Luke Chmilenko
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Starbreaker: Volume 4 - Chapter 38
🕑 Added 2025-10-15 16:00:07 +0000 UTC“Proposal Three: The shikari are the cause of the Aion’s downfall. A predator that the magic-reliant Aions had never encountered before, and which could dispatch their defenders faster than they could cast. An outside context problem for a species that was entirely devoted to magic. These creatures have proven themselves quite capable of planetary annihilation on a grand scale in contemporary times, so why should the Aions have been in receipt of any different treatment from them?”
—The Shikari Potentialities, Olivan Veilbohr
Just the thought of facing the shikari now, as bruised and battered as they were, filled Sylvas with dread. Even in their prime, it had been a brutal match-up against considerably fewer of them.
I would personally prefer to never fight them again, if that is an option, darling? Perhaps we just head for the colony and allow them to deal with the issue. Surely, they’ve got the means; otherwise, there wouldn’t still be a colony?
“Just like we planned.” Sylvas said, realizing full well that he wasn’t comfortable with that risk. “I pin them, and you scythe them.”
“As you say.”
Kaya was making a long and protracted groan, but she didn’t argue.
They had just reached the first tended fields, now abandoned, presumably to escape the shikari. The colony itself couldn’t be much farther. If they meant to stand and fight, it would have to be now.
Sylvas took a dive, and the others followed him to ground. The moment they touched on the mud, he spun and began casting, but it seemed as though the preternatural intelligence that the shikari had shown before was not limited to simply working out ways around existing problems but predicting future ones. They had begun spreading out the moment that they left the trees, and now they were dispersed so widely that there was no hope of catching all of them in a single gravity spike.
I have a proposal, but you’re not going to like it.
Sylvas grinned. “Have I ever said no to you?”
Alright then, I have a proposal, but I don’t like it.
Gathering all of the shikari in one place would require bait.
The monsters bounded across the field, slowly closing in around them in a great arc. The center of the line slowed so that the flanks could curve in and overtake them, and the assault could come from every direction at once. They were cunning hunters, but cunning could be used against them. Sylvas frantically cast the spells that he was going to need into personality fragments to be used when they were due, and then he cast one last backwards glance at his friends. Malachai stood ready with his scythe in hand, and Kaya was surrounded by the thickest metal armor he’d ever seen her layer on, covering both her and Hector—probably the only viable way to ensure he didn’t get snatched off her back in the midst of the fight.
Then the first of the shikari was almost in leaping distance, and Sylvas let the first teleportation spell click into place.
He repositioned behind the enemy line and let off a series of focused gravity spikes, each one hammering into the midst of the shikari, knocking all of them off their balance, sending them tumbling in towards the event horizon he’d just conjured. Then he was flying along the rear of their curved line, firing off shot after shot, enough to hurt, to distract, to knock their plans askew, but not enough to kill any of them. He wasn’t trying to thin their numbers. Quite the opposite. As they realized he was there, the charge slowed and reversed, and the far flank peeled off from its pincer movement towards Kaya and Malachai and instead flowed back along the rear of the line in pursuit of him. Of course, the shikari were coordinated enough that the other flank was doing the same thing, the same pincer, closing behind their line instead of ahead of it, and the rest of the line churned up mud and dug in claws to slow and return from where they’d come. They had no idea what Kaya and Malachai were capable of, but Sylvas had shown he could hurt them, so he was their target.
Just as they’d reversed course, so too did Sylvas, turning back from his original course around the rear of their line and heading back towards the central point. All the while, he was still peppering them with focused spikes, sometimes hitting a limb and snipping it off, sometimes striking home into a central mass of body and crushing organs and bones. Not one shot was enough to stop the shikari. Not one of them meant to.
Once he was back in the center, he began to cast once more, gathering the black gravity mana in a great sphere between his hands as he layered on more and more magic. He decreased his own mass as he went to give the spell less and less to hold onto. It was nothing more, and nothing less, than a tiny black hole, and it did exactly what it was meant to do when Sylvas cast it down at his own feet. The charge towards him accelerated past the limits of even shikari. The gravity well dragged everyone and everything towards it. The pincer movement tried to unstick itself and slow, but between the pull of the black hole and the pressure of all the other shikari behind it, there was no way to stop it now. Sylvas stayed there, atop the black hole, gritting his teeth as he resisted its pull, pouring more and more mana into it and marveling as all the water from the rows upon rows of irrigation ditches splashed up and was drawn into a slow, spiraling orbit. Clods of dirt tore up, too, and whole swathes of the newly laid fields were stripped bare, everything falling in towards the one central point of this extreme gravity spike, focused in as tight a space as he could make it and still growing stronger.
Even as weightless as he was, he soon had to throw all of his will into moving away from the black dot in the middle of it all, dragging himself away inch by inch, even as it drew all of the shikari towards it. It was slow—agonizingly slow—but he could see the shikari suffering the exact same thing in reverse. For every move he made away from the black hole, they were all dragged the same distance closer. All of the shikari were gathered around now, all of them straining against his magic’s pull, all of them helpless in the face of it. They had no magic, they were subject to the laws of physics, and Sylvas controlled those laws. With one last frantic push of power and will, he launched himself free of the black hole’s hold and cried out to Malachai, “Now!”
The scythe blades of death that the necromancer had launched at Sylvas during their duel back on Strife had been vast, expansive, and lethal. The one he released now was almost comedically compact by comparison. All of the shikari were bunched so close that he had focused on the intensity of the spell rather than its spread. It cut through all of the shikari, passed harmlessly through the black hole beneath Sylvas’ feet and then dissipated with a sound like a woman’s scream. Sylvas released his spell, breathing steadily again for the first time since he’d cast it, and turned his attention inward to see how much mana he had to spare in case there were any survivors. His core was still full.
All of the mana that he’d just spent, on the flight, on the teleportation, on the black hole vast enough to drag in all of the shikari… they’d all cost him nothing. He didn’t even need to run through his cycling technique. Magic flowed into him from all around, drawn in by the hunger at his core, and Strife within him had guzzled it all up, regurgitating a perfect mix of war and gravity in such vast quantities that he hadn’t made a dent.
He looked down at his hands, the overlay of jagged claws over them in stark red, and he could see the war mana flowing around them, the destruction and battle that they’d just wrought turned into raw power for his eidolon. For him.
It was with that realization that the first phase of his covenant clicked into place, Sylvas and Strife both aligning to the other.
The scythe strike had not been enough to kill all of the shikari. Out on the periphery of it, there were a few that had suffered only near-lethal harm. Sylvas dove for them now, his claws already hooked and ready to tear through their flesh, to take their blood and make it his own. Every drop that he shed as he tore through bone and deeper swept up into orbit around him, and just as he’d directed his orbitals to strike out with it, the blood of his enemies now became his weapon, slicing and carving through everything that still moved.
His heart hammered in his ears, in his chest, but it was not fear or exhaustion that drove it to such a wild rhythm, it was excitement. He was one with Strife, and it loved to fight. Its whole being revolved around battle. He had become one with it, and he would never know peace again as anything but a burden, an interlude before the next glorious slaughter could begin. Strife had calmed as they came into alignment, the endless fury inside of it tempered by Sylvas’ constant need for control. The combination of their two souls combined took a wildfire of chaotic intention and forged it into something solid. A blade.
He tore through the shikari with joy in his heart, and Mira watched with no small amount of dismay from his hindbrain. On the opposite flank, there were some half-dead shikari trying to pull themselves out from under the corpses of their kin, but Sylvas had no intention of letting them escape. With a fresh surge of blood from all the dead at his feet carrying him, he launched himself at the shikari. Those red, ragged claws of war mana worked fine at parting their scales and their fur, but it wasn’t enough. Fragments of what he’d learned from the new spellbook that Mira had been constructing combined with the instinctual manifestation that Strife gave him allowed him to speak the new words with care even as he brutally kicked each shikari that tried to rise back to the ground.
The claws that enveloped his hands were no longer translucent lines of red but a rather a solid, rich burgundy comprised of both war and gravity. Claws forged from his gravity shear, shaped in the way that he’d made his first sickle so long ago. He laughed aloud as he brought them down on the first of the shikari to try and snap its teeth his way, parting its skull and jaw down the middle in three places. It didn’t die, it tried to regenerate, but he dug in under its chin, caught hold of its spine, and ripped it out through its throat. More blood rained down around him, and it was glorious.
All too soon, there were no shikari left, just him, surrounded by their broken and ruined bodies, and his friends, standing back at a safe distance, staring at him as though he had just grown a new head. He spat some of the shikari blood from his mouth and laughed. What had they expected? He was a trained soldier, a warrior, and now half of him was an eidolon of war. Was it such a surprise that he would fight? That he would win?
Calm down, darling. The fighting is done, for now. Hopefully.
“Hopefully?” Sylvas turned to follow the gaze of Kaya and Malachai to the newest arrivals on the battlefield. They were not shikari, but that didn’t mean that they were friends, either.
