But it wasn’t, because Eliot was sporting a huge amount of invisible magical protection in the form of Fergus’s Spectral Armory, which by itself would have saved his life even if the blade had hit home, but in addition to that he was sporting Fergus’s A Whole Lot of Other Really Useful Combat Spells, which had amped his strength up a few times over, and most importantly, had cranked his reflexes up by a factor of ten, and his perception of time down by that same factor.
What? Look, Vile Father spent his whole life learning to kill people with a knife on a stick. Was that cheating? Well, while Vile Father was doing his squats and whatever else, Eliot had spent his whole life doing this: magic.
When he and Janet had first finished up the casting, a couple of hours earlier in the chilly predawn, he’d been so covered in spellcraft that he glowed like a life-size neon sign of himself. But they’d managed to tamp that down so that the armor was only occasionally visible, maybe once every couple of minutes and only for a moment at a time, a flash of something iridescent and mother-of-pearly.
The time-reflexes part of it worked a bit like that bullet-time effect in The Matrix, which is to say that it worked exactly like that. The trigger was Eliot twitching his nose like Samantha on Bewitched. He did it now, and everything in the world abruptly slowed down. He leaned back and away from the slowly, gracefully thrusting blade, lost his balance and put a hand down on the sand, rolled away, then got back on his feet while Vile Father was still completing the motion.
Though you didn’t get to be as big and fat as Vile Father was without learning a thing or two along the way. He didn’t look impressed or even surprised, just converted his momentum into a spin move meant to catch Eliot in the stomach with the butt of the pole. I guess it doesn’t pay to stand around looking all impressed on the battlefield.
Though Eliot was impressed. Watching it slowed down like this, you had to admire the athleticism of Vile Father’s style. It was balletic, was what it was. Eliot watched the wooden staff slowly approaching his midriff, set himself, and all in good time, hammered it down as hard as he could with his metal baton. The wood snapped cleanly about three feet from the end. Fergus, whoever you were, I heart you.
Vile Father course-corrected once again, reaching out with a free hand to snag the snapped-off bit while it spun in midair. Eliot batted it away before he could get to it, and he watched it drift off out of Vile Father’s reach, moving at a graceful lunar velocity. Then, seeing as how he had some time to kill, he dropped the baton and slapped Vile Father’s face with his open hand.
Personal violence did not come naturally to Eliot; in fact he found it overwhelmingly distasteful. What could he say, he was a sensitive individual, fate had blessed and cursed him with a tender heart; plus Vile Father’s cheek was really oily or sweaty. Eliot wished he’d worn gloves, or gauntlets even. He thought of that dead hermit and those burned trees, but even so he pulled the punch. With his strength and his speed all jacked up like this, he had no idea how to calibrate the blow. For all he knew he was going to take the guy’s face off.
He didn’t, thank God, but Vile Father definitely felt it. In slow motion you could see his jowls wrap halfway around his face. That would leave a mark. Emboldened, Eliot dropped the knife too, moved in closer, and delivered a couple of quick body blows to Vile Father’s ribcage—the hook, his instructor had told him, was his punch. Vile Father absorbed them and danced away to a safe distance to do some heavy breathing and reconsider some of his life choices.
Eliot followed, jabbing and slapping, both ways, left-right. My mother, my sister, my mother, my sister. His blood was up now. This was in every way his fight. He hadn’t come looking for it, but by God he was going to finish it.
Vile Father was moving in again, still without much expression on his stolid, hoggy face. Eliot felt as though he ought to be inspiring a little more terror in his adversary, but whatever. He flipped time to normal speed for just a second, coming up for air; Vile Father was whirling his abbreviated pole arm in a tricky cloverleaf pattern, much good may it do him. Eliot slo-moed again, ducking under it, working around it, pounding the man’s body like a heavy bag, hoping to knock the wind out of him.
He ought to have been more careful. Eliot had seriously underestimated how much punishment Vile Father could take, or maybe he’d overestimated how much he was giving out. He’d definitely underestimated how quickly Vile Father could move, even relative to Eliot’s massively accelerated pace, and how completely he had sized up his overconfident, inexperienced opponent. Gently, even as he sucked up a hail of body shots, Vile Father barged into Eliot and managed to get his arms around him.