Path of the Pioneers

Bright, sparking gouts of flame were surging out from Adeline’s swords, dancing between spear, shield, sword, and hammer. A trail of sparks crashed into the air each time her weapon made an impact against theirs. The enemies attempted to pin her down at every turn, to surround her and attack her from all fronts, but she refused to allow it to happen. As soon as one showed any indication of slipping around one of her sides, she’d back off, forcing them into the terrible position of assaulting her from the front all at once. It was a terrible bottleneck. The three fighters tried to stay as spaced out as they could while attacking her, but it wasn’t enough to stop her blades from intercepting each and every attack that came her way. Unfortunately, it seemed like this position also meant that Adeline wasn’t making much headway towards defeating them.

I needed to figure out how to step into their battle before just running in. If I wasn’t careful, I’d be putting Adeline in more danger, or myself. If they turned around to attack me instead, it would be a simple thing for them to put an end to me.

Just as I almost gave up and ran right over, Adeline peered over at me from behind the enemies. She hopped back, and then dashed around with an unnatural speed. With impressive grace, she hopped the final meter or so towards me, spinning in the air to reorient herself towards our foes. “Hey there, stranger.” She grinned. “Good work on those two.” She looked towards the corpses that I made. “They were a tough match-up for you. With your training, though… These guys should be way easier.”

By the time she had said that, the three were just about in front of us. [Aesthesia] was still active, something that I made sure to check. It would be a terrible thing to take a spear to the gut simply because I forgot to put it back up.

The one wielding the hammer, a gruff-looking woman in thick plate armor, swung her weapon towards Adeline. I expected it to crash into the ground, but she rotated with it. I had to back off to avoid getting caught in its current, something about it made me certain that it would shatter any bone that it hit with great ease. Her group fanned out to the left and right of us, the one with the spear on my side, and the sword and shield for Adeline. Eventually, after a few more rotations, the movements of the hammer came to a halt, and it crashed into the ground. It had sunken in, and given the depth of the sinking, it would almost certainly leave a small hole.

What was the best option here? What would put an end to this?

For a moment, I felt every possibility. Saw it. [Energy Missile] could put a hole through her throat or head, [Forcethorn Burst] would, if it landed right, almost certainly kill her…

I sent out a handful of threads of raw mana, ducking under the spear that attempted to stab into me. They flew out, tightly wound together until they reached the end of the woman’s hammer. Just as she attempted to pull it out, I coiled them around the end of the handle.

[Transmutation]

For just the smallest sliver through the hammer’s handle, I decreased its ductility, elasticity, and hardness as much as the spell would allow, and the threads faded with the casting completing. The woman lifted the hammer back up, but only the handle followed her movement, its head stayed buried in the dirt.

I heard Adeline’s laughter roar out from beside me, and then several more clashes of metal against metal while I avoided getting covered in holes by the spear-wielder. “What are they supplying you Hunters with nowadays? Couldn’t even bother to go into a dungeon to get something better?”

I would have paid far more attention to the exchange if I wasn’t still being attacked. Several times over, I was nearly skewered by her. The spear danced around me, moving frighteningly quickly as it pierced through to where my vitals had been but moments before the movement began. I wasn’t certain if I could repeat the trick I had pulled on the hammer. The threads had a tendency to be rather fragile, if I tried to reel them around the spear, they’d probably just get torn apart from the way she was moving it.

There was another problem, in addition to that. The same feeling that I got from Adeline when she used aura was flowing off of the tip of the spear.

She stopped her assault for a moment, eyeing me up and down. It was then that I realized that she had manipulated me away from the group. By making me dodge in certain ways, by making me move to avoid her attacks, she had separated us.

The woman took in a deep breath, and then lunged towards me. I felt the power coming off of one of the blows as it grazed against my arm, the sharpness of the spear’s tip cutting me open.

Don’t panic. Don’t. Panic.

She had a way of keeping me on my back foot, stabbing in, and then swinging towards me with a blade on the side of her spear, forcing me to duck down. I let loose an [Energy Missile], and she intercepted it with the bottom end of her spear haft. It pierced through, and even struck her, but only it barely tore through her chainmail, leaving just a small hole.

I felt a surge of aura in the haft when she blocked it -- had she used aura to absorb most of the impact, rather than the wood?

She backed off, and took on a different stance with her spear. Her back leg was bent, primed to kick off of the ground. She held her spear with one hand, reeled all the way back at her side. It.. Looked as if she meant to throw it at me, but that couldn’t have been right. I felt the breeze kick up behind me, flowing towards her. Dirt and dust soared through the air, showing its currents to me. She was the cause of it all, the wind seemed to gather at her beck and call, and it was currently centered on her spear, just below the tip.

She drew two of the daggers on her hip into her left hand, and then kicked off with her back foot. Her right arm moved out and towards me, and then she let go of the spear she was holding. It was heading towards me at an impossible speed.

What do I do..? What do I do?!

I gripped my dagger tightly in my hand, and used [Cloak of Shadows], diving to the left as fast as I could, tucking my legs in just in case. I heard it smash into the ground behind me, a surge of wind buffeting against my body from behind. I stood back up, and I sensed the spear rising up behind me of its own volition.

W-what?

The wind was beginning to pick up, and I looked towards the source of it. Her hands were gripped tightly down on the daggers she was holding, her nose seemed to be bleeding, and her face was a shade paler. This skill was overexerting her. She couldn’t maintain it for long. She turned her hands over as I made a break for her side. Opening her grip, the daggers that were once held tightly began to float freely. They were practically surging with aura, along with the spear.

Her tired eyes began to search around the field, sticking somewhat close to my location. Could she sense me somehow? The daggers flew behind me and in front of me, hitting empty air only to keep gliding through. Her spear aimed towards the middle ground, stabbing into where I was standing. I stepped to the side, narrowly avoiding it. I kept running towards her.

This cycle repeated a few more times as I made my delicate approach. Her accuracy was getting better with each one. I think I had an idea of how she was detecting me, but it baffled me that it was possible. Then again, [Aesthesia] was a baffling skill.

My theory was that she was using the displacement of the wind to see where I was, even though I had been fully silent and invisible. ‘Disappear completely’ didn’t mean that my physical body stopped interacting with things. Her sense was one of the few things that could pierce through [Cloak of Shadows]. Even though it wasn’t perfectly accurate, the odds of her landing a strike on me grew.

Eventually, I reached her side. I managed to situate myself behind her before I felt a dagger pierce through my side, near where the arrow had struck me. I gritted my teeth as [Cloak of Shadows] came to an end. I grabbed onto her shoulder with one hand as a fist drove into my ribs, nearly making me black out on the spot. My other hand laid flat against the top of her back.

[Forcethorn Burst]

It was a horrifyingly intimate experience to watch the glittering beam of mana surge through her chainmail, boring through flesh and bone until it came out of the other side. A fraction of a second later, it burst, allowing no time for her to move. Spiny thorns of mana fractured off from the rod, growing inside of her and ripping anything it touched apart with its greed for space.

After it burst, she struck me once more, even as a few small craters appeared in her chest and back. I felt a rib or two crack, and my vision flashed white. A sudden pressure behind my eyes nearly overwhelmed me entirely. My grip loosened on the woman, and she fell to the ground.

Olivia. That was her name. I knew her name, and yet… I had to kill her, didn’t I? It had to happen. They wouldn’t have let us walk free. The two of us had no choice but to fight them, to stop them from killing us.

Why did that excuse ring hollow in my mind?

I put my hand over my side, a whimper nearly coming out of me as I drew the dagger out of me. I gathered mana in my body where I had been stabbed, and cast [Mend Wound]. The cost of repairing my body enough to keep me standing took nearly the entirety of the mana I had left.

I turned away from the body, and towards Adeline’s fight. The woman wielding the hammer laid dead on the ground, a sword wound on her throat, singed and blackened. In a haze, I watched her dance with the last of our assailants. His sword was covered in frost, along with his shield, but the ice was beginning to melt.

Adeline’s first blade pierced into the man’s leg after a high feint, bursting into flames and nearly blowing it clean off. He toppled to the ground, and she drove the other into his back. Smoke trailed out of his open mouth, and he was gone.

She turned towards me, and smiled. Then I saw the smile slip down, eyes widening.

“Hey, kids.” I felt a hard kick against my back, sending me rolling a few meters ahead to Adeline. The voice was husky and dark. There was something lurking in the tone, like quiet frustration. I turned to face our new foe, struggling to stand.

Right where I had been standing was a tall woman with long, messy red hair that was currently tied back. Her skin looked weathered, with a few wrinkles and smiles lines on her eyes and cheeks. She was wearing a tattered red cloak, with plate armor underneath emblazoned with a sigil of a flaming bird. She held one sword in her hand, but she hadn’t used it against me.

I looked back towards Adeline, and for the first time I saw true horror dwelling in her gaze.

“It really wouldn’t have come to this if you hadn’t ran, Adeline.” The woman’s eyes bore straight into her, with a tinge of regret. “You took out dozens of my men with your stunt, and the family’s given up on you just to avoid causing a war between the two houses.”

She sighed, “You know that I don’t want to do this, but I’m honor-bound. I’m sorry, Sparks.”

I heard Adeline give a shaky plea in a tone I had never heard from her before, “P-please Sybil.”

Her gaze met mine, “Run.”