Chapter 22: Rigged
"MISS STARLING," SOL GREETED HER. "I have set up the room for you already. As it is already dinner time, I will see you later. Train hard." His cloth fluttered in a farewell wave and he floated out the door. She didn't really see the point in an Ethereal going to dinner, since in all the time she'd sat next to him in the cafeteria, she had never seen any of the Ethereal Delegates ever eat - not even a morsel of food went into their mouths. Then again, she didn't know if they had mouths because she could never pinpoint exactly where, though Sol's voice kind of radiated from underneath his cloths.
Perhaps it was just a formality that the Ethereal Delegates had to fulfill, to be present at mealtimes whether they ate or not in order to prove that they were part of the Delegates. She allowed herself a grin as she moved to the center of the room. Guess I'm not part of that family then.
Taking stock of all the targets stuck on the walls and floor and hanging from the ceiling, she picked up the throwing knife that Sol had left on the floor and could've laughed at how she was so used to this, with all the weapons and the powers and the different creatures that she'd seen. She ran her fingers across the length of the blade and felt nothing from it, unlike the constant buzzing of the air around her. The knife was as dead as Nicholas's cat had been, but unlike him she felt no urge to bring it back to life.
Lips curling, she sent the knife airborne, flinging it into the center of one of the targets and cutting the almost invisible string that was tied there. Immediately, the contraption that Sol had set up sprang into motion and tens of knives shot at her from every conceivable spot in the room. She’d done things like this before, with the creative machines that Sol always managed to dream up. But not with this many knives. If she got hurt she’d yell at him later.
A flicker of a thought and the air was whirling around her and she could’ve spun with it, surrounded completely by the buzzing, shivering, whooping call of the wind. Her own personal tornado. She’d practiced with it in almost every training session since the one Sol had showed it to her, and she knew that it was a destructive force, capable of shredding wood, shattering rocks and twisting blades into unidentifiable lumps of metal. If she spun it fast enough, that is. Most of the time she collapsed before she could regain enough control to carve her initials in the concrete walls of her training room.
But this time it wasn’t about destroying things, or tearing things into pieces. This time, she “needed the air to protect her”, like Sol had said. He’d explained it to her as if every molecule of air was like a person, with thoughts and feelings. To do this, the air must want to protect you. Air wants to move. If you move it, it will continue to move until there is nothing more that can be done. Air keeps its promises, but it will be done all the way, to the very end. That had only become clear to her after the Ethereal’s fifth consecutive explanation.
If she told her Air magic to clear the oxygen from a certain area, all the oxygen would be gone, whether she had specified that or not. If she didn’t specify the area, all the oxygen from her location could be gone in the blink of an eye. “To be careful is the key, Miss Starling,” Sol had said. “Air guarantees the events and process, but never the consequences. You will not be able to predict that.”
And if she wanted the air to spin, then it would spin, but it would take a whole lot of effort to make it stop because the air around her, in the training room, wanted to “move” as well. It wouldn’t want to stop, especially not if she just told it to. So she let it go faster and faster, till it formed a constantly shifting sphere of wind that surrounded her from all sides. Again, she had to be careful. If she spun too much the wind would peel the skin off her flesh and tear her to pieces and carve into her bones. But her Air magic wasn’t like that of Metal. It was an intuitive thing, like that time Daniel had given her a paperclip. She just had to think; she didn’t have to feel. And because of that she didn’t have to worry about losing control.
She reached out with her senses – or it could have been her magic? She didn’t really know anymore; sometimes they felt one and the same – and felt herself in every molecule of the whirling air, spreading out and away from her own mind to cover the expanse of the room until the space between the speeding knives and her body seemed to her like a football field to an ant. The blades were fast, but she was everywhere. It didn’t even take a shred of calculation – simply the barest flash of a thought and pure instinct. The winds angled themselves, almost as if of their own accord, to fling themselves straight into the sides of the knives. She could’ve gone even faster and pierced the metal straight through with shots of air that were harder and more dangerous than steel bullets. Then again… “It is not wise to waste resources, Miss Starling.” Fine then.
So she tamped down on the amount of magic she channelled into the tiny molecules – as much as she was able to, that is – and only made the winds knock almost gently into the knives, one for each blade that had been shot at her. They were flung away from her, but she knew Sol had set the targets up around the room for a reason. She wasn’t done yet, though it felt like she was going run out of energy soon.
Gritting her teeth, Amber spread her consciousness even further out and pressed the air against the knives even as they flashed past. It was like pulling an elastic band outwards, but with not only her arms but her entire body in every direction. She strained out, feeling a stretch in places that probably weren’t physical, to put pressure on the sides of the blades, below and from above, guiding them so they began to face towards the targets. The last step was to push them from behind, send a shot of air aimed at the hilts of the throwing knives to shove them out and away once more.
The individual thumps from every knife vibrated through the molecules of her air that surrounded each one, thrumming back to her till she felt like her entire being was shivering as well, down to her very cells. One by one the knives shot into the red circle at the center of the targets, thudding into the wood again and again under her guidance. Bullseye, bullseye, bullseye… Wait, one more. There’s one more left. It sped towards the target, headed exactly towards that red circle that she wanted it to hit so much. And yet, being hyperaware of so many things that were happening in the room, she could feel her magic fading out from around the blade.
It was going away and disappearing like smoke from the molecules. The air was becoming dead and void and she couldn’t do anything about it. She had nothing left. You might burn up and die if you use too much power. The knife started to fall in mid-flight, losing altitude and momentum. She tried to get wind moving underneath it, to pull the air together to push it up, but all of a sudden she was rebounding back into herself like a bungee jumper after the free fall, with all the force she’d used to push her consciousness out now coming back to reel her in, sucking her down into its whirlpool.
She could only watch as the last knife fell tip first onto the floor with a dull, resounding clang that sounded with a sense of finality. Good job. That was a great attempt, Amber. Next time try not to fail. In battle, you might not have time to do that. And I don’t think that one knife should be on the floor. Shouldn’t all of them have landed in those red circles over there? She growled and her hands clenched into fists of their own accord. I could work on it, but then again, that never means anything, does it?
Just as the last thought crossed her mind, the sound of another string snapping reached her ears. You couldn't give me a break, could you? Sol, you sneaky lump of cloth, what the hell did you rig this time?
These sneak attacks had become quite common ever since Sol decided that she could be trusted to train on her own. There had been one for every single day for the past two weeks, apart from the two days before today. She'd almost completely let her guard down - hadn't thought that he'd pull another fast one when today's training had already been so straining that she'd already burnt out. Unless he had wanted that to happen, that is.
She gritted her teeth again, feeling her molars grind against each other. The thud of the last knife when it fell... It had vibrated differently. In the fading remnants of her magic, she had felt it. Sol had known that that was the target she wouldn't be able to reach, and rigged it so that if the knife she sent there fell - or, knowing Sol, if it so much as touched the ground - more would come flying at her. The question now is: how many knives?
Sol had always rigged only a few - four at the most. Right now, only one or two would have already done the job, since she had no Air magic left. The air felt dead, and as much as she tried to see them, the links in the air around her and tiny, tiny molecules didn't materialize in her vision. Every time she squinted, a jolt of pain went shivering through her head. Nevertheless she cocked her head and listened for the shinggg of the knives that would soon get shot at her.
But there wasn't even a sound when they came. It wasn't just one knife or two knives or three knives. It was tens of them, flashing at her like a tidal wave of metal, as many as the first time, maybe even more. But now time didn't seem to slow down for her to think like it had last time. Instead, everything looked like it was speeding up, the light the blades reflected into her eyes as they flew blinding her even as she dropped down and tried to dodge them. But there were some aimed at her feet and her legs - no escape anywhere. Sol is trying to kill me, isn't he? Finally couldn't take the stress of training the resident Demon?
The first knives whizzed past her, missing her forehead by inches, and, as much as she tried, she couldn't help that initial flash of panic that went flickering through her chest. And after that first taste of emotion, came the fear - the fear that attracted... A shudder went through her entire body and she pitched forward, almost cracking her head against the floor before she braced herself on her elbows. The world blacked out around her, and all she saw was darkness and that faint yet unmistakable sheen of silver.