Wizard Trials: Chapter 144 (Patreon)

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          Catching someone off guard was so much easier than a proper fight. One moment of surprise; that was all Alex needed. He got that moment when the closest guard grabbed his wrist and twisted it behind his back to apprehend him. The soldier grabbed the wrong wrist. While he wrestled to get control of Alex, he twisted around and slid the hidden dagger he had in his other hand into the man’s neck. The motion was so quick and practiced that his partner didn’t notice anything was wrong until he saw the blood start to spurt out of his neck. By the time the other guard realized what was happening, Alex was already diving on him, getting inside his sword arm before he could bring it up to defend himself. Alex tackled the man to the ground, his hands around his neck, squeezing for all he was worth. It turned out; he was worth quite a bit. Alex’s hands were thick with muscle. He managed to collapse the cartilage of the soldier’s throat so he wouldn’t have to hold him down for the two minutes it would take to strangle him properly.

          While Alex was busy killing the two guards, that same gardener continued screeching out a warning to everyone in earshot. Alex looked up from the man he was just finishing strangling, too late to stop her. “Help!” she screamed. “Enemy in the gardens! He’s killing them! He’s killing them!” Alex scowled. It was his own fault for acting too rashly. He should have let the guards take him somewhere secluded before making his move.

          If soldiers started converging on Alex’s location, he would be overwhelmed. Even with the battalion weakened with the deserters that had left this afternoon they would have no trouble killing one, dirt-covered human saboteur. Alex had known the risks of this mission. He couldn’t go back; he would just have to do his best with the current situation. It wasn’t like he had to kill everyone on his own, he just had to reach the gates and get them open before the soldiers being summoned by the alarm found him. There was still a chance. He reached down to the dirt near his face and picked up a fist-sized rock and threw it at the screaming woman. Her skull made a hollow thunk sound when the rock hit her, and she finally shut up.

          A bell started ringing. Soldiers would be on their way, and they would head for the last place they heard that screaming. Alex needed to be as far from these bodies as he could by the time they arrived. He made for the nearest doorway and took off at a sprint. As he ducked inside he heard soldiers running past outside, headed toward the four bodies he’d left behind—five if he counted the first gardener, but they wouldn’t find him for hours. Alex just had to hope they’d waste time trying to get the screaming woman to wake up and tell them what she saw. She wouldn’t know where he’d run off.

          In the door he’d ducked into Alex found himself in a hallway. He was still trying to get his bearings, but he thought this hall connected the underground living quarters to the upper parapet walkways. A small squad of soldiers came running around the corner with spears drawn. There were six of them and they filled the hallway. Alex did his best to act like the dirty gardener he knew he looked like. “S-soldiers!” he shouted, pointing out the door he’d just come through. He did his best impression of a frightened civilian, shocked by whatever violence he might have witnessed. “In the garden! There was s-so much blood. Please, you have to save us!” The tremble in his voice was a nice touch. The soldier in front looked at Alex and waved his men forward. It was good Alex had mentioned the blood, as it would have been hard to explain how he’d gotten so much of it on himself otherwise.

          The soldiers running past didn’t even question Alex’s story. One of them merely said, “Don’t worry citizen, we’re here to help,” and they kept going. Alex stopped to catch his breath, smiling from the exhilaration of it all. He was relieved to see the killing still came naturally, but it was the running that was giving him problems. Being cramped up in caves for weeks didn’t introduce a lot of opportunities for cardio. Winded as he was, though, he couldn’t stop. It wouldn’t take long for the soldiers that had just gone past him to talk to the others and realize he was probably the enemy they were supposed to be looking for. When they got that woman talking she’d describe a thickset man with threadbare clothes covered in dirt and spattered with blood. The chances of that description matching anyone else were effectively zero. Alex closed the door behind them and slid the cross board home to bolt it closed. That ought to buy him some time.

          Turning a slow circle, Alex took a minute to figure out which way would lead to the Southern gate where his men were waiting. The décor looked a bit different since the last time he’d been here. Left, he figured. He took off at a lazy jog in that direction, ignoring the sound of warning bells ringing all over the place. He passed a laundry room and food cellar he recognized, reassuring him that he was going in the right direction. It sounded like most of the commotion was outside, so he reached the South gate without incident. When he did, he had to pull up short as he came around the nearest corner. A squad of six soldiers in plate armor came around the corner at the same time he did, going in the opposite direction. They were clearly on patrol, trying to figure out what all the commotion was about. The gatehouse was just behind them.

          “Stop right there, citizen!” the nearest soldier shouted. “What are you doing out here?”

          “P-please,” Alex panted, trying to keep up the scared voice he’d used a moment ago, but also too short of breath to make it very convincing. “There was an attack in the gardens,” he told the men. “I barely. Made it out. Please, you have to do something!”

          “Why are you covered in blood?” a different soldier asked.

          “I must’ve—”

          “He’s got a bloody knife!” a third soldier pointed out.

          “No, I was just… cutting plants… and… I tripped…” His cover story was far from his best work. It was full of as many holes as the shirt he was wearing and he knew it. He could tell they weren’t buying it, so he turned back the way he came and ran away. He was in no position to take on six fully armed and armored soldiers with just a knife.

          “After him!” a voice echoed down from the hallway after Alex. “Someone stop that man!” Someone started blowing on a high-pitched whistle in a series of bursts Alex had no doubt were communicating his exact location and direction of travel. Another thirty seconds of running later the door leading to the gardens in front of Alex was kicked open. Soldiers in full armor came through and spread out to block his way forward. He turned around to find the soldiers from the gatehouse following up behind him. He was surrounded.

          A soldier with one of those pompous feathers sticking out of his helmet pulled back his visor and said, “We have you surrounded. Throw down your weapon or we’ll be forced to kill you.”

          “So you can torture me until I give up my friends?” Alex asked. He snorted his disdain and threw his dagger at the man’s exposed face.

          The officer managed to block the ineffectual attack with a raised arm. “Kill him,” he told his men. “He had his chance.”

          Alex used the few seconds his attack had gained him to dig the one vial of dryad sap he had out of his pants pocket. He popped the cork off with his thumb and downed it. It was all the extra sap Taelshin had managed to save the whole time they’d been living underground. If he wanted to live, Alex was going to have to burn most of it in a single attack. It was the only card he had left to play.

          Magic filled Alex’s veins. It felt like a reflection of the emptiness inside him; like his disregard for human life; like the empty hole in his heart where his sister used to be. He swallowed it down and let the hatred of lunamancy envelope him. A wave of darkness pulsed out of him, consuming everything in its path. The soldiers before him screamed as it touched them. Alex’s magic ate their screams just as readily as it ate their bodies. His mana spent, the darkness receded. Alex found himself surrounded by a dozen messy corpses with random pieces of their bodies simply gone. At least one person had survived the attack, for now. Surviving wasn’t something Alex would have described as lucky. The man still had blood pouring from a dozen deep wounds. He’d be dead in minutes. Alex stepped over the bodies and turned around to head back to the gatehouse. “What a waste of mana,” he said to himself. There were far more efficient ways to kill with lunamancy, but he been in a bit of a hurry and not willing to risk holding back. His body still had mana in it, but he couldn’t tell how much.

          When Alex caught sight of the Southern gate again he found that it was closed tight and looked to be unguarded. The massive gates at the entrance to Arena City had been modified when Alex and his council had taken over to mimic the design of fortified castles. There was a fortified gatehouse next to the actual gate that had the wheel and counterweights in it that would actually open them. That’s what Alex would have to use to open the gate. He kicked the door of the gatehouse open, and… came face-to-face with the remainder of the gatehouse garrison. Some twenty soldiers stared back at him with surprise.

          Half of the soldiers had swords, the other half had crossbows. The initial confusion at Alex’s entrance didn’t last more than a second. “Kill him!” someone shouted. The guards with crossbows turned them on Alex. He only had a second to act before he’d be mincemeat. Alex’s mind raced through his options. His magic was a void, a lack. His nephew Peter had described it to him before as a power that could unmake anything—like he’d partially unmade that last group of guards he’d encountered.

          There was no question Alex didn’t have enough mana left to unmake twenty guards. He didn’t even try. In ideal circumstances he might have been able to erase only small pieces of them, but the gatehouse room was too large. His magic couldn’t reach them all; not in the moments he had left to act. Instead, Alex turned his magic on himself with a technique Peter had helped him theorize but never actually practiced. This was the time to try it out. He closed his eyes and let the hatred that powered his magic bubble to the surface. He thought of his hatred for everything, for the very world he lived in. Everything had turned to shit these last few months: being forced to squat in a cave underground; the smell of goblin feces growing so prevalent he almost couldn’t notice it anymore; watching a tyrant settle into the home he’d worked so hard to build; watching most of the survivors that used to live in the moderately free society he’d briefly built bend the knee to Dwyra just to get by. I hate this place and everyone that defends it! Alex screamed into his mind. Something snapped. The sound of the soldier’s yelling cut out.

          Alex opened his eyes to find darkness. He was nowhere. The void. He felt the moment he arrived as his skin started trying to tear off his body. His saliva boiled in his mouth. He tried screaming in pain only for no sound to emerge but the beating of his own heart in his ears. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to feel but pain. He’d wanted to leave his world behind and instead ended up somewhere so fundamentally at odds with life that he started dying the moment he arrived. He hadn’t known what his magic would do when he used it on himself like that, but tearing himself out of the world to die in some dark void was not what he’d had in mind. It was just a last ditch desperate move he had been saving in case of emergencies.

          With every fiber of Alex’s being, he regretted his spell. He tried to reverse it, even knowing full well that he’d used the last of his mana to pull it off. Take me back! Return! Getting riddled with arrows would have been preferable to this. At least his eyes wouldn’t have been getting sucked out of his head while the life drained out of him. He could feel his hold on consciousness fading. If he passed out in this place, that would be the end. He only had a few seconds to figure something out. Alex tried a reversal of the method that had brought him to this place, he tried to think of how miserable this non-place was. How he hated it even more than the world he’d come from.

          It worked. Alex was dropped out of the empty air, right back to the location he’d been a moment ago. He pulled in a shuddering breath. His lungs were on fire, black spots were flashing over his vision, his ears were ringing… but he was alive. “What happened?” he heard a soldier say. “Where did he go?”

          Alex looked up stiffly. The soldiers looked back at him. The wall behind him was riddled with crossbow bolts. A few of the soldiers in the back had already started winding the levers on their weapons to load new bolts in.

          “There’s something wrong with him,” a soldier said uncertainly. Alex looked down at himself and had to admit the soldier was right. He could see his own hand as though through a distant fog, almost like it wasn’t entirely there. His very skin seemed to suck in the light that touched it like he was one of those shades that sometimes found its way to Eldira from the shadow realm.

          “Don’t just stand there,” an officer said. “Kill him!”

          Alex coughed miserably and tried to get on his feet as the first soldier with a sword came at him. The man stabbed at Alex. He tried to roll out of the way, but his body was too lethargic, it wouldn’t respond in time.

          The sword never reached Alex. The soldier stabbed, Alex failed to dodge, then the sword just sort of… disappeared when it should have gone through him. Alex looked down at his stomach, as surprised at what he was seeing as the soldier. The man pulled back his blade to stab again, but there was nothing to pull out. The sword had been erased when it tried to stab him.

          Not entirely sure what was happening, Alex reached out with an empty hand to touch the soldier. As he did the man was erased. The man’s arm, then a section of his chest and armor just disappeared as Alex reached for it. Even the resulting sprays of blood were seemingly sucked into the same void that Alex had just come from. It seemed… some of that void had come back with Alex. He had no idea how long the effect would last, so he decided to use it as quickly as possible.

          “All at once, men!” the officer among the group yelled. “He can’t stop us all!” The rest of the soldiers with swords raised their weapons and charged at Alex from across the room with a cry of false bravado.

          Alex just… let them come. Swords stabbed at him, crossbow bolts flew; all were consumed. He walked forward with his arms held wide and let these soldiers join the void. The crossbowman in the back gave up when they saw they had no chance and threw their weapons down. “We surrender!” one of them cried. “Don’t kill us!”

          “Open the gate,” Alex told them coldly. They did as he said, frantically grabbing the wheel of the gatehouse and turning it. Gears groaned as the massive gate started turning open. Alex wasn’t even sure he would have been strong enough to get it open on his own.

          The aura of darkness surrounding Alex gradually receded. He should have been nervous about that, but the fight had gone out of the remaining soldiers. He tried to stand confidently, like he had the power to easily recall that void if he wanted.

          Alex walked outside to see if his men had reached the open South gate. He found Boom’ba and a crowd of goblins armed with assorted bits of pointy metal. “Kill times?” Boom’ba asked.

          “Yes,” Alex said. “But only those that fight back. Capture the rest. Don’t eat them!”

          Boom’ba pointed an arm forward and shouted something in the crude goblin language. His tribe of vicious cannibals surged forward into a fortress that thought they were looking for a single killer hiding somewhere in the gardens. They wouldn’t be ready.

          After the goblins surged past, Graevin came jogging up. He had three crystals of ice floating out in front of him. “Alex!” he said. “I didn’t think you’d actually do it. How?”

          “I killed some people,” Alex answered truthfully. “I killed a lot of people.”

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