Life Delusion Chapter 6: Chapter VI : Beginning Over the End?

Read chapter 6 of Life Delusion by The_lite on NovelPedia.

The field smelled like copper and wet soil. Aqua noticed it once, then not again. His armor made a small broken sound when he walked. One of the straps at his left side had torn earlier — he couldn’t remember where — and the loose metal kept knocking against his hip. It was annoying. Then it wasn’t. He kept walking because stopping had not changed anything yet. The men on the road were placed well. Not perfectly. Perfect formations usually meant someone had read a manual and survived no battles. This was better than that. The archers were too far out for a normal line, which meant someone had actually measured how far he could cross open ground before a second volley. The two S-ranks were in front, but not close enough to be eager. Their weight was low. Neither one wanted to be first. Someone had watched him before tonight. That happened sometimes. The man leading them was older than Aqua expected. Not old enough to be harmless. Old enough to have stopped pretending he was. Rain had silvered the edges of his beard. His sword was up, but not in the foolish way men held swords when they believed steel would solve a thing. He looked at Aqua for a while before speaking. “Gate conscripts were different,” the man said. His voice caught on the first word. He cleared his throat. Not dramatically. Just a tired old habit. “They were to see how you moved.” Aqua came closer. The veteran shifted one foot back. “We’re not here for that.” Nobody moved for a second. Then the archers fired. There must have been a signal. Aqua missed it. The first arrows were not meant to kill him. They took away the easy angles. The S-rank on the left entered behind them with a stance Aqua didn’t know — not quite imperial school, not southern either. There was an extra half-step where there shouldn’t have been one. Aqua blocked. The hit landed wrong. Pain moved through his forearm, sharp and brief. The other man felt the mistake too; his eyes changed, not with hope, exactly, but with the small insult of discovering the impossible man could misread something. Aqua caught his wrist. The expression disappeared. The fight became noisy after that. Mud, breath, shouted numbers. Someone in the rear kept calling corrections, and twice the line shifted before Aqua had finished using its last shape against it. That was inconvenient. One archer slipped while retreating and still loosed from the ground. Aqua had to turn his shoulder. The arrow broke against the edge of his pauldron and skidded under his chin. The veteran came in during that half-turn. Good timing. Too good to be instinct. He had waited for that gap, or for one like it, and when it came he moved as if his whole body had been built for that one small theft of space. His blade cut through the rain where Aqua’s throat had been a moment before. Aqua struck him in the ribs. Not hard enough to kill him. Hard enough that the man made a sound and stepped back with one arm folding against his side. The mages lasted longest. That was unusual. Two barriers came down at once, not stacked cleanly but tangled, one catching force and the other catching motion. Aqua hit the first and sank halfway into the second. For a moment the world had edges around him. Rain stopped touching his face. Sound went flat. One of the mages started laughing. Not because it was funny. Because he couldn’t help it. Aqua pushed. The barriers bent. The laughing stopped. He came through with more force than he’d meant to use, and the earth in front of him broke open in a wet black line. After that the formation was no longer a formation. The veteran was still standing in what remained of it. His sword hand shook. He noticed, tightened his grip, and got the blade back up. The tip dipped anyway. Aqua looked at him. The veteran looked back. There was mud on one side of his face. Blood at his ear. His mouth moved once, but no word came out. Aqua was about to speak. He didn’t know what he meant to say. Then Lily came out from between the trees. He kne