Calvin’s awareness was spread across the field of battle, aware of every little detail, barely able to keep up with the speed of the Stalkers as they raced across the field, turning One’s troops into quivering chunks in an expanding circle from the center of the battlefield.

I’ve got to keep myself aware of the exact center of mass of my swarm, Calvin thought, tracking the center of the circle carefully.

Calvin’s crystal bombs tore One’s army apart at the edges, staggering his giants to prevent them from attacking Calvin’s stalkers as a unified front.

Eventually there was hundreds upon hundreds of feet between each stalker, and they were having trouble maintaining a line.

The radius was about quarter-mile, it should give Calvin a minute or two.

Ravager, the whores of Calvin’s March are down to the last two. Should I move on to civilians after this?

No, let’s avoid causing problems if we can. Hold off on their Bent until I give you the word.

Yes, Ravager.

Calvin turned his attention back to the battle. He deliberately locked himself in a game of tug of war with One for the better part of the afternoon, until the battlefield was absolutely drenched with Warp.

I think Tzen has enough of a head start, Calvin thought, glancing up at the setting sun. No time like evening to make a quick escape. One’s creature’s most likely had night vision, and Calvin didn’t want to push his luck in pitch black. He might be fine, but he had people who might not feel so at home in the dark.

Now, Calvin thought, dismissing the spell. The loose ring of three hundred Stalkers burst into green smoke as they ceased to exist, their task fulfilled.

Calvin’s body imploded into existence at the very center of the battlefield, dropping him from about a foot above the ground right onto the bloody earth.

Agh, forgot about the wounds, Calvin thought, holding his side as he climbed back to his feet. It didn’t hurt much, considering his current situation of being living-impaired, but the sensation of leaking was unpleasant. The worm’s teeth had put some decent sized holes in his side. Calvin clapped a hand over the slowly closing holes, and the Warp and Bent started rolling in.

Calvin had Kurawe pay a premium on Bent, so the gracious whores of Calvin’s March usually saved it for him. They didn’t know they were saving it for Calvin, specifically, but it all worked out fine.

The Bent and Warp flooded into Calvin’s body as he stood at the center of the battlefield, taking deep breaths to try and absorb as much Warp as possible before the frontline caught up with him again.

12/54 Bent Remaining

20/36 Warp Remaining

14/54 Bent Remaining

…

36/36 Warp remaining

26/54 Bent remaining

Calvin scanned the battlefield, eyeing the ragged lines of giants charging toward his position, largely missing their brain crab counterparts.

This looked manageable.

Calvin took a deep breath and summoned a handful of Kurawe.

Calvinian summoning.

Chimera

Atom Ant

25/54 Bent remaining.

“When I start to look dizzy, you get me the abyss out of here, top speed, understood?” Calvin asked.

The summoned creatures puppeted by Calvin’s zealot nodded.

Here we go, Calvin thought, mentally opening the lid on his Warp tank and dumping it all into his body. If he was going to get a Break out of this, it had to be here and now, while he had the space to get gone before One’s giants caught up with him.

Calvin felt the cold sweat across his entire body in seconds, proof that he’d been subjected to enough Warp to trigger a Break.

0/36 Warp remaining.

A second later, a pale magenta wave of Bent rolled over the battlefield, emanating from the treeline in a pulse that travelled across the land in the blink of an eye.

“Ah crap,” Calvin muttered as the Kurawe flanking either side of him poofed into green smoke, which was drawn down into the magenta color as it drifted downward.

The magenta Bent settled into the ground, coalescing into a vein-like pattern that evenly covered the land for as far as the eye could see.

Simply to test exactly how screwed Calvin was, he tried summoning some compressed air to help him fly away.

The Bent was torn apart and spiraled into the veins of magenta that crisscrossed on the ground.

I hate that color, Calvin thought to himself with a scowl.

Ravager, it seems the enemy predicted your decision to try and Break.

Yeah, no shit, Calvin thought, scowling at the approaching army. The giants melted away, revealing a most unpleasant sight.

A walking box of blackened steel.

Strange to think that the literal giants were the light infantry, Calvin thought as he inspected the formation of heavily armed and armored creatures marching in a tight formation, shields raised above and in front of themselves, to make a tight box of dark metal.

Calvin’s bombs burst across the surface of the shields, scratching the heavy iron, but not much more than that.

Calvin knelt down and put a hand on the ephemeral vein of magenta Bent, pulsing hungrily under his touch.

I wonder if there’s a way to sabotage this spell. The veins suggest the effect has an origin, so perhaps if I could drop an un-dissolvable nugget of bent with instructions to cause damage at the end destination…

Rather than that, perhaps running would be a better use of your time. Those armored ones are slow…oh, nevermind.

Calvin glanced up and spotted One’s elite units along the sides. They looked something like Magenta, thin, long-limbed mockeries of the human form, and dangerous as the Abyss.

As soon as Calvin saw them, they started moving fast, covering hundreds of feet per second.

I guess pretty screwed is the answer, Calvin thought, assessing his chances for survival in a tiny fraction of a second. He didn’t have time to break the spell preventing him from casting, any reinforcements he brought close to land would cease to exist, and he would fall unconscious far sooner than he could run out of the range.

If only my bombers could hit the elite units, Calvin thought as the creatures zoomed across the battlefield, too quickly to get a bead on. Calvin couldn’t outrun them.

Idea!

Calvin dropped low and bent his knees, focusing on Beli Ma, and specifically Rooted Lotus, maximizing his ability to alter trajectories by staying still.

There was only one place where he could accurately predict where One’s elites would be, and that was right on top of himself.

Calvin watched the elite units approach, running on all fours and tearing up earth as they sped across the battlefield.

Another nine seconds to get to me, six seconds for the bombs to reach the ground.

One.

Two.

Three.

Calvin gave his wasps the go ahead, ordering them to drop everything they had on and around him.

One. The creatures became thumb sized in the distance.

Two. The monsters were about the size of a coin.

Three. Fist sized.

Four. Soccer ball.

Five. Starting to really get a sense for how big nine feet tall is.

Hey are you sure dropping bombs on yourself is a good-

Calvin could see the whites of the creature’s eyes when the sky and earth turned into one massive explosion, turning everything white.

***

Calvin opened his eyes blearily, his vision swimming, barely able to make out the color of sky through the watery sensation in his eyes.

“Ugh.”

Calvin’s entire body was covered in minor cuts where crystal shrapnel had grazed him, diverted a handful of inches by his Skill.

“~?” Calvin thought he heard something, and he blinked the gum out of his eyes to try and see what was going on better.

His right eye was having trouble opening and closing, as well as seeing anything other than light and dark, but his left eye was able to clear itself somewhat, enough to see his wife kneeling over him.

“Kala? How did you get here? Are you trying to steer the future again?” Calvin took a deep breath and tried to muscle past the lightheadedness. “’cuz that didn’t work out so great last time.”

Calvin blinked his good eye a couple times as Kala shook her head and said something. Calvin brought a trembling hand to his ear and came back with rich purple blood.

“Wait, Learner?”

The beautiful, dusky skinned girl leaning over him nodded, her expression concerned.

Calvin’s voice went up an octave.

“Are we still fighting!?” He put all his effort into raising his head, and spotted a mess of lanky bodies, torn to shreds and deposited in a loose circle around himself.

Bet he didn’t see that coming. Calvin had gotten the Calvin-killers in one hit.

“Haha, One can suck it.” Calvin couldn’t really hear his voice, but he was pretty sure he was enunciating clearly.

In the distance, the wall of heavy iron kept marching forward, shrugging off the smattering of explosions like a guar did flies.

***Learner***

“Haha, un ca sub lit,” Calvin groaned through the brain damage, idly itching at the piece of crystal sticking through his eye.

His good eye widened.

“O sha. Ima pass u rree soon, I gooa gee oua heee!”

Shortly after he said that, Calvin’s head flopped sideways, his eye closed.

Learner put her hand on Calvin’s chest, focusing on the chemoreceptors studding her fingers.

She could taste the subtle chemical cocktail of a body going through a Break. Calvin’s Warp saturation was remarkably high, considering the number of deaths. She could also taste the acrid, bitter flavor of Calvin’s purple blood, seeing as his lean chest was covered in it.

He probably won’t mind if I take a sample, Learner thought, tucking a bit of it away to study later while her human brain was warring with itself about sneaking peeks at Calvin’s musculature.

Did he dump his extra Warp reserves back into his body in order to Break? That’s insane! How was he planning on getting away when he would definitely pass out? Learner thought, glancing at the ground, where veins of magenta Bent covered the ground, exerting a kind of magnetism on any Bent that strayed too close.

They took advantage of Calvin’s over-reliance on summoning Bent constructs. It was times like this that it became obvious why Calvin needed an actual army.

“He alive!?” Ella shouted, running toward them at full speed. The Genosian was covered in blood. The only skin that showed through all the muck was stained the bright orange-red of rust.

“That’s a loaded question!” Learner shouted back, hauling Calvin up onto her shoulder and dragging him forward. The slender frame she was accustomed to, while societally advantageous, simply didn’t have much spare room for carrying men, and she struggled to keep him in place.

“Here,” Ella said, grabbing the lean wizard and draping him over her shoulder.

Learner bit her lip. She was pleased that Calvin wasn’t going to slip anymore, but her human brain was delivering tiny little pangs of discomfort to her heart and guts, watching Ella carry him instead of her.

I could carry him just fine. Carrying him felt nice. My skin is numb…

Ella glanced down at Learner’s sour expression and grinned. “You can carry him next time he tries to get himself killed. Boop.” She poked Learner’s nose, leaving a tiny streak of blood on the tip.

“Now, how do we get out of here without dying?” Ella asked, glancing down at the approaching army. The question drew Learner out of her stupor.

“Right. Getting away from them.” She glanced down the hill and tugged on Ella’s elbow, the two of them beginning to run in Tzen’s footsteps.

“The biggest weakness of these creatures is their metabolic rate,” Learner said. “Humans were designed for endurance, long distance movements to exhaust prey. These things were not made with that in mind. They were designed to mature in only a few months, and they burn through energy like you wouldn’t believe.”

“How does that help us?” Ella said, loping easily with the pale wizard flopping around across her shoulders.

“They can’t get too far away from their food supply,” Learner said, easily keeping pace with the towering Genosian girl. “Means they’ve got a short range, and as long as we get far away from the black forest, they won’t be able to send an army after us.”

“I feel like you’re leaving something out,” Ella said, glancing at her from the side as they sprinted through the woods.

“From what I’ve seen of their metabolic speed, their efficiency and the sheer amount of land they cover…” Learner shrugged. “They probably outnumber every human on the Bal continent a thousand to one.”

“Oh. Is that all?” Ella said, grinning as she spoke with what Learner’s brain identified as ‘mild sarcasm’. “I thought you were going to tell me that One had creatures designed for long chases.”

Learner blinked.

“I never thought of that.” She shrugged. “It’s possible.”

A bush beside them burst to life as a four-legged creature jumped out at them, snarling.

Ella punched it in the face, her fist shattering the creature’s jaw and dislodging several razor-sharp teeth. The creature’s eye rolled back in its head and it collapsed, not even slowing their flight down.

I wonder if those four legged creatures have different metabolic requirements, Ella thought, slowing down and craning her neck to see the creature as they ran past. It would be useful to determine the range that the four-legged ones could chase them.

If One did design a creature for high-endurance, then the corpse might have some clues as to how he had managed such a thing, which could benefit Learner’s self-improvement efforts. Learner slowed down some more.

“No time to stop and play around in monster guts, princess,” Ella said, grabbing Learner’s shoulder and giving her a friendly shove forward.

“I feel as though my brain has suffered from some kind of damage.” Learner said. “My emotions are more volatile, and I’m having a difficult time maintaining my focus.”

“You’re covered in Calvin’s blood.” Ella said, glancing down at herself. “We both are. We’re probably gonna be a bit loopy for a couple hours.”

Learner studied the rich purple blood on her hands and shoulder. Maculat blood. That brought a buried thought back to the forefront of Learner’s mind.

Calvin was going through his first Break as a Maculat, and once his body was done processing all that Warp and raising its tolerance to the energies of her home, he would be completely dry, empty of Warp.

“He’s gonna wake up hungry.” Learner said.