Dimension Fracture (14 page)

adversity

Two days passed since the first strategy and planning session—and I was growing more and more anxious.

After I located the place where Karin was held, my part in the first phase of the operation was finished. The Archivist Elias sent word to his scouts to gather as much information about the target facility as possible. Amber and Meilin kept busy preparing for the assault, but there was nothing more I could do until the mission began.

I was in one of the training halls, facing a practice dummy, my eyes narrowed and my ears laying back as I prepared to unleash destruction upon the target. Motes of spell-flame appeared above my hands and I mentally commanded them, sending the bullets of magical fire racing toward the dummy.

There was a staccato series of tiny detonations, blasting chunks of foam off the dummy's inner frame. Small fires licked at the squishy polymer, melting it and causing molten black plastic to fall to the floor.

“You know, those are for
unarmed
combat practice,” a sarcastic voice came from behind me. Amber walked through the double doors of this particular training area, casually leaning against the wall as she regarded me with amusement. “We'd really appreciate it if you didn't set any more of them on fire.”

“Sorry… it's just…” I trailed off. Amber knew full well why I was so frustrated and placed a strong, sword-callused hand on my shoulder.

“I know you're feeling helpless right now, Misaki, but there's nothing more you can do. You've done your part brilliantly; now we know where to strike. Our scouts should return within the next twelve hours. We'll have everything we need to start the mission.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to let the tension and anxiety slide off of me like raindrops. It wasn't helping.

“I would definitely put you to work if I could… but you aren't physically strong, you don't have enough knowledge to help the medics or the technicians. I'm sorry, Misaki, but we just don't need your help right now.”

If Amber was trying to reassure me, she was certainly doing a terrible job at it. My tail dropped low and swished very slowly. I could hear her boot heels clicking on the hard floor as she approached, but I didn't bother to turn to look at her.

“You going to be okay?”

I forced a smile and nodded. “I'll be fine. I'm just… really worried about Karin. I love her so much, so you can guess how I feel…”

“I know.”

The Swordlady stretched her burly arms above her head and let out a sigh. I watched her warily, certain she'd come here for a reason but not exactly sure what that reason might be. Her sense seemed slightly off and perhaps a little too overly casual.

“You came here for a reason,” I observed.

“Well, yeah. I'm concerned about you. We're about to fight alongside each other, but I don't think you're in the right headspace.” Amber's tone was warm enough to take the sting from her words. “I can see you're stressed almost to the breaking point, that being torn away from your lady love has just about crushed you.”

I shrugged at her blunt assessment, neither confirming nor denying.

“Look, when I'm stressed out, a good sparring match always helps me out a lot. Really clears my head, gets the blood flowing and the muscles moving. Gives me something to focus on, something here and now, physical and primal.”

My ears perked up slightly as I felt a stirring of interest. I wasn't entirely convinced what she suggested would actually help, but I got the feeling that she was nervous, too, and getting to go at it for a bit might help put us both at ease.

I walked over to one of the nearest sparring mats, a dense foam square roughly six meters across. Kneeling down, I unlaced my boots and tugged them off, setting them down near the edge. Amber did the same and the both of us stepped onto the mat with our feet bare.

“Protective gear?” I asked, though I suspected I knew the answer already.

“Nope. It's not good training if you don't feel the strikes you can't dodge. You're trained in unarmed combat, right?”

I nodded. It had been a very long time ago, but I was well-trained. “The women of the Sakurai clan were trained in hand-to-hand, short blade and
naginata
techniques. I was no exception.”

Amber snorted. “Weapons 'suited' for a woman, huh?” She unstrapped the heavy swordbelt from her waist and set her Relic on the ground near her shoes. “Wonder what those stuffy old men would say about me.”

“I'm sure they'd be absolutely scandalized,” I remarked sarcastically, dropping into a guard stance. When it came to unarmed combat, I was hardly a master, but I
did
spend many hours drilling with the other women of House Sakurai. When the men went off to fight their wars, defense of the home was left to their wives and daughters.

Amber didn't bother entering a stance but instead came right at me in a charge that leveraged her considerable weight advantage. She was much taller than me, with longer limbs and thus longer reach. I was more than a little surprised she would throw away such an advantage and close to grappling range.

Planting my feet wide, I met her charge head-on. My fingers closed around the wrist of her leading fist and pushed it wide, attempting to lever her up onto my hip and use her own momentum against her.

It didn't work. Amber's grin became feral as she halted her charge and broke my grip with contemptuous ease. Stepping back and away, the left-handed Swordlady struck with her right hand. I tried to duck out of the way, but I was too slow and her open-palm blow caught me forcefully on the shoulder.

I grunted in exertion as I struggled to maintain my balance. The gleam in Amber's eyes told me that she knew my strategy—the arrested charge had been a ruse to try and discern what techniques I'd use. Much of my hand-to-hand training had focused on utilizing my opponent's force against them.

“Good one,” I muttered and narrowed my eyes. My tail swished in anticipation as we danced around each other, warily watching and waiting to see who would make the next strike.

Amber's fist flashed out in a dizzying series of punches that would have laid me low if any of them landed, but I managed to twist out of the way and drop down to the mat. I lashed out with my legs, striking her behind the knee joint in an attempt to knock her down or at least ruin her balance.

“That's not going to work,” Amber taunted as she moved in the direction of my kick, dropping into a forward roll that stole the force from my attack. I scrambled to get back up, narrowly avoiding her as she came crashing down in a devastating elbow drop.

Grappling with her would be a mistake, I knew. She was considerably stronger than me and a veteran fighter. I couldn't place her unarmed technique, not fitting with any of the martial arts I was familiar with.

“Where did you learn to fight like this?”

Amber was on her feet again and I rushed in, slashing at her head and neck with a series of lightning-fast jabs. Her left arm came around and deflected my right hand at the exact same moment as she slammed her right fist into my midsection. I backpedaled, my last-second dodge reducing some of the power in that strike, but the blow still hurt.

“The Army, of course,” Amber boasted, stepping forward and spinning half around, pouring her momentum into an elbow smash aimed for my temple. I ducked and lashed out with three quick, hard thrusts to very specific locations on her left side.

My smile widened as Amber gasped, attempting to draw back and discovering her left arm wasn't working quite so well. “What the hell did you do to me? My arm's all tingly and numb!”

“An unarmed technique that can stun and weaken,” I explained, pleased with myself now that Amber was firmly on the defensive. “Very useful when faced with a bigger and stronger opponent.”

I stepped forward, pressing my advantage as best I could. Amber's left arm wouldn't stay numb for very long, after all—the pressure-point trick was an assassin's skill, intended to weaken an armed mark in order to deliver the killing dagger thrust unhindered. I rolled underneath her right-hand swing, flicking my tail down between my legs as I shoved the bone of my hip against her.

My fingers closed around Amber's wrist, exploiting her overbalanced state and leveraging the momentum of her punch into a toss that sent the much heavier woman crashing to the mat with a tremendous
thud
. The breath blew out of her and I followed the throw with a forward roll that put me in the exact position I needed to be in.

Four rapid strikes later and Amber's right arm was drained of strength. She strained and struggled to get off her back, but it was no use. I twisted around and planted my knees on either side of her body, straddling her torso and pinning her to the mat.

We both stared at the other, breathing hard, each trying to read the intentions of the other. I shifted my thumb and pressed hard on a vulnerable spot under her arms. Amber howled from the expected sizzling jolt of pain and numbness.

“Okay, okay, I give up! You can quit digging into me like that!”

I released her arms and levered myself off of her, sitting on the mat next to her as she twitched her arms uselessly. She started shaking—at first I thought it was in anger, perhaps, that she'd been taken down by me, but then I realized she was actually laughing.

“Ah, but that was fun!” Amber closed her eyes and sighed contentedly. “I didn't expect to lose, much less lose so
quickly
. You'll have to teach me that nerve-deadening trick.”

“If you would have known I could do that beforehand, you wouldn't have lost. One full-power strike from your dominant hand and I would have been out of the match.”

The Swordlady let out a chuckle. “True enough. You've got grit, Misaki, I'll definitely give you that.”

“Why does Luna have a position like yours?” I inquired. My abrupt change of subject didn't seem to throw Amber off in the slightest.

“You mean the Swordlady?”

“The Order of the Moon has always been an order of sages and lorekeepers. I don't know a whole lot about the history, but I do know the Order has never engaged in wars of conquest.” I let myself collapse to the mat next to Amber, stretching my limbs out, my tail swishing slowly across the textured plastic surface of the foam.

“Luna's task centuries ago was not much different than it is now,” Amber explained, tilting her head to look at me as she spoke. “Knowledge is valuable and knowledge of the astral is almost priceless. You probably already know that the first human mages learned their craft from specters.”

I nodded. “So the legends claim.”

“Like most legends, this one has some truth to it. The first specters to meddle in the material world weren't summoned and bound, but crossed the boundary willingly—it was much more permeable in those days. They came here from the astral world and were seen as gods by primitive human tribes.”

That much I knew—the interference of specters in early human affairs resulted in the creation of the first rigid religious hierarchies. Unlike later religions, these proto-religious tribal pantheons actually lacked the element of faith, for their “gods” were in fact very real and actively sought to rule over them.

“The specters set themselves up as deities, brought humans under their control and organized affairs as they saw fit,” Amber continued. “The more followers they acquired, though, the more difficult it was to keep them all under control. We're a contrary lot, after all, and simple obedience isn't all that fulfilling.”

I blinked as I realized where she was going with this. “It's really that simple?”

“Yeah, it's that simple,” she replied. “Think about it this way; if you're a typical specter, you have a
lot
of magical power. You can do a lot of damage with invocations and even just using miasma offensively. But that power isn't unlimited; throw enough warriors at even the strongest specter and it won't be able to stay anchored to the material world.”

“So the specters, playing the role of god-rulers for their followers, tutored their most trusted and high-ranking lieutenants in the art of magecraft,” I reasoned, the connection becoming obvious. “The god-rulers were able to project power through their high priests and more effectively maintain larger groups of followers.”

“Makes sense, doesn't it?”

“It does,” I allowed, frowning. I pulled myself back up into a sitting position, my tail curling around against my leg. “Logically it would follow that even if the specters were killed or retreated back to their own world, the followers would remain under the control of the high priests. The knowledge would be passed on and the specter cults would continue.”

“Right. I know this was something of a tangent, but it's relevant.” Amber slowly eased her weight onto her arms and shakily pushed herself up off of the mat. “Specters are the original source of magecraft, and Luna exists to gather arcane knowledge. We have no soldiers and we don't conquer, but we
do
need to protect ourselves. Dark spirits usually aren't all that willing to share.”

“Was the Shattered Sword created by the Order?”

“No, we acquired the Relic and its imbued spirit about four hundred years ago. I don't think anyone knows much about its history. The imbued spirit wasn't especially willing to discuss that sort of thing. I get the impression he wasn't all that happy with his new circumstances.”