Book 2, Chapter 80

I floated in the darkness and watched as the wards, so painstakingly and carefully crafted, stretched and twisted beyond their tolerance. The shape of the room they’d been anchored to had been torn apart, and they could no longer hold. Even without that, they’d drawn their power from Monarch’s throne, and that was gone now, a thousand feet below me and broken into pieces on the ground.

Monarch was not dead, but then, I hadn’t expected that to kill her. She was enough of a mage to be able to fly under her own power, though we’d see if she was good enough to stay in the air while defending herself from my attacks. Apprentices commonly struggled with holding one spell while casting another. I expected Monarch to rise to the challenge, and I’d be a bit disappointed in her if she failed to do so.

I swooped down into the abyss to meet her in aerial battle. We fought in darkness broken only by the light of our magic, specifically the fires she hurled my way. These didn’t come from her scepter, but from her own mana core. They were colored black and green and blazed with far more heat than normal, and I opted to swerve out of the way rather than let the spell land on my shield ward. Now that the fight was on in earnest, we were both working hard to conserve our mana.

I needled her with force bolts to start, then swiftly moved on to physical projectiles I conjured up. Both attacks failed against her shield ward, but had the advantage of disrupting her concentration. It seemed that Monarch could fly and attack at the same time, but adding defending herself to the mix proved too much for her.

Despite that, she cast her spells quickly and efficiently. I only managed to counter a single one, something with a long windup that I suspected would have simulated a great weight on me and strained my flight spell if she’d pulled it off. Even with a hundred feet between us, I was able to spike pure mana tendrils into the structure of the spell and distort it past the breaking point.

With access to my phantom space returned, I was in no danger of running out of mana. I couldn’t say the same for Monarch, based on the measured approach she was taking to attacking me. It was obvious she was playing a game where she tried to overwhelm my shield ward before I did the same to her, which told me that she thought I’d exhausted myself with my master tier spell.

It was a reasonable assumption, but unfortunately for her, it was also wrong. This fight wasn’t going her way, and I didn’t see that changing. I deflected another blast of flames, this time by creating an immense gust of wind to blow them off course where they splashed harmlessly against the ultra-hardened stone walls formed by my abyssal maw spell.

I found a measure of luck there. I hadn’t forgotten about Monarch’s bodyguard, but he hadn’t made an appearance, and I’d been unable to locate him until just now. The light given off by those flames should have spread smoothly across the wall, but I caught a flash of shadow, just for a moment, like someone was clinging to them.

If Hangman was there, he had an absolute mastery of mana shielding. I saw the plan immediately. Monarch was focused on disrupting my shield ward while Hangman kept himself positioned to attack me as soon as he saw a sign of my defenses being worn down. The flaw in that plan was that until Monarch actually succeeded, her servant wasn’t contributing anything to the fight. They’d have a better chance of overwhelming me if they worked in tandem.

As I thought that, I lost track of her bodyguard. He was even stealthier than Haze had been, despite my multiple scrying spell keeping an eye on my surroundings. Short of a true invisibility spell, I wasn’t sure how he was managing to keep out of sight. Maybe that was what he was doing. If so, he must be using it intermittently whenever he thought I would spot him and hiding some other way the rest of the time.

Now that I knew his rough location, though, I had him. I sent mind spikes out blindly into the darkness, not because I thought they would get through his defenses, but because they’d provide the sensory feedback needed to pin him down when he deflected them. They were cheap enough to cast that I didn’t mind wasting a few dozen right now. This was no time to be stingy, but that wasn’t an excuse to be inefficient.

At the same time I was deflecting blasts of fire from Monarch and hurling mind spikes to hunt down Hangman’s location, I was launching all sorts of attacks to try to sus out any weaknesses in Monarch’s defense. As expected, her shield ward resisted fire, water, ice, force, lightning, and air in equal measure. Kinetic energy wouldn’t do much better, but great weight would. It was easily the most effective way to overwhelm a shield ward, but unfortunately, the process of destroying her throne hadn’t left me much in the way of weight to throw at her.

I got a ping on one of my mind spikes and reacted immediately. A light bomb went off behind me at the same time I scrunched my eyes shut. Monarch cried out in pain and surprise, but I ignored her to see through my scrying spell.

My first impression of Hangman was that he was some sort of giant, wiry spider clinging to the wall, swathed in a black, tattered cloak. It was hard to get a true impression of his height with his body contorted the way it was, but he was at least three feet taller than Monarch and, unless I missed my guess, rail thin. Half of his nose was gone, and he looked at me with dead, ice-blue eyes.

That wasn’t the stare of a person. If I hadn’t been able to tell just from looking at him, I knew it from the fact that something unexpected had happened. When my mind spike had touched him, he hadn’t defended himself against it. Any mage versed in mental combat would easily defeat such a weak attack. Hangman hadn’t even tried. He’d let the pain wash through him without uttering so much as a whisper of complaint.

He leaped from the wall and flew twenty feet through the air at me. As he moved, he extended an empty hand in an oddly familiar gesture and pulled a noose made of thin, gray rope out of nowhere. He had a phantom space, not unlike my own, though I would guess it was far smaller. It might not be big enough to hold anything more than that noose.

I caught him with greater telekinesis just as he reached the boundary of my shield ward. Hangman’s muscles strained against the spell, but he was nowhere near strong enough to break free with sheer force, and strangely, he wasn’t using any sort of magic to resist it. Any mage would have tried, and I would have expected those in the Wolf Pack’s inner circle to be competent enough to slip out of such a fragile attack.

Was Hangman not a mage?

I let my staff go and reached up both hands to grab the sides of the man’s head. This would only take a second, and Monarch was still reeling from my light bomb. Really, that was her own fault. Who didn’t inscribe runes to defend against visual attacks into their shield ward? I’d only thrown the light bomb to flush out Hangman. It working so well against his master was an unexpected bonus.

Months ago, I’d discovered a man named Nermet. He’d been enslaved by the governor of my little village with mind magic, trapped in his own body with no voice and no free will. Noctra had been an amateur, and he’d done a great deal of damage to Nermet’s mind in his fumbling about. It would have been a kindness to kill the poor man, but my father’s intervention and selflessness had given Nermet the time he needed for me to help him recover.

Monarch was not like Noctra. Her mental domination of Hangman was absolute in every way. There was nothing left of the man in there under her magic. There was no mind to think, no will to break, no voice to cry out. He was a walking corpse that hadn’t realized it was dead yet, a puppet moving on the strings of Monarch’s will.

The only kindness I could give him was to grant him a swift death. I released Hangman and floated backwards a few feet, then cast a spell called force cleave. Magic lanced out in a vertical plane between us, so sharp that it sliced through skin, muscle, and bone in an instant. Hangman was split in two, the blood contained only because his body was still in the grip of my greater telekinesis spell.

I let it go, and both halves of his corpse fell into the darkness below. The abyss would be his grave.

Green and black flame flashed by me, striking my staff where it floated in the air waiting for me to reclaim it. I glanced over at the wood and watched it char and break apart. The core of living stone I’d transmuted inside it cracked down the center and split as well, leaving the melting silver and my mana crystal to fall to the ground far below. That was going to be expensive to replace, and I’d never even gotten the chance to grow into it.

“Now what, child mage?” Monarch taunted. “Without your staff, your mana core can’t possibly hold more than one or two spells. This battle is over.”

“I’m a bit of a hypocrite,” I said to Monarch without turning around. “When I was your age, I was a far worse person than you are now. I took what I wanted, and I killed anyone who tried to stop me. In that, I suppose we’re the same, but I was far more effective at enforcing my will on the world than you are.

“I wouldn’t say that I ever really redeemed myself. It’s more that I mellowed out as I got older. I learned some truths about the world, I suppose. But there were a few things I swore to myself I’d never indulge in again, a few of the darker magics that were too evil even for my tastes. Necromancy was one. That’s a branch of magic that can stay gone. Mind control was another. When I was young, I used it freely to get what I wanted. Now, I find it abhorrent, a violation in ways that other spells can’t quite match.”

“Everyone with power is a hypocrite,” Monarch said, that sneer back on her face. “What makes you so special?”

“Nothing, I suppose,” I said. Through my scrying spells, I saw her prepare to attack me again. I raised one hand into the air and pulled the shrunken storage crystal I’d taken from Tetrin out of my phantom space. “This was meant for creation, but it seems there’s always something else that needs to be destroyed first.”

My assault started with a simple lightning bolt. It ripped through the air with a roar of thunder and broke against Monarch’s shield ward. Before she could counter, I struck her with a force smash. The shield held again, but Monarch dropped thirty feet before she stabilized her flight spell.

She swung her arm up at me and something metal flashed in the light of the fire blast I ignited around her. I caught it with telekinesis and tucked it away in my phantom space to examine later. Another lightning bolt hammered into her at the same time, and I could sense the shield ward starting to weaken.

I burned through a master tier spell’s worth of mana over the next six seconds, casting spells two or three at a time while holding my own defenses in place. Monarch never got the chance to fight back as I battered her defenses down. Finally, they snapped, leaving her vulnerable for the first time since I’d walked into the room above us.

I sent a force cleave into her neck to behead her, but as the magic connected, one of the rings on her finger burst in an explosion of light, heat, and metal. Where Monarch had been floating before, there was now nothing. I glanced up and saw her far overhead, staring down at me with terror in her eyes. She turned to flee, but I cast shadow leap and jumped through the darkness to appear behind her.

I gestured at her with one hand and drew mana from the storage crystal. Bladed chains wasn’t a master tier spell, but it was extremely expensive. They burst into existence from my outstretched hand and lunged out to catch Monarch as she tried to flee. Sharp links of steel caught her arms and legs, wound themselves around her limbs, and crawled up across her stomach and chest to her neck.

Then they constricted, biting deep into Monarch’s flesh. She tried to say something, but all that came out was a choking gasp. Whatever her final words might have been, she didn’t get the chance to speak them. The chains pulled at her from every direction, and Monarch’s body was ripped limb from limb.

I caught the pieces and cast them out past the edge of the abyss. Her victim deserved better than to share a grave with the woman who’d turned him into a hollowed-out shell of a person.

Then I left the room. My work here was done, but there was still one more issue to address before I could put the Wolf Pack behind me.