Starbreaker: Volume 3 - Chapter 24

“What is madness? We prize diversity of thought amidst those academics of the universe. Seek it out in all of its varied forms beyond those limits, yet when we are confronted with a worldview that does not align with what we know of things, we call it madness. Is it our own lack of insight and education that marks another as mad?”

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

It was only back in the safety of the Blackhall that night, long after he’d spent an afternoon laughing and chatting with Malachai and his entourage, that Sylvas finally allowed emotion to come back into his mind. He had gone through the usual social graces in exactly the same way as he would have if his interior hadn’t been entirely blanked, and Malachai had seemed pleased enough with his company. But he hadn’t really been able to parse through everything that the man had said until now, replaying it all with his eidetic memory, sifting through for any useful intelligence that he could share with Bael during tonight’s study session.

This was the kind of job that his Second Thoughts paradigm would be ideal for. The theory behind the actual physical and magical construct that he planned to use to house it was almost ready for creation. But now he was at the dangerous point of having to begin the usual fragmentation of his psyche with the intention of pushing the new parts together to form the core of the new mind. He was having to cut slivers from each of his existing memories so that he could propagate a new copy of himself, and there was an awful temptation throughout the whole process to begin making amendments. Removing the parts of him that made him weaker, keeping only the parts that made him his best self, and ending up with a secondary mind that was superior to the original.

The trouble was, the moment that he started making those changes, he was going to start making it harder and harder for the two minds to connect and behave as equals in the relationship. The other mind would have a separate instance of his consciousness if all went well, which meant that if he made it superior to his own, he could look forward to a life enslaved to it. His own mind would serve only the base functions while all decision-making was ceded to the new Sylvas. Eternal slavery to his own mind would have been moderately tolerable if it weren’t for the fact that it would also knock the two minds out of the instant synchronization that he was going to need from them. The whole point was for them to be identical. If he couldn’t edit his own mind into better shape, then he certainly shouldn’t do it to the other one.

The biggest danger of the fragmentation process wasn’t just the damage he could do to himself shunting aspects of himself into the specific fragments that he meant to use as the seeds for his Paradigm but also the speed at which it would all have to be done. The individual fragments had a tendency to become chaotic after a few minutes of independence, which was the main reason he didn’t wake up first thing in the day and load up with all the spells he planned to cast. That and the constant mana drain of keeping the spell-forms alive. If he didn’t accumulate all of the fragments he meant to use fast enough, they’d begin to drift. Every other one of his paradigms had been slow and tedious work, building them up block after block while this one would have to be wildly different. He’d have to reshuffle all the thoughts in his head so that they’d be evenly split, and then implanting them into the other brain would have to be done in one go. Otherwise, the coherency of the individual fragments would break down.

All he could do for now was continue his diligent preparations and hope he was up to the task. Which he supposed was something of a microcosm for his whole life here on Strife.

By the time Bael arrived, he had already sifted all the relevant information that he could find out of his memory of his conversations with Malachai, so they had plenty to discuss. For his part, Bael had made some serious inroads documenting all of the Grayhall students that he’d seen fighting over the course of every match that he himself was not in. By his estimation of their numbers, they’d now be moving into the second round of the tournament with a solid half of the contenders already out, which meant that everyone who was going to be fighting had fought at least once. Combining their respective knowledge bases, they had almost everyone covered.

Of course, knowing who everyone was and what they could do was only part of the battle. They then switched to working out how each of the specific problems could be countered. For the most part, it was straightforward: evasion, deflection, or blitz attacks to overwhelm those opponents who couldn’t be countered. From the moment that Sylvas knew who he was up against, he would be prepared to act. He knew which opponents to fight from the air, which to take to the ground, which to deal with up close, and which to keep his distance from. By the end, there was only one notable gap in their decided tactics.

“We need to talk about Kaya,” Sylvas finally blurted out.

“Your dearest friend who absolutely adores you,” Bael replied in a monotone. “I cannot imagine why I might have been avoiding the subject.”

“She’s one of the strongest in the Blackhall. At some point, I’m going to be fighting her. I need to… make a decision on how to handle that.”

The elf drooped ever so slightly. “With all due respect to Ms. Runemaul, she is singularly poorly equipped to deal with your affinity and skillset. Reliant almost entirely upon close combat in all of our previous conflicts, you need only keep her at a distance and the matter will be closed.”

“And what if you come up against her?” Sylvas sometimes got so caught up in his own planning that he forgot that Bael was in the competition, too, but he was doing his best to try and offer the elf some actual help rather than just raw information that he could use to make his own calculations.

“I will endeavor to keep her at a distance as best I can. While there is little I can do to disrupt her embodiments, where she finds most of her combat capabilities, I can counter those utility spells that she does use and presumably score some form of decisive blow.”

It was all very vague, but Sylvas didn’t push for a more detailed plan from the man because he suspected that there wasn’t one. Whatever faults Kaya might have had, one thing that could be relied on was her unpredictability. It made her very difficult to plan around, both as an ally and an opponent. More often than not, Sylvas had just pointed her at a problem and left her to her own devices.

From that point on, the conversation felt a little stilted, and it wasn’t long before Bael was claiming that he needed his rest, but Sylvas knew that he had overstepped somehow in reminding the elf that he was in the fighting, too. Bael was more comfortable talking about the contest as an abstract rather than something real that the two of them had to face. Sylvas wondered if it was because it meant having to think about facing him.

It definitely wasn’t a concern for Gharia, for the moment that she spotted him across the expanse of red sand the following morning, she let out a whoop of excitement.

Theirs was the first match of the day, and if they’d been walking together like normal, Sylvas would have realized that she was going to be his opponent, but they’d been separated in the crowd.

Or she deliberately pulled away after working it out to steal whatever advantage being prepared might give you.

He ignored the intrusive thought and took flight, not with the spell Gharia was already using to zip around the curvature of the dome but with will, mana, and the new body’s parts that functioned like the orbitals he’d just unleashed. She soared through the air with grace and beauty, tail trailing behind her, and he moved like an object in space, drifting upwards. Neither one wanted to cede the high ground, but neither did Sylvas have any desire to be as close to the protective shell that encased them as Gharia was flying. He had no idea if spells detonating against it would blast back into the arena as if it were a solid surface, and he had no intention of finding out, at least from the perspective of the detonation recipient.

At the speed she was traveling, it would be hard to hit her with any sort of direct strike, but despite that, her movements were predictable. Those graceful arcs she traveled in had predestined endpoints, and Sylvas knew from experience that rapid directional changes while using that spell were jarring, to say the least. He cast an Inversion up ahead of her and watched as she soared straight into the area of upturned gravity.

For a moment, she dipped as the spell caught her, and her own push against gravity reversed direction, but with a spin, she recovered and soared on through the spell with scarcely an afterthought. Used to be, he could bring her crashing down all so easily with that spell, but she had seen it so many times by now and had all the time in the world to adjust her own magic to accommodate his.

The mana storage crystals embedded in his hand began to sting as he drew more and more mana in while watching her move. All mana was drawn to him as he cycled, and then it filtered into each of those crystals or dispersed unless it had gravity affinity, in which case it followed his channels down to his core. The solution wasn’t perfect, but it functioned more or less like the gauntlet had before it was destroyed. Not that he planned to use any of that mana until he had no other option.

So far, she’d given no indication of how she meant to actually attack him, only giving away that his spells wouldn’t necessarily find purchase with the winds surrounding her and fighting against his pull, but he wasn’t waiting for that to change. Launching himself up a little farther into her path, he readied his next spell.

A Gravity Spike launched from his clawed palm, a tiny sphere of pure darkness shooting out towards her. Gharia did a barrel roll to avoid it, just as Sylvas assumed she would, passing by it as he carefully and deliberately set it off. The sudden pull of gravity up above her combined with the lift that the flight spell gave her launched her upwards. Sylvas had not personally made any attempt at touching the barrier spell, but from those more dynamic matches that he’d seen, it seemed to function mostly like a solid object. One that Gharia was now scraping along, shedding a rain of pristine white scales off the back of her neck and head as she tried to right herself. She could adjust for his spells, but it took time.

The second Gravity Spike hit just up ahead of her, once more, right against the surface of the dome, but this time she was ready, jerking away from it the moment that she felt its pull. She hauled down with all her strength, just as Sylvas had predicted she would. This Spike only flickered in existence for a fraction of a moment before dispersing. A feint of a spell meant only to make her react. Without the gravity to pull against, Gharia shot down as though she had no spell of flight on her at all, and just like that, he had her. A perfectly predictable downward arc.

His next Gravity Spike wouldn’t land near her, it would intersect her. She was in a free-fall, panicking, zooming down towards the sand below at terminal velocity and pulling against it with all her strength. Her people had a musculature that put human bodies to shame, with thick scales reinforcing an already solid skeletal structure, but even she was hard-pressed to pull up from the dive without hurting herself. And when she did pull up, it was straight into Sylvas’ next Spike. It hit her somewhere near the shoulder, then momentum dragged her on for a moment, and it ripped down the length of her torso. It didn’t matter how tough she was naturally or how much tougher her embodiments had made her when her internal organs were being crushed and twisted together.

She fell from the sky and hit the ground hard enough for bones to shatter and blood to splatter. One moment later, her Crest activated before anything worse could happen. Not that Sylvas could readily conceive of much worse happening.

Everything had unfolded too fast for him to really think about the person he was maiming, only the fight in front of him. He could taste bile at the back of his throat that had nothing to do with the noxious cocktail of supplements he’d knocked back along with his breakfast. He reached for his Paradigm to wipe these feelings away, then stopped himself. He should feel disgusted over what he was doing to his friends. If he didn’t feel something he wasn’t human anymore, just some fighting machine like the Ardent seemed to want him to be.

Yes, it’s oh so brave of you to feel sad over the people you’ve hurt. They should give you a medal for sorrow.

That voice again, sounding less and less like the sound of his own each time that he heard it. He knew that there was going to be some instability as he fragmented his mind off for his new Paradigm, but he couldn’t have predicted it would have manifested like this. Hearing voices was definitely one of the things that the medic would have sent him for a psychological evaluation over.

I just better make sure she doesn’t know about them then.