The Restored: Chapter Three

As I turned to look in the direction of the nightclub, I felt a slight shift on the roof next to me, and in my peripheral vision, I saw Calder struggling with himself. 

All of his instincts, born of being raised to be a killer since he was a child, doubtless made to kill innocents and not-so-innocents of all kinds, the words of the woman who had raised him, and the mission he had been entrusted, told him to kill me. 

At the same time, the part of him that was a free thinker, that was able to see beyond what he’d been told, and see that I had chosen to not kill him, even when I’d been given more than ample opportunity, fought back. 

Deepwater sprang then, pulling out a dagger carved from wood and plunging it towards my eyes, aiming for the part of my body not covered by plates of metal. 

If I hadn’t seen it coming, it might have been enough to at least seriously injure me, but I’d prepared myself the moment I’d seen his internal struggle. I casually swatted his hand aside, swept his feet out from under him, and then re-sealed him in the metal of the roof. 

“I’m sorry,” Calder said,

“I’m not angry with you, but I am disappointed you chose that,” I said. “I did the same thing, once, choosing to kill someone who had shown me kindness and mercy. The difference was, I succeeded. I can never undo that. But you can. You didn’t succeed. I might not be the original Deepwater, but they died. You can live. And you can be better than them or me. I’ll be back for you.” 

Then I stepped off the roof. 

Whether it had been a plan, instinctually fleeing before a more dangerous mage, or some combination of both, Calder had done a good job drawing me away from Cipher Nightclub, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to make it there in time. 

Oh, I was a powerful and skilled sorcerer, sure. But without a flying disc specifically enchanted to manipulate force and air density to assist my own spells, metal magic wasn’t exactly ideal for flight. My flight was little more than levitating the metal in a direction. Reducing my mass to near nothing helped, certainly, but I’d never win a speed contest against someone with dual force and air rune bonds, or even someone with a particularly powerful enchanted item. 

I tried anyway. 

I might not have the advantage, but I had trained my third arch-star, the trickle charging star, to work best when infusing it into powerful magic, rather than restoring my own aura, so I reached out and infused it into the levitation spells I was using to fly. I built up speed quickly, until, with a burst of speed, I arrived in the tunnel leading into Cipher Nightclub. 

And promptly smashed into a force ward. I actually crashed into the ground, stumbling back as the world spun around me, like I’d sprinted head first into a wall. If I hadn’t been reducing my mass to almost nothing, the impact might have done far worse to me. 

Blinking my eyes until I was back to my senses, I infused my aura-hiding archstar into my body, then burnt the aura to make my mass zero – at least, zero enough to pass through the force ward.

I stepped through, and the first thing I heard was the screams. 

But they weren’t the first thing I noticed. 

No, that was the smoke. 

The air was thick with smoke, cloying and choking. Not just the scents of cigarettes and harder things, but the kind of smoke that indicated someone had started a large scale fire. 

Cipher Nightclub had better ventilation than many other parts of the underground, and there was some debate as to if the tunnels had been carved by a benevolent mage who didn’t want people to choke to death on their own smoke, or if Cipher Nightclub had become located where it was now because of their own tunnels. 

But with wards trapping the smoke, fire, and air inside, none of that mattered. 

There were people here on the other side, and the moment they saw me, they started grabbing my arms and hands, asking how I’d gotten in. I ignored them while I spat out a curse and slammed my hand into the wall, casting my metal sensory spell as far as I could. I poured power in, not caring how much of my aura it drained. 

The nightclub had once been a large stadium, not entirely unlike the arena where I had been raised, and as such, there was a massive amount of metal running through it. I couldn’t manipulate this much metal at once, but I could search.

The new Zone had done a good job, though. Wherever she had carved the wards, she’d kept it far away from metal, at least where I could sense it. I ran my sensory spell over the area again, then did something incredibly risky. 

I tried to not shift integral parts of large underground structures, unless they were largely freestanding. If they were surrounded by a cavern, like the hospital of the White Rooms had been, then I could shift things around without worrying about causing a cave in. But in a sunken spot like this, any structural shifting I did was going to risk bringing the roof down on everyone. 

I figured it was probably better to die in a cave-in than to be burned to death, or slowly have the life choked out of you as the air grew stale and burned away to nothing.

“I’m going to take the wall down and try to break the ward,” I shouted, and my deep voice cut through the panicked mass of people. 

People started to protest, but I ignored them once again. I closed my eyes, building up spells as best I could and I began ripping out support beams, reinforcing others to try and minimize the odds of a cave in while still doing damageI focused my spells one around the entrance I was in, tearing the I-beam through the dirt and cheap plaster walls. Some of the ceiling crumbled, and I was forced to fling one of the patches of metal in my coat out to stop it from hitting someone’s head. 

More plaster fell, as well as more dust than I thought possible. 

Then the ward flickered out. 

I’d caved in some of the ceiling, but not so much that people couldn’t climb over the plaster and escape. 

That was a compromise that most large scale wardcrafters were forced to make. When you warded an area, it was easier, cheaper on aura, and more powerful to just defend – or in this case, trap – specific spots, like the exits. 

But it left the ward vulnerable to having the terrain manipulated, so long as the attacker didn’t care about damage to whatever it was they were attacking. 

In a place that had rich and powerful ambient aura, a massive supply of aura generators, or a lot of time to pour into layering and interlocking, then a wardcrafter could enhance every stone of a castle. But this had been a quick and dirty lock, probably put together over the last few days, meaning it wasn’t anywhere so refined. 

Air gushed into the tunnel, and I lifted into the air, pulling out my water bottle. I wet my shirt then tore it off and wrapped it around my mouth and nose. The safest way to the other entrances would be to route around the nightclub from the outside, but that was also the slowest. 

I shot down the tunnel, passing into the massive open area of seats and field, where the fire was thickest. As I did, I shifted the beam of metal, flexing and warping it into a long, thin sheet. 

People were running for exits still, others were trying to battle the fire with magic, and others had simply collapsed into heaps. I didn’t know if they were dead already, or if they had simply given up, but I forced myself to put it out of my mind. 

I had hoped there would be large, open spots that I could easily crush the fire on with my metal sheet, but there was no luck, and a part of me wondered why I’d even bothered. Of course, I knew why, but when surrounded by such destruction and death, it was easy to forget. 

I reached another exit and ripped it open, tearing apart the ward by destroying the terrain, and using the plate of metal to shield myself and the people around me, then turned and dove back in. 

I had torn open three more exits when they arrived to stop me.

The Arenamaster and Alyphize stepped through the flames, apparently unaffected by the heat and the lack of air. Next to them was a girl wearing the angular mask that I recognized as belonging to Zone. The Arenamaster beckoned towards me.

I shot her. 

In all the cacophony of the fire, with people already firing off spells and guns to try and break open the force wards, it was barely even noticed. The bullet tore through the Arenamaster, whose form dissolved into the flickering red light of demonic magic. 

She must have been an illusion produced by Alyphize. Ah well. 

I ignored them and few to another exit, ripping it open as well, and it was only as I turned to leave back into the flames that I spotted the group standing at the end of the tunnel. The Arenamaster was holding the glowing orb of light that pulled aura sparks towards her again, and had three lines of faint red light rushing off it. Last time, hadn’t there been two? And I thought they’d been going in different directions, but I couldn’t attest to that. After all, my sense of direction was rather disoriented right now, given I was underground, had flown around in a circle, and moved through a drug and smoke filled area. 

More pressingly, Alyphize was holding a knife to the neck of the girl who wore Zone’s old mask. 

“Come now, Mist,” the Arenamaster said. “There’s no need for you to act this way. We can be mature, sensible adults.” 

My fingers twitched, but I didn’t shoot her. I really wanted to, but if there was even a chance that a brainwashed girl was going to be killed for my actions, I couldn’t take them. 

Instead, I built my mass sensory spell, as well as one other spell.

Zone was definitely real and physical, as was the knife pressed to her throat. Alyphize gave me the weird sensation of physical aura, the shell that she was technically having mass, but also interacting with ordinary physics in a way that I didn’t entirely understand. 

The strange thing was that the Arenamaster felt… half-there. Her mass flickered in and out, like a light enchantment with its runes on the verge of burning out. Even when it was gone, though, there were still fragments there, but it flickered back and forth too rapidly for me to be able to get a good handle on what was going on. I wasn't sure if it was some sort of solid illusion, a bit of demonic magic, or something that I’d never felt before. 

My eyes were drawn to her, confused, but she seemed to take it differently, because she smiled. 

“Good boy. Why don’t you put down the gun, and I’ll have Alyphize lower the knife.” 

I began to crouch, as if to put my guns on the floor, then cast the spell that I’d built in conjunction with my mass sensory spell.

The knife ripped out of Alyphize’s hands, and tore through the form of the Arenamaster. Her mass flickered wildly for a few moments, then her form vanished entirely, along with Alyphize’s.