Chapter 40: At the Mercy of Fortune

As the rebel soldiers now surged towards them, Nydra went into a defensive stance and Peteri pulled out his bow, while Hima pressed ahead confidently with Miro having no choice but to follow her into the thick of it. With one hand she made a sweeping motion from her left to her right, grabbing one advancing soldier in a stream of ice and using it to bind him to the wall of a building.

“How many fireballs do you have?” she asked.

“Three.” It had been a productive morning training session, and the accidental use of his newly-discovered Identify spell cost him a fourth fireball.

“Alright, use them wisely then.”

There was a rebel that was standing in wait in the doorway of the eatery that had been serving them and jumped out at Miro with weapon raised. Miro cast a fireball immediately, and though it was initially fired wide of its intended target, the hapless soldier stepped into it and the spell hit him in the arm. This gave Hima the time to stomp her foot and summon a raised platform of ice that sent the soldier flying across the square.

“Yeah, that will do,” she said, and Miro thought it sounded much too much like an actual compliment.

His reverie though was short-lived, as another soldier came at Miro from the left, her sword nearly getting the side of his head, thwarted only by Hima blasting it away. Miro stretched out his hand to try to get her with a fireball at close range but the undeterred soldier continued with a bare-handed attack, grabbing Miro’s wrist and sending the fireball flying directly up. The soldier then tried to hit him with her free hand but Miro caught it, and as the two grappled he cursed his 3 Strength points that were about to give way at any second. Meanwhile, Hima was prevented from intervening because of how closely he was entangled with the soldier.

“Burn her hands,” Hima commanded as she grew an ice shield over one arm to knock an arrow out of the air.

“What?”

“Your passive powers, like with the flame you use for light.”

None of what she was telling him was making any sense. Short of wasting his last fireball by firing it blindly before being inevitably wrestled to the ground, there was nothing for Miro left to do. Before that could happen though, Hima’s hand had waved a patch of ice into existence underneath the soldier’s feet and with one shove Miro sent her flying onto her back and hitting her head on the stones. Miro’s experience bar was rising but there was little time to bask in the progress. He turned around just in time to see a soldier sneak behind Hima and then, moving swiftly to her front, slap a pair of chain handcuffs over her wrists. Miro recognized with a sickening feeling that these were no ordinary restraints, but mana-cles – designed to suppress a mage’s powers.

Now wearing the mana-cles, Hima lifted her bound hands and inspected them with a furrowed brow, while the rebel soldier looked on pleased at having nabbed his quarry, pulling his sword out of its scabbard with much too much gusto.

“What is this?” Hima asked slowly and Miro was about to use his last fireball to try to buy her some time when the mana-cles began to glow blue, grew a thick layer of hoarfrost and then shattered away from her wrists.

“Nobody touches my powers,” Hima practically growled before sending a storm of icicles that hurled the stunned soldier away from them, the icewinder fixing a hard look after him until her eyes suddenly widened and she shouted, “Behind you!”

All Miro could do was turn his head as the arrow zipped by his cheek and impaled itself in the wall behind him. Frozen, he looked at where it had been released from and found Peteri in a crouch, his bow facing upwards and a rebel archer slumping to fall from the roof.

Although more than a little glad to be alive, the troubled look on Peteri’s normally placid face told him everything he needed to know about how close he came to no longer being so.

Disoriented for a moment by his narrow brush with disaster, and with Hima taking care of another attacking soldier with the business end of an ice spear, Miro turned his eyes towards Nydra. Their training, he now discovered, had to this point revealed only a small glimpse of her abilities. While neither ice nor water mage, Nydra moved like Miro would have expected a tidal wave off the Boundless Sea or an avalanche high in the Deep Scar Mountains to come bearing down on the terrain before it – a force indifferent to any trivial resistance that it may encounter. With her hefty longer sword in her main hand and a shorter narrower sword in her off hand, there was not a rebel soldier that could even get close to her, though they went at her in numbers. The longer sword, which she somehow held high despite its weight, hit the rebels with wide devastating arcs, while the shorter one, easy to forget when faced with the larger weapon, would deliver precise debilitating jabs.

He experienced a disturbing realization that instead of being sickened by the spectacle, he was envious of how high her experience bar would have been moving had she been a mage or if that had been him.

The moral implications of this new-found bloodlust would have to wait, as there were more pressing matters to attend to. Spotting two fist-sized chunks of ice by his feet, he picked them up and tossed them at the soldiers fighting Nydra. The first one fell short, but the second hit one of the rebels in the arm, knocking him slightly off balance which was enough of an opening for Nydra to finish the job. This time, it was Miro’s own experience counter that went up in answer to the soldier’s demise and the feeling of nausea returned. There was no glory in it, just a grim duty forced upon him. He knew he needed to keep going but instead he watched Nydra make her way closer to Commander Sajoy who, Miro realized to his own horror, was making his determined way towards him.

“Hima!” Miro called, and the icewinder stepped into a defensive stance by his side. “Do you think we can take him?” Sajoy caught Miro’s gaze and gave him a wide grin, picking up his pace

“Don’t think we’ll have much of a choice in a moment,” Hima said, and stretched out her hand in front of her, Miro following suit. She released a bolt of ice towards Sajoy but the rebel commander was quick enough to deflect it into the sky with his word. Not waiting for him to fully recover, Miro shot another fireball, which instead hit a nearby soldier who was then knocked back by an arrow released by Peteri, giving Miro another sizable experience boost.

There was now a wall of remaining rebel soldiers that separated Nydra from them, and Sajoy, with his gleaming manic smile, had almost reached the two of them.

“Maybe you should get behind me,” Hima suggested, ushering Miro with one hand but he resisted. She pulled one leg slightly behind her while putting her weight on the other and unleashed a massive ice ball at Sajoy, who managed to duck low to dodge it, and when Hima responded by immediately trying to freeze him to the ground, he’d swung his sword at the forming ice, freeing his foot and using the momentum from the rising ice to jump into the air. Miro tried to take advantage of this airborne vulnerability by lobbing a fireball at Sajoy, but was rudely reminded by an “Insufficient Mana” error message that he was fresh out of luck.

Seeing this, the rebel commander’s mood seemed to shift entirely. Mere feet away from them now, he scowled and hesitated, and as both Miro’s and Hima’s attention were on him, neither of them noticed one of his soldiers break away from the group and shove Miro in the shoulder. The sudden motion twisted Miro around, making him and the soldier come face to face as the rebel pulled his sword back in order to plunge it through Miro’s heart. He would have done it too, if Miro’s previous stray fireball that he thought he fired off into the air did not burn through the ropes holding up the heavy wooden sign of the eatery, causing it at that second to come loose and come crashing down atop the rebel soldier’s head.

Miro stood, mouth agape at the sign and its smoldering charred ropes that lay where his would-be killer had just stood, and nearly did not notice that Commander Sajoy called for a retreat. The rest of his unit disengaged immediately, and took off down the square in the opposite direction of where they had come from.