Surviving Arkadia

The moment that I popped up out of the hatch I threw my weight forward so that I wouldn’t fall back through the hatch. As I landed I got my first chance to see how the battle was going. Of course it was pure chaos and at first I couldn’t make any sense of what I was seeing. Enemies in the sky and on the ground behind us. Spells filled the air and our speed made it hard to tell incoming from outgoing. All further confused by the shimmering domes and facets of shield spells.

The first thing that I could make sense of were the pop up system warnings in the corner of my field of vision.

YOU ARE BENEFITING FROM:

2 x REGENERATION AURA

A DISPEL SHIELD

Amris helped steady me as I landed on the roof.

“Dispel shield?” I said.

“From the repair school. I’m hoping it’ll strip the enchants off the Assassin Rounds. Don’t worry, it only affects incoming projectiles,” said Amris. I handed him the belt of potions that Asser had made for him. He gave me a grim little smile as he strapped it on.

At least one of the regeneration auras had to come from Sarah. She was glowing with the familiar green of healing magic, too bright to be plant magic. Sarah had her back to me and her huge back muscles were bunched up with the effort of drawing back the bowstring of her massive bow. She was tracking the movement of a man in a black Ostian uniform flying toward the train on the back of a thing that looked like a skeletal carousel pony about two sizes too small for him.

She loosed the arrow and it caught him in the throat, just above his chest armour. A gout of blood burst forth and he fell from the pony. The moment he was off its back the blue light inside its rib cage went dark and it fell out of the sky.

A new system notice warned me of +1 REGENERATION AURA. It was going to be easy to tell how many kills Sarah got.

I looked back along the line of fast vanishing rails towards the hospital and saw a bunch of the soldiers in black standing in the overgrown meadow. They were all firing rifles or lobbing spells towards the train.

Neither spells nor bullets were hitting the train because of the constant blossoming and fading of a plethora of shield and barrier spells.

In the time since we fled Moonstone everyone had been practising. It turns out that when you have a dozen arcane scholars and a large, strongly motivated civilian population with a lot of free time, what you get is a flourishing of new defensive spells from every imaginable school. A lot of them were cheap cast but expensive to maintain so people practised popping a Fatigue regeneration potion and casting the spells in short bursts that overlapped with allies. All it needs is someone to loudly count to four and people cast on different numbers then repeat until the danger has passed.

Every spell or bullet that was sent our way got caught in a tangle of overlapping defences long before they reached us. That didn’t work so well on the cavalry.

I don’t know what else to call them since they were riding horses. Admittedly they looked like they’d been made out of black metal coat hangers, but they were shaped like carousel horses. They even had an upright pole through the front of the saddle that the riders held onto. In the heart of the skeletal frame was a crackling ball of blue light that reminded me of the Bliztenpaards that the guild of Navigators used to pull carriages.

I felt a stab of anger that anyone would think to harness the adorable lightning ponies to weapons of war. I added it to my ever growing list of grudges against the Ostian military.

The Cavalry looked like they'd mobilised in a hurry. Most of them weren’t wearing helmets. A few of them hadn’t even strapped themselves to their mounts. Thus a few elite soldiers died because civilians hopped up on fatigue potions smacked them in the face with a hastily raised kinetic shield spell and they fell off their horsies. I would have laughed if I hadn’t been busy trying not to die.

It seemed that some of the cavalry had worked out that neither bullets nor spells were going to work. They switched to lances. The things that looked like the pole of a carousel horse were actually extendable lances, holstered in sockets in the back of the metal horses.

A pair of the riders lowered their lance points and charged towards us. It was only then that I realised that we were standing too close together. There was no room to dodge without getting in each other’s way.

With no time to think of anything smarter I threw myself down, flat to the roof of the train. One of the riders passed over me, so close that he caught my hair with some part of his horse.

I looked up in time to see Amris sidestep out of the way and then slash at the rider with his retractable claws. He caught the rider’s arm and the forward momentum let Amris tear the thick uniform sleeve, and the arm below it, to shreds.

The rider switched the lance to his left hand but showed no other reaction, even as the blood ran down his arm like wine spilled from a bottle.

The other rider went straight for Sarah and she parried the lance. I wouldn’t not have believed it possible if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. She batted it to one side as casually as you might swat a fly. The tip dug into her bicep and tore through the skin but the wound barely bled and started closing as I watched.

I got to my feet and drew my messer as Sarah slung her bow and cracked her knuckles.

The three of us spread out a little, giving each other room to move, room to fight. Keeping our backs to each other as we tried to watch all of the riders at once.