NOVEL NEXT 89 - Mary Plays the Hero
Mary and Rory couldn't make any real ground.
Rory's Shielding Spin could stop the various Enchantments of the Wandclerk. Flying daggers of corrosive black. Undulating blue spirals. Bricks of solid red. Rory could bat each of these away, but if he stopped, the barrage would overwhelm them. Mary cast her wind Skill, but every time, the Wandclerk would redirect the winds with red channels in the air.
They were making no progress.
"I can do this all day," Rory said. "But the longer we do this… the weaker that thing gets."
It didn't matter much to him, but she was a commoner. A single Gem could feed her for a month. It could buy her freedom from the Granavales. If she wanted to take the creature out, he was going to help her.
"I might have something," Mary said.
Mary reached inside her long pack and pulled out a Gemstone Rapier. Rory stared. It was quite possible that wealth was no object to her.
"Have you been carrying that all along?"
"Yep!"
"Do you even know how to use that thing?"
Mary grimaced. "Archmund sent me to supervise the training of the Honor Guard whenever you were on rest days from training. I did win the tournament, even if it was mildly rigged, so Garth gave one of these to me."
"Yeah, well, I threw my match against you," Rory grumbled.
"I suspected as much," Mary said. "If you'd gone all out, I didn't have any dirty tricks up my sleeve."
"That's his job, huh?"
"The young master is… eccentric. As I'm sure you know."
That Archmund Granavale. Clearly he worked his servants to the bone, though he was no slouch himself. He called himself a lazy sack of shit, but as far as Rory could tell, his idea of lazing around was reading obscure fables and poring over mathematical textbooks. There was a quiet desperation when he did either, but Rory had no interest in prying.
"I can't cover you if you go in," Rory said. His control over his staff at a range wasn't fine enough, even with the instinctual knowledge granted by the lanyard.
The Gemstone Rapier sparked a dim gold. "You won't need to."
She ran forward, the Gemstone Rapier glowing in her hands, past where Rory could guard her.
Mary's blade danced before her, imperceptible, the natural Deflection granted by the Gear. She swatted the red bricks and black bolts out of the air as fast as they came, but she ducked and weaved under the blue spirals as she drew closer and closer to the Wandclerk.
The Wandclerk wasn't stupid. The closer she got, the more blue spirals it used. She didn't block those, couldn't, and dodged and bobbed her way closer until she was almost upon the creature.
Two things happened at once.
She pierced its side, black blood bubbling out of the wound and scabbing;
A blue spiral found its mark, hitting her in the chest. Her whole body glowed with a halo of blue light.
She pulled her rapier back, her motions now the dance of a trained swordsman, not the magical ghost-knowledge granted by Gemstone Gear. Her blows landed true, piercing the Clerk's hide, slower yet still effective.
The wand flashed black.
Her eyes widened.
She pulled back, her blade twitching towards the emerging dart, but without the flow of magic through her veins she was slowed. Rory watched, horrified, as if it all happened in slow motion, as she failed to deflect the dart in time, how she dodged back just enough, raising her arm, her hand, any desperate attempt to shield her body, as the black dart pierced her arm and a trickle of red blood seeped out.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Rory moved without thinking, his staff dancing before him. He ran up as Mary staggered back, as the Wandclerk created other constructs like debris in a tornado.
In the nick of time he got in front, intercepting a barrage of red bricks and black darts, scattering them to the walls. His Shielding Spin scattered them all.
"Get to safety," he said.
"It's a shallow wound!" Mary said. "I can still fight."
Perhaps she could, but she would be fighting on the level of the mundane. The blue spiral had silenced her magic, reducing her Gemstone Rapier to nothing more than a sharp stick in her hands.
He couldn't do that, letting her fight like the commoner she was, when he was of noble birth and magic still flowed through his veins. It would be low of him.
"The fastest way to keep us safe would be to kill it… milord," she said, hastily attaching the term of respect to the end.
She was right. A dead monster made no attacks.
"And of the two of us, I am better suited—"
He held his staff like a bat and smashed it into the Wandclerk's head.
Or rather, he tried to. Its wand flashed red, and a red splotch like cloth enveloped his staff, slowing it down, so that when it hit it was just a tap.
The wand flashed blue, and a spiral hit him in the chest.
It didn't hurt, not externally, but he felt smaller and weaker, like a little boy. His staff felt less natural in his hands, less an extension of himself, more like just a rod made of crystal.
The wand pointed at his heart. It flashed black.
"No!" a voice cried.
And Beatrice darted in front of him. Right into the path of the black dart.
His own voice shouted "No!"
She caught the black bolt on her Shadow Cloak, throwing it to the ground.
The wand flashed blue. He threw himself over her, to take the hit himself — he'd already eaten one, and it had weakened him, but she was still strong.
"What are you doing, you idiot!" she shouted. But the blue spiral hit him, not her.
Another black bolt.
She darted forward again, this time with her black knife in hand. She shoved the Monster's arm back.
And with that, Beatrice slashed at the final Monster's throat. It slumped forward, black blood spurting from the wound, immediately scabbing upon touching the air. She cursed and stabbed forward, hacking through its spinal cord, and it collapsed for good.
For good measure, she stabbed its neck into the ground.
The black light of its Gemstone Gear faded instantaneously, its Gemstone Keycards returning to inert gray crystal, clattering to the ground.
She picked up its wand, looking at it gingerly.
"Rory," she said, her voice dangerous. He said nothing.
She pointed at the card with the wand. "Pick that up. You can have it."
He did. It instantly flooded with orange-red light, the color of his hair, of the iron-full clay of his mountain home.
She glared at Mary. Her Shadow Cloak faded from around her. He was surprised to see that her eyes were red and slightly tearful. Hadn't she won?
"Couldn't you have pulled that out blade sooner?"
"Apologies, young miss," Mary said.
"I… whatever," Beatrice said. She let out a quaking sigh.
And then she turned on Rory.
"You always do this!" Beatrice shouted. "You self-sacrificing glory-seeking guilt-ridden chauvinist!"
She wasn't being coherent; she was contradicting herself. Rory suspected she didn't care. He was feeling a bit guilty about it.
He found the best way to get around this was to let her ride out the anger.
"Why didn't you just throw your staff? Wasn't that the whole point of that tassel thing? Isn't that what got us into this whole mess in the first place?"
He supposed she was right about that. Why had he thrown himself bodily into danger when he could've just thrown his staff?
Maybe she had a point.
She walked forward and jabbed a hand into his chest. "We're equals, you hear me? Equals. You shouldn't be seeking death in any way, any more than any of us."
Her voice was cracking.
He tried to argue that it was what he was good at, that this was his job, to be the rock, the clay of the earth, that which a strong foundation could be built on. And she wasn't having any of it.
"You're not the Ur-Giant, Rory. If you die defending us, no one is going to build the world from your corpse. Rather the opposite."
He didn't know what she meant by that.
They were interrupted by the sound of clapping.
Archmund climbed down from atop the cubicles. "Good job!"
He was tucking his Gemstone Rapier under his arm, and had a stain on his cloak. "Had to pull this thing out," he said, brandishing the Rapier. "Didn't want to get hit by more of those dark bolts than I had to."
He walked over to Mary, taking a concerned look at her bleeding arm. "How does it feel? One to ten?"
"Hurts," she said. "Four?"
"Not too bad, then," he said. "Think you can keep going?"
She nodded.
"What were you doing?" Beatrice said, a bit of edge to her voice.
Archmund smirked. "You'll see."
They pushed forward. Every few steps, Archmund knelt and picked up something off the floor.
Gems.
"How do you know where those are," Beatrice said, her voice strangled. "What did you do?"
Archmund's smirk grew wider. "Take a wild guess."
"He was killing them from his vantage point," Gelias said. "He got the high ground and started mowing down half-formed Monsters, while leaving the peons to us."
"I can't believe you," Beatrice said.
"Believe it!" Archmund said, with the self-satisfied air of someone making a reference no one else in the room would get.
"I cleared our way forward," Archmund said. "Our path, from here on out, will be much safer for this run. We can loot as we please. The only one of you who could've done what I did from up there was Gelias."
"And there's a reason I didn't."