A Beginner's Guide to Heroism

by LoyalLiar

XXIV - Rumble in the Volcano

XXIV
Rumble in the Volcano

Now, a lot of things went through my mind as I stared down Clover. Wintershimmer had trained me extensively in the art of magical dueling, so I gleaned more than a bit of information just from the way Clover stood and angled her horn. She had a counter-clockwise coiling on her horn, likely favoring her left side, for example. However, at the time, I didn’t think any of that mattered. I knew Wintershimmer’s spell, and she couldn’t defend against it.

“Angel, please stay back.”

Though I did have some small concern for my golem, my gut told me Clover wouldn’t actually attack him so long as he stayed on the sidelines. But there was another reason for the comment: giving the impression I my attention had left her. Thus, when my horn lit up, Clover might be delayed by just a moment. The coiling of my horn made me fast enough that just a moment was all the lead I needed.

I knew Clover felt it: that oft-mentioned chill at the base of the skull. Her eyes widened. But I couldn’t do it. I hesitated. And in that pause, her horn lit up in reply and flung a spell at me, wild and almost on instinct.

I admit, I’d never seen anypony hurl a spell so quickly; I barely had time to even start dodging before it hit me, square in the right leg. It tingled and then went numb, but it was the sudden weight pulling down my leap to the side that gave me the first sickening realization of what had happened. My grasp on Wintershimmer’s spell fizzled away, the surging light gone with no small part of my precious mana. But that was hardly the worst part..

My leg was stone, from the hoof up nearly to my shoulder. In that regard at least, I have to give Clover credit—she’d gone for a beautiful white marble. In the moment, I wasn’t quite so optimistic, though.

I hefted the heavy leg so it wouldn’t scrape on the ground, and lunged with my three functional legs out of the way of a second spell, and then a third and a fourth. Every lunge left me closer to the sheer cliff that carried Clover’s notes. Thankfully, Clover’s assault halted before my legs grew tired at carrying their new weight. When I glanced up to my opponent, I noted that a slight drop of sweat was worming its way down from her brow.

“I promised I wouldn’t kill you; the petrification isn’t permanent. Just do be careful you don’t break it.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” I called back. “Can you offer any other helpful advice on how best to go about dueling you?”

I realized how blatantly I’d left myself open when the middle-aged mare smiled and replied, “Surrender.”

Hesitantly, I put my marble hoof on the ground. It held my weight, so I lifted my other hoof and dug into my jacket. Out came a ruby, glowing from the mana I’d placed inside. As I had explained to Blizzard and Graargh, it held a pre-cast spell, dramatically weaker and infinitely less flexible than something fresh from my horn, but with the notable advantage of not tiring me out.

Apparently, pulling an unknown item from my jacket had Clover nervous; she hurled a new spell at me, one I didn’t immediately recognize. I responded by hurling the ruby I was holding against the volcanic stone before me.

With a violent crack and a burst of fiery red, the ruby shattered. I felt the ground shift under me, and moved my flesh-and-bone leg back down to stabilize myself. A wall, easily twice my height and width, surged up from the stone in jagged bursts, interrupting the oncoming spell. When Clover’s arc met the stone, shards of the rock broke off, flying every which way like tiny razors.

As soon as it struck, I leapt out from behind the wall, back in the direction I had come—hoping that she would be expecting me to continue my straight dash toward the heavily carved wall of the mountain. For a moment, I even dared to think I was right.

Clover was exactly as good a mage as I had feared. I didn’t even have time to start Wintershimmer’s spell before her magic was flying for me again—the same petrifying bolts she had opened our duel with. As I skidded to a halt on three hooves, I brought up the first shield that came to mind. Pale blue curved before my muzzle, mere moments before her spell would have struck. Instead, with a visible ripple and an ear-piercing crack, I felt my magic redirect hers. The petrifying spell surged back across the mountaintop toward its maker, only for Clover to casually dispel it; the effort seemed not to have bothered her in the slightest.

In contrast, I was fading. I’d used my two spells, and beyond that I was hauling a not-insubstantial amount of solid stone with every step. I could probably still outrun the aging mare, but I was a far cry from outcasting her.

As her horn started lighting up, I grabbed an amethyst from the lining of my jacket. Without hesitation, I smashed it against the closest piece of stone I could find: my marble leg. As purple light arced out from my crippled limb, I shouted upward. “Angel! Try to keep up!”

Clover’s next spell was another of her crescent arcs, whose purpose I still hadn’t identified. It didn’t matter; I hardly intended to let her catch me. Breaking into a full sprint, I headed straight for the cliff wall. As I ran, I rotated the shoulder of my petrified leg.

Clover stumbled. Loose stones slid across the ground, and even the magma flowing off the side of the mountain changed its course.

‘Down’ had changed in my favor.

“Gravity control? That’s impressive evocation, especially to fit into a gemstone.” Clover elected to adapt to the rapidly changing gravity with a casual downhill strolling pace. Even as she spoke, her magical onslaught continued, blasting all around me. Her first four or five blasts missed, but soon it became completely obvious I wasn’t going to keep dodging with three legs. So instead, I used just one.

Turning my stone leg upside down completely was a gut-wrenching experience, as I hung in midair halfway toward freefall. “Angel!”

“Here, Master!” Almost as soon as I heard the words, I fell on top of Angel in the upside-down chunk of the world I’d created. My flying rock couldn’t actually hold up my weight, but he certainly slowed my fall enough for my purposes. Secure for the moment, I glanced over to watch my opponent. Thankfully, Clover was falling as well, flailing her legs wildly.

“Mana,” I ordered the golem, and in a moment, I felt Angel oblige. Sweet energy coursed through me, even if my three good limbs still felt drained from not only the casting, but all the running and jumping I’d already done.

“Master Coil, if I may, perhaps yielding to her—”

“I have to know,” I interrupted, in the midst of our slow fall. “Swing us over that lava.”

“Master Coil?”

“I’m going to need you to be very brave, Angel. Please, trust me.”

As Angel flew us sideways, so that the overhang and the edge of the lava fall were ‘below’ us, I watched Clover catch herself in her own telekinesis and right herself to stand on what had formerly been the roof of the overhang. “Alright, Coil, I’m impressed,” she called out. “But now I’ve only got one question for you.” Her horn ignited with a frankly enormous spire of her purple mana.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Do you feel lucky?”

I watched the last of the purple glow on my marble leg fade, and as Clover’s released a small scream at the shift in gravity, I called out to her. “In my experience, there’s no such thing as luck.”

In retrospect, what I really meant was ‘there’s no such thing as good luck.

I was closer to what had formerly been the ceiling, and landed before Clover did. I expected to have an opening when she landed, but when I looked up, I couldn’t believe what I saw. With inequine grace, Clover was somehow running down the loose pieces of volcanic rock that had been flung into the air from my manipulation of gravity, momentarily resting on each one just long enough to slightly arrest her fall. In the shock of her incredible feat, I forgot the shock of my own plan until I saw the orange glow on my marble leg.

“Angel, drop your halos!”

With the golden discs, Angel lost his ability to fly. All that was left behind was a sentient rock. In the pinnacle of bravery, I scooped what was left of Angel out of the air, holding him in the frog of my good hoof, and lifted said leg directly above me.

Just in time to catch a river of falling lava directly atop me.

My horn flared before the molten stone engulfed me completely.

“Are you hoping I’ll assume you’re dead and stop paying attention?” Clover asked. “If that was the plan, you should have at least pretended to look surprised. You posed for the lava. Nopony does something like that unless they already have a plan to survive it.”

Of course, I was busy, so she didn’t get an answer. Clover sighed. “If you’re still alive to hear this, you’re a decent mage. Incredible for being barely a grown stallion.” Then she laughed gently to herself. “I wonder if you can hear me under all that lava. Coil, would you like to continue, or are you ready to concede?”

I answered by walking out of the lava straight toward her. Fire dripped from me and my jacket, completely concealing my horn, my coat, and my clothing alike.

“If you were hoping that coating yourself in lava would protect you from my magic, you haven’t thought through the results.”

“Oh? My apologies, Archmage Clover, but I’m afraid you are going to have to explain that one to me. Lava ought to be quite effective at—”

Clover cocked a brow. “You’re his golem, aren’t you? Angel, right?”

“Oh. Uh, quite, Archmage.”

About that time, I was actually standing about sixty feet behind Clover, where I had teleported after building Angel a body shaped like me out of lava. I had, admittedly, hoped he would have been able to emulate me ever so slightly more effectively. Alas.

I reached into my jacket for my last two gemstones… but my hoof only found one. I ripped it out of my jacket and hurled it at the ground at Clover’s hooves. The ruby shattered.

Nothing happened.

“Bad luck?” Clover shook her head.

I caught the way she said the word. “How could you possibly have…?”

“Wintershimmer sent you to duel me and he didn’t even teach you my thesis?” Clover shook her head, smiling. “If he hadn’t taught you his spell, I would have almost bet he wanted you to lose.”

She wasn’t lighting her horn, so I decided to humor her, and see if I could learn something about magic. “That’s your second quip about luck now. And your name is Clover. You’re doing something here, aren’t you? Messing with luck? Or rather, probability?”

“In the absolute simplest possible terms, yes. But you’re a smart colt, Coil, so I’ll explain a bit more. Three hundred years ago, Archmage Hourglass taught us that time isn’t simply a line; it’s the water in a branching river. Some of the forks in the river are wide, and some are narrow; we most often call their relative sizes ‘probability’. Reality is a leaf floating on the water. When you get pushed down the fork you want, that’s luck. The smaller the fork, the luckier the pony. But until the leaf actually goes down one fork of the river, both forks are possible futures.”

I paced on my three good legs in a wide circle around Clover as she spoke, feeling the drain on my magic. I’d spent my four spells, and letting her talk seemed like my best tactic.

“Hourglass taught us that when we use magic to look downriver, something dangerous can happen: we don’t have good control over which fork we see down, but whichever one we do look down becomes the only fork; it becomes the guaranteed future. And if we don’t look into the future with magic, we only learn what fork of the river we’ve gone down when somepony actually observes the result—like putting your hoof into your jacket to see whether or not all your rolling around and jumping broke one of your gems. Or to put it another way, a tree that falls in the forest cannot have made a noise unless somepony eventually comes by and notices it fell over.”

I nodded. “Most of that is King Electrum’s work on divination. Time works as a quantum wave; until you check where it actually went, it goes both paths. Are you saying you can cheat that, and know which way it’s going to go without looking?”

“No. Manipulating probability of future events with magic always involves observing it. The second you try, you already decide which path is absolutely, certainly going to be the case. That’s what makes looking into the future dangerous. But that’s because King Electrum and Archmage Hourglass actually looked into the future themselves. I don’t actually see what the future holds in my spell. I send a little magic charge down all the possible futures; a spell that would let me see the future, but isn’t strong enough to actually give a vision. Then, in each possible future, my future self adds mana to the spell, based on how good I feel about a particular outcome. Obviously, in the possible futures where you kill me, I can never add any magic to the spell, so present me can never see a vision from those futures. But in the futures where I win, I add magic and send the spell back. Whichever future sends back the most magic ‘wins’, and that’s the future my spell shows. And since I’ve then looked at the future, it becomes almost certain. I don’t know ahead of time exactly what I’ll get, but I can guarantee with almost absolute certainty that something good comes true.” Clover smiled. “Star Swirl and Queen Platinum refuse to let me play bridge with them anymore.”

I nodded. “So you have perfect luck? Is that how you ran down the falling rocks so perfectly?”

“Ah, you did notice. Yes, I just happened to get ‘lucky’ that every rock was in exactly the position I needed to form a safe path down to the ground without falling and hurting myself. Admittedly, the spell is draining even in the present, but at this point you’re looking a lot more tired than I feel. And you now know that I have perfect luck, and that you’re probably out of prepared spells, I feel like I should ask one more time: would you like to yield?”

I gave the only natural response.

Some of you following along in this narrative may be reflecting that my choice of title was odd. I call this little sliver of my life story A Beginner’s Guide to Heroism, yet the best you’ve seen me at is a somewhat egotistical but well-meaning teenager. At worst, I was an unwitting assassin in service to an explicitly evil wizard. But standing near the peak of that leaking volcano, I made a choice to be something better.

I lit up my horn. Clover lit hers. Her spell came first: another petrifying bolt.

I grabbed onto her soul. Her eyes widened behind her gold rimmed glasses in utter shock. And just before her spell struck me square on the muzzle, I pulled.

I don’t know if the drain of my own magic or her spell took my consciousness first.

Comments

[SIGAWESOME]

So Clover has to power of save scumming?

[LoyalLiar]

8695977
That's probably a decent summary; it's save scumming, but she does all the possible runs at the same time, instead of one after another.

[RoboRed]

That's...really damn clever.

[djthomp]

I had forgotten the details of how her trick worked, that's pretty clever. It's also probably part of what helps her survive what's about to happen (since presumably Morty isn't making a big deal about deciding to be better and is going to start off on that by just murdering the pony he is looking at).