We continue like this; when my guard is low, Adel shields me with a paper kite while I channel blasts of nur. Through deft commands, he folds the kite into paper needles, flinging them inside mouths or penetrating eyeballs.
At every small victory, the next line of Azadnian soldiers follows, bursting from behind the valley. Too many. As soon as I can I engage, and the hair on the back of my neck lifts.
A crack splits from beneath me, and Adel flings a hand to form a thick current as a shield. The grasslands explode, blasting me off my feet. My shoulder smashes against a rock and I roll into a ball.
‘Khamilla!’ Adel yanks me up.
‘I am fine,’ I manage, seeing that though the Azadnian forces are overwhelmingly solely mortals, there are a few who are Eajiz. ‘What was that affinity?’
He grimaces. ‘A Heavenly Contract of Fortification where the wielder has unparalleled strength. They must have stomped upon the terrain to shake it.’ He continues, ‘Though our formation holds, their numbers are the problem. We must expand our blast’s reach.’
I place my khanjar back into my mouth and combine my leg and arm bonds into Second-Stratum to form a horizontal barrier, so any attack is less likely to immediately overwhelm us despite their numbers. And though the odds are terrible, we spin back to back to face the enemy.
Adel rotates his shoulders, forming a vortex current that whirls puffs of dirt into a funnel. It’s a grey angry monstrosity, rippling like smoke and uprooting the shrubs. As the grasslands shake and splinter below the net of grey, Adel flexes his hands, widening the vortex before us. Just in time, it absorbs the next wave of the Fortification affinity before spitting it back toward the Azadnians.
‘At my next current, run and blast.’
Understanding his intention, I take two leaping steps, landing in ninth stance, ideal for dense bond expansion, compressing nur within the heels of my palms. At his signal, my hand bonds fling gold ropes, bursting right into the funnel. Adel flattens the storm before erupting it mid range before the enemy.
I cannot see in the chaos of light and air, but the tremor carries into my feet before the thuds of bodies reach us in sickening squelches as warriors are shredded apart.
Twice more, we blast in the same manner. Eventually, we break their lines, allowing the rest of the central soldiers to split toward the flanks.
I follow Adel to the left wing in time for our squadron to engage the Azadnians from the rear.
Officer Samira turns at our approach but before she even speaks, her body stills and red gushes from her chest, a knife protruding in mid-air. To my bewilderment, the ground mutes into a dark chroma as if a great shadow has befallen this section of the battlefield. And then the knife rips from the captain’s chest, cutting her fingers in sprays of red before careening into her throat and lopping her head off.
I lunge with a strike of nur but the shadow skitters back across the battlefield. ‘What was that?’ I reach out, hardly processing her corpse.
‘Reinforcements.’ Adel breathes calmly despite the obscene death. He gestures ahead at the next line of Azadnians. ‘This is a shadow art, from a jinn through a Mitra bond. I’m not certain how the human soul coexists in that warrior, but it seems Azadniabad has sent their best, a stupid sacrifice for a melee.’
As if summoned, a roar of fury rips through the air. Leading the charge is a lithe woman, black Veils rising from the ground at her command and shielding her comrades. She lunges from shadow to shadow –no-pounding on all fours like a leopard flying.
‘Her strength is drawn from shadows on the ground,’ Adel observes, his brown eyes alight, almost welcoming the challenge. The Seventh-Slash flattens his hand on the clay, sending rolls of currents to swerve them, but the shadows hold. ‘A change of tactics, my underling. Cast your affinity to pierce her legs.’
Grounding my soul, sweat trickling down my back, I force the Heavenly connection through three bonds. The nur becomes malleable from the Third-Stratum, pouring from my toes into a long wire before crossing the beams into textured threads. Flinging my arms, I raise them like a puppeteer commandeering a bonded creature to my whim. I mentally recite the prayer of the style: Seventy-seven Binding Art, a manifestation of what I had invented in my Duxzam.
‘Hold.’ Adel braces as he stacks a wall of currents around it. Then he surges it upwards, elongating the creation until the nur resembles the long white spine of an aži.
‘Now!’ he cries, and I release the scaly bonds through seven exhales.
It crashes at the enemies’ feet in sweltering waves of agony. Adel widens his hands to carve the nur outwards into compressed blades. It impales Azadnians across their ankles so neatly; it is a startlingly grotesque art. Red crests through the valley.
I do it again, the mirage of pale yellow slithering into my opponents’ mouths this time. My heart thuds faster and faster, an exhilaration filling me. They are no longer my people, but silhouettes of numbers. Things to destroy. Blackness curls in my vision, the shadows growing as Heavenly Energy surges into the spiral of my soul. My lips twitch.
One, two, three — more.The light blankets me, thick and heavy.Why care for life when the Divine has bestowed on you the gift of death?Nur is a destruction, not a creation.
My fingers unclench again. For the next two enemies, tongues of light lap at their feet, crawling upwards, the dense mass pawing their faces until they slough off in liquidised flesh.
Adel suddenly holds a hand to his mask, and I blink out of the fervour. ‘Was that the last of their flank? I must go to the Sepahbad,’ I pant, staring down at my arms.
‘Wait.’
Then a cry erupts from their flanks. I pause in sheer horror.How?
Within the strewn bodies, a shadow writhes out, slamming through corpses. The wraith digs like a thumb in the meat of an apricot, expelling the dozens of soldiers it had cocooned. The remaining Azadnians rush to surround us. The same shadow-wielder leads them, baring her teeth at me while blocking my path to the cliffs.
‘She won’t let me pass—’ I begin.
