The effectiveness of layered metal armor against primitive weapons was something I understood academically but had few opportunities to witness firsthand. The technological collapse of the warbreed did not completely eliminate older technologies, techniques, and methods of warfare, and thus they tended to favor quick strikes and mobility rather than sheer durability. Metal armor was rare in such an environment, as even the more effective armors tended to be scavenged pieces of manufactured technology, like near-impenetrable nanomaterial fabric stab vests or monoatomic-layer graphene ablative plates designed to shrug off high-energy ballistic fire.

As I watched Vaozey cave a flaming man’s skull in with her mace while two women tried unsuccessfully to grapple her to the ground and stab her with knives, I wondered briefly if the warbreed techniques had been sub-optimal in a low technology environment, and if they would have re-developed heavy metal armor if they had survived. Sparks leapt from Vaozey’s boots as Rehvites tried to shock her, but failed to do so because of the shielding effects of the mail she wore. Looking to my left, I saw that Koyl was gone, and briefly wondered where he was as I walked into the worship hall.

A group of Rehvites rushed past me in a panic, seemingly not even noticing my presence due to their desire to escape. While the oil that Vaozey had used was smokeless, the wood of the benches was not, and the room was losing visibility rather quickly. The high ceilings of the hall helped to keep the air breathable, but only just. A third of the way across the room, another man began running at me, his lips forming words that were inaudible over the screaming. I tried to step out of his way, saw him re-direct himself to intercept me, then drew my sword.

Cutting him down with a single strike to the neck that split his torso down to the sternum, I shoved him aside just in time to dodge a screaming woman trying to grab me. Tripping her as she passed by my left shoulder, I heard her skull crack wetly on the marble floor and knew she wouldn’t get up immediately either. Where is the warrior? I wondered, looking around the room. I hadn’t seen anyone in combat equipment before the fighting started, but considering the Rehvite affinity for magic, it was possible I was looking for the wrong types of tools and clothing.

Moving along the wall to stay away from the majority of the panicking humans, I moved in the direction of the spiral staircase, keeping an eye out for humans that were trying to attack me. After the initial two, it seemed that everyone was either ignoring me out of fear or more likely just too confused to know what was going on, so I got to within five meters of the staircase without issue. It was at that point that I looked up and saw that someone was descending it at a walking pace, dressed quite unlike the rest of the people in the temple, with an open-faced bascinet on his head and a robe of patterned silver and black. As he descended, he drank from a small bottle, then tossed it over the railing beside him.

Since I had the benefit of surprise, I immediately drew a throwing knife with my left hand and launched it at his face, using the force magic technique I had developed to launch it more like an arrow with an axial spin. The man snapped his hand up, caught the knife in midair with his own magic before it struck him, then locked eyes with me. Using no physical motions at all, he spun the knife back around and sent it back at me faster than I had thrown it. I narrowly avoided the projectile by bobbing my head out of the way, and it clattered off into some unknowable position behind me.

Opting not to descend the last bit of the staircase after being attacked, the man instead jumped off and dropped three meters, landing on the ground with no apparent injury. As his cloak parted, I could see that he was wearing metal armor underneath it, dyed black and inscribed with countless geometric patterns using silver. It’s not as thick and heavy as Vaozey’s, I thought, that set is designed for movement and aesthetics, not absolute protection. I should be able to get through it without breaking my weapon. As if responding to my weapon, the man drew his sword. A thin rapier-like blade, over a meter in length including the handle, pointed toward me from his right hand. His left then beckoned me.

I knew I wasn’t the most skilled duelist when it came to fighting with swords, so I moved slowly to try to gauge the ranges that he could strike at. It was possible the blade was poisoned, but after the first strike, that theory was proven false. I tried to get a bit too close to the man, at which point his sword seemed to take on a life of its own, bending erratically as waves of force traveled down the blade, making the tip whip out and cut through my left cheek and nose. How did they get spring steel that good? I wondered after stepping back. While my healing magic fixed the wound in seconds, the meaning of it was clear: I would not be attacking this person without being struck myself.

Since technical skill was off the table, I decided to use force. Rushing in, I used my left arm to block strikes in an attempt to get close enough to land one of my own. My gambeson did fairly well at fending off the razor-sharp sword, and once I was close enough the man had to rely on much slower slashes to attack me rather that his quick flicks and wrist motions. The problem then became actually hurting him, because my first attack that was directed towards his right arm stopped just short of hitting metal, seized by a familiar and invisible force that gripped my blade.

Of course he’s as good as Yaavtey, I had time to grimace before the rapier ran me through. A bit low for a fatal attack, it pierced my guts and went out my back, blood blossoming out of the wound at approximately the same speed as the pain. From up close, I saw the man’s bearded mouth smile and speak a word, though the noise of the room made it impossible to make out. Normally, I would have kept attacking him with the weapon still in my body, but considering that he was a Rehvite I jumped back, pulling the sword out with assistance from my left hand and getting out of its range. Just as I let go with my left, I felt twinges of electrical magic start to flow through me.

“You are the jhaoyeyl then?” the man asked loudly. “You disappoint.” He didn’t let me form a reply before he broke into a hyper-aggressive series of attacks of his own, trying to force me back into the center of the room where still more panicked humans would try to attack me. Instead, I bore the brunt of the pokes and slashes, circling around to place the podium behind me and making sure not to keep contact with the blade long enough to be shocked. My clothing was torn to shreds in the process, and the mask that had barely been holding together became more of an obstruction to my vision than it was worth, so I pulled it off and discarded it.

“The hard way then,” I said aloud in English, voicing my thoughts accidentally. Charging through his attacks once more, I began a series of magic-enhanced blows that could have split an unarmored man in half easily. To my surprise, my opponent didn’t try to block most of them using magic like Yaavtey did during our fight. Instead, he used his weapon to block the attacks or re-directed pieces of his armor to deflect them by re-positioning his body. After a particularly effective overhead strike that caused his sword to bend so far that it nearly snapped, I kicked the man between the legs, fracturing my shin but denting his armor and causing him to wince in pain. I followed the move up with a magic-enhanced elbow to the chest, making another dent in the armor and knocking him off balance. Only when I was about to cut his head off with a horizontal chop did he grip my sword telekinetically to stop it.

How much magic has he been using? I wondered, He can’t have bottomless reserves, and some of those sword techniques must be using magic to get the kind of strength they have. A human arm just isn’t capable of flicking a sword that hard with such a small motion, he's creating waves in the blade directly somehow. I ripped my weapon from his grip and stepped back before he could stab at me, leaving his range, then checked my magic reserves. Eighty percent, I thought, If we’re alike in quantity, he’s been using almost three times as much magic as I have, so… No, I can’t make that assumption.

The man began an elaborate flourish with his sword, serving no outward purpose at first. At the same time, my eye spotted a pouch on his belt underneath the cloak open on its own, and strange sparkling particulate begin flowing out along his body to some unknown location. Thinking quickly, I tried to keep my eyes on the sword to appear distracted while watching the process with my peripheral vision. What is he doing? I wondered, but then his left arm came up and pointed at me. By sheer reflex from decades of fighting with firearms, I flinched out of the way just in time to avoid the brunt of whatever he had done.

The left side of my face was pelted with something that felt like sand, and I tried to blink to clear my vision. Upon moving my eyelid, moderate discomfort turned into searing pain, and my vision only worsened. The man dove in with more strikes, forcing me to do a series of hops backwards almost five meters to make distance between us so I could fix whatever he had done. My left eye was now filled with blood, judging by the red in my vision, and when I wiped it with my hand and looked at the result with my right eye I figured out the reason. Powdered glass, I thought, seeing the clear substance on my fingers, it’s stuck in my eye, I can’t get it out like this.

My opponent made more pointing gestures towards me from five meters away, and I quickly dodged out of the way of them, only to see clouds of faint twinkling powder fly by me at a speed just below that of a crossbow bolt. Those were toroid shapes, I noted from the last one, Self-stabilizing in mid-air, like those experimental plasma weapons. Exactly how the Rehvites had developed the technique was something I would need to figure out once I left the temple, and since I had no other way to resolve my blinded left eye I did the only thing that would work. Grabbing a knife from my holster and keeping my right eye on the man, I jabbed it into my left eye, then pulled it from its socket.

“Disgusting,” my opponent spat. Ignoring him, I held my eye in place with force magic and cut off as much of it as I could without damaging the optic nerve or retina. I could feel healing magic regrowing it almost immediately, but while the socket was empty I wiped out as much of the remaining glass as I could manage. All the while, my opponent had been manipulating the powdered glass from his pouch, heating it to the point of melting in midair and forming a single blob of liquid above his hand. As my left eye began to come back in, the blob extended into a long ellipsoid, then split into twelve thinner ellipsoid shapes, each of which began to spin. Long-distance projectiles, I thought, and my conclusion was proven correct as the shapes re-solidified and then split into dozens of needle-like shards each.

Revolving them around his wrist, the man began firing shards at me like bullets from an automatic weapon using force magic, accelerating them to speeds so quick that I couldn't track them by eye. Two struck me in the torso, slipping between the weave of my gambeson and piercing my skin like it was paper, before I realized what was going on. I’m sure this kind of attack is shocking to the Uwrish, I thought, Unfortunately for you, I’ve been shot at more times than you’ve been in a fight, and with much more destructive weapons than this. I knew the effect his technique was supposed to have on me, so I decided to do the exact opposite.

Using my sword to block the line of fire to my face and neck, I charged the man, hearing glass shattering against the metal of my weapon. I felt shards piercing into my torso and legs, but none of them were damaging enough to actually slow me down, just painful. As I crossed the last two meters between us, I saw panic on the man's face, and I smiled widely as he began increasing his rate of fire to no avail. My left fist connected with his nose, shattering it, and I heard the sound of glass shards and a helmet falling to the ground.

As the man reeled back, I gripped my sword with both hands and swung for his head, using my core muscles for extra force. I gripped the ground with force magic and also used it to help my weapon move, feeling a twinge of pain shoot down my spine from the exertion. The remaining glass shards around the man’s wrist all shot out haphazardly at once, skewering my gut, but a moment later my weapon met his forehead. It stopped very briefly, from force magic, then slipped through his grip. Four centimeters into his forehead it stopped again, and I felt electricity beginning to flow into my hands.

I ripped my blade out of the man’s head before he could form a proper attack, shocked at his resilience, and wound up a second strike as he began to roar like an animal. Whatever human-like mind had been inside him was disrupted the moment his frontal lobe was split in half by my weapon, and though he had remained conscious in a technical sense it was clear that the processes behind his eyes were not as they once were. Striking from overhead, I split his skull in half with no magical resistance, stopping his vocalizations abruptly. Still, somehow, his limbs flailed in my direction after I pulled my weapon out, and his teetering body remained standing.

Just fucking die, I swore, shoving my left hand into his skull and gripping as much brain matter as possible. With a pull, I tore out the majority of the inside of his skull, and his body went limp immediately, then I was overcome with a feeling of nausea. I bent over and gagged, then vomited out some deep red blood onto the ground. Internal bleeding from the glass, I surmised, checking my heads-up display and finding that I had lost nearly ten percent of my red bar. It was stable, however, meaning that I was either generating new blood at the rate I was losing it or the bleeding had been stopped.

I took a deep breath to steel myself and involuntarily crushed the brain matter in my left hand, feeling something hard between my fingers. What’s this? I wondered as my attention shifted to the pebble-like feeling in my right hand, some kind of brain implant? I opened my hand to take a look, seeing nothing but gore at first. Then I noticed what appeared to be a tiny rock mixed in with the brain matter, which quickly evaporated as though it had never been there in the first place. Before I could even think about what I had just seen, my train of thought was disrupted by a sharp pain in the back of my neck.

I turned around to see an old woman, bloodied and half cooked with a manic expression, staring back at me. Reaching to the site of my new injury, I pulled out a long, serrated knife. Another kitchen knife, I thought, this could have killed me. I was distracted.

“You will die for what you have done here,” she giggled, as though the situation was funny.

“Not likely,” I replied, shoving my sword through her heart. The woman kept smiling as she tried to shock me, barely producing more than a tingle in my right hand before she expired. After I withdrew my weapon, I stomped her head a few times for good measure, just to ensure she was going to stay dead, then looked around at my surroundings. My left eye still stung terribly, but my vision had mostly cleared.

Not more than one or two Rehvites were left standing in the whole room, and those who still stood appeared to have ceased any kind of resistance. The majority of the room’s population had fled, but knowing the state that the lobby was in it was unlikely that they made it out alive. The wooden benches were still burning weakly, and spots of oil on the ground created hundreds of tiny flames around the room. Vaozey, covered in blood and ash, was around ten meters away from me, turning someone’s skull into paste through repeated mace strikes. As if she had felt my gaze, she looked over at me when I saw her.

“Good job with the yihzhae!” she shouted. “Now get up to the second level, we’ve only got a quarter of an hour at most before the lobby fire goes out!”