Book 2, Chapter 63

Using a wand to bypass the direct contact requirement of a spell wasn’t a new trick to me, nor was it all that useful. It gave a few feet of range, even with a well-crafted wand, and could easily double the mana cost of the spell if the caster didn’t understand how remote casting actually worked.

This attack was exactly the level of sophistication I’d come to expect from a Wolf Pack mage when they weren’t employing that cache of artifacts some of them carried. That tempter’s tooth was far more dangerous than an apprentice-quality wand and a mage who might not even deserve the title, and even that had been the least dangerous of the artifacts I’d run into so far.

The curse Velvet tried to put me under rolled across my shield ward and dissipated into shreds of mana that didn’t even last long enough to harvest before fading away completely. Between this display of spellcraft and the tooth, I was now confident this was, in fact, the real Velvet. Why he’d stayed here to use himself as bait once Echo’s future sight had confirmed the encounter was a mystery to me, but I wasn’t going to complain about a bit of luck coming my way.

Maybe it was as simple as him wanting to be the one to kill me. He’d hardly be the first person who’d lost a family member to my magic and decided to do something about it. Nor would he be the first mage to so spectacularly fail to accomplish anything. I almost felt pity for the attempt, but the truth of the matter was that while I was a better person now than I’d been in my youth, I still lacked an overabundance of empathy.

That was why I didn’t wait to release the spell I’d been holding. Force crush was in the advanced tier of conjurations, complicated due to its non-standard manifestation point, which was just about anywhere I could see. Most force spells emerged from the caster’s hand, or wand, or staff, or some other static point. Force crush took a lot longer to cast and had a correspondingly higher mana cost than its weaker cousins like force wave or force bolt, but I’d come in with it already constructed and ready to be fired.

A globe of magic appeared around Velvet. At this point, he had roughly two seconds to dispel it. Either he was startled by the magic, or by the fact that his curse hadn’t landed. Whatever the case, he wasted his first second in incomprehension. By the time he started pulling his own mana into a spell, one which I fully planned on interrupting with my own counterspell technique if necessary, the globe had already started shrinking.

Two seconds later, it was forcing Velvet down to his knees. Whatever spell he’d been planning to cast, he must have realized he wasn’t going to get it off in time. He abandoned it and burned his mana on invocations designed to make him stronger and reinforce his joints. I could see the logic there. If he could just outlast the conjuration, let it burn through its mana while avoiding being killed, he could escape.

It was a terrible plan. The sphere didn’t stop contracting, and without some sort of shield ward to protect him, he had no hope of surviving it. Velvet must have realized that, because he started working on some sort of spell to save himself. Rather than try to break it, he simply vanished and reappeared on the opposite side of the room.

Crude, but effective. A force crush with a spatial lock worked into it to prevent escape was far more expensive than I was willing to sacrifice here. For that exchange, I’d say we’d come out about equal in terms of mana spent. Perfect.

When Rouri had sold me information about her cabal-mates, I hadn’t simply taken it at face value. I was testing it now, trying to get a feel for how accurate it all was. She might have lied to me, or simply been mistaken about something or working on incomplete information. So far, my expectations for Velvet were lining up nicely with the reality of this fight.

I casually tossed a few force darts at his new location, forcing him to scramble out of the way. “You know, something I don’t understand,” I said while I cast a quick trio of stone needles. “I know your cabal knows how to construct shield wards. I’ve seen the belts on your rank-and-file mages heading out to a fight. Why aren’t you wearing one? You knew I was coming.”

Velvet let out a hiss of pain as one of the needles pierced the fleshy part of his leg up near his hip. The other two missed, one thanks to his dodging and the other broken back into mana by a touch range instantaneous dispel. I almost wished he’d tried that against the force crush spell I’d caught him in, just so I could watch it fizzle as it failed to overcome the construct’s rigidity.

Maybe he knew that force magic was notoriously difficult to dispel. That was something any first-year apprentice learned, primarily because basic force magic was an excellent introduction to conjurations more advanced than elemental manipulation and their concepts were easy to grasp. Back in my old life, I would have assumed that was the case, but anymore I was hesitant to take anything for granted with the patchy knowledge of magic on display in Derro.

I didn’t have unlimited time to test out the limits of Velvet’s abilities. In fact, I’d probably already spent more of my very limited minutes than I should have, at least if I wanted to leave without a fight or a chase. Even now, the sources of mana that I assumed were his guards were only one floor below us. The layout of the castle was working against them without a single staircase that traveled all the way from the ground floor to the top one, but that was only delaying them, not stopping them.

Velvet was probably more capable in battle than any of the mages who hadn’t earned themselves fancy code names and an invitation into the cabal’s inner circle, but when compared to the other mages who had done just that and specialized in fighting, he was a weakling. That wasn’t to say he was worthless, just that his specialization was in control and manipulation. Compared to fighting off Swarm’s constructs or piercing Monolith’s defenses, Velvet was easy pickings.

Simple conjurations would do him in, given enough time and effort. Spells like mana shield could only protect him for so long, and though I was sure he knew it, he was too careful with his mana reserves to allow defending himself to drain them. Instead, he darted about, trying to dodge blasts of flame and spikes of stone while weaving together his own brand of offense: mental domination.

“Did you and Nocturne study together, all those years ago?” I asked as I shrugged off the urge to drop my staff with simple willpower. “Were you the better of the two? Is that why he got the boot out to manage the farm and you got to stay here?”

Drawing him into a conversation would hopefully distract him and, more importantly, prevent him from wielding the tempter’s tooth since its magic needed something to build on, persuasions or commands usually. If he wasted his time talking to me instead of trying to control me, so much the better.

But Velvet didn’t answer. For whatever reason, he’d gone coldly silent other than the odd grunt of effort or pain. Perhaps he wasn’t a master invoker, but he was doing well enough to keep up with the physical threats conjurations represented. With that amulet of mind shielding protecting him from divination-based attacks, and the stark difference in our physical capabilities making hand-to-hand combat inadvisable, enchantments or transmutations were the only real options besides continuing to barrage him with conjurations.

Enchantments being his specialty and transmutations being slow to cast, I decided it was best to expend a bit of mana in the name of efficiency rather than wear him down with cheaper attacks. I hurled a lightning bolt at him and watched his own enhanced muscles spasm hard enough to throw him into a stone wall.

The spell didn’t outright kill him, but I followed it up with stone jaws, this time centered to come out of the wall and crush him. Velvet could have done his short-range teleport to escape, or even something like phantasmal step if he knew how, but he was too busy shaking off the aftereffects of my lightning bolt. The jaws closed around him and started grinding together.

Velvet fell through the stone a second later, covered in blood but still alive. He was tenacious, I’d give him that much, but the whole fight, brief though it had been, was just him trying to keep up with me after his opening spell failed to land. There was still mana in his core, but I didn’t suspect he’d have the willpower left to fight through the pain and cast another spell.

I took a few seconds to create a force smash, then brought it down on him while he glared at me, only one eye still open. That eye widened when the hammer of magic appeared overhead, and he opened his mouth to say something, but by then it was too late. My spell came down on his body and cracked against the stone, pulverizing Velvet like a hand squashing a bug.

I frowned and stared down at the broken body on the floor. The mana in it was still holding strong in his core, something that shouldn’t have been possible, not unless he knew a few necromantic spells that were more advanced than anything else he’d displayed. From what I understood of his abilities, he was a schemer and a fast-talker, not a grave-robber and corpse-cutter.

If someone had told me that Freak had dabbled in necromancy, I might have believed that, but not Velvet. So why wasn’t he dead? His physical body was destroyed, and there’d been no indication that he knew enough soul magic to survive that. I leaned forward to examine the intact mana core, then jerked back with a curse on my lips.

“A vengeful phantasm,” I muttered. “That explains why you weren’t wearing a shield ward, at least.”

The ward would have disrupted the formation of the phantasm, it being a spell that was undeniably hostile in nature. It formed a spiritual body from the remnants of mana left over in the corpse after it died, a sort of soul projection that was shielded from being dragged into the cycle of reincarnation, at least until the mana ran out.

In my old life, they could sustain themselves for years and years, but here, now, I gave it twenty minutes at best. That was plenty of time to kill me, though. Vengeful phantasms had a very particular set of abilities that weren’t at all tied to what the mage knew in life, and much like Freak’s soul hook, they could attack where I was weakest.

Velvet’s mana pulled itself together, ethereal strands that rose in the shape of the man he’d been in life, only with distorted proportions. His torso was too thin, his arms too long. His hair drifted out behind him, freed from the tight braids he’d kept it in and floating like he was underwater. Spectral fingers reached out for me, and I gave a single moment’s thought to fighting back.

No, it would serve no purpose. Velvet was dead, had probably gone into this fight knowing he couldn’t win it if Echo’s prophetic magic was any good, and he’d opted to burn up his mana on the phantasm in a bid to kill me at the cost of his own life. But it would be easier to flee until it withered and disappeared than to destroy it.

Even as I thought that, the first of the guards arrived at the door and crashed against my bar passage spell. I didn’t have long to make good on my escape. It was a good thing I didn’t need to use the door.