BT - Book 1 - Chapter 103

Micah crept through the tower’s hallways, occasionally ducking into a side room when he heard voices.  This high in the building, there weren’t regular patrols.  Apparently, the alarm on the roof was considered sufficient.

On one hand, he was surprised that there weren’t more guards keeping the VIPs on the upper levels safe.  On the other hand, given what Micah knew about Martin and Brenden’s predilection toward rituals that were frowned upon by the Kingdom, he wasn’t surprised that the floor was largely unpopulated.  They’d probably demanded it.

Really, Micah though, focusing his mana on the cloak as he scurried inside a nearby closet to let a man in a suit carrying a silver platter with a teakettle on it pass, his biggest concern was the servants.  They weren’t terribly common, but as he drifted from room to room looking for Martin the well dressed men and women stopped his search more than once.

Still, the cloak did its work.  Micah passed from hall to hall unnoticed, pausing outside every door with light trickling out under it.  Twice he slipped a door open a crack.  In the first, he recognized some of Brenden’s shirts laid out on an unmade bed and moved on.  In the second, a bulky middle-aged man labored over a desk.

Micah quietly closed the door, waiting for a second to see if the man noticed his presence before moving on.  He wasn’t sure if the writer was the tower’s commanding officer, or some other assorted ‘very important person,’ but whoever he was, Micah couldn’t afford a fight that would tip Martin off to his presence.

Finally, he found himself before a massive oak door, inlaid with carvings of ancient heroes defeating creatures from myth.  Above the heroes and monsters, Luxos sat on a throne made of light, the rays of the Sun radiating out from behind his head.  Behind the door, a male voice muttered angrily to itself, barely audible through the thick wood.

He placed his hand on the doorknob with a shrug.  If the Martin Osswain he remembered was anywhere on this floor, the self important scarecrow would be in the most ostentatious room available.  It sure looked like Micah had found him.

Gently, the door slid open under his touch, but even with his tread completely silent from the cloak, Martin stiffened from where he sat at an ornate wooden desk, reading a massive tome by mage light.

Seeing the old man once again was almost nostalgic, thin and clad fastidiously in a well tailored suit.  His curly grey hair was neatly combed and styled tight to his head, and every one of his mannerisms as Martin slowly closed the book brought back unpleasant memories.  Micah tightened his grip on his spear.

“Thrakos.”  Micah frowned as Martin spoke purposefully, without any hurry.  “You might think that you can sneak back into my office twenty minutes after you should have returned without me noticing, but I have a life detection ward covering this entire room.”

He froze.  Martin hadn’t turned around, instead drumming his fingers impatiently on the cover of the grimoire on the table in front of him.

“When I was a squire Brenden,” Martin continued slowly.  “I respected the knight I served under. I learned how to anticipate her requests.  I kept detailed notes on her preferences so that I wouldn’t disappoint her, and eventually she helped me gain the levels I would need to become a full Knight in my own right.”

“What I didn’t do.”  The old man began turning lethargically, his voice cold.  “Was try and avoid my duties.  I didn’t run off to flirt with castle maids when I was supposed to report back to my knight because I knew that it would lead to swift-”

Martin stopped, squinting his bushy eyebrows at Micah.

“Who in the name of the Sixteen are you?”  He asked incredulously.

Micah responded by uttering the final word to Haste’s incantation and darting toward the old man, pushing Flash Step to its extreme.

With a single word, Martin summoned a trio of water tentacles, each as big around as Micah’s waist.  Frantically, he activated the temporal enchantment in his spear as Micah tried in vain to track the blindingly fast pillars of water as they whipped toward him.

Between Haste and the glittering trails of rainbow light preceding Martin’s spell, Micah slipped past the first attack.  Without a moment to breath, he threw himself to the ground as the second sailed past his head, a bare fraction of a second later.

The third rod of water struck him in the shoulder, knocking Micah from his crouch and slamming him face first into the stone floor of the chamber.  The defensive ward he’d looted from the ritualist activated at the last second in a flash of mana, protecting him from the worst of the blow.

He skidded across the ground, his arm aching dully despite the hand’s span of ice wreathing it.

Micah stood up, quietly mouthing the words to Regeneration as he flexed his arm experimentally.  Martin just squinted at him, confusion furrowing his brow.

“How in the hells are you alive boy?”  Martin glanced at the block of ice on the ground where Micah’s defenses had negated the worst of his attack.  “More importantly, what in the blazes have you done with my squire?”

It was a fair question. He’d seen the same spell ripping apart monsters in the Royal Academy’s captive dungeon like they were wet leaves.  Even a prince, garbed in the most powerful enchantments that the Kingdom could provide should have been crushed into strawberry paste by that attack.

Temporal enchantment active once again, Micah dove to the side narrowly avoiding the lance of ice that Martin condensed out of thin air.  Apparently, like Micah the old man had been playing for time to complete a spell of his own.

A Flash Step later and he was in range of the tentacles once again. They crisscrossed in front of Micah with a tsunami’s force, a complex pattern of destruction heralded by their multicolored auras.

Micah hurdled one at knee level, ducking his head and curling himself into a ball in order to pass through a gap between the pillars of pressurized water.

He felt a spray of mist on his face and neck, like standing in the ocean as waves broke, and then Micah was through, a mere handful of paces from Martin.

A snarl on his face, Micah lunged forward with his spear, only noticing the old man’s smirk a moment too late as Martin snarled a command word.  Energy pulsed from the Knight, his closely combed hair standing on end as blue tendrils of power arced between the strands.

The simple turned to ice for a dozen paces around Martin.  Wrist deep, it encased the bottom of one foot and the toes of another.  Micah’s momentum slammed him forward, almost dislocating a hip as he jerked against his suddenly trapped extremities.

Then the water tentacles hit him, one after another.  The ward activated once again, dissipating the force of the first blow as it thumped into icy armor.  The second shattered the ice, and the third pulverized the ribs on his right side, shoving their broken shards into his heart and lungs.

Time blurred and disorientation filled him as Temporal Stutter deposited Micah back in the air, chin to his chest and spear across his bent knees as he shot the narrow gap in Martin’s array water tendrils.

Micah twisted unnaturally in the air, slamming his spear butt first into the ground to keep himself from touching the ground, just in time for Martin’s spell to freeze it in place.

He pole vaulted toward the old man, mouthing the words to a spell as he silently cursed that they were on the upper level of a building, negating most of his wood magic.  Poison Fog might work, but Micah suspected that Martin would have some sort of defense or resistance against toxins.  At best he would be able to wear him down over the course of the battle.

Instead he was stuck, unable to use Explosive Thicket or Binding Vines.  True he could try and lob Pressure Spears at Martin, but the battle seemed to be moving too quickly for that.  He doubted that any of the mana bolts would get anywhere near the old knight without his water limbs intercepting them.

Micah’s foot landed on the ice just in front of Martin.  He wasn’t able to use Flash Step, the spear the martial art relied upon planted and abandoned behind him, but his hands formed into claws as they thrust toward the knight’s throat.

At this range, Micah could see his old mentor’s lips moving and the arrogant sense of superiority in his eyes.

He knew what was coming next.

Only twice when Micah had been in a dungeon with Martin did a monster manage to penetrate the whirling mobius of high pressure water that the old man used as both sword and shield.   Each time, just before the creature could land a blow, an arm’s length of water had appeared surrounding Martin to protect him.

Ice cold and pressurized to the point that Micah suspected a sword would break on it, both of the monsters had been trapped midway into the aura.  Their movements frozen in place, both of them had been crushed like a day old crust of bread beneath a carriage’s wheel.

Knowing didn’t prepare him.  The aura grabbed both of his arms at the elbow like a vice.  Pressing down with enough force to crush rock and bend steel.

He bit his lip, blood filling his mouth as Micah’s advanced Body attribute and Regeneration worked in concert to fight back against defensive spell long enough for Micah’s own attack to land.

Sonic Orb.  He hadn’t gotten close enough to use it recently due to the spell’s major flaws.  It required two hands, meaning that Micah would need to abandon his weapon to use it, and it forced him close within grappling distance of an enemy.

The ball of energy formed between his hands, fingers creaking against the pressure of Martin’s spell.  Even with his head outside the aura of water, Micah heard it pulse and thrum, a humming bass note that shook his body and rattled his teeth.

Inside the defensive aura?  Water splashed to the ground revealing Marin’s soaked form, blood streaming from his nose, mouth and eyes.  The old man stumbled backward senselessly.

Water magnified sound.  It multiplied Sonic Orb’s already potent power and channeled it through Martin’s frail body.

That was the problem with wizards and elementalists.  Their defenses were powerful if laid out properly, but every ward had a key or a weakness.  A lucky blow or simply knowing their preferences and skillset was often all it took to crack through their magic and reveal their decidedly average bodies.

Micah’s elbow found his nose, smashing it flat against Martin’s face.  His foot lashed out, shattering one of the old caster’s knees with an audible crunch.

Martin collapsed, hands flailing toward his face before Micah’s boot slammed down on his chest hard enough to crack the ice beneath both of them.

The old man curled into the fetal position, as Micah began muttering the words to an unfamiliar spell, a pitiful shell of what he’d once been.

At one point, the old man had been like the reaper himself.  Holding’s Micah’s life in the palm of his haughty hand.  Tormenting him in an effort to force the last glimmers of potential to manifest themselves.

Laying there, bleeding and broken he reminded Micah of…

His mind blanked as Micah tried to think of his only friend at the Royal Academy’s name.  It had been almost a decade ago, but that was hardly an excuse.

He couldn’t even remember the cheerful boy’s face.  Just the pleasant memory of their day at the zoo and then the terror of the sacrifice in the dungeon.  He was just one of many blurry shapes that Micah was forced to perform horrors upon while Brenden and Martin leered down at him.

Somehow, not remembering was actually worse.  For all of the sins that the Royal Knights had made him commit, damaging him until he simply forgot was the worst.

Even after he escaped their clutches, fading back through the currents of time, the trauma and terror of his time in their grasp still gripped his soul.

No more.

His hand touched Martin’s forehead, his face a distorted wreck of blood and smashed cartilage.  He whispered the final word to his spell.

“Coma.”

Martin stilled, eyes fluttering briefly behind their lids as Micah slung his limp form over his shoulder.  Behind him, the door burst open, the muscular man he’d seen earlier bursting into the room, a gleaming longsword in hand.

Micah simply pulled his spear from the ice, shattering the spell that had been weakening since he had incapacitated Martin.

“K-knight Osswain?”  The man asked hesitantly.

Micah glanced back at him.  His eyes were wide and his mouth was agape as Micah opened the window to the room.

With a snort, Micah stepped outside and let himself drop, Martin on his shoulder as he mouthed the words to Flight.