The Restored: Chapter Four

I glared at the girl in the Zone mask, crossing my arms. 

“Alright, are you going to come quietly, or are you going to be a pain to capture? I’ve got more people to save, and I’m not against detaining you.” 

“Oh, look at you, the hero of the hour,” Zone said, and I could feel her eye-roll behind the mask. “I’m going to come quietly, yes. I’m not an idiot.” 

“Good.”

Then I cast a spell to bind her hands in metal, so that she couldn’t throw any enchanted items at my back. I was willing to take the kid’s word, but I wasn’t willing to be an idiot. Then I wrapped her waist and feet in quick metal bands, and lifted her into the air, anchoring her in place behind me, just like I did with the anti-divination device. I tethered them together to create a more stable triangular spell array, and held it in place while Zone let out a shriek of indignation. 

“Do you have a way to filter out the smoke and toxins?” I asked as I wet the shirt over my face again. 

“I do, you enormous–” 

I tuned out the rest of her sentence as it turned into a string of cursing and shouting, and shot out of the tunnel and towards another. In the chaos, most people didn’t pay her much mind – or else, they thought I was a powerful mage kidnapping her for unscrupulous reasons, and chose to ignore it. 

I sighed as I realized that it was probably the latter. This was a pretty unscrupulous part of the undercity, after all, and while kidnappings weren’t common or so blatant, they did happen. 

Besides, if they thought ignoring someone doing something terrible would save their lives, then the fact they were in a bad part of town would barely matter. Many people would make the trade to save their life, and I couldn’t blame them. 

After I ripped out the steel beam and the people flooded through the dissolved ward, Zone spluttered from where she was floating over my shoulder.

“That’s how you broke my wards? That’s not… but. What? That. No! You should at least do it properly. That’s like lockpicking a door by throwing an explosive at the wall until the door falls over and breaks.” 

“I’m so sorry for offending your professional sensibilities as a warder, but people are dying,” I snapped at her. 

“Yeah, but they’re barely people,” Zone retorted. “What value do most of them add to society? A few of them have low level jobs that will be replaced within a few days, and the rest are leeches on the world.” 

“Sure kid,” I said, ignoring her. I flew out to another spot, and Zone barked out ‘antonym of erstwhile seas’. 

The ward shimmered for a moment, and I wondered if she might have set a dispelling sequence in. Most ward had something like that, either a phrase in another language, or a string of nonsense wards that could be said to turn it off, or in some cases, completely dissolve the magic. 

My thought was proven wrong as the ward promptly exploded. I shifted the huge sheet of metal made from the I beam that I had been using to protect people from potential cave ins, but I was too slow to protect everyone. 

Force ripped through the air, knocking everyone off their feet. I slammed to the ground, bits of stone rained off and crushed onto my flat metal shield, or the protections woven into my coat. As I staggered to my feet and looked around, I saw bodies. 

Men, women, teenagers. 

Some had been partially protected by my slow shield, and a few had been completely covered, but several of them had large chunks of concrete or enchanted copper rebar skewering them. A few, the ones who had been clawing and scrabbling against the ward, had been completely torn to shreds by the power of the explosion.

The air stank of blood, even over the smoke of the fire.

Behind me, I heard a choking, coughing laugh, and turned to see Zone, still bound by my metal magic, but with a long, thin spike of rebar running through her chest, near her lung. Where I had lowered the shield to try and protect those in front of me, it had shifted out of the way of her body, which had been hoisted upwards.

The laughing continued as a moment later, the Arenamaster and Alyphize appeared. They swept their gaze over the scene as the red light clutched in the Arenamaster’s hand began drawing sparks in from the crowd.

The Arenamaster’s face twisted into an ugly snarl. 

“You idiotic children,” she spat. “Do you know how much work I put into raising up another Zone?” 

“The… blood…” Zone started to choke out. Alyphize flickered, and drove her knife at Zone’s throat, but I moved, lunging forward with speed empowered by metal sorcery moving the plates in my coat. 

Demonic magic flickered, and probability warped. My soul tried to shed the effect sinking into me, and another copper button from Jessica glowed brightly, knocking the curse off course. 

I caught Alyphize’s knife in one hand and shot her through the chest, but the bullet was caught on a spinning ward that appeared in mid-air. The bullet hit the floor, and Alyphize drove her knife down again. 

Runes and lines swirled out from my hands as I threw everything into casting as fast as I could. All of my previous spells vanished as I bent my mind to this one task with all my will. 

The knife in Alyphize’s hand stopped an inch before Zone’s throat. The Arenamaster growled and snapped. 

“We don’t need a second living Mist, and we needed to collect his life anyways. Kill him.” 

Alyphize’s eyes glowed bright red as light flickered from around the Arenamaster, and her form seemed to grow brighter before dimming into a much more solid shape. She lunged at me, moving faster than she had any right to, and I shot my other gun, this time infusing it with my spells to let it slip by the wards. It was caught by a shimmer of red light, and missed Alyphize. 

This was part of why I had insisted on getting protection from curses and other charm magic. Alyphize was the heir to the Throne of the Gambler, and her demonic magic allowed her to warp probability via changing the minor interactions of souls with the world. 

It made her curses incredibly potent, perhaps even more so than the War-Witch of the North’s, even if she couldn’t alter anything without a soul.

Unfortunately, it also made her defenses inscrutable. 

Her claws extended out and towards my throat, and I threw myself to the ground. There was a hiss of air as they just barely missed my head, and I thought she must be off balance, so I prepared to strike. But Alyphize turned on a dime, and summoned another knife.

This one looked… strange. It was partially conjured of red light, but it also partially looked to be made of bone, and it dripped with blood. Some sort of demonic artifact or the like? 

Not for the first time, I wished I had mage’s sight, one of the fifth tier archstars. 

Even as I released my spell and sprung to my feet, throwing nearby metal at the knife, Alyphize brought it down. 

Not on me. 

She had turned, after all. 

She brought the knife down on the exposed throat of the new Zone. 

Something – an aura spark, perhaps, but mutated and larger than any aura spark that I’d ever seen before – rippled out of Zone and flowed into the knife. From there, it flowed into the Arenamaster, and into Alyphize as well. 

Alyphize’s form warped, and she grew so solid that she looked human, save for the miniature horns growing out of her head. Her magic spun around her, demonic runes in a language I didn’t know flowing, and she pointed at me. She spoke in a rich, powerful tone that was nevertheless creaking and rasping, and said a single word.

Another curse slammed down on me, with more power than any of the previous ones had ever had. The Arenamaster stepped forwards, even as my vision started to flicker, and she withdrew something from her satchel – a disintegration bomb. 

I tried to build spells, but they fell apart as twinges in my body shot through me at just the right moments to disrupt my concentration. 

I tried to reach out for Odril, see if this had enough causal momentum, or whatever it was that Hadiya had called it, to break the seal, but I couldn’t feel it. Each time I reached for it, my body screamed with aches and pains. 

If I hadn’t been modified by the Arenamaster, I might have been able to resist it better, but she had done experiments on my body, connected my soul and flesh to help empower me. Now, Alyphize was using that same connection to wreak havoc on my body, even as I tried to fight. 

I didn’t have much strength in me, but I gathered what I could and lunged at the Arenamaster. I hit a ward, but split my mind, forcibly building a spell and infusing it into me. It took me three tries, but I had built this spell countless times, enough that I could almost match someone with a contingency arch-star designed to instantly do it. 

And probability could only be stretched so far. 

I fell through the ward, even as Alyphize’s strange knife missed my neck by inches. The bomb that the Arenamaster tossed hit my chest and fell into my coat pocket, but I threw myself atop her. She spat out a long, snarling curse, and ripped it out of my pocket for me, then threw it up the tunnel, where things rumbled. 

My spell dissolved, and her ward ejected me a moment later. Alyphize’s knife swung, and I swayed, using my split mind to allow half of me to be consumed by the pain and negative effects of the curse while the other did the best it could to pilot the wreck of the body I was currently in. 

The blade bit my cheek and left a hard scar. One of my teeth actually cracked under the power of the stab. Blood and power flowed into the knife, and from there, into the Arenamaster and Alyphize a second time.

I just barely managed to slug Alyphize in the stomach with as much physical might as I could. I wasn’t able to focus for another mass or metal spell, but I was still two meters tall, and not exactly a beanpole. 

Her body staggered back, but she caught herself in moments, and her knife flicked out, scoring a wound across my side that somehow managed to slip between the layers of metal plating in my coat. More blood streamed into the knife, and I slipped, falling onto the ground and almost cracking my head open. 

Alyphize leapt forwards, knife glimmering in the burning light of the fires, and it swung down at my neck. 

As the blade grew closer to the vulnerable flesh of my throat, the world seemed to slow down. I saw that the Arenamaster was standing again, having recovered and held her glowing orb of red light aloft. She had a complex look on her face, half smiling in satisfaction, while half of her was still annoyed at the death of her new version of Zone. 

I was sure that mixed expression would be the last thing that I ever saw. 

Until I saw a thin, curved sword tear through her chest.