“Hating yourself is part of being leader. So is being hated. Your job is not to be everyone’s friend. Your job is to complete your mission at whatever cost has been deemed acceptable. More often than not, that means people will die. In dire circumstances, that might mean all of you, so long as victory is achieved. It’s a cost that might have you rethinking your definition of victory after a few of those missions. It might have you rethinking your relationships with those around you too as you start seeing them through the lens of expendability. That is when you start hating yourself.”

  —Squad Tactics, Fal’Vaelith

  “Mira.”

  Sylvas gasped as his eyes opened. The world-soul shard looming vast above him, like a moon falling from orbit. Like a falling star. Everything hurt, everything ached, but he was alive.

  He had survived.

  Shunting all pain and thoughts of his visit to what came after life aside, Sylvas threw himself back up to sitting and took in what he’d missed. The silver-whip armed mage had flung himself down to meet Ironeyes where the pair now traded blows, whip cracking against thunderous booms.

  Kaya and Bael had come up on the far side of Malachai, mounting the platform where they now all stood, she had her blades at the ready and the lumbering bone golem coming at her. Bael was frantically casting some sort of ritual magic, aiming up at the world-soul shard with whatever he hoped to get off before he could be stopped.

  And stopped he would be, Sylvas saw, for the two other Whitehall mages were coming for Bael and Kaya with all haste, both of them already in mid-cast.

  To Sylvas mind that left Ironeyes on his own against a single mage who had yet to show his affinity. He had bigger problems to manage if they had any hope to win the day.

  With Sylvas disabled, Malachai had turned his attention in the other direction, the simple slices of death he had been launching earlier apparently not suited to counter whatever Bael was weaving. Instead, he channeled a new form of magic, something huge, something on the verge of being unstoppable.

  The spell was gathered in his hands, green and black crackling around each other in a typhoon of whipping blades that looked so much like the awful curse they’d dealt with earlier that it made Sylvas skin crawl.

  But by this point, Malachai wasn’t the only one casting anymore.

  “I’m not done with you yet!” Sylvas shouted out, hoping to distract the man, to make him fumble his spell, but instead he was shocked to be on the receiving end. Malachai turned, shock written on his features, but he didn’t hesitate. He bowled the storm of chaotic death in his hands right at Sylvas.

  But even so, it didn’t catch Sylvas unprepared, his staff leaping to his hand, pulling him up as he shed weight and lifting him over the oncoming orb, only to then slipping from his near lifeless fingers to drop him back where he’d started.

  “Congratulations are due, I suspect to your elf friend?” Malachai asked as he resorted to launching a quick sickle of death at Bael, who had to pause his spell and dive aside lest hit him. “For the death ward, I mean. It saved you once but now it is spent.”

  Sylvas knew better than to answer that question directly, choosing to instead launch his barrage of orbitals at the man as he started to cast.

  Ripping through the air, each one of the little spheres glanced off a barrier in front of Malachai, an eerie image of a ghost bursting into focus for a split moment each time they struck. As they rebounded, Sylvas sent to strike again, and again, and again, but every time, no matter what angle he attacked from, the dead protected Malachai.

  It was a barrage that the necromancer didn’t even need to raise a hand to defend against, the spell protecting him clearly attached onto some other source of mana, so that he didn’t even have to spend effort maintaining it.

  The world-soul shard, of course. Sylvas realized as he wanted his attacks falter time and time again. Infinite death affinity mana, for whoever could use it.

  And Malachai knew exactly how to use it. How to use all of it.

  The man then finally launched his counter attack, a few more crisscrossing scythe blades of death that Sylvas had to duck under while continuing to cast. Yet even as he did, Sylvas saw that he was just a little too confident as he moved. A trite too smug about how easy it was for him avoid the spells. It was only a moment too late that Sylvas realized that they weren’t even truly aimed at him. Not exactly.

  The junction where two of the scything death-spells met hit directly in the middle of his staff where it was hovering by his side. The metalwork of the shaft crumpled under the impact, and rust blossomed across its surface like a plague taking hold. The delicate enchantments that Sylvas had placed inside were warped and distorted. The two orbitals that he had embedded in it became numb to his touch.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  There was no chance of a direct attack on the necromancer now.

  But direct attacks were the forte of his friends, Sylvas had other tools at his disposal, such as he spell he’d been casting. It was Inversion, yet again, but this time cast not on a tiny area to disrupt the enemies’ movements but rather upon the whole chamber.

  The polarity of gravity shifted slowly at first, then snapped all at once, a slow drag as the wall behind Sylvas grew accustomed to being ‘down’, then an abrupt fall as they all began to plummet towards it.

  Flashing by him as the world tilted, Sylvas saw Bael catch hold of Kaya’s coat-tails right as she jammed her metal spike arms through the metal mesh flooring of the gantry. Next he saw the debris and others images flash by him, moving too fast for him to do anything than acknowledge their momentum, let alone truly see what they were. That was because his attention had been fixed upon himself and Ironeyes, either of whom had anything to keep them from falling.

  But fortunately, each had their own plans and intentions to see the moment through.

  The mage fighting Ironeyes had been closing the distance with him slowly, lashing out with his whip, casting his spells, only to find a static discharge from the dwarf lashing out to intercept each blow. Ironeyes, meanwhile, had made his peace with fighting in close combat and readied his hammer. When gravity switched, the whip-mage fell towards Ironeyes before the dwarf lost his own footing and caught a heavy blow to the face from the hammer for his trouble. The dwarf then fell back towards the far wall, laughing all the way, with one fist still twisted in the other man’s lapel as they in turn twisted and spun through the air.

  Spun in such a way that Ironeyes landed on top, an relatively easy thing to orchestrate when your opponent happened to have his face conveniently bludgeoned in with a hammer.

  It was enough that when the pair landed, the impact set the crest on the Whitehall mage’s chest ablaze and encompassed him in a shield to absorb the force of impact. One that stretched out for both him and the dwarf by virtue of proximity.

  As for Sylvas, he had been planning to use his staff to navigate throughout the fall, but now that option was taken from him, he simply shed all of his weight. Gravity couldn’t grab and drag him if he was weightless. The sudden drop in density would almost inevitably mean coming back to broken bones once he was the normal weight again, but for now, he floated while the others all fell. The bone golem rumbling end over end along the gantry. The enemy mages falling with all the grace you’d expect from someone who’d never faced gravity affinity magic before.

  The only one of their foes who did not seem taken aback by the sudden change in gravity was Malachai. The same grin still split his face, and as he fell towards Sylvas, he readied his scythe to be used as an actual weapon. Most likely to half Sylvas where he hung alone and exposed in the air above the platform.

  Sylvas reached out a hand and caught an orbital. The scythe slashed through the air where he’d been just a moment before he was dragged aside. Malachai clicked his tongue as he fell pass. Like it was a mild annoyance to be bodily flung across the whole chamber.

  From the unforgiving steel of the bulkhead hands blossomed. Pale and white just like all the other shields and protections Malachai had at his disposal. They caught him and cradled him like a baby. Then, they tried to do the same for his three minions.

  The bone golem took its fall with some dignity, going stiff and tucking itself together so it didn’t hit any of its team, or the railings. The mages on the other hand, were less smart about things. They screamed and flailed around as they tried to grab at anything that they could reach. One managed to jam an arm out through one of the barricades on the walkway and promptly broke it. The other just went end over end flailing uselessly until they finally smashed head first into the far wall. The bone golem, despite being ostensibly less intelligent by every metric, kept its cool and was rescued from smashing by the waiting hands of the ghosts.

  Letting the Inversion go, Sylvas dropped back down onto the walkway and steadied himself. He closed the distance with the one mage where she lay, broken armed and screaming on the gangway.

  She met his eyes and within the span of an instant she became Hotlips, her face melting, her bones blackening. The next, she was Mira, dissolving away into nothingness at the touch of the Eidolon he had summoned. Then she was his mother, racked with the plague and desperately clinging to his body as the life ebbed away from her.

  She was everyone he had ever let down, betrayed, disappointed.

  She was the noblewoman who took interest in some pathetic orphan and gave him a chance to become more. She was Vaelith beating him and beating him until his very mind broke. She was Gharia, the look of hurt in her eyes when he turned her down. She was Kaya, when he’d done nothing to help her and she’d spent all her mana and she collapsed and died on the deck of the Ardent ship.

  She is… not real! Sylvas shouted in his mind as his paradigm slammed shut against all the lies that the mind mage was pouring into him. In a blink the senses that were being clouded suddenly cleared as the filter overlayed them. Her illusions, planted right into his head, wouldn’t do anything now but waste the precious moments that she had left.

  All it took was a little extra weight channeled down into his leg as he kicked her in the temple, the white glow of the Crest rising up to envelop her at the same instant breaking bone sounded out. There was a time when an act like that would have turned his stomach. When the idea of putting a person down with such ruthlessness would have overwhelmed him with guilt. But now, it didn’t so much as phase him, the act as normal as taking a breath.

  Maybe I am becoming what Vaelith wants me to be, Sylvas thought as his next move was to touch the thread of his bag, the one that connected to Cold Storage and bore the oppressive weight of what he had stored there.

  As he did, he saw that Ironeyes still lay where he had landed amidst the fallen mage and other bodies that had heaped themselves up against the distant wall. A place far too close to what he intended to do next. A decision had to be made again, between one of his team living and dying, a decision between victory and failure, a decision that nobody else could make for Sylvas.

  So he grit his teeth and made it.

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