"I'm granting your wish." Matthieu stepped aside, jabbed a finger at the armor and weapons strewn at his feet. "Gird yourself."
Fitz sighed. "You can't possibly mean-"
"You're romanticizing violence because you haven't had to engage in it for years. I'm going to disabuse you of this. We'll fight, now-"
"It's the middle of the day-"
"It's a sun-blasted desert. There's nothing around.”
"I don't want to fight you-"
"We'll fight. If you win, we go over to the beacon and I humor your wishes and we murder a few Consecrated for sport. If I win, we stay here."
Fitz shook his head, ran a hand over his face. Matthieu paced over to the exit.
“If you’re not outside in five minutes, I’ll come after you myself. Please don’t make me do that. I’d prefer not to demolish our quarters.”
“This is infantile, Matthieu.”
“Five minutes.”
Matthieu stepped out into the sunlight and, flexing his Shroud, propelled himself down the face of Mount Sinai, alighting in a flat expanse of desert at its base. He glanced around: barren, empty. No witnesses or bystanders to dance around.
Fitz emerged two minutes later, clad in what looked like half of his full armor: helmet, mail, pauldrons, and boots, but no greaves, and no plate. He had his sword, naturally, and his dirk hung at his side, but his bow, lance, and mace were nowhere to be seen. His bulky, metallic silhouette glittered in the sun as he leapt from their hideaway’s exit and, vaulting hundreds of feet through the air, landed before Matthieu, silent and weightless.
Fitz narrowed his eyes, the visor to his helmet still raised. He waggled his sword noncommittally at Matthieu. “I feel ridiculous. You’re totally unarmed.”
“You’d prefer I fetch a spear or something to waggle around? You know that’d just slow me down.”
“I know, but it feels wrong. You’re in your favorite shirt.”
“If you want to concede, and end this without a fight, you can do it now. So long as you promise to give up on this ridiculous plan of yours.”
“I don’t want to fight you.” Fitz groaned. “But I stand by what I said. We can’t just-”
“So be it.”
Matthieu darted forward and, flexing and warping his Shroud, let loose a flurry of explosions of superheated air. Fitz was caught just a fraction of a second off-guard, and while he was more than quick enough to absorb and redirect the heat, he was just a moment too slow to prevent Matthieu’s follow-up blow, a kick that sent him spiraling head over heels, streaking through the air. He hit the side of the mountain with a thunderclap, a small explosion of dust blooming around where he landed.
“I take it that means we’re starting,” Fitz’s voice rang from somewhere in the midst of the cloud, amplified and deepened by his Shroud.
“En garde,” Matthieu replied.
A shockwave rocketed out from where Fitz was, obscured still by the dust, cutting a neat gouge through the ground as it approached. A boulder that had been sitting behind Matthieu was cleaved in half by it, the cross-section left behind flat as glass. Matthieu himself was already high in the air, never close to getting hit.
He rained explosions down on the base of the mountain, letting the blowback from his attacks send him hurtling higher into the sky. Between the explosions he laced electrical discharges like oversized bolts of lightning and sonic waves loud enough to seem to physically pound the earth, pulverizing and flattening the top inch of arid topsoil beneath.
“You’re rusty.”
Matthieu whirled to see Fitz floating, as if standing on air, just above him, a grin starting to creep across his face. He reached out with one mailed fist and clenched his fingers. Matthieu felt an invisible vice clamp around his arms. Before he could flex his own Shroud around the imposing pressure, Fitz whipped his arm and sent Matthieu crashing down, fast enough that the air whistled as it whipped around his form.
Matthieu left a crater the size of a small lake where he landed, and more dust choked the valley, a growing fog of sandy debris dark enough to block the sun. More slicing shockwaves rained down, cutting perfect x-shapes into the desert, but Matthieu weaved around them, speeding up now, remembering what it was not just to move but to fly, to cross from point A to B at the speed of thought, to ignore gravity and orientation, to be weightless.
He was behind Fitz, hundreds of meters up, in a fraction of a second. Fitz whipped around, sword raised, but, blinded by another fusillade of small explosions, missed entirely.
“I’m not the only one out of practice,” Matthieu said, snatching Fitz by the arm. He felt Fitz’s Shroud bend and buckle beneath his own, thinning out under the pressure he was exerting. With a thought, he aimed another explosion, concentrated and flattened, at Fitz’s elbow, blowing his arm cleanly in two.
Fitz frowned as his gauntlet, disembodied hand still inside, dropped through the sky beneath them. “Rude. I was using that.”
Fitz moved to swing his sword one-handed and Matthieu, expecting that, shot away, off and downward. The swing had been a feint, however, and Fitz pre-empted his evasion, cut him off halfway through his trajectory, and drove his stump arm into Matthieu’s gut. Again, Matthieu streaked from the sky like a meteor, and again the impact of his landing left a yawning crater in the desert.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Head swimming--he hadn’t expected to hit the ground quite so hard, and a small fraction of the energy of impact had leaked through his Shroud, rattling his bones--Matthieu clapped his hands against the earth beneath him, scattering particles of his Shroud around him in a huge circle. The particles accumulated chunks of rock and dust and then rained upwards at screaming velocities, a razor-sharp hailstorm in reverse, before detonating, a huge, thermobaric dust bomb that seemed to blot out a chunk of the sky.
It was Fitz’s turn to fall from the sky, his armor glittering and smoking as it hurtled back to Earth. Matthieu rushed over to where he’d landed, a small cloud of supercharged plasma arcing around his hand in preparation for another attack. He hesitated at the last second, as his target came into clearer view: Fitz’s armor was empty, just the plate and helmet, tied together by the plate’s straps, a decoy.
Matthieu had only half managed to turn around when Fitz’s next, and strongest, sword blow rocked the earth, cutting a ravine into the ground meters deep and taking both of Matthieu’s legs at the knee. In an instant Fitz’s boot was on his chest, pinning him down, his sword leveled at Matthieu’s throat.
“I think that’s game,” panted Fitz, grinning wildly. Matthieu was surprised how much the look of that smile lifted his spirits, despite his loss, his bewilderment, and his newly absent lower half.
“Ouch.” Matthieu craned his neck to look at the ragged stumps where his legs once were, the wounds spewing bright, arterial blood into the dust. “You really went straight for amputation.”
“You started it,” Fitz said, rolling his shoulder as his arm, newborn-pink and jutting from a jagged hole in his mail, finished its regeneration. “Go on. Best start healing yourself.”
Over the centuries, Matthieu’s pain response had dulled to something vestigial. Even now, with a good portion of his body physically destroyed, with bones and muscles cleaved through, he was easily able to compartmentalize the agony, to stow it in a corner of his brain and pay it almost no heed. Conversely, over that same length of time, his relationship to fatigue had deepened, and he was feeling this now, as his blood evacuated his body and pooled around him in the desert. An enticing lethargy was settling around him. His eyes began to unfocus, and he felt a powerful inertia, a reluctance to do much of anything but go to sleep.
“Matthieu,” the voice of his beloved cut through his growing numbness just enough to stir him. “Heal yourself. Now, please.”
He took a breath and craned his head up, let the sky fill his vision. The vulture was back, circling.
“Matthieu!” He felt, distantly, a mailed hand clasp his shoulder. Energy flooded into his Shroud, donated from Fitz, who could give as much of his energy as he liked, but who, like all Consecrated knowledgeable enough to regenerate, was still helpless to heal anyone but himself.
Matthieu heard the growing edge of concern in Fitz’s voice, and that was enough to dislodge him from his paralysis. He chuckled up at the vulture. The poor bird would be disappointed.
“Yes, yes, sorry,” Matthieu croaked. He reached for that well of vital energy, locked away but always available, and set it loose in its raw state, let it work its magic on his ruined legs and shattered ribs and flayed skin. He heard Fitz take a single, sharp breath and retreat.
Within a minute, he was whole again, and that insidious fatigue had retreated, a tide that he knew could ebb but never fully retreat.
“No need to startle me so,” Fitz chided.
“Yes, sorry, I was distracted.” Matthieu stood, brushed sand from his clothes. He stretched and exhaled. “Well, fair is fair. Let me collect my things. We can set off-”
“Maybe…” Fitz began, then trailed off. Matthieu crooked an eyebrow, waited for the man to collect his thoughts. “Maybe there’s a compromise to be struck here.”
“I’m a man of my word.”
“I know, of course. But you’re clearly averse to the idea of going. It’s written plain across your face. And I don’t want to make you do something so clearly contrary to your nature.”
“You’re not making me-”
“What if I went alone?”
The question hung in the air for a few moments. Matthieu was surprised to find himself struck a little dumb by the simplicity of it. He’d truly not considered that option, somehow.
“I could leave on my own, go fight, and then collect you to join me when the dust clears,” Fitz offered. “I doubt it would take too long. You could stay and entertain yourself, do your reading, and fill me in on all the history and literature you please when I return, and I could relay you tales of the fighting. It could be nice.”
There was that dread again, pooling in Matthieu’s gut. “You’d return different, wouldn’t you? If you really did achieve this godly power you seek.”
Fitz shrugged. “I’m far more powerful now than I was when we met. Is that man-at-arms you ran away with really all that unrecognizable today?”
Matthieu pursed his lips. “No. You’re still Fitz.”
“You worry.”
“Of course. I’m still Matthieu.”
“I won’t die.”
“You might.”
Fitz snorted. “I won’t. Let them drop their bombs.”
“It’s not the rabble I’m worried about. What if the Consecrated of today are more powerful than we assume?”
“Oh I’d hope so. It’d be a pity to travel all that way and find no sport in it.” Fitz grinned, then, seeing Matthieu’s consternation, softened. “I won’t die.”
Matthieu didn’t think he would. His mounting dread centered around something different entirely. “We haven’t been apart in so long.”
Fitz nodded, thoughtful. “Yes. That will be uncomfortable and strange. But it might be an opportunity for growth. I worry that, if we’re not careful, men as long-lived as ourselves tend to grow stagnant. The only antidote for that is small doses of discomfort once and a while.”
Fitz was right, Matthieu was troubled to realize. This was a good idea. So why did he feel so awful?
Fitz took his hand, mail cold against his bare skin. “You’ll still be able to feel me. And I you. The world’s too small for us not to.”
This comforted him, but not enough for him to soften completely. Matthieu’s eyes darted as he thought, worried, ran through contingencies and possibilities. The two men stood together in the ruins of their spontaneous battlefield, Fitz waiting patiently for his calculations to cease.
“Please?” Fitz finally offered. “A quick sojourn. It’s all I ask.”
There was another minute of silent, tense consideration. The vulture circling above peeled off finally, leaving them alone.
“Fine. Yes, you can go.” Matthieu relented. “As loath as I am to admit it, it’s a good idea.”
As he watched Fitz’s face brighten, Matthieu wished he believed what he was saying.