Book 2, Chapter 48

I gave myself a moment to take it all in. There was a ring on his finger with a Wolf Pack signet. He was more than twice my height and probably weighed eight or nine times as much as me, all of it muscle. His head was shaved, and he was bare-chested. Most importantly, his skin shimmered with mana, some sort of strengthening invocation. It actually repelled the dust clogging up the room, leaving him spotless. I suspected it probably worked on blood stains, too.

There were twelve children in the room, all of them obviously and gruesomely dead. Tanner’s broken neck would have been the least messy of them all if his skull hadn’t split open from being thrown headfirst into the wall after the mage was done with him. Behind the man himself was a partially collapsed wall that looked like it had been knocked down from the outside. Rubble had poured into the room, and loose chunks of stone had been blasted into the walls and children inside.

I noted all of this between one step and the next. This man, Monolith, I suspected, was apparently the kind of person so sadistic he enjoyed murdering innocent people. I’d met his type before. Even at the deepest depths of my own evil ambitions, I’d never enjoyed casual, wanton cruelty against people who’d done me no wrong. I couldn’t fathom why some people did.

The mage was close enough that he was starting to reach down to grab hold of me when I unleashed a force wave strong enough to bring down the rest of the building, targeted directly at him. He let out a surprised “Oomph!” as he was picked up and thrown all the way across the street to crash into a stone wall.

It didn’t hurt him, not with the invocations reinforcing his body. Though he didn’t have that steel texture Freak’s durability spell had given him, I knew it would take far, far more than a simple force wave to do any real damage. As far as my spell choices went, I would treat this mage as functionally immune to kinetic force. Any spell powerful enough to overwhelm the man’s defenses would be a waste of mana.

The force wave was just to give me some space and time. Even before the man crashed into the building across the street, I was already building the spell that would end his life. I just needed room to finish it, and maybe I’d get a few answers out of my victim first.

“You’re part of the Wolf Pack?” I asked, stepping through the hole he’d smashed into the orphans’ hideout and into the open. The man was just now climbing back to his feet.

“I am. You’re the kid who killed Freak somehow.”

“I am. What’s your name?”

“They call me Monolith,” he said while he pulled a pair of leather gloves from his back pocket and slid his hands into them. “Now, I’ve got orders here, so I’m going to beat your ass, and I need you to try not to die from it. Velvet is pissed at you, and he really wants you alive to hear about it.”

What was the point of using codenames if it was so easy to guess who was who? Even worse, these idiots had given hints to their strengths in their names, too. Ash was almost certainly a fire magic expert. Monolith was a big bruiser, Weaver created their gear, and Velvet was their smooth talker who kept things organized. I hadn’t gotten good looks at all of them yet, but it was easy to guess what someone called Monarch’s role in the cabal was.

“I guess he should have been home when I came to visit him, then,” I said. “All that effort wasted.”

Monolith laughed. “Won’t hurt my feelings any if you want to do this the hard way. I don’t even much care if I kill you, as long as you’re fighting back.”

“There won’t be a fight,” I told him. I gestured behind me with my staff. “After this… No, why would I bother?”

“You’re surrendering?” Monolith asked, his brow furrowed in confusion.

“No.”

How he didn’t see the mana building around me, I’d never know. Monolith appeared to be dangerously overspecialized in invocations and not much else, a classic example of why a rounded education was important. Whether he was oblivious or simply ignorant, he was standing in the middle of the street when I unleashed a master tier conjuration known as boiling blood.

He paused mid-step and frowned. Then he grabbed at his chest and let out a groan. “What… the hell?” he asked as red mist wafted out of his mouth. More came from his ears and nose and around his eyes.

Monolith dropped to his knees and coughed, spewing out more red mist. Over the span of a few seconds, his body started to shrivel up, all those bulging muscles becoming wan, wasted things. There was nothing he could do to stop it, either. And he knew it.

“The spell is called boiling blood, if it helps,” I told him. “It’s one of the most excruciatingly painful spells I know. Congratulations. It’s not often I go out of my way to punish someone for their actions.”

Did that make me a hypocrite? Probably. I wasn’t interested in arguing the ethics of it.

The mist started to condense once it came in contact with the air, first turning into a ground-hugging fog before it settled as a red stain in the dirt in a twenty-foot radius around Monolith. In the end, his invocations were only making it worse for him. With his skin impermeable, the super-heated blood had only a few vents to escape through.The pressure built inside him faster than it could be released, trapped in a cage of his own flesh and pulping his organs.

I didn’t stay to watch Monolith’s death, but only because something else had caught my attention. In the back of my mind, I was always aware of the mana around me. The presence of leech stones being used as currency and a population perpetually drained of almost all their mana made it a bit harder to keep track of things, but I’d adapted.

That was why I hadn’t paid much attention to what felt like a person with a bag of shards a few hundred feet away, not until they started grabbing handfuls and throwing them into the air. I turned to look just in time to watch mana crystals sparkling in the dim light flash as they released their contents and artificial bodies formed around them. In moments, there were twenty diminutive, green, bipedal monsters in the streets.

They charged at me as a howling mob, jagged teeth and blackened nails flashing. I had only a few seconds to decide what to do before my shield ward got put to the test, and the lack of ranged weapons or any semblance of discipline and intelligence made it an easy decision. I levitated straight up into the air while using sharpened senses to get a better look at the caster.

He was a tall man, though nowhere near Monolith’s height, and somewhat scrawny with pale hair that looked white in the dim light. I put him at perhaps forty years of age. His eyes were locked onto mine, and as I rose into the air, he threw another handful of mana crystals straight up. Mana swirled around him, catching the stones and blowing them my direction. The constructs built themselves around the crystals, keeping them as a core, until a dozen giant rats were falling through the sky at me.

What the man was doing was more akin to golemancy than it was to summoning, though anyone without a firm grounding in the various magic disciplines would be easily confused since the end result looked so similar. But the creatures attacking me only appeared to be summoned. In actuality, they were shells of mana given physical form and slaved to the caster’s will.

My guess was this was the Wolf Pack mage known as Swarm. The moniker certainly fit the odd fighting style. Any basic tier spell could destroy one of those constructs, or even something as simple as clubbing them with a stick. The tactic anticipated losses and relied on overwhelming numbers. I could see how it would work, but it certainly seemed wasteful.

More importantly, it had a major weakness. Swarm himself was only safe by virtue of the wall of constructs he’d brought to life between him and his target. Distance was his defense, and he didn’t have that much of it. Even as I thought that, though, he cast another spell and vanished.

A force wall smacked the flying rats out of the air, at least momentarily. Thin skin membranes opened up, revealing them to be something more akin to bats, and they regained altitude. It seemed Swarm was smarter than his partner had been. Monolith was nothing more than desiccated corpse lying in the street below me, covered in a fine red misting of his own blood.

In all fairness, I had used a master tier spell to kill him. It was a good thing I had, too. It would have been much harder to deal with the constructs if I was actively fending off Monolith at the same time. I wondered for a moment why the crystals hadn’t already been placed beforehand if the pair were working together. Swarm obviously had a way to control them remotely, and his being there left him vulnerable.

They must not have been expecting to find me so quickly. I’d delivered myself into their hands before they’d had time to set up a trap, and then I proceeded to kill Monolith in the span of thirty seconds while Swarm was still scrambling to get his offense going. That meant he was on the back foot, desperate, prone to mistakes. Good.

The damage potential was overkill for weak constructs like these, but arc lightning had more than enough range to jump from bat to bat, frying them and breaking the animating crystals. A single spell got almost all of them, and the remaining two went down to a pair of force bolts. That left the goblinoid constructs on the ground, but even scaling the buildings, they couldn’t reach me if I just floated up a bit higher.

Destroying the constructs was pointless. It cost the enemy mage a bit of time and mana, but if he was allowed to escape, he’d just make new ones. He’d disappeared, but he obviously still had some way to control his minions. There were a few methods for that. The easiest was through line-of-sight commands, which could mean he was hiding behind some spell and otherwise on the roof. Another option was through a scrying spell, either of the general area or to see directly through his constructs much like a mage with a bonded familiar might do.

The way Swarm had disappeared reminded me of how the kind of short-range limited teleport spells like shadow leap worked. My bet was that he was in some nearby building, scrying the battlefield and directing his constructs. That was easy enough to check with a simple counter scry spell.

As I suspected, someone was spying on me. If it was Swarm, and I had no reason to think otherwise just yet, I could use tracing scry to follow the enemy spell back to its source. That took a few seconds to set up, during which time the goblinoids started pelting me with stones they had gathered from the street-level rubble. Those bounced off my shield ward, doing no damage.

Tracing scry suddenly locked on to Swarm, hunched down in a building a quarter of a mile away and feeding mana into more construct crystals to send out another wave of those bat-like monsters. They were massing in two different points, winging their ways down nearby streets at ground level so they could burst out and catch me in a pincer attack.

Shadow leap didn’t work if I wasn’t in a shadow, which I wasn’t out in the open air, but nothing was stopping me from switching out levitate for flight and crossing the distance to where Swarm had fled in a matter of a few seconds, so I did exactly that. There was a gaping hole in the roof that allowed me easy access to the interior, where I found Swarm goggling at me in surprise.

“Hello,” I said. “Let’s have a little chat, shall we?”