https://youtu.be/15_eaHGeQ7s
When I saw him fight, part of me knew our lives had changed. It was like unveiling a blade whose construction defied all understanding of conventional science. He was a sword more deadly than any weapon we had ever conceived of, and in that moment he was fighting with a blunted edge. If he had been piloting the machine he was perhaps even then conceiving, would I have changed my decision? Would I have sent him away out of terror for what his power represented, and in so doing, changed our fates? I cannot know for certain, but still I wonder.
Arthur exhaled to relax his muscles as the Pallas Athena gained distance, his eyes fixed on the thankfully smooth display, currently populated by the highlighted form of the winged Eidolon hovering above and before him.
The moment Menelaus’ voice called for the duel’s commencement, his instincts screamed at him, and Arthur threw the Hoplite to the right with a grimace for its input lag.
The detonation of plasma cannons against the arena’s reinforced surface echoed a moment later, and Arthur glanced at the red-hot, freshly scarred steel.
“I guess we’re not even pretending this is training, then?” he asked conversationally.
Circe’s face, which was still live in his feed, morphed into a predatory grin.
“‘Not in my nature’,” she quoted back at him with a hint of mockery.
Arthur snorted and shifted his stance to a lighter guard, his eyes locked on the hovering form of the Pallas Athena.
“Do your worst, then!”
Instead of responding, Circe’s expression firmed, and the winged Eidolon unleashed a barrage of high-explosive plasma at him in a cascading wave of repeated fire from her twin hip-cannons.
Arthur immediately pushed the Hoplite to its limits and moved the machine in a slightly awkward dance across the arena floor with measured bursts of its right-side shoulder and foot thrusters. He couldn’t entirely dodge her shots with the limited speed and response time of the Eidolon, but he could angle his shield to absorb the majority of the impacts.
By the time the barrage stopped, Iris’ voice filled the cockpit.
“Warning: Minor damage to right leg. Please adjust for reduced movement capacity.”
Arthur clicked his tongue and threw the Hoplite forward with a roar of its spinal thrusters to dodge another fusillade of fire. Then, with a scream of stressed servos, he set the machine into a sprint.
“Mute damage alerts!” he said toward Iris, who responded with a simple beep.
Circe didn’t let up for a moment with her barrage, and explosions chased him while he moved in an unpredictable serpentine across the arena’s floor.
Arthur’s mind worked furiously at the problem, and he realized immediately that his first step had to be to force the heiress to fight him on the ground. Even with her added agility, it would be a far easier form of combat than slowly losing efficacy to her barrages.
If things continued, the power difference alone would decide the outcome.
Arthur glanced at the trail of explosions following him and made a snap decision.
He danced away from another pair of cannon shells and quickly slipped his shield back onto the machine’s spine to free up his left hand and protect his back.
With that done, he pivoted the Hoplite’s body mid-sprint. He flared its thrusters, sliding backward a short distance in his previous direction from inertia alone until the new velocity overrode the old. His jaw locked in focus, and Arthur urged the Hoplite into a forward roll at the exact moment as Circe fired her cannons once more.
The rattle of an explosion, boom of close impact, and subsequent screech of an alarm echoed within the cockpit—but Arthur killed it with a thought and came up beneath the hovering form of the Pallas Athena.
With his rifle in hand.
Arthur took aim and drilled a single yellow beam shot upward, trusting in his extrasensory awareness to guide his targeting.
The Pallas Athena’s right wing rocked with a detonation.
Arthur grinned at the result and the subsequent shout of alarm from Circe.
She hadn’t expected him to dive into an attack. It was an insane thing to do, after all.
That was why he’d placed his shield on his back, and timed the dive to absorb the shot directly to the guarded section of his spine. Had his timing been off, he might have lost the duel in that moment—but he’d trusted his instincts, and the extrasensory awareness afforded to him by his psions.
It wasn’t true precognition, but it was damn close.
The mark of a true Eidolon pilot was the ability to put total faith in their spatial senses.
In that sense, Arthur was among the best of them—and the most reckless.
However, he had no time to celebrate as Circe used the explosion for momentum and flipped the Pallas Athena through the air in an elegant pirouette. Her hip cannons retracted backward, and a snarl of ignition sent the white-and-pink machine blazing toward Arthur with shocking acceleration.
He met her sword-led charge with a last-minute desperate pivot, and put distance between them enough that she flew past him with mere inches to spare.
A breath of relief left his lips, and Arthur took the brief window of advantage to pull his shield back into his left hand, while mag-locking his rifle to his left hip.
Circe returned with a smooth flip of the Pallas Athena and a flaring of its partially damaged wing unit. A blaze of plasma followed in her wake and she charged in at Arthur, the halo behind the machine’s wings burning gold while she swung her blade in a testing strike head-on.
Arthur met the stroke with his shield and burned his engines to compensate for the velocity of her impact, while grunting at the shock of the collision. The Hoplite was a good training unit, but it wasn’t built for actual battle, and the screaming alarms warning him that its core chassis had sustained blunt force damage confirmed as much.
He had no time to care as Circe threw herself backward, then leveraged her superior agility to launch herself upward and over him to attack from his rear.
Arthur barely managed to turn his machine left fast enough to put his training shield in the path of her sword, and grunted when her blade left a deep gash in the shield’s surface. A quick mental diagnostic informed him that her blade’s plasma field had seared through the shield's light layer of anti-energy laminate.
Her blade could kill starships, after all. His shield was hardly a meaningful challenge.
Options leaped into his mind and were discarded in the same instant while Arthur worked to keep up with Circe’s increasingly rapid movements. The Lion Maiden was finding her groove in their close combat, and while it was more sustainable than simply attempting to evade a mass barrage of plasma rounds, Arthur knew that he was still fighting a battle of attrition.
One that he was losing, though in an admittedly more manageable capacity.
“Is this it?” Circe asked with evident disappointment when Arthur burned fuel and pivoted to parry away another slash from above. The follow-up cartwheel-kick to his machine’s head sent the Hoplite reeling, and Arthur grunted at the shock of impact radiating through his body.
“You’re supposed to be some sort of prodigy, Arthur. What the hell is this?”
Resonance echoed into the intervening space between them, though Arthur immediately clamped down on his emotions when it did.
He did not think Circe would do the same.
Her words drilled into him with a mix of goading and subtle concern. She was worried, he knew immediately, not for herself, but for her expectations. She was worried she would win, and that she would be proven wrong.
She was worried she had put her faith in the wrong man.
“The lag—”
“Don’t blame the machine, Arthur!” Circe admonished while twisting away from a retaliatory slash from his blade and responding with a hover-assisted roundhouse that smashed his Hoplite backward, and nearly toppled it over.
“You told me you could defeat me regardless of the disadvantage. You promised not to hold back!”
Her voice was growing angry now, and Arthur wondered if Menelaus was still listening and was surprised by their agreement.
Perhaps not. He knew his daughter, after all.
“I’m not holding back anything!” Arthur insisted with genuine frustration while throwing the Hoplite sideways, and then fending off another flurry of attacks from the Pallas Athena with strokes of his blade and some quick and desperate movements of his shield to send her blade-strikes sparking off the flat of its surface.
“Then you’re a liar, Arthur Magellan!” Circe said with a ferocity that gave him pause. “You promised me you’d be my sword, and my shield! You promised me something incredible. Friendship. Safety. Peace! Is this how you plan to give it to me? To my family? With this weakness?!”
Another attack from the flank came in, and Arthur grunted despite the partial deflection he managed. He tried to position the defending metal properly, but he was just too slow. To make matters worse, the strike finally proved too much for his shield, and it snapped in half jaggedly at the center.
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“You promised to be my Knight, Arthur Magellan,” Circe snarled. “You promised!”
Another strike sent the Hoplite reeling, and Arthur only managed to stabilize himself with a burst of power from his engines while carefully altering his machine’s stance and center of gravity.
“Come on!” he growled in frustration. “Work with me, Hoplite.”
No amount of cajoling, however, could create higher interface speed.
“That trick with the rifle was almost impressive,” Circe admitted heatedly while they dueled, “but what the hell is this? You can barely even stop my attacks!”
“The machine—”
“Don’t blame the machine! I’ve seen you fight and felt you fight—this is pathetic!”
Something was wrong. He knew something was wrong. He shouldn’t have been so easily overpowered, Hoplite or not. His confidence hadn’t been false. Arthur knew he was better than this. He knew he was of a higher caliber. Something in his mind raged against his performance, yet he could do nothing. He could answer her with nothing.
Nataliya Verchenko had neutered him.
Another strike forced him to throw the Hoplite left and leverage its weight into a body-spinning slash with his sword, which narrowly forced away Circe’s attack and opened up distance again. Even still, she scored a gash on his chestplate—one that registered with a grim chime of warning and a rattle of his cockpit.
“What happened to the man on the hilltop, Arthur?! What happened to the warrior that defeated me time, and time, and time again?! What use is that strength if you’re worthless in an Eidolon?! What use are your psions?! How can you even begin to protect my family like this?!”
“I will—!”
“THEN SHOW ME SOMETHING!” she screamed at him.
Alarms blared across the cockpit once more when the Pallas Athena surged in and feinted with its sword, before a surprise pirouette and engine-assisted roundhouse kicked him away across the arena. At the same time, the Pallas Athena’s wings flared outward to send it backward and toward the sky with a roar. Circe’s blade came up in a ready stance above him, and she couched it atop her shield, her Eidolon’s eyes blazing green.
As green as the accusing gaze on his screen.
“Warning!” Iris chimed in despite the mute. “Chassis integrity at 67%. Critical damage is imminent. Surrender is recommended for operator survival, Arthur.”
“Just give up,” Circe said with a hint of bitter resignation. “Just admit you lied to us all. Psions or no psions, you don’t have the skills to use them, Arthur. I thought you did, after our duels, but Eidolons and swords are different. This proves that.”
Arthur tried to say something while he stared at her face on the screen.
Nothing came out.
“Surrender, Arthur,” she growled. “It’s over.”
Surrender.
Surrender.
Arthur froze.
The Pallas Athena charged.
He stared at the advancing Eidolon in silence.
Surrender.
His hands loosened on the controls, and a slow breath left him.
Surrender.
Arthur looked across the flashing red lights of the cockpit dully and took in the mess Circe had made of his machine in a few minutes. He thought of Endymion, Perseus, Cassandra, Atreus, and Menelaus. He thought about them praising him. He thought about them watching on with the growing realization he was a fraud.
He looked back at Circe’s face.
He saw tears in her eyes at the recognition of his failure.
He thought of the time they’d spent walking the beaches.
He thought about the laughs they’d shared in the palace, and in Pallikári.
He thought about that first night at the Lion’s Pride, and the stolen moments after.
He thought about the way they’d find any excuse to hold hands, the way she’d sit in his lap and pass it off as ‘his solemn duty to make her comfortable’. He thought of her smile, warmth, pride in him while he learned, and how she fought with all she was.
He thought of her lips on his, and the love she could never know he felt.
He thought of the cost to her future if he failed to become the Knight she needed.
Surrender.
Colors exploded within Arthur’s vision.
Arthur stared across at Nataliya’s brown eyes with cold calculation while she spoke.
“For this ruse to work, we must dull your instincts,” Nataliya said calmly. “We must wrap your skills behind a veil of incapability, and neuter your natural battle senses.”
“How will that help me gain success? That seems illogical,” Arthur said skeptically.
“The depths of your talent would give you away. If the wrong person witnessed them, they would connect you too quickly to your origins. It would threaten everything we wish to accomplish.”
“Then how will I know the right person?” he asked with a frown. “Especially when I can’t even remember what it is you’ve done.”
Nataliya laughed at the question, and Arthur suppressed a glare of annoyance.
“No need to be so discontented, my lord Zacaris. There is no complexity to this, really. I will simply key the seal to your own emotions.”
“My emotions?”
“Yes. For you to know who you can trust, you must let your powers guide you. You must understand them, in a way you understand few others.” Nataliya’s gaze was intense while she spoke. “You must connect with them in a way that is beyond the pale.”
“I don’t really understand. You want me to fall in love?” he asked quizzically.
“No. This is so much more than that. It is a calling. A duty. A sense of true purpose. You must find someone that ignites in you a passion, a drive, a need that drowns out all other considerations.”
“What sort of need?”
Nataliya’s smile was far too knowing for Arthur’s tastes.
“A desperation to succeed.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Is that it?”
“I suppose there is something else, too.”
“Spare me the crypticisms, Inquisitor.”
Nataliya laughed again. “You’ll know it when it happens, my lord. After all, you are a child of Terra.”
Her gaze was intent with double meaning.
“And Terrans never surrender.”
Time seemed to slow to a trickle.
Power flooded his body and mind. Energy as vast as the ignition of a sun surged through his veins, and a fog he had failed to notice peeled away from his mind.
The part of him that had flickered, echoed, and twitched in the hangar exploded to life. Oceans of psionic force surged through his veins like the breaking of a dam, and the flooding tide of a tsunami. He felt alive. He felt awakened. He had been slumbering, he knew. Nataliya had put his most terrible power to sleep, and keyed it to awaken only in the moment he truly needed it.
Yet another missing piece of his psyche and sense of self slotted into position.
The Terran Inquisitor had enacted her psionic wytchery well indeed.
Arthur felt his resonance with Circe rapidly increase to the level of true analytical precognition, the way he remembered it, and his control over that power became absolute.
He became Mordred again.
His eyes opened with icy clarity.
The Grand Knight of Pendragon surveyed his dominion.
Reality seemed to contract into a single instant, and within that moment of stopped time flow, Arthur assessed everything.
The angle of Circe’s approach.
The state of his Hoplite.
The availability of his armament.
The power of his engines.
The velocity of her charge.
Information snapped into place like the coming together of a puzzle, and his previous calculations seemed like they’d been done in a drunken fugue by comparison. Arthur’s hands tightened on the control spheres, and screens of data appeared and vanished across his display in the space of nanoseconds as he made adjustments to the Hoplite’s function.
Iris was silenced. The alarms were silenced.
Arthur Mordred Zacaris breathed.
Time snapped back to normal, and he moved.
The Hoplite blazed forward into the path of Circe’s charge, and Arthur dangerously overcharged its right side engines and left foot thruster, and launched it in a sideways leap into the air.
Arthur’s Hoplite spun with its momentum, jerked backward with a burst of vernier engines on its chest, and he used another spot reallocation of power to overcharge the Hoplite’s right foot thruster.
The Hoplite smashed a kick into the exact location his active resonance told him Circe would be two seconds later.
The foot struck charging steel.
The Pallas Athena crashed into the wall with a bang.
Arthur landed and charged her without a second thought, ignoring the small explosion of overtaxed engines, and rapidly recalibrating power output as easily as breathing.
The Pallas Athena turned to swipe with its blades, and Arthur jetted to the right, force-diverted an oversurge to his foot thrusters, launched upward, and then used his spinal boosters to flip backward and deliver a scything kick to Circe’s torso.
The Pallas Athena smashed back into the wall, and even while her cannons were still lowering, Arthur was already dodging the fusillade of plasma she sent his way with wild desperation.
She wasn’t speaking anymore. Her expression was entirely focused.
Beneath it, however, was something else. Arthur felt it in the resonance.
Confusion, surprise, shock, anger, fear… and hope.
The Pallas Athena abruptly exploded skyward with another tracing barrage of its cannons and then faltered. By design, the impact into the wall had damaged its wings. Her momentum had helped to harm the more delicate motors he had exposed with his earlier beam shot.
So instead, Circe lifted her machine’s blade with two hands, and charged again.
Calm focus was his only reality while he watched her approach.
The Hoplite blazed forward into the path of Circe’s charge once more, and Arthur vectored himself at an off-angle yet again, diverting power to his left side engines as quickly as thought.
The hoplite’s body pivoted around and up, and Arthur turned the Hoplite upside down and vertical while Circe charged him.
His right shoulder had been placed directly into her blade’s path.
Her eyes went wide momentarily, and a moment later she struck him with the force of a runaway grav-train.
The Hoplite’s right arm was eviscerated in an explosion of ruptured machinery, and Arthur used the blast of momentum to spin himself back down to his feet while igniting his spinal thrusters in the same moment.
Before the Pallas Athena could even begin to turn, Arthur crashed his Hoplite into its spine with the jagged edge of his ruined shield leading. He stabbed the sawtooth-like bottom of the mauled defensive weapon directly into the central thruster at the core of the Pallas Athena’s spine.
Circe’s shout of alarm fell on deaf ears as Arthur diverted all power to his foot thrusters and burst upward, snapping energy back to his spinal engines and surging downward—at the zenith of his impromptu somersault—to smash into the Pallas Athena’s head as Circe was flaring her wings instinctively.
The Pallas Athena flew up.
The Hoplite came down.
The machines impacted with a scream of metal, and the Pallas Athena’s eviscerated spinal engine exploded at the strain with a chassis-rocking fatality.
The Hoplite’s left leg vanished in the resultant blast.
Both Eidolons crashed to the arena floor with the Hoplite on top, and Arthur smoothly reached down to grip his rifle and place the barrel to the Pallas Athena’s center mass.
Directly against Circe’s cockpit.
Silence followed the action, and Arthur met Circe’s eyes levelly.
Another moment passed, and finally she seemed to remember herself.
“I… I yield,” Circe said quietly.
Arthur’s smile was wry.
“Sorry for worrying you,” he said gently.
Circle just closed her eyes and smiled in response.