The Effaced: Chapter Twenty-Five

As the explosion rocked the hall and Hadiya and I were thrown to the ground, I immediately started shaping my aura around me, but while I was fast, I wasn’t fast enough to outpace an explosion. Still, as I rolled to my feet, I was already shifting the weave of my shirt into the most protective one I could manage with only my shirt. A half a second later, I grabbed metal from all around the room, fed it into the into the crude knife that I’d made from Horse’s slagged gun, and shaped it into a rough imitation of a longsword.

It was rough work. I’d gotten a lot better about shaping metal delicately with all of my work on airships, but swords had never been relevant. Even when I’d fought, swords had only been a backup weapon. I debated trying to keep the anti-divination device floating, but dropped it instead, tucking it under one arm. 

Next to me, Hadiya’s skin was flaring with light of a half dozen different colors as she leapt to her feet and a force blade conjured itself in her hand, and we both spun in unison as we tried to figure out exactly what in the thrones of the void had happened to us. 

It was hard to breathe, with heat running in the air, but not as much as I would have expected from a chemical bomb or standard fire enchantment. Maybe it was a purely force-focused bomb with incidental flame? 

I wove together a metal sensory spell, and my eyes shot open. 

“Get back!” I shouted, shoving Hadiya back while throwing myself out of the way with as much force as I could manage. A moment later, the ceiling above where we’d been standing began to bough and twist, then the ceiling started to cave in.

It took me a second to figure out why, but as I surged my spell out, I noticed the discrepancies. 

Power wasn’t flowing into the alteration enhancements that ran through the brass beams holding the building stable. On its own, brass was strong, but it wasn’t nearly strong enough to support a building of this weight and size. If the power had just been cut, it still would have had redundant systems, and even if those were switched off, it was still metal and concrete. It wouldn’t collapse so quickly that the building couldn’t be evacuated. 

But an old building? Even kept in decent repair by White Lily, it wasn’t perfect, and some of the enchantments would be out of date. If it lost power, and then there was something to break its structural integrity, like a large explosion… 

As I reached my senses out, I began to expand a new spell circle with my aura. It was a very simple spell, at least in terms of runic structure, but I had to expand it out through the entire building, and that took a tremendous amount of aura and willpower to manage. 

I’d only ever cast a spell of this size a few times, and as I spun the circle larger and larger, winding it around the building, I felt like my brain was going to break. I used my second arch-star, split mind, diverting half of my expanded attention to holding the spell firm, while the other half worked on expanding it. My entire aura was drained to the very limit, just shaping a spell on such a massive scale without any ritualistic aids, and I was forced to draw some power from my first arch-star to make use of it. 

Hadiya was saying something, but I couldn’t hear her. There were sounds outside of that, but I wasn’t paying attention, completely lost in the spell that I was casting. 

I started to weave in another function to the spell. Negating mass would be far too much, but if I could lighten the load, even a little bit, that would reduce the strain on the rest of the spell frame. 

There was screaming around me, and I thought I heard the sounds of gunfire, but I couldn’t even pay attention. If I was shot… Well, that would be bad. But I couldn’t give up this close. 

I interwove the functions together, binding them together, then reached up for my third arch-star. With Odril’s familiar power, I infused it into the spell.

The third arch-star was an interesting one. It produced a continual stream of pure aura that came from seemingly nowhere. Aura generators used them as a part of the creation process, though the exact details were tightly kept laboratory secrets. 

Most of the time, when I infused it into a spell, it provided the power for the spell from it, rather than from me. It gave me a distinct advantage when clashing spell against spell against an average mage, as with Odril’s power, I could offload the power onto the arch-star, freeing up my own personal aura reserves to work on something else. 

All arch-stars had the capacity to grow, and I’d grown my third arch-star quite a bit. My aura’s size was only mediocre, but I’d made it dense enough that I was at the level of most professional mages and fighters. When that combined with my natural recharge from iron and iron-heavy metals touching my skin, and my third arch-star’s trickle of power, I recovered that power far faster than an average mage.

But I was still trying to hold an entire building together. Even as an extraordinary mage, that was a massive feat. There was a reason the Mage of Barrok Mountain had become a legend after moving an entire mountain in under a week, or more pressingly, that White Lily had astonished people by moving the hospital across the entire undercity. 

I’d bet every last thin pane I had left in my bank account that they’d used ritual magic to assist them, but I hadn’t had time for that. 

My spells had been simple. A building wide metal reinforcement spell, interwoven with a mass reduction spell. The enchantments would have already had far better versions of the metal reinforcement, but those weren’t working right now. 

Aura, pure and clear, produced from my third arch-star, exploded through the entire building, surging like a tidal wave bearing down on a small oceanside town. 

The building shook one more time, then settled.

My brain felt like it was breaking. I’d kept the pain and strain on my willpower and shaping skills to maintain such a massive skill in one of my streams of consciousness, but that stream of consciousness was completely overwhelmed to the point it was causing white spots in my vision. 

“What did you do?” Hadiya shouted, and I heard more gunfire and what sounded like a force spell blocking it. 

“Hella bull in toga,” I slurred, then coughed and tried again.

“Holding the building together,” I said, and though my voice was still a bit wobbly, it at least was understandable. 

I couldn’t fully see Hadiya’s face through the white and black spots in my vision and overall blurring, but I could hear the disbelief in her voice. 

“You… what?” 

“Big spell,” I said sagely. “Can’t keep it up forever.” 

“How do you have the power for that? You shouldn’t… Unless you’d gorged yourself on aura sparks like a member of the old Paerúsian nobility, you shouldn’t be able to hold a spell of that size for more than a second or two!” 

She let out a curse as several more gunshots went off. 

“What’s happening?” I asked. 

“Shootout between White Rooms Security and some of those people who attacked your sister,” Hadiya said. “The flesh elemental bound to Horse’s form took part too, but it’s mostly escaped, probably back to its master.” 

I threw myself to the ground as I tried to keep the spell intact. Overhead, I heard the rush of air as something big, bigger than a human, passed by quickly. 

I couldn’t say I’d lose any sleep about the people who organized and ran the White Rooms being killed off, but a lot of the people who worked here were desperate people who needed the money. They didn’t deserve to die because they’d turned to prostitution to keep food on the table.

Then I heard a familiar, lazy, overconfident feminine voice cut through the noise. 

“Well well well, what’s this? I admit that I didn’t expect to run into you again here. Arenamaster’s going to be pissed someone leaked her second hi–” 

She was interrupted by the sound of Hadiya releasing some sort of elemental attack that sounded like a lot of lightning.

Lightning magic against a metal mage was always a risky endeavor, since it either did nothing at all, or worked flawlessly. A bad metal mage could easily be fried alive by it, but a good one had a variety of counters like forcing the lightning to follow a different path, divesting yourself of any direct contact with metal, or altering the internal resistance of the metal. I’d always gone with the first approach, since it was the easiest and usually worked with whatever metal manipulation I was already casting. 

You didn’t need to be faster than the lightning, after all. You just needed to be faster than the person firing the lightning, since it took a moment for any spell, be it from a sorcerer or a magical item, to build up and release. Drops of water condensing from the air, sparks of flame or lightning building up, metal rising from the ground and reshaping itself. It wasn’t altogether that different from learning to dodge bullets by dodging people’s aim. 

Unfortunately, judging by the laughter coming from the fake Mist, I suspected that she was good enough to shift the lightning away from her. 

“So in all seriousness, what are you doing here?” the false mist said. 

“Currently? Holding a building together,” I managed to grunt out. 

There was a moment of silence. 

“You’re… What?” Fake-Mist asked. “Wait, is he serious?” 

“As far as I can tell,” Hadiya said. 

“That’s so stupid!” Fake-Mist said, sounding genuinely annoyed. “I can’t fight him if he’s holding a building together. That won’t be fair at all. Like shooting an old fighting dog while it's asleep. But we really do need a building to collapse…” 

“Why?” Hadiya asked. “Are you hiding the evidence of your master’s murder of Horse?” 

“The Thrones are you talking about, old woman?” Fake-Mist asked. 

“So you didn’t kill Senator Ermonte?” I asked, leaning on the wall for support as another force blast hit the building, and the mental strain redoubled. 

“Who?” Fake-Mist asked. “Wait, is that–” 

A third force blast hit the building, and I lost the spell. I just hoped my reinforcement had bought the people on the floors above and below us to get out.

There was a massive groan of metal as the mass of concrete I’d been lightning was suddenly back to normal, and the brass beams enforcing the building were no longer magically enhanced. I was thrown to the side as the building turned and boughed.

But with the snapping of my spell, my third arch-star returned to its place in my aura, and the strain on my mind evaporated, and though some still lingered, it was more of an exhaustive miasma than it was active pain. 

With my sight rapidly clearing, I took in the building. 

The left side of the structure was starting to crumble and slouch down, and a huge rent in the floor had opened in the middle of the hallway. Hadiya was crouched behind a block of concrete and brass. The anti-divination device had fallen next to her, and she’d shoved it into a corner. A body dressed in the same pseudo-military outfit as the people at Zone’s apartment had worn was on the ground next to us, bleeding out, with three more wearing similar outfits dead in the hall. 

On the other side of the gap, the fake version of me stood, her sword drawn. Two dozen people wearing the garb of the White Rooms security were dead at her feet, cleanly decapitated. 

Even though she was wearing a mask, I could feel the moment that Fake-Mist’s eyes landed on me and realized I wasn’t holding the building up anymore. 

“Finally,” she whispered, sounding almost reverent. She raised her blade and pointed it at me. 

“Mist! No escape this time, you fight me.” 

I cracked my neck and shook out my limbs, before raising my own sword. I didn't have my guns, nor did I have my coat, but I had a sword and a bit of metal. That would have to be enough.

“Oh, please do,” a familiar, cultured, feminine voice said. “It would be delightful to watch my two best children clash.” 

My blood ran cold.