Page 31 of Cage of Starlight

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A quick operation, everyone says. A chance to stretch their legs.

Just a handful of Arlunian soldiers camped in the woods bordering the wide field and picturesque Arou Cliffs that hem in the cold ocean.

What meets them is anything but small. Fog and smoke explode around them when they push out from the tree line, blotting out the salty sea air.

Prentice saw none of this. Tory has no time to wonder how.

Chunks of dirt and cutting fragments of stone rain down. Tory surges forward, squinting into the billowing wall of white. It consumes the Westrian troops until Tory is alone inside it. The fog swallows sound. He knows only the hammering of his pulse and the heave of his breaths.

The CFR unit is limited by range of sight. If they can’t see what’s coming—

Tory doesn’t need his eyes. He reaches for nearby energies. Unlike during training, most of the projectiles out here are guided by Seeds and carry their signatures. He finds them.

Thousands of them.

A volley of arrows pierces the fog. Tory expands his awareness to the fringes of the field and takes the energy off the arrows, flinging it in the general direction it came from, but once he’s done his job, gravity works as well on the arrows as it does on anything else. They stop, arrested midair—and fall.

Top-heavy, too many plummet point-first. Screams tear the air.

Alone in the impenetrable fog, Tory hears but doesn’t see the deaths of Seeds like him. Young like him. Wanting to live like him.

Where are the Fielders with their forcefield dome to protect everyone? Where are the cocky Kinetics to lob projectiles at the enemy?

Someone stumbles into view, fog-dimmed and ghostly. Randall.

A shaky smile splits his freckled face. “Hey there!”

The moment of distraction nearly kills them both. Tory barely deflects a crushing wave of Seed energy before it barrels into them. “Pay attention!”

Randall laughs, half-hysterical.

Explosions swirl the fog, swallowing great gulps of it in rushes of flame. Screams pierce the air. There’s no energy to the fog, nothing Tory can wrap his mind around and move . Every man trapped in it dies alone. Tory didn’t train for this.

A few brave Healers duck low over the ground to reach the wounded just like in training—except none of this is like it was in training. A breath of peace, then—

Randall’s voice, from his left, high with terror. “Niela? Niela, run!”

An explosion rocks the ground, spraying Tory again with dirt and stone.

It’s wet. Tory swipes three fingers over his face and pulls them away. In the eerie, flat fog-light, the blood that turns earth to mud is impossibly red.

He steps on Randall before he notices him. He’s strewn across the ground, chest a mess of broken flesh. His eyelids flicker, red-slick mouth gaping wide.

The fog rushes away as the Fielders finally establish a barrier (weakened; one of the attacks must have thinned their numbers), but it’s too late.

They worked like a machine in maneuvers, CFRs dropping projectiles while the Fielders established their barrier in record time, every time.

They were so confident on a field where a balloon to the chest meant a bruise and Randall smiled on his way to the infirmary every day.

“Randall?” Niela’s cry from beyond the wall of fog is wrenching.

Tory’s breath clogs in his throat. He falls to hands and knees as the sword corps rush to the front to take their positions and the CFR Seeds retreat to do their work at the periphery.

Now that the shields are up, the rest of the Healers scramble in to whisk away the injured, heal them, and return them to the fight.

Niela finds them then.

Randall’s name tears from her throat as she stumbles to her knees. She doesn’t spare Tory a glance, pressing her hands to the meaty mess of her boyfriend’s chest, and Tory staggers back. Niela curses through her teeth. Randall’s unblinking eyes stay fixed on the sky.

“No . Damnit, Randall, no ,” Niela is saying, and she leans down to give him breath, but the air just bubbles from his lacerated lungs.

Tory coughs on an exhale but manages to keep from gagging. When he looks up, the fog is thin enough to reveal a group of Fielders and fighters lobbing attacks at nothing, their practiced formation in tatters.

In his peripheral vision, there’s Niela, hazy in the fog and soaked yet again with someone else’s blood, giving herself away for a corpse. She grabs Randall’s face, squeezing at his chin like he might move his lax, wide-open mouth for her.

Tory screams for her to run, or maybe he just thinks it. She’s an idiot. He’s gone already. Tory will be, too, if he doesn’t focus. He’s standing here stock-still and covered in mud and Randall’s blood, making a target of himself.

He tears his eyes from them and turns. Arlunian soldiers in loose shirts saunter from the tree line in pairs. Tory understands, now, why they wear no armor. They don’t need it.

A small splinter group. No more than ten , the report asserted.

There are ten at the front of the line and more behind them than he can count.

Seeds, all of them. Tory has learned, with practice, to pick out the faint, electric presence of Seed energy.

There’s nothing faint about these, each one a lightning storm.

Their attacks rock the forcefield, splintering it with glowing cracks the trembling Fielders hurry to seal. They won’t survive this for long.

He’ll die here. They’ll all die.

Either he’s shaking or the earth is. Tory reaches for the next wave of attacks—massive, overwhelming—and peels off the Seed energy and kinetic energy before they can hit the shields.

He gives the entire unit a moment’s reprieve.

They regroup, but the CFR unit is still hindered by the fog, and Tory won’t be able to deflect all the attacks forever without the support of his unit.

He diverts everything he can, but he’s only one pair of hands, and carrying the buzzing energy of hundreds—thousands—of projectiles is like lifting a boulder twice his size.

Sweat stings his eyes. His vision swims.

The weakened forcefield bursts when he fails to fully deflect the next volley of attacks. The unit scatters. Tory ducks and runs zig-zag, weaving in and out of smoke.

This isn’t how he wants to go. Not like this. Not today. He barely knows himself, is only now learning to speak the words he used to swallow. Their own weapons fly back at them, amplified. Seed-enhanced explosives carve craters in the earth.

Tory swallows hard as the trembling under his feet increases.

The earth really is shaking.

Something rolls over the hill—or rises from it—silhouetted black in the fog. No, three of them.

Legion . Every horror story Tory has heard batters around in his skull.

The one nearest him unrolls from its sphere shape and grows, piercing the ground with vines like spindly, spidery legs, and bursts upward, rising into the sky.

At its center, the vines gather into a thorax-like platform.

A Seed crouches on the platform, hand clasped around a stellite crystal glowing yellow-white while two other Seeds, beside him, attack the fleeing Westrian soldiers with flames from above.

The other two Legion units take the form of spheres—writhing and ever-shifting.

They share the shape of the mechanized things on the training field, but they’re so much worse.

They roll over the ground at impossible speeds, vines disentangling from the sphere to spear anyone who gets too close.

At this rate, they’ll drive the fleeing Seeds over the cliffs.

A wave of energy nearly crushes Tory. He crashes to his knees in blood-soaked mud.

Enough of this.

Tory forces himself to his feet and runs for the spidery Legion unit. He grabs one of the braided vines at the base and throws all his energy and anger and desperation into it.

Like they did in the lab, the vines break from their curated shape.

They unwind, tear apart, wrench away. The Arlunian Seeds tumble from the crumbling platform and land on the ground with awful cracks.

The vines drive into the earth on either side of Tory like a doorway of bone. His vision fades, ears ringing.

Another noise fades in, discordant, distant but getting closer. “Arknett, damn it!”

Sena.

Yesterday’s guilt is nothing in the face of his relief. Sena has a terminal case of competence. Tory could do with a dose of that right now.

“Hey, I—”

Sena’s annoyed face morphs into terror. “In front of you!”

He throws the energy from an incoming projectile, body aching with the effort.

He has a fraction of a second to realize his mistake as a shell touches down, clattering once, twice on the springy grass.

It’s not a cannon ball or a balloon. It won’t just lie there.

The pressure from the explosion hits him before he registers the sound. A gasp sears his lungs with white-hot air.

He needs to take the energy and redirect it, preferably toward one of the Legion units, but it’s useless; he’s only practiced with balloons.

He grasps for the swelling explosion, but it expands beyond his control.

It’s too large, too strong, bleeding a reckless, wild energy. The force of it drives him back and up.

They’ve modified the shell, too.

Of course they have.

Sena’s panicked voice rises above the roaring in his ears. “Tory, stop! Behind you!”

If he can just get his hands on this, if he can contain and throw it—

Arms lash across his back, wrapping around his shoulders, and the energy is out of his hands, thrown only a fraction as far as he wanted. The force of the explosion catapults him—them?—backward.

He expects to hit the ground and get pummeled by the blast, but he keeps moving—up and over and down, down, down. The fall lasts a few seconds, long enough for him to see jagged rocks and hear the lash of salty waves.

A flash of recognition, a lurch of fear. He doesn’t even have time to breathe.

The rest comes in fragments.

A crash as they hit the water, softer than he thought it would be.

Cold, sharp enough to shock the breath from him.

Fire in his nose and mouth when he reflexively inhales.

Then, blessedly, nothing at all.