares of light in the sky as they ignited on contact with oxygen, so small that the heat surrounding them kept them aloft.

All three of them winced as the heat bore down from above, shielding their faces from above.

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Brendan recovered first, his fluctuating armor shrugging off most of the heat.

“You little shit,” he growled, marching forward.

The sorceress recovered a moment later, pointing her long nail at Calvin.

This isn’t looking super great. Elliot commented, eating what sounded like an apple.

No shit.

Meat shield.

Sounds good.

Calvin scrambled forward, sliding awkwardly through the grass, covering his face, arms and shins in grass stains, his spine straining as he ducked beneath the commander’s swing.

Calvin leapt to his feet, his face inches away from the commander’s.

It’s not close combat unless your nipples are touching, one of Karen’s anecdotes came to mind unbidden as Calvin slapped his left palm across the man’s helmet, blocking his vision.

Through the man’s armpit, he could make out the sorceress holstering her finger, scowling.

“Get out of the way dear, you’re making this more difficult.”

“Gah, you little – “ Brendan’s word were cut off by an animalistic shriek of pain as Calvin kneed him in the side, right where his knife was still held in place by the man’s armor.

Brendan fell to the ground, just as Calvin had hoped, but he hadn’t expected his palm and knee to get stuck to the armor, dragging him along for the ride.

“Gah!” Calvin wrenched with everything he had before the bond got any worse, tearing a fair amount of skin off his palm, and losing his entire pant leg.

At least it’s not my dominant hand, he thought, curling his left hand into a fist to slow down the bleeding. He’d felt worse pain in Shadow Boxing. That armor made things difficult.

Is it an artifact or a skill, I wonder?

Duck. Elliot warned.

“Transference.”

Calvin threw himself down behind the supine form of the sorceress’s nephew, picking up a fistful of dirt.

“Now, boy, you’re very brave, but that’s not going to – Calvin jumped up and pitched the dirt at her with everything he had, forcing her to flinch while the dirt bounced of her invisible shield.

Calvin searched his belt for the smooth matte sensation of the Steam Component.

Shaping

12/15 Bent remaining.

Calvin detonated it beneath himself, not giving the blonde woman a chance to interfere with the spell’s trajectory. He needed something to cloud sight. An actual cloud would do.

He created a wide circle of liquid steam beneath him, which immediately exploded into a thick cloud of white that billowed outward in every direction, completely severing line of sight.

Hopefully that will prevent her from targeting me with that spell, Calvin thought, dropping low and scrambling over to where he remembered Grant being, frost from the rapid expansion crumbling away from him.

I didn’t know it would do that, It’s supposed to be hot steam. Calvin thought as he crunched through the frosted grass.

It cooled in the vial. Rapid decompression creates a heat vacuum, basically. The tiny amount of heat that remained in your little vial was suddenly spread out over a large area, displacing other heat. Science is cool.

Calvin was able to see the sword dancer when he was about three feet away, close enough to touch the man.

“Man, you folded like a chump. How are you feeling?” he asked as the ambient temperature of the grass slowly melted the thin layer of frost.

“Colder than a witch’s tit.” Grant said, shivering.

Oh, hey, that’s still a saying. Neat.

“I want to keep pushing them, but I’m gonna need you to be able to stand.” Calvin said.

“Gimmie a minute.” Grant slowly unfolded his arms and tried to put them under himself, seemingly as weak as a newborn.

“What the hell is taking you so long? You should have gotten rid of her Bent by now.”

“The effect is instantaneous,” Grant grunted as Calvin helped him to his feet. “Her Bent is long gone.”

Um, yeah, I forgot about your medieval education. There’s a little something called core body temperature, and if you change it by even a couple degrees, it can get pretty debilitating. If she actually made him the same temperature as the ground, it should have killed him. His Endurance and Stability probably played a part in preventing that.

“Well, I don’t have a minute,” Calvin said, hauling Grant away as fast as he could.

“Less than that.” the woman’s voice came from the left, and an instant later, the cloud of steam was blown away with a gust of wind emanating from the sorceress’s arms.

“How are you doing all that?” Calvin asked, preparing his Bent.

“Practice, young man, don’t reach for your belt,” She said, pointing at him from less than ten feet away, black Bent thrumming in her outstretched arm.

Calvin had his knife emerge from the skin of his foot, nestling the handle between his toes as he raised his hands in surrender, showing her his Bent-free wrists.

“Agh, damn boy, I’ll sand off all your skin and replace it with salt before making you dig your own grave.” Brendan muttered as he stood up, favoring his left side, Calvin’s knife still sticking out of his side.

The armor must be holding it in place to prevent bleeding.

In front of Calvin’s eyes, his knife rode a swell of leathers, deposited in the grass with a hiss of pain before the strange armor clamped down around the wound.

“I see you weren’t classically trained, Wasp,” Charlotte said, holding her hand to Brendan’s chest to stop him from moving toward Calvin.

“I never really called myself that. Seems a little on the nose.” Calvin said, hands in the air, Grant’s heaving breath above his head.

“Right. How would you like an apprenticeship from me, in exchange for your Spell? There’s a lot that can be done without Skills. You’re not a Gadveran, after all. With my sponsorship, you’d receive a warm welcome at the Den of Iniquity.”

“I think I know everything I need.” Calvin said, tightening his toe’s grip on the blade.

“You don’t even know a simple Dispersal.” She scoffed. “You threw dirt at me. like a monkey.”

Rather than respond, Calvin flung his right foot forward and released the knife, sending it flying toward the sorceress. Like a monkey.

She flinched away from the blade long enough for Calvin to spin around, bringing Grant between him and the woman.

“Transference!”

“Bastard,” Grant moaned as he went cold and slumped to the ground, But Calvin was too busy summoning a pet to ward off the fearsome leather creature barreling toward him.

Chained spirit.

11/15 Bent remaining.

Nadia manifested in front of him, facing the charging commander. Calvin wished he could have seen either of their expressions as he put a grimy foot on Nadia’s lower back and shoved her headlong into the charging commander’s path. The two of them went down in a tangle of limbs as Calvin sidestepped.

“Keep each other busy.” Calvin muttered, eyes on the sorceress raising a hand toward him. She paused for a moment, her face paling as she spotted the Ilethan princess on the ground.

“Is that…”

“A distraction?” Calvin said, raising his left hand to create a shimmering stream of Bent in front of himself, splitting into a Y shape, while his other sought out his belt.

What’s going to take this woman out of the fight? She flinched when things went for her eyes, which belied a lack of experience at fighting, but she was also better at magic than he was, able to adapt to Calvin’s tactics rather quickly.

Gotta be a limit to her shielding… Eye strain?

Calvin’s fingers grabbed the Flash Component as Charlotte’s gaze snapped back to him.

She wordlessly cast a spell, and Calvin felt a disruption in his Beli Ma before his shoulder went numb.

Flash.

10/15 Bent remaining.

Calvin closed his eyes and turned his head as the explosive detonated between the two of them, but his eyes still went black from the sudden light.

Blind, he charged forward and felt his discarded blade touch his foot moments before he tackled someone about the same size as him, that was to say, small and bony. The sorceress. They fell into the damp grass, and Calvin pulled the knife from his foot into his hand and plunged it toward the body beneath him with every ounce of power he could manage.

The knife met resistance, like it had been caught in a spiderweb, unable to push any further.

It wasn’t the sensation of flesh and bone, it was the constant even resistance of magic.

Calvin threw his shoulder into it, and he felt the knife part flesh for an instant before his entire body went numb, causing him to gasp as his blood turned to ice pumping through his veins.

He’d never experienced anything like that. Even when he fell in the water inside the mountain, the cold had come from outside. This felt like it was radiating from inside him. the deepest bone chilling cold he’d ever experienced.

Calvin’s limbs went limp against this will, and his knife slipped from his fingers.

Shit!

Not quite enough, buddy.

Calvin felt his body being pushed away, and was able to blink the stars out of his eyes just enough to see Charlotte coming to a stand in front of him, holding a well-manicured hand over a small well of blood on her chest.

She looked furious.

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