Spellheart 9: Chapter 39 (Patreon)

I raced to Sava’s last known location, somewhere between the Alchemists Laboratory and where I called for my matriarchs to rally and defeat these monsters. I found exactly what I expected waiting for me there. And precisely what I feared.

There was a rift in space slowly sealing itself. This one was far smaller, and no monsters spilled from it. It was cut just as smoothly as the big gash, clearly made by the same hand.

“The first attack was just a distraction...” I muttered. My fingers drummed against Spell Eater's shaft with one hand, and the other balled into a fist tight enough to turn coal into diamonds.

“Well, shit...” Dean said as he arrived and saw the rift slowly sealing itself. “Well, we should dive in after her, huh?”

“You coming?” I asked. Having Dean as a backup would be perfect. He could handle himself in a scrap, and I trusted him to have my back.

“Of course, buddy. Nobody kidnaps my friend’s baby momma while under my watch!” Dean thrust his axe in the air.

Tivana, Eltiana, Assyrus, Melise, Yorik, Illiel, and Nela arrived soon after, each with looks of grim determination that matched my own and Dean’s. They were all coming with me.

“Sava would do the same for us. Let’s go.” Tivana gazed at the rift with firm determination.

“And don’t forget me!” Ethan said, landing just behind us. “I’m here to help, don’t worry.”

My eyebrows rose. “You’re coming with us?”

“Sure.” Ethan shrugged. “I’m here to help. But who do you think stole your elf? We shouldn’t go in blind.”

I grimaced. “The Satyr King, or one of his agents, most likely. They must have cut a hole in the Devilbeast Wilds somewhere outside the Hearthwood, traveled within it, and then prepared this plan all to capture my Sava.”

But Ethan looked skeptical. “I don’t think so. I know the locations of every Satyr Demigod in the World of Sanctuary and Serenity, and not one of them is in a position to pull off something like this. I heard you figured out how much trouble pocket worlds give them.”

I ran my hand through my hair. “I don’t see who else it could be.”

Unless...

No, it couldn’t be. Could it?

There was only one entity in the Devilbeast Wilds with the raw power and the cunning to pull off an attack like this one. My evil robotic twin.

But it couldn’t be. Why would he be after Sava? The Satyr King wanted him, but that golem of flesh, magic, and a small lost chunk of my soul seemed to want nothing to do with flesh and blood beings. Hell, I’d seen his full metallic body.

He didn’t even have the physical assets to use a beautiful woman of any sort properly. Nor did I think he had the interest, being more machine than man. So what exactly did he want with Sava?

But while I thought, my hands made their way to the rift to tear it wider. There would be time to debate and wonder later. Now he had a rescue mission to embark on, and the faster we did so, the better our chance was of rescuing Sava quickly.

***

I shrugged off the anxiety gripping my heart and plunged into the rift. My comrades followed close behind me, leaving the Hearthwood in the dust. The rift started shrinking again as soon as we were through, but I knew with the power we carried could cut our own exit open at any time. We were only entering the rift where we were because we wanted to follow the tracks of the one who made the rift and took Sava.

As soon as we entered the Devilbeast Wilds, it was as if we’d been plunged into a world of twilight. The sky was shrouded with dark clouds, and skeletal trees towered over us. They were just as large as their kin back in the Hearthwood, but these were dead and decayed after decades or centuries without sunlight.

After Dean sealed the pocket world, everything that had once been in the Devilbeast Wilds started eating itself. This forest must have been teeming with life back in its day, some hostile, some not. In some ways, it was a shame to see so much death, but at the same time, I knew that if Dean hadn’t sealed the area, monsters would have come pouring out across Deania every few years in search of tasty elves.

And that wasn’t even mentioning the fact that I’d been sleeping blissfully unaware in The Wanderer, stuck in the middle of this deadly forest. Had he not sealed away the deadliest monsters, I probably wouldn’t have lasted long enough to meet Sava and my matriarchs.

The zeal in the air here was thinner than I expected. This place and the Heartwood had switched in that respect as I opened Dean’s nexus seals. I doubted the deadly monsters within could survive in such harsh conditions for long, and truth be told, I had been hoping to starve most of them out rather than need to clear this place out the hard way.

But this was how that ended for me. Sometimes avoiding problems just leads to bigger problems, like the one I face now.

“Look, there.” I pointed to the mud before us. Amidst the gloom, there was a path. The trail was clear to follow, and no effort had been made to hide the prints, though I knew such a thing could be done by even the weakest of earth cultivators.

I crouched down to examine the prints on the ground, furrowing my brows as I looked at them. These weren’t the telltale hooves of Satyrs. It looked like the booted foot of a human. In fact, based on the length of the stride and the style of the boot, I might have thought they were left by me.

It seemed my robotic twin really was involved in this. I didn’t see Sava’s prints, but that probably meant he was carrying her. There were no other marks on the ground.

"So it really was him..." I muttered under my breath.

"This evil adamantium clone of yours was the attacker?" Tivana asked.

I nodded. "Seems like. Get ready for another tough fight."

“He went this way,” I said as I followed the trail.

The gloomy wasteland of the Devilbeast Wilds seemed... tamer than it should have been. The path we were following was straight and orderly. Not as good as the streets of the Hearthwood, but better than any wilderness path had any right to be.

No monsters came to attack us. When I’d peered in on the Devilbeast Wilds before, it had been full to the brim with deadly foes. Now the area seemed quiet and empty.

“What’s going on here?” Ethan muttered. He kicked at a gnarled stump. It was sliced clean on the top. It looked like it had been cut with a saw, and it wasn’t the only one. Many of the other dead trees had been harvested in much the same way. Few monsters could make such a clean cut, and none would do so except by happenstance. Only an intelligent race like humans or elves would clear timberland like this.

Shortly after that, we encountered the bodies of fallen beasts. I recognized the largest of them, a Sky-Touching Kilobeast, in its juvenile form. It lay dead on the ground, surrounded by the bodies of lesser monsters. At full power, the Sky-Touching Kilobeast would have been a Demigod-level threat.

Most of the bodies around it would have been at the Sorcerer or Wizard realms. Something very powerful had taken down these monsters. And from the laser burns tracing the Sky-Touching Kilobeast’s hide, I was pretty sure my robotic twin was to blame.

“Your twin’s been busy,” Dean murmured, his gaze grim as he examined the fallen monsters. “Looks like I’m going to get a proper fight after all...”

“You’re going to get to him before me.” I flashed him a determined smile. I wasn’t sure how strong my robot twin had gotten, but he couldn’t have cultivated faster than I had with how hard I’d been working. And even if he had kept up with me, I brought enough firepower to flatten a country at my back. If my robot twin knew what was good for him, he’d hand Sava right over and apologize for the trouble he’d caused. Otherwise, we were about to turn him into scrap metal.

As we crossed the horizon, standing trees became scarce, granting us a clear view of what lay just over the hill. From a distance and shrouded by dead branches, I’d mistaken it for a mountain or a cliff face. But now it was clear to see.

There was a large castle of black stone looming on the horizon. I grimaced. Of course. Apparently, my evil twin had taken my edgier tastes with him when the two of us separated.

Dean turned with a grin and raised an eyebrow.

“Not a word,” I warned him.

“Not hiding, at least,” Yorik shrugged.

The black castle looked even bigger up close. I was impressed by the sheer scale of the thing. Castle Mac was bigger, but not by much. But building that had required the aid of a friendly dungeon core. My robotic twin must have constructed this entire thing by hand.

The defenses also seemed impenetrable unless wizards or higher were brought into the equation. A group of mage acolytes could hold a fortress like this against an army ten times their number.

The battlements were high and sturdy, and the towers were higher and sturdier still. The slits and murder holes lining the walls would mean certain death for any attacker without the spells or raw power to shield themselves.

But the castle was eerily quiet. There wasn’t a sound to be heard anywhere, as expected of a barren place like the Devilbeast Wilds. There were no elves to guard this castle.

I couldn’t help but wonder why my twin would even bother building it. What was the point of all this?

It wasn’t like he had a family or followers to defend like I did. That was why I constructed Castle Mac. As a being that was basically an intelligent golem, he would have been fine with a hole in the ground. Heck, considering his true form was that of an Earth elemental energy matrix surrounding a tiny severed part of my soul, he should have been fine just sinking right into the ground and merging with the earth.

Earth elementals were usually content to do just that for decades, which was their natural state. Why build a black castle on a hill overlooking a barren wasteland like a forgotten tyrant from myth and legend?

I stepped up to the door. It was made of iron, already turning to rust in the harsh weather. The elves among us took a step back, but all were at high enough cultivation levels to shrug off the iron’s adverse effects.

Dean, Ethan, and I were all unaffected. Tivana also had more resistance than most, thanks to her human heritage, so we took the lead.

I stood in front and shoved the doors open. They creaked and groaned as they opened wide, but they were not locked or barred from the inside.

The sound of the groaning metal hinges made the elves wince, but they followed me inside anyway. Beyond the doorway was a grand hallway, much like a throne room. Torches lined the walls, burning with steady magical fire that did little to pierce the shadowy gloom.

To either side of the grand hallway stood two enormous statues, each on their knees with looks of fear in their eyes. I recognized the faces. One was Sharian, though she had the dress and look she’d had when she commanded the Corpse Collector Company.

The other was Kysalian, her bodyguard. She looked as she had at true mage when she’d nearly killed me.

Both elves had pressed me to the edge of life and death, and my battles with them were some of the toughest fights I’d ever had. But I’d overcome them both, and now the two pledged loyalty to me.

My evil twin must have considered victory over them a core memory to have carved statues of them as they were. There was something oddly familiar about the statues’ eyes, though. The glittering gemstones within closely resemble something I knew I’d seen before.

I might have pieced it together after more investigation, but there was someone far more important in the center of the room, drawing my attention away. She rested atop a few pillows, asleep and with her arms crossed, but otherwise none the worse for wear. The table she lay on top of was made of crystal and looked like it had been grown from the stone floor beneath it relatively recently.

Behind her stood a statue carved of emerald and in her exact figure. It stood frozen with eyes closed in quiet serenity as she held her hands over the real flesh and blood copy of herself below.

Sava’s hot breath fogged the crystal above her, and my pounding heart steadied when I saw she was alright. The others rushed up close behind me and joined me by Sava’s side.

“Looks like she’s fine,” Ethan said. “Someone used a sleep spell on her, but nothing can be lifted with a few moments of concentration. Shall I?”

I held up a hand. This couldn’t be all we were here for.

“Quit lurking in the shadows!” I shouted into the empty gloom. “I know you’re out there. Come on out!”

Ethan looked around and shrugged. “This robot twin you keep talking about isn’t here. I imagine he fled the moment he sensed two Demigods in this party. Let’s just grab your girl and--“

Ethan’s voice cut off abruptly as a scythe-like blade swept through the shadows behind him. His eyes widened right before the blow made contact, and his Demigod senses screamed danger at him.

His figure vanished and disintegrated into an illusion, revealing the real Ethan two paces away. He'd tried to evade the surprise attack through mind magic all too similar to a technique I used myself. But because I had used such a trick myself, my evil twin knew to expect it and had compensating accordingly.

Ethan's throat was firmly in the grip of an arm that was all too similar to my own.

<Note>
Evil twin is back!

I know this novel has been all over the place in terms of antagonists this book, first with the dragons, then the Cult, then the Satyr King, and now the Evil Twin.

I swear it's all going to come together perfectly in another 15 chapters! (Hopefully)