Emma had never seen anything alive move as fast as the Grai charging her. Not Aexilica, certainly not anything she’d fought. Maybe horses on a level road compared. Maybe they didn’t. Twenty or so metres separated them, she barely had a second before they disappeared to nothing.
Her hands came up, magic flared out and the shield hardened between them. The Grai smashed into it with a swinging axe that split clean through the barrier, sent cracks creeping across its entire face and left the thing shuddering even before her momentum exhausted itself with a shoulder-bash against the weakened section. She stopped, barely. Emma stumbled away.
Another swing smashed what was left of her barrier, then Aexilica leapt ahead of Emma and brought her sword down. The Grai sidestepped, backed away and retaliated with a sidelong clubbing attack that Aexilica barely blocked. She actually lost her footing, thrown down by the impact. By then Emma’s energy lance was built up and she unleashed it with a scream.
But the Grai dodged that, too, barely having it clip her shoulder and whipping away from the point of impact. She was trying to circle around Emma, and fast enough that even from metres away she was close to managing it.
Emma blasted out a wave of wind, kicking up about half a tonne of debris from the dusty ground and throwing it into her enemy. It hit her face, her eyes, it hit hard and fast enough that Emma thought it might’ve skinned a normal person. But there was nothing normal about this woman, she powered through it like it was harsh language and just came flying at Emma all over again with that damned hammer. The gale didn’t even seem to slow her attack.
Another barrier came up this time, and a second beneath it. Emma tried something new now- her first defence was thinner, and the Grai smashed through with little enough resistance that she was carried unexpectedly forwards by her own charge. Then the second barrier raised just a foot off the ground and farther back from the first caught one of her ankles and tripped her.
It was more categorically akin to a prank than a cunning application of magic, but it fucking worked. While she was busy finding out what the dirt tasted like, Emma readied her next attack. Not an energy lance, no time for that, just a big, solid block of hardened energy which she threw out with all the power she could muster. It struck just as her enemy came up.
Ringmail broke apart, shattered links flying in all directions as the woman stumbled away. Stumbled, not flew, as if something were anchoring her in place with many times more weight than her body had. She righted herself, lunged again. Emma’s barricade didn’t stop her any better this time, and the hammer actually grazed her shoulder as it swung through.
Pain exploded beneath the skin, a syringe-full of acid pumped clean in. Emma dropped down, body simply disobeying her orders to stand. This wasn’t an action scene, she wasn’t going to thug her injury out with gritted teeth and willpower. This was her body simply shutting itself off. The pain was so hot it felt cold, numbing. Dissociative. She felt like she was in another person’s body, watching it happen. Staring at herself convulsing on the ground, seeing, helpless, as the Grai raised her hammer and stepped forwards to bring it down. Emma was almost blinded by the tears in her eyes, almost deafened by the pounding in her ears. She was helpless.
But Aexilica recovered just in time.
It was her with the advantage now, coming up behind their enemy and actually nicking her with a slash that was barely evaded at the last moment. The Grai’s cheek opened up, unarmoured and exposed, and Emma saw a crimson river run down her jaw. She was stumbling, wrong-footed and forced back as her attacker saw that advantage and hungrily pursued it. Emma just remained on the ground, groaning and whimpering. She felt the pain still radiating through her in long waves, silently urged it away. It ignored her wishes entirely, but slowly faded. Or, perhaps, remained long enough for her to slowly adjust. Thought became easier, clearer.
The danger more felt.
Emma forced herself up, felt her arm scream. She swore, wrapped it in hardened energy so tight she thought the circulation might be cut off. Ignored that, finished getting up, looked around. Aexiclica had clearly knocked the two lovers out before the Grai had started attacking, or perhaps just after. They wouldn’t be interfering. The other men were still confused, scrambling to answer the call and sound. Maybe they had moments, maybe minutes. The main concern was that their enemy outmatched them.
She made another weapon, this one softer and more flexible, and launched it. The energy construct slipped beneath Aexilica’s arm and wrapped around the Grai’s leg, softening on impact, melting around her, and reforming. Then the fun started. Now that it was bound to its enemy, Emma applied a Force effect to send the thing away from her. With one leg suddenly being dragged backwards, the Grai’s movements became clumsier.The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Aexilica had been on the backfoot, now she regained her advantage and then some.
She swung like she was chopping down a tree, smashing big chunks of broken rings out of the enemy’s armour and sending her one way or the other with each impact. Emma heard the ringing of metal on metal like a bell was tolling, even as she conjured up another attack.
More energy projectiles, these ones smaller and sharper. She barked a warning, watched Aexilica dive to one side and sent them out in an arc so wide it was unbelievable how few actually struck home. Of those that did, most broke against ringmail or bounced off the supernaturally tough tissues below. One, though, caught the woman in one of the bare patches where armour had been smashed away. It sank in deep, announcing itself with a spurt of blood and drawing pain across her face.
Aexilica’s next swing added to that pain, leaving another mark across the woman’s chin and sending her back again. Her leg, still dragged by the energy shackle, shot out from under her and she hit the dirt and started sliding as if she were chained to a moving car. Emma would’ve found it funny, if she had room for anything other than relief.
“MAKE THAT MOUNT YOU USED BEFORE!” Aexilica screamed, and the urgency of it- the sheer, volcanic danger in her voice, hurried Emma into motion before she’d even grown consciously aware she was acting.
The energy poured out of her, hardened, somehow, and defied everything Emma knew about physics to become a solid sledge. This one was different than the last, wider and longer. It was propped up on a set of long, bladed supports below it and rimmed with a high edge. There was enough room for, she hoped, four people, but when Aexilica came back she had only one of the lovers over her shoulder. They were still unresisting.
Emma leapt on the vehicle, screamed for Aexilica to do so. For a moment it seemed like she might not, and the thought terrified her.
Then the woman winced, leg buckling under her, and she leapt onto the back. Emma’s Force carried them off. Too slowly, the Grai was coming up behind them. She blasted Energy into the sledge to accelerate it even more, desperate enough to risk toppling the thing, and then blasted some more to pelt their pursuer with sand. In moments they were at top speed.
And top speed was a lot more than it had been.
Emma’s design changes had been a rush-job, but apparently they did their work. The supports below allowed for parts of the sledge to grip the dust better and made for easier steering, while the high rim made it less prone to suddenly lodging one side in the ground at a sharp twist and flipping. Combined, and bolstered by the wider distribution of weight, the whole thing was far more stable. Emma would’ve killed for a speedometer, but as far as she could tell she was doubling, maybe tripling her previous speed.
That was definitely faster than she could sprint, faster than most people she’d met could sprint. But evidently, not faster than a horse.
The Grai was still gaining.
It was ridiculous, impossible. But then so was shooting energy beams and making matter out of nothing. Emma couldn’t do anything but watch as the woman closed in, swearing to herself. Her Force should have been propelling them faster. She realised too late that it wasn’t a constant acceleration she conjured, but an amount of force to induce it. A heavier object, like a large sledge and three people, would need a lot more force to accelerate at the same speed.
And she was already putting in as much as she was capable of. Her mind raced, shoulder stung again, guts lurched and panic grew.
Time. That was her ally, time. Emma could power the sledge for a very long time–- an hour or more if she had to— without taking a break. Humans could only sprint so long, especially if they were wearing ten or twenty kilos of ringmail. Except this one seemed to have sprinted for longer than that already. Did she have superhuman stamina to go along with her speed, or…Was she just pacing herself?
No, think. If she could sprint faster than this, she’d be catching up by doing so.
So the woman had more stamina than a normal human too. Meaning that Emma had no way of gauging how long she’d be able to close in for, and at their current rate she had maybe ten or twenty seconds before the Grai was on them.
“What do we do?” Aexilica asked her, voice carrying that same, battering-ram tone that smashed the hesitation out of Emma and left her thinking fast.
“Lighter. We need to be lighter.”
It seemed, to her, quite a broad and useless thing to say. But Aexilica was spurred into motion before the words even finished leaving Emma’s lips. With one swift movement, she hoisted the now-slightly-less-asleep captive up and stripped away his already half-removed armour. The rings rattled as she tore them off, then hurled them at their pursuer.
Naturally, the Grai evaded the projectile. But the primary goal was seen to, and Emma’s next application of Force left them accelerating that tiny bit more with however many kilograms’ less mass to work on. They sped up, fractionally. The woman didn’t. Emma felt hope at that, felt it die as she realised the Grai was still gaining. How long now? Five seconds, ten being generous. What could she do?
Perhaps if they started cutting their prisoners’ arms and legs off…She blinked. No, that was stupid. If he bled out they’d done all this for nothing. Emma saw that the Sculd behind them was just paces away, panicked, and risked everything.
Diverting her focus from the constant application of Energy needed to maximize their speed, she started building up another energy lance. It was ready just as the deathly-quick blur was on her, and it caught the woman full in her chest. Emma didn’t see her fly back, exactly. With all the light, the eye-watering heat and teeth-rattling blast, it was really more of a deduction than anything. One moment they were both moving as fast as they could in the chase, the next Emma was falling back into her sledge and there was no enemy to be seen.