A Legacy of Blades - An Epic Tower Fantasy

Anilith faced down an army, Razhik at her side. Behind them, eight Grokar squires protected their flanks, four to a side. Orion remained in hiding, serving an essential role all his own.

The man had shown, aided by the sensory transmissions of his connection, to be adept at sifting through the information and finding details she would categorize as unimportant. Even with far less ability to handle the information, something she took pride in having trained, Orion demonstrated a knack for noticing patterns in the enemy movements.

Anilith typically grouped information into three main categories: threats, non-threats, and could-be-threats. This strategy worked well for her, as she had always focused on a style of combat that relied on reacting quickly and efficiently to incoming danger, so the first category impacted her split-second decisions the most. It was hard to dodge an attack you didn't see coming, and she would overlook many attacks in the fast-paced setting she faced if she tried to pay attention to everything.

For a moment, she fantasized about what that would be like, to be so aware, but quickly discarded the thought. The idea was so far beyond the realm of what a human could accomplish, she doubted even the Blade Weaver was truly that talented, whatever he might let people think. Plus, she had no time for fancy, as death breathed heavily against her neck, even if it was becoming an uncomfortably common disturbing experience.

Could-be-threats probably made up more information than the other two categories combined, particularly as non-threats were quickly forgotten and threats were handled with haste, but it was hard to tell when everything was in constant flux. The terrain itself made up most of this category. Only Anilith's immediate area made it to the level of "threat," but even there, it was befuddling how much of the landscape had been altered by the presence of immobile bodies, or their component parts.

Any odd movements, particularly the actions of enemy ranged attackers, she kept in the back of her mind and sorted into this category. Enemies with unknown capabilities were, by necessity, placed in this category.

Thanks to Orion and Razhik, there were remarkably few unknowns in this fight, which let her focus on the incoming horde more fully than she could have hoped. Their efforts were astoundingly thorough when it came to categorizing the Rare enemies. None of them had time to waste figuring out the capabilities of the common soldiers, beyond sorting them into the camps of melee or ranged.

The only enemies with unknown capabilities seemed to be the leadership of the large, elite squad. Even if they likely had similar abilities to their subordinates, "likely" was hardly a comforting thought. At least Orion had his eye on them, giving Anilith the freedom to worry about more pressing hazards, putting them firmly in the non-threat category, for now.

Non-threats were really discarded out of hand, as she simply couldn't be bothered to keep track of every small movement in a fight with more than a few moving parts. Any common melee combatant beyond more than a dozen yards was quickly tossed into the pot. Rares beyond a few dozen yards were similarly filtered out. The largest addition to the non-threat category, however, came in the form of the aggregate movements of the army not aimed in her direction.

That left a lot of ground for surprises to pop up, unsurprisingly.

In a small-scale fight, this shortcoming hadn't greatly hindered Anilith, but it could prove deadly in a battle on this scale, where enemies numbered in the hundreds. Keeping track of the flow of battle and making sure his friends weren't surprised were Orion's primary missions this time around.

That, and continuing to surgically remove threats as he saw fit, maintaining order on the battlefield.

Anilith couldn't help but appreciate how simple her role became with the support of her friends. Knowing they had her back, she moved slowly, the Wind flowing through her body as a tornado, prepared to destroy anything in her path. She would carve a path through the goblin forces; they left her no other choice.

Whatever their twisted beliefs were, she'd seen at least two of them return from a certain death. That gave them an edge over any man she'd known. She wouldn't let herself be weighed down by their deaths any more than necessary.

She could only hope it was enough.

"Form up, Grokar! Protect her, as my champion!" Razhik seemed to swell to a size she'd never witnessed, darkness billowing from his shoulders like a cloak. "A King leads by example. Walk in my shadow, and I shall protect you from your own."

He passed her by with a flash of teeth. Could he be smiling? Even as she prepared for the incoming assault, Razhik cleaved a hole in the frontlines, shifting away before the diminutive monsters could retaliate. Using his speed and size, he forced the beasts inward, limiting their ability to swarm the small group from all sides at once. Each time it seemed a force might overcome his efforts, he was there with a shadow step, ready to drive them back: to drive them into the grinder that was his champion.

Even with Orion's assistance, the tide of battle seemed little more than chaos to Anilith, and she gave up trying to find any reason in the swirling mass of enemies. They moved as a maelstrom, seeking to tear her and the Grokar viciously apart, but Razhik stymied the tides.

There were too many to deflect every blade, but each arc of her own spelled the end for a soldier. As she strode through the battle, reacting at a speed no normal combatant could match, the line of corpses grew in her wake, the Grokar Juggernauts shoving bodies aside whenever they could find the space.

What blows made it through any of their defenses found their efforts insubstantiated by Razhik's strange boon. The darkness cut, stealing momentum from the strike and, even when the weapon drew blood, the darkness reformed and sealed the wound in an instant. Embraced by the umbral ligature, Anilith was able to ignore wounds that would have normally given her pause, the pain the only sign of her injuries.

She was no stranger to pain; her master had ensured that. The legacy he had allowed her to train in had forced her to endure more phantom pain than any young warrior should know. She had lost digits, limbs, and felt the enervation of blood loss so clearly, she had learned to keep her composure through sheer strength of will.

As the battle wore on, she found a rhythm, growing accustomed to the tactics of the enemy. They were simple beasts, and they swarmed her group, at Razhik's behest, filled with a raging bloodlust. It seemed lesser than the palpable rage of the Rares, but when faced by such numbers, it became an undeniable force.

Ice crept through her veins as she fell into the trance of Blade Weaving, feeling its inexorable pull as she fought her way through countless enemies.

She lost track of how many times her blades had struck true, how many ringing blows her blades had deflected, or how many wounds must mar her skin beneath her blackened visage. For all her speed, all her talent, superior numbers presented an inordinate, if not insurmountable, challenge. She needed more.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Almost without recognizing it, she fell fully into that familiar trance. It was a safe place. It was a burrow where her most primal self dwelt, unleashed onto her enemy as she borrowed its home. In there, she knew nothing of the outside world, the pain of her body, or her own actions.

When the trance came, she wasn't even aware she'd gone to this place, only returning to her senses when the threat was neutralized.

It was easy, like letting someone else take the reins, as if that absolved her of the consequences. Fleetingly, she questioned if having no memory of an event pardoned her, and found she didn't like the answer.

Suddenly, with an internal tug, she realized she wasn't alone in that timeless place. A presence fought its way into that space which defied remembrance.

"Kid, I ain't sure if you can hear me, but snap out of it!"

The voice was so familiar, she was sure she knew that…man?

"Whatever you're doin' is right effective, but we're runnin' blind here. You keep…shiftin'. I can't keep up, it's just too much information!"

No matter how hard she tried to focus, her mind kept wandering away from the difficulties of reality. This place was so comforting, so peaceful, her mind refused to wander beyond its bounds.

"If you ain't got it in you to take control, I'm gonna have to cut the connection, and I ain't sure we'll survive without it."

She felt that strange tug, pulling at her with renewed vigor, but it couldn't overcome her mind's desire to Wander back to blissful thoughtlessness.

"I know we ain't gonna make it if I don't cut it soon, though. C'mon, kid. Fight! We're right here with you: fight!"

An apparition of shadow, the silhouette of a man, appeared in that lightless place, its hand outstretched towards her. The shape of him looked so familiar, she wondered that she couldn't remember, wandered blank neural pathways, sure she could hear ghostly echoes, memories just out of reach of a…Wanderer!

In a crystalline moment of clarity, she reached out and grasped the shade's hand, feeling the tug intensify until she was pulled, unpleasantly, from that tranquil nothing.

The clamor of battle welcomed her back, rudely as a wake-up slap.

It took her brain a second to process her surroundings, a second that nearly claimed her head. A tickling sensation from her Blade Weaving was the only thing that warned her of the incoming axe, and she rolled out of its path.

When the image of the battlefield finally clicked, her face paled in comprehension. Snippets of Orion's words came to her, faint as if heard through a thick curtain, and she understood what had happened.

She had lost control, and in her trance, her body had taken over her senses. When she relinquished command of her vessel, she had been guided by the Wind. Now, she was using her Earth-Sense, something her friends hadn't had a chance to learn.

She knew beyond a doubt that, in the grips of her Blade Weaving, she had been switching senses, using whatever served her personal situation best at the time, despite the feedback it caused her allies. Knowing she couldn't use both simultaneously, she had been working on training herself to change between modalities at a whim.

Apparently, that was a skill her Weaving could appropriate.

Still taking stock of her surroundings, she shifted back to her Wind-Sense, feeling relief from her connection with Orion, accompanied by the sensation of a pressure releasing from her head.

She noticed a few drastic changes. The average goblins had been all but cut down, a path of carnage trailing back behind her far farther than she cared to see. The bodies of Rare enemies had begun to mix in with their lesser brethren. It seemed she had fought her way to the real battle.

Additionally, three Grokar bodies lay like hulking mounds among the fallen, dwarfing the unmoving goblins. The remaining five fought on at her sides, keeping in lockstep, appearing unaffected by the loss of their allies.

Even after so much bloodshed, overcoming the remaining enemy forces seemed to fly in the face of reason. That so few had come so far, leaving countless broken in their path of destruction, was a victory unto itself, but anything less than total annihilation would leave their victory a forgotten footnote, one that never even made it into the histories of the Tower.

As Anilith regained her feet, the Grokar moving as one to protect her, she felt two blades approaching with uncommon speed. Still reeling from disorientation, she positioned herself to take the hits as best as possible, knowing she'd be all but out of the fight even if she positioned herself perfectly.

In the moment before collision, a surge of shadow built on her chest, elongating into the unmistakable form of Razhik's taloned paw emerging from her torso, not just blocking the strikes but maiming the goblins who executed them. Two rage-born fell lifeless to the ground, the shock in their eyes evidence of their surprise, which was only surpassed by Anilith's own.

Razhik's long form leapt out of her armor, following his claws. "Get your head on straight, Ani! It's time to get serious. Ori keeps trying to show us something, but I don't know what he means!"

Razhik and the Grokar took over the fight, their bodies looking pristine beneath their shadowed armor. She doubted they fared much better than her, though, feeling no shortage of aches and the sharp sting of sliced flesh.

Focusing on the connection with Orion, she let him guide her senses, highlighting the enemy movements. At first, she was concerned to see the elites had finally surrounded their position without Razhik hindering their movements. That feeling only amplified when what Orion was really highlighting clicked.

Each of the squads, no matter what other members they'd lost, still had their blaster. A feeling of frustration, images of wind, an arrow, and a bow reverberated down the connection. Anilith wasn't quite sure what that meant, but took it to mean the man couldn't take the suicidal beasts out.

They were just about to make their move when Anilith ascertained their plan, and it was a simple one as things went. Any goblin bearing a shield that still stood rushed ahead, beelining for the small group while making a wall for the blasters behind them. The blasters each emitted the tell-tale glow of their magic.

"Get close, and get down!"

Moving on instinct alone, Anilith used every ounce of speed she could muster, slicing countless trails in the air above her allies, Razhik pulling them all close with his coiled form, before she ceded her grasp of the Wind, reaching for her gifts in a way she'd been neglecting.

She grabbed ahold of the remnant energies left by the passing of her blades, steeped as they were in her power, and braced herself for the inevitable.

Blaster after blaster finished their cast, causing an unparalleled eruption of power as their magic built on one another. If three sequential blasts had leveled the battlefield earlier, the explosion that followed cratered the mountain's peak, altering the landscape forever, only, it didn't go quite as planned.

Anilith's final defense took hold, causing the incoming magic to rebound and devastate the goblin army. The Rares were annihilated in a moment. Even a majority of the command squad was incinerated with a flash. None of them were left unscathed as the explosion washed over the area, nearly reaching the tree line and evaporating an astounding amount of the lake.

Anilith and Razhik's squad stood sheltered in a bubble of silent peace, as even the thunderous sound rebounded from her blade ward. The ground around them was cratered for a hundred yards, unscathed at the center where they stood. Too late, Anilith considered how she may have doomed Orion with her quick thinking, but they were closer to the water than the trees, so the devastation didn't make it far into the forest.

If it weren't for the connection, she would have been sure she'd inadvertently killed the man, but she could at least tell he was alive, and let out a breath she didn't know she held.

There was so much dust in the air that even her enhanced Wind-Sense struggled to make out any real detail. When the sediment finally settled, she heard a faint rattling cough, marveling that anything could have survived the blast.

"Gods, there are still things alive out there," she said, helping a shell-shocked, wide-eyed Grokar to his feet. "Let's see if we can't remedy that."