Luke Chmilenko
patreon
Starbreaker: Volume 2 - Chapter 36
🕑 Added 2025-01-27 17:00:04 +0000 UTC“Combat in space is always curtailed. At a distance from the most common sources of mana, conservation becomes even more vitally important than when fighting planet-side. In addition, you are dealing with an environment inherently hostile to your survival, greatly limiting the tactical value of any assault. Any space-craft or station is a bubble of life just waiting to be popped, so unless both sides of a conflict are equally committed to maintaining the integrity of that bubble, you are looking at massive casualties dealt by whoever is the first to pull out a pin. In training, the Ardent focus on destructive power, due to the forces that we contend with, but in any engagement in space, we cannot unleash that power without risking ourselves and our mission. Mana conservation is an element of why the magic used is limited, but far more pressingly is the desire to remain alive. The inter-ship combat of the Ardent Navy is typically preferable to any sort of boots-on-the-ground action as a result. Better to lose a ship or citadel than the army it might take to claim it.”
—Squad Tactics, Fal’Vaelith
The first thing to hit the Ardent when the door burst open was the cold. The chill of space still clung to the outside of the ship and the vacuum that had been occupying the landing bay was only now abating. The air from within the shuttle was dragged out, hissing, and the gathered mages rocked on their feet to maintain their stability as their environment everted into the open space. For a moment, it took Sylvas breath away, then he was able to drag his next gasp in and he regretted it. The cold had been the first thing to arrive, but the smell followed right after. The enemy came for them, and while they were not fresh and decaying bodies by any stretch of the imagination, there were still dry clinging tendrils of flesh connecting the various bones.
The stench of decay rushed into the cabin just a step ahead of the oncoming horde, and Kaya gagged. Lucky that she didn’t need to cast, really. Both of her arms were encased in steel, and both lashed out now, a scissoring strike halving the first skeleton up the ramp, and the reverse stroke knocking rib cages aside and scattering bones. She could go on swinging like that all day, never even touching her mana. So long as the tide of skeletal constructs pouring up to meet them could be slowed enough that she wasn’t completely overwhelmed.
Sylvas levelled his staff like a spear and cast his first Gravity Spike. It tore a line through the charging skeletons, right down the length of the ramp to where it finally burst into full life. Every skeleton it had touched was warped and twisted, the bones no match for the weight he’d suddenly unleashed on them, but it was that final burst of gravity when the spike struck the deck that really mattered. Every skeleton in the room that had been charging forwards suddenly slowed. The closest were toppled in towards the focal point of the spike, those in the mid-range were knocked off balance as they strained against it. Only those the closest to the shuttle went more or less unhindered, and their front lines had already been cut down.
Gharia’s bubbles poured forth, wild and chaotic, drifting out into the space and exploding skeletons apart each time that they made contact with one. She churned them out endlessly, casting one spell after another after another. They’d have been a foolish waste of mana in most situations, given their lack of guidance towards a target, but here with the bodies packed so tightly trying to get in through the door, they were perfect. The splash back of bone fragments should have peppered Sylvas and Kaya with shrapnel, but the overlapping shields that Luna and Orson maintained kept them from harm. Ironeyes spells were slower to enact, and he had to be considerably more careful with them, given the way that lightning was liable to leap around inside a big metal chamber, but when they were unleashed, they were truly things of beauty. Lightning arched up and over Sylvas and Kaya, over the shields and even over the front ranks of charging skeletons. When it touched down, it was only for a fraction of a second before it was leaping out again in every direction, from skeleton to skeleton, from animated corpse to immobile ones once more. The lightning didn’t blow them apart or smash them to pieces, but every skeleton struck stopped dead and crumbled. The magic holding it together undone.
Through it all more of the undead came on, crawling into the doorway from above, scrambling along the walls of the shuttle, bones creaking from the cold of the void, and together Kaya and Sylvas stopped them. His staff had greater reach than her blades, so while she stayed low, dealing with the ones coming up the ramp, he struck out at the others. Unleashing one gravity spike after another, plucking the massed bodies of the dead off the sides of the shuttle and launching them off into the docking bay. His orbitals moved around Kaya, spiraling around the blows she struck, lashing out at any bony hands reaching for her and striking with enough force to crack those bones. Even with his newfound focus, it wasn’t easy, there were so many moving parts, invested with his mana and will, that he had to keep directing, the psyche fragment holding onto Inversion was beginning to ache like a needle in his skull.
But it was working. They were holding the undead off, they were clearing the enemy forces. They just had to keep up the pace a little longer and the tide would be thinned out enough for them to make their way out and start clearing the remnants. Except, of course, life could never be so easy.
The doors leading from the docking bay to the lower ring of the station were battle-scarred and blackened. The mechanism that opened them long dead, but the metal pried apart and rusted away to practically nothing. Everywhere Sylvas looked there were the signs of a hundred battles fought here, spell-scarred metal and molten punctures. Pieces of the previous generations of living corpses embedded in the walls and metal gratings of the floor everywhere they could be jammed. Through the gap, a white-clad mage ducked through, already casting.
It was what he would have done. If he was planning to ambush an invading force, he wouldn’t have left it up to the mindless to deal with. The undead could hold back a group of mages, but they were unlikely to stop them entirely in this basic form. The smart move would be to deploy the grunts to hold the invaders at bay and keep a second line of casters at the ready to move in and exploit whatever position they’d been locked into.
The fact that there was only one caster being sent their way didn’t suggest a misplay, it suggested a problem. “Everyone behind me. Now!”
That spell, the one that had been trailing from the Whitehall mage’s fingers since he first came into sight was still building, and through his second sight, Sylvas got some grasp of what it was about to do. Like Gharia’s bubbles, or Veltrian’s sonic blasts, there was concussive power contained within the sphere he’d gathered. Vibrating with a lethal force, just waiting to be unleashed.
If you were about to blast a ship back out through the docking bay it flew in through, you wouldn’t send multiple troops, you’d send one, because it minimized the risk of taking out more of your own troops if the spell protecting the bay from space didn’t reseal itself fast enough.
Abandoning Kaya to stand alone against the skeletal hordes, Sylvas stepped back and cast, twisting his staff in his hands, swiveling it from upright to horizontal as he spoke the final words of the Inversion.
The orb of concussive force soared across at an almost dainty pace considering all the destruction it contained. Flying in a straight line from the Whitehall mage’s hands to where it would impact the shuttle, just above the door. Blasting it into space, and exposing all of them to the deadly vacuum.
Inversion took hold. Gravity twisted at Sylvas command. The floor of the shuttle had been their down, one moment, then the opposite side of the docking bay became down instead. They fell forward as gravity flipped, every one of them dragged from what felt like a position of safety to drop. The metal curvature of the far wall came rushing at them, the only buffer to their impact with it, the bodies of those in front of them, and the bodies of the dead being crushed between them and that distant wall.
The spell hit the shuttle.
If the sudden switch in gravity hadn’t been enough to launch them all out of the shuttle and across the room to smash into the inside wall, then that explosion would have done the trick. It exploded out invisibly when it hit, blasting the shuttle off the ground, launching it back out into space. Emergency lights flared inside the cabin where they’d stood just a moment before, and the spells designed to protect those on board snapped into effect, slamming a shield into place before the internal environment could be snatched out and replaced with nothingness. This shuttle had a mirrored material over its cockpit, so Sylvas could not see the pilot’s expression, but he had to assume it was a continuation of the terror and confusion that had been afflicting her since they’d first been hit by a space skeleton.
Inversion cut out as Sylvas lost his concentration after smashing face first into the bulkhead, dumping them all onto the ground in a heap. The protective magic meant to prevent the station from emptying itself into space cut back in once the shuttle was through and out, though the heaped corpses that had been piling up around it had been flung out to drift in space. Good. Less material for the necromancer to use against them.
The Whitehall mage had been effected by the sudden switch in gravity, the same as them, it had taken hold of him a moment after he cast, sucking him back out through the ragged gap in the twisted metal of the door and plastering him across the inside wall of the passage. Trying to untangle himself from amidst the rest of his squad, Sylvas dragged himself that way. Using his staff as a walking stick to try and pull himself up out of the morass of bodies. If he just had a moment to cast Flight, he would have been over there and knocking the hell out of the man before he could find his feet. As it was, he drew himself up just before a second torrential explosive blast washed by the gap in the door. Suppressing fire. Clever. “Havran, flank him.”
Sylvas cast Gravity Shear and ran. He’d been right to. That suppressive blast of explosive energy may have been a big swing from the other mage, but it hadn’t been everything that he had. There was another spell already being woven as Sylvas burst out into the corridor, the already crumbling metal doors warped and twisted ever more out of shape by his passage. The next explosive pulse washed over the Shear, dispersing up, down and to the sides, wrapping all around Sylvas without hitting him. The Mournhold rocked with the impact, but Sylvas had no time to worry about collateral damage in that moment, not when he was standing face to face and eye to eye with one of Malachai’s little acolytes. He thrust his staff towards the man to make him think a spell was forthcoming and marveled at the speed with which a shield was raised. Another sudden pulse of explosive force that would have knocked anything else off course. It was a shame that he was facing entirely the wrong direction.
That shield would have protected him from anything that Sylvas had launched his way, but it had done nothing to protect him from Havran. Sylvas’ favorite scout had phased through the pile of bodies that he’d been buried in the midst of, right through the wall, and made a beeline for Malachai’s minion. The others had spent so much time developing new skills, new paradigms, new equipment and enchantments to go along with it. All that Havran had needed to perfect his own particular style of magic was the knife he now had in hand. It sunk deep and bloody into the Whitehall mage’s throat before he could say another word. If he’d even seen Havran on the periphery of his vision, Sylvas doubted it. The crest on their enemy’s chest flared to life, enclosing him in a bubble of slowed time before he even hit the floor. Sylvas smiled. “Well done.”
Havran managed a half smile. “Shame eidolons don’t drop so easy.”
“Just need a bigger knife.” Sylvas quipped back.
It would have been a nice moment of friendship for the two of them to share if it weren’t for the explosive round of yelling that erupted in the background from where they’d came interrupting it before it could truly begin.
It seemed that they weren’t finished just yet.
