Gathering Storm (The Salvation of Tempestria Book 2) - Gary Stringer (read e book TXT) 📗

magic the two bright young women had thrown at him had much chance of doing any real damage, but then they weren’t trying to – it was only a mock battle after all. Plus, he had to concede they had kept him mostly on the defensive. They were also beginning to have a significant impact on his power levels. He hadn’t had this good a workout for centuries.

The sight of a column of fire raging towards him from the South – conjured by Cat from a small pile of leaves that had ignited thanks to her keeping them bone dry despite the rain, plus Mandalee’s previous fire attacks – snapped Daelen out of his introspection pretty quickly.

From the East, Catriona, from her vantage point atop some Windy Steps, fired blades of sharp ice, formed out of some water she had thrown into the air from a bottle she was carrying.

Mandalee, moving impossibly fast, North of where Daelen flew, inflicted multiple flesh wounds with a blade that returned unerringly to her hand. Simultaneously, she sent forth a volley of tranquilliser-tipped arrows. She had borrowed the arrows from her friend, but she didn’t need the bow, using a simple clerical levitation spell, instead. She, too, was off the ground. Her friend had found a way to add moisture to her Windy Steps so that they split the light, creating a kind of Rainbow Road.

It also began to rain rocks on the shadow warrior’s head. Daelen marvelled at how many spells Catriona could maintain at once without any noticeable magical energy drain. Recalling that it wasn’t really her own personal power, but the power of nature, he began to suspect her magic was probably limited only by her ability to multitask. Rather than trying to counter all these things at once, Daelen chose to take the line of least resistance and fly in the one direction they hadn’t covered: West. Except he flew straight into a wall of superdense air, hitting with an impact that almost knocked him from the sky. The column of fire hit his unprotected back before he could react, burning his flesh painfully.

“Ooh, I bet that smarts,” Mandalee called out, giving her friend a high-five, as Jessica and Sara had shown them. “Don’t worry, we promise to heal you later!”

Catriona was in hysterical tears. “Oh, Mandalee, I haven’t had this much fun for ages. All I have to do is create a trap with an obvious escape route, and he takes it, not sensing he’s just walking into a bigger trap.”

Mandalee just giggled.

The mock battle continued for hours. Sometimes Daelen would gain the upper hand, forcing the others on the run by sheer power, but always, pretty soon, one of them would come up with some trick to turn the tables and give Daelen plenty to think about. He really couldn’t understand how they could be matching him despite the vast power difference. True, he wasn’t using his greatest power weapons, but then they weren’t pulling out their best stuff, either. They were only breathing harder from laughter, not fatigue, and neither was showing signs of power drain. Everything he threw at them, they seemed to have an answer for. They anticipated his every move so well, he wondered if Cat was using telepathy, but no, she wasn’t in his mind. Working together as a team, complementing each other’s skills and helping each other out when necessary, they were formidable opponents. He was glad Cat hadn’t chosen to assist her friend’s assassination attempt a few weeks ago. Together, they might just have succeeded.

Daelen caught them in a kind of giant spider’s web, thinking to keep them stuck tight in its hold, but it didn’t hold them for long.

“Dust?” Mandalee remarked randomly to her friend.

“Mandalee, you read me like a book,” Cat confirmed.

If this was a plan, Daelen had no idea what it was.

“Do you know the basic difference between a spider’s web and a cobweb?” Cat asked him.

Daelen admitted he didn’t.

Mandalee educated him. “Fresh spider’s webs are practically invisible. That’s why they’re so effective at catching flies – if the insects could see them, they wouldn’t blunder into them. But over time, because the webs are sticky, they gather dust. After a while, that makes them useless, so the spiders abandon them and make a new web somewhere else. The abandoned, dusty webs are what we call cobwebs.”

“So, all we need,” Cat continued, “to turn this sticky web of yours into a useless cobweb is…”

“Dust,” Mandalee concluded. “Such as the dust Cat generated earlier when she reduced your training centre to rubble.”

“You might want to close your eyes for a sec,” Catriona advised her friend.

For a skilled druid, the small amount of dust that still clung to a few places in what was now Catriona’s Meadow was all the raw material she needed to create more. Then a gust of wind covered the web in that dust, allowing them to pull free.

Mandalee used her super-speed to charge at Daelen, but she stopped in her tracks when she realised that she and Catriona were now fighting a copy. Concentrating, she felt something. Thanks to his training sessions, the assassin was able to sense Daelen even when he powered down into what he called ‘stealth mode,’ and knew that he was behind her. Sending Cat a sympathic warning, she sent out a Fear spell in his general direction. She couldn’t imagine what the shadow warrior might be afraid of, but whatever it was, it made him cry out for a second before he realised it was an illusion. Time enough for them to narrow down his location. The disruption in his mind cancelled his copy, and Catriona quickly asked the plants to pin him in place. Mandalee called a Flame Hammer to her hand, throwing it at the shadow warrior and following it in, while drawing her Pureblade to switch to hand-to-hand combat.

Catriona prepared to back up her friend with magic, combining steel and spells to launch a new style of