Millennial Mage

Tala felt like she needed a good stretch after spending the morning sitting and chatting with Dagan and Alva.

So, after lunch, she moved to her sparring circle and moved through her morning routine for the second time that day.

She was barely halfway through when Terry flickered into place across from her.

Something in his avian stance gave her pause.

He was crouched a bit lower than usual, and there was a glint of… finality?

Don’t be ridiculous.

Regardless, there was something in his eyes. “Terry?”

He trilled at her, flickering forward and tapping her chest with his clenched talons before flicking back.

She instantly understood, standing fully upright with a smile. “Oh? You’re ready for a spar?”

The solemnity of the situation settled on her in an odd way. She didn’t know what was going on, but this was important to Terry for some reason. “As you wish.”

She pulled Flow to her hand, ensuring that the sparring sheath was in place as she took up a ready stance. The one she chose was geared towards fighting a ring of opponents surrounding her.

She hadn’t fought Terry recently, but she still remembered what it was like… At least, she thought she did.

She was wrong.

Terry immediately flickered in, landing just in front of her back foot, smaller than she’d seen him recently.

In the same instant, he grew, mouth held upward to clasp around her ankle, driving her foot upward.

What the rust?!

Tala instinctively kicked out with her other foot, and Terry flickered away.

No, not away.

He appeared directly between her shoulder blades.

The only reason she knew that was because of the bloodstar she held just behind the base of her neck, mirroring her perspective as a complement to her normal vision.

Terry struck her with ridiculous force, his foot lashing out, talons tearing through leather and screeching off of the iron layer of her skin.

Her willpower fought to keep the iron intact, and with the backing of her sturdy body, she barely succeeded.

Even so, she was thrown forward into a roll.

Her mind was finally switching over into combat mode. It had been less than a second, and she was already chastising herself for adapting so slowly.

Flow licked out, morphing into a glaive for added reach for the first of her probing strikes, driven straight towards Terry, where he was still falling through the air.

Each of the strikes was forced to aim in a completely different direction.

The second was a sweep to the side, with Flow being a sword as Terry flickered into being, beak snapping at her shoulder.

The third, before she vaulted up to her feet, was a slash with her knife to fend Terry away from her other side.

She was once again reminded of how much fighting Terry was like going through martial forms.

They didn’t clash; Terry never stayed long enough to force that.

Instead, she was forced to move through combat forms without any feedback or rebound.

Yeah, rust that. This time seems special for some reason. I need to do better than this.

She pulled open holes in the iron layer all over her body, forcing her aura to flood out… right as Terry appeared just behind her right shoulder.

Flow struck backward, and Terry flickered away.

1. Tala asserted her will over the space and Terry within it, but it felt like she was trying to grab a greased rope that was already whipping across the yard.

Terry slipped away without issue, and Tala cursed.

-Voidsight?-

Voidsight.

Tala engaged that vision across all her perspectives and glanced at Flow’s sheath.

Black and purple-ish metals seemed to stand out more starkly in the intricate, intractable pattern that made up the sparring guard as Flow took a void-form.

Void-magics contained. Good.

The world came into stark focus, and she had an instant realization.

I could use Kit. Kit can move people. Kit could move Terry, or at least contest Terry’s movement.

-Tala, don’t. The people we move can fight it, and we don’t actually know what such a clash would do.-

She only hesitated an instant—warding off no fewer than a dozen of Terry’s attacks—before she agreed. You’re right. This is a fight between him and me. Kit shouldn’t factor in.

Tala felt herself loosen, ancillary concerns falling away as she settled deeper into the calm of combat.

It was just her and her opponent. The rest of her sanctum was irrelevant.

Her voidsight showed her Terry moving about, just as her magesight highlighted the pulses of dimensional energy.

She tried several more times to lock the avian in place through force of will and by contesting him magically, but he always slipped away with ease.

She simply didn’t have a good enough grasp on what he was doing to oppose him properly. She couldn’t even oppose him well enough to force him to use his magical weight against hers.

We really need to study this branch of dimensional magic more.

-Even if only for defensive purposes, absolutely.-

She wasn’t tired; she could quite literally do this all day. Though, a shield would make it easier.

It was frustrating that she seemed utterly unable to make any of her strikes connect.

Even so, beyond the first two attacks, Terry hadn’t successfully landed a blow on her, either.

As Tala focused more and more on Terry’s movement, she could see where he would arrive infinitesimally before he appeared, the nodules of reality shifting to make room for him, somehow.

That wasn’t a perfect description, but it was the only one that came to mind, or seemed to fit, at the moment.

Sadly, her foresight wasn’t even close to far enough in advance for her to react with her weapons, but it did give her an idea.

Her aura had expanded to fill the entire sparring circle, though Terry was staying within five feet of her, seemingly without issue.

That part of her attempt had failed. He was simply too magically stable to be negatively affected by her more advanced aura.

Even so, the effort wasn’t in vain. She could now use that spread of control to try something else.

She focused on all the lumps, nodes, and nodules of reality and acted without thinking too deeply about what she was doing.

The command was simple. Join.

The working sparked but failed to grab hold.

Her fundamental understanding for her gravity manipulation, ‘All mass attracts all mass.’ just didn’t apply in this situation.

The nodes of reality didn’t have mass, they… indicated mass? They were like a convenient grouping system for various subsets of existence.

No, not existence, reality. We’ve never seen magic or void as any part of a nodule, just on the outside of them.

She continued her dance through Terry’s attacks, even as she focused.

The threads of reality had clung together, attracting one another and trying to create clusters.

More than that, her dissolution breath was a specific breaking of connections. To do that, the magic had to act on something.

The connections are there, not just between all matter.

-The dissolution breath has dispersed magic, too. It acted on existing connections within spell-workings and broke them apart.-

And my healing and defense, the opposite of dissolution, is a pulling back together, a reunifying or a strengthening of the unity that is already there.

-The true antithesis of dissolution is pulling together more tightly, combining more closely.-

Everything is connected.

That wasn’t really an important, nor novel, realization.

Void clung to reality, magic acted within reality, and all three held to itself.

Tala hadn’t seen void be pulled apart, not specifically, but she believed that it could be.

What she had seen was void around her self join with void from another source, seamlessly blending.

Everything in existence pulls together.

That resonated deeply.

It wasn’t unequivocally true, her own siege orbs proved that when they detonated. Her dissolution proved that when it severed the connections.

But exceptions proved the rule, and the statement was true enough to hold weight.

She refocused on all the lumps, nodes, and nodules of reality and acted, this time thinking deeply about what, exactly, she was doing.

Join.

Existence wanted to pull together. Gravity was but one part of that, and she was using it as a template through her inscriptions.

There was the barest hesitation within her magics, both natural and inscribed, followed by an almost ringing clarity as the spell-forms activated.

Power.

Magic blazed through her, surging at her command.

Pieces of reality couldn’t be joined together, not in such a purely physical way, but they could pull together more tightly.

Tala’s power stoked that pull at a deeper, almost metaphysical level, pressing the clumps in a way that she had no description for. This was partly because nothing physically seemed to change.

There was no pressure on her or Terry within the physical space, but Tala still felt a heaviness to the air.

It was purely a feeling, however, rather than something that would slow her or anyone else.

She thought that she recognized the sensation as similar to that which she’d experienced during her training with a diminutive Eskau of the House of Blood.

Everything within her aura was just slightly more stable.

While the effect was there, it was minor.

Terry still flickered around her unimpeded, and she still warded him off with blade, pommel, haft, fist, and foot.

But she didn’t stop powering her magic.

She had the working in effect, and she devoted her immense reserves—and most of her throughput—to amplifying the ‘join.’

Less than ten seconds—and uncounted exchanges—later, Tala noticed Terry taking a hair longer to flicker about.

It wasn’t much, and it certainly wasn’t enough to allow her to land a hit, but it was noticeable.

The miniscule delay took some pressure off of Tala, and what was likely more important, she could tell that Terry was needing more and more power for each flicker.

Usually, the terror bird could move with such ease that even a mundane could have sustained the power requirement indefinitely, or nearly so.

Now? Now Tala knew that even she would be hard pressed to keep up the needed power for even an hour.

Still, this fight wouldn’t last even a tenth that long, despite their tremendous endurance.

I’m wearing him down, or at least starting to.

Despite the seemingly increasing resistance to dimensional movement, even after a full minute Terry was still flickering about with little difficulty.

Terry had obviously noticed the change whether or not he knew how or why it was taking place.

His determination seemed to harden further, and a rock suddenly struck Tala in the side of the leg.

She had seen it, but Terry had timed his attacks so that she had little recourse but to take the light blow.

A light blossomed within the terror bird’s eyes.

Oh… rust. It had been a test to see if it would be worth the effort, her disregard showed that it was. After all, if it had been trivial to avoid, she would have, and anything that wasn’t trivial would tip the scales of the match.

At random intervals, Terry vanished for slightly longer than he had before, and projectiles began to arc toward the sparring circle with varied trajectories and speeds.

Tala responded by calling her defensive discs into the fight, adding them to Flow and her body as she deflected and warded off Terry’s increasingly sophisticated attacks.

The incoming projectiles added the first real sound to the conflict, besides the soft tap of Tala’s footfalls.

Each arching attack that was deflected had a slightly different sound based on the composition of the projectile itself and which method Tala used to avoid harm.

When she avoided them entirely, rocks made a cracking sound against the sparring circle’s ground, wood thunked, mud splatted, and dirt clods cascaded like a broken waterfall.

When Flow took them from the air, they rarely landed near enough to be easily heard, and the sparring sheath ensured that even the less coherent distractions were deflected as a whole.

Kinetic impartment, I can see why Rane loves you so much.

-Yeah, it is really convenient not to have to worry about shattering incoming missiles.-

The attacks that met her defensive disks made similar sounds to those that met the stone beneath her feet, save that the sound was more hollow, as if the disks were dense wood or hardened bone.

We never did figure out what those were made of.

-Yeah, it’s never seemed like a priority… like now…why are you thinking about this now?-

The sound is rather pervasive…

-It is that. Like rain on a thin metal roof.-

Rust no. Not that annoying.

-But it is distracting.-

Fine! I’ll focus.

Terry seemed to have learned how she responded to various types of assault, so he was expertly working to maneuver her into a position to force her to take another hit.

She couldn’t remember a fight this interesting since Io, though Alat could probably check. She wouldn’t of course. She needed to—

-Tala, for the love of everything, focus.-

Right!

Terry’s strategy was forcing her toward taking a hit.

So, Tala grinned and changed her reactions, shifting between subsets of the Way of Flowing Blood.

That almost earned her a blow on Terry’s side, but the slippery avian flickered away at the last instant, clear surprise flickering in his eyes as he vanished.

That’s right. You’re not the only one who can change the battle.

Even so, Tala’s mind was stretched thin.

She was not used to having so many independently moving parts within a protracted fight.

The fact that Terry had no discernable pattern to his attacks was aggravating in both senses of the word.

First, it was infuriating to not be able to predict his attacks.

Second, it was making the strain on her mind and willpower much worse.

Even with Alat’s assistance, Tala was nearing her limit.

Adding to that frustration was the fact that she still hadn’t landed a blow on Terry.

He’s fighting more fluidly than we’ve ever seen.

-Yeah, if I didn’t know better, I’d say he was actually trying to kill you.-

Tala huffed an internal laugh. If he wanted to do that, he knows where I sleep. I’m durable, but a terror bird the size of a house sitting on me as he ripped off my head? Yeah… I’d die.

-…you would, but…-

Tala mentally hesitated, which of course made all the strain she was under worse. What is it?

-I’m not sure that you’d stay dead, honestly. It would come down to whether your gate stuck around, or even if it left, if your body had enough power stored up to regrow your head. The Archive connection would be broken, but who knows how much would come back from just the healing. Basic function? Probably. Likely not more than that. In either case, you might not stay dead.-

But my body would be without my gate? Without my soul?

-Well, in the absolutely most extreme case of your body recovering, yeah.-

That’s… horrifying. Would I still be able to act?

-That’s a ‘what is the soul and how does it work’ type of question.-

She didn’t have any bandwidth for more contemplations after that.

Thirty seconds later, Terry was able to land a blow that started a cascade of projectiles striking her and continuing to move her as he chose until, finally, he became massive in size as he pinned her to the ground with his taloned foot.

Tala wasn’t breathing heavily, but her mind was definitely spinning.

That was the hardest fight she’d ever been subjected to. Even the Eskau that she’d fought hadn’t pushed her that hard, and that was before her most recent improvements.

She was proud of how well she’d done, and it hadn’t been enough.

-We would need to try to kill him to have a chance at winning, I think, at least for now.-

Yeah, I think so too. A couple of siege orbs or the like could help us bring about a victory, but I don’t know how he’d fare in that case.

-Precisely. It would just be a chance.-

Then there’s the ending-breath.

-Oooo, I do like that name for it.-

I know, right? But hardly helpful now.

-Yeah, you should probably focus on the matter at hand.-

Tala looked up at her wagon-sized avian friend, even as he examined her with one eye, his head tilted to the side, critically. “Good fight, Terry. Give me a couple of minutes to rest, and we can go again, yeah?”

He didn’t move, or really respond in any way except to swivel his head to examine her with his other eye.

After a long moment, Tala cleared her throat. “Terry?”

Finally, he trilled and flickered away, appearing on the far side of the sparring circle, barely larger than a chicken. He gave her a long, long look, then flickered away.

I wonder what that was about.

-No idea.-

“Thank you for the match!” She called out after the no-longer-visible terror bird, infusing her words with power so they would carry.

A rolling, powerful squawk came back, clearly an acknowledgement of her gratitude.

“I hope he’s okay. He’s seemed down lately.” She spoke softly, obviously to herself.

-Yeah… I’ll see if I can find any clues in our memory.-

“Thank you, Alat.”

-It is my pleasure.-

Tala still had some time before Master Leighis and Latna would be coming by, so she turned her focus back to physical training for the next half-hour or so.

At that point, she was ready to move onto something else.

Honestly, she was in an awkward place.

She was back with humanity, and she had nothing that she had to do on a day to day basis.

She wasn’t healing anymore, so she didn’t need to take it easy.

She wasn’t with her friends, so she couldn’t fill her time by bugging them or doing random things in their free time.

She's with her siblings, and they aren't always available, though they did make an effort to be with her as often as was reasonable.

Even so, Tala needed some way to fill her time.

Training was all well and good, but if it was all she did, she wouldn’t survive her now effectively infinite life-span.

She’d die of boredom.

There was an item that desperately needed investigation, and she’d been putting it off again and again.

She couldn’t do a lot herself, but she hadn’t even done the initial things required to get others involved.

It was time that she at least looked at Io’s now fully matured artificial corpse.

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