Book 2, Chapter 51

I walked into a building about a mile away from Blue Rat’s office. It was on an otherwise unoccupied street that looked like it had been the site of a battle between two equally matched mages of middling skill, which was to say that a lot of explosive magic had gone off over a wide area. For experienced mages, victory or defeat usually came within a handful of spells, and collateral damage tended to be measured in number of acres leveled, but novices could go on and on punching holes in buildings until they ran themselves out of mana.

Myumi was still alive, for whatever that was worth. My decision to spare her had been motivated more by my goal to leave a deliberate trail for cabal agents to follow to the gang. Of course, that hadn’t stopped me from dropping the thugs gathered outside that office with a pair of arc lightning spells. Those people weren’t necessary for my plan to work, and it set a good precedent about the consequences of crossing me.

I was sure a few people at the end of the arcs had survived. The lightning got marginally weaker with each person it jumped to until it was down to about half strength at the end of the spell. I’d seen at least one person still twitching as I walked by, my staff thumping against the floor with each step. It really was just ridiculously too big, but right now I needed its mana replenishing and transference smoothing properties to extend my reserves as far as possible.

Once I’d gotten Blue Rat’s location from Myumi, it had been simple to scry out his temporary command post for directing the search. It also gave me a direction to search out my secondary target: the child friend of Tanner’s. I suspected he was still alive, and if so, I planned on having a talk with him. First, though, I needed Blue Rat himself.

That had led me to the command post in a shell of a building with a few dozen holes in it. I could feel what I thought were eight different sources of mana with a scattering of money attached to some of them, though when I’d scried the building ten minutes ago, there’d only been four. It was impossible to say if Blue Rat was still there based on just my mana sense, but even if he wasn’t, I’d still need to talk to the people inside to find out where he’d gone.

“Uh… you… can’t be here?” a thug near the front asked as much as said when I stepped in off the street.

“I’m here to talk to Blue Rat,” I told him. “Is he still here?”

A second thug walked up behind the first and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I got this,” she said, giving him a gentle push to get him out of the way. The first thug seemed more relieved than anything else, and he smoothly stepped off to the side to let her through.

“You’re Keiran?” she asked.

“I am.”

“Okay. Follow me,” she said. She pointed at the big, stupid thug and said, “You don’t let anyone else in unless they’re from the inner city.”

“How do I tell?” he asked, but the woman ignored him and beckoned for me to follow her.

For some reason, people always seemed to assume they could sneak around without me noticing them. It wasn’t even just the people I’d met since my reincarnation, either. Thousands of years of anecdotal experience told me that countless people from all walks of life simply underestimated a powerful mage’s defenses and awareness of the world around them. At least this particular gang had the excuse of having spent their whole lives in a magic-starved wasteland. They probably had no clue what a proper mage was capable of.

I was more amused than threatened as the men and women under Blue Rat’s command scrambled to react to my arrival. Outside of my immediate line of sight, they were running for reinforcements, gathering weapons, and moving to flank me. Eight people rapidly turned into twenty, then thirty as they ran to relay messages to their fellow dulls out in the streets.

Even without magic, I could hear the occasional scuffle or whispered instructions coming from the rooms we passed. To my amusement, my escort could also obviously hear the noises and had the most aggravated expression on her face.

“Amateurs, huh?” I said.

She sighed and nodded. “I told Blue Rat this whole plan was a waste of time. If you beat inner city mages and came back looking for us, the only way we were surviving was to throw ourselves at your feet and beg.”

Huh. A smart one. Maybe the Blue Rat Gang would have been better off led by her. “It’s convenient to be constantly underestimated, but it is nice to occasionally get some respect from other people,” I said.

“I know how you feel. You mind if I ask you a question?”

“I can’t promise an answer, but sure.”

“Are you really a kid? We’ve got a betting pool going with a few different theories.”

“Biologically, my body is around four years old,” I said.

“But…” she prompted.

“What are the theories? I’ll let you know if one is right.”

“Hah, alright.” The woman paused at the end of the hall and sighed again at the sound of people shuffling behind it. “Waste of time,” she muttered. Then, raising her voice back to normal volume, she said, “So the top theory is that you’re a body snatcher with a vendetta against the city because one of the mages there killed your original body, and the kid was just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“That’s not even close to correct.”

Well, it kind of was, except I wasn’t really a body snatcher, and my vendetta against the Wolf Pack had nothing to do with them trying to kill me. At this point, it was more preemptive self-defense than anything. They’d started it; I’d hit them back. Now I was going to hit them again, hard enough to put them all in the ground because I didn’t think someone like Velvet was going to just let me walk away and I didn’t need that kind of problem popping up five years down the road long after I’d put him out of my mind.

It wasn’t that I blamed Velvet, necessarily. I understood why he wanted me dead. I just wasn’t going to sit back and let him work on pulling that off. Once I’d killed him, I’d reconsider my stance on hunting the rest of the Wolf Pack, depending on how they took the death of their members. Some cabals were as close as family and would never forgive the murder of those they saw as brothers and sisters. Others operated as more business associates and would be open to ending hostilities if they thought it was too costly to continue.

“Good, I didn’t bet on that one,” the woman said. “Second most popular theory is that you’re some sort of fake person created specifically for combat, that your creator made you a child to make it easier for you to blend in and surprise your victims when you attack them.”

“No,” I said flatly. “That’s not even possible.”

It wasn’t that artificial humans couldn’t be grown, but they had extremely limited intelligence. They were basically golems in a flesh suit, and in an environment with no ambient mana, they’d die quickly unless the creator poured a ridiculous amount of resources into keeping them alive.

“Changeling?” she asked. “You were never a person to begin with?”

“Also no.”

“Favored child of our ancestors’ spirits, chosen to be the hope of all mankind?”

“What? No. Did people really bet on that?”

“A few,” she said.

“Did you?” I asked.

“No!”

The flush in her cheeks said otherwise. “You did,” I said.

“I believe I’ve given you my answer already. Come on, the idiots have had more than enough time to hide themselves. Just out of curiosity, would a few dozen crossbows have even the slightest hope of stopping you?”

“Not really,” I said. “Not even if I was unconscious.”

She sighed and shook her head. “And you’re not even worried about telling me that. This whole plan was hopeless from the start. Look, could you do me a favor and not kill all of us? Most of the people here never had a choice about being anything else.”

“You don’t have me figured out at all if you think I care,” I told her. “Blue Rat is actively aiding my enemies. You’re leading me into a trap that you know doesn’t have a chance of succeeding and hoping that by acting friendly I’ll show mercy to people trying to kill me because they all had shitty lives. If you want to save them, I suggest you go around and tell them to get out of this building while I talk to your boss. Or don’t, and I’ll leave anyone who pulls the trigger on their crossbow as a charred, smoking corpse on the ground.”

The woman paused for a second, then nodded. “Right. Can’t ask for more than that.”

She led me through the doorway, pausing only once to lean into another room about halfway down the hall and mutter something that I wouldn’t normally have been able to hear, but a bit of mana applied to my senses fixed that. “Kid said if you want to live, get the hell out of the building. Not telling you what to do, but I believe him. Pass it on to the rest of the gang. Everyone makes their own decision.”

Huh, how about that. I knew she was a smart one. There was an unexpected compassionate streak in her too, fine for people living in quaint little villages that never saw skies filled with smoke or tasted air thick with the coppery tang of blood, but a hinderance to those who fought and struggled to stay alive. Given her position in a street gang, I had to wonder what her story was.

“Here we are,” she said at the end of the hall. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Sorry you didn’t win your betting pool.”

“Nobody else did, either.”

“True. Good luck – I’m sorry, what was your name again?”

She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Lyxana.”

“Good luck, Lyxana,” I told her. “For what it’s worth, I think your talents are wasted here.”

“It’s all I have,” she said simply. Then she opened the door and gestured for me to enter.

I was expecting some kind of trap, but either the word had spread quickly that staying meant dying, or the trap was supposed to come later. All I saw was a makeshift table made of a flat piece of stone propped up on a pile of rubble with Blue Rat sitting next to it.

He was covered in dirt and dust and had a notable black eye. His back was slumped down, weariness evident in the curve of his shoulders and the droop of his head. When I walked in, he glanced up briefly and started laughing, a strained, helpless, frustrated sound.

“You know, I’ve got a hundred people scouring the streets looking for you on threat of death,” he said. “Over half my crew pulled off their jobs to scour every nook and cranny. And then you just walk right in to see me. I’m guessing you stopped at my office first to find out where I was?”

I nodded, not saying anything, and Blue Rat continued. “Myumi still alive?”

“She is,” I said.

“Good. Good. That’s something. You know, kid, I don’t know how you did it, but you pissed off all the wrong people.”

“I am aware. I met two of them less than an hour ago.”

“And you got away? Color me impressed.”

“No, I killed them,” I said.

The color drained out of Blue Rat’s face, but I could see something cold and calculating behind those eyes. He slapped a hand on the table and pushed himself to his feet, then paused, surprise visible on his face for the briefest of moments before he got control of his expression.

“Were you expecting something to happen just now?” I asked.