“Fuck.” The blood drained from Dan’s face as he realized the impact of his actions. Daeson had never revealed how old he was, but based on context clues, the elf was at least two thousand years old. He’d just picked a fight with an archmage who had been accumulating power and experience since before the fall of Rome.
“You arrogant monkey,” Daeson snarled. “I spend my valuable time and resources training you, and this is how you repay me? You were nothing when I found you! A corpse that didn’t know it was dead, abandoned to this awful planet’s night. Now you have a little bit of mana in you, and you can’t remember everything I’ve done for you.”
“Done for me?” Dan’s initial terror faded into anger. “You’ve trained me, but you’ve never respected me. You’ve taught me a couple tricks, but I was never a student to you. I was a pet that you would trot out at a party so I could shake hands and fetch before you locked me away so that you could get on with your life.”
“Isn’t that what you are, Daniel?” Daeson’s needle-like teeth flashed as he sneered. “Humans aren’t Imperial citizens for a reason. Your lives are short, violent, and ruled by emotion. I thought I could turn you into something more, but instead there you stand, flush with stolen mana puffing out your chest like your meager accomplishments are anything but a reflection of my skill as a teacher.”
“If I wanted to make something of my life while avoiding a volatile drunk, I would just move back in with my dad,” Dan replied, raising his sword to a guard position.
“Is that all you have?” Daeson rolled his golden eyes as he took a few steps towards Dan. “Pathetic repartee and amateur spells? You’re higher on mana than any dockside dreamflower addict, and all you can think of is to insult my drinking. I gave you the tools to prevent the addiction! How many times did I tell you to meditate to temper your emotions and develop emotional self-control? But no, you were too impatient. You’d rather spend that time hunting more monsters and stealing their mana before you were fully in control of yourself.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Dan questioned, a hint of confusion leaking into his voice.
“Look at yourself, Daniel!” Daeson shook his head. “Your eyes are glazed, your cheeks are flushed, and you’re acting like an impulsive fool. That’s mana addiction and a bad case. At this rate, you’re going to throw away everything I taught you to become some back alley serial killer, hunting other sentients for another fix. Really, it’s for the best that I cull you now before you can soil my reputation by hurting someone.”
Dan’s eyes only had a second to widen as an invisible fist closed around him, pinning his arms to his sides. His armor rune flickered as the layers of force surrounding him glowed visibly. Even through his euphoric haze, Dan realized Daeson was right. He wasn’t acting logically. Rather than biding his time, he was lashing out aggressively when he wasn’t ready. All he had to do was put a sleeping draught or poison in Daeson’s wine and sneak away. It wasn’t like the elf actually checked the stuff. Instead, he had challenged probably the most powerful individual on the planet to a one-on-one fight like an absolute idiot.
“How are you still alive?” Daeson asked him quizzically, cocking his head to the side as he kicked an empty wine bottle away. “I’m squeezing you hard enough to kill an ordinary man. At the very minimum, I should have broken bones right now, yet there you stand, more or less all right?”
The pressure surrounding Dan increased to the point where he struggled to breathe and his armor rune began to fail. Frantically, he activated its high-performance mode, causing the field around him to shimmer brighter. Almost instantly, the crushing force alleviated enough that he could draw in a breath, but the rune drained his mana at a rapid pace. Although he had bought himself some breathing room, it was far from a permanent solution.
“Your defensive rune is more impressive than I originally thought,” Daeson remarked, a slight wine-induced hesitation in his voice as he inspected Dan. “At least killing you won’t be a complete waste, if I can get a chance to look at the runescripting up close. I seem to recall it being fairly compact, and any rune that compact that can absorb this amount of damage will be worth something to the war effort. Maybe not enough to get me reinstated to my faculty committees, but at least enough to give me a class or two to teach. Probably something on runescript theory. Nothing terribly interesting or fun, but at least I will be back at the Academy.”
Dan struggled, helpless but at least not at risk from Daeson’s attempt to crush the life out of him. The elf stared at his efforts to free himself for about ten seconds longer before shrugging. For one brief second, Dan was free from Daeson’s grasp, then an invisible wall of force slammed into him, sending him careening into the wall of the mansion.
Dan was on his feet in a flash, launching a Lightning Stroke at Daeson. The elf barely registered the electricity as it was again absorbed by the spell shield surrounding him. Dan, on the other hand, immediately noticed the cracked rib from Daeson’s most recent attack. Each breath felt like a shard of glass lodged under his left shoulder. Still, inaction meant death, so he charged Daeson, sword in hand.
The elf drunkenly waved his hand, and Dan was hit by a pillar of force at knee level, tripping him and sending him into a sprawl at Daeson’s feet. He tried to pull himself up onto his hands and knees, only to discover invisible shackles binding his hands and feet to the floor. He yanked his arms several times, trying futilely to free himself, but only bruising his arms. Even if he had the strength to break whatever spell Daeson had cast, he just didn’t have the leverage to effectively use it while pinned face-down.
One of the elf’s soft-soled shoes pressed into the small of his back. A second later, a metallic scraping sound signalled that Daeson had picked up Dan’s sword from where he had dropped it. A weary sigh escaped from above him.
“Look at you, Daniel.” Daeson spoke softly, a mournful note in his voice. “You kill a couple monsters and convince yourself that you’re a force of nature. As soon as you think that you don’t need me, you try to take advantage of my kindness and a moment of weakness to murder me. Never mind that you are a millenia too young to stand in the dueling ring with me. Now, here you lay, broken and defeated at my feet. It really is a pity.”
A sharp pain stabbed the back of his thigh as Daeson used Dan’s own sword to hamstring him. The armor rune held for a second, but it fared much worse against a blade than a diffuse bludgeoning force. Dan screamed. He flung himself against his bonds, cursing incoherently as the blood drained from his right leg and pooled on the ground around him.
“Do you know what the real shame is, Daniel?” Daeson asked the question rhetorically as he stepped over his bleeding and writhing body. “Ultimately, this entire futile exercise proves Jareth right. I argued that humanity was worth training and nurturing, and he claimed that you were blunt instruments. Almost as brutish as the Orakh we are sending you to fight. He told us that, even if humanity could directly use magic, it would be a mistake to teach you. That you would betray us and try to tear us down. I fought him for years before I was eventually exiled, but at the end of this sad saga, here I am. Forced to execute my own student and ultimately concede the point to him. Humans are, by nature, prone to treachery and other base emotions.”
A brief whistle sounded as Daeson swung his sword again. Then pain erupted in his other leg. His voice was hoarse from screaming as he thrashed, both legs useless. Dan’s bindings disappeared, but he was too exhausted to take advantage of his brief moment of freedom. Invisible puppet strings pulled him up into the air and rotated his body until he hung, two feet in the air and staring at Daeson.
“Really, Daniel,” the elf drunkenly giggled to himself, “if this was how things were going to turn out, the least you could have done was to die in the night. It would have been much more dignified for both of us.”
Dan stared at the elf, pain dimming his vision. Something deep inside of him snapped. Daeson might kill him, but he wouldn’t make it easy for the arrogant fuck. He might not win the fight, but he would be damned if he went through all of this and didn’t even make the elf bleed.
Daeson left Dan hanging in the air and walked over to where he had left his last bottle of wine and removed the cork with his pointed teeth. The elf took a long pull from the bottle, his back still to Dan. Then Daeson turned around. Without thinking, Dan launched a pair of Fireballs at the elf, set to detonate right behind him. In the fraction of a second while the Fireballs were in the air, Dan struck the front of Daeson’s shield with a pair of Lightning Strokes.
Immediately, his head hurt from the sudden massive mana expenditure. Daeson’s eyes grew wide as he raised his hand, reinforcing the shield as lightning rippled over it. Then, the fireballs detonated behind the elf. Time seemed to slow down as the spheres of fire overlapped with Daeson at their center, panic on his face.
Daeson must have empowered the shield where the electricity struck it at the expense of areas he considered secure. For a second, the shield held, but then the combination of heat and concussive force overwhelmed Daeson’s rear defenses. Cracks appeared in the force field for a brief moment before flames washed over Daeson’s back.
The elf screamed and dropped to the ground, his expensive robes burning freely. Dan’s restraints disappeared, and he joined the elf on the ground. Grunting, he hefted his body up with his right arm while unleashing a Lightning Stroke with his left. This time, there was no shield to stop the electricity. Daeson twitched and spasmed uncontrollably as the current flowed through him.
Frantically, Dan crawled over to the elf. He had a momentary advantage, but if Daeson recovered, there wouldn’t be a second chance. Hell, he was surprised there was a first chance. He didn’t know if his former mentor was too drunk to fight properly, didn’t consider him a proper threat, or some combination of the two, but a proper shield spell would have stopped any attack he could throw. Only Daeson’s casual and sloppy defense after he had grown confident in his win had given Dan an opening.
The seconds seemed to stretch into years as he pulled himself to Daeson, watching the elf’s convulsions fade. Fear filled him. Fear that he would be just a half second late. That this moment right here on the mansion’s porch would spell the end of Earth’s freedom. He would die here and no one would come back to prepare Earth for the coming war. That he would die with so much left unfinished and undone. Then his hand closed on the elf’s vambrace just as Daeson opened his eyes.
Dan ripped the gauntlet off of the elf and threw it across the porch, just as a wave of unfocused mana poured off of Daeson. Without an attunement stone to focus it, the archmage’s wrath was as threatening as a spring breeze. Dan punched his arm into the elf’s chest and began activating Shocking Fist in pulses, stunning Daeson once again. Then his left arm gave out, and he collapsed on top of the twitching elf.
Blindly, he fished around his blood-slicked belt for a second before he found his hunting knife. He stabbed it into Daeson’s side once. Then again and again. He lost count of how many times he embedded the blade into his former mentor and only companion for almost a year. Finally, he rolled off of Daeson and onto his side and collapsed, breathing heavily, waiting for the mana to hit him.
After a couple of seconds, he frowned slightly and with some effort pulled himself up enough to look at Daeson. The elf’s eyes were open and blood stained his lips.
“Well, I’ll be,” Daeson whispered, his voice coming out as a wet gurgle. “You got me. I gave a speech like a villain in some play rather than finishing you off, and I let down my guard.”
Dan didn’t reply, eyes focused on the blood steadily flowing from the elf’s chest and sides.
“Oh, don’t worry, Daniel,” Daeson’s speech was interrupted by a series of bloody coughs. “I can feel the blood in my lungs, and my potions are too far away. I’m dead, and I know it. It’s just a matter of minutes.”
“Still,” Daeson spoke between clenched teeth. “Let me finish my role as your master by illustrating my final lesson. When you have someone weaker than you on the ropes, don’t dither. Finish the job when you have the chance, or you’ll end up like me.”
Daeson’s eyes went blank, and a tsunami of mana crashed into Dan.
