Chapter 8 Avery
AVERY
Heath and Wyatt did not appear surprised to have been volunteered to demo.
They dropped their gym bags to the floor, and Wyatt ambled over to one of the storage lockers.
He pulled a battle-ax from the locker, and then he followed Heath as he trudged out into the middle of the glowing arena floor.
It was only then that I realized Heath was one of the few students who had arrived wearing a blade.
He pulled a long, slightly curved sword from the sheath on his back—a saber, and a fine one by the look of it.
As they swung their weapons a few times to limber up, Cash directed everyone to clear the floor.
We climbed into the bleachers and spread out around the perimeter.
No one sat down. Instead, we all leaned over the railing, ready to watch half of the Blackwell Quad do whatever they were about to do out in the middle of all that brewing magic.
The glow brightened, and several wraiths appeared in the middle of the arena.
I had to hand it to them—the illusion magic was extremely realistic.
Wisps took the vague shape of an animal and were barely corporeal, and they tended to leak and spread like an oil spill from the source of a rift in danger of tearing.
“And why is that, Anderson?” Cash asked, pointing a finger in the direction of a beefy guy leaning over the railing near the control booth.
“L1 wisps are harmless and don’t have a corporeal form that can be slain,” the guy recited.
“And why do we learn to identify them anyway?”
“Because they are often seen in the location of a rift that will tear and release higher-powered wraiths within the next few lunar cycles.”
“Correct.”
Well, at least they weren’t teaching total bullshit here.
The wisps winked out, and a dozen swarmers materialized onto the floor.
Again, the magical construct was dead-on.
A wraith’s form was always a mixed bag, but we could count on a swarmer to range anywhere from a poodle to a small pony in size.
A swarmer usually couldn’t kill a shifter on its own, but they became lethal when they would pool together and, as their name suggested, swarm.
And the illusion wraiths were definitely gearing up for a swarm.
Half of them took the form of a bat-like body the size of a Doberman, but the bat had eight gnarly spider legs and a mouthful of tiny, spiked teeth.
The others had more of a chimpanzee shape, if a chimp were a dried-up husk with fangs and no eyes bent into a quadrupedal form with legs twice as long as its body.
All of them had chunks of skin and hair missing, exposing decaying ribs and pieces of skull.
Like all wraiths, they were a colorless dark gray, but the magic gave them a soft ice-blue glow around the edges.
Some of the bat-spiders screeched, and all the swarmers converged on Wyatt and Heath.
It was immediately obvious that those two had been training as a team a lot longer than just the two years they’d been here at the college.
They worked through the horde methodically, dodging teeth and claws and slicing off limbs.
Heath slashed his saber through the necks of two of the chimps, lopping off their heads.
The wraiths flashed and faded away, the “kill” releasing the magic holding the construct together.
The trainer with the tablet tapped the screen, and the jumbotron chimed above us, awarding Heath a hundred points for each kill and Blackwell Quad the same amount.
The SWIM rules appeared to mirror those in the real world—you had to decapitate a wraith to kill it. We’d learned you could also gouge its heart from its body, but that was trickier and messier. Anything else, and the wraith could regenerate.
Wyatt kicked a spider away that’d launched itself at his chest. He spun wildly, swinging his ax and severing the head of another spider that’d attacked him from behind. The wraith winked out, and Wyatt’s points went up on the board.
“It really looks like they’re slicing limbs,” I mused. “And taking real hits when they collide with the magical simulations.”
“They are,” Brody agreed. “That’s seriously advanced—and seriously expensive—magic.
The Guardians hired the world’s best construct and illusion specialists to design this program about twenty years ago.
If you ever sneak up into the control booth, you’ll see thousands of runes etched into the equipment.
There are a bunch in the arena floor too.
The specialists visit each region’s programs quarterly to recharge the magic when the Moon is at full power. ”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s impressive, but you know what’s even easier than paying through the nose for specialized magic like that?”
Ian snorted. “Going outside at the New Moon?”
“Bingo.”
“You two are so fun,” Brody gushed. “But fair warning. The injuries we sustain against SWIM aren’t real, but the magic makes it so your body thinks it’s real.
If you get slashed with mutant razor claws, it will feel like your arm is falling off.
If a six-foot-long tentacle smacks you in the head, it can knock you out.
You can even ‘die’. If you take a lethal hit, you’ll pass out right there on the floor and need to be revived.
The magic also knows when you’ve been down long enough for the SWIM to devour your soul and kill you that way.
And if you die or flee, you lose the points you’d have won from the kill. It’s happened to almost all of us.”
“Hear that, Aves? Next time a Giant almost takes your leg off, you won’t have to spend the night in the hospital.”
Brody sputtered a cough, his eyes going comically wide. Some of the other nearby trainees were giving us some dubious looks. Being surrounded solely by shifters with sensitive hearing was going to take some getting used to.
Heath and Wyatt made quick work of the rest of the wraiths.
The last of them winked out, leaving the two of them standing in the middle of an empty floor, their breathing labored but barely a sweat broken.
The soft glow of the active magic seeped into the carved lines of Wyatt’s bicep as he slung his ax casually over his shoulder.
Heath sheathed his saber behind his back in a smooth practiced movement.
They waited, looking almost bored, as Cash got back on the microphone.
“That was a textbook elimination of an L2 swarm, gentlemen. As blades are needed for the kill, there should be no reason to shift in a fight with an L2. It is all about quick and efficient weapons work. Support Squadron trainees take note, as culling these swarms will be your main job in the field while the Guardian teams take on the larger, deadlier wraiths. Now”—he nodded to his buddy in the control booth—“we’re going to run a randomized sequence of higher-level specimens at Gale and Blackwell.
Normally a sequence like this is reserved for quads only, but Gale and Blackwell like to show off, right, boys? ”
Neither of them acknowledged him.
“And if one of them is KIA on this one, then consider it my gift to you chumps who are trailing so far behind them on the board.”
Without warning, two Rippers materialized on the floor and charged straight for the guys.
Rippers were the equivalent of fighting a Prime shifter. Apex predators, always larger than the version of the animal found in the wild, but the wraith version came in the form of a fucked-up mutant with appendages, claws, and teeth in places you couldn’t predict.
Heath and Wyatt were being treated to a pair of hellhounds the size of an Alpha wolf—putting them somewhere around five feet tall at the shoulder.
These came with dinosaur spikes down their backs, extra-long tails that looked like they had scorpion stingers on the ends, and gaping jaws that oozed orange flames around drooping gray skin and exposed jawbones.
I’d seen a few of those around. The tail forms varied, and sometimes they spewed noxious purple gas instead of flames, but either way, they were a bitch to deal with.
Iterations of wraiths tended to repeat, and they usually spawned in multiples.
Whatever was happening in their realm was seriously fucked-up.
The hounds snarled, leaping straight for Heath.
He pulled his sword and ducked under one beast, then sprang up just in time to lop its tail off before stabbing the other in the throat.
It lurched, and Wyatt was quick to behead it with his ax.
He pivoted, wound up, and launched a baseball swing at the other, who’d just recovered from losing its tail and was back on the attack.
The flat of the ax hit it in the face, and it staggered away.
Two more Rippers appeared. Seven-foot-tall gorilla things with ram horns and four-inch claws. I’d seen similar versions of these in the wild, as well.
Those thick necks were challenging to cut through, and the wraiths were so much faster than they looked.
Wyatt tossed his ax to the floor, and the blade embedded there as if it were soft ground, the handle sticking up in the air.
He shifted instantly, his training gear coming apart at the seams and falling into a heap on the floor.
A large but sleek bear tore from his body, his dusty-red fur appearing almost purple in the icy-blue light.
He charged the gorillas as Heath managed to behead the remaining hound, earning the kill.
The bear barreled into a gorilla, knocking it to the floor.
Wyatt was the fastest bear I’d ever seen—nimble but still enormous and solid enough to plow through a wraith that size.
He roared in its face and slashed his bear claws across its throat.
Then he sprang away, allowing Heath to jump in with the head-severing blow.