+2 Endurance, Strength, Kinesthetics.

Sense Grafting has reached level 14!

Stealth has reached level 8! 40% correction.

Knife Work has reached level 8! 40% correction.

Your Princess is in another Castle has reached level 7! 35% correction.

“It’s funny when I stop to think about it,” Calvin said aloud, musing as he snapped off imaginary spell after imaginary spell in Shadowboxing, perfecting his ability to mesh multiple disparate ingredients together to create a whole.

How’s that?

“I was so excited about making a single glass eye five years ago, and now I’m unsatisfied with the power to roast men alive and throw the entire economy of a nation out of balance. I still feel underwhelming, but if I take a few steps back and look at it objectively…I wouldn’t wanna mess with me.”

Being satisfied with what you have is a fairy tale. It’s antithetical to life as we know it. besides, you’ll need a lot more than eight wagons to bring an entire economy to its knees.

“Awfully cynical, but I guess I understand. If you didn’t want things, you would die.”

If you’re not living, you’re dying.

Calvin cycled through his prefabs, whipping them out as quickly as he could:

A self-lighting torch, made with cloth, wood, oil and a spark of god’s fire.

A suit of armor made from Jerrytanium, dragon leather, a bit of stabilizing oil, and cloth,

Self-lighting thermite,

Something Elliot called a grenade, and another he called a claymore, basically two variations of iron packed with Borus’s Boomclay and a simple fuse. They really weren’t more immediately useful than god’s fire for killing things, but Calvin recognized how effective they would be if he were to acquire Permanent Split, seeing as they stored well and were ridiculously easy to use.

Jerrytanium foam.

That last one was strange, but apparently if he structured the bubbles small enough and just right, It would be almost as strong as jerrytanium and light as a feather.

Needless to say he hadn’t got the hang of it.

Once Calvin was done practicing his prefabs, he shifted over to Sense-Grafting, followed by Knife-work and Stealth, finishing up the day by begrudgingly practicing his princess kidnapping skill.

There were princesses in Uleis and it would be a waste not to kidnap them long enough to trigger the Bowser ability. Raising the correction of the Skill made it more likely that he’d succeed and not get killed in the process.

“Why is it called The Bowser?” Calvin asked.

It’s named after a fictional character that kidnapped princesses, like, a lot. To a ridiculous degree. He was also a bit of a brute.

“Ah.”

Calvin opened his eyes once the practice was over, surveying the miserable sight before him.

The Gadveran troops were camped out on the top of a sand dune, hiding from the sun under a thick burlap sheet stretched out between the circled wagons protecting them from the constant wind and searing sun. The heat was so great during midday that stepping out onto the sand was like stepping onto frying pan.

Wagons, as it turned out, sucked on sand. At least Gadveran wagons. It seemed like every hour or so Calvin was forced to use his Knick-knacks to unstick a wagon or push one back up the side of the dune, losing them valuable time before the next debilitating wave of heat.

They’d added a loop of wood around the wheels to spread them out, but that only partially helped, as the biggest problem was the daytime.

He almost couldn’t shadowbox, the temperature was so excrutiating. The military wagons that had been full to bursting with water when they set out were getting lighter every day: Worryingly so.

The guide had told them the final oasis was nearby, and they would be in Uleis, but then disappeared in the middle of the their sleep schedule with a desert guar and a full barrel of water.

That probably wasn’t a good sign.

After the fact, Calvin wondered if the man was a spy or simply looking out for himself.

A week later, Calvin was down to four Bent, and had been forced to unsummon all except for one Nadia in order to conserve the remainder. Kala and Ella helped him out, and between the Knick-knacks smoothing the path ahead of them and making sure the wagons stayed on the dunes, they were moving…but Calvin wasn’t sure they were moving fast enough to survive

Calvin was pondering the problem of increasing either their pace or their water supply when the solution presented itself.

Hiss-thump! A barbed shard of brown glass about as wide as his thumb and a hand and a half long buried itself in the wood beside his head.

Calvin jumped to his feet and peered out into the blazing desert, where he spotted a dozen wide vessels, bone white and sliding across the desert sand as if it were water, propelled forward by the region’s constant wind.

A hundred or so men and women with grim expressions, wearing next to nothing, were carried along by the merciless blast of hot air toward them.

Can humans survive that kind of heat? calvin mused to himself. It was hot as an oven out there. Balud had even cooked some eggs with nothing but the sand and sun to heat his pan.

They can if they had a Skill for it, I imagine.

You know who these people are?

Dude, I was imprisoned for a thousand years. I don’t know jack.

The enemy wielded tiny dark brown bows, more similar to slingshots, really, and a handful were already taking potshots at the circled wagons. Others bore shields that seemed to be made of guar hide and clear glass swords that were nearly invisible from this distance.

“Enemy attack! Get on your feet and get behind cover!” Calvin shouted. “Grant, get over here!”

Grant ran up to where Calvin was standing behind the wagon, The hulking general covering himself with his four swords as he approached.

“What am I looking at?” Calvin asked, pointing at the approaching fleet of flat white ships with sails sticking far up above them.

“Desert pirates, I assume.” Grant said with a shrug, peering out at the approaching enemy.

Presumably not the kind that sing and dance, either.

“Grant. I want those ships.”

Grant broke into a grin. “What do you need?”

“You go high. Up and over them,” Calvin said, pointing up. “Massacre anyone that tries to get away. Tell Baroke to start working back to front, and focus on the ones who try to run. Everyone else can shoot back at their leisure.”

“What are you gonna do?” Grant asked.

“Haven’t figured it out yet,” Calvin said, peering out at their boats. “I don’t want to destroy their sails with fire, the wind makes poison impractical, and the heat and sand makes wasps less than ideal.”

Calvin glanced at the general. “I’ll get back to you on that.”

Grant nodded, hopping onto two of his swords and flitting out the back of the camp and up into the air, wincing as he came out into direct sunlight.

The man was even paler than Calvin, so it couldn’t be pleasant.

Explosions risk damaging the ships, heat as well… grease or Webs, perhaps.. the grease would be absorbed quickly by the sand, and the amount of dust would make the webs less sticky...

Stop overthinking the problem and buy yourself some time first, they’re coming in hot.

Calvin slipped the wand out of its holster, enjoying the way the wood felt in his hand. It was the first opportunity to try it out outside of practice, and his heart was hammering wildly at the opportunity to truly test it’s effectiveness.

Cavin took a deep breath and ducked his head out to see where the sandships were, then ducked back behind the wagon again.

As long as he knew where they were, he didn’t need line of sight.

Calvin took two steps back, facing the wide wooden wall of the wagon, picturing the ships on the other side, continuing to move toward them.

He focused on a jagged, circular-saw shaped piece of the marble at the end of the wand, wound up, rocking backward as he shifted his weight, turned his hips, and pulled back his arm.

With a grunt, Calvin swung the wand forward as fast as he could, flicking it forward for that little bit of extra speed.

Mass shaping.

3/15 Bent remaining.

Thousands of tiny discs of Jerrytanium appeared on the other side of the wagon, sailing out into the turbulent desert wind, tearing through the air.

Calvin glanced out and spotted no less than a quarter of the attackers clutching wounds from his attack.

Now bleed.

He unsummoned the blades, which unblocked the jagged wounds they created, bleeding out their victims, forcing them to deal with their wounds immediately or perish.

Around him, the first Mujenan volunteers rallied, firing their longbows out into the hot wind. A lot of the arrows went off target, most of them in fact, but there were enough arrows landing to make the approaching raiders crouch behind their shields, close enough now to see the whites of their eyes.

In the din of combat, there was the steady thrum of a steel wire as Baroke fired arrow after arrow over the heads of the leading pirates, dropping the ones farthest in the back.

He even got creative, targeting the men at the rear of the ships who were responsible for steering their vessels.

Calvin watched a single well placed arrow arc down into the chest of a well-muscled man holding a rudder-like piece of glass steady on the rearmost ship.

The man’s grip slipped, and the entire boat veered off the side of the dune and tumbled into the ditch, dropping several pirates off onto the hot sand in the process.

The ones in front didn’t notice a thing, attributing Baroke’s high arcs to just another missed shot.

People don’t bother to look behind them when they’re the ones charging.

When the pirates were close enough, they drove their ships straight into the side of the wagons, causing the entire makeshift structure to slip and tilt violently as the desert men jumped over top the wagons, landing inside the Gadveran circle of wagons.

Upon arrival, the desert raider realized that they were outnumbered.

Baroke had personally disabled four of the dozen ship’s drivers, stranding their occupants far behind the front line. Grant had swept in from above and butchered the contents of two of them, and so only half of the leadin Uleisian pirates were able to make it to the wagons, and many of them were wounded.

Standing front and center, Ella, Kala and her bodyguards crushed the assault like an egg against a rock.

In a matter of just under a minute, Calvin saw alarm travel through the eyes of the raiders as they swiveled their heads to see half their forces laid out behind them: some stranded far behind on the hot sand, others killed by a floating sword-man.

They broke and ran, and the first Mujenan volunteers picked them off with relentless efficiency.

“Hold on!” Calvin shouted up at Grant at the top of his lungs as he swooped toward the handful of stranded pirates. The distant general looked over at him and then approached, standing on his floating swords.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know how to sail these things,” Calvin said, pointing to the white ship buried in the side of his wagon. “Leave the ones who surrender alive.”

“Got it.”

The rest of the battle wound down quickly, and minutes later, Calvin was watching the company load the contents of the wagons onto their new transportation, using nets and cinches to keep everything from blowing away in the whipping wind.

Movement off to his side caught his eye, and Calvin spotted Baroke walking out into the blazing heat of the sun, grimacing as his shoes absorbed the energy in the sand.

What is he doing? Calvin frowned, watching Baroke walk past the team of Knick-Knacks pulling one of the capsized sleds out of the valley of the sand dune. There was nothing out there but bodies and heat.

Damnit, Baroke, Calvin thought, jumping out into the sand and muscling past the instinct to hop around from foot to foot as his feet began to scream with pain. It was tolerable.

Calvin broke into a jog and caught up with Baroke as the huge archer studied one of his kills. A thin young man who stared up at the sky with a gaping mouth as if he were suffocating. The sun had already dried out the man’s lips, tongue and eyeballs.

“I just need to be sure.” Baroke said, glancing over as Calvin approached, hi fingers gently closing the corpse’s eyes.

“Sure of what?”

“Sure I’m still under my own control. Continuity, a sense of cause and effect, rather than detached repetition. I need to know for sure that I killed this man because that tells me I’m not killing my countrymen.”

“You saved us a lot of trouble today,” Calvin said. “Without you, we could have lost some people.”

“Couldn’t you have just killed them all with your magic, wizard boy?” Baroke asked, glancing over his shoulder.

“Probably,” Calvin said with a shrug. “To be honest, I most likely could have killed them all with wasps infused with one of my abilities to make them stronger, able to resist the heat.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

Calvin considered it for a moment.

“At the time, I thought I wanted to conserve bent, but after thinking about it…One day I’m not going to have Bent available, or I’ll be somewhere else, and when that happens, I want the First Mujenan to be able to do their jobs. Solving all our problems with a wave of my hand is doing you a disservice.”

“Tough love, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“How do you do it?” Baroke asked.

“Do what?”

“Think so cold.”

“I don’t…feel very much Baroke,” Calvin said. “The howling emotions inside you are a gentle whisper in me.”

Calvin clapped Baroke on the shoulder. “But that doesn't mean I don’t have them, I just have to listen more carefully. ”

Calvin glanced up at the sun and regretted it.

“Let’s get back into the shade before we bake.”

Baroke nodded.

***

Sandships were fast.

They were closer to sleds, actually, giant sleds entirely made of a perfectly smooth glass that had an easy to grip surface on the top and an impossibly smooth bottom that glided over the desert sand like a dream.

He wasn’t kidding about Uleisians being good with glass, Calvin thought, once again admiring the creations. The whole thing only weighted a hundred pounds or so and could carry up to twenty men.

Incredible… Calvin thought, running a palm over the smooth glass as they shot forward across the dunes at a pace that beggared belief, going as fast as the wind. How could glass be so light?

It’s probably just got bubbles in it, that’s what’s diffracting the light and making it appear white. Also why it’s so light. The thing is mostly air.

You’re not gonna take this moment away from me by making this any less magical, Calvin thought, standing at the front of the sled, watching the distance disappear beneath them.

We’re gonna live!

“I’ve got sand in my crack,” Ella grumbled, wrapping a protective layer of burlap around her.

“Everyone has sand in their cracks right now, Ella,” Calvin said, spitting out a bit of sand as the city of Uleis began to sparkle on the horizon.