The Restored: Chapter Thirty-Nine

A look of confusion crossed the Arenamaster’s face, as well it might. Even setting aside practical concerns, like why I’d even ask that in the first place, it was a difficult question. I was certain the Arenamaster had memorized a map of the city, but we’d moved around a bit while started, and the devastation made guessing such things hard. 

The building we were standing next to had partially collapsed when an airship had crashed into a building. The building was well built, and had used steel reinforcements that didn’t require magic, but being hit by tons of metal dropping from the sky isn't the kind of thing that even most well-built buildings can handle. 

I only knew where we were through the simple process of elimination. When I’d cast my sensory spell, I’d looked for a specific metal, one that was anathema to demons, much like iron hurt the Fae: silver. 

I’d found a massive source of it, much larger than I’d expected to find. I’d thought that I’d have to make my way to a jewelry store, and work with a tiny amount of it. But to my good fortune, either the power drain, the airship crash, or some combination of both had disabled the wards around Elderglass Central Bank’s vaults. 

Melting it through the thin gaps, and slowly pooling it together into a weapon above the Arenamaster’s head had been the hard part, as well as the risky one, and I had been forced to rely partially on the Arenamaster’s old humanity for it. Even in a city with towering skyscrapers and airships, most people don’t look up. 

When I’d changed my spell, I increased the mass of the spears of silver suspended hundreds of feet over the Arenamaster’s head many times over, and gave them an order with metal magic to fall. 

Even before the Arenamaster could open her mouth to respond to my strange question, silver spears hammered into her from above. One caught her in the eye and skewered down through her head. One struck her in the heart, pushing through her chest and her stomach, another hit her in the neck, right in the jugular at an angle that skewered through her lungs and out the front of her body, and on and on.

By the time the barrage ended a second later, the Arenamaster looked more like a very bloody pincushion than a living thing. Even her Throne looked severely damaged – powerful or not, it was still hurt by silver in a way that Odril’s war magic hadn't been able to manage.

I didn’t want to take the risk that wasn’t enough to kill her, though: she’d healed from wounds that should have been deadly before. 

So I exploded the spears of silver. Each one erupted into hand-sized, sharpened blades, and they began to spin as if caught in a tornado. They shredded through the Arenamaster’s body and the Throne alike. My aura started restoring itself faster and faster as I did, and I released my concentration on Familiar Fusion arch-star. Odril, in the back of my mind, let out a laugh that was somewhere between hysterical and amused.

The Throne was slowly but steadily torn apart until a resounding thunk rang out through the air. The silver clattered to the floor, leaving the Throne. Physically, it looked fine, but there was something that was… lesser. The black of the ink wasn’t as deep, and the aged yellow vellum was no longer as old and profound looking. The diagrams of demon and human anatomy seemed less realistic, and even the wood of the chair looked more weathered. 

I had sundered it. Sure, it wasn’t as dramatic as re-Sundering the Throne of Sacrifice would have been, and I’d used the terrain heavily to my advantage, but even so, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of pride at the fact I’d managed to sunder a Throne.

“Brutal!” Odril said, in a way that made me even more unsure how she felt about it. She let out a sigh and I had the impression of her relaxing. “It’s good to be back. You’ve changed a lot. You’ve gotten old.” 

Normally, if Kelly or Jin had told me I’d gotten old, I would have protested that thirty-five wasn’t old. But in that instant, with my soulstuff nearly wrung out despite the decades of it sitting there without Odril harvesting it, with my aura storage archstar’s endless reserves drained dry, and with my body aching from countless bumps, bruises, fractures, and worse? I felt old.

“I have,” I said, speaking aloud. “But I’m afraid our business isn’t done yet.” 

I spun my aura around. It was no longer restoring itself quickly, the drain flowing to Alyphize’s grand spell too much again. I didn’t know why it had peaked in the fights – maybe the Arenamaster’s spell had done something to the ambient aura? But now, with it no longer restoring itself, I guessed that I might only have about fifty auric units left. 

I turned to examine the battle between the demons and Archmage Davalier and the strange northerner. Davalier was in bad shape, but so was Deepwater. The alterations he was making to pressure were horrifically inefficient, as he flooded the entire area with aura and soulstuff to compress that, but they were effective at preventing her sound and wind from countering it. She had some spells and enchanted items that operated on strange principles, or maybe a familiar bond, and that could help hold it back, which was the only reason she’d survived so long. 

On the other hand, she was able to rip out chunks of Deepwater’s throne and body with her wind, and he was much slower to heal than the Arenamaster had been. Each time she cut, he stayed cut for a long time. She just needed an opportunity to cut deep enough to kill.
Well, I could work on that. I quickly glanced at the northerner, Hadiya’s friend who was going to play the part of the false creator of the tattoos. 

His fight was seemingly going much better. Firefright was much stronger than the young man that had been this Deepwater, and he’d been using demonic magic for far longer than this Deepwater had. Those made him a more dangerous opponent. But in turn, I thought that the northerner was more dangerous than Davalair. 

One of the reasons that Elderglass had never sought to expand north, other than the absolutely massive mountains, was the fact they seemed to churn out absurdly powerful Archmages. I’d assumed that this was largely propaganda and a number advantage, but watching the black coated, plain looking blond man bull rush through a wave of hellfire and release an explosion of black lightning right into Firefright’s face? I started to believe it. 

I patted my pockets for any leftover bullets. I’d gone through my stock quickly in the fight, but it was also more than possible that I’d missed an entire box due to the frankly absurd speed of combat that I’d been operating at. I wasn’t so lucky, but I was able to find three bullets that had managed to avoid being used in combat, and I started composing spells in my head. 

I only had three shots, but more practically, I only had one shot in each fight, if that. With so little aura, I had to make sure each shot worked to maximum effectiveness to tilt the balance, to buy as much time as possible. That part of the spell was both ongoing and costly, so I might not even be able to get two shots if I had to do too much guiding on my first shot.

I wished I had a rifle. If I did, I wouldn’t need to be worried about guiding the shot manually, and could have taken a much more accurate shot at range. But I didn’t have time to stand around and lament not having the tools I wished for, so I got to work. 

“You might want to hold back for this one, Odril,” I said. 

“That’s fine. I burnt pretty much everything already,” her tired voice said. Despite the situation, I couldn’t stop a smile from spreading across my face as I worked. My first friend was back. 

Though I didn’t normally need it, being a sorcerer, I decided to write my ritual out as if I were a witch. With my rune bond, it would only save a few auric units, but every bit counted right now. It was rushed and sloppy, but I placed the three bits of silver onto the circle, alongside three bullets, and rushed my aura into the spell. As a metal sorcerer, I was perfectly compatible, and there was a flash as the sympathetic connection between silver and each bullet formed. Unlike Hadiya, I was no enchanter, and I hadn’t formed an anchor within each bullet. The spell would last minutes, if that. 

I clicked one into the chamber and raised my gun, forming the control spell and aiming toward Deepwater. Despite his transformation, I couldn’t help but think of him as a child, and I didn’t want to kill him. I’d have been perfectly happy to banish him to the Fallen Void, but that wasn’t an option. And if it came down to killing him or letting him take the Throne of Sacrifice and re-starting the massive demon spawning, I’d kill him. 

I fired. 

The bullet spun across the distance, carried more by my spell than by the alchemical powder propellant. Deepwater turned aside an arc of the Archmage’s wind, and as he did, he lifted his arm. 

The bullet, infused with the properties of both silver I’d used in the spell and the lead it was made of, burrowed into his chest. Soulstuff and blood exploded out of him, and he screamed. Even blocks away, I could hear it. 

Davalier, despite her largest contributions to magic being in the design of many radio spells, was still the Archmage Consulate for a reason. In the instant of distraction, she formed a spell, and a tornado of wind ripped off Deepwater’s head. His body was lifted into the air and began to shred itself, an action not entirely dissimilar to what I’d done to the Arenamaster. 

It was right as I turned to fire my shot and help the northerner that everything started to change. 

In the sky above us, the Malapert exploded. I stared up at it, frozen in place, not even sure what had happened. Had demons gotten aboard the ship? 

Before I’d even processed that, the Throne of Sacrifice vanished from the sky above. An instant after it vanished, the world itself seemed to warp. For half a second, reality itself seemed to become… more. Like we’d touched on something deeper than reality, something better left buried. And a wave of gold, red, and blue erupted from the Central Aura Depository as a tower of crystal splintered upward into the sky.