Starbreaker: Volume 4 - Chapter 41

“Trust is a fool’s invitation. Ultimately, the only living creature in the universe that you can be entirely certain of the intentions of is yourself. When you trust, you put a knife in a traitor’s hand. When you trust, you accept that your fate is no longer yours to make but a plaything for whosoever you have handed over the reins to. Trust is suicide with extra steps.”

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

“I don’t know how to do that.” If they had time—days, weeks, or months—they might have gradually become more familiar with each other. He might have gotten to know who she was under the bravado, and she might have gotten a glimpse under the surface of the mask he was holding up to keep his identity a secret. But they had no time.

She took a draw on the bottle, swished it around her mouth, swallowed, and then groaned. “We get hammered, tell each other secrets, best friends forever. That works, right?”

Honesty remained the best policy, so far as Sylvas was concerned. “Alcohol has no effect on me.”

She offered him the bottle. “So you’re definitely going to win, right?”

Their fingers brushed together as he took it and sniffed the contents. Some kind of fortified wine, by his guess. “I don’t want to watch you destroy your liver and lie to you.”

“So don’t.” She watched him take a swig of the sour liquor.

He handed it back. “I don’t understand why you’re being so persistent about this.”

“Hi, we just met, so you probably don’t get it yet, but I’m an Aion archaeologist?” She offered him a hand to shake. “My whole life is finding mysteries and cracking them. If you weren’t being so mysterious, I’d be bored with you already.”

Setting the bottle on the floor in between them, she took a deep, steadying breath. “I’m Rania, I was born on the Gallus 4 penal colony, and I’ve got three brothers, all younger.” She knocked back a shot. “Now you.”

Reluctantly, Sylvas tried to tell her what she would already know if she’d read any official file about him prior to his alleged death. “I am Sylvas Vail, I was born on Croesia, and I have no idea if I had any siblings. I was orphaned.”

“Way to bring down the mood, Sylvas.” She groaned and nudged the bottle his way. He took a drink.

“You are the one choosing the subjects we talk about.”

They went back and forth for a time, exchanging pointless bits of information that meant nothing. Her favorite color was green. She once broke her leg falling out of a tree. She had tried to make ends meet as a teacher when she couldn’t find anyone willing to finance her expeditions. She was prized by the Consortium and others like them because she could track down vaults, decipher their locks, and navigate around the traps the Aions laid, despite having no magic to call on. Sylvas gave little away in return, but even with just the odd droplet of truth, there was soon a pool of knowledge about him that he wished she didn’t have the capacity to draw on. Conversation lulled for a moment as she tried to think of the next question.

The sun had set outside the open window, and a cool breeze was now washing through the room, disturbing the dust and reminding Sylvas that there was a world outside of this room, here, with her. She snapped her fingers. “Okay, I realized I wanted to be an archaeologist when I first read about them in the library.”

This was entering dangerous territory again very quickly. “I can’t tell you what my job is, or when I decided that I wanted to do it. I don’t even know if I do yet.”

“Okay, that’s something. I can work with that.” She nudged his knee with hers. “A little uncertainty. A little vulnerability.”

Another gulp of the booze led to the next revelation. “My first kiss was a boy we all called Frogger because he was good at catching frogs. Probably had a real name, never learned it.”

Go on, darling, tell her the tale of our grand romance.

“My first kiss was… we were friends in the place where I studied magic. She died.”

The worst possible rendition I’ve ever heard. Never attempt an autobiography.

Rania groaned. “Killing the mood again.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have many happy memories to share. Maybe we can try something else?”

“Right, so you’re a miserable guy who hates fun. Got it.” She ticked it off an imaginary list.

“I don’t hate fun.” Sylvas tried to look more relaxed and less like this was an interrogation. “I am very fun. I said this isn’t fun.”

She leaned in closer still, until her face was so close Sylvas could feel her breath on his face. “Those don’t sound like things a fun person would say.”

Sylvas didn’t flinch back but met her gaze. “Maybe you and I just have different ideas of what fun looks like.”

Not if you kiss her!

Sylvas’ eyes darted down to her lips, and he could see the very corner turn up into a smile. Then the screams began outside. They weren’t cries of terror; they were too resigned for that. The people here had been suffering the same assault night after night for so long that they couldn’t even muster up the energy to be truly terrified of the doom coming for them.

Rania’s smile vanished in an instant. “Shikari.”

“They’re early?” Sylvas brushed past her on the way to the door, magic already gathering around him without him even needing to will it.

“We’re late.” Rania was at his heels, checking the mechanism of her rifle.

With a push off the ground, Sylvas was in flight and so accustomed to it at this point that he didn’t even realize that he was carrying extra weight until he glanced back and saw Rania clinging to the back of his shirt for dear life. He hooked an arm under her and then accelerated towards the source of the screaming.

The shikari at the makeshift walls of the compound were no different from the ones that he’d fought before, but in the dim twilight, lit only by flaming torches and starlight, they took on a demonic appearance. Like the mass of them was one huge writhing beast of fur, scale, and claw. There must have been a dozen attacking the wall at this one point, the colonists firing down into them, helplessly trying to slow their climb.

Sylvas dropped Rania to land heavily atop the ramparts while remaining aloft for a better view of the battlefield. He cast gravity spike; the shikari would not be climbing over any walls while he was around. He completed the spell just as the first claw hooked over the top and tore most of the climbers off to land back in their feral roil. But the one that had surmounted the wall already, there was no way to dislodge without exerting so much gravity that it would tear the makeshift barricade right down with it. He couldn’t raise its weight any more, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t raise his own. Releasing the kinetic hold on his body, he poured on more mass and weight as he surged down towards the creature, leading with his heel. When he made contact, it was with all the force of a falling star, aided and abetted by the gravity spike already in place. Bones and muscle shattered and tore beneath him, launching a plume of gore into the air as he descended right through the length of the beast to land at the base of the barricade, surrounded by shikari.

A grin that was not entirely his own spread across Sylvas’ face as glowing claws manifested around his hands, that same slick burgundy color of his two affinities fused. “Who is next?”

Without fear or any thought to their own survival, the shikari pounced at him. He caught the first by one of its tusks and slammed it down into the ground like he was telling off a naughty puppy. A kick followed that up, with all his enhanced strength and shifting mass put behind it, launching the shikari head over heels, up and over the next rank with green blood trailing behind it. There was no time to celebrate each small victory; the next dove in at his side, and he had to hammer an elbow down into the top of its snout or risk it locking its teeth through his ribcage. He cast as he fought, summoning out his orbitals and sending them zipping out to lodge in the shikari out of striking distance, pulling the same trick as they had before to rob them of traction, lodging each shot of the orbitals in some joint or cartilaginous corner and using it to hoist them aloft.

The defenders on the walls might have been taken aback by his initial wild charge, but now they sprang into action, firing into the suspended targets as they flung themselves around with no hope of escape. Through it all, their blood rained down, and Sylvas’ grin went from feral to crazed as he felt all the power coursing around him, pouring down his face. All of this blood was his now.

It took shape into javelins so slim they looked like thin beams of green as they soared out into the crowd, piercing through more of the shikari, pinning them to the ground, even as they strained against it.

Perhaps war and gravity were strange bedfellows, two affinities that in normal times would never have occurred naturally together in a single creature. But Sylvas could not deny that they felt right together now. That they both shared a sense of absolute inevitability.

This was not a fight anymore. It was a slaughter. The shikari were powerful compared to any human, elf, dwarf, or animal that Sylvas had ever heard about, but they had no magic, and without it, they could never match the impossible feats that he performed without effort most days.

With the death of the last shikari by his hands, Sylvas made out the unmistakable sound of cheering from atop the walls. The colonists had just seen what he could do for the first time. They had witnessed him merging himself completely with an eidolon of war, and the relief pouring off them was palpable. He had expected everyone to be afraid of him because of Strife living within him. He had expected to be treated like a monster, but instead, they cheered. These people had been without hope for so long that even his brutality seemed like a welcome hope.

But it wasn’t cheers that Sylvas was listening for. He could stop and examine how he was feeling at being treated as a hero to these people some other time when everything was over and done. Right now, he was listening for two distinct voices, Malachai and Kaya, and they were both missing. He launched himself straight up. Whatever else could be said about his friends, neither one of them would have shirked a fight if it showed up. Which meant one of two things: either something had stopped them from joining him at the wall or…

He caught sight of the shikari on the opposite side of the compound, three of them surrounding one shining bit of silver, and a pair of them dead without any sign of injury by the wall. Malachai’s work, no doubt. Sylvas launched himself down.

Malachai couldn’t risk a shot at any one of the shikari with Kaya in their midst, and Kaya couldn’t break free of the melee to give him that shot with the shikari circling like that. They needed outside intervention to break the stalemate.

Sylvas reached out with kinesis and plucked Kaya out from the midst of them. She shot straight up, yelling all the way, flailing her bladed arms around in a way that would almost certainly have resulted in Sylvas being filleted if he hadn’t pulled back up even higher out of reach the moment after lifting her. Malachai’s sickle blades of death rushed down, cutting across two of the shikari and dropping them on the spot, but the final one had pursued Kaya up. It had rebounded off one of its dying companions to leap right back up after her.

Its jaws were open, its claws were extended, and Kaya had no traction to move. So Sylvas moved her. He didn’t pull her aside. He threw her down into the shikari’s maw with all the force he could muster. The dwarf shot past its teeth before they could close, lodging in the soft tissue of its throat before exploding in a dervish spin of cuts. Blood fountained from the leaping monster’s mouth as momentum continued carrying it up, and Kaya leapt free of it as it fell dead to the ground alongside its kin. Sylvas threw some extra weight into himself and came down hard on it, to be sure that whatever backup brains the things used to keep the different parts of their body moving had also been crushed.

The steel flowed off Kaya’s head, and she stood laughing. “Oh, man. We’ve got to do that one again.”

Malachai approached from where he’d been positioned on the wall, a chorus of ghosts surrounding him like a mantle, carrying him down. “I would prefer if you did not. I believe that my heart may have stopped for a moment.”

“Aww, you do care about me,” Kaya crooned.

Malachai opened and shut his mouth without making a sound. Sylvas jumped in before things could get any more awkward. “How did you know the shikari were attacking here?”

“Well, for one thing, they’re smart enough not to go on throwing themselves in a meat grinder...” Kaya started, before Malachai cut her off.

“Hector briefly regained consciousness and provided warning. If he had not, we would have been entirely unaware.”

“Yeah, that.” Kaya scowled at him.

“Is he still awake?” Sylvas tried to crush the excitement mounting in his chest before it could come to fruition, but he was too slow.

“They drugged him back to sleep.” Malachai’s own injuries looked no better than they had earlier. “He couldn’t think… There was too much pain.”

Sylvas’ shoulders slumped. He had been putting on a brave face for the colonists, but he felt like their chances of actually achieving any of their goals would have been greatly increased with Hector recovered and at their side. Malachai could see his dissatisfaction. “The facilities here are rudimentary at best, and their healer isn’t well-equipped or trained. The actual medical staff expired in the early days of the shikari attacks.”

Sylvas took a deep breath, then let his frustration fade. “The sooner we can get the Aion platforms offline, the sooner we can get him to decent help.”

Kaya looked up at him with a frown. “So you’re still planning on going for the queen?”

“What other choice do we have?”