Read Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant for Free Online

a moment this might be another feint-an attempt to exaggerate his confidence-but his deepest instinct told him it was real. The acid of Simon’s attack was dissolving his own guards. Simon’s psionic thunderhead boiled away, but Al’s was still there, and finding itself suddenly unchecked, it hurled toward the deconstructing blocks. One, two, three shells cracked and sublimated, and Al snatched greedily at the glyphs leaking through, as bright and effervescent as oil on a sunlit pool.
    Simon attempted to distract him one last time by triggering an involuntary motor response - a desperate move because if discovered, it was easily reversed It was a clumsy attack, and Al simply reflected it without knowing what it was. The last of Simon’s blocks shattered, and his secret stood revealed: a photograph of a knight in armor. Laughable. Al opened his eyes.
    “It was a photograph of a knight,” he said, briskly.
    “Fourteenth century, I think.”
    Simon’s eyes were wide and dazed. He was looking vaguely at his lap, and as Al caught the scent of ammonia, he suddenly realized what motor response Simon had been trying to provoke. Served him right, then.
    “Very good, Alfred,” Teacher Roberts said “And good try, Simon.”
    “May I be excused, sir?” Simon choked out.
    “Yes, perhaps you’d better.”
    When Simon was gone, Teacher Roberts’ lips twitched in a little grin.
    “That was well done,” he said.
    “Now, I didn’t see what was in the envelope you chose. I still don’t know what your image was.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I’m coming for it. Now.”
    Before Al could blink, an egg of molten pain cracked against the nape of his neck. He had already relaxed his battle guards, of course, and this smashed through his habitual ones as if they weren’t there.
    Desperately, he tried to enfold the pain, but Teacher Roberts’ Humpty-Dumpty would not be put together again. Instead, he just gritted his teeth and swallowed it. It was only pain, and nothing real was happening to his body. Nothing real, though he felt his hands clutch and spasm with the force of it.
    Teacher Roberts’ mind didn’t look much like Simon’s. It was part spider and part octopus, spinning out a hundred tentacle-legs of black concertina wire. One of these was already wrapped around his neck, razoring into it, and more were enveloping him.
    Vision and manipulation. The two shaping forces of telepathy. He pushed back his fear and hesitation, grasping the scalpel strands with imaginary hands, knotting them to each other. Many faded as he did so, but not quickly enough. More came, splitting like roots digging into loose soil, now tipped with throbbing green scorpion stings. He couldn’t stop them all, and he knew it. More wrapped around him, and pain was a hot filament through his axis. Don’t be confused.
    He was letting Teacher Roberts control the imago. The instructor’s mind was no more a monster than Simon’s had been a spherical fortress, but Al had let himself be convinced it was, tried to fight the metaphor on its own terms-treating the tentacles as if they were real. He twisted his perspective, twisted it again, and the radial monster collapsed around itself, formed the knight from Simon’s photograph , save that it had four arms instead of two, each equipped with a massive sword. This was a perception he could deal with a bit more easily; one of the weapons was buried in his neck, but he slid off of it, made each of his fingers a rapier and flicked them out.
    The knight fell back beneath the onslaught, sparks striking on his armor from Al’s needlelike fingers, then lashed back even stronger than before. Three of the blades grew longer and heavier as the fourth condensed away. They hammered at his rapiers, shattered them, and Al was forced to replace them with bucklers just to fend off the merciless battering.
    Still, he was planning a new attack when he suddenly noticed that the fourth “sword” hadn’t vanished at all, but