Here Be Dragons: The Soldier

Chapter nine: Attack

The boy darted off the second she released his sleeve and turned to Anna. She was staring at the encroaching shadow with wide eyes. Vayle grabbed her by the shoulders, shaking her for good measure as she ordered, "Anna, look at me!" When the other girl complied, she continued in a tone that brokered no argument, "Follow that boy, the teachers will keep you safe." Anna seemed to try and speak, but no words came out, so she nodded dazedly and stumbled after the sprinting boy. 'That will have to do.'

Returning her attention to the shadow, which had now reached the foot of the mountain, Vayle started running. By the time she escaped the cluster of buildings that was water camp, she was breathing hard, and the army was close enough that she could make out the eyes of the first few Turned. Roughly half of them burned red, and the rest glowed icy blue. A quick glance around told her that she was the only one between them and camp. She quickly attempted Henrie's trick before her lesson yesterday – she summoned air energy into her palm and then pressed it into her chest. Breathing suddenly settling, she closed her eyes. The drumming of the approaching monsters faded into the distance, the only sounds remaining that of the singing within her and the racing of her heart. She reached out to tap the white pool in her chest, carrying as much as she could into each palm. Opening her eyes once more, she found she had created element balls roughly the size of her head. She pushed them together to form an even larger ball, which she held between both hands. Crouching, she summoned air beneath her feet and used it to push herself skywards. As she rushed through the air, she looked down upon her targets. The Turned were still streaming through the pass they had found in the mountains, so she couldn't yet see the end of the column. Instead, she raised the ball above her head and aimed it at the foot of the mountain – roughly the centre of the section she could see. Feeling herself slow, she let loose.

As always, it flew straight – though straight at a point slightly wide of her target. The Turned below looked up at the incoming element ball, and every tenth stone monster raised their arm towards it. Dozens of thin red lines snaked out of the ball and into their hands, leaving a swirling white mass within the huge green sphere. The Turned seemed to pause for a few moments when they realised the ball flying towards them wasn't only fire. Then the flames the removed from it were thrown in its path, knitting together to form a wall. When the ball crashed into it, it exploded in a brilliant flash of white light. Blinded by the light, Vayle had no idea what was going on. In the rushing wind, her clothes rippled against her skin. For the briefest instant, she thought she heard the flapping of huge wings. Suddenly, a freezing hand closed around her ankle. She tried to kick away from her assailant, but her thrashing leg couldn't find anything to connect with. The sound of the wind quickly diminished, and felt as if she were hanging upside-down. Utterly confused as to what was happening, she was left trying to blink away her blindness as she felt herself lowered gently to the ground.

She felt solid ground beneath her back, and found a faint red circle within the white screen that was her vision. A slight tremor rippled through the earth, and a few seconds later, a blurry face obscured the circle. Its lips were moving, but her voice was distorted – as if the face were shouting down a long tunnel, "Are you okay?".
After a quick assessment of her body, Vayle mumbled, "You sound funny... and look funny. My feet are wet."
Eyes and ears slowly coming back into focus, she found the face before her belonged to a girl wearing a blue jacket. "Sorry about that. It wasn't my best catch... but you were flying past so quickly you're lucky I grabbed you at all."
"You saved me..." The girl nodded. "Thankyou."
She disappeared from Vayle's vision, but the voice that drifted down was reverent, "I should be thanking you! Did you see what you did to those Turned?"
Unsteadily pushing to her feet, Vayle located the girl and tracked her gaze – where there used to be a lush green field of grass at the base of a mountain, there was now a crater, half-filled with a mixture of ash and sand. And it wasn't just the floor that had been wounded – the mountain looked as if a giant had taken a bite out of it, creating a cliff-face before which a mound of Turned corpses were piled. "I... I did that?"
"And those are just the ones that fell off the mountain after the explosion... The ones already on the ground are now the ash in that crater." She turned to a stunned Vayle, staring at her as if her prayers had been answered. "How in The Dragon's name did you manage that?"