vs ebenezer

Ebenezar slashed his hand down at the boulder beneath him with a word, and in the same spell a blade of unseen force slashed a three hundred-pound section of rock free of the boulder he stood on and sent it zipping toward my boat at several hundred feet per second.
I wasn’t even going to try to stop it. It was just too much energy, too much momentum. It would be like lifting a medieval shield to block a descending war maul. Sure, you can do it, but if you do, you’re gonna wish you hadn’t.
No. The smart thing to do is to give that war maul a single sharp lateral tap just as it begins its forward momentum. A few pounds of pressure in the right place, at the right time, are often more effective than expending heroic levels of energy.
And besides. If I tried to match the old man swing for swing, he’d bury me. Not so much because he was stronger, although he was, but because he was better than me, more energy efficient, milking twice the efficacy out of every single spell while expending half the energy to do it. Wizard fights between the old and the young were a reverse image of mundane confrontations between the same. I was the one who was weaker, slower, limited in what moves I could attempt, and had to play it smart if I wanted to win.
So as the old man sent the section of boulder at the Water Beetle, I lifted my staff, modifying the formula of my simple force-blow spell to send it in from the side instead of straight ahead, and smacked the projectile firmly in the flank as it got moving.
It streaked forward at an angle, wobbling and tumbling as a result, and smashed into one of the boats farther down the dock, plunging through the hull and part of the deck, straight on through the hold and out the other side, with such force that water splashed a hundred feet.
The old man brought his boulder around in a swooping arc, studying me through narrowed eyes, his voice bitter. “Now you learn that you don’t have to swing for the fences every time.”


Peace Talks Chapter 32, Page 301-302