Just a Bystander

Kant Touch This

The fact that all of us had read the same textbooks was evident. Nobody bothered shielding. After a quick glance to see that we were on the same page, all ten of us fired off the best glyph sequences we had in our arsenal.

Rule One: Focus fire.

If an arcanist had no access to artefacts and they had to rely on mental glyphs, then the best way to take them down was to overpower them fast by sheer weight of numbers. After all, a person could only split their attention so many ways, and no matter how good your arcanic control was, you could only channel so much arcana at once. If they had to throw up an all-encompassing shield, they were spreading their arcana thin. And a thin shield can be smashed with raw power.

Triss' attack was the first to manifest. Her sequencing speed was really impressive. Somehow, she modified her formula and managed to produce two beams this time - one from each palm - that seemed even more potent than her single beam from before. They filled the air with a keening noise as they lay siege to Kant's defences.

It looked like he was still holding her at bay using a directional shield but this time instead of a flat plane of energy, it seemed to be made up of several overlapping layers that rotated around a central point.

Since my improvised quadruple-bolt sequence was still fresh in my mind, I took a quick moment to tweak the density formulas and packed more arcana into each one, and adjusted the angles to hit at a slightly different spot than before, then fired it off again.

The rest of our modified bolts didn't take such a different form like Triss', but the distinctions were still clear. Bolts of all shapes and sizes were flying from every direction towards Kant, who was still reading. No other shields had appeared, and he was only maintaining the one directly in front of him that kept Triss' twin beams at bay.

At the last possible moment, the rotating layers from his frontal shield swarmed out and then re-formed in front of him. In that single instant, they had moved quickly enough to deflect the rest of our bolts. They flew off in wild trajectories, smashing against the walls, floor, and ceiling, where they glowed briefly before dissipating as the room's glyph sequences safely absorbed them. Triss' beam managed to push again the last layer and press it back by maybe a centimetre, but by then the other layers had reformed and bolstered it again. Her beam sputtered out after ten seconds.

Kant looked up from his book and grimaced. His body shields were completely untouched.

'Good attempt, I suppose.'

We all knew what was coming next, and again we defaulted to the conventional wisdom. Since all of us were already standing close together, we instinctively arranged ourselves in a standard spearhead formation. I found myself just behind Emilia, who was at the tip, with Reyes next to me.

Rule Two: Gestalt where possible.

Kant's attack was obviously meant to show off. I think if I had been at the tip of the spear, I would have completely dropped the ball because his work was so distractingly incredible. Where our combined assault had been a chaotic hodge-podge of arcana, he had somehow seamlessly joined them together into an efficient array.

He copied Triss' twin beams and directed them at us out of his opened palms. But at the same time, just as the beams shot out, a copy of each of our sequences also blossomed out from each palm, and as far as I could tell he had somehow managed to reconstruct exactly what each of us had been doing. I recognised Emilia's denser bolts because of their telltale change in shape, and Reyes' bolt that was designed to split and swarm on impact was actually several bolts held together by a membrane. And I could see the tell-tale wavering in the air that meant my own invisible variations were arcing out towards us at an angle.