"FORM UP!"
Steinar drove his voice down the length of the caravan in one hard, percussive crack. He was already running, his sword drawn, slapping the side of each wagon as he passed to shake the drivers from their stupor.
"On yer feet! Weapons up, all of ya! Bandits in the trees!"
The hypnotic cadence of the march shattered as wagons ground to a halt at uneven intervals. The ten dedicated guards swung down from their saddles, each person already reaching for their weapons as they landed. They drew swords, hefted shields, and formed a thin defensive line along the northern and southern shoulder of the road in seconds.
The civilian travelers were a different story.
A merchant in fine green robes fumbled at his belt for a knife he'd likely never drawn before, while a young man fell off his pony and scrambled back to his feet with wide eyes. Behind one of the rear wagons, a woman started weeping. Two of the armed travelers raised blades they clearly had no idea how to use, hands trembling hard enough to make the steel quiver.
Cal was honestly surprised at first. With the Dominion's mandated training he expected everyone to have some semblance of competence with weapons. But then he thought back to how Leo had been even with all of the preparation and remembered that sparring in a controlled environment was much different than standing toe-to-toe with someone out for your blood. He shook his head, vowing to protect as many of them as he could while he turned his attention back to the Virethane.
The forest pressed in from the north and south, an impenetrable green-and-brown wall that hid dozens of bandits creeping closer with each passing moment. Every yard of the road stretching east and west was exposed.
Christoph appeared at Cal's elbow, his cup of tea abandoned somewhere behind him. The urbane mask had cracked into something harder.
"Cal. What is happening?"
"Bandits, we think. Over eighty people have surrounded us on both sides of the road and are drawing closer as we speak. There are… three D-tiers."
Christoph frowned as he absorbed that. Cal turned to Corinne, who had appeared on his other side with her spear in both hands. "Stay near me, Cor. Use the wagons for cover and don't let anyone get behind you."
"Indeed." Christoph settled his hand on her shoulder for a brief moment. "Stay near Cal, my dear. I may be needed against the other high tiers if we are all to get out of this alive."
The men shared a look that said more than words. They would both do whatever they had to in order to keep her safe.
Corinne gripped her training spear and grinned, all teeth and adrenaline. "I've been itching for a real fight!"
"Well, you're about to get one," Cal said, giving her a tight smile. "Fight well, and be smart."
He turned and vaulted onto the driver's bench of their wagon in one quick hop. Mahina had already abandoned the seat. She stood among her garrons with a thick spear, murmuring her low rumbling hum to the lead grey-dapple. The massive animal had gone still, its ears flat against its skull.
Cal rested his spear across the bench beside him. He unslung Nen'tae from his shoulder and drew a reinforced arrow from his quiver, fletched in dark feathers and tipped with a heavy steel broadhead.
He nocked it and began pouring Stamina into the bow's frame.
Nen'tae drank the energy hungrily. The ka-vae'zhar wood and string lit up in his perception as he channeled the Stamina through the bow until the draw weight escalated from something he could draw easily, to the point he would need to use Stamina on himself just to move it. The wood grew warmer, then hot to the touch. A faint red glow haloed the limbs, the bow's reservoir of contained force singing as it capped out.
He fired another [Spiritual Pulse] in a smaller radius.
The bandits were getting close. The cordon was tightening, the F-tiers fanning out into rough attack groups while the E-tiers held position behind them as anchors. The three D-tiers were spread down the line: one at the front of the column on the south side, one at the middle on the north, and the final near Cal on the south. He turned to face the direction of the close one, still not visible but only seventy-five yards away through the trees.
Let's see if all of that training and gold was worth it.
Cal shifted his spiritual perception into the narrow beam, re-enabling the spatial component as he mapped the corridor of forest between himself and the approaching D-tier. The data flooded in, showing the angle of a leaning hemlock thirty yards out, the gap between two spruce trunks where the foliage thinned, a curtain of hanging moss at sixty yards, and the precise contour of a moss-covered boulder the bandit was rounding.
[Spatial Mapping] built the wireframe in real time, a grayscale model of branches and trunks and undergrowth assembled inside his head. [Savant of the Mind] and [Combat Analysis] ran the trajectory calculations across the model, plotting potential firing solutions.
Cal raised Nen'tae, heat rolling off the wood. He tracked the D-tier's position through the mental pathway, waiting for the bandit captain to reach an optimal location as the leading elements prepared to break cover.
"Here they come."
He spun up [Crimson Overdrive] and drew the string back to his ear.
Corinne Hearthsong
Corinne heard him, but the words slid past her like rain off oilcloth. She could only stare.
Nen'tae was a spiritual bonfire in his hands.
Through her [Spiritual Perception], the bow had transformed into something truly terrifying. It shone with a red power so dense she thought she could almost taste it on the back of her tongue. The Stamina contained in that drawn frame was more than she had in her entire body. More than Captain Hatch using a D-tier [Dash]. The bow sat at the edge of detonation, its Stamina compressed so tightly Cal would surely struggle to draw it.
And yet draw it he did. A corona of red erupted around him as he hauled back on the bowstring. The light burst outward from his body in a visible aurora, billowing like an angry flame. Her perception shuddered under the load of his aura as his Stamina rotated through his body in a high-velocity circuit she could practically hear buzzing.
Cal released a moment after the string reached his temple, sighting down the shaft. The arrow vanished in a flash as all the stored energy dumped into the shot.
A streak of scarlet light bored a tunnel through the air with a keening hiss that rose as it passed and left the air vibrating. Hanging strands of moss along its path simply ceased to be, vaporized into curls of green vapor that were expanding before the sound caught up. Leaves blew apart on a sudden wind. Somewhere deep in the forest, the streak terminated with an abrupt thump.
A choked stammer cried out in panic from the direction of the shot. "P-Piker! Spirits, 'is head! It just... i-it's—"
The rising alarm was cut short by a bellowed roar from further down the road.
"ATTACK!"
Chaos unfolded. Bandits tore from the treeline in an uncoordinated blitz. Shouts of confusion and rage tangled with the war cries of men committed to violence. The carefully timed ambush had been ripped apart before it began, and the men in the trees were charging now because forward was their only option.
Corinne planted her feet shoulder-width apart and dropped her hips into [Iron Root Stance]. The practiced motion settled into her bones and helped calm her pounding heart, as she braced the spear in front of her, point angled toward the three F-tier bandits sprinting at her position.
She clenched her teeth. Come on, come on! Make my day you filthy—
The lead bandit stumbled mid-stride, an arrow sprouting from his throat. He hit the road face-first in a spray of blood and slid two yards before stopping.
The second died with a shaft through his eye socket.
The third made it three more steps before an arrow caught him in the side of the neck, dropping him in a heap. Corinne hadn't needed to lift a finger.
She glanced back at Cal. He was a blur. His hands danced in a stream so fast they smeared in her vision. Draw, nock, pull, release; all the while pivoting to different targets up and down the line. He fired faster than she could count, two or three arrows per second, Nen'tae no longer burning with each shot but still deadly. Spent arrows kept appearing in his draw hand from his quiver at a speed that defied her ability to follow.
He twisted back on the driver's bench, picking off another cluster of bandits bearing down on her, then spun to fire across the southern flank, then back to the north. Almost every arrow found a body, and usually some place deadly.
Her perception helped paint the pattern of his strategy. He was hunting the brighter auras first, the E-tiers, the sergeants and lieutenants. One brilliant red signature in the southern treeline winked out. Another, near the rear of the caravan, collapsed and began to go dark. He was cutting the command structure to pieces in real time.
A bolt of red lanced toward the D-tier at the front of the caravan fighting Steinar; Cal had partially charged the bow for a potshot at the bandit commander. The man twisted at the last instant, the arrow grazing his shoulder and disappearing into the underbrush behind him. He thundered, his D-tier aura flaring as he shouted at his men.
"ARCHERS, KILL THAT MAN!"
From her vantage point, Corinne could make out the brute: a mountain of muscle with a shaved head, brandishing a war axe that looked big enough to anchor a ship.
A frantic voice cried out from the treeline. "There are none left, Gasto! He got 'em all!"
Corinne stiffened. Not only had Cal been slaying the higher tiers but he'd systematically eliminated the ranged threats before they could even attack him.
A brief pulse of Mana brushed against her senses from Cal's direction and her head snapped back toward the wagon. Cal had discarded an empty quiver and slotted a full one into place at his hip, proceeding to draw and nock a new shaft.
The bandit commander, Gasto, roared in frustration and stomped his foot. With a loud crack, a visible shockwave of force blasted out from his position down the road. The compressed air hit Steinar and tossed the caravan guard back against a wagon as if he were a rag doll.
Before Steinar could recover, Gasto snatched a spear from a dead guardsman nearby. He dug his heels in, his entire body loading up for a herculean throw. The spear hurtled from his hand, tearing down the narrow passage between wagons, aimed directly at Cal's heart.
Corinne opened her mouth to shout a warning that would arrive far too late, but Cal was already dodging.
He bent backward at the waist, his spine arcing into a shape no human spine should make, his shoulders dropping below the level of the driver's bench and his own feet. The spear hissed through the space his chest had occupied a heartbeat earlier, ruffling his hair as it passed. It embedded itself with a splintering crunch in the trunk of a tree twenty yards down the road.
Cal kept falling backward as gravity accelerated his dodge, his hips beginning to follow his dropping shoulders, Nen'tae still gripped in his left hand while he somehow managed to hold the arrows with his right. He pushed the bow behind his head as he fell, the upper limb extending to press into the ground racing toward him. The wood flexed, absorbing the force of Cal's momentum. He pushed back in conjunction with the rebounding bow, and it launched his torso skyward.
He rose to a standing position on the driver's bench in a smooth, impossible arc, like a marionette pulled up by its string. He had an arrow nocked before his feet had even settled on the planks.
"Christoph!" Cal called effortlessly over the din. "There's a D-tier three wagons up, north side! They need you! I've got Corinne covered!"
Corinne saw her grand-uncle hesitate for one breath from where he had been standing by the garrons. Then the old man was darting away, his slender frame surging forward with a swiftness that startled her. He sprinted down the wagon line in long strides, his hands already gathering green light between his fingers.
A bandit charged her from the side.
She caught his clumsy overhead swing on the shaft of her spear, deflected it down and away, and drove the point through his sternum. The blade slid through cloth and flesh and bone with less resistance than she had expected. His weight pulled the spear down as he collapsed. Pinning him with her foot, she twisted the haft to free the blade and pulled it back up into guard.
Vermin, she spat. Corinne had more sympathy for a starving animal than she did for thinking folk who would attack the innocent.
Another bandit broke past her line of sight, barreling beyond her and toward Mahina. The dwarven teamster stood frozen between her panicked garrons, her spear raised in shaking hands.
Corinne reacted on instinct. The Stamina was already there, packed in her cells, waiting. She channeled it into her legs the way Cal had drilled her a hundred times, focusing the burn down into her thighs and calves as she stepped. The world stretched. She covered the ten yards in a single stride, the wagon and Mahina and the bandit's back rushing toward her.
She drove her spear forward in the same instant her foot came down, the steel punching through the bandit's back between his shoulder blades and emerging from his chest. He folded forward without a gasp.
Mahina stared. The dwarven woman's stoic composure had devolved into wide eyes and an open mouth. She looked from the corpse at her feet to Corinne, and her braids quivered as her chin trembled.
"T-Thank you," she barely managed.
Corinne nodded and recovered her stance, her spear leveled before her as she started turning to face the forest. She felt another surge of Mana from Cal just before something silver flashed past her eyes.
A thunk sounded directly behind her, followed by the soft thump of a body hitting stone.
She spun. Another bandit lay sprawled on his back two yards behind her, a slim throwing knife sunk to the cross-guard in his skull. His own short sword was still clenched in his dead hand, the arc of his swing stilled mid-strike.
She looked up at Cal, but he was already turning back to fire another arrow, the motion of his throw flowing into his draw.
When did he start using throwing knives? And where did that extra quiver come from?
She shook off the questions and faced toward the forest, spear held ready. The assault on their position had crumbled. The ground was littered with bodies, most sprouting an arrow, a few with the throwing knives. The handful of bandits still standing had lost their nerve, their charge dissolving into a scramble towards anywhere but Cal.
"Cor, with me!"
She turned in time to see him leap from the driver's bench and into the enemy. Nen'tae lay flat across the wagon seat now, the quiver beside it empty. He had his spear in his hands instead.
He was… as graceful as he was deadly.
The space between him and the nearest knot of F-tier bandits collapsed in a heartbeat. Cal landed among them like a falling star given form and fury, his spear sweeping low and then high in motions that turned three men into three corpses before any of them had finished raising their weapons.
Corinne ran to catch up. The lane between the wagons had become its own private hell. A guard with a gash across his thigh was holding off two bandits, his shield arm slick with blood. Further on, a merchant lay face-down in a pool of red beside an overturned crate, dried herbs and small bottles scattered across the stone.
A bandit lunged from behind a barrel at Corinne's side, but Cal cut him down without breaking stride, his spear piercing the man's neck in a flick that looked almost lazy. He was already moving forward by the time the body hit the ground.
They moved together through the wreckage of the column, the sounds of Christoph's harried voice rising over the din ahead. Snapping wood. A roar of frustration. And beneath it all, Corinne felt the cold rush of Mana being spent in a torrent.
They rounded a wagon and the duel came into view.
Christoph stood with his palms upraised, sweat sheeting down his face, silver hair plastered to his temples. Green light streamed from his hands into the ground, and from the road in front of him, vines erupted. Thick as Corinne's arm, studded with black thorns the length of her fingers, they climbed up from the dirt and loam and wrapped around the huge bandit pressing toward him.
The vines broke against the man. The bandit's skin had the rough, knotted texture of bark, slabs of hardened hide layered across his arms and chest like natural armor. The thorns scraped across his hide and snapped, dropping in black fragments to the road. He roared, the long claws extending from his fingertips carving through the vines and tearing them away.
He took a step forward. Then another.
Christoph gave ground, his travel boots shuffling backwards on the road, his breath ragged.
"I'm-I'm losing him!" the older man gasped, his focus locked on the magic streaming from his hands. "His skin is too—"
Cal vanished.
The corona of ruby light streaked across the gap in a burst of speed that Corinne couldn't track. One instant Cal was beside her. The next he was in front of the bark-skinned bandit, who had just ripped another vine from his shoulder, his head beginning to turn as his expression contorted with alarm. It was already over.
The blur of red motion resolved into a static image. Cal stood before the bandit, perfectly still, his forward momentum arrested. His spear was already extended, its Mycari steel tip buried to the shaft in the D-tier's eye socket. Cal gave the haft a final, brutal twist as he wrenched it free.
The bandit's body went rigid at that, then collapsed sideways in a heap. As he hit the road, the green vines unwound from his limbs and slithered back into the ground.
A voice rose from the chaos nearby.
"Raj is dead!"
A moment later Gasto shouted once again from the head of the column.
"RETREAT!"
The remaining bandits broke. Some dropped their weapons as they fled, while others kept their blades in hand. The living that remained scattered back into the treeline like a crazed stampede, the underbrush thrashing as they crashed through it. Within twenty seconds they had all disappeared into the forest.
The road seemed to hush except for the moans of the wounded and the labored breathing of the survivors. Mist drifted in slow curls between the wagons as a lone garron whickered nervously.
Corinne stood with her spear in her hands, blood drying on its tip, adrenaline still singing through her body in a wild song.
The light from Cal's boosting Ability faded around him as he straightened above the corpse of Raj, the spiritual vibrations of circulating Stamina receding with it. His sleek black armor absorbed the highsun light, his auburn hair tousled from the fight and moss-green eyes searching the treeline for any sign of danger. He was completely unscathed.
A roar built in her chest before she knew it was coming. It tore out of Corinne in a wordless, triumphant cry that surprised her with its volume and passion. She raised her bloody spear toward the sky and shook it.
A heartbeat later, the cry was answered.
From the front of the caravan, Steinar answered with a gravelly bellow. The wounded guard with the gashed thigh joined in. A traveler shouted from somewhere behind. Then another. Then a chorus of voices roared together up and down the line of wagons, a sound of survival and bloody victory that rolled through the avenue of trees and into the canopy above.
Hey folks! Thanks for reading.
I've noticed a lot of authors that do the OP MC stuff tend to show off the MC from a different POV sometimes, and as a reader I find it to be a particularly effective narrative technique for the genre. I remember the author of Hell Difficulty Tutorial doing it a lot. (As an aside, I really have enjoyed that series. It's worth getting through the first book for imo). So I wanted to try it here with a swap to Corinne for Cal's juiced up combat debut. I hope you enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun to write!
Other than that... uh, well. Selara is going to get temporarily deaded in today's chapter on RR, and similar to how things went here I'm going to stay radio silent until the phoenix reveal Friday. I mention it because maybe some of you will find it cathartic to see the broader audience go through it, idk. No spoilers though! They should have to suffer through it like y'all did... :P
Last thing I'll mention is that I'm in the process of doing a massive Skill expansion retcon. There's just been a lot of progression stuff that has fallen to the wayside as I've focused on the story and what not itself, and even before that things I didn't think about that have been put on my radar by readers. Things like Skills aligned to magic, and not just Cal progressing there through Spells alone. Along with some basic Skills that are pretty meta for the genre that should be included. All that to say there might be some Skill inclusions for the upcoming chapters that will be brand new to you. I'll try to explain them in a pre-note for context, and if I forget or don't do a good enough job of it just let me know in the comments and I'll try to clarify anything. I appreciate you suffering my inadequacies. <3
Have a great week!
Jon