Absolute Mana Dominion: All My Talents Are SSS

Chapter 19: 19 - Breaking Point

- Greymoor POV -

Ariane had been holding the same domain for most of the afternoon and dropping it in the same place every time, and Garrick had run out of ways to say so without repeating himself.

”Again.”

”It breaks at thirty-four seconds.” Ariane let the frost fall out of the air around her boots and shook her hands out. ”It’s been thirty-four since spring. I know where it breaks, Garrick. What I don’t know is how the hell I’m supposed to stop it from breaking there.”

”No. Neither do I.”

”Adrien would figure it out.” She said it lightly, and it did not come out lightly, and she heard that herself. ”You’ve seen him. He’d stare at it for five minutes, make that stupid face he makes when he’s thinking, and somehow it’d work.”

Garrick watched her for a moment. ”Is that why you haven’t shown him any more spells?”

Ariane looked at the old knight.

”Maybe.”

”That’s petty.”

”I know.” She gave a short laugh and rubbed at one wrist. ”I know it is. But I woke my core at eleven, Garrick. Eleven. I’ve been out here every morning since. Rain, snow... I came out with a fever once and Mother nearly killed me for it.”

She glanced at the frost around her boots.

”I’ve spent years on this spell. Years. And I can hold it for thirty-four bloody seconds. Then Adrien wakes his core some weeks ago and suddenly he’s better with my own affinity than I am.”

Garrick was quiet for a moment. ”Would you rather he wasn’t?”

”What? No.” That came fast enough that she almost sounded offended. ”Of course not. He’s my brother.”

She looked away toward the house.

”And he’s the head of the family now. Half the reason I’ve managed to sleep since Father died is because that seat went to him instead of some cousin from the capital I’ve met twice.”

Her mouth tightened.

”I just...” She exhaled. ”Can I be pissed off about it and still be proud of him? Because apparently I’m doing both.”

”You can.”

”That’s it?”

”What else would you like me to say?”

”I don’t know. Something wise. You’re old.”

Garrick stared at her.

Ariane almost smiled.

”It means he matters to you,” he said. ”If he didn’t, you wouldn’t care enough to be angry.”

”See? There. That sounded wise.”

”I’ve had thirty years to practise.”

Ariane opened her mouth to answer that, and the horn went off on the west wall. Both of them turned at the same time, and the second horn came before the first had finished, which was not the signal for one animal on the road.

Garrick had already started for the gate.

”Field. Now.”

They came down through the lower pasture, and they did not come the way the wolves had come. Those had arrived hungry and disorganised and had broken when it stopped going their way. What crossed the fence line an hour after sunset came in a wave, and it did not break for anything, and half of it was nothing anybody at Greymoor had a name for.

The wolves were there, at the front, in numbers. Behind them came things that walked upright and low at the same time, with four limbs that ended in hooked claws long enough to be used like arms, and a flat wide face with eight eyes set across it in two rows. They came fast on all six points of contact and they did not make a sound while they did it.

Marek took one look at them while backing toward the line.

”Sir... what the fuck is that?”

”I was hoping you knew.”

”I’ve never seen anything like it. That’s not from the mountains.”

”No.” Garrick brought his sword out of the air with his mana and put himself at the head of the line. ”Adrien said something was wrong up there.”

Another creature cleared the fence on all six limbs.

Garrick lowered his sword.

”Looks like it came down to introduce itself.”

They fought it in the open field below the wall because the alternative was fighting it in the yard, and the field was worse for everybody and better for Greymoor. Two hundred paces of flat ground and nothing to hide behind, with the house at their backs and every soul on the estate inside those gates.

The first hour was a knife fight with a hundred and fifty animals. Ariane held the left, where the fence had a gap in it from the last time, and she worked. Ice Wall to break a charge, and again forty paces down when they came round it, and Frost Lance into everything that got past. She was good at this. She had always been good at this, and the men on her side of the field had learned in one night not to look at how young she was.

By the second hour her spells were coming slower, which was the part nobody ever talked about. Every wall cost her, every lance cost her, and the manifested weapons the knights were carrying cost them the entire time they existed. Marek had let his axe go twice to save what he had left and had fought with a spear off the ground in between. Two of the younger men were down to nothing at all and were using what the dead had dropped.

Mana was the only currency any of them had, and by midnight most of Greymoor was broke.

Evelyne Clairmont came out of the gate at the worst possible moment, which was also the correct one.

The left had folded. Ariane had a wall up and the wall came down under weight, and there were forty of the things pouring through a gap sixty paces wide with nothing in front of them except twenty tired men.

Adrien’s mother walked out past the last of the archers, lifted both hands, and set the field on fire.

It came up in a line from one end of the gap to the other, a wall of flame the height of two men that roared when it took, and the front rank of what was coming through went into it and did not come out the other side. The rest turned. They turned as a body, and they ran the length of the fire looking for the end of it, and the end of it kept moving because she kept feeding it.

Ariane stared at her mother across sixty paces of burning grass. She had known. Everybody at Greymoor knew that the lady of the house had woken Pyro and had been considered promising, in the way daughters of good families were called promising, and Ariane had never once in fifteen years seen her use it for anything.

”Stop staring and get your line back together!” Evelyne shouted across the fire. ”I’ve got maybe four minutes before this drops, so somebody better come up with something by then!”

That sounded considerably more like her mother.

The wall bought them the middle of the night, and it was not enough on its own. The things with the eight eyes learned, and by the third hour they had stopped coming at the fire and started coming around the flanks in twos and threes, and that was where Garrick spent everything he had.

He had been fighting for four hours. Twice he had used [Iron Vigil], forcing mana through his legs and torso until his whole body locked into place, turning himself into something the creatures had to go through rather than around. The first time he had held the centre. The second, a gap in a hedge that had somehow become the most important doorway in Greymoor.

He had also used [Anvil Fall] once, early in the fight, when the centre had nearly collapsed. Mana had flooded into his sword before he brought it down with both hands, the impact crushing the first creature into the ground and throwing the ones behind it off their feet. It had bought them maybe twenty seconds.

Twenty very expensive seconds.

Both techniques demanded far more mana than ordinary swings, and [Iron Vigil] was even worse on his body. At his age, with the hip that had been giving him trouble for years, four hours of fighting had already pushed him well past what Garrick should have been asking from himself.

He knew what he had left, and he had known for an hour. The one that killed him came in from his blind side while he was pulling a man out from under another one, and Garrick turned into it and brought his sword up to meet the first claw the way he had five hundred times in his life.

The sword was not there. It had come apart at some point in the last few seconds, the way manifested steel does when there is nothing left to hold it together, and it had gone quietly and he had not noticed, and he was swinging his empty right hand at a thing with claws the length of his forearm.

It was a stupid mistake. It was the mistake a boy makes in his first year, and Sir Garrick of Greymoor had spent thirty years telling boys to count what they had left, and he made it in front of forty people.

Two claws went into him below the ribs and came out through his back, and the thing straightened up on its hind limbs and lifted him off the ground on them.

He hung there against the dark with his boots off the earth and his own blood going down the claws in sheets. It was pouring out of him faster than he could feel it leaving, and the cold arrived before the pain did, starting in his hands and going inward, and the field below him tilted and got very far away.

Somebody was screaming and it sounded like his lady’s daughter, and the last thing Garrick was sure of was the ground coming up to meet his shoulder, and the smell of burning grass, and the fact that he had gone out of the world because he had forgotten to check.

Ariane got to him with everything she had left, and it was not much. She put ice into the thing standing over him until the ice stopped going anywhere, and she was on her knees in the mud with both hands pressed into a hole she could not close when the sun came up over the ridge and the last of them went back toward the high ground.

Nine dead and thirty-one hurt, and Garrick was breathing, in the shallow careful unimpressive way of a man who has no business doing it, and by the time somebody came for him there was already a stranger on the other side of him with her hands where Ariane’s had been.

...

AN: Add the novel to collections and send (power stones and golden tickets) support if like it ;)