Chapter 12
Twelve
The impact staggered me. Through the cloud of hanging smoke, I spotted Dathka coming up with a second pistol in her off hand, and instinctively threw myself to the side, landing behind a stone block.
My Frunza charm had stopped the bullet, but it still felt like I’d gotten a chipping hammer embedded in my lungs. As I crawled toward better cover, half my chest filled with wheezing, throbbing fire.
I could barely hear Rade’s shout over the booing crowd. “I tried to warn you!”
I lay there in the block’s shadow, hurting. All my na?ve thoughts about honorable fairness and the traditional rules about not hitting women went straight out the window, because that deadland bitch just shot me. I drew Gax’s pistol.
Oh, we’re doing this now.
Risking a peek around the side of the block, Dathka was moving my way, pistol still raised.
She fired the instant she spotted my head, and stone chipped in front of me.
With an empty gun in each hand, now it was her turn to take cover as I leaned farther out to take a shot at her.
By the time I got the sights aligned, she was behind another block.
I jumped up and started running for a better position. Instinct told me as soon as she was reloaded, she’d be doing the same, trying to get an angle on me. Only, I intended to get there first.
Except then, somehow, she was right behind me. Which I didn’t realize until she shot me right between the shoulder blades.
The Frunza protection hadn’t had time to recharge, but thankfully, Bruxt—or maybe it was Blork—had done his job, and the goblin enchantment stopped the bullet.
I landed on my face, skidding across the stone, and it felt like I’d had my spine shattered.
A goblin charm will save you, but those little bastards make it hurt extra bad on purpose.
Temporarily losing all the strength in my limbs as if paralyzed had also caused me to drop my gun. It went sliding across the stones to stop a few feet from my clumsy, nerve-deadened fingers.
“One down!” the announcer shouted with his artificially loudened voice. “One to go.”
How had she gotten all the way over here? When I rolled over, Dathka was standing in the shadow of the block I’d taken cover behind, calmly breaking open her pistol. She dumped the smoking brass case and pulled a fresh cartridge from her belt. “I told you you’d never even get close.”
I’d practiced going for my enchantments so many times that I could use them even with tingling hands. I tugged an Obscura ball from my vest, concentrated on the simple spell embedded in the clay, and let it roll away. When it hit the ground, it burst into a black shadow cloud.
Dathka fired blind through the magical smoke, but I was already moving. The bullet whizzed past my head. Remembering where Gax’s pistol had fallen, I ran my hand along the stone until I hit something metal and scooped it up, then kept running.
“You dare use a shadow spell on me?”
“I’ve got more where that came from.” The artificial spine shot pain had faded enough that I’d gotten a bit of dexterity back, so I grabbed a handful of screws.
A second of concentration activated the Red bound to the steel, then I tossed them under hand through the smoke. “I call this one Screws of Chaos.”
This was one of first formula I’d come up with myself, and it was still one of the nastiest. The Red heated the metal molten hot, super quick, and when the screws hit the ground and scattered, they began their out-of-control dance, bouncing, shrieking, popping, and sticking to anything that might burn.
From Dathka’s enraged shout, one of them must have caught her.
The Obscura cloud only lasted about seven or eight seconds, just enough time for me to blindly stumble my way to a better position.
And somehow Dathka was now ahead of me.
It was a surprise when she appeared around the side of the white stone block I was heading toward. She was limping, and the bottom of her cloak was on fire from the screws, but she was already swinging her pistol my way.
Rather than freeze and marvel how she was getting around so impossibly fast, I dove headfirst into a trench.
It was about a seven-foot drop into the perfectly rectangular hole. I didn’t even have time to activate a Descend; that landing really hurt. Joints popped, but thankfully, it wasn’t enough damage to activate the goblin charge, because that would be a sad way to end the match!
Over the roaring of the crowd, I could barely hear her boots crunching across the gravel as she rushed me, hoping for a final shot. I threw a pinch of Red dust up out of the hole.
She walked straight into a Shroud of Fire.
That was the only invoked spell I knew, and creating a magical effect directly from an element with no other ingredients could be rather potent. The size and intensity of the fire this spell created was proportional to the amount of Red I used, and I’d not had time to grab much.
Though, in this case, it was still enough to set her hair aflame.
She was distracted, probably blinded by the flashing fire, and vulnerable, but I didn’t have a shot because of the edge of the pit. With cocked pistol in my right, I raised my left hand and made a fist. “Ascend!”
The air solidified and curled around my arm, hoisting me violently upward. I flew out of the hole, pointed the gun at Dathka as I passed ground level, and yanked the trigger. There’d been no time to aim. It was purely by instinct, like pointing a finger. Yet by some miracle, I actually hit her.
There was a magical flash as my bullet knocked her off her feet.
The crowd loved that.
As I continued my rapid rise, first I realized that the flash had been the wrong color to be a goblin charm.
She also had her own protective enchantments.
Second, I needed to pick a destination before she recovered and shot me out of the sky.
I looked toward the scaffolding, opened my hand—breaking the Ascent—and dropped the last few feet to collide with the wooden poles.
I managed to grab on to the side and hang on.
Rade was sitting one level below me. “Excellent shot, my friend!”
“From up here, can you see how she’s moving around so fast?”
“She’s wearing some kind of high-level enchantment.”
I’d heard talk about that kind of spell in the Collegium, but there was no way a Slump fighter had such a potent thing. I knew Clotz was going to screw me somehow. “Rank ones can’t teleport. That’s like an eighth-level spell!”
“It’s more as if she steps into one shadow and appears out another. Ah… so that explains her ring name.” Then Rade flinched as Dathka’s next bullet punched a hole in the planks between us. “Hey! No killing the audience!”
Staying in one place for more than a few seconds against her would get me killed.
I let go of the scaffold. Dropping this far normally would break bones or worse, but I’d been practicing my Descent a lot and activated it as I fell, aiming my open glove at the ground and imagining I was pushing back against gravity.
Those same invisible ropes of air that had pulled me upward were now wrapped around me, drastically slowing my body before impact.
I landed about as soft as jumping down the last three or four steps on a staircase, which stung, though far preferable to breaking both ankles.
My opponent was out of sight. While scanning the nearby shadows, I reloaded my gun.
As I moved, I looked up toward the crowd.
Since they had a bird’s eye view, that would tell me where my sneaky opponent was hiding.
It must have been because she had two goblin charges left to my one, because her next move was extremely bold.
A small object came sailing over the blocks.
As I saw it falling, my first thought was that it was some kind of offensive enchantment, like my snail grenade, so I ducked down and covered my head.
Except when it hit, it didn’t spread fiery fragments, but rather concealing smoke. She knew Obscura too.
Only she could use the shadows that spell created to travel through.
I was engulfed in darkness. It was only by the instincts developed by years of working in pitch-black tunnels that I sensed her appear next to me.
I spun just as she shoved the muzzle of her pistol at the back of my head.
It discharged where my skull had just been, and I was already pushing her way.
We collided. Her other gun crashed uselessly against my wrist and the reflexive tightening of her grip caused her to launch a bullet uselessly into the ground.
I could imagine the audience was screaming about how they couldn’t see. They could only hear the gunshots. What’s happening? What’s going on down there? And they got their answer when I kicked Dathka in the stomach so hard that she flew out of the smoke and bounced her head off a block.
Now, rules of civility about striking women aside, forgive me, Ketekunan, but that had been profoundly satisfying.
I followed her out of the smoke. She was struggling to her hands and knees, and from the shimmer lingering around her, that hit cost her a charge on her goblin charm.
Sadly, she was lying in the shade of the block, and before I could shoot her and put an end to the second charge, she fell through the shadow and vanished.
There was no way a rank one had come up with that enchantment on their own!
I glanced toward the scaffolding, to see that Rade was desperately pointing at the far side of the arena.
I couldn’t see her myself, but that told me approximately where she’d reappeared.
She was surely shaking off the magically induced feeling of a fractured skull—I found that goblin-reinforced pain lasted about ten or twenty seconds—and then she’d be reloading her pistols or readying her next spell. I had an idea.
“Ascend.” I didn’t fly nearly as high this time, going just to the top of the nearest block before cutting the spell and landing atop it.
I still didn’t have a line of sight, so I began leaping from block to block.
There were only a few feet between them here, the tops were flat, and they were roughly the same size.
Moving across the blocks was nothing to someone surefooted enough to be a trapper on the lava wastes.
I caught Dathka reloading. She looked up just as I blocked the light charm above her, and she might have even escaped me using my own shadow, if I’d not been ready for that trick.
The Red dust I hurled wasn’t directly at her, but above her. It ignited in a sweeping arc of fire which obliterated all the available shadows she could’ve dropped into.
It only took a bit of concentration to get my Shroud of Fire to linger for a second…
Just long enough to line up the pistol’s sights on my target and squeeze the trigger.
Just in case the goblin charm failed, I aimed low.
Regardless of her attempting to put bullets in my lung, spine, and brain…
I remained a gentleman and merely shot her in the leg.
Sure, such a wound could still be lethal if she bled out, or it could explode the bone and require an amputation, but you know what they say: It’s the thought that counts.
There was a flash as my bullet flattened against the goblin charm. One knee twisted out from beneath her, and she flopped into the dust, crying out in pain. As the sparks from my spell drifted down around her, she shouted, “I yield! I’m done.”
I stood atop the block and took a long, deep breath.
There was no feeling quite like triumphing in the arena.
It was better than bringing in a great haul of Red.
I was confused why the audience wasn’t roaring.
They usually loved high mobility fights, but then I realized they were all on their feet cheering or booing—depending on how they’d bet—they just sounded muted because of the ringing in my ears from all the gunshots.
I swear, when I got better at magical formula, I was going to figure out how to make gunpowder explode quietly.
The announcer came out of his bunker to proclaim Put Down Tom the victor.
Goblins ran out and directed me back toward my gate.
I really wanted to ask Dathka where she’d gotten that powerful shadow magic from, but she was holding her knee and glaring at me with murderous wrath.
If that enchantment had come from Clotz, I was going to shoot that snot-faced bastard.
Goblins, being greedy as could be, didn’t even let the gladiators stay on the scaffolding after our fights were over.
They expected us to buy a ticket if we were going to spectate, so I wouldn’t get to watch Rade or Krachma fight.
I was on my way to collect my percentage of the earnings when I saw a familiar face standing near the bookie’s board.
It was Carcalla’s menacing right hand, Cutter Joran, and it was obvious he was waiting there for me.