“We’re under attack!” Calvin shouted, pointing at the mercenaries dressed like sand pirates as they flooded down the mountain, some twelve hundred of them, kicking up dust as they sprinted at break-neck speeds down the near vertical cliff-face, led by Grant sporting a couple fancy new swords.

I didn’t give him the budget for that. Calvin scowled.

Decent swords were moderately expensive, but fantastic ones, made by men with Skills, those cost almost as much as the mercenaries did.

Calvin ran over to the alarm bell and started ringing it with all the panic he could muster. The Storm Stretch mercenaries ran up onto the walls and gawked at the approaching army.

It was bad, but it wasn’t impossible. They had maybe a hundred and fifty men remaining in the fort, but they also had walls, and over a thousand men just a few minutes away. If they could keep the enemy off the wall long enough, their friendlies would see the attack and come wipe out the pirates at the rear of the fortress.

At least, that’s what they thought.

Calvin stayed at the front of the fort, ringing the alarm bell wildly as the majority of the defenders amassed at the back wall, facing down in the incoming army.

“Activate defenses!” one of the sergeants shouted above the din, and the Uleisan army rippled as various different abilities were triggered, making their armor shinier, their bodies, bulkier, or more evasive.

There were porters busily hauling boxes of glass slingshots and huge cases of glass bolts, getting the men ready to rain death down on the approaching force.

“What the hell are you doing?” A nearby sergeant clapped his hand on Calvin’s shoulder. “We know there’s an attack already! Get off the damn bell, grab a weapon and get on the line!”

The sergeant roughly shoved a glass sword into Calvin’s hand and bid him face outward, toward the desert.

People needed to watch the front, too. No telling if this might be a distraction.

Calvin peeked over his shoulder, toward the rear, where the action was happening. Mercenaries were beginning to make it to the base of the wall, and glass bolts were whizzing down from the top of the wall.

Here I am, on the top of a wall again, and it’s not even mine. Well, I mean, it’s gonna be mine.

Modern warfare had a lot of standing on walls.

Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about shaped Charges. All I remember about them is that they use some kind of inverted cone inside a funnel, and a metal to be shot out of it. It can literally cut through anything. We can practice in Shadow-boxing.

“Eyes forward, shitbird!” The sergeant shouted, cuffing Calvin over the head, sending a shooting pain up through his scalp and into his ear. “Keep your eyes where I tell you to put the, you slack-jawed moron.”

You DARE!

Calvin stabbed him in the face, the glass blade scraping on the skull for a bit before it found purchase, sinking into the sergeant’s eye socket.

The sergeant collapsed in a shuddering pile of meat before he shit himself.

This did not go unnoticed by Calvin’s fellow wall-standers, who faced him with uncomprehending, open mouths a moment before they began to rush forward, blades raised.

I think I’ve got a problem.

With the people trying to kill you or your lack of self-control?

Calvin stumbled backward as the first man loomed toward him, putting on a show of knock-kneed fright.

Presently, both.

When Calvin felt the edge of the railing behind him, he used it to rebound forward, reversing direction and attitude violently, catching the man by surprise and cutting off his nose before kicking him in the crotch.

The other two rushed toward him, ignoring their wounded friend to tag-team Calvin.

I mean, I just put everyone working with Orson on Orson’s side, and everyone working on my side on my side, and assigned equal amounts of culpability to all of them. Killing the randos who mop the floors at night sounded like a great idea because they were all The Bad Guys.

Yeah, well, welcome to nuance.

I Hate Nuance. Someone acts like they’re better than me, I just wanna kill ‘em. Calvin thought as he scampered backward, trying to lure them into a one on one.

One person can’t fight two people at once, Karen used to say. If you ever see someone successfully fighting more than one person at a time, that is actually a series of extremely fast one-on-ones. You should never, ever try to fight two people at once if you don’t have to.

Taking Karen’s advice, Calvin retreated back to the gatehouse, the bastards coming at him nearly in lockstep. Apparently they heard the same advice.

Most teenagers feel that way. Actually killing people is the big difference here.

One lunged forward to stab him, while the other leaned forward, with a readied blade, aiming to take advantage of his block.

Beli Ma.

Calvin looped Bent in front of his left palm, he could get the field about six inches away from his skin now, rather than four. The extra two inches made a huge difference when it came to the number of lost fingers.

He dragged the lunging one’s blade out of the way and the readied one swung, having decided to just go for Calvin’s head.

Calvin ducked and put the slightly curved blade at an angle, allowing the enemy’s to sail over his head and lodge itself into the side of the gatehouse.

Calvin was pulling the blade downward to take out the lunging one, when the man changed from a lunge to a tackle, taking advantage of Calvin’s poor stance and raised sword.

The man’s shoulder hit Calvin in the pit of the stomach and propelled him backward, deeper into the gatehouse than he’d intended to go.

Calvin’s shoe slipped into something, and his back impacted against wall.

Then Calvin heard a hissing pop as his skin melted against the gearbox and the faintly glowing hole in the floor.

The pain caused him to mindlessly buck, shoving the man away from him and staggering away from the ruined mechanism.

He wanted to lie there and moan for a few days, but the other one yanked his sword out of the wall and brought it down toward Calvin’s crawling form like an excutioner’s blade.

Calvin rolled, and got about halfway before the pain in his back stole his breath and arrested him halfway.

The man tore his sword out of the floor, where it had missed by inches and brought it down again, mindlessly stabbing down at his cornered opponent.

The Bent emitted from his left hand caught the blade and pulled it to his right, earning a nasty nick on the side of his palm in the process.

Beli-Ma has reached level 7! 35% Correction

The man seemed surprised when Calvin used the opportunity to stab him in the stomach.

The soldier stumbled away, holding his guts inside himself as his friend got to his knees, orienting on Calvin.

“If you leave now,” Calvin said, his left hand pumping blood onto the bannister as he dragged himself to his feet, holding the blood-soaked piece of worked glass in front of him. “I won’t have to kill you. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

The mercenary’s eyes narrowed, and he lunged forward, aiming for a slash. Calvin blocked, but without the ability to slide out of the way, it was a pure contest of strength. The mercenary leaned into the blow, forcing Calvin’s wrist to take more than it was ever meant to, sandwiching Calvin’s blade up against his body.

This is not good.

The position Calvin was in was the one the guy who was about to die was usually in. He needed a defence

Sure enough, the mercenary braced himself, used his left hand to trap Calvin’s sword-arm in place, then hauled back with his blade, aiming to cleave up into the young wizard’s chest.

Really hope this works, Calvin thought, focusing his attention on his chest, aiming to sprout the stored blade sideways.

There was the crunch of shattering glass as the man’s blade impacted against the Jerrytanium knife, a bit of extra sting against the background of mind-numbing pain as a few pieces carried their momentum and embedded themselves in Calvin’s skin, but the blade stopped.

Calvin didn’t give them man time to react, using his left hand to gouge the soldier’s eyes, forcing him to flinch backward.

His sword-arm was still trapped in the man’s grip, so he reabsorbed the knife sticking out of his ribs, and jutted it out of his left fist, catching the recoiling mercenary in the face with a blade-enhanced punch.

Knife-Work has reached Level 10! 50% correction

+1 Kinesthetics

Please choose and ability or-

The man slumped to the side, directly on top of Calvin’s left leg, which sported burns from ankle to lower back from stumbling into the hole the Heat-Powder had carved.

Calvin screamed and kicked the corpse off with his good leg, hyperventilating as the adrenaline flooded his system, forcing the pain to the back of his mind, if only long enough to keep him alive.

Just call it thermite, man.

My world, my rules, Calvin thought, dragging himself to his feet under the watchful eyes of the guy holding in his own guts and the one with both hands clasped over his nose.

I can’t believe some people prefer this kind of fighting. I sustained major damage, could have died, just to take out three guys. Four if you include the sergeant.

Calvin could take out several hundred people with a single point of Bent.

So why didn’t you?

Three guys seemed like something I could handle without wasting a whole point. The plan is pretty demanding, Bent-wise.

Calvin tossed aside his sword, fishing through his belts with his good hand. He pulled out the bottle of yellow-brown crystals in its own satchel, and the vial of God’s Fire, holding the two of them in one hand.

Mass Multi Shaping.

13/15 Bent remaining.

He selected a chunk of the biggest crystal, then a tiny dollop of god’s fire, along with a couple sharp selections of the vial’s steel container, then arranged them in front of the defenders and the half dozen soldiers sprinting towards him from other direction.

Calvin made a palm-sized, dense cluster of steel pieces, with a fist-sized cylinder of frozen Boom-Juice behind them, with a pinkie-sized bit of God’s fire at the very back to give it the violent shock it needed

The Bent flew out of his body, and a fraction of a second, there was another sharp crack, and nearly every single defender was either killed outright by the shrapnel or thrown over the edge of the wall as the shockwave slammed into their armor, delivering them into the hands of Calvin’s mercenaries.

Calvin limped forward, kicking the noseless mercenary in the face with his good foot on the way by.

Public Relations, Calvin thought as he watched his mercenaries swarm up the walls, unhindered by the dead men atop the walls. According to the girls you can’t just kill everyone who doesn’t agree with you.

This was Calvin’s compromise with them. The way he wanted to take care of things. Rather than killing all of Orson’s business associates and prompt the public to hate him, he would humiliate the old man, steal his Cobalts, prompting a unified retaliatory attack on the fortress from the rest of Uleis with an army numbering in the tens of thousands. Maybe more.

Just like back home. Definitely going to have a place to crap this time.

Now that the fighting was mostly done, Calvin could take a moment to rest before Grant found him.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Calvin said as Noseless reached for his sword. “I could kill you without moving a finger. Your best bet is waiting for ransom, or at least indenture.”

Noseless considered this for a while before pushing his sword off the edge of the wall, taking off his hat and using it to stem the flow of blood, leaning against the wall.

In the distance, the mercenary he’d stabbed in the gut was also taking it easy, waiting for the outcome of the battle.

Calvin fished out one of his tools for the upcoming war: it was an intricate toy produced by a master glass worker, it had twelve five-sided faces, and each one sported a strange, segmented star that had been painted a different color.

The entire thing could spin on any of those twelve axis, allowing the colors of the star segments to get all jumbled up. The game was to get them all the same color again.

Elliot called it a Rubik’s cube, but it obviously wasn’t a cube, just another one of Calvin’s passenger’s weird name for things.

The intricate glass toy was used by rich merchants and the aristocracy of Uleis to raise their Mind during breaks as they tried to deconstruct the pattern behind it.

As far as avoiding finger-pointing was concerned, Calvin had made sure that not a single Gadveran from his unit could be found here, while the mercenaries were dressed as pirates.

Matter of fact, the First Mujenan Volunteers were out in the city, generating goodwill via charity, cleaning up the city, helping old women cross the street, donating labor to local constructions and businesses…that sort of thing.

Look good with one hand, kill ruthlessly with the other.

Well, I don’t want to kill Orson yet. Gotta let him live so the other eleven Bad Guys have someone to blame for losing this place. Gods, I never would have thought of that.

Calvin glanced over his shoulder at the army sprinting toward them in the distance. They were just a little too far out to stop the ‘sand pirates’ from taking the Cobalt mine.

“That you, kid?” Grant asked, flying in and settling down on the wall beside him, peering at Calvin’s Uleisan disguise.

“Yeah, you got my uniform?” Calvin asked, glancing up.

“Sand pirate chic.” He said, reaching into a bag and tossing Calvin a couple towels.

“Where’s the rest?”

“One’s for your head, one’s for your junk,” Grant said, pointing up and down.

“You suck.”

Here’s hoping One of the Guys grants me some semblance of Uleisan sun-resistance.

Calvin tried to take of his pants, but found his left leg refused to move without causing agonizing pain.

“Grant, I never thought I’d ask you this.”

“Eh?”

“I need you to take off my clothes.”