Book 2, Chapter 26

The chimeric aberrations were nothing but a distraction at this point. Fighting them was a waste of time, one that I couldn’t afford unless I wanted to let my opponent unleash the entire menagerie on me. I had better uses for my mana, and killing them all now would prevent me from harvesting the creatures later when I put them out of their misery.

Flight was probably overkill, but I fully planned on replenishing any mana spent on this fight at the end, and it defeated the immediate issue of having flesh crafted animals and monsters attacking me. As far as I could tell, I wouldn’t have to worry about any sort of ranged attacks from them, and even if I did, those would put far less pressure on my shield ward than standing on the ground while they tried to maul me.

I was almost sure the spell Freak had cast was puppet master, which meant that he was directly controlling his experiments like extensions of his own body. It was possible to sever the link, but it would be easier, faster, and cheaper to kill the monsters than it would be to attack the spell directly. If I was right, however, that meant he could control at best a handful of the creatures before his mind reached the limits of his ability to multitask.

At least, it could under normal circumstances. Freak was an alchemist though, and an elixir of fractured minds wasn’t off the table. If he had one handy, instead of his limit being three or four, it might be ten or more. Even if he didn’t, killing one of the monsters would just free up part of his mind to take control of another one. Regardless of whatever preparations he might have made prior to using puppet master, the solution was still to kill him as soon as possible.

His robe was somehow still functioning despite the beating it had taken, and Freak was taking full advantage of that to scuttle around. Worse, his skin hadn’t yet lost that metal sheen, meaning just about any conjuration I could use below the advanced tier was worthless. Transmutations were a possibility, but the ones that I thought might be effective had long cast times.

I didn’t want to get up close, not when he still had that soul hook, but my ranged options were limited. Most mages with any real measure of skill could resist mind magic, and until that transmute flesh to steel spell of his wore off, blunt trauma was out of the question. Even the master tier spell I’d used on that giant fish wasn’t likely to do much of anything against powerful mage. Freak would need to manually keep his mana stable without his core holding it in place, and the spell might cripple him in the long run if he couldn’t repair the damage, but it wouldn’t do much to help me win this fight.

No matter how I did this, it wasn’t going to be cheap. But a glance around the room told me there was plenty of mana to restore my reserves. It was best to end this now with a spell strong enough to cut through his defenses and precise enough not to collapse the ceiling and leave me buried under hundreds of tons of rubble.

Before I could begin to cast the master tier spell that would end the fight, I caught a surge in mana coming from one of the aberrations below me. Fiery red light was starting to leak out through its cracked leather skin, painting a pattern of black ribs lit from inside. It took only a moment for me to recognize the magic: a disturbing spell known as incendiary organs, often used by necromancers.

I had just enough warning to conjure up a force wall before the monster exploded in a rolling wave of fire. Most of the heat broke against the wall, and my shield ward kept the rest from reaching my skin. By the time the bursts of fire ended, the corpse was splattered fifty feet in every direction.

Incendiary organs was a nasty spell in that it flooded every organ with explosive magic, then set off a single one with a mere spark. That explosion chained into new ones, causing the subject to blow up, throwing organs in every direction. Those in turn blew up half a second later, spreading the damage even further.

It wasn’t an easy spell to cast, especially against an unwilling target. I suspected the monsters in Freak’s menagerie didn’t have the intelligence or the willpower to resist being turned into bombs, and even if they did, he could easily have given himself all sorts of ways past their defenses when he had them strapped to that table beneath me. The ones who managed to resist, well…

When the table had tipped itself, a sliding panel had also opened into the floor. I couldn’t see where the new hole ended, but my guess was the lake below. Failed experiments were probably dumped in the water, food for the lake dwellers. The whole mechanical mechanism looked quite clever to me, but that sort of engineering had never been my specialty, nor did I have a lot of interest in learning.

In the time it took to craft a force wall, I finished casting the master tier spell I hoped would end the fight. Telekinesis was a versatile, if limited, spell. There were plenty of variations, and apprentices since time immemorial had been encouraged to explore the limits of that line. Greater telekinesis retained all its weaker cousin’s flexibility at the cost of increased difficulty to cast and mana used to fuel the magic.

Beyond that was the master tier version, grand telekinesis. With it, I could reach out my mental hand and crush any of these aberrations to a pulp. It also cost roughly three hundred and fifty times as much mana to cast as lesser telekinesis and took me a full five seconds to pull together instead of being instant and reflexive, so it wasn’t something I wanted to use unless absolutely necessary.

Channeling grand telekinesis for a single second would drain my current core fourteen times over. Without my staff to help limit transference loss, I could expect to use this spell for at most three seconds before I was completely out of mana. With the staff, I might get five. In reality, I’d already used about a fifth of the mana my crystal was holding for me, so the duration of my spell was even lower than that.

One second was enough for the magic to grab hold of Freak and rip his head off his shoulders. In my haste, I misjudged the exact alignment of the spell and got the arm he’d raised up into the air as well. Flesh-turned-steel let out a tortured squeal as telekinetic force strong enough to level castles bore down on it. Immediately, it gave way, sending the severed arm and head flying in one direction while the rest of the body slapped against the bars Freak had been standing in front of.

I cast a pair of stone needle spells to impale the still-living monster below me, then swooped down to use paralyzing touch to hold it still for mana draining before the body went down the convenient disposal chute. That threat neutralized, I wanted a better look at Freak’s body. There was a suspicious lack of blood all over the place where I’d ripped him apart, and I needed to know if that was because of some lingering enchantment holding his blood in, or if it was because he wasn’t dead.

Flesh crafters were notoriously hard to kill. Smart ones would build redundancies into their bodies that made decapitation or heart failure trivial to recover from, and thus far, Freak has been a surprisingly resourceful opponent. I hadn’t expected to need a master tier spell to pull off a decisive win, but he’d done an excellent job defending himself against the advanced tier magic I’d started with. It was entirely possible that a single second of grand telekinesis was not enough to kill him.

If he was still alive, hopefully I’d have shredded his defenses and left him easy to finish off. That robe of his had been obscuring his mana to the end, and I wasn’t sure if what I was still sensing was residual mana that was rapidly emptying out of his body or if it was hiding an intact mana core. What I didn’t know was what the flickering aura still limning his still form meant. There were so many spells that presented with the same visual indications that it was impossible to narrow it down.

I could make some assumptions given his focus on flesh crafting and, presumably, alchemy. I hadn’t seen him use any potions or elixirs, but he could have taken some before he’d revealed himself to me. Considering how badly he’d underestimated me, that did not seem terribly likely, but I wasn’t ready to dismiss the possibility. Some concoctions were cheap enough and lasted long enough that any reasonably wealthy alchemist could afford to maintain their effects indefinitely.

The light was a soft white, almost cream color, probably not a reflection of Freak’s soul. It was just as strong now as it had been when it flickered to life back in the grow room, and if not for the fact that the flesh crafter’s soul hook had gone flying with the severed limb, it would have been enough to keep me from going anywhere near the body.

I double checked that the soul hook was still far, far away from me and spotted it gripped in Freak’s hand thirty feet off to the side. Neither the severed arm or head moved. The room was silent save for the slight wheezing growl of the paralyzed monster. Once I thought about it, that was somewhat strange. The first time I’d come through this room, they’d all reacted to various degrees when I’d lit the place up.

It wasn’t fully lit now, but there were a number of cells I could see into, thanks to the single light spell hanging in the air. That one was Freak’s, mine having been dismissed after I’d entered the grow room earlier. Light was another one of those spells that had a lot of variations and could be something that needed a constant drip of mana to maintain, in other words cast as a conjuration, or have a dedicated reservoir to draw from, meaning it was an enchantment.

Different mages had different styles, and It wasn’t uncommon to pick one and stick with it for everything. I tended to prefer longer running enchantments over things I had to actively channel mana into, even if they weren’t as efficient. At least, I had in my previous life. Efficiency was the most important factor in almost everything I did these days, so I’d switched over to channeled spells for the most part.

What all of this meant was that despite a number of ongoing spell effects in the room that had been powered by Freak’s mana, I couldn’t safely assume he was alive or dead yet. I’d just wasted the last ten seconds staring at his body, looking for some sign so I wouldn’t need to approach him, but there was nothing definitive so far.

While I was contemplating whether life sense would give me an accurate reading or if that robe would block that too, I noticed that the growling had stopped. That was the clue I needed to make a decision. There was no way that monster would have stopped on its own, and I hadn’t done anything to shut it up.

I didn’t even need to look to see that it was dead. Whatever that aura was, it was obviously feeding off the life essence of the aberration. Though it looked no different, I could feel the magic growing heavier. Something black and goopy bubbled up out of the top of the corpse, almost like tar except that it could stand on its own. It took a moment to reform into the rough shape of Freak’s head, shoulder, and arm, then he was back in the fight.