NOVEL NEXT 61 - Part 1 of the Fight Is Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel
Three horses, pitch black, thundered up the circular slope leading to Granavale Dungeon, towards three boys.
"Think you can work your magic, Granavale?" Rory Redmont said, holding his quarterstaff before him, ready to block. The ruddy crystal gleamed with his magic.
"Let me try," Archmund said. He fired off another Infrared Lance, this one with greater intensity. It struck the horse closest to the rim of the path, searing its skin, and for a moment its head was wreathed in fire — but it galloped through the attack and kept moving towards them.
"What are you doing, Granavale," said Xander Cooper quietly. "What is this power?"
"Nobles have a right to magic, and with our magic we defend the peoples of our lands," Rory said. It was a rehearsed line. But his voice was shaking. Maybe it was the Monsters. Maybe it was Archmund's power to kill from afar. Anyone would be nervous in either situation.
"Please forgive me for my horrific rudeness," Xander said, his voice still quiet.
Archmund mentally reviewed his Skills and Gear.
Infrared Lance — very good at delivering a large amount of heat energy into an opponent at once. Very bad if that enemy manages to become heat resistant, which Monsters did naturally to diminish pain.
The Gemstone Rapier — at this point, good for two things: being a status symbol, enforcing societal mores, and defensive utility. He could Disarm with it — useless against animalistic beasts like horses — and stab with a Flurry of Blows.
The Gemstone Sword — a weapon, but also one that made him bloodthirsty. Not great for a situation with allies fighting besides him.
The Onyx Cube — purely a defensive utility. He could create energy barriers, maybe, and quench fires, and gave him a Bodily Barrier, which weakened the effects of fire and could diminish physical blows once at high enough levels, but he didn't want to test those barriers against physically-embodied man-eating horses.
Microwave — boiled water, even if it was inside someone's body.
That last one was worth a shot.
Archmund did the minute tuning of his magics, the slight shift in the flux of his souls essence, that always came with switching Skills from Infrared Lance to Microwave. His Ruby Tetrahedron spun in the air like a drill as it modulated his magic from harsh explosive bursts to a steady pulse, like a sine wave in an oscilloscope.
The rimward horse screeched in pain, thrashing about on its feet.
Horses were, all things told, very delicate creatures. The leftmost horse collapsed to the ground, as if its leg were broken.
Yet the other two horses didn't stop. Normal horses would've broken, fled, shaken by the panic. They were skittish creatures. But these Monsters charged forth, emboldened and empowered by their fallen brethren and their taste for life essence.
Archmund changed his focus to the center horse.
"Seriously, Granavale, what are you doing?" Redmont said. "You're a bit of a monster yourself, aren't you?"
"No I'm not?"
What were you even supposed to say to that? But Rory just smiled. "Hell, I hope I'm in your dorm at the Academy. We'll beat the clay out of everyone else in the tournaments."
Well, even if he'd beaten the shit out of Rory, they were at least on friendly terms. Maybe that was just how men interacted with each other?
He let the Microwave flow out of his soul and his Gem, hitting the center horse. It spasmed, but didn't fall. In fact, there was some light sparking on its chest — electricity, as the microwave hit it, the photoelectric effect as discovered by Albert Einstein.
"Why— why isn't it stopping?" Xander said.
"They're learning," Rory said.
"They can do that?" Archmund said. "Learn from each other?"
Rory nodded solemnly, tossing his staff from one hand to another. "Big thing with pack animals. Some people think they might even be one Monster in multiple bodies."
Like the many reincarnations of Alexander Omnio I, almost. One soul split between many bodies. Except it probably wasn't anything like that at all and Archmund really needed to clamp down on how fast and how far his mind ran whenever he was in deadly combat situations.
In any case, as it charged forward, the sparks on the horse's chest solidified and manifested gleaming armor. Metal armor, based on the electrical sparks that were created when the Microwave Lance hit it which — well, if he thought of "horse armor", for some reason he thought of greed and paying small amounts of money for digital cosmetics and the Pandora's Box of the total monetization of video games — but none of that mattered in Omnio.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
It was an anthropological data point, he supposed. At some point in the history of this world, horses had worn metal armor. And that metal armor had shielded them from death and pain effectively enough that these ghosts conjured it to block his Microwave.
The fallen horse had also been slowly pulling itself back into action. Like a puppet being righted by a puppetmaster, it had literally snapped back onto four legs, its body dragging a 90 degree arc through the air until it stood up straight once more. Was he imagining it, or were its legs thicker?
Normal horses had to be put down if their legs were broken. These were no normal horses. These were regenerating Monsters, eternal until they were cut down.
"Alright. Rimward's shifted its power to legs. Center's shifted its power to chest armor. Agreed?" Rory said.
"Agreed," Archmund said. He was a little surprised Rory had picked it up so quickly, since it hadn't been obvious to him. He had to reassess Rory, just a little bit — he'd thought Rory was an arrogant meathead, but he was more than just a warrior — he was a tactician, even if not quite a strategist. "Thoughts?"
"Please kill them please kill them please kill them," Xander muttered.
"You set that horse on fire," Rory said. "Is it fire magic, or…"
"It's heat," Archmund said. "And you're thinking, the metal—"
Rory nodded.
Archmund gave himself a second to think.
Infrared was pure heat energy.
He remembered as a little boy in his past life trying to go down a metal playground slide that had been in the sun for an afternoon. The heat had burned his legs, quite terribly. But that had been an entire afternoon of sunlight, and full skin contact with his legs.
The horses approached.
Metal had a low heat capacity. It didn't take much energy to make it really, really hot. It took a lot more Infrared to boil water or damage cells than it took to heat metal. As far as he could tell, his magic transmitted energy, as heat, directly. The amount of energy it took to heat metal up and thus cause pain to the horses was far, far less to make the horses burst into flames.
The horses approached.
The way heat spread through a solid block of metal was governed by the heat equation. It had taken a lot of very smart people a lot of very difficult thinking time to determine the exact rules and parameters of that equation, because the evolution of the heat depended on both how hot the metal already was as well as how much time had passed—
The horses approached.
Oh, none of that really mattered anyways, did it?
He swept a Microwave at the horse closest to the walls. It, too, developed a carapace of metal armor. He hit the rimward horse with his Microwave as well, but though it shook in pain and disruption, it staggered forward nonetheless on its reinforced legs.
That might be a problem.
So he returned his focus to the center horse.
He hit it with his Infrared Lance, not aiming for its head or any vulnerable parts, but for its armor.
The heat capacity of metal was, after all, lower than that of water.
When he'd tried to kill directly, he'd focused his heat into a narrow laser-like beam. But that was for goring pinpoint laser-sharp holes in important systems or burning away sensitive tissues like eyes. Given the heat equation, focusing all of his energy on one point had the risk of being… inefficient.
He didn't want to melt one or two parts of the armor. He wanted to turn all the armor red hot, into a clamshell of pure heat, turning that instinctive defensive measure into a deadly trap.
It was a break from his intuition.
But the intuition didn't have any real physical basis, did it? When you spun something really, really fast, it spread out. The angular momentum pushed its distant parts outwards.
His magic was kept in a tight, piercing beam by his force of will. And if he relaxed that force of will, just a bit…
A wave of hot air hit his face. Rory and Xander stumbled back too.
Even in the setting sun, the air before them shimmered with a heat haze, a cylinder about a meter in diameter. He grimaced. That meant there was some loss, some inefficient transfer of his magic, heating the air instead of his target.
[Skill] [Heat Wave]
And the horse's armor was glowing red-hot.
It shrieked, thrashing about, yet still it galloped forward even as its head whipped back and forth madly. The metal steamed upon its flesh. Even though all three were in pain, they charged forward in lockstep.
"What are those, really?" Xander whispered. "They're not horses, not really, are they?"
"They're Monsters," Rory said, brandishing his staff in defense, as if it would do anything. "And they're what we've sworn to fight."
Xander said nothing, and gazed at his Gemstone Rapier. Archmund almost felt bad for him. He won a contest by beating up other kids his age, and then he had to fight literal beasts from hell.
And still the beasts charged up the slope. Too fast, almost, for how much they thrashed about wildly. The one on the left had become the most stable, stomping its way upwards on its legs like wizened wood. The middle thrashed about like a mad dog; the right charged forward.
He knew the pulse of the magic now, how it felt not as Lance but as Wave. He turned it upon the rightmost horse, heating is armor, and it, too, fell to spasming paroxysm.
And still the horses charged.
"I kind of hope," Rory said, uncertainty creeping into his voice, "that they'll be done before they reach me."
Archmund tracked the beasts. As the light faded, their superheated armor glowed like distant stars.
"Because they're moving in a way that's hard to predict."
Monsters ultimately did try to follow the laws of physics, even if ultimately they were deranged and impossible ghosts of the dead adopting the forms of their memories.
Archmund fired another Heat Wave. The angle of the ramp was such that he caught all three Monstrous Horses in the blast. He pumped enough magic into the spell, but try as he might, the armor only turned orange. He wasn't strong enough to turn the metal white-hot, to the point of melting — at least not in a wide beam.
But even that yellow heat was enough to send the beasts thrashing in pain. And the rimward horse, the one with gnarled legs, screamed in pain as well — though the Infrared Waves weren't enough to burn it outright.
Almost in unison, their forward motion drew to a stop. Yet they thrashed and gyrated in pain.
And then the center horse sunk its teeth into the skull of the one on the rim.