The Effaced: Chapter Thirteen

I paused for a second, as I expected that a lone figure would probably be on my side. It didn’t stop me from preparing my defensive spells, of course, but I didn’t attack. 

“That’s a stranger,” Odril said, and I raised both of my guns as I took a good look at him.

At the time, I’d thought of him as old, even though he was only about forty or so. One of his eyes was glowing a bright white with threads of pink light twisting through it, but the other was completely mundane brown, and he was wearing mundane clothes, just a button-down shirt and slacks. Not even visibly enchanted, though I couldn’t rule out the idea that it was just something I couldn’t see. I wasn’t an archmage, after all. 

And I saw the reason that he’d stopped in the hallway. One of the swirling loops of the arena’s enchantments was nested in the floor here, and he’d pried up the tiles to expose it. I’d learned enough about runes to recognize that he was either using magic from a spell language that was obscure or from far away. 

Or, and more likely in my opinion, since his eye was glowing, he was using some sort of inhuman magic. Definitely not demonic, Odril or I would have recognized it, but… something. 

He looked up from the floor and his eyes fixed on my guns. 

“Put those away, kid,” he said quietly. 

“Who are you?!” I said, layering another spell over my guns to further enhance the shot I’d be firing at him. 

“You wouldn’t know my name if I told you,” he said, but it didn’t sound dismissive, just quiet and almost sad. “But I think you care more about what I am, correct?” 

“Don’t play games with me old man,” I said, my hands trembling around the grips of my pistols. 

“I’m a druid, and a part of the EC-Six,” the man said. “Here to stop your madwoman of a… mother? Whatever she calls herself to you.” 

I’d not heard of the EC-Six at the time, but I’d later learn that they were a branch of special forces… namely when I’d briefly worked alongside them in the military, putting my dangerously experimental rune-bond to work. 

“The Arenamaster?” I responded, confused. 

“Really? That’s cold,” he said. “She adopted you, and she can’t even let you call her mom or mother or something?

That, more than anything, disturbed me. He was just acting too casual and relaxed. 

“Surrender,” Odril said. “He’s too strong for us. You can feel it. I can feel it.” 

I dismissed her whispering and shook my head at him. 

“You’re trying to kill her and destroy the demonic thrones, then spread your influence over all of Cré. I know. The Arenamaster told me.” 

“I won’t pretend that Elderglass doesn’t have some exploitative importation and exportation policies,” the man said. “But I’m really not trying to do anything other than save some kids and put an end to a bloodsport.” 

“If they’re too weak to survive, that’s their fault,” I said, parroting the rhetoric that I’d been taught. 

“We both know that isn’t true,” Odril whispered into my ear. “How many of them are–” 

“Shut up!” I shouted, and the man frowned, stepping forwards.

I opened fire on him. 

Looking back, that was one of the mistakes I’ve never been able to forgive myself for. 

It took me a long time to forgive myself for the arena killings, but I’d eventually accepted that I was a child who had been raised in an arena, raised to kill, and had never had the opportunity to learn better. 

But in that instant, I knew that there was something wrong. He hadn’t attacked me, but I chose to attack him. Odril was telling me not to, and I knew I shouldn’t have. 

Now, I would have gone with him, surrendered. But even if I’d just run away, I could have lived with myself. 

Instead, I shot him in the head. 

His defenses were good, but I was better. 

Between my experimental rune bond and Odril’s ability to infuse shots with my arch-stars, the Arenamaster had done a very good job with raising her weapon. 

As blood and brains erupted from his head, and the pink-white light of whatever being he’d been communing with faded away, I turned and ran.

As I ran, Odril whispered in my ear, soothing my raging emotions, but not absolving me of the blame. I shouldn’t have done it, and she didn’t pretend that I was fine. 

It was a sad marker of that time of my life that a demon was giving better advice than my adoptive mother. 

I killed several more squads as I ran through the tunnels, cursing the fact that they were so massive and winding, just trying to find Zone, Firefright, Deepwater, or the Arenamaster. I’d have even taken Alyphize at that point, I was so desperate. 

Then something caught me, and I turned to see a hand, made of spectral white force magic, grown to the size of my entire torso. I whipped around until I spotted a group of three people – a tall sorceress who was clearly manipulating the giant hand with motions of her own hand, a short woman whose arms were covered in tattoos that I thought were meant to better conduct druidic magic, and a combat witch crouched on the floor, tossing things into a circle and muttering spells under her breath. 

The government must have realized their standard hit squads weren’t getting the job done and started sending in specialists in, or maybe they’d always been there, and I was just running into another one. 

I shouted as I twisted my aura, spinning out a variant of the spell that I used on my bullets to let them bypass force shields or wards, while at the same time using a metal manipulation spell to push me upwards. I moved through the force hand as if it wasn’t there, then my metal-lined boots clunked into the ceiling and I started releasing fire onto the group of three.

The force sorceress snapped her hand out, and a shield flared to life, blocking the shots, until I flipped around, dropped off the ceiling, and then re-cast my spell, focusing it on the bullets instead of me. When my bullets started passing through the force wall, the druid stepped forwards. Bright blue light flared around her, and the magic formed into a cross-hatch of water that caught my bullets. 

I cursed under my breath and started wrapping my bullets in layers of spellwork, prepared to fire, but the druid turned and said something to her teammates. 

Then my mind was on fire, and she was standing in front of me. Pain exploded through my consciousness as every nerve in my body was seared, and every corner of my brain pounded with hate and pain and fear. 

It reminded me of Firefright’s auric flames, but this druid was so much stronger, they were so much worse. 

But Aniseed and the Arenamaster had trained me to defend my mind. I wasn’t as good at it as Zone was, but I pushed down on the pain. It was phantom pain, not real. I wasn’t actually burning alive. 

I knew that on a conscious level, but that wasn’t inherently enough to make the pain vanish. Maybe there are some people out there who are so in command of their own consciousness that they’re able to drive off mental illusions with nothing but their mind, but I wasn’t one of them. The worst part was, while my experimental rune bond could be used to detect most illusions, this particular one it wouldn’t be much good for, as it was just a sensation. 

So I used my split mind archstar. I allowed one stream of consciousness to delve into the pain, to accept it, and to experience it. With the other, I focused on the fight.

The druid was in front of me, shaking her hand out from where I guessed she’d tried to punch the metal plate over my stomach. Judging by the flaring red light around her arms, she’d likely used some sort of strength enhancing boon as well, but it hadn’t been strong enough to let her punch through steel. 

I released the last couple of shots from my pistols, but they were intercepted by flashes of stone that materialized in midair. Stone elemental boon, maybe? 

I needed to be careful. There were good odds the witch was cooking up something nasty, and while I’d proved I could escape the force effects, if she stepped in while I was distracted, it could cause issues. 

I was skilled enough to cast multiple spells in only one stream of consciousness, but I was going to be more limited. I could probably manage one continuous spell, and still have enough to adapt to the fight.

I flexed the metal altering spells that would lighten, strengthen, and enhance the flexibility of the plates of metal in my coat, then shoved it to the back of my stream of consciousness to focus on the fight. 

I built a quick metal manipulation spell to reload my pistols, but the druid flashed to the side in a burst of speed and threw a blow at my head. I spun and layered a spell over the metal in my pants and boots, catching her on the side and throwing her back. There was a crunch of bone snapping as she hit the wall, but then green light cascaded off of her form, and she stood up.

“Not bad, kid!” she complimented, then used her speed power again. Her fist flared with the red strength enhancement magic, and I was forced to manipulate myself with my metal bond again, spinning to the side and out of the way of her heavy blows.

She was smart, aiming only for my head in order to dodge the metal plates in my torso, but it was forcing her to be predictable.

I might not have been a diviner capable of seeing the future, but I’d killed enough people in the arena to twist, duck, and dodge out of the way of her rain of blows, and with Odril’s voice guiding me, it was nothing at all. 

“Behind you!” Odril snapped

I caught aura flashing out of the corner of my eye as the sorcerer cast a series of force blades, force bolts, and smaller force hands at me. 

I couldn’t pull off my phasing trick, not if wanted to keep dodging the blows of the druid, since her punches would still land, even if the force magic didn’t. In theory, I might be able to stop that, but my bond was brand new. I’d had to design all its spellcraft with the help of the labs, and it wasn’t rooted solidly like normal bonds were. If I overtaxed it, my spells were likely to shatter. 

So instead I started firing on the druid while pouring more magic into the enhancement spells running through my coat. The bolts and blades sliced off, even as the druid’s absurd flashes of speed left her taking no more than grazing blows from the shots I was firing.

Frankly, I expected that she was using some sort of predictive or mind reading magic from the dreamscape to figure out where I was aiming before I even did, because even as I pulled basic tricks like aiming with my hands one direction and using metal magic to alter the flight path of the bullet, she was still out of the way. 

Then Odril shouted a warning as the hands arrived and fell around my neck to choke me. 

I threw myself to the ground, flexing the spells running through my coat to allow me to rip through the force. It left bruises around my neck, but nothing I couldn’t recover from. 

I rolled out of the way of a sizzling red star of demonic aura that the druid released at me, Odril muttering her contempt about its slipshod craftsmanship. 

I came to a knee and infused my next bullet with my fourth arch-star, then dropped my defesnice spells to make room in my mind’s eye for my experimental spell, then fired, casting a metal manipulation spell to guide the flight path of the bullet. 

It ripped through the head of the sorcerer, passing through her armor spells as if it wasn’t there at all.

And kept going. It drove itself into the witch’s neck, but Odril shouted a warning as the Druid was suddenly next to me. Her hand slammed down on my back, and the pain in my head vanished.

But… that wasn’t quite right. 

It didn’t vanish. 

It flexed, and I felt demonic spells twisting through my body, manipulating the auric connection between myself and Odril. It funneled into her, first a twisting of magic that felt similar but not the same as the pain spell, then another spell from a world I didn’t know, followed by another that I thought might have been angelic magic, but it was hard to tell. 

And then the shimmering spot of red light in the back of my mind where Odril always lived, had lived since I was a kid, went dark, to never light itself again. 

A moment later, I had passed out as well as the druid used a boon on me. Honestly, I commended her. I wasn’t sure I would have had the restraint to nonlethally restrain someone who had just killed two of my friends. 

Then again, she had gotten her revenge. I still wasn’t sure exactly what the druid had done to Odril in that instant, but she’d never been seen on her own plane, nor had I ever felt our connection spark back to life again. 

But she wasn’t dead. Her magic still floated in my aura, and though I’d never revealed it to anyone until I’d told the Contractor just now, I could still use her infusion boon.