So, wind equals danger... got it.
The sun beat down, the breeze kissed cooly at the warm skin on my face and ruffled my hair as I stood atop the mighty curtain walls that ringed my city. Across the vastness of the mindscape, I could see the enemy armies approaching. This wasn't the frenzied onrush I had seen during the duels at the party; there was no menagerie of beasts and cartoon characters, no competitor was standing on the city walls opposite mine, wildly waving their hands around, and there was no watching crowd. This was a battle to the death, not a spectator sport, and the thirteen armies were slowly, methodically advancing toward me. All to that backdrop of that almost pleasant gentle breeze.
No, not toward me... toward us.
So why, then, was there a howling storm when Sterling attacked me on his own, but now there is only a gentle summer breeze when thirteen of these fuckers are here? Fucking metaphors are never gonna make sense to me.
"You think Toussant could pick a few of them off for us while we hold our ground?" I asked nobody in particular as I squinted out into the distance.
"Unlikely," Uri answered as he rolled his neck and loosened his shoulders, looking like a champion prizefighter about to step into the ring. "There is too much power in the mindscape; the time dilation effect has to stretch to contain it all."
"It... what?"
Jeeves nodded. "He's right, Sir. Although it is technically possible that Toussant will be able to help us out, time is running at a rate of approximately one second in the real world for every four and a half hours in here."
"Shit, so even if he shoots one of them, we would have to wait in here for an hour or more just for the bullet to actually hit them."
"That's right," Uri nodded as he started to pace back and forth behind me. "And these things rarely last that long. We must hold them here."
I frowned out at the approaching armies. Every time I had been in the mindscape with another person, their city had shimmered into existence a few hundred yards away from mine. It would only take a few minutes at a gentle jog to traverse the gap between my walls and theirs. But the concept of the mindscape 'stretching' to accommodate the power being held within it - mine and theirs - seemed to be an apt one because there must have been two or three miles of open space between my city and the armies advancing on it. It's not like that distance made a huge amount of difference in terms of seeing them; simply focusing and concentrating a little let my eyes 'zoom in' - for lack of a better term - and see the enemy with all the nerve-wracking detail I'd always done.
"So you have done this before?" I arched a hopeful eyebrow at Uri. I held all his memories, but it was not like having access to my own, where I instinctively and naturally knew things. His was more like a library; I held the knowledge, but I would have to consciously look through them to find what I needed. I simply hadn't had the chance to do that since I had drained him.
"Nope," he shrugged back.
Faye giggled. It was an oddly out-of-place sound, given the circumstances.
"Well, that's helpful." I rolled my eyes. If Uri's need-to-know mentality had come with him into my mind, this was going to be a very long.... Eternity... or, I supposed, looking out at the oncoming hordes, a mercifully short one.
"We have sort of trained for it, though," he offered as if reading my thoughts. "The conclave would do something similar to what they are doing to take down another Evo if they had broken the law. But..."
I waited for him to finish, then turned and arched an eyebrow at him when nothing further was added. "Dude, seriously? But what??"
"Well, I was over there in my training," he nodded out at the enemy with a shrug. "I was always one of the people training to take down the errant evo. I've never been on this side of the fight.
"Well, that's better than nothing. Any ideas?"
Uri hummed thoughtfully and gazed out onto what would no doubt soon become a battlefield. "All I can tell you is how we did things in the Conclave, but it is safe to assume that they would do things differently because they would have always planned to fight other Evos, and most of them would have learned their combat skills with us." He had the decency to continue after only a short pause and before I felt another urge to prompt him - or punch him - again. "In the Conclave, we would combine forces into a few, much larger armies. One person would be in charge of attacking from range, another would be responsible for trying to storm the walls, one would try to tunnel beneath, one would try to sneak past you like Neil did in the duels, and so on. One large multi-faceted attack, and maybe three or four of those armies all hitting from a different direction. It made countering it very, very difficult."
Yeah, okay, that did sound kinda terrifying. It would only take one of the thirteen Evos to get into the city unopposed or unnoticed to do a truly staggering amount of damage.
"The problem is," he went on, his eyes still fixed on the enemy. "They are not doing that, at least not on the scale that we did. The only thing I can think of is that they mean to surround your city completely and hit it from all sides at the same time, probably from range, then charge your walls, all while undermining or sneaking as well. But instead of three or four concentrated forces, they have them all completely spread out. But there does still need to be a focal point."
I ground my teeth again as he stopped talking, but Uri wasn't paying attention to me. He was squinting harder out toward the horizon. "Uri, I swear to fucking Kermit! If you don't start talking, I'm gonna..."
"Thirteen armies throwing themselves at the same time sounds dangerous, but in reality, it's no different from them attacking one at a time; you could just pick them off. Divided, their forces still couldn't breach your walls. In fact, looking at them, I doubt most of them would even be able to break my old walls. The whole point of doing this is to combine their power to a level that could beat you. And there has to be a focal point, a commander, whatever you want to call it, around whom all that power is concentrated. He is the one we need to find and kill."
"What?? How does that make sense? How does it make a difference if thirteen of the fuckers are attacking all over the place or in a single spot? There are still thirteen of them!"
"Really?" Uri turned to me. "Which is the highest number, five or one?"
"Fucking hell, seriously?" He held my eyes. "Five, obviously!"
"Five?" repeated himself, holding his hand up with his palm facing me, "or one?" he clenched his fist.
I blinked at him. The wheels were starting to turn in my head a little better now. "Okay, so we have to look for the guy who seems to be in charge, the one with all the power. And then what? We kill him and...?" I waved my hand out at him, gesturing for him to fill in the blanks.
Uri opened his mouth but paused. I could almost see that the realization that he was having to teach me this shit on the fly was just dawning on him, and I was not going to be the easiest student; plus, given the armies still bearing down on us, time was a factor.
