Book 2, Chapter 25

I’d been studying Freak since he’d revealed himself to me, mostly to determine how best to kill him when he made his move. He had a shield ward of some type built into his robe, probably a very basic one. Flexible cloth rarely made for good material for inscription, though I’d seen some mages use a hardened trim to hold the runes in shape.

Freak’s robe was enchanted for strength and movement, possibly to the point where it would reflexively defend him. Physical attacks wouldn’t be effective against him, not unless they were overwhelmingly strong. It would have to be something that came in one big strike as well, as the robe could probably handle a group of needling attacks coming from multiple directions easily.

There was a brewer’s ward stone on his person somewhere too, probably hidden in a pocket in the robe. That was mostly to protect him from a mana backfeed when he was working, but it did make it harder to affect his core directly. It wasn’t proof against a deliberate attack, but hitting him with any sort of mana drain would have to come after I’d subdued him since I’d need time to overcome the ward stone.

The best way to win would be to strike quickly and decisively with overwhelming force. For the moment, Freak seemed to think he had the upper hand. I’d already clued him in that I wasn’t a normal child, mostly to see if he’d react. A mage with bonded familiars had been part of the group that attacked my home, and he’d had more than enough time to spy on us. I hadn’t been able to determine how much information he’d fed back to the cabal in Derro before I’d eliminated him.

Assuming Freak was part of that cabal and would have access to the information, the answer was apparently none. Perhaps he didn’t know about the child mage living in the village of Alkerist, or perhaps he did, but hadn’t made the connection that it was me. I was a long way from home, after all, and I’d taken some pains to hide my full abilities.

Or perhaps all of my assumptions were wrong.

“Are you part of the Wolf Pack?” I asked.

“I am, little boy,” Freak said with a hissing laugh. He held up one of his deformed hands. It had only three fingers to go with its thumb, upon one of which was an all too familiar signet ring. “You are surprisingly well-informed about a variety of topics.”

“Your cabal-mates have been interfering with my business,” I told him. “The only reason I’m even in this city is to deal with all of you.”

“And how do you plan to do that?”

I stared directly into his misshapen black eyes and said, “With excessive violence.”

Freak started laughing. “Maybe I’ll cut you up after all.”

“Even if you could, I wouldn’t be able to satisfy your curiosity that way.”

“Oh no, my poor naïve child. You are grossly mistaken about that.”

Six new tendrils grew out of Freak’s robe, making him look like nothing so much as a giant, grotesque, lop-sided spider. From a pocket on the inside, he pulled out a small metal rod with a hook on the end and brandished it.

My blood ran cold at the sight of it. “A soul hook,” I said. The enchantments on it were potent, far stronger than anything I’d expected to find in Derro. Worse, my soul was a weak point in my defenses, being so delicate with all of the invocations I’d laid down before my reincarnation. That magic wasn’t necessarily fragile since souls were by their very nature resilient, but a soul hook was a tool designed to interact with the soul.

Specifically, it was designed to remove them.

Of all the possible threats, having my soul harvested by this demented alchemist was high up there on the list. It wouldn’t necessarily be the end of my existence—it was merely difficult to use magic as a disembodied soul, not impossible—but it would be an extreme inconvenience. It would be far less of a hassle if I avoided letting Freak use his soul hook on me in the first place.

“Would you like to fight back?” Freak offered. “I do love when my victims struggle. It always gives me clues as to how best to use their body after.”

Was there anything else I needed from this mage? Some information about the rest of his cabal would be ideal, but it wasn’t worth the danger. No, it was better to kill him now, then raid his archives at my leisure. His lab represented a treasure trove of resources I could already see a few good uses for.

It hadn’t worked so well against the fish in the lake, but then, that had been considerably larger than the hunchback in front of me. I raised a hand into the air and reached into my phantom space, then withdrew my staff and channeled a lightning bolt through it.

Freak’s face lit up in surprise as I pulled the staff out of thin air. He had a single frozen instant of his crooked eyebrows shooting up before my spell struck him. I aimed it deliberately to throw him back toward the door so that the plants would remain undamaged. I cared far less about his chimeric experiments in the other room, and if he managed to survive the lightning bolt, I’d prefer to fight him in there.

The robe protected him from the impact, if not the lightning itself. Freak’s hood slipped back when he struck the door, revealing scraggly black hair growing in random tufts on his scalp. It was a bit thicker on the left side of his head, enough so that the length would have partially hidden his general baldness if it wasn’t standing on end right now.

Light welled up from the runes stitched into his robe as mana flooded through them to protect Freak from the spell. Despite that defense, I could still smell seared flesh and smoke in the air, and as Freak pulled himself back to his feet, he clutched at his chest with a grimace.

With the robe’s defenses literally smoldering, I suspected it’d lost much of its integrity. A trio of force darts formed in front of me and launched themselves through the air. Surprisingly, Freak was still aware enough to duck beneath one. He took the other two on an arm he threw up to protect his face, tearing the robe further and bloodying him in the process.

I threw a mind spike at him, not out of any expectation that it would incapacitate him, but just to test his mental defenses and possibly distract him for a second while I cast my next spell. The stone around Freak rose up like a pair of enormous, toothy jaws and clamped down on him, then ground down against each other like a chewing mouth with the unfortunate mage caught between them.

I narrowed my eyes as I watched the jaws work. A creature caught in them would be shredded and pulped under normal circumstances, but that didn’t appear to be happening this time. The jaws closed and ground together, but there was no blood. No screams echoed out into the room. The worst that could be said for the attack was that long, shredded strips of black cloth got tangled in the teeth.

A misshapen arm bulging with muscle covered in steel burst out from between the teeth, followed by a leg. They forced the jaws apart despite the animating magic. After a few seconds of straining, the arms slackened, but by then, the spell had run its course and the stone jaws fell apart into a screen of loose gravel.

Freak stood there, his robe hanging off him in tattered strips, his skin the dull gray of burnished steel. Mana flickered around him in a shell, some sort of secondary defense that he’d activated while caught in my stone jaws spell. The twisted smirk was gone from his face now, replaced by anger and pain.

For a moment, I thought he’d lash out with a spell of his own. I prepared myself to counter it, but instead, he just jerked the door open and retreated into his menagerie. Was he actually trying to run away, or just moving the fight to an area that he thought favored him? I’d had some hopes of harvesting the mana in that room after I killed Freak, but he’d proven more tenacious than I’d expected.

Chanting came from the room, the first I’d heard from Freak since we’d met. He was obviously able to cast spells without the words, which likely meant that whatever he was using was difficult for him. That meant intermediate or even advanced tier magic, which made it a smart bet to stop him before he finished.

A few months back, I would have considered it an extraordinary waste of magic to shadow leap a hundred feet through an open door, but right now, I had the mana to spare and it would be far better not to make my entrance through such a predictable location. Just because my shield ward would almost certainly catch whatever spell Freak was casting did not mean it was wise to let myself get hit by it.

I emerged out of the shadows around the operating table and spotted Freak standing in front of one of his abomination’s cells. Whatever his spell was, it was taking him long enough to cast that it was ripe to be countered, if only I could get close enough. I hadn’t known where he was at in the room and could only see one clear landmark for my spell to latch onto though, which meant there was considerable distance between us.

I started forward, only to trip over some sort of mechanical foot pedal built into the base of the cutting table I hadn’t noticed in my initial inspection. It was only a second of vulnerability, but in a fight, a second could be the difference between life and death. I was far too used to being so overwhelmingly powerful that my victory was never in doubt, but I wasn’t that person anymore. That single moment of inattention could very well have led to my death.

Luckily for me, Freak was otherwise occupied with completing his spell. Unluckily, the pedal seemed to trip some kind of mechanical operation in the table, causing one end to tip down and the other to swing up. It smacked into my shield ward in the process, pushing me back and causing me to stagger three full steps before I caught my balance.

By the time I had returned my attention to Freak, he’d completed the spell and removed the bars in the cage. I hadn’t even caught if he’d done it with magic or by some hidden catch somewhere. Either way, the abomination was no longer locked inside.

It looked like it had been some sort of great cat originally, but now its tail was three times longer than it should have been, the bones stretched out on some sort of whip-like cord. Additional muscle had been packed onto its forelimbs and shoulders, giving it a hunched over appearance, and its lower jaw had been split down the middle to allow its mouth to open wider. It no longer had a tongue.

All the extra bulk made it appear ponderous and slow, but nothing could be further from the truth. The flesh crafted cat blurred forward, almost too fast to even see, and slammed into me. My shield ward flared with power, shoving both the cat and myself apart a good twenty feet before we came to a stop. I lifted my staff to smite the monster, but as I did so, I saw past it.

Freak was standing in front of a second cage, but this time there was no chanting. He made a lifting motion with one hand, and the bars rose up at the same time to free a second flesh crafted beast. Without waiting for the monster to leave its pen, Freak ran to a third set of bars.