Chapter 11: Side: Greg

It’s calm. There are even conversations here and there, interspersed by laughter as everyone cleans up after the battle. I look back down, the bloody corpse of a boar half bereft its hide. Rivulets of blood trickle slowly from open wounds and its gaping snout.

The sight disgusts me. I stand and walk away.

Nobody asks where I’m going.

Nobody even glances at me.

It’s as if I don’t exist as I leave the clearing.

As soon as I step past the first tree, I’m in another place.

The office. As if everything from the last month was just a dream, a normal day. I have reports to complete, files to look over.

I sit down and begin work.

But the papers are signed, the reports submitted.

A hint of confusion enters my mind. I’d just started, hadn’t I? Why was it done already?

Maybe, maybe I just forgot I’d already done it. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds right.

My vision hazes. What’s wrong with me? I blink hard, but it makes no difference. Maybe my glasses… Where are my glasses?

In a daze, I move over to Phil’s cubicle. Maybe he knows where they are.

As I am about to enter, I feel myself paralysed. What is this? Fear, why is it fear? Why am I so afraid, I, I don’t understand, it’s Phil, there’s nothing to fear, why am I so afraid?

I take the last step, and my vision clears abruptly.

I don’t remember when it began, but there is a soft creaking sound.

The office chair in his cubicle is slowly spinning around, creaking as it goes. Upon it is seated a pair of legs. Only a pair of legs.

Bare flesh faces the backrest, spilling streams of scarlet and dying chair and floor red with pools of blood.

Then, the whole floor gets covered in blood, a thick layer of it.

The chair spins a half-revolution, giving me a frontal view.

No, no no, please no…

His entire torso is gone, just… gone.

On the legs lay a small cat curled up, licking the blood off. But it keeps spilling, and flowing, and spurting out, causing the liquid to get higher and higher.

The cat pauses its demented grooming, looking at me. It disappears.

And I wake up.

Sitting up, I rub at my eyes. They weren’t bleary from the sleep, but tired and bloodshot. I feel them straining to take in light that doesn’t exist. It’s still pitch black, despite the small windows on the far wall. It is still night.

Since that day, I have trouble getting to sleep, instead of trouble waking up. The food is tasteless. Well, more than, it… al…

Humour seems dull.

Life, seems dull.

I know I won’t be able to get back to sleep, so I stand up, and dress myself. My face is stiff as I leave the room, closing the door behind me. In the darkness, I navigate through the stone halls and out the front doors. The guards there look at me but say nothing.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this, and it won’t be the last.

I get to the outer wall, and turn to move along it. My limbs move, my heartbeat accelerating as I run faster.

And faster.

And faster still.

My hands cut through the air as they pump back and forth like pistons in a well-oiled machine. With every step, I dig my feet into the packed dirt, pushing off with all the strength I can muster.

Faster.

If this were a few days ago, I would still be marvelling at the lack of flab lining my midriff for the first time in over a decade. Now, I don’t want to think about anything.

Just move faster.

My body is hunched over to reduced air resistance. Palms straight, like blades.

Step after step. Breath after breath, inhaling and exhaling as rapidly as my feet pound against the ground.

A wall looms ahead.

Changing the direction of my feet to face the wall, I push off with both feet, rocketing towards that hard surface.

Slightly shifting my body in the air, I impact feet first, bending my knees to neutralize the force surging through me.

Snapping my legs straight again, I push off of the wall.

My trajectory still intersects with the wall ahead of me.

With a somewhat awkward movement, I stretch out a leg to kick off that wall.

My airtime is gone, and I land with a slight stumble, but my momentum is now in a direction parallel to the wall.

Again. Faster.

Until I’m fast enough to overtake that monster.

A cold tremor shakes my body. My legs seize, sending me crashing to the ground.

Due to my speed, I scrape and tumble along the ground for a couple metres, opening gashes along my legs, arms and back.

Trembling, I turn myself over, flopping onto my back. I sit up, looking at my stinging palms as blood begins to well out of the wounds.

Tugging strands of mana out from within me, I turn them to holy mana and sink them into my various wounds, watching as new skin grows to cover the wounds.

I can heal this, but I couldn’t heal him.

My talent lies in lightning magic, not holy magic.

It’s too late to heal him. He’s gone.

But…

I can still avenge him.

And if I’m gonna kill that monster, I’ll have to be faster than it. And be able to see that speed.

Lightning… lightning is fast. But I’m not lightning. I only wield it.

Channelling it through my body? Ridiculous. It’d be more likely to kill me than make me faster.

But maybe wind can. My affinity to it is a bit lower, but still pretty good. If I could make the air part in front of me, that would eliminate most of the air resistance. But it could also reduce the amount of air I can breathe. Perhaps a tailwind would work. If I can somehow make the magic parting the air in front of me to let air pass through in the other direction, that would lessen air resistance and make me be able to breathe at the same time, right?

But wait, you can’t breathe in wind magic, so making a magic tailwind to let me breathe wouldn’t work. Damn. I suppose I’ll have to exclude my head from both magics to allow myself to breathe.

Would that cause a bit of whiplash? Maybe… But… that might not be too hard to rectify! If I can just get a piece of metal that runs up the back of my neck to keep it straight, that should work, right? It could be secured around my forehead. If there’s a lot of padding, it won’t hurt too much.

I flinch as I come back to reality. Think later, now: run!

Stretching forwards to put my hands on the ground, I put my feet on the ground behind me, and kick off again.

I’m still dripping sweat from my earlier sprint, breathing heavily with aching muscles, but I push on regardless.

I push off with my left foot, using the painful burn of the various muscles I’m straining as fuel to push even harder.

As my left leg moves forwards, my right foot meets the ground, and strains against it to push me further, faster.

As my right leg moved forwards, my left…

As my left…

I pump my limbs, terror forgotten.

I am only able to do a lap and a half sprinting before my legs give out. I push myself onto my back and lay there, unseeing, until the first rays of light peek over the horizon.

Then, getting up, I move my aching limbs to a nearby water barrel. I take a deep drink, then take a moment to look at my reflection.

My normally wild, bushy red hair has dried to the surface of my head over the course of my rest, making me look like I’m wearing some sort of red helmet. My face is caked in a mixture of dust and sweat, bits flaking off as I rub at it. I look down at the barrel again, and a pair of green eyes stare back at me, not shifting or moving at all, completely and absolutely still.

Turning away, I start running again. A slower pace, no doubt, but still torturous to my overworked legs.

I traipse on, body clad in sweat and dust.

As I stumble my way through my third lap, I’m joined by Boris. He’s a good guy, but we hadn’t had much in common, before… This.

I’m amazed by how much weight he’s lost. He’d confided a while ago that he had tried to exercise and slim down once before this, but he’d taken the wrong advice. He said he’d been told that if he gave himself a little ‘treat’ after every period of exercise, it would make him more motivated. Only problem was, after he’d had one, there were another eleven in the same box, and he kept slipping up.

He’d joked it was much easier now that he had no access to sugary foods.

Now though… we don’t joke. We don’t even say a word to each other, and he soon outstrips my exhausted self with little more than a glance in my direction.

I sit in magic class, my limbs limp – but my mind in overdrive.

Lightning flashes around me, crackling and highly lethal. Despite this, I make it writhe around my body like a twisting snake of electricity.

That’s what lightning is, after all. Electric discharge. Normally the charge has to build up to such a point that it can overcome the resistance of air, but here, mana is a direct conduit. It IS the lightning. Within the mana, there was no resistance.

Man, the scientists back home would go crazy over this stuff. Something that’s superconductive at any temperature? Science would rocket forwards a decade or two, I bet.

Of course, that doesn’t mean much here. What can you do with electricity, but no electrical devices? Nothing beneficial to humanity at least.

The lightning disperses into nothingness with a crackle and a faint smell of ozone.

Ozone is harmful to the body, right? Would it be viable to use that as an attack? Probably not, I don’t know how much lightning I’d need to create to produce lethal or damaging levels of ozone.

My clothing rustle as a breeze moves past. We are indoors, so this would be very strange – were there not magic in this world. I look at my palm and send the wind there, spinning. Outlined in particles of dust is a miniature tornado. This isn’t even near viable as an attack.

Disregarding the small size, it isn’t an actual tornado. Rather than the spinning air currents being formed by cold air and warm air twisting around, it’s just spinning air.

To make a bigger one, I’d need an obscene amount of mana. Creating blades of air? You’re joking, right? Air isn’t sharp! It’s bloody air! To make something get cut by air, it needs to be going at obscene speeds. If I could send air mana at such speeds, why wouldn’t I just send a chunk of earth or a blade of ice? You know, things that have significant mass.

And things like that need less speed to do the same damage. Sure, if it’s air you can’t see it, but you can’t see pure ice easily either.

Ice…

Ice?

Wait, can’t I do something with ice?

Ice skating would make me go faster without much effort, right? As for laying down the ice where I’m going, that’s what magic formations are for, right? Only problem would be the skates themselves. Not just making them, but having to put them on before every combat would take time – time you don’t usually have.

But it’s a thought for the future.

For now, nothing I’ve thought up will help me at all… they need some piece of equipment and magic formations too complicated for me right now.

So, there’s only one thing I can do. Ask the captain how he got so fast.

As such I sit on my chair, and wait until the lesson is over. He isn’t talking about anything I can use anyway, so I stare into the distance as time passes away.

I walk around outside, looking for the captain.

I find him doing push ups as a man in full plate armour sits on his back. I waited until he is done.

“Forty… Eight! Forty… Nine! Fif…ty! Alright Frank, that’s enough.”

The armoured man gets off his back and walks away. Standing up, he wipes the sweat off his brow and notices me standing there.

“Hello Greg, it’s a bit early for training, isn’t it?”

“I wanted to know how you moved so fast back when you reprimanded Antonio”, I say.

He laughs. “I wondered when someone might ask. It has been a month, you know?”

His smile fades away, and he gets more serious.

“I’ll tell everyone in training today. It’s about time anyway. That aside… You were his friend, right?”

Not much I can say to that, so I just nod.

“Have you lost someone before?”

Again, I nod. He leads me to the wall, and we sit with our backs to it. I open my mouth and start to talk.

“It’s just different, you know? I’ve lost people, a couple friends, relatives… But it was to sickness, accidents, that sort of thing. I never had someone die so suddenly, so close to me, and in such a horrific way…”

He lets out a long sigh.

“It’s always like that. Doesn’t get easier, either. I’ve seen a lot of people die to beasts, monsters, men… But in the end, they joined the army knowing they could die. They made their peace with that possibility. But when I looked into your eyes back in that cave, I could see that none of you had.”

Unable to help himself, he gives a short chuckle.

“You looked like frightened rabbits, ready to bolt. I still wonder, sometimes, whether all this was the right idea. You’ve all got the power, the talent to do it, sure. But do you have the guts? I don’t think so. A month in, and you’re still greener than the salads my mother used to make!”

That sounds about right. We were just civilians until a month ago…

He continues, without the humorous tone he’d just had, “You should give it some thought… whether you really want to fight or not.”

I already have. Phil got me thinking about it when we’d just got here, and after the... events, a few days ago, I have decided what I want to do.

So I told him. “I’ll fight, if only to kill that cat. After that, we’ll see.”

“Good enough.” he says.

Then he gets up and points at the people trickling into the courtyard.

“It’s about time for training.”

We walk over, and the captain gathers everyone around. He starts speaking.

“Alright people, it’s high time I teach you something a bit more interesting than what you’ve done so far. Now, from what you’ve been taught so far, you know that people without elemental affinities can’t use magic.”

A few of us nod along.

“Well, that’s not strictly true. They can’t do anything fancy like the magi, but they can still manipulate pure mana. Pure mana, as you know, is used to power the formations in coins. Outside that, it isn’t much use. However, there is still one more use for it, although it isn’t really a spell. It’s called mana reinforcement.”

Phil was right, there is magic to reinforce the body. Damn, why did I have to go and think of Phil again?

“All you have to do to use it, is move a bit of mana from your mana heart, into your normal heart, and let it go. Now make sure you start with a small amount, it takes a long time for your body to get used to pumping mana through it.”

That easy? I move a trickle of mana a few centimetres across my chest to my heart, then just… let it go?

For a few seconds, nothing really seems to happen. After that, I feel slightly different, but I can’t tell what has changed.

The captain starts speaking again.

“Some of you may have noticed that you don’t feel any different. That’s mostly because the amount of mana you used was small, so the effect is small. But you are currently slightly faster, stronger, can fight longer and the world around you appears to slow down.”

The soldiers sparring against us weren’t even using this, were they? That means they’re even stronger than we thought.

“Now that you’re done standing around, draw your swords and get swinging!”

Back to torturing myself, then.

The sun slowly tracked its way across the sky, its movement ponderous, yet inexorable. My gaze is directed at it, and yet I do not see it, thinking of other things.

Of Phil, specifically. The memories are like fire. Warm, but painful.

I remember meeting him. Almost a decade ago, different job, different place to the one before all this happened. He didn’t talk much with the other employees. Not at all to me. Seemed like a bit of a shy guy at the time. At some point, I quit that job. The atmosphere there was stifling. I didn’t have much of an impression of him back then, so I forgot about him a short while later.

Imagine my surprise when the next month he shows up at my new workplace, a fellow employee. We shared a laugh about it, and chatted every now and again. It surprised me that he seemed comfortable with conversation, contrary to what I’d thought earlier. Still, we were at the level of acquaintances. I said goodbye to him a few years later. The atmosphere at that workplace was fine, but the workload was huge, and I felt myself aging a few days every day of work there.

The third time, I seriously wondered if he was stalking me. But he seemed seriously shocked to see me, and we shared another laugh about it. After that we chatted some more. He was quite obsessed with reading, to an almost strange degree. Whenever he wasn’t tapping away at the computer he was reading. I think I saw him take a novel with him when he went to the toilet a few times.

Lunch time? Who needs food? I’d rather read.

End of work? Let me finish this chapter first. A cliff-hanger!? I must read the next!

You just got to work in the morning? Hello, I’m reading.

Staff meeting? Don’t worry, I can multitask listening and reading.

Going out drinking with co-workers? What do I do, I finished my novel already? Oh well, I’ll have to start the next one early. *pulls out another book from bag*

It was starting to get scary at some point, so I staged a cleverly thought out intervention. I introduced him to light novels, web novels, and how to find them. How did this help? Well, you see, he had to use a device to read them, which produces light and is a lot more visible to disapproving managers.

It… was not a good idea. From light novels and their forums, he found anime, manga, and thus he became more consumed than before. Watching anime in one window, a novel in another, work in yet another… I have no clue why he wasn’t fired.

That craze lasted a fair while, then died down suddenly.

Yeah, he got into meditation.

Huh? One day he was staring at his screen, scrolling down one page rapidly, occasionally switching to another page to rapidly type, and the next he was just sitting there staring blankly at his screen. I remember going over to ask if anything’s up, and he looks like he’s just woken up, blinking eyes, confused look and everything. Then he says he was trying out meditation because it ‘sounded fun’.

Looking back, he was one crazy fella.

Then, when this all started, he just seemed to take it all in stride…

To be honest, I was jealous of how relaxed he was. There he was, laughing and excitedly joking with me about what was happening, and while I was instinctively responding to his comments, I was actually a nervous wreck. That day, I hit a new high score for blood pressure.

I brake myself out of my reverie as people around me start getting up. End of the lesson, then.

After I get myself some grub, I head back outside. The cold wind bites at my face. I get to running again, trying to tire myself to sleep.

It hasn’t worked so far.

I guide a bit of mana to my heart. If it lets me run for longer, more time will have passed, and I’ll be more tired, hopefully. I got somewhat used to activating it during practice earlier. As long as you channel a steady trickle in, it’ll keep going. My mana pool isn’t as obscene as Phil’s was, but it goes a fair way, and this is but a drop in the ocean.

The sun is dipping over the edge of the world by the time I collapse onto the ground.

I place my palms on the ground either side of me. My arms aren’t tired yet.

One… Two… Three…

My arms buckle under me. I use other muscles to twist myself onto my back. I start doing sit-ups.

It hurts to move my body, now. I get on my feet and move slowly towards the doors to the keep. The sky is black as pitch.

I fall into bed, body too exhausted to move.

And yet, it seems, not too exhausted to think.

My mind wanders through memories sharp as knives in an agonising eulogy.

I, an adult to over forty years, thus cry myself to sleep.