Book 2, Chapter 27

The only good news was that the aura around Freak faded away as his regrown top-half solidified. My best guess was that it was some sort of life shell that was powered by the souls of victims. He’d probably used it on that cat monster right before he’d cast incendiary organs and blew it to pieces. When my spell dealt him a wound too grievous for the spell to handle on its own, it grabbed hold of a second victim to give it the power needed to keep Freak alive.

Unfortunately for him, the new flesh was plain skin, not transmuted steel skin. I immediately hurled a force bolt directly into his face. He threw his still-metal hand up to catch the spell, which forced the limb backward. Though his hand smacked into his face quite hard, Freak didn’t let that stop him. Almost at the same time I cast the force bolt, he cast his own spell.

It was a greater telekinesis variant called many hands. Rather than concentrate all its power into one single movement, it spread it out into numerous smaller ones. It took a nimble mind to direct them to their full capabilities, but it allowed a person to function in place of a whole group as long as the tasks weren’t something that required a lot of muscle.

Even if a single hand couldn’t muster the force needed to move something, multiple hands could work on the same object, as Freak proved by sending eight of them my way. My shield ward kept them from grabbing me, but did nothing to stop them from opening other cells or, worse, snatching up the fallen soul hook from where it was still held tightly in Freak’s former hand.

Many hands was a good spell. It had flexibility, a reasonable mana cost for what it achieved, and it could accommodate a wide variety of skill. It was easy to learn, and beginners could start with two or three hands and work their way up to a full twenty as they practiced with it. It had a lot going for it, but speed was not one of those things.

Flight could be activated instantly, and unlike many hands, the problem with using flight in such an enclosed space was avoiding accidentally crashing into things. I had no need to worry about that; I planned on intentionally crashing into something. I oriented myself at Freak and willed the spell to send me forward, an upraised hand leading the way.

The soul hook came flying in from my left, carried on a magic hand and heading straight for the outstretched fingers Freak was holding up to receive the weapon. I fired off a single force bolt through the telekinetic hand, disrupting the magic’s structure for a moment. The hands created by the spell were an application of force magic, that being the primary component to the conjuration needed to modify the original telekinesis spell, and by hitting it with another force spell, I could scramble it for a moment.

It was barely a blink as my force bolt passed through it, but that was enough to make the hand drop its cargo. The soul hook clattered to the floor, and before the hand even had time to pick it back up, I reached my target. My palm made contact with the bulbous contours of Freak’s head, and I cast mana siphon.

I didn’t know how much mana Freak had left, and I didn’t want to risk using mana drain and not getting enough. Restoring my own reserves was important, but the goal here was to tap Freak’s core and run it dry. Mana siphon wasn’t as efficient, but as long as I could hold the connection, it would keep going until there was nothing left.

I crashed into Freak’s body, still mostly steel, and relied on my shield ward to protect me from the ragged tendrils of his robe as they tried to pluck me loose. Meanwhile, mana flooded into my core continuously. Just as fast, I sent it to my staff, which was only just now catching up to me from where I’d left it floating in the air when I’d used flight to cross the room in an instant.

I pulled enough mana out of him to completely recover what I’d lost casting grand telekinesis, which meant that Freak had a stage three core. This was the first confirmation I’d found that mages here even knew how to advance that far, and it was an ill omen for my future plans. Thus far, I’d compensated for having a pathetically small mana core with superior skills, knowledge, and equipment. That could only take me so far, though.

If I was lucky, I’d stumbled across one of the most powerful people in the Wolf Pack. Otherwise, I might need to retreat and prepare some more advanced tools if I wanted to kill the rest of them. But first, I needed to survive this fight. I couldn’t trust that Freak was out of options just because I’d drained his mana core to empty. He could have a hidden mana crystal or a potion of some sort reserved for desperate situations.

I wasn’t interested in risking Freak coming back to life again or seeing what other tricks he might have up his sleeve. Now that I was able to get within touching distance, I just needed to finish him off. It was overkill, but I’d make the mana back soon. I used another master tier spell.

Despite my best efforts over the years, I’d never been able to unearth who’d come up with this spell originally. It had such a pretentious name, which told me that it had been created during the Razkalian Era. That predated my own birth by at least fifteen hundred years, likely more. Whatever records that might have credited the master mage who’d designed it had been lost.

Ridiculous name aside, Chill of the Infinite Void, as it was called—and always capitalized in full in the manual I’d discovered it in—was a powerful spell that drained every last scrap of heat out of a subject. It could be used in a wide area as well, making it a flexible spell that excelled at killing large groups of enemies. I didn’t need it for that purpose here.

I wanted it because it left its victims as nothing more than frozen statues that quickly crumbled to pieces under their own weight. Freak’s skin flashed to a cold, pale blue, his pain-filled grimace locked in place and his tar-sludge hand held out to receive a soul hook that would never reach him. Unless that black tar regenerating spell could build Freak an entire body from a chunk of frozen flesh no bigger than his fist, it wouldn’t be saving him from this.

On the off chance that the black tar regenerating spell couldin fact rebuild Freak from a chunk of frozen flesh, I floated back ten feet and eyed up the body. It seemed like there was something at work trying to save him, otherwise he could have collapsed into himself and shattered already. Chill of the Infinite Void was a fast-acting spell. In fact, most of the mana cost associated with it came from just how quickly it removed heat from the area.

I suspected the rest was wasted on dispersing that heat away somewhere else. If I’d written the spell, I would have designed it to store that heat as a second attack. A compressed ball of all the heat taken from a fifty-foot-wide sphere would do a considerable amount of damage. Modifying the spell had been on my list for decades, but somehow something else was always more important and I’d never gotten around to it.

It probably wasn’t necessary, but I was equal parts cautious and impatient. I threw a force wave into the iced statue that had been my opponent and shattered him to pieces. At that point, the telekinetic hands of Freak’s spell all disappeared, along with the light orb that had been hanging in the air. That answered whether he preferred enchantments or channeled light spells, I supposed.

That should have been the end of the battle, but Freak’s many hands had managed to open a dozen other cells. All sorts of aberrations were loose now, and without their master to control them, they went wild attacking anything and everything in sight. I would have been content to let them tear each other to shreds, but I’d used several powerful spells and I needed a top up.

I floated up near the ceiling, cast a few new light orbs out into the room to illuminate everything, then swapped out flight for levitation. After that, it was a simple matter of taking the time to remote cast mana drain over and over again. I didn’t quite fill my lost reserves from the freed monsters before they finished killing each other, but I got close.

Now it was time to rob the place blind. I might just need to upgrade my phantom space with more room soon.

* * *

The first thing I did was locate Freak’s alchemy lab. It wasn’t hard to find, being in another chamber just off from the grow room. After I was done sweeping it for traps, I spent a few minutes cataloguing the equipment, most of which was in decent shape if not terribly advanced. It would be more than sufficient for what I needed it for, and I quickly started touching pieces to pull them into my phantom space.

After that came the bottled potions and elixirs, along with the jars of ointment, tinctures, unguents, salves, and creams. Freak had apparently been some sort of packrat, uncaring if his creations expired. Or maybe he saved them to test on the poor creatures that ended up on his operating table. It wouldn’t have surprised me.

Regardless of his motives, I had no use for a bruise salve that had started to separate back into its component parts. It took me another twenty minutes to go through everything in Freak’s stock, most of which got discarded. Of far more value to me was the supply of processed ingredients just waiting to be used in some recipe or another. Those, I could do great things with. I’d need to set this lab back up somewhere else soon.

The rest of my time was spent harvesting as much of the plants as I could. Some weren’t ready yet. Others needed days or weeks from being harvested to being ready to use. I took what I could and stole the mana from the rest. Without Freak around to keep this place going, there was no point in planning a return trip. Most of the remaining plants would wither and die, starved of the mana they needed.

I kept exploring, hoping against hope to find some sort of massive storage crystal. There was so much mana left in this lair, but I didn’t have the capacity to take it with me. I hadn’t been planning on confronting a member of the Wolf Pack inside their own lair so soon, and my preparations were lacking. There had to be something here though, something that was acting as a power source for all the enchantments in the lab. There was no way Freak was doing it himself. He’d never be able to leave!

Then again, maybe he never did leave. He’d seemed a bit unhinged when we’d spoken, and practically all the magic he’d used was calculated to take advantage of the place we’d fought at. If that was the truth though, where did he acquire the creatures for his experiments?

“From his cabal-mates,” I muttered to myself. “Damn it. There’s probably nothing here.”

But then I got lucky. Tucked away in a back closet was a pillar of granite, eight feet tall and three feet square at the base. It was shielded, just like everything else in the base, but I could feel the mana in it when I touched it. It had four or even five times the storage capacity of my own mana crystal and it was unattuned, a smaller version of the mana batteries I’d installed in my own labs.

“Perfect,” I said.