Harlan waited in line for an audience with the king of Harvestal, a nation on the stripe south of the one in which Fomoria was located.
That the king’s castle allowed public questions and requests while also failing to have arrays to stop illusions like what Harlan was using to hide his identity meant it was really only a matter of time before someone assassinated the man.
But that was not Harlan’s plan, not today.
Behind the king was a stained glass window with the crest of the kingdom, a shield with a cross in the center which made squares, top left was green, top right was yellow, and the pattern was reversed on the bottom.
In the middle of this shield was a sword pointed downward, but instead of a blade there was a stalk of wheat.
“Speak.”
“Apologies, I was enamored by the glass behind you.
I wanted to ask why you sent five women to kill me.”
The change in the atmosphere was immediate, his knights moved between them.
“The Butcher King.”
“I came here to speak, not to kill anyone.”
“You murdered my son.”
“Are you sure? When did I do this?”
“In Kor, he-”
“I killed slavers and the soldiers who defended them. You will not be getting any apology, but you have my sympathy.”
“You know nothing about us or how we use slaves.”
“But I do, I’ve had men in your city for days already. That is part of why I am giving you a chance at all.
In six months I will return, by that time, if I believe you have failed to implement my policies regarding slavery, I will directly conquer your nation with my army.”
“You claim to come here to speak and then you threaten me?”
“Everyone has a choice, you can choose if you listen to me, and I will choose how I react accordingly.”
“Kill him.”
Harlan caught the first blade in his hand, his black bone gauntlets would suffer no harm from it.
“Do not make me react.”
He admired the false mythril blade and the wheat stalk pattern which was etched along the length of it.
The first knight couldn’t budge the blade from his grasp, and the others did not listen to Harlan’s warning.
From their perspective, Harlan just looked at them and an unknown force sent them flying at the walls.
The first knight removed his hands from the blade and went for his dagger, Harlan reacted with a headbutt that caved in the man’s skull.
There was no need to let him suffer, so Harlan flipped around the blade and stabbed the man in the brainstem.
The king seemed to hardly react.
“I may die, but my people will never bow to you.”
“I am taking this blade for my collection. Six months.”
Harlan, this Harlan, returned to Kor through a gate and met up with the original Harlan.
“I brought another blade and I found out why he tried to have you killed. As it turns out, we killed his son.”
“Did he have it coming?”
“It was when you first captured Kor.”
“Then he did. Take the blade to the collection, and make sure it is clean.”
“I will.”
Harlan decided that there were few people who could be trusted to enact his will.
So he cast aside the moral issues, as they were less than most things he still had planned or had done recently, he began making true copies of himself and cutting down his extra bodies to just two in stasis and his main body.
Xol came to pick Harlan up, and drop off one of the other Harlan’s.
“While I don’t think it is the wrong way to do work, as one can never trust another as much as himself, by making copies of yourself that have real free will, you risk them rebelling.”
“Has that happened before with you? Other than Kleon?”
“I don’t think I should comment on that. But eventually they will grow into different people, but with you as the base, and you are… erratic, prone to making wild choices.”
“I disagree. These ones have all of my memories from the time of their creation. We all understand that I am the original and their boss, and we all understand that we don’t like that we’ve resorted to this.”
“I’ve heard that before. Anyway, I’ll just grab another one and you can take this one.”
“Very well, just don’t grab one that is working on anything important.”
“How many do you have now?”
“Seven. I don’t want to make more than one per day, it dulls my emotions and makes my memories foggy for a few hours whenever I make one.”
“Good, pace yourself appropriately, and I’ll see you next week.”
The Harlan’s made their way to the lab, and then to an extra room which Xol set up for this process.
The name of the technique was mind devour, and it involved exactly what it sounded like.
Harlan killed himself, his other self, and when the soul became unbound so did the mind.
It was as simple as grabbing the mind with the right spell and then putting it inside of an alchemical pill that Xol developed.
It felt wrong to him, not having to kill himself repeatedly and rip the mind from the soul, but that he hadn’t developed this technique himself.
Cheating was one thing, taking as many shortcuts as he could to grow in power at a rapid pace, but doing so using someone else's methods entirely without a real understanding of the inner workings of them bothered him.
Harlan swallowed the pill, which would remain in his body for half a day, and as it broke down in his stomach, which was the physical location in which an intangible soul was anchored, it would release these memories and the soul would absorb them.
Harlan meditated on what he was feeling during the process in the hopes to understand it, but Xol made the spells required for his training in a manner that obscured them.
Harlan expected at least half of the runes that he both physically carved in the room and drew with his hands were nothing but fluff that could be cut out.
Yet even the slightest change made a chain reaction in the spell that simply made it fail, he didn’t understand how they mattered to the spell, the mana just seemed to flow through without activating any magical effect.
As he sat there he relived the memories that were not his.
“Sigils, a higher level of magic, and one that you have experience pulling apart to use parts of already.
Since you’ve already started to go through the process of making more of yourself and sigil work is something you can do on your own for the most part, we are going to work on cooperative casting.”
“Do I need another me here?”
“I will fill that role. There is a power difference between you and the original, as a new life born from another soul it would take a year or more to get to his level, so you must learn how to handle being matched with someone who is far stronger than you.”
“I don’t feel any weaker though.”
“You don’t feel that weakness because you are still full of mana. If I was to put this into numbers, and this is a vast oversimplification, so don’t think too much about the numbers given.
A 10 year old might have 100 mana points, and a 20 year old might have 1,000, but when the child uses 50 points they will be notably tired, whereas the man would barely feel it. The stress of mana burn, which is to say low mana in the body, is always relative to what your cap is.”
“How much mana do I have then?”
“As I said, don’t think about the numbers. The soul is a complex machine, and quantifying it in simple terms is only helpful for generalizations. But if Harlan has 5,000, you have 500.”
“Is that a lot?”
“I used 1,000 for the man because that is an average for a soldier from Ragne at that age.
But if a soldier without any other changes, trained only a few more hours a day, they might reach 1,500 by 20. Most second year students at the academy are already at 1,000 due to their environment and schedule stressing the soul and forcing faster growth.”
“So how would I-”
“I shouldn’t have gone down this path at all. Don’t think about how much mana you have, or Harlan has, or anyone else. Only try to think about how much you have as relative to full and think about how much more magic you can use before running out. Just as a 20 year old might have 1,500 mana, he might also have a fireball that is 50% less efficient than a man with 1,000, so the number itself is worthless, any deficiencies can be dealt with by proper combat technique and spell usage.”
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“Right, sorry.”
Xol began with holograms to act as a three dimensional blackboard.
“Cooperative casting at its base is two or more people casting the same spell but by syncing their mana and consciously working towards it, the spells mix into something more than the sum of its parts.”
Xol showed a circle in front of each person, a fireball launched from the circle and hit a dummy, which burned it.
Then the people held hands, and each cast the spell with one hand, causing the circles to overlap and another fireball was launched, this time the dummy was entirely destroyed.
“As you can see here, the two people move their spells overtop of one another, but this overlap happens before the spell is launched, and this happens because the physical contact that they have is causing a mana flow between both of them, and by each using one hand, this mana flow treats both of them as a single entity casting magic, which doubles the mana that goes into the spell. Now, what is the issue here?”
“If you double the mana in a spell then it becomes less stable. How do we get past that?”
“That’s the fun part, we don’t. A warmagic is often the example of what co-op casting is for, because war spells are larger by default and they can more easily handle the larger amount of mana being put into them.”
“Alright, I think that I have the idea down then.”
Xol chuckled to himself.
They stood in a giant crystal cave and held hands, for a start they would use a fireball.
Harlan hadn’t used words or hand movements to cast the spell in a very long time, it was a nostalgic experience for him.
Yet very quickly he noticed that it was wrong.
Xol stopped his casting.
“You understand, right?”
“I need to match your mana flow. Is mine slower because I’m weaker?”
“No, the mana flow that you can feel isn’t your full mana flow, it’s just the surface. This is something innate in people, and it is almost never an issue or something that affects how well one can use magic.
Try to focus on it, and I suggest that you visualize it as a river with a dam, open and close the floodgates to control the speed of the water.”
Xol didn’t stop for even an instant for the next hour, to the point where Harlan passed out.
When Harlan woke back up Xol handed him a tonic.
“How?”
“Co-op casting is the name of the technique, but I will also teach you forced casting.”
“Oh. That seems useful.”
“While you are recharging, let’s talk theory.”
It was a strange thing, to look through your eyes, to hear your voice come from your mouth, but to know for certain that you were not the one who saw or said these things.
In time, as the memories were fully integrated into his mind, this oddness would fade.
Xol returned once more.
“Are you done already?”
“You need to leave.”
“Have the Hands come?”
“The academy is under attack.”
“Alright. Let’s go.”
“I cannot go there right now.”
“What? Why?”
“No time to argue, I’m sending you there, but you might not enter exactly where I want you to. Your goal will be to save people, that is all.”
Xol opened a void gate, yet it fizzled out.
“That shouldn’t be…”
He opened another one, and the same thing happened.
Harlan’s eyes went black and he found himself in her void.
“If you go, will you truly return?”
“I need to go.”
“Do you distrust yourself so much? What of the others? Have you no faith in your allies?”
Harlan could see the exit that led to the front of the academy and he could see the students fight one another along with soldiers.
“I don’t trust that they can do the right thing, to do what needs to be done.”
He took a step and felt a weight fall on him.
“Is there such a thing?”
With another step the weight grew.
“What I decide is right is right, and going there is right.”
He could only move a few more steps forward before the weight brought him to his knees and he began to crawl.
“I cannot see what will happen if you go there, Fae magic hangs in that place.”
He couldn’t move more than his fingers, his skeleton had a spiderweb of cracks along it, but the exit was within arms reach.
“I promise, those outside of the veil deserve me there, they all deserve what I have coming.”
The weight was gone and his body was healed.
“Go then, and return to your work once you have.”
Harlan hadn’t left the room, the exit was false.
Xol kept trying to make void gates which kept failing.
“What in the hell is that witch playing at?”
Harlan raised his hand and a void gate of his own opened.
“Oh, you can just do that now.”
“She knows I’ll be back, no sense in keeping me trapped out here.”
“Don’t think of it as being a cage, you’ve done good things here.”
Harlan stepped through the void gate and felt his body break down into mana and be transferred to the location.
Why he couldn’t feel it before was something he didn’t understand, perhaps it was something only the caster understood?
Either way, he was there, back in the veil.
He could wave his hand again and be back home, he could see his parents, he could visit his sisters, see his nieces and nephew.
But instead he walked towards the fighting.
The attackers wore a yellow band on their bodies somewhere, some on the head, but more often on the arm.
They wore the academy robes, those of Reino and Ragne fought alongside one another to kill anyone without the yellow band.
A girl was dragging away another wounded student as a blade made its way to her in a downward arc.
Harlan skipped over and killed the soldier with a swipe of his hand, his claws rent steel, flesh stood not against him.
The girl froze when she saw him.
His blue skin and features marked him as being clearly inhuman and he towered over her, his horns gleamed like obsidian in the afternoon sunlight.
He reached down to stop the man’s bleeding with a simple healing spell, but that was it, he didn’t want to waste more time or energy than needed, killing would save more lives than just reviving people too weak to fight back.
“Find some place safe.”
He moved first through the dorms, the tight halls made friendly fire an inevitability, which meant most of the fighting was the clashing of shortswords and daggers.
Both sides had no way of knowing who he was.
Wind and water imbibing aided his movement and let him slip through the crowd.
He simply extended his arm and smashed the head of one of the students against the wall, another found his throat had been cut before he even saw the man who passed by.
He cleared the hall of enemies and the remaining students stood there in a panicked standoff, no one knowing who was really an enemy.
“Watch for those with the yellow bands.”
The mana in his voice made it carry through the hall and despite many of them being in shock the words forced their way into their heads.
As he made his way through the halls and made a few observations, the first being that no beastkin or false undead wore the yellow bands, and the second was that he didn’t feel anyone he cared for in the dorm, not that he had many male friends anyway.
With the building cleared as best as he could as fast as he could, he was sure that he missed stragglers, but now those with the bands were far outnumbered by those without.
And so he made his way to the girls’ dorm next.
There was no denying that he hurt him more to clear the halls in this place.
He disliked harming women, but when the circumstances demanded so, he did not stay his hand.
He tried not to look at the faces, he just focused on who had a band, it was easier that way.
He didn’t want to think about how old any of them were either, each and every one of them was now a soldier who was killing students.
Soldiers lived and died by their orders, by their choice to follow them.
Harlan’s reasoning for clearing the dorms first was not just that they were much smaller and simpler buildings than the main academy, and that now he could direct the other students to return to their rooms.
He stayed in a more or less human form with the hope that others would be less likely to attack, shifting in and out of having the void mist in his soul as needed to avoid stressing his body.
The void mist granted power and energy, and much like the relative tiredness of mana burn, if he got used to the extra energy from the sigil then changing back would affect him more.
Directly inside of the academy was an array, and judging by the bodies in the area, it killed those who walked into it through lightning.
Harlan started to unravel the array, but judging by the complexity it would take 10 minutes or more.
So instead he tossed one of the other bodies in the area into the array to test the reaction and drain it through another method.
“So it checks for life…”
As he continued working on turning the array off a group of soldiers came by, having been alerted that someone had killed most of the others in the dorms.
They stepped through the array without issue, and Harlan jumped back to avoid their spells.
Once outside he sealed himself in a box of stone.
The soldiers started to cast a spell to crush the box inward, but unsurprisingly, Harlan had left the moment he was out of sight.
The wards of the academy prevented him from moving around with gates, but a void gate simply became inaccurate.
As he moved back towards the soldiers he cast simple spiralized void bolts.
Of the 20, half failed to stop or deflect the bolts.
Harlan didn’t slow down as he approached, the shield sigil he had cast sucked up the spells.
He had a little time to train with it, sigils didn’t often increase in power directly, generally speaking they were strong, but also stagnant. Most of the extra power that one could get from a sigil was by either mixing it with other sigils or by finding out all of the little quirks of the spell.
Sholl was a clear case of someone whose entire combat ability relied on these sigils, and thus he neglected his other magic, leading to much of his current weakness.
In this case, Harlan’s shield was a black hole that could shrink and expand to eat spells.
The limits of this weren’t clear, he had eaten Helik’s ice spear and then instantly blinked out of existence, but when he tested it against normal spells the hole would eat up a great deal of magic before it was destroyed.
How much of this was the fault of sigils against sigils and how much of it was just the power behind the spells he couldn’t be sure.
Once he reached the men he cut them off at the knees and then swung around again to start taking their arms.
He then sealed their wounds with fire and skewered them with their swords, making.
With them unable to resist, he took their bands off, analyzing the magic, it was simple, shockingly so.
The bands were keys, and the array had a lock, anyone who took the time to notice how the very faintly enchanted cloth could replicate that same signal.
At least, Harlan believed it was simple, the reality was that he was good at these kinds of things, and while he took less than a minute, most others his age might spend 10 or more before being able to replicate it without fault.
Yet he didn’t want to make the key and go through the array.
He originally planned on using the men as a lightning rod and casting a spell that would discharge the electricity through the swords he stabbed into the still living men.
But now he had a better idea.
He walked into the array with the band in his hand and the array suddenly wasn’t as obscured.
From there it was fairly easy for him to flip the system.
To make sure that he had done it right, he put the bands back on the men and tossed them inside, where they were quickly electrocuted.
Then he stepped in, without the band, and the array didn’t activate.
It took more time than just going through, but he already saw how many died trying to get out through the front gate, and when, or if reinforcements arrived, no matter the side, it was worth the time.
He started moving through the halls, looking for minds that he recognized.
Had he known Adina was in the infirmary, there would’ve been no hesitation in his destination, but the first mind he felt was Selen.