I raced toward them, shouting for attention. My cries were lost amid the screams and crashes of battle, unheard by my friends.
Someone else heard, though. An Augmenter peeled away from the fight with Ganyir and charged at me. I readied myself for another clash, but six feet away, the sand swallowed him.
I stared at the ground, watching for any sign of where his Hidden Burrow technique was taking him. Suddenly, there was a noise behind me, and I felt sand spray my back. I flung myself clear as a sword sliced through the air where my neck had been. I spun around, but the Augmenter was already sinking into the sand.
I could use some one-handed techniques, so I slung the Depthless Dream Trident back into place on my back. I stood in the center of an open patch of ground, circling slowly, watching for any sign of movement. That Augmenter could come from anywhere, but I couldn’t watch everywhere at once.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sand shift. I turned and raised my hand, just as the Augmenter shot up into view. His sword was already swinging, but I swayed back, and it hissed past an inch from my chest. Before the Augmenter could sink into the sand again, I fired a burst of superheated Untamed Torch at the ground. The sand turned to glass, and the Augmenter failed to vanish. I kept my hand raised, but this time, I produced a volley of Stinging Palm thorns. The wooden spikes flooded his face until he looked like a human pincushion. He dropped soundlessly to his death.
A battle cry made me look up from the grizzly remains. Targin was shouting at the top of his lungs as he jumped off the top of the pagoda.
As he dropped to the ground, a Sandstorm swept up below him. He flew on the sandy whirlwind while he swept his free hand in a diagonal arc through the air. Another Sandstorm appeared, and this one smashed Vesma and Kumi. The technique flung them to the ground as Vesma’s spear went flying and Kumi’s precious water poured out of the fallen bottle to darken the pale sand.
Targin landed between them with a look of triumph in his eyes. He glanced over at me with a smirk, and my blood ran cold as he raised his sword over Vesma’s neck.
Chapter Thirteen
Targin and I stood staring at each other. There was a mad gleam in his eyes, the look of a man who really was enjoying the destruction he had unleashed.
“Say goodbye to your pretty little friends, Swordslinger,” he said.
There was no way I could cross the ground to him before he brought his club down on Vesma’s head. My magic, on the other hand…
I flooded my mud channels with Vigor and allowed the magical energy to flow down through me, into the ground, and over to where Targin stood. I had to be precise since he was standing between my two fallen companions and I didn’t want to catch them in the blast. I narrowed my mind, shutting out all other thoughts and fears, so that my whole focus was on where the magic was going.
A Mud Geyser exploded from the ground beneath Targin’s feet. It hit with such concentrated force that it sent him flying. He hurtled back through the air and crashed through the window of a pagoda, shattering the shutters on his way through.
Mud rained down on Kumi and Vesma. They started to stir, hauling themselves slowly off the ground. That was all I needed to see; as long as they were safe, I could focus on my target.
I ran in through the door of the pagoda. Inside was a sand-swept hall that had once been the receiving room of someone relatively wealthy. Moth-eaten tapestries hung from the walls, and a large wooden chair, its back intricately carved with images of legendary beasts, stood at the end of the room.
In the middle of the room, Targin was pulling himself up out of the splintered remains of a once-sturdy table. He got to his feet, picked up his club, and faced me.
“So, you have a handful of dirty tricks,” Targin said. “Bastard, hybrid magic for a friend of the bastard, hybrid Wilds. You’re probably the sort of filthy swine who fucks trolls and ogres too, aren’t you? No sense of the superiority of your own kind.”
“Don’t give me that Straight Path bullshit,” I said. “All your talk of purity is just an excuse to justify your own power and keep yourselves on top. You’re parasites, sucking the blood from the rest of society. Murderers draining the lives of the innocent to make yourselves feel important.”
“Big words for someone who’s barely finished as a guild initiate. Let’s see what you’re really made of.”
Targin stamped his foot. A Ground Strike shot across the room, lifting sand and flagstones. I jumped over it, and it hit the far wall, shaking the timbers of the house. Dust fell from the rotting ceiling boards above us.
I charged at Targin with both weapons drawn. He brought his club up and blocked my first strike from the Sundered Heart, then countered a lunge from the Depthless Dream. He fought with the whole of the war club, not just its ridged steel head. The shaft became a staff that he used to block my blows while the spiked butt became a weapon for stabbing counter-attacks that forced me back and gave him the offensive edge.
The clang of weapons colliding filled the room until it made my ears ring. I launched a frantic attack from the right to batter down his defenses, but he twisted the whole fight around and brought the shaft of his weapon around between my legs, almost tripping me over.
Being able to attack from two directions at once gave me an edge, and
