Two

Oddly my first thought wasn’t ‘My goodness, there appears to be a tentacle monster extricating itself from that gentleman’s visage to attack me.’

 

Nor was my first thought a far shorter and more explicit version of that.

 

My first thought probably saved my life. My second thought was a string of expletives, which didn’t really add to the situation. My third thought almost killed me.

 

The mass of purple-grey rubbery tentacles shot across the hallway towards me and I reacted on instinct forming the spell in less than a second.

 

Scutare.

 

It wasn’t a magic word as such, words have power but they tend to be power we give them. I gathered my will and drew the ambient magic into me. But raw, unfocused magic doesn’t do anything, it needs to be shaped and that’s where the words come in. The first time you do a spell you have to Free cast it, shaping it purely with your will. It’s a pretty neat trick but not all that easy to do �" for a human anyway �" and most importantly it takes time. Incantations are kinda like keyboard shortcuts. You shape the magic to the word. Or shape the word to the magic. Or…make a link….its hard to explain, but you basically pick a word and imbue it with power and meaning to help you shape the magic a little faster. In this case: Scutare a bastardised version of ‘scutum’, Latin for ‘shield’. Free casting doesn’t take long if you’re good, but in a life or death situation a fraction of a second can make all the difference.

 

Lots of people will say things like that, that in extreme situations shaving those tiny moments off your reaction time can save your life. It’s why soldiers train to commit their movements into muscle memory so they don’t even have to think to react. Even if you understand that logically, there’s probably some small part of you thinking ‘Oh it can’t make that much of a difference. I’m sure I’d be fast enough.’ I certainly thought like that.

 

Right up until my shield snapped into place before me, blocking the creature about six inches in front of my nose. Trust me, that’ll give you a new perspective on things.

 

Have you ever seen a Lamprey? They look a bit like a thick eel with a flat end and a circular mouth filled with razor sharp teeth. This was kind of like that but there were three of them, with smaller tentacles coming out of the mouths. Oh and they hit me like a ton of bricks, knocking me flat shield or no shield (momentum is a pain in the arse that way). Oh and they were right in my face. Seriously I can’t stress that enough. That’s the bit that led to the string of expletives.

 

Then �" still acting on instinct �" I extended my hand towards it, gathered my will once more and thought:

 

Flemmis.

 

You can probably guess what that one means. Well honed instincts are brilliant, as a first reaction they can save your life. Don’t rely on them for the whole fight though because your instincts are bloody idiots.

 

A gout of flame lashed out of my hand and struck Mullen in what was left of his face, right where the things emerged. I say a gout, more a plume. Fun fact about this particular type of abomination �" turns out the foul smelling oily gunk covering them is quite flammable.

 

‘But David’ I hear you ask ‘surely setting the horrible thing trying to kill you on fire is a great idea!’ Well ordinarily you’d be right. But there were a few things that you �" like my instincts �" hadn’t taken into account. Like the fact that I was standing in a corridor with wooden stairs filling one side, that Mullen was between me and the exit, and that I was still being battered by giant tentacles, throwing off my aim. Only know they were flailing wildly, they were angry, and they were on freaking fire. Oh and they were flicking flaming blobs of oil everywhere I hadn’t already managed to hit when my arm was knocked around.

 

It took me about fifteen seconds to strengthen my shield and steady myself from the blows. It took about ten seconds for me to be surrounded by fire. It took five seconds for me to remember a drawback about my first spell. See the thing about surrounding yourself with an impenetrable barrier of force is that it’s completely useless. You can’t move and you pass out in a minute after you’ve used up all the air. They need to be the right mix of hard and durable, whilst still being flexible enough to move around in and semi-permeable so you can still breathe. My shield is pretty good for someone who’s only been doing this a couple of years, but there were a couple of things it would still let through. For example: Smoke. If I need to breathe I need to take air in. This meant taking in the foul smelling smoke from the rapidly dying creature. For a second example: Heat. It blocked the flames yes, but if air and light can get through then so can hot air, not to mention infra-red radiation.

 

This is fairly basic stuff actually, there are ways to block fire fairly effectively but they’re pretty advanced so I didn’t know them. Fire �" or at least the sort of unfocused fire I’d just used �" was pretty hard to control anyway, which is why most people who have any idea what they’re doing don’t bother with it. It’s flashy looking but only useful against people who don’t know what they’re doing, and if you’re up against one of them there are ways to do it that won’t set your own hair alight. In short: Only an idiot combines those two spells, especially in a tight space. In my defence I’d been training with fire the week before so it was the first thing I reached for. Actually that’s a terrible defence, pretend I didn’t say that.

 

The Abomination was still thrashing, but it was clearly on its last legs (or no legs really, Mullen had collapsed) and I was able to get out from under the giant lampreys. My lungs were filling with smoke and the heat was really starting to hurt, I figured I had twenty seconds before I collapsed. I frantically tried to modify it on the fly �" not recommended by the way �" mentally reshaping the energy to seal it up. Of course there wasn’t much I could do there, if I sealed it too much I wouldn’t get any air at all. So instead I played it smart: I lessened the permeability for one. Getting air in was difficult, I had to really suck to pull it through, but it meant it acted like a sieve, filtering out the majority of the smoke. Next I fiddled with the colour. These things are normally transparent, but you had to work to get it that way in the first place. Making it opaque again was simple, and making it reflective only took another moment.

 

Right, so now I could just about breathe, and I was reflecting heat away from me. I couldn’t see but at least I was safe. Well safer. Well, not much safer. I assessed things frantically: I couldn’t put out the fire. I couldn’t just summon water in, I knew an air blast spell but that would just fan the flames. I knew a cold snap spell but I hadn’t finished forming an incantation and it would take too long to shape. I couldn’t head out the front door because the still thrashing Mullen was in the way screeching (which was really helping me think). The fire had already spread past me in every direction by the time I’d got away from the lampreys (My aim may have been put off more than I care to admit when I got whacked the second time). I knew Mullen had a family but considering the blood pools, and the fact that I’d heard nothing from them despite the tentacle monster and fire I figured there wasn’t anything I could do (hell I couldn’t think of anything to do anyway!). Oh and from the way I was feeling, and the increasing difficulty in maintaining the shield I guessed I was starting to asphyxiate. Guess I made it too smoke proof after all.

 

Right then. I turned around what I hoped was the right amount and ran towards the back of the house, lowering the reflectiveness of the shield just enough to make out shapes so I didn’t hit a wall. Miraculously I made it into the kitchen. Which was already considerably more on fire than it should have been �" I’m guessing lamprey-Mullen had been traipsing that oily muck around the whole place before I arrived. In particular there was a blaze right in front of the glass doors to the garden.

 

Things were going black (well blacker than they already were within my bubble) so I took a deep breath, drew in as much energy as I could and ran at the doors releasing it in a half shaped blast of force and air as I went.

 

Oil, fire, and shattered glass exploded out onto the lightly damp grass, followed a split second later by my jumping through the wreck of the back doors. I collapsed on the ground, let my shield drop and took a delicious gasp of air before coughing it out along with a lungful of smoke. I’m pretty lucky the grass didn’t catch fire either because that’s about the moment I passed out.