The figures blocked the lane in a loose crescent, unhurried, patient in the way of people who think they already know how the next few minutes are going to go.
There were perhaps a dozen of them, men and women, and every one of them wore a mask of stark porcelain white covering their eyes.
Expressionless except for the faint curve painted at the mouth, more decoration than emotion.
Their coats and robes were cut from the same porcelain white cloth, with intricate diamond motifs and what looked to be literal crystals that caught the light in small, hard glints, like frost on a window.
They carried weapons, swords held in front, wands tucked into sleeves, a shield or two slung across the back of some, even a mace, they held all sorts of weapons.
All were set with small clusters of crystal, faceted and gleaming, embedded into the hilt, blade and rim as though the weapons themselves had been grown rather than forged.
‘An opportunity’ Cormac thought, without slowing his walk, one could even say it was even more enthusiastic now.
‘I respect the drip at least.
Someone in this organization has a very committed set designer.’
They were waiting for him.
That much was obvious in the way none of them moved to intercept, the way their masked faces simply tracked him closer, patient, confident, the specific confidence of people who believed the numbers already decided the victor.
So he smirked.
“Sir Knight,” he said, not breaking his stride, “would you care to hear a song?
One of mine, this time, not from my family.”
A knight, still draped in his borrowed bedsheet, brightened visibly.
Cormac was currently training his spirit vision and now able to see not just the ether body but also the astral projection.
So he looked at a knight’s astral projection, showing a mixture of red and yellow.
‘Excitement and happiness’
Then at the white-clad people blocking his way, green and blue with a bit of purple.
‘Calm, coldness, and in thought’
He tapped his thumb and middle finger twice in quick succession, turning his spirit vision off so it doesn’t distract him.
“Someone would be honoured,” a knight said, with the particular gravity of a man being offered a great and rare gift.
So Cormac sang.
“What color is the sky?
¡Ay, mi amor!
¡Ay, mi amor!
You tell me that it’s red ¡Ay, mi amor!
¡Ay, mi amor!”
It was a bright, tumbling little tune, quick and theatrical, the kind of song built for a skeleton dancing on a stage.
It came from a world Cormac was fairly sure did not exist here and never would, borrowed wholesale and utterly without shame from a life two identities ago.
“Where should I put my shoes?
¡Ay, mi amor!
¡Ay, mi amor!
You say, ‘Put them on your head!’ ¡Ay, mi amor!
¡Ay, mi amor!”
He gave it everything, a bit of flourish in the phrasing, a wink at nobody in particular, humming through the bits he’d half forgotten and inventing new ones just as confidently as the ones he remembered.
It came even more naturally now stemming from his Mexican roots from his mother.
‘Emperor Roselle stole every saying he could remember, what’s a little song compared to that?,’ he thought.
He kept singing as he closed the distance, dancing a bit with the song, and the white-clad figures shifted, uncertain now in a way they hadn’t been a moment ago, questioning whether they have the right person or just a random fool.
One of them stepped forward, palm raised, and spoke in a clear, formal voice clearly rehearsed for exactly this sort of occasion.
“By order of the St.
Pavlov Foundation, we have been sent to investigate reports of a man in unusual dress travelling in the company of a figure wrapped in bedsheets.”
Cormac did not stop singing.
“You make me un poco loco.
Un poquititito loco.
The way you keep me guessing.
I’m nodding, and I’m yessing.
I’ll count it as a blessing.
That I’m only un poco loco”
“We are authorized,” the figure continued, a note of strain creeping into the practiced calm.
“To extend an invitation for you to register as an Arcanist and join our ranks.”
Cormac did not stop walking, as if he could not hear the words said to his face.
He passed within arm’s reach of the man, still singing, still smiling, and kept going, and the whole loose crescent of white turned in place to watch him go, masks tilting toward each other in a silence that Cormac found, honestly, rather satisfying.
‘Three steps,’ he thought, counting them off with the specific relish of a man enjoying himself far more than the situation strictly warranted.
‘Two.’
“You do not have a choice in the matter!”
The voice cracked out behind him, sharp now, all pretense of polite invitation gone.
“You will register as an Arcanist, and you will come with us!”
“You are just un poco lo-”
Cormac stopped.
He stopped singing first, the tune cutting off mid-note, and then he stopped walking, his back still turned to the dozen white-masked figures now bristling behind him.
He rolled one shoulder, then the other.
He set his suitcase down, gently, as though it deserved better than being dropped.
He shrugged out of his overcoat, folding it once over his arm before laying it across the suitcase, still without turning around.
The fabric of his three-piece suit pulled taut across muscles that had not been there in quite this shape three days ago, clearly defined now even beneath tailored wool, his back articulating his muscles like a work of art
He loosened his collar, two fingers hooking the burgundy silk of his necktie and easing the knot half an inch looser, and when he spoke again his voice had gone strange, deeper, carrying a weight and a certainty that did not belong to a seventeen-year-old boy who had, until a few days ago, mostly worried about meat pies.
“I… am Nikador,” he said, “the Lance of Fury, the messenger of turmoil, and the embodiment of strife.”
He turned.
“Best me,” he said, sliding into a stance that owed nothing to any boxing match he’d ever half-watched on television, low and coiled and entirely, unnervingly correct.
“Or I will grant you an end befitting a warrior.”
He was already moving before the last word finished leaving his mouth.
The first strike landed before any of the twelve had fully processed that he’d closed the distance at all, a short, driving blow to the gut of the nearest figure.
Cormac felt, even mid-strike, the very deliberate ratio of force he allowed through his knuckles, a fraction of what the Warrior pathway strength in his arm was actually offering him.
It was still too much.
The man folded around the blow and left the ground entirely, sailing backward into the hedgerow with a crash of snapping branches, and did not get up.
‘Oops,’ Cormac thought, already pivoting to meet the next one closing on his flank.
‘Noted.
Even holding back that much, I could probably put a man through a wall.
Although I’m pretty sure I calculated it well, huh.’
The white-clad group, to their credit, did not scatter in confusion for more than a heartbeat.
They reformed with the crisp, practiced efficiency of people who had trained together for exactly this kind of chaos.
Two peeling off to flank left, a woman with a rapier and a small round shield stepping into the gap the fallen man had left, three more falling back a pace to rise wands crested with those same glimmering crystals, and the rest scattering around him.
A knight took off his bedsheet garment and moved to Cormac’s side without being asked.
“This is hardly a fair fight,” he said, and there was something almost gleeful buried under the old formal cadence of it, “for them.”
He drew his sword in the same motion that shed the bedsheet from his shoulders, and the blade came alive in his grip the way it clearly hadn’t in centuries, catching the last orange light of twilight along its edge as he stepped forward to meet the rapier woman.
She was good.
Cormac registered that immediately, in the sliver of attention he could spare her while five of his own attackers circled in.
Her footwork was clean, efficient, weight always over her center, the kind of trained precision that came from years of formal training rather than desperation.
She opened with a testing lunge that a knight turned aside with barely a shift of his wrist, the two blades ringing together once, twice, a conversation conducted entirely in steel.
However, her skill was still not enough to fight a knight to a standstill, even with her allies supporting her.
Yet, a knight did not press the advantage the way Cormac half expected.
Instead he let her recover, let her circle, drew her half a step wider than she wanted to go, and only then did his strike come, not to wound however.
Cormac noted that he used a flat strike with the broad of the blade against her sword arm that sent the rapier spinning from numbed fingers before she’d even finished registering that she’d overextended.
‘Not necessarily holding back, just no intentions of killing’
Cormac drove an elbow up into a man’s ribs, careful, so careful, to pull the strike a fraction shy of anything that would actually crack bone while still observing his comrade in arms.
‘He’s controlled.
He’s been doing this exact kind of control for a very long time.
I could learn a thing or two’
The mace-wielder staggered, wheezing, and Cormac finished him with a short hook to the jaw that folded his knees and threw his eyes to the back of his head.
Cormac caught the man’s body on the way down and lowered him with something almost like courtesy.
Two of the wand-bearers spoke their incantations at once, twin lances of crackling white-blue light hissed through the space he’d occupied a half second earlier.
Cormac was already moving, low, fast, closing the distance rather than retreating from it, because a man mid-incantation was a man who couldn’t easily dodge.
He reached the nearer of the two before the second bolt had even finished dissipating against the hedgerow behind him.
He caught the woman’s wrist before her second casting could form and turned his momentum into a clean throw that put her flat on her back in the dirt, breath knocked clean out of her, her wand skittering away into the grass.
Across the small churned battlefield of the lane, a knight was a blur of blue coat and gold thread, parrying a shield-bearer’s rush with the flat of his blade angled just so.
He let the man’s own weight carry him past and off balance, then following with a controlled pommel strike to the back of the helmet that put him down without ever drawing blood.
A second swordsman came at him from the side and a knight met the blow with a parry so precise it looked almost lazy.
Blade meeting blade at exactly the angle that cost the attacker the least amount of his own strength returned against him.
He turned it into a disarm in the same fluid motion, the man’s sword spinning free to bury itself point-first in the dirt three feet away.
‘He fights like he’s been doing this for centuries,’ Cormac thought, and found, distantly, that he believed it.
‘He probably has.
I guess that’s to be expected of a ghost knight’
The remaining wand-bearers, three of them left, backed toward the treeline, incantations building faster now, more desperate, protected by their comrades.
Cormac caught the shift in their formation, the particular way trained people arrange themselves when they’ve decided a fight is no longer winnable and are looking instead for the shape of a retreat.
He tried to stop them but was held up by those who chose to sacrifice themselves.
The three white-clad figures produced, from somewhere within their robes, small dark rectangles that Cormac’s eye insisted, absurdly, were floppy disks.
The kind of thing that belonged in a computer lab decades from now rather than a muddy lane in 1929.
The disks unfolded into a dim light, swallowing the three of them whole in the blink of an eye.
‘Arcane skills are so useful, I wish I could use them too,’ Cormac thought, watching the space where they’d been with the envy of a rich man wanting for more.
‘I’ll file that under: things to ask someone about, eventually, assuming I ever find an Arcanist willing to explain themselves.’
But nine remained, most of them already on the ground or on the trees.
It turned out, numbers were not enough.
By the time the last of them went down, a swordsman who’d made a valiant, entirely doomed final stand against both Cormac and a knight together, the lane looked like the aftermath of something considerably larger than what had actually happened.
White-robed bodies lay scattered across the grass and the churned dirt, some particularly unfortunate were hanging on branches, breathing, not so unbroken, but thoroughly beyond continuing the fight, and the evening had gone properly dark around them while nobody was watching it happen.
‘The experiment,’ Cormac thought, flexing his hand and feeling, deep under the skin, something shift and settle, warmer and more solid than it had been an hour ago.
‘Was worthwhile.’
He could feel it clearly now, the Warrior beyonder characteristic digesting further, his strength felt richer, and greater.
He noticed that the digestion of the three pathways were distinctly not separated into three individual portions the way he might have expected from being in three pathways at once.
It rose in as one continuous thing, one answer adding to three questions, although it seemed the threshold felt bigger.
‘So that’s how it works,’ he thought, turning the realization over carefully, the way he’d turned over everything else worth understanding since waking up in that forest.
He also gained an understanding of the acting method for the Warrior sequence.
‘Not “beat this many people” or “take this many hits.” It’s about the manner of the fighting itself.
Overwhelm cleanly.
Adapt to whatever’s thrown at you.
Be skillful in every move, every hit.’
He felt the digestion tick forward another fraction, small and satisfying, confirming the thought the way the click of a lock confirms the shape of the correct key, and allowed himself a moment of genuine, quiet pride in it.
‘Excellent.
Theory confirmed.
I really am getting the hang of this.’
Then he looked around at the nine unconscious, thoroughly defeated Foundation agents scattered across the lane, and the pride gave way to a more practical problem.
‘They were insufferable, certainly,’ he thought, nudging the nearest one with the toe of his oxford shoe and getting nothing but a low groan in response.
‘Pretentious.
Rude, even, showing up armed like that for what they called an invitation that I apparently don’t have the choice to decline.
But none of that quite adds up to deserving to die in a ditch.’
He stood there for a moment, turning the problem over, already halfway toward an answer he wasn’t quite sure the shape of yet, when a knight’s voice cut cheerfully across his thinking.
“A magnificent battle!” a knight declared, sheathing his sword with a flourish that seemed entirely unnecessary given there was no scabbard visible under the blue cloak he was wearing, if you could even call it wearing.
“A glorious victory, sir Nikador!
Someone hath not fought so well at another’s side in more years than Someone cares to count.
Someone shall call thee comrade, and gladly, and shall fight at thy side until this very sword rusts to nothing!”
‘Nikador?
Oh yeah, the random quote I pulled out of my ass, honestly it just felt fitting’ Cormac thought, watching the knight’s vague shape practically glow with enthusiasm.
‘But that misunderstanding.
I shan’t be fixing that one either.’
“Sir knight,” he said instead, settling easier on the title he now shared with his friend
“Would you lend me a hand in gathering the corps-”
He caught himself before “corpses” made it all the way out, and adjusted, smooth as sandpaper.
“-the defeated,” he finished.
“I got an idea on what to do with them, and I’d rather not leave a mess like this for the next farmer to stumble across on his morning walk.”
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________ first fight scene, hoped you liked it