Two hours’ ride from Tatwar, the largest city in the north, twelve soldiers stood sweating outside a wooden door attached to a single-story stone building, narrow but stretching far back into the woods off of the road. It was a hot day, unusual even for late summer in a part of Lysia known for its warm climate, but their perspiration had more to do with anticipation than heat. One private nudged another with his elbow.
“You think this guy’s much better than Alfie?”
The other trooper shot him an exhausted look. “For fuck’s sake, Tom. Why worry about it? If he isn’t, we’ll know in a minute, and if he is, we probably won’t even realize before we’re dead. And don’t rag on Alfie, neither. It’ll mess with his head.”
Tom planted the butt of his rifle in the dirt, twisting it nervously as he shifted his significant weight from foot to foot. “All I’m saying is, there’s a reason military wizards settled for military pay. I like Alfie, and damn anyone who says otherwise, but this is a real laboratory we’re looking at. These reclusive types, I hear some of them are total geniuses. I don’t want to end up as a pile of ash because we brought a sword to a gunfight. You know, magically speaking.”
His compatriot stood up straight and turned to give Tom his full attention, but before he could get out a word, everyone present heard a slight whoosh of displaced air. The lieutenant, who had been leaning against the wall, swore and fumbled at his belt for his sword, revealing himself as the product of a time when swordplay was considered an invaluable skill for a soldier. In the time it took for him to look back up, six rifles were pointed at the newcomer, with the remaining five soldiers staring awkwardly at the absurdly short woman who had just appeared in their midst. She wore a tailored charcoal suit and thin-rimmed circular glasses, with her hair up in a bun. The woman hardly looked at the arsenal pointed towards her, stepping forward and addressing the bearded lieutenant directly.
“You, in the grey.” The officer glanced to his left and right, as if to confirm that all the soldiers under his command were also wearing grey. “Yes, you. I’ve just received word from a trusted colleague that there are matters of interest to me in this facility. I’ll be entering now, but as a trusted and firm friend of the Kingdom,” the woman smiled, revealing wickedly sharp teeth, “I would, of course, be happy to bring you along, provided that you all stay close and do nothing you are not told.”
The flustered lieutenant finally overcame his confusion, squaring his shoulders and lifting his arm to point at the woman, who he was only now realizing must be at least part gnome. As he opened his mouth to deliver a lecture full of the confidence of a man who had spent nearly two decades in a position of middling authority, he saw directly behind the audacious woman a soldier urgently waving his hands and shaking his head. The man trying to get his attention was marked as the platoon’s wizard by the star on his breast.
It was popular wisdom in the military, repeated to the point of annoyance, that a magical practitioner out-ranked the Marshal herself in an emergency. Despite this, the lieutenant barely paused for a moment before continuing.
“Now see here, lady, this is a sensitive operation. It’s also going to be dangerous as all hell, so-” the older-looking man’s mouth kept moving for several seconds, but no sound could be heard.
“We’re all sorry, ma’am. He didn’t know any better, honestly, and he didn’t mean any disrespect. If you’re willing to help, we’d all appreciate it greatly.” Alfie, the wizard, was as close to begging as a man could get while still on two feet, having just finished the spell that silenced his commanding officer.
The intruding woman quirked an eyebrow. “Have we met? I didn’t think I was so recognizable these days.”
Alfie shook his head quickly. “No, ma’am, I don’t know you. But…” He looked pointedly at the pocket of empty air in which she had arrived. “I’ve never seen or heard a teleport half as well controlled. And, well, your eyes.”
All of the soldiers leaned in at that, most noticing for the first time that the tiny woman’s sclera and irises were the same shade of light blue, which even the least educated among them could guess was not natural for any race. She let out a hum of satisfaction.
“Well! You’re charming, aren’t you? Yes, indeed, that was the proper response. Good to see some people still have manners.” With that, the gnomish lady turned and walked three paces to the door of the one-story building they had all gathered outside of, turning the handle and crossing the threshold without a care.
The soldiers, still-muted lieutenant included, shuffled behind her after a few seconds of mutual discombobulation. Some had more understanding of the situation and others less, but all were in agreement that the best thing to do was to shut up and follow instructions. A few men were even looking cheerful, having grasped that the dreaded job of invading a wizard’s chosen grounds had just gotten a lot less dangerous.
As they proceeded down the hall in silence, the passage dimly lit by floating orbs of pale light, stopping here and there for the woman to peer and mutter at seemingly random patches of the air or floor, Tom shared a look with the man he’d been bothering earlier.
“What the hell was all that?” he mouthed, but Jakob, the other soldier, only shrugged, either not understanding or not caring to comment. As they kept walking, the quiet was suddenly shattered as two jets of white-hot fire roared out from the walls on either side, completely engulfing four men in the middle of their loose column. It happened with no warning, and every soldier ahead and behind scrambled away from the doomed men. Their screams echoed in the long hall, seeming to go on forever, until Tom blinked away the spots from his eyes. He immediately started laughing, quickly joined by the other soldiers as they realized that the screaming men didn’t have a singed hair on them, being, as they all were, under the gaze and apparently protection of the small woman in the suit. She snapped her fingers, drawing their attention.
“I missed that one, and your friends are lucky I’m still quick. Might be that the wards on you all would have held against that, but politeness isn’t the same thing as talent,” she declared with a look at Alfie, who looked down and shook his head. The strange procession continued, the soldiers now more confident and their sharp-tongued shepherd more careful. After a right turn leading to a door that revealed a downward set of stairs, the woman turned to face the troops.
“All right. Down there is going to be where all the interesting things are, and more importantly for you, the illegal things. It’s also quite likely to be where a wizard who was unhinged enough to draw the attention of both the King’s army and myself has prepared his last stand. With that in mind, I will be going down there, and you young men will sit tight until I say otherwise.”
The lieutenant, now capable of speech, looked as though he desperately wanted to protest, but seeing the faces of his men, he could tell that any attempt to act like he was in charge here would only be embarrassing. The well-dressed woman entered the stairway and closed the door behind her, leaving the King’s men listening intently to the faint sound of her shoes on stone steps as she descended.
The air was crisp and clean in the lower level of the building, not at all what a casual observer would guess about a basement dug into a building in the middle of nowhere. The gnome was not surprised, knowing that sensitive experiments required carefully controlled environments. She walked through a vast room with a low ceiling, past jars and beakers and jugs, some holding exotic magical ingredients but most holding simple materials like water, soil, and sand. There were empty spots on tables and in containers, some of the more complex or fragile contents of the laboratory clearly having been hastily put away in anticipation of a raid. There was no obvious source of light in the basement, and indeed it was dim, but a faint blue glow of unknown provenance filled the room, keeping it somewhat visible. It seemed to come from everything, but when she examined any individual object, there was no sign of anything causing the light.
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A fly buzzed around the woman’s head. She glanced at it, then did a double take as the pest stubbornly refused to burst into flames. The gnomish wizard squinted, and the insect…no, the small flying creature was slapped out of the air by an invisible force, crushed against the floor. She continued, disturbed at the revelation that a clearly promising practitioner was not only messing with demons, but had gone so far as to allow critters from the Hells to freely roam the laboratory. It didn’t match the image she had in her head of a man so fastidious he would pump fresh air through five meters of earth to maintain the climate of his workspace.
As the gnome passed what she guessed was halfway from the stairs behind her to the far wall of the enormous room, the crack of gunfire rang out. A bullet hovered in front of her torso, caught by her layered magic, still spinning gently even as it dropped to the ground. It was quickly followed by a vial full of a mysterious brown liquid, launched with such speed it couldn’t have been by a human arm, which the woman in the suit sidestepped, twisting her hand to cause the floor to rise up and cover the vial when it shattered on the ground behind her, containing any fumes. She flew forward, abandoning any pretense of being limited to the speed of her small legs. Another two shots rang out, to the same effect as the first. She collided physically with a body, and they tumbled over each other in a heap, a pistol skittering across the floor. The human man, as this wizard was revealed to be, had the advantage in size, and quickly got on top of her, pinning an arm with his knee.
“Get out of my fucking house!” he screamed, and brought his hands together, conjuring a huge, roiling mass of fire, intending to push it into the woman’s face. She unbuttoned a pocket on the front of her suit with her one free hand, and a torrent of dirty green seawater came blasting out of it, far too much and too quickly for such a narrow opening. The water pushed the two away from each other, soaking them both and sending the man reeling to the floor. As soon as she regained her composure, the woman, her suit ruined, raised both hands, conjuring blue chains from nothing which bound her enemy’s limbs. She walked up to him, bending down to peer deeply into his eyes as he struggled.
“No…no, damn it. Really, not even a little influence? You’re just that stupid? Desperate, maybe? Well, I tried,” she said under her breath, and before the laboratory’s owner could even process the words, the gnomish woman flicked a finger, caving his head in from all directions in less time than it took to blink. There was no blood, and the rogue wizard’s corpse crumpled to the floor in an instant. She straightened up, brushing her hands over the waterlogged suit in a vain attempt to make it look presentable.
The sound of squelching shoes echoed throughout the basement laboratory as she explored, taking her time now that there wasn’t an angry wizard lurking in the shadows. Every cabinet was opened, every cask unsealed. The investigating woman frowned, unsure of what she was looking for. There were illegal experiments, yes, alchemy research perhaps a year ahead of what was publicly available and some genuinely interesting notes on techniques for siphoning ambient magic, but nothing mind-blowing. This could have been enough to attract the government’s eye on its own, though gods only knew she had more dangerous work lying around on her floor back home. She couldn’t see what would have led Baru to tip her off, however. He may not have been at the cutting edge of magical research anymore, but he should have known what would be worthy of a personal visit from the bespectacled gnome, and nothing here rose to that standard.
Sure that she was missing something, the woman changed her approach, kneeling and placing a hand on the floor, fingers splayed. She closed her eyes and a thin wave of light raced out from her hand across the ground in all directions, running over each object and tracing every nook and corner of the cavernous basement before bouncing back towards the diminutive wizard. She blinked, having prepared for the sudden rush of sensory information that flooded her mind, but still not being able to process it all immediately.
After a moment, she hummed thoughtfully. There was a circle near the furthest wall from her which had returned no information about its contents, meaning it was almost certainly shielded from magical effects. The topographic scan had revealed other items of interest, but this seemed like the most promising.
She trudged across the room, in no particular hurry despite the Lysian strike team that must have been anxiously awaiting her return at the top of the stairs. As she passed, a high, keening noise started to emerge from a glass beaker resting on a desk, filled with an unidentifiable orange liquid. The noise was instantly cut off as a rather large amount of smoke for such a small sample of liquid began to pour out of the top. Harmless, she could tell at a glance, but an unwelcome reminder that she didn’t know the details about any of the sensitive experiments stored here, and that was a dangerous situation even for an experienced practitioner like the gnomish wizard.
As the woman in the grey suit approached her destination, her pace quickened dramatically, then slowed to a stop two paces from the boundary of the blank circle on the map in her head. The source of her alarm was a pale young woman sitting hunched over on the floor, not a bit of furniture around her nor a scrap of clothing on her, directly in the middle of the circle, which upon closer inspection was clearly made up of dozens of binding inscriptions scratched into the floor. The girl’s hair was a deep black, broken up by a singular large, curling white horn emerging from the right side of her head. Scars, bruises, and even a few open wounds covered her body. She raised her head to look at the newcomer as she approached, but didn’t make a sound.
“Fuck,” the gnome swore as she tried to make sense of the situation, conjuring a too-large spear in her right hand as she thought. There was no valid academic reason she could think of to keep and torture a demon, and she would have killed the man responsible again if she could, but it would be no mercy to let a demon live on the mortal plane. As she took a half-step forward, the wounded demon finally spoke up.
“Please kill me,” she said in an emotionless monotone, glancing at the spear that had just appeared. “I stand a significant chance of harming and killing members of sapient races if I am alive on this plane, and my life has no value because I am not a moral agent.”
The gnome, who had been expecting anything from nonsense to violent threats, stopped as abruptly as if a wall had sprouted from the ground in front of her. “Excuse me, what?”
“I am a powerful demon. Even if my instruction were complete, which it is not,” here she glanced at her left arm, which displayed one of the more recent gashes, “Any time spent in the mortal world would include a high risk of accidentally killing a being whose life matters. That is unacceptable, therefore the logical course of action is to end my life.”
“Your…instruction?” The woman in the suit spoke slowly, and the spear in her hand flickered out of existence, which caused the young-looking demon’s face to fall.
“Mr. Godwin has been attempting to teach me ethics. I think it is a useless effort, and no more time should be wasted on myself or any other demon. I really must insist that you kill me.”
The gnome finally resumed her movement towards the bone-white girl. She scuffed the inscription on the floor in front of her with her foot, allowing her to cross into the circle. She spoke quickly, fully focused on the demon in front of her, casting diagnostic and restrictive spells for a full two minutes before she finally closed the last few steps, laying her hand on the least-injured patch of skin she could find.
“My name is Anne Tarynn. I’m not going to kill you. Not yet, at least, but I do need you to come with me. There’s a place that I think will be very helpful to you, and it’s also one where you can be helpful to others. How does that sound?”
The demon was visibly distressed as soon as it became clear that the gnome would not kill her. The knowledge seemed to cause her far more discomfort than any of her dozens of wounds. Despite that, the demon stood up.
“Good. We do have to leave rather quickly. There are some men coming shortly who would…” Anne trailed off, realizing that what a Lysian platoon would try to do to a demon would actually be desirable to the one in front of her. Instead of finishing her thought, the gnomish wizard flexed the hand now on the demon’s shoulder, closed her eyes for a second, then cracked them back open. “You know what? I think you’re going to love college,” she commented, before they both disappeared in an instant, air rushing in to fill the void left by their vanished bodies.