Chapter 48.2: Air and Fire

Ventyr fell to a knee and gasped, his body seizing as another of the asura struck him from behind with some sort of electrical weapon. His hands uncontrollably clutched at his staff, and his body curled in on itself until the current shut off. The asura pulled back a step and waited, eyes wide at what he’d done. He must not have been a fighter.

Ventyr had time for a flash of gratitude at that. Under normal conditions, he could have seized control of that elemental electricity and redirected it away from himself, perhaps even back at his attacker. He knew that. But these weren’t normal conditions. He’d been stripped, starved, and denied rest for three days. Minkus’ help or not, he was in no shape for combat, and yet, here he was, not only having engaged the fight, but having spent the last several minutes harnessing degrees of elemental power that would have left him winded on a good day. He’d initially dispatched the wagon’s defenders by calling on a sweeping gale of wind powerful enough to rip them free of their positions and off across the open field. As Crusader Jindel and, surprisingly, Scholar Yissa had engaged the fallen combatants, Ventyr had then turned his attention to the golem and the wagon, halting the wagon’s movement by consuming its wheels in flame and incapacitating the golem that drew it with a focused dart of lightning straight to its robotic eye. It was still fumbling around blind as the near side of its wagon collapsed into the dirt. Those exertions, though effective, had left Ventyr as worn as if he’d been confined in that glass cylinder a fortnight. 

He didn’t have time for the weakness, though. Sucking a breath, he thrust himself back to his feet, transferring the force of the upward movement into an swing of his staff that caught the attacker in the chin and launched him off his feet. The shock wand flew from the asura’s hand, and Ventyr took intentional steps forward to hover over the squat person. There was genuine fear in his eyes as Ventyr collected his strength and bashed the butt of the staff into his forehead, knocking the technician unconscious.

Only then did Ventyr draw several long, ragged breaths.

He turned back to the wagon, where Crusader Jindel was exchanging strikes with another of the asura defenders, this one clearly more experienced. Armored for combat in the black and red of the Inquest, he threw a flurry of sword swings meant to take Jindel off her balance as she parried with dual axes. Each deflection rang through the tropical air as the nimble guard continued to press her back toward the far side of the collapsed wagon. They passed it, and Ventyr almost screamed a warning, noticing the hunched shape of an asura down at the edge of the burning wagon, out of the crusader’s view. This one gripped some sort of club and was in nothing but a helmet, one leather gauntlet— and her undergarments? Venture blinked. It was the scholar.

As Jindel drew the guard back past the edge of the fallen vehicle, Yissa leapt out clumsily and smashed a bat of wooden debris over the back of his head. It popped into a starburst of splinters, and her victim turned, not incapacitated, but distracted just enough to give Crusader Jindel the opening she needed.

Hooking the sword with one axe, the young woman moved it aside, exposing the asura’s dominant hand at its hilt. The other axe came down before her opponent could react, slashing through the leather-strapped underside of his forearm like it was straw. The guard screamed and half dropped the blade, his overhand going instantly limp. Still, he tried to swing it back at her once more with his good hand.

Bringing both her weapons across its trajectory, Jindel easily knocked the flailed sword out of his grip. “Yield!” she yelled.

Cold eyes burned up, and the guard drew a pistol from his belt. “Nev—”

Before he could finish the word or take his aim, the woman slashed a curved blade clean through his good wrist before digging the other deep into the gap between his back and shoulder plates. He collapsed, broken and seizing, but she still kicked the weapons out of reach.

Yissa scooped up the gun, and Ventyr was suddenly impressed with the scholar’s ingenuity and grit.

“More of them are coming, sir,” Jindel panted, pointing in a wide arc across the courtyard.

She was right. From the western side of the complex, a new batch of asura were appearing out of doorways and dark crevices between buildings. A golem or three dotted their ranks, and if Ventyr had to guess, these asura would be better armed than the unprepared defenders they’d first encountered. This was a counter-offensive.

But the asura weren’t all that the sylvari recognized. The bandits to their north were on the move too, engaging the Inquest where they interfered but clearly making a path toward the wagon he, Jindel, and Yissa had just taken.

Yissa craned her neck in the same direction, her braids frayed but still bouncing with her movements. “Has my brain been rattled free of its anchors,” she asked with a grimace, “or are they bringing the other wagon to us?”

“I don’t care,” Ventyr said through clenched teeth. “We have no more time.” Both the asura and human looked at him uncertainly.

Ventyr kicked a foot against the side of the crippled wagon. Despite collapsing over flame-eaten wheels, it stood sturdily enough, several of its crates still butted up precariously against the remaining sidewall that was now pressed into the dirt. Others had fallen out alongside it. Ventyr climbed into the wagon’s bed, one bare foot on the half-upright floor and the other on the short sidewall.

“Give me your weapon,” he said, looking to Crusader Jindel.

She obeyed, handing him an axe, and he jammed it between the lid and body of an upright crate, prying the top free of its nailed hold. Ventyr pulled the lid off entirely and dug out the packing hay that covered the crate’s real contents. It was not the jade.

“A golemite?” Yissa spat, bouncing to see over the edge of the wooden box. “We did all that for a golemite? What in the alchemy is…”

Ventyr tuned her out, already moving to the next crate. He got the blade between lid and box and pried them apart, shoving the lid back and rifling through the top layer of packing hay. It was another of those miniature, pill-shaped golems.

“We targeted the wrong wagon,” he said flatly. Fire sparked inside him, but he pressed it down, concentrating it for what he knew came next. He turned to the approaching wagon and its human entourage, handing the axe back to Crusader Jindel. “They do not escape this valley.”

Beside him, Yissa frowned. “I don’t get any particular sense that they’re attempting to escape the valley, Sergeant. The opposite direction would likely have been the optimal path for that. If I were to theorize, actually—”

“They’re coming right at us,” Jindel interrupted.

Ventyr had a duty to the two alongside him, and a deeper one to Tyria. He didn’t need to know the details of this threat to know it was one. Inhaling deeply, he reached out through the staff in his hands for any element he could touch.

They were all still there but dwindling away from him. Water felt the furthest. There were no great bodies of water nearby for him to draw on, but neither could he feel its cool, healing presence in the earth beneath him; it was little more than a distant echo, nothing he could touch. Earth wasn’t far behind. Though it surrounded him on all sides, he was so weak and completely furious that it seemed to stand at a distance, balking from his impatient touch. Those two elements wouldn’t bend to him, leaving him with fire and air and whatever scraps of energy were still in him. That would have to be enough.

Ventyr concentrated, stoking the wind and flame inside him. It rose higher and higher in his chest as the bandits and their wagon closed the gap. Forty yards. Thirty-five. Thirty.

He glanced aside at the new band of asura approaching as well. They were even closer.

“Sergeant?” Jindel asked. It was the first he’d noticed her looking at him, worry in her eye. She hefted axes and lowered into readiness. “What are we doing?”

He heard the whizz of a rifle round shoot by him. Then another. They didn’t come from the other wagon, but he didn’t have the focus to see where they did come from.

Hot streaks of energy were now coming from the asura as well. Two of those neon blasts from their magitechnical weapons struck the upturned underside of the wagon, eating charred craters into the boards.

“They’re shooting now!” Yissa squeaked, ducking into the bed of the wagon.

“Sergeant!” This time Jindel all but demanded his attention, but Ventyr kept his eyes locked on the coming humans. “Fend off the Inquest, and stay out of my way,” he instructed. “I will take this.”

In his periphery, Ventyr saw Jindel pause a moment before jumping to action, a sign of her uncertainty. But he could see them clearly now, the humans. Heads and shoulders rose above the rear of the wagon slowly rolling toward them. He recognized the slender one with the hawkish nose, now up and taking shots at the same asura his own people were positioning against. Ventyr might have also recognized the two big men driving the wagon, but he had no energy for that. His sights were set on the man in the middle: the haughty leader with that scar carved down his face.

They were only twenty yards out now, and the pressure Ventyr had been shaping inside himself reached his limit, pressing in anxious rage against the remaining walls of his will. He screamed, extending his free hand and clenching it into a fist. The air around him went chill, as he drew every possible inch of heat he could find into a single point at the heart of the bandits’ vehicle. It took just a second, though it felt to Ventyr like an age, and that point exploded into a blinding ball of flame: white, then blue, then a searing crimson. It blew back the humans, consumed the tarp atop the wagon’s load, and took root all along its wooden sides, roaring into a bonfire.

Ventyr panted at the exertion, but he wasn’t done. The gale he’d been containing also strained to be free.

Staff in hand, he began to stir, sweeping circles faster and faster as he pulled the air around him into tighter, closer, more compressed rotations. It swept and spun, swirling into a cyclone the width of his staff until he pushed it forward, releasing it to the diameter of a large boulder and sending it hurtling across the field at the bandits’ wagon. He thrust out his will to reign its forward motion to a halt right over the blazing cart, and he cycled that lost momentum back into its spin, suddenly pulling loose boards off the vehicle. The twister did exactly what he’d intended: pressurized air on the outside was drawn back up through the eye and across the fire, stoking it higher and higher until the whole wagon raged. A spiraling gout of flame shot thirty feet in the air.

Then, just as quickly, it fell away. The wind died out, the flames fell to nothing, and the charred remains of the wagon collapsed to the ground, along with its crystal cargo, glimmering in the remaining flickers of firelight. Ventyr gasped and fell to a knee, catching himself on his staff.

He remained there for a moment, lightheaded and spent. He heard the sound of whizzing gunfire again, shots he faintly knew had been aimed at him. He couldn’t make out her words, but he heard Yissa’s pitchy voice, as small hands wrapped around his waist. It took her several tugs, but she dragged him back behind their toppled wagon, and the sound of whizzing shots receded.

“That was certainly a show,” he finally heard her say as she pushed him up against the bed, “but by all the logic of the Alchemy, you can’t simply take a nap in a direct line of fire!”

“Pull down those crates,” Jindel demanded. Ventyr turned to see her spin back around the opposite side of the wagon and fire off westward shots with the gun he’d last seen in Yissa's hand. The crusader was still fending off the oncoming asura. She spun back. “Pull them down now, Scholar!”

“Oh, me?” Yissa squeaked. “Right. Of course. Apologies. I was uncertain as to whom you were instructing—”

A shot whistled by, and the asura jumped, head spinning nearly off her neck as she looked to the shot’s source. The bandits who’d been driving the wagon were up and coming on again, though now without the burden of their load.

“If you don’t want to be shot,” Jindel screamed, “just do it!”

Eyes wide, Yissa nodded and obeyed, hopping up into the overturned bed and wedging her small frame behind a remaining stack of crates that stood atop each other precariously. Once, twice, and she shoved the haphazard stack out from the wagon bed. Six more crates toppled down onto a small pile already settled on the ground. Two of their lids splintered, cracking open and spilling golemites and hay into the open. The pile of crates, broken planks, and steelwork parts could hardly be called a bulwark, but it was at least enough of a mess to give the three of them something more to shelter behind on the second front of their battle.