Stormblade 4 C44: Grudge (1)

44 - Grudge (1)

Deborah snarled and lunged, her sword and shield whipping at my head fast enough to crack the air. I moved. My leaping twist pulled my body out of line, and Nimbus Edge whipped across the thick brass armor. Sparks flew. I hit the ground, legs already pumping.

I was completely and totally sure I could win. I’d beaten her before, and I hadn’t had the Stormkin Avatar aura. But I couldn’t use it. Not yet. I had to find an opening first, and her armor was thick and strong.

Her sword ripped across my vision, and my parry deflected it up and to the right. I countered in Mistwalk stance—I didn’t have enough charges of anything to make an empowered move yet, and Rain-Slicked Blade was my best bet for cracking her shell.

“You could have been mine!” she screamed as her shield whipped around. “I was going to bring you into the fold, with Carter!”

I ducked the blow and lunged. My sword left burn marks across her faulds, but no real damage. “I wasn’t interested then, and I’m not interested now.”

“That’s fine. I only want you dead.”

We traded blows; if I was right, I’d have a few more seconds before Deborah could use her instant-kill attack again, and I wanted to build up my charges before that happened. I danced from Mistwalk to Cyclone, threw a pair of Stormfire Bolts that got deflected, then from Cyclone to Thunderbolt. Rain-Slicked Blade punched into her armor, and she grunted in pain as the lightning sword cauterized a hole in her side. Her sword cut into my arm. Blood poured from the wound, and Stamina rushed to dull the pain.

Then she attacked—but not me.

I wasn’t ready. She launched herself toward Sarah and Nathan, and I pushed off awkwardly. Both feet left the ground as I jumped. She turned on a dime, armor screeching, and threw herself into the air.

Toward Cheddar.

Her kill shot skill activated even as I tried to unsummon the winged serpent. A line of blood appeared across his chest and neck. It rained down as he vanished, hot droplets splattering on the brass floor around me. I curled a lip and growled in rage—and in fear. I couldn’t summon him again. Not until Sarah could patch him up. The wound was lethal, and if Cheddar was still alive, it was only because the dimensional space I stored him in was a stasis field.

But in one move, Deborah Callahan had put me at a disadvantage.

Stamina: 161/500, Mana: 113/630

I could still win without Shadowstorm Battery feeding me Mana, but it’d be a lot harder. Last time, I’d used Stormbreak and avatars with Stormfire Lance to suppress Deborah’s Mana and give me the advantage. Cheddar had been a critical part of that. I needed a different way to win.

Sarah shouted something. It sounded suspiciously like “No!” Both Deborah and I looked toward them as a wall of fire, the shape of a massive egg, erupted around them; the waves of heat were almost a physical force, and I took a step back.

“Got his reincarnation,” Deborah said smugly.

I stared at the fire for another second, then locked eyes with her helmet. Nimbus Edge shot out toward her head, but her shield caught the blow.

“He’s out of the fight. The Phoenix Reborn’s real power isn’t his power. It’s the reincarnation. He can take risks, and if he dies, he’s reborn at the cost of his Mana and Stamina. But he’s no threat, and he removed the Spark of Life, too. She’s stuck in there.”

Our swords clashed one more time, and I smiled through gritted teeth as I pushed against hers. “Then you have no one left to threaten—and I have no one left to protect.”

◄▼►

Mistwalk Forms. Windwalk.

I backpedaled as Deborah screamed a battle cry. Her sword passed inches under my feet, but the blow came too late. My counter bounced off her helmet; I didn’t mind one bit.

The last time I’d really used this tactic had been the fight against Andrew, during the Fallen Delvers Tournament. He’d caught me on the edge of a rock in a molten field of lava, and I’d stepped into the air, then strafed him from above. It was a powerful move, but it wouldn’t work against everyone—and I hadn’t spent enough time ‘flying’ to be ready to dodge attacks from every angle.

But in the massive work-space where the siege drill had been assembled, it was perfect.

I dashed up into the chains hanging from the ceiling, ducked behind a massive welding torch, and hung by my free hand for a second. Deborah’s eyes were locked on my cover, but the S-Ranker didn’t have a good ranged attack. She could almost certainly close the gap with her instant-kill, but if I could survive it with Mistform or Storm Dance, that’d leave her vulnerable. She’d be even more vulnerable if she tried to jump the distance—although I was pretty sure she could.

We were at an impasse. Or at least, she was.

I climbed onto the welding torch and changed to Cyclone stance. My Mana wasn’t truly high enough for this, but I needed to keep up the pressure. Stormkin Avatar activated as my aura collapsed into a single point, then expanded into the Dad-shaped knight. He fell the thirty feet to the ground, hitting like a thunderbolt, and his sword and shield slammed into Deborah. I smiled; I’d fought that stance before, and it was tough. He wouldn’t leave any windows open, and he’d be ready to take advantage of any gaps in Deborah’s defenses.

That gave me a moment to breathe. A moment to plan and think about the last time I’d fought Deborah, and a moment to put together a strategy. The Phoenix Reborn was out of the fight. Sarah Cullman would rejoin it at some point, but I couldn’t rely on her to shift the battle. Dadvatar would fade in a few seconds as the Mana cost got too high to sustain, and Cheddar couldn’t help me.

So, I’d have to win with the tools at my disposal. With limited Mana and Stamina, and with a Stormbreak that wouldn’t one-shot an S-Ranker.

The plan was simple. I’d beat Deborah exactly the same way I had last time, but more slowly.

Rolling Thunder into Stormfire Lance. The ray of lightning slammed into Deborah from behind as the Stormkin Avatar faded, setting her Mana ablaze. Then a second—and copied first—lance hit her. As she spun and threw herself into the air, I launched a Lightning Chain across the arena and pulled myself up toward one of the sealed doors high overhead. The fourth Stormfire Lance slammed into her at the same time her shield crushed the gigantic welding torch like a tin can.

Her helmet locked onto me. “I see what you’re doing. It won’t work.”

“Wanna bet?” I asked.

She roared and launched herself at me again. This time, I didn’t bother with Lightning Chain. My Mana couldn’t take it. Instead, I dropped into Mistwalk Forms and parried her blow, then stepped through her shield slam. Mistform carried me off the edge of my narrow platform, and I let myself fall. She leaped after me.

Perfect.

Windwalk activated. I stopped mid-air and ran left. She fell through the invisible steps I sprinted on, and I launched myself down after her, sword first. Thunderbolt stance. Rain-Soaked Blade punched through her armor, but this time, she hardly reacted. I didn’t care—my goal wasn’t to end the fight right here. It was just to get another Lightning Charge. Small steps, incremental victory.

Thunderblade. With Windwalk running, both my attacks and movement were faster than Deborah could handle. My sword blurred, and I danced around the heavily-armored woman, blows landing in a fast rhythm as she struggled to stop them with sword and shield. I pressed the attack as hard as I could, knowing I’d have only a few seconds before—

Deborah froze for a moment, and I lowered my stance to Mistwalk. But she didn’t use her instant-kill. Instead, her sword and shield both slammed toward my face, and I had to parry the blade and take the shield-strike.

Bone crunched. My left eye’s vision blurred, then blackened, and my head rang like a bell. I barely got Nimbus Edge up to parry her next blow, and had to use Mistform to dodge the one after that. I barely made it, pushing through the agony as best I could.

“Got you good, didn’t I?” she asked as the blows rained down. I didn’t respond. Everything felt blurry; I’d definitely been concussed, and even though Stamina poured into the broken jaw and eye, my healing was too slow. I needed distance—needed time to recover.

Storm Dance threw me across the gigantic room, a full hundred yards. I breathed once as the Stamina dulled my pain and blinked tears out of my good eye. Deborah was already crossing the distance, in a full sprint that all but shook the floor. I spat blood onto the brass floor and braced myself for impact.

◄▼►

As I struggled to avoid Deborah’s blows and blinked blood out of my good eye, the battle trance slowly tightened up. The fight wasn’t a proper one. Not really. Both of us were fighting at well below our full potential—I was out of Mana and low on Stamina, and she’d already burned a ton of her resources on her fight with Angelo Lawrence.

I couldn’t believe she’d killed him. It seemed impossible; he couldn’t die. He was the strongest delver in Phoenix, and he was never without an escort to keep him safe from threats like her. And yet…

All his usual allies had been with my team, or were Deborah Callahan. It was possible that she’d pinned him down by himself, and if that was the case, it was also possible that she’d managed to eke out a win. The suit jacket was definitely his.

I blinked again, forcing my brain to refocus on the fight. A sword-blow ripped across the Stormsteel breastplate; the maelstrom tore at Deborah’s sword ineffectually. She was fast. I had to remember that she wasn’t a tank—she was a striker/spellblade in heavy armor.

My feet backpedaled. The motion felt clumsy, but I dragged her away from Sarah and Nathan. When that fire egg hatched, they’d be targets again. I couldn’t let that influence the battle.

Blows rained back and forth. I checked my resources as we disengaged, both breathing hard.

“It didn’t have to be like this,” Deborah said. “You could have stopped it all by accepting my offer.”

“The one in the apartment lobby? No, I couldn’t have.” I stayed in Mistwalk Forms. The moment I lowered my guard, she’d launch into another instant-kill attack, and I couldn’t lose like that. As I stepped back behind the scaffolding, I kept talking. “I’d already made promises. People were relying on me. If it had just been about me…”

Deborah followed me, and I backpedaled again, trying to focus on my footwork. Distance was time in a fight, and as long as I kept her at a good distance from both Sarah and me, I had the advantage—sort of. “You should have talked it out with me. I could have made those promises go away for you.”

“No. You’re a monster, Deborah. I knew it then, and I know it now. Most monsters exist for one reason.”

“I know, I know. To kill and kill until there’s nothing left to kill. I’ve seen the propaganda, too. But you and me? We know differently, don’t we? Sometimes, you have to talk it over with more powerful monsters. That’s what you should have done.”

My skull clicked painfully. I squeezed my eyes shut, and when I opened them, half of my vision was in black and white—but I had both eyes back.

I launched right into the attack again, letting the battle trance take over in place of my concussed brain. Thunderbolt stance. Rain-Soaked Blade. This time, the blow punched through Deborah’s shield—and shield arm. She hissed in pain as the wound cauterized, mixing molten brass with muscle. I spun to dodge her counter. It clipped my shoulder and stopped my spin, but didn’t break through the pauldron.

We kept fighting. Blades spun, lightning crashed, and wounds opened on both of our bodies. My Stamina ticked down painfully low; I felt myself slowing down, but couldn’t disengage. Instead, I pressed the attack, forcing Deborah to dodge around towering scaffolding and duck under huge, suspended forging tools. The massive room stank of ozone, copper, and sweat.

And that’s when I made a mistake.

I hadn’t been keeping track of Deborah’s Mana, and this time, when she froze, I wasn’t ready to switch stances and dodge. I panicked; Thunderbolt Forms had nothing to manage Deborah’s instant-kill, and the Stormsteel armor couldn’t take that hit. It might not kill me. I might survive. But the fight had been balanced so far; if she landed the blow, I wouldn’t recover.

My eyes closed.

◄▼►

Yreanne: Guardians hacked!

Yreanne: Wanna know how I did it?

User295: Not really.

Yreanne: Shut up.

Jessie stared at her computer screen, grinning. She’d been waiting for hours. The job was starting to look like a failure, and whatever the Guardians were up to in their triangle of green farmland, she’d all but resigned herself to not knowing about it. But, somehow, Yreanne had done it.

Her friends were good. Really good.

User295: I mean, you probably just slipped a Trojan in through someone’s weak security on a smartphone or something, right?

Yreanne: No. It was way more complicated than that. The Guardians have air-gapped security systems and wired connections within their facilities.

User295: So you didn’t use a Trojan?

Yreanne: Of course I used a Trojan. Who do you think you’re talking to? But that’s not all I did. I had to remove the air-gap somehow, and I—

User295: Don’t care. What’d you find out?

J-Dawg: Rude, User295. Very rude. But also, yeah, I need to know what you found out. Tell me all about the technique later so I can replicate, but I’m pressed for time.

Yreanne: Betrayed. Absolutely betrayed.

J-Dawg: Yreanne, please.

Yreanne: File Attached: Guardian Comms1.jpg; File Attached: Guardian Comms2.jpg; File Attached: Guardian Comms3.jpg.

Yreanne: Make a clean copy of these before you save them outside of your quarantine. I think I got all their security, but purges aren’t always 100% clean, and they had so many layers of defense.

J-Dawg: Thank you.

User295: Impressive.

Yreanne: So you admit I’m better than you?

User295: No one’s better than me.

As Jessie shut down the chat window and made her clean copies, then jammed them through her own cleaning protocols before letting them out of her computer’s second-order quarantine program, she couldn’t help but crack her knuckles dramatically. She sat in the Desert Wind’s kitchen, on a stool, with her wheelchair nearby in case she needed to go somewhere. But her mind was fully in digital space.

And the implications of the three screenshots Yreanne had sent were clear.

There were two of them.

First, Yreanne had found a lot more than she’d posted, and she knew that what she had was worth way more than Jessie had paid. Friends or not, the kind of work her hacker friend had done on the timetable she’d done it on was high-skill. User295 couldn’t have done it any better, and he was—supposedly—the best. Jessie couldn’t have done it at all.

And second, it was worth more than Jessie had paid.

These messages weren’t from Guildmaster Vern Kellen, like Jessie had expected. They were from his second-in-command. And they weren’t about the guild’s maneuvers. They were about an unnamed second party, referred to only as ‘she.’ And they implied that ‘she,’ whoever she was, had a plan that’d push the Guardians into power in Phoenix as long as they followed her lead.

Jessie groaned and tabbed over to the Desert Wind Guild’s bank account. Yreanne had her right where she wanted her—incredibly curious and completely reliant on the hacker’s skills.