4 - Soldiers

The instant Doufan tensed his legs, Anzi followed suit and did the same, but she was the first to take the leap. With her spear in hand, she lunged with the spear tip pointed at his chest, knowing that he was too lithe and agile to be struck any other way. She guessed that it would land on nothing but air even then, however, and she was far from surprised when he disappeared and left only a blur of brown leather in his place.

He was wearing flexible armor as well, which meant all the more trouble for her. He was dangerous with the halberd, unacceptably so. Under ordinary circumstances, she wouldn't have tried to match his weapon head to head with a weakened spear like this, even a magicked one, but she had no choice. He was forcing her hand, and Aimee was in the back still aiming rocks at her with alarmingly deadly aim.

They were playing it safe, with her using her potshots to limit Anzi's mobility while Doufan chipped away at her stamina with a rapid chain of strikes of his halberd. She leaped back to avoid a vicious downward stab that would have impaled her foot and trapped it to the ground, but in doing so, Aimee had yet another opening to send a rock flying toward her forehead.

THWACK!

She staggered back, seeing double from the sheer force with which it had hit her. Damn them. If they were alone, she could have taken them down one on one with little trouble, but like this...It irritated her that they would work together against her when she was obviously more suitable for promotion than they were. Skewing the odds this way was a disservice to the empire. What would they do if one of them was really selected for the Premier Guard? They would be less useful than she would be.

If they were truly loyal, they wouldn't let their greed get in the way of serving the people. But that was alright. That just meant she needed to exceed herself for the sake of the empire. All she had to do was get past Doufan and Aimee -

THWACK!

She recoiled again and blinked away the blood that began streaming over her eyebrow to drip into her right eye. Dark hells, this would have been a good time to have a helmet, but none of them had been allowed one.

She had to stop retreating. Who knew if these two had an agreement that if they drove her back far enough, then Aimee was supposed to pick up one of the targets and run off on her own? Anzi couldn't afford to lose even one of them. She needed all twelve in order to pass over to the next stage.

But Doufan gave her no time to contemplate her options. He stabbed forward with the halberd toward her abdomen, aiming for the soft flesh with every intent to pierce her straight through. They weren't supposed to aim for killing blows on each other, but they all had one emergency healing cantrip each just in case. Things happened, after all.

And he definitely wanted to 'happen' to her. Wise of him. If he tried for anything less than a lethal blow, she could turn it on him and make him regret it. She didn't like it, but he was making the right choice to go all in.

But if he was going that far, then she wouldn't feel guilty about doing the same. They were supposed to be comrades, but they were competing for stakes so high that she could set aside those hesitations.

The next time he tried to jab down at her feet, she raised her foot to evade the curved blade by a hair, then stomped down hard on the weapon's head. It wouldn't break, thanks to the reinforced wood and binding of the metal, but she knew what was weaker than the power that held a magicked halberd together: his physical grip on it. If she could just get his hand to slip even for a half second, she could -

But he refused to let go, even though he was forced to bend his knees and crouch under the force of her ferocious stomp on the head of the halberd. How he managed to hold on, she didn't know. She was inordinately strong, even by elite standards, and while Doufan was a fearsome fighter, he couldn't stand against her in a contest of strength. He was fast and agile, but he lacked -

Ah! She caught the pained grimace that flashed across his face at exactly the right time, and she realized in the same instant that his efforts had cost him. He should have let go instead of holding on, or at least let her press the halberd down to the ground and sweep it out from under her foot afterward. Instead, he had stubbornly tried to hold on while also fighting back, and he must have hurt himself.

Where, though? His wrist? Elbow? Shoulder? Where was his new vulnerability, his new weakness that she could exploit? But no, she shouldn't be thinking about bothering with that. This wasn't a spar, and she wasn't trying to force a surrender: while she had the chance, she needed to put him down once and for all so that she could go and take Aimee down next. She raised her spear and aimed for his right shoulder, his dominant arm, so that she could drive it through all the way and pin him, which would dash his options for fighting back even if he managed to free himself afterward, too.

THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!

She cried out with a half-snarl, her face and neck throbbing horribly. She hadn't whirled away in time to avoid the projectiles, and worse, she had only managed to nick skin and nothing more, thanks to the third rock that had struck her on the hand and sent a crippling wave of pain through her fingers. Aimee! Damn her!

Frustration and anger flooded her when she felt Doufan kick at her shin next, trying to bring her down to the ground, to his level. Her first instinct was to stop him from knocking her down, but at the same time, continuing stand over him would do nothing but make her an impossible target to miss. She couldn't let him get back up, and yet he was the only thing that could shield her from Aimee, since she couldn't curve her trajectory and wouldn't risk hitting him instead of her.

THWACK! THWACK!

But none of this strategizing would get her anywhere; she was getting pelted hard enough to collect deep gashes and a ringing head. She had no choice, then. It would take all the wind out of her for a few seconds, and she hated resorting to this because she was still terrible at it, but she hadn't expected to be so overwhelmed by this simple joint maneuver from them. If she had more time, maybe she could try to think of a clever plan to counter their method with a lot less pain, but that was beyond her now as she retreated back several steps.

She had to do it. She had to do it now, before either of them pulled a nasty trick over her and got away with the remaining targets somehow. Breathe in, breathe out, steady, calm...

She blinked the blood out of her eyes as she spun her spear in hand in a blur, attempting to deflect the rocks that were now whizzing at her two, three at a time. Aimee had been hiding her true capability all this time too, it seemed; she had never been this good in the last three months that all of them had begun training together. Sneaky, both of them, holding back in order to maintain the edge.

But that just proved how unsuitable they were to advance. A good soldier would give their all, never greedily holding onto what they could offer up instead.

A wave of magic exploded from her body and rushed out in all directions in a perfect sphere, kicking up dust and and a fierce shower of sand, as well as throwing Doufan back down onto the ground where he let out a surprised wheeze. He had to have seen what she was about to do and blocked it with his own psionic shield just in time - that was basic training. And yet he sported a bloody nose, bloodshot eyes, and a face as pale as death anyway. She hadn't thought it would affect him like this; she had been trying to get to Aimee instead, who wouldn't have seen what she was about to do since her view would have been obstructed by Doufan's back. She was the one who was supposed to be stunned and disabled, not him. So what was this...?

Anzi wasn't doing so well either now, however, and she stumbled to down to one knee over his legs. Her shins crashed into his, and with a nauseated retch, she keeled over to the side, their legs knocking against each other as they both convulsed in the sand.

Her balance was gone - completely. A wave of panic surged through her when she realized she had both overestimated and underestimated herself at the same time: her psionic burst was far stronger than she had expected it would be, which meant she was also far more debilitated by it than she had expected, too. She clawed at the sand, desperate to get back up, but all she could do was twitch and writhe as the world spun around her in all directions at once.

How could this have happened? She hadn't resorted to doing this in many months, and even her commanding officer had advised her not to practice or otherwise use this ability because of how double edged it was. So how could it be so much stronger than it had been when she used it last?

And for that matter, what had happened to Aimee? Even in the depths of intense vertigo, Anzi was coherent enough to wonder why she could no longer feel rocks slinging into her with fracturing force. Had she stopped because Anzi was no longer a threat, or had she gone down, too?

Or maybe she was using this chance to run off with the targets, she thought in a panic, and sudden fear sent a feverish energy running through her veins. It was enough to give her the willpower to fight her way to her hands and knees, and she did exactly that.

She lifted her head, still dizzy, and despite her shaky double vision, she saw a crumpled form lying in the sand six or seven meters away.

Was that Aimee? The range of the concussive burst should have reached her, but it shouldn't have been enough to knock her out cold. And yet it had reduced Doufan to a catatonic mess, too. She couldn't pretend to know what to expect anymore.

Either way, her confusion, her surprise, both were irrelevant. She was a soldier, and she had an objective to fulfill. She couldn't waste time tottering on the ground like this. She needed to get up and carry on. Both of the others were out of commission and no longer threats, and now there was only one thing left to do -

Oh, no. Her eyes widened as a belated realization dawned on her, far too late. The children!

She forced herself to focus her vision until she spotted the heap several meters behind Aimee's fallen form. Had she hurt them? How could she have been so stupid? She'd only been thinking about how to get out of the fight, but in the process - ! She needed to see, needed to make sure she hadn't...

She fought through the urge to give into the dizziness and collapse onto the ground, fighting for every centimeter that her hands and knees dragged through the sand. Her nose was bleeding from both nostrils, and there was still more blood streaming from her forehead and the various other wounds she had collected courtesy of Aimee's aim and Doufan's nicks with his halberd. But finally, she dragged herself the final stretch past the young woman and reached the unconscious children lying side by side.

She breathed a sigh of relief when she felt steady pulses under her fingertips for all three of them. They were a mess and predictably bleeding from several orifices, too, but the medic would take care of that. Maybe the fact that they had already been knocked out beforehand had protected them from being hurt more severely than they already were, who knew? Either way, they were alive.

Which meant she could go ahead and do what she needed to do.

With great effort, she raised her hand and reached for the closest child's forehead first, her index finger already glowing with a white, spectral flame...

* * * * *

Hundreds of kilometers away in the direction of the deep desert, a man lifted his head and stared abruptly into the distance. Under the dawn light, his molten gold eyes seemed to gleam brighter than the sky somehow, and a patch of faint, black-tinged scales rippled into existence at his temples under his dark, tousled hair.

He continued to stare for a long moment, until at last the man behind him asked a quiet question:

"Lord, is something wrong?"

Instead of answering right away, he relaxed finally, and nodded to indicate that they should continue walking once more. "No," he said.

"Then...?"

He glanced back at the direction he had felt the pulse of energy originate from. Unmistakable. He would recognize it anywhere.

"Nothing's wrong," he said. "I felt her."

"Then should we change our route and go to her instead?"

"No, keep going." He fixed his golden eyes straight ahead toward their destination...

"We'll find each other soon."