The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 23

The water bolts twisted apart an inch away from Rue’s armor. Instead of tearing through the leather and shredding her guts, they harmlessly splashed off her with three distinctive wet plopping noises. No one was more surprised than Rue to see her standing there, unharmed.

“What the hell was that?” the water mage asked. He reached one hand up to touch his headband, as if reassuring himself that it was still there.

Nemari must have countered his water magic, Rue realized.

Seizing the initiative, she drew her blades and leaped at the mage. He recovered from his shock quickly, but not soon enough to prevent himself from getting stabbed. Luckily for him, his friend with the armor and the shield had better reaction speed. He got in front of Rue, but she discharged her kinetic pulse ring at him, emptying it out and knocking the front-liner back the two ungainly steps it took him to recover his balance.

She heard whistling in the air behind her and knew the climber with the knives had flung them. Before she could start to duck, Od moved in the way. The clang of metal on stone told her he’d blocked the attempt, so she stayed on target instead of dodging.

There were less than three feet between her and the mage, and from the panic on his face, Rue knew he wasn’t going to come up with an answer before she ran him through. She pushed off her left foot, the blade she’d taken from the ruin on Floor 1 lined up to shred his intestines. Three feet became one foot.

Then that slender, flashing blade wielded by the rank 4 who’d been standing fifteen feet away slapped her thrust aside. Undeterred, Rue moved with the parry, whipping around in a half circle to bring her face-to-face with the swordsman who’d thwarted her first attack while hacking at the mage’s hip with her right-hand sword.

The swordsman’s free hand grabbed the mage’s shirt and hauled him back a foot, literally dragging him out of danger. He did it casually, too, moving a man who probably weighed one-eighty as easily as if he were a small child. The mage went sprawling behind the swordsman, who paid him no more mind.

“Take care of their mage,” the swordsman said, his eyes never leaving Rue’s. “I’ll deal with the girl. Remember not to kill anyone.”

“R-right. Yeah.”

I hope you can do whatever you did last time again,

Rue thought to Nemari, and that Od can hold the other two off until one of us can win.There was no chance Yoru or his buddy were getting off the ground to help with this fight, not without a lot more healing. Aura reading wasn’t a perfect way to judge someone’s health, but as she’d grown more sensitive to the fluctuations in people, she’d started to notice patterns. Simply put, those two were still in bad shape.

The swordsman assumed a stance Rue hadn’t really seen before. His eyes glinted darkly as he regarded Rue, who ignored the mage scrambling around behind them and the armored climber, who’d apparently caught some signal or just knew better than to interfere. They were both aiming for Nemari, but Od had already moved close to protect her.

“It would be in your interest to end this as quickly as possible before your team gets overwhelmed,” the swordsman said. “I’d be happy to take your surrender.”

Rue casually flicked out a stab, just to test the man’s reflexes. He picked it off, barely even moving his blade. At the same time he was pushing one sword aside, she thrust the other one into his undefended side. The swordsman demonstrated speed greater than anything Rue was capable of and parried that one, too.

Strong, but not abnormally so. He’s got something to make him fast and coordinated, maybe something like Sorin’s Speed Burst for movement. Too soon to tell how his endurance is or if he’s got regeneration or defenses.

The swordsman didn’t just stand there and let her evaluate his capabilities. As Rue reset her stance from her double attack, he pressed forward, his blade flickering almost too fast for her to follow. It was easier to see the motion from his shoulder than the tip of the sword, but that wasn’t enough to tell her when and how to dodge.

Those sparring sessions against Sorin paid off, not because he’d moved equally fast—though he did—but because that was where she’d really focused on honing her ability to track movement through Aura Sense as a way to compensate for attacks that her eyes couldn’t keep up with. The swordsman tried to tag her with three lightning-quick jabs, but she blocked the first two and dodged the third.

Surprise showed on his otherwise smug face, but not concern. When Rue launched her own attacks, stepping into them in an attempt to get inside his guard, he merely smiled and deflected her swords while repositioning to keep the distance between them.

“Nice footwork,” she said. “You do a lot of dancing? You’re so light on your toes, I almost can’t tell you’re running away.”

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“You’re a bit young for my taste, but you don’t always get to pick your partner when you move to the rhythm of battle. You could be good one day, but you’re far too much of an amateur to take seriously right now.”

Rue slashed her sword in a simple horizontal strike, having noted that his stance had the hardest time reacting to them. When she tried, his counter was to use his superior blade-length and reach to stab at her face, but she had a second sword for a reason. This time, she parried his strike, foiling him and leaving him with no way to defend his stomach. He scooted backward half a step, but ran out of room on the trail.

Steel dug through the leather cuirass he wore, but it robbed her attack of much of its momentum. The swordsman was barely even scuffed, and now she’d wasted a trick of maneuvering his steps. She doubted he’d fall for it again.

“First blood to you,” he complimented. “Of course, everybody knows it’s last blood that’s the important one.”

“Don’t worry, I aim to take that, too.”

Instinct told her to push him into the corner, to use the cliff wall of the trail to limit his movements so he couldn’t dodge. Experience told her that if she tried, she’d be the one who ended up skewered. Controlling his movements made her own too predictable against an opponent with superior speed and reach.

Nemari cried out in pain farther up the trail, followed immediately by the evil chuckle of the knife thrower. At the same time, the crash of metal on stone echoed down the mountain. Right, I don’t have time to screw around here. Time to play dirty.

What followed was ten seconds of frantic back and forth. The swordsman controlled the fight effortlessly, and with each traded blow, his smug smirk grew. Then Rue made one of her swords go invisible. That wiped the grin off his face, but he still managed to parry the attack.

“Nice sword,” he growled, pushing against the blade he couldn’t see.

Her other sword flickered out of sight, but he had the measure of her reach and smoothly stepped backward out of her range. It was all a setup, though, and while he had a good idea of how long the blade was, he wasn’t prepared for the eruption of shadowy energy from Reach to slice deep into his arm.

Roaring in pain, the swordsman shoved with all his might. Rue simply didn’t have the weight to contest him and stumbled back a few steps. Knowing she was vulnerable, she immediately brought her blades up in a set of wild parries designed to sweep the air in front of her for a sword point she couldn’t see.

As satisfying as the ring of steel against steel was, it didn’t save her from a long, shallow cut grazing one cheek. Better than getting stabbed in the brain, she thought. She charged back in two steps, her invisible sword flicking blood off it to splatter against the stone as she brought it around.

Somehow, the swordsman disappeared from their lock, moving two feet back in the process and swinging his sword around in a powerful arc that caught her own blade near the hilt and plucked it from her fingers. It flipped through the air, abruptly visible, and clattered across the ground behind him.

“Fun time is over now,” he snarled. Blood ran down his arm from a gash that had a slip of white bone visible in the middle of it. He wouldn’t be using that limb for anything this fight, not without a powerful healer intervening, and she didn’t think any of the ones available were on his side.

The swordsman moved in, his blade driving her back with powerful lunges and deceptively swift cuts. Rue parried where she could, but she took hit after hit. The armor helped some, but it wasn’t enough. Iron Body kept the lacerations from going too deep, but it was a losing battle.

One more shot at this. Can’t miss a vital spot again.

The red square of cloth flashed up into the air, tossed up as a distraction that worked more because of its powerful fixation enchantment than anything else. Even then, it gave her a fraction of a second before the swordsman pulled his eyes away from it. That was just long enough to activate Quick Step.

Rue practically teleported from in front of the swordsman to his left side, where his useless arm couldn’t be moved to block her. If he’d used his own version to move, he’d have easily dodged a single strike delivered at no quick speed. But he didn’t, and in that moment of vulnerability, Rue separated his head from his shoulders.

The swordsman toppled over to the ground, dead, and Rue found herself momentarily surprised that there was no influx of anima from him. Then she shook herself out of her stupor, snatched the cloth up, and charged up the trail. Her sword was on the way, and she grabbed that, too.

Just as she rounded the bend, the water mage fell at her feet. He rolled around, screaming as flames devoured his clothes and burned through his skin. Spurts of water appeared over him, but every time, they were flung off to the side before they could reach the flames to douse them. Not interested in watching him suffer, and knowing that there were two more climbers to defeat, Rue stabbed a blade down into his heart.

“You bitch!” the front-liner roared from where he and Od were exchanging blows. “I’ll fucking kill you slow! It’s gonna hurt for days before I toss you into a pit of wire ants so they can finish you off!”

“The hell you will,” Od said. He unleashed a powerful uppercut, his entire fist covered in stone, that the front-liner took on his chin.

With the fight shifted to three against two, the knife thrower saw which way the wind was blowing. He wasn’t locked into the brawl, but now that Nemari had free range to light up his world without distractions from a rival mage, he knew exactly what his future looked like.

The coward ran for his life.

“You got the big one?” Rue asked as she ran by.

“Yeah. We’re good. Be careful,” Nemari said.

Rue noted four different knives sticking out of her, but Nemari was ignoring them in favor of conjuring up another firebolt. That’s got to hurt like hell. I hope Od’s got enough in him to fix all this damage once the fight’s over.

Rue sprinted up the trail and around the next bend, fully expecting to find some sort of trap or ambush. She hadn’t forgotten how the climber had somehow gotten inside the range of her Aura Sense without her seeing him, and she knew better than to expect an uncontested pursuit.

Instead, she rounded the corner and found the knife thrower choking, a hand locked around his throat, his feet kicking six inches off the ground, and his own hands grabbing at Sorin’s wrist. They were maybe a hundred feet away, and Sorin was absolutely covered in blood.

“Can’t leave you three alone for five minutes, can I?” he asked.