Deadgold: Chapters 18-19

Comments last week made me think that perhaps it would be helpful to link Fithan Geography 101 again. If you want to brush up on the various nations/factions or just get a broader understanding of Fithe, that's probably the best overview.

You won't need it much this week, though, as we are mostly continuing what was set up last time. But as I said last year, my goal with this book is to focus on the overall logistics and politics of war, regardless of whether or not fighting is involved.

-

Chapter 18

The transition was the single most dangerous part of the battle for Fiyu, the ultimate test of her ability to handle both her stealth technique and a weirkey at the same. Worst of all, she would have no idea whether or not she succeeded until it was too late.

She and her allies emerged in the city of Laksloe, which might have been shocking if she had not already seen Nondol with her relative and thoroughly prepared herself. It was irrelevant, compared to the danger of being discovered. There were sublime materials all around them, designed to measure those who arrived, not to mention the physical observers, and she had no idea whether or not her subterfuge had been successful.

First they had lingered in the non-space between worlds, waiting until she felt others moving to weirkey into Laksloe. Fiyu had then followed them, arriving soon after. Her stealth technique covered Friend Nauda, Ally Krikree, and one of their new allies, while most of the depths Fithans arrived unobscured. The hope was that their mass and cantae would explain the arrival and that no one would look closely for an invisible strike force hovering above the ground.

If anyone accosted and searched the group, they would discover that they had no weirkey - this shortcoming had been raised during planning, but they simply didn't have enough weirkeys to use one as a decoy. Fiyu instead hoped to rely on the fact that few would do something so absurd.

In any case, no one attacked them immediately, which proved nothing. Fiyu flew together with her companions into the city, even as she kept her senses on the walking group, confirming that no one was coming to arrest them.

"Are we safe?" Friend Nauda asked.

"As far as can be determined," Fiyu answered. "Even if they somehow detected our arrival, they cannot possibly have tracked our movements since then."

"Then we need to find the sabotage point and hit it fast, right?"

"It has to be in one of the reinforced outer buildings," their depths Fithan ally said. "Our supporters searched every other location, they couldn't be hiding something dangerous enough."

Fiyu was personally not so certain about this step in the overall logic of the plan. Allegedly Tymetron used an explosive stone material in most of its traps, which would indeed have enough mass to be difficult to hide. But it was entirely possible that they hid some sort of acid or other threat that could puncture the exterior of the city less explosively, and if so it might be difficult to track down.

Unfortunately, with the limitations on subterfuge, they could not afford to search the entire city down to the smallest material. Fiyu and her allies needed to find the critical point before the battle began, or they would have thousands of deaths on their hands.

Their local ally took them to a region of warehouses that were patrolled by Tymetronese guards who were oblivious to their presence. Beyond that, the depths Fithan intelligence was uncertain, but Fiyu extended her senses through the warehouses and discovered that, though they all had identical basements, only one contained a concentration of densely intricate sublime materials.

She had expected to need to press her case, but she had the support of the others. They left Krikree and their local ally to cause a distraction outside, which gave them more than enough space to slip into the key warehouse. There were only a few guards, but unfortunately one of them was a Tymetronese Stronghold, a grizzled old man who could definitely provide an obstacle. The fact that there was such a guard was the last confirmation Fiyu needed that they were near their goal, however, so she gestured for the others to slip around him...

"Halt!"

Cantae flooded from the Stronghold, seizing the air around him and binding everyone in place. His eyes were moving wildly, with no idea where she was, but somehow he had sensed something. There was power building in his hands, as if he planned to begin unleashing cantae bolts in all directions, but that was not his greatest weapon.

"Someone's here! Sound the al-" Then Friend Nauda broke through the grip of his technique, her body moving in glorious unity. She collided with the man and the air shattered, leaving all of them free.

The others who remained immediately attacked the guards, so Fiyu hesitated only a second looking back to Friend Nauda before she pushed onward to achieve their objective. She blasted her way into the basement, aiming for speed even though she retained her stealth. That dense weapon was still below her, but there were people around it, and if one of them activated the explosive...

When Fiyu burst into the basement, she unleashed spikes of darkness that knocked the inhabitants of the room away from the central stone. All were defeated except for a man who was encased in stone... and suddenly Fiyu paused, in the middle of her action to try to neutralize the explosive.

Surely it could not be... as the man broke through her darkness, walking toward the explosive, she lunged up to him and sliced at the face of his armor, just enough to see him.

And realized that it truly was Ally Homez.

At Authority, he shouldn't have been close to fast enough to strike her, but his spiked gauntlet came uncomfortably close to her head. Fiyu used her superior speed to evade, only barely remembering to put herself between him and the artifact.

Again she attempted to use strands of darkness to bind him in place, but he was strong for an Authority, and his armor resisted attempts to impede him. Despite her best efforts, she couldn't stop him from moving toward her. Every muscle in his body seemed to be tearing at itself, which must have been agony, yet he still moved to attack.

"I'm sorry," Ally Homez said, tears running down his face. "So sorry."

Fiyu realized a terrible truth: she didn't think she could stop Ally Homez without killing him, and the entire mission might hang on his life.

~

As much as Theo wanted to throw himself against Jazin, to get a rematch after their abortive fight the previous year, he realized that would be a mistake. For one, he still had higher priorities, assisting the rest of their army in completely shutting down the Tymetronese fortress. For another, something about the way Jazin stared at him made Theo suspect a trap.

Then the chaos of the battle swept up them both, Jazin getting dragged into the fight with the Tymetronese Dominion while Theo helped assault the base. He didn't get anything like an even matchup, but his disabling gravitational fields and distortion techniques were incredibly effective at helping all their allies sweep in without heavy attrition.

A Stronghold tried to stand in their way, but she didn't prove much of a challenge: she used heavy gold armor that could be slowed down by his gravitational fields, and a Stronghold from the Wavefront joined in to take her down.

Something flickered at the edge of Theo's vision and he realized that there was someone flying at great speed, weaving in between the undersea streets, staying away from Theo's gravitational fields. Whoever they were, they used their cantae efficiently enough that Theo couldn't pin them down with simple gravity, and they moved too unpredictably for him to target with his other techniques. He guessed it was an Authority, but had yet to get a good look at them.

Something flickered in his direction and Theo instinctively cast his usual gravitational fields and anti-mass points... and the attack still struck him. Not cantae, he realized, but compressed wind. Most of the arc of wind had splattered off his armament coat, but the top cut through his cheek.

Theo wiped off the blood, marveling that this Authority might actually be the greatest threat to him outside the Dominions. Whoever they were, they were taking down some of the soldiers on his side, so he needed to find a solution quickly. Theo tried to impede their path with points of mass and anti-mass, even focused his full gravitational attention, but they were too agile to pin down for long, and the arcs of wind kept coming.

Maybe this was a problem better solved by thug Theo. He flew after the Authority, trying to use his superior speed to pin them down against one side of the dome. When they slipped away, he would open a portal, throwing himself into the path of the enemy, who proved to be a young man in a sleek robe.

Of course his opponent was too agile to be caught this way, but he was no longer shocked by Theo's portals. Theo intentionally opened them slower than he could have, letting his opponent adjust to the timing. Eventually he opened one ahead and saw his opponent react, hurling an arc of wind through the portal to hit him while he was off guard.

Except that was exactly what Theo had been waiting for. Instead of running into the obvious portal, Theo dropped into a second, appearing just beside his opponent. The Authority panicked and hurled an arc of wind at point blank range, but it broke on Theo's coat and then the distance was closed.

A single torsion punch finished the job, dropping the young Tymetronese man.

Theo considered finishing him off, but hesitated and instead looked into the man's soulhome. It seemed to be well-crafted, though the shielding wall was just Tymetronese thorns. Without a specific focusing technique, Theo's ability to analyze was limited, but he could see enough: he found a massive golden seal across the young man's roof.

Slave or willing soldier for the empire? Maybe Theo was biased because his opponent had been clever, but now that he got a close look at the seal, he was intrigued.

"Hey," Theo called to the nearest Asplundat soulcrafter. "Take this one prisoner, we need to examine him."

"Sir!" The soulcrafter responded with more formality than was perhaps strictly necessary, but at least that took care of the problem.

When Theo rose back into the air, he saw that the fortress had nearly fallen. There were a few pockets of resistance, but they had no more Strongholds, and he didn't see any Authorities nearly as dangerous as the wind-user. That meant he could safely turn his attention to the battle between Dominions, which still raged on the other side of the dome.

Except, as Theo moved toward it, he realized that the balance had changed drastically. Citizen Dominion was cradling an injured arm, and Melitta was hard-pressed against the Tymetronese Dominion. Theo understood what had happened even as he got a demonstration of it: Citizen Dominion attempted to use an earth technique, only to have it evaporate in the implosions caused by Jazin's strange geodes. With the technique crumbling, the enemy Dominion was able to hurl an attack that knocked Citizen Dominion to the ground.

They'd brought the numbers, but that wasn't enough to give them the upper hand. Theo flew to the other side of the city at top speed, intending to prove the same thing was true of him. But before he arrived, without warning and without technique, the world exploded around him.

-

Chapter 19

Since ascending to Stronghold, Nauda hadn't gotten an opportunity to really flex her strength, not against an equal opponent. She had been eager to fight the Tymetronese Stronghold one on one, since he seemed to have an interesting ability, and would have been proud to buy time for Fiyu that way.

Instead, her chance of a good brawl was ruined by tactics.

She might have been able to win a slugging match, but they were fighting in the middle of a wider battle, and she realized that her opponent was attempting to disable her allies every time an attack missed her. Blocking them with her own body was one tactic, but Nauda realized that she didn't actually need to win. Because Fiyu had gotten through to the explosive artifact, time was on their side, and what mattered was making sure that the enemy couldn't interfere.

They clashed in midair, testing their strength against one another, and Nauda stopped trying to actually deal damage. Instead, she spun them in midair, then suddenly hurled her opponent. The Stronghold flew away from her, sailing harmlessly over the city... but losing time, as he suddenly came under fire from the battle taking place outside.

As she waited, intending to hold off him or anyone else trying to stop them, Nauda searched around for any parts of the battle that needed her help. It turned out to be the opposite: their side was winning the day. Except for the Dominion battle, which felt grim, their strike force had gained the upper hand.

On the other side of the complex, she saw Krikree leading a surprisingly large number of depths Fithans. It seemed as though they had broken into a prisoner of war camp, and though the freed soulcrafters looked in poor health, they were unleashing cantae on their guards with surprising ferocity.

[Water ants!] Krikree emitted enthusiastically to no one. [Save water hive!]

No one else was likely to understand her, but it didn't seem to matter, because she still led them to roll over the nearest opposition. The Stronghold out in the city was still struggling to get back, so she had time. Nauda started to turn to focus on the battle between Dominions when she picked up a sound that should have been too soft to hear over the battle.

"Nauda, help!"

Tactics vanished as she plunged down, shattering through a layer of brick to reach the basement. There she spotted Fiyu defending the artifact from a single opponent... and suddenly Nauda understood as she recognized Homez.

"I can't stop." Homez cast an agonized gaze in her direction even as he unleashed stone spines from his armor. "I'm sorry."

"Nauda, we..." Fiyu didn't finish her sentence, needing to dodge the spikes, but it was clear enough.

The obvious solution was killing him, but clearly that was unacceptable. Not Homez, who had fought with them so long in the Asplundat Movement. Since he was a tier beneath them, they must be able to find a solution.

Nauda lunged in to take him in hand-to-hand, letting his stone fists shatter off her body and striking with blunt force. But even when she landed a strong blow on his head, he didn't fall unconscious. Either the sublime material that was controlling him kept him going or his own durability was harming him. Knocking someone out wasn't nearly as simple or safe as many believed, so trying to beat him down ran the very real risk of causing a mortal injury.

While he was distracted, Fiyu managed to build up coils of darkness that wrapped around his legs, pinning him to the ground. But Homez launched a shard of stone toward the explosive artifact, forcing Fiyu to move rapidly to intercept it. That was the other lever that he used to prevent them from subduing him.

Instead of continuing like this, Nauda lunged in without thought for her own defense. She took a few heavy blows to her face and shoulders before she wrapped her arms around Homez, catching his arms in a bear hug and pinning them to his sides.

"Fiyu, disable the artifact!" she called.

"How?" the other woman asked desperately. "It's set up to explode!"

Homez had been attempting to grow spikes into Nauda, but her skin was too tough for them to penetrate. She had been confident in her defense and wasn't prepared when he suddenly switched to headbutting her directly in the nose. Nauda grimaced and ignored the blood, instead gripping him even tighter.

"Take the explosive!" she insisted. "Just-"

Another headbutt cut her off, and this time she lost her grip. Homez broke free and landed a spiked punch into her stomach, making her fall back.

Once that might have dealt a serious injury, but after her ascension, Nauda managed to absorb it. She still had the presence of mind to craft a line of wards using her gauntlet, set up between them. Homez smashed into them once, but quickly shifted, instead rushing toward the explosive artifact.

It was too late: Fiyu had gripped the central stone and pulled it into her soulhome. Cantae spluttered uselessly from the supporting armaments, no longer able to trigger an eruption. Nauda feared that it could potentially do harm to Fiyu, but there was no time to take action there.

"Bind him again!" Nauda yelled.

This time, Homez couldn't use a soft target against them. Between Nauda fighting him directly and Fiyu wrapping darkness around him, they managed to shatter his armor and eventually pinned him down on the floor of the basement. When Nauda formed a circle of wards around him, he finally sagged and simply lay there, weeping.

It didn't feel like victory.

~

As Theo picked himself off the ground, he wished he could analyze the sudden explosion, but there wasn't time: he needed to move fast, because Jazin was hurling attacks at him.

He spun between the cantae bolts, trying to close the distance, and realized that he had been mistaken about one thing: they had been geode implosions, not explosions. Theo's coat and defensive chambers had protected him, but the sudden loss of cantae had wiped out his gravity and made him plummet to the ground. That didn't explain where the implosions could have come from, since it wasn't as if Jazin could have trapped the entire city.

Then again, judging from the grin Jazin shot him from across the battlefield, perhaps it wasn't so impossible.

Jazin himself was a threat, but the way he seemed to be coordinating weaker soulcrafters was the bigger problem for the battle between Dominions. As he flew there, Theo picked out all of the clusters of hidden soulcrafters, occasionally doing their part to interfere with the Dominions. They were strangely spread out, either for their protection against Dominion attacks or as a necessary condition of their formation.

Exactly the sort of situation his distortion technique had been developed for. The soulcrafters in the formation might have positioned themselves so gravity would have little effect, but as Theo flew past, their inner ears did backflips and they began collapsing, vomiting, or at least reeling. He entered the area that had been occupied by their formation completely unchallenged.

"Hey there." Jazin hurled a much larger geode at him, forcing Theo to evade before it could implode, sucking away the cantae in a vast area.

"I don't think you knew we'd be coming," Theo said, "otherwise you would have had a trap prepared."

"This took us by surprise," Jazin said with a shrug, "but having a forward base attacked isn't that much of a surprise."

Theo unleashed a torsion bolt from a distance, which Jazin countered with a smaller implosion in front of himself. In response, Theo simply repeated the technique, smiling as he did so. If they truly fought a direct battle of attrition, he was willing to bet that his cantae, which gradually refilled itself, would outlast Jazin's finite supply of sublime geodes.

Realizing that the technique was intentionally monotonous, Jazin smiled and then hurled something down. The dark spark looked completely different from the geodes, but vanished into the stones of the city without apparent effect. Theo was still on high alert, and when the streets underneath him erupted in a column of cantae, he was barely able to spin out of the way.

A technique like that clearly signaled its launch, if not its moment of striking... Theo didn't understand until he saw Jazin wave a hand and drop half a dozen sparks into the ground.

What followed was a chaotic battle taking place on two axes, both of them exchanging ranged techniques directly while the columns erupted from below. While he managed to stay ahead of the technique, Theo tested out his simpler techniques, but found that Jazin had reinforced his body enough to be immune to distortions, and flew too effectively to be controlled by mass or anti-mass.

Well, that was why Theo specialized in blunter techniques. As he dodged aside from another column, he plunged his fist into a small portal in front of him.

His fist emerged from another portal just beside Jazin's head, and it still almost wasn't fast enough. The Tymetronese Stronghold reacted with lightning speed, a geode emerging from his soulhome without the need for a gesture. Its implosion wiped out the "torsion" part of Theo's punch... but not the fist itself.

When he felt the blow connect, Theo knew he got a good hit in, and he saw Jazin fly back across the battlefield. As much as he wanted to follow up, he pulled his arm back and caught his breath. Staying ahead of all those techniques had tested him, and he was a little scorched from the battle.

Aside from winning the exchange, Theo had learned something useful: Jazin had imploded one of his geodes in his own face and been unharmed by it. Potentially the implosion had weakened some of his defenses, but Theo judged that the other man was a ranged fighter and he hadn't been disabled by the punch. So he had soulcrafted some sort of personal defense to prevent his own technique and sublime material from being used against him.

Of course, if one person could do it, then Theo might be able to pull off the same trick. As interesting as that was, he couldn't do it in the middle of the battle, so even as he considered those details, Theo glanced toward the larger battle.

Without Jazin to tip the balance, Citizen Dominion and Melitta appeared to be steadily gaining the upper hand. Unfortunately, that was exactly the sort of victory that they didn't want, because the Tymetronese Dominion would likely retreat via weirkey if he saw the battle was lost, and their goal was to take out the entire force. Theo couldn't afford to underestimate Jazin and make any reckless movements to intervene, however.

Jazin returned to the fight with a cascade of columns that Theo only barely evaded. As he escaped the assault, Theo spotted his opponent again, now surrounded by circles of geodes, and formed another portal.

He wasn't stupid enough to try to punch through it again, and sure enough, Jazin was prepared for exactly that. Even as Theo tried to thread a cantae bolt through the portal, his opponent struck it directly, implosions triggered on both sides - Theo's portal collapsed and he was left with a dead ring on his side.

Grinning, Jazin summoned a larger geode and began to pump cantae into it, clearly preparing for a larger implosion. As it launched, Theo created a large portal directly in its path, as if for defense... then suddenly created a second, much smaller portal in front.

This one swallowed the geode while it was still a sublime material, before it could create its anti-cantae effect. It emerged across the battlefield, imploding just as it neared the Tymetronese Dominion. Part of the man's defenses collapsed, and Theo's allies immediately attacked the opening weakness.

There was no chance that Theo would be able to pull that off a second time, however. He could portal the geodes but not the implosions, and Jazin adapted by sending geodes in pairs, the smaller defending the larger from any of Theo's countering effects. When Theo began creating more complex effects and using gravitational fields to send the geodes off course, Jazin countered with more complex formations.

Amid the chaotic moves and counter-moves, Theo actually lost track of his opponent. For a moment he was unopposed, his senses rapidly searching around the city. He was getting better at sensing the columns of cantae in the instant they erupted, so Theo was able to fly back when another one blazed from just beneath him.

He wasn't fast enough to dodge when Jazin emerged from the cantae, slamming both fists into his chest. Each held a geode, and the imploding blows drove Theo toward the street. Yet closing seemed like a bad move for Jazin: Theo could shrug off the pain and reach out to grab his opponent's clothes. He spun them as they fell, hammering a fist into his opponent's face.

When they hit the Fithan street, they cracked the cobblestones beneath them. Theo barely felt the impact and he'd ended up in a strong position atop his opponent, ready to rain down blows. Jazin looked honestly stunned by the hit... then implosions blossomed around them.

The massive sequence of implosions was more than Theo could handle, and while his defenses were overwhelmed, Jazin released a column of cantae directly into his chest. It sent Theo tumbling backward, chest blazing with pain, and he smashed into the side of a building before crumpling. If he hadn't reinforced his body so much, he could have been killed or at least knocked unconscious.

It took real effort to pull himself up, but fortunately Jazin hadn't been faking his own injuries. The bigger concern was where all those implosions had come from, because Theo hadn't seen any geodes be dispersed around the area... then he saw the unconscious bodies of the Tymetronese formation moving strangely, some coasting to a halt.

"Wait..." Theo swayed on his feet, trying to make his vision resolve itself. "Did you have geodes in all the soldiers' outfits this entire time?"

"Every single one." Jazin was on his feet and, after he wiped blood from his mouth, looked in better shape.

"But you implied you didn't know we were coming."

"I had no idea, I just guessed I'd face you again eventually. So I've been giving those sublime materials to every single soldier I ever served with." Jazin smiled almost bitterly. "You're an excellent soulcrafter, but I fear there's a vast gulf in the level of resources available to us."

That seemed unfortunately true, and though Theo was slowly recovering, he wouldn't be up to the level of evasion he'd needed earlier. They were closer together now, but he wasn't confident that Jazin would let him close the distance for physical attacks. The position looked bad for him... until Theo felt a flicker of another presence.

"That's an accurate assessment," Theo said slowly, "except for one category of resources."

Theo didn't finish the statement with the word "allies" because he didn't want to give Jazin even a split second of extra time to react. While his opponent frowned, uncertain as to his meaning, Nauda suddenly leapt from Fiyu's stealth technique.

She flew directly into Jazin's rings of geode defenses, but as she neared him, Nauda slammed one fist into her gauntlet armament. The resulting wave of nullification clashed with the implosions, the two seeming to cancel one another out, and in the burning neutrality Nauda closed the distance.

Jazin barely evaded her fist, and Fiyu struck from stealth a moment later, her blade cutting into his side. Even that wasn't quite enough, because he reacted with unreal speed, shooting away from the two of them.

But when he regained his balance in the air, Jazin had blood pouring freely down his side, and he was looking down at a trio of Strongholds.

"Fair play," Jazin said. He glanced at his own allies, considering dispassionately, then disappeared into a weirkey.

Theo smiled at his friends and went to greet them, intending to urge them all to join the battle between Dominions. Yet when he got close, he saw that Fiyu and Nauda looked extremely serious, not at all like they should have after a victory. Had Tymetron managed to sabotage Laksloe with some slower-acting method that still rendered the city doomed? He couldn't think of what else could have brought their moods so low, not until Fiyu unveiled something else from within her stealth technique.

When Theo saw Homez and felt the living gold burning within him, he realized that this might actually be more important than the battle.