Book 2, Chapter 64

The only decision I had left to make in this castle was whether to take the time to snatch up the journal and reference book Velvet had been using when I’d come in. I wanted it, but I’d run out of time, and it was at least twenty feet away in the wrong direction.

Fortunately, magic solved a lot of problems. I cast telekinesis on the books while I ran back into Velvet’s bathroom. It still cost me a second at the wall, since I had to wait for the spell to come back to me so I could stow the books away in my phantom space before I left the suite. I spent that second watching the last vestiges of mana disconnect from Velvet’s corpse as the vengeful phantasm fully coalesced.

Then I was gone from the room—not that a stone wall would stop a murderous incorporeal specter from following me. I ran straight to the exterior wall I’d passed through on my way in and threw myself through it, launching myself into the air outside the castle. The phantasm came through a different wall, uncaring about the barriers that would have cost me mana to overcome. Before it could reach me, I cast flight and, for only the second time since I’d been reborn, let loose at full speed.

The inner city’s wall had wards designed to catch anybody moving over top of them, and that included flight. I felt them like ephemeral cobwebs brushing against my mana core, there and gone in an instant as I flew over the wall. They weren’t really gone, of course. The tracing spell imbued in the wards had tagged me, giving whoever was divining for the Wolf Pack a clear beacon to focus their efforts on. I’d take care of that later, once I got far enough away from that phantasm that it would disintegrate before it could catch up.

Except that when I looked back, I could see its ghostly outline chasing me down, and it wasn’t nearly as far behind me as I would have liked. At the speed I was flying, I was going to leave Derro behind in the next thirty seconds, and somehow the phantasm was keeping up with me. It must have been burning through the animating mana at a prodigious rate to pull that off, which was probably a smart move on its part.

I suspected someone was guiding the phantasm’s actions, possibly even feeding it more mana to keep it around longer. Vengeful phantasms were not known for intelligent decisions or canny tactics. If left to their own devices, they only did one thing: try to murder the person who’d killed them in as straightforward a manner as possible.

It was possible this one had just made the connection between catching up to me and murdering me, but they didn’t usually get faster. They didn’t need to. A vengeful phantasm could always find the target of its murderous rage, barring a few scenarios involving powerful protective wards. There was no rush, no reason to burn mana to go faster. Unless someone was controlling the damn thing.

I flew past the outer wall of the city and angled myself between two small villages I could see on the horizon. I did not need a bunch of farmers with dormant cores jumping into the middle of this, and it looked like I might end up fighting this thing after all. My other option was to keep running until I was out of mana and hope I could outlast it. If that failed, then I’d be easy prey, nothing but a four-year-old child with no magic to speak of.

There was a spot that would be perfect to fight on—solid, flat ground with no sand, no fissures, no anything. Obstacles would only play to the phantasm’s strength, so if I did end up fighting it, it would be better to do it in an open field. I landed there, then turned to watch the spectral figure in the sky get closer. At the rate it was going, I had perhaps ten seconds to prepare for it.

Incorporeal monsters were difficult to fight. They were basically immune to conjurations and transmutations. Divinations and enchantments could work on them, but neither discipline was that great for offense. The best way to deal with an enemy like this was to use necromancy, but that was unfortunately not something that was all that viable in combat without a lot of prep work. Necromancy wasn’t an official discipline but a blending of alchemy and transmutation, generally with some inscription or enchantment mixed in to empower and control whatever unholy abomination the necromancer was crafting.

I would know, being a former necromancer myself. In my later years, I’d taken that knowledge and turned from crafting undead armies to exterminating them, though it was admittedly easier to firebomb a few thousand zombies than it was to hunt down ghosts.

For the vengeful phantasm, the spell that would end the fight was rupture core. The problem was that it wouldn’t incapacitate it like it had with those giant fish, and its mana was tainted now, meaning I couldn’t recover it. The phantasm would fall to pieces after a minute or so, but that was still a minute I needed to survive with almost no mana left to defend myself if I used it on a master tier spell. Maybe if I could have fought it back at the castle without interruption from all of Velvet’s guards and staff, I might have been able to use that strategy.

But now that I’d burned a sizable chunk of mana on a two-minute-long flight, it would strain the rest of my reserves with no good way to recover them. I needed to think about the next battle after this one, which meant that instead of one powerful, decisive blow, I was going to have to give this monster the death of a thousand cuts.

Because touching an incorporeal creature was impossible, it was a lot harder to impose an enchantment like mana drain on it—not that I would have wanted the tainted mana that fueled its animation anyway. What I did want was to poke holes in its form so that it would run out of mana faster, and to do that, I turned to a combination of divination, enchantment, and conjuration known as core puncture.

Much like its big brother, rupture core, core puncture attacked an opponent’s mana directly. Unlike the master tier version, it was easy to resist. Hopefully, whoever was helping the phantasm would now be out of range and unable to intercede on its behalf. A typical vengeful phantasm never even tried to resist getting hurt. They were all offense.

The phantasm streaked through the sky, heading directly for me. A mortal enemy might have landed in front of me and taken a second to orient itself before attacking. This monster didn’t. Instead, it came right down on my head like a falling star.

I cast mana puncture twice once it got in range, then I had to skitter sideways, mana shield up to defend against its grasp. Sadly, my shield ward hadn’t been designed with incorporeal attackers in mind and wasn’t going to do much to help. Even the mana shield only deflected its hands to give me a bigger window to dodge while I peppered the monster with another mana puncture.

If it got hold of me, it would literally rip my soul to shreds, not only killing me, but almost certainly preventing me from recovering my memories in my next reincarnation. Another mana puncture sunk into its body, letting even more mana bleed out of it into the air. Normally, it would have hung around, a thick miasma that I’d have had to make sure to keep clear of as I led it on a chase, but here in the desert, the tainted mana disappeared almost as quickly as it spilled out of the vengeful phantasm.

 It was too quick to stay ahead of, and even if I could, a phantasm had other abilities besides incorporeality and flight. It decided to demonstrate one such attack, its poetically-named vengeful shriek, after failing to rend my soul from my body for the third time. Mana quickened in its form and its jaw dropped open to let loose a wail that would leave me bleeding from every orifice.

I cast an aura of silence over the area, just before the sound ripped through me. That took away its teeth, but vengeful shriek carried through more than just the air and the ground. It echoed through mana itself. For once, the empty air worked in my favor. With no ambient mana to conduct the attack, and the physical sound itself blocked, all I had to do was put a bit of distance between myself and the monster.

It was starting to slow down now, too much of its mana spent keeping its manifestation whole and trying to kill me. The three mana punctures continued their steady work, and at a guess, I suspected it had at most a single minute of life left in it, assuming it stood still and did nothing to burn through its limited mana.

I felt another temporal ripple pass through me, the second one I’d noticed, but they were so faint, it was entirely possible I’d missed a few. I must have scared the Wolf Pack far more than I’d originally thought if they were sinking so much mana into trying to predict my actions. The timing probably meant that I could expect to be pulled into another encounter soon, since I didn’t think they’d have done more future scrying just to determine the outcome of my fight with Velvet’s vengeful phantasm.

My choice of location helped, at least. There was nowhere to hide out here, so anyone approaching would be easy to spot from a long way off, or they’d come up through the ground. But I’d sense that if they tried, so either way, I’d have plenty of warning. Now I just needed enough time to finish bleeding out this phantasm so that I wouldn’t have to fight it and another mage at the same time.

Tempting as it was to take the opening I saw after it finished its ineffective scream, I held off on casting another mana puncture. It was a matter of seconds until this fight was over, and mana shield was strong enough to keep me safe from its attacks as long as I used my head and kept moving.

I was counting down the seconds until the phantasm vanished, perhaps twenty at this point, when I felt something enter the edge of my perception, a burr in my mind that represented the knot of magic I’d woven into an enchantment a few weeks ago.

Rouri was nearby, or perhaps it would be better to think of her as Haze. I couldn’t see her physically, but that was no surprise. She was a stealth specialist and an assassin. I wasn’t sure if she was here to kill me or not, and if she was, whether she would wait for the phantasm to finish its attempt or if she’d join it in trying to end my life.

I started running, empowered by an invocation of speed. The phantasm chased after me, easily able to keep up, but our course took us away from Haze in a circular path that arced farther and farther off into the distance. At least, it would have if she’d stayed still. Instead, she crept after me, her vanishing knife telling me exactly where she was.

The phantasm let out a final shriek of rage. Denied its murderous purpose and its mana spent or lost, its form dissipated into wispy strands that faded to nothing. Somehow, despite everything, I’d managed to make it this far without running myself completely dry. I just wasn’t sure if I’d have enough left to deal with Haze if she’d double-crossed me. Considering how little loyalty she’d dedicated to the cabal, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if she’d fed me enough information to sacrifice her cabal-mates, then came back around to finish the job and protect her secrets.

“You might as well come out,” I called to the empty air. “I know you’re here.”