The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Nine

I spun and brought my blade through the neck of a four foot tall, swan-winged and nine-handed, and it exploded into a mess of soulstuff. 

The demons that were flooding through the city weren’t all as difficult to kill as the slime-like demon had been, but none of them were exactly the weak, fodder demons that I had hoped most would be. Even the weakest of them required me to exchange two or three blows before they fell, and that was adding up. 

Even though my aura was continually replenishing, my body was starting to wear out. 

Not only that, but while I had a small store of bullets for my gun, I had a limited amount. If I shot every demon that got in my way, I’d run out of bullets well before I got the chance to reach Alyphize. 

With both those limits in mind, I shifted my style to that of a more traditional mage:  increasingly relying on metal manipulation magic to spin copper blades, bronze shields, and brass poles around me, launching them into demon’s paths, blocking blows from those that got close, or leaving bruising welts on them. 

I wasn’t sure how long had passed when I saw – and felt – it.

One of the ships that was still hanging in the air near Alyphize began to glow, and my aura started to flex, warp, and shift. Power shot into the hole that had been punched in my aura. 

All of a sudden, my aura almost seemed to be in two places at once. It was there, around my body, maintaining and making on the fly alterations to my spells. But it was also elsewhere. 

It wasn’t like some of the books I’d read that talked about southern Archmages being able to split their auras in two, in order to follow a second path of magic. It was more like focusing on a familiar, and looking through their eyes while they were in another plane, just with Aura instead of a being. 

My not-familiar aura raced through enchantments. I felt it pass through an aura clarification spell, scrubbing it clean, which was quite the difficult task to do with the thoroughness this enchantment seemed to manage it.

Scrubbing a rune bond and familiar mark was hard, so while the aura I was providing had been clarified, it could really only be used to provide power to already activated, but not fully charged, spells. It couldn’t be used to cast an entirely new ritual circle, or anything of that sort, not unless there was some truly fiendishly complex and powerful magic going on. After all, if it were as simple as just carrying around a clarification spell, then nobody in the world would be a witch. 

This spell was a good one, scrubbing my aura more than clean enough to help me charge up… something. It was some powerful spell or enchantment, and I heard a loud somehow familiar groaning sound, then felt four other auras swirling in concert with my own. 

I wasn’t able to see magic. That was a fifth tier arch-star, or else an extremely rare and valuable familiar ability. But despite that, I somehow felt a sense for these auras. It had to do with the aura pouring into the empty void. 

The first aura was similar to my own: bound to two words, and tainted by an old demonic power. I couldn’t see the rune – I couldn’t even see the aura, or anything at all for that matter – but I knew that one of those runes was the same as my own. 

It was Jin. It had to be. 

The second aura was bound to a single word, and a source of other power. I didn’t know what word it was, or what power it was, as it did not match my own, but if the first person was Jin… Well, Kelly had a single rune bond, and was bound to a faerie. It fit him just about perfectly. 

The third aura was filled with four major taints, but it was also filled with close to two dozen other, lesser taints. Some of the lesser taints were demonic, but most weren’t. Some matched the taint of who I suspected to be Kelly and his familiar, but not all of them.

A druid, then, but I didn’t know who it would be. Devi was the only druid that came to mind, but why would she be near Jin or Kelly, or what she was doing, caught up in all of this. For that matter, I didn’t know what Jin and Kelly were even doing, or where they were, but the fact I could feel their aura was a good sign. Probably. Unless I was dead, and this was What Came Next?

As if on cue, pain erupted through my body, and my eyes snapped open. I had already been using split mind to help focus on combat, running aura through my coat’s defensive enchantments, maintaining the floating pipes, the shields, and blades, and my flight spells, but I leaned hard on it now, splitting my awareness along the same lines as the aura that was in two places at once. I shoved all my spells into the combat side of my mind, dropping the pipes and shields to just maintain my flight and my blades, while I looked ahead. 

A demon, resembling a gorilla with an elephant’s head, and with four pairs of horse fly shaped wings had slammed a fist into my side. My coat’s protections had stopped it from being immediately lethal, but I had cracked a rib at least, and would need healing. 

At the same time, I could feel the fourth aura that was running into the mix. It was oddly familiar, almost clean like a witch’s, but also an amalgam of all sorts of other things, as if it were an enchantment that a score of people had built together. 

I spun out of the way of another gorilla-like fist, whipping down with one of the metallic blades and leaving long, thin wounds, only for the gorilla to speed up all of the sudden, ripping its hand out of the blades’ paths a mere instant before they struck. It launched into a series of pummeling strikes, and I spun my spell, turning the blades to intercept and act as a shield. It was harder, and I wished that I had been able to maintain my shield, but I couldn’t maintain so much magic with only one part of my split mind. 

In the other half of the split mind, I felt all of the auras pouring into some vast network, working to activate switches and empower the active spell. It seemed to take an absurd amount of power, more than I’d ever thrown into any singular spell, even when I’d held up an entire hospital for a short time. 

The demon’s fists pulled back, stopping moments before they rammed into the blades, and the creature began to emit sparks. Demon magic wasn’t as gifted at manipulating the elements as human, given it’s deep, soul-based nature, but there were a handful of tricks that could manage it, like how Firefright created a false flame with his aura. 

This was a different trick of the same sort. Rather than using soulstuff to manifest a new demon, in the way that the Thrones had done, it burned soulstuff directly to produce hellfire, a partially physical, partially auric, flame. There was a great deal of debate among scholars over the exact method that demons used to create hellfire, but that didn’t especially matter right now.

The flame rushed at me, and I cut off my flight spells, as well as the spells levitating the weapons around me. 

We dropped like a stone, and I caught myself a moment later as the hellfire melted through the glass of one of the windows that I’d been hovering near, and I began firing thin needles of metal from my collected swords, throwing them out rapidfire miniature spears and bullets.

They ripped through the demon’s flesh, but it exhaled a cone of flame, enveloping a demon nearby and turning it to nothing more than cinders. The soulstuff and aura that had made up the now-ashen demon sucked into the gorilla monster, healing it in moments, and it was diving down, swinging in a hammer blow. 

In my other mind, I could feel as components popped and fizzled. Materials designed to last for a decade or longer were burnt up in a single instant, all to fuel this great working, but the power was still rising, not yet at its peak. I reached for my third arch-star, then slammed it into the working, infusing the continual flow of aura into the magic. 

The demon dove at me, a lance of hellfire lashing from its hands, and I fused copper scraps into a shield, then compressed it into a ball and shot it into the stomach of the demonic gorilla. There was a crunching and a thwaping sound, and the gorilla raced down towards me. 

My cannonball attack had torn off the thing’s left arm, but it was still coming at me, cauterizing the wound with hellfire. I threw power into my flight spell and quickly shot upwards, betting on my ability to shift my aerial direction being better than something that relied on legs.  

My arch-star had been trained specifically to power my spells, continuously dumping more and more aura into them, and I’d trained it to the highest limit I thought was possible during my time in the arena and in the military. When I’d held up the hospital, focusing on a spell of that size had been enough to nearly cause me to white out, but it had been my brain that was the limiting factor, not my arch-star. 

For the first time in over a decade, I encountered a single spell that could take everything that my aura threw at it, and still beg for more. I mentally sent out a prayer – Rhys’ research into some of the old cults that had worshiped dragons, demons, or angels must have been rubbing off on me – and I reached for my first arch-star. 

My gamble had paid off. The demon flared its wings, beating them rapidly in an attempt to rise to my level, but it couldn’t. I ripped a chunk of metal from a crashed airship nearby, tearing plating from its hull and forming it into four rough, arm-thick spikes, then fired them with all the power I could pack into the single metal-throwing spell without expanding its size. 

The demon spun, causing my first spike to miss, but the second hit one of the demon’s wings, tearing it and throwing its flight off kilter. That gave me the moment I needed, and I shifted the orientation of the spikes. One slammed into the back of the elephantine head, and the other into the gorilla-like back. 

The demon dissolved into soulstuff and I let my focus shift slightly to my other half of my brain.

My Aura was constantly on a trickle recharge, but that left plenty of times where it was full. When it was, I directed the power into the aura-storage archstar. I hadn’t really emptied the vault since I was in the military. I had built up over a decade and a half of aura. 

Of course, it wasn’t perfect. The average storage arch-star started with a capacity of around eighty-five auric units. 

A mage could spend aura in order to create space, but it was inefficient – for every hundred or so auric units used to expand its capacity, the capacity only increased by around one, though the rate could be improved with training. I’d never bothered to undergo that training, instead just working on expanding the total capacity of the vault, saving all of it for a rainy day. 

With both halves of my mind working in concert, I could replenish the aura I’d spent in the fight and send the rest of my arch-star into this strange spell, but… Was I willing to commit to that? I turned, focusing on one of the half-destroyed buildings, then flew inside and landed, dismissing the spells holding me aloft. 

That was when I heard the crunch of footsteps behind me, the sounds of battle, and the smell of smoke.