Chapter 25 I Swear It!

Electricity arced from Fen’s outstretched fingers into Lenna who quickly grabbed onto her aunt’s shoulder causing the lightning to course through her as well. Jala tried to let out a cry of pain but her body tensed so quickly that she only let out a short squeak. “Stay. Invisible.” Lenna told Isaac through gritted teeth who had vanished before Fen had finished the spell. Lenna knew that the spell would wear out after a few seconds but until then it was primed to jump towards its next target. Fen was banking on Isaac appearing during those few seconds.

Isaac teleported behind Fen and tried to slash at his back again but this time the sorcerer was ready. His sword had barely touched the sorcerer’s robes when a shard of broken glass the size of a man’s torso appeared and caught the blade. The shard had the same prismatic effect as the rest of Fen’s reality spells. Isaac’s sword bounced back so he withdrew a throwing spike from his Inventory with his free hand and tried to stab Fen with it. Again, as soon as the spike made contact with the sorcerer’s robes the fragment of reality was there to block it.

Isaac could feel the mana pouring from Fen. At that moment he had an invisibility detection spell, a spell that gave him a ground bound form of echolocation, chain lightning, and a shield made of a fragment of reality all draining his reserves at the same time. Fen threw his arms wide and yelled one quick burst of anger and rage only there was no sound of man heard. A roll of thunder sounded out in its place and a shockwave blasted out of him in all directions tossing tables and Isaac alike across the room.

Fen was unlucky however as right when Isaac was about to become visible to the chain lightning spell, from his shadowcloak being blasted apart, the spell ran out of power and faded away. The reason Lenna had shared the lightning with her aunt was not so her aunt would suffer but rather to burn through the power of the spell faster. Her quick thinking paid off and most likely saved Isaac’s life.

“Fen you moron!” Jala yelled as soon as she could breathe again. Isaac hit an overturned table flopped over it onto the cold, wet, bloody, stone floor.

“You could help me, you know!” Fen retorted, throwing her own words back at her. Isaac pushed himself up with a groan as his death flames reset a broken rib from his impact with the now fully upside down table.

“She will be doing no such thing.” Lenna replied evenly while gripping Jala’s shoulder tighter.

Isaac locked eyes with Fen and flashed him a grin. He cracked his neck. “I am the Lord of Darkness itself.” He told the elf while shadows collected around him to reform his shadowcloak. “You are but an imitation.” He taunted and vanished once more.

Fen growled. “I am shadows and shadows are me, seek my foes I command thee, find and bind them still, there are yet ones I must kill.” He chanted through gritted teeth. A dozen tendrils of shadows rose up from the ground around him and started to wave about looking for Isaac. Fen shifted his grip on his curved shadowblade.

Isaac appeared just outside of the range of Fen’s shadow tendrils and made a show of walking into them. The two closest to him reached out and tried to wrap around him but they slid off of his shadowcloak as if they were made of oil and water. “A shadow spell.” Isaac purred. “Finally.” He stopped walking and just let the tendrils try to get a hold of him. “Let me try.”

Fen lunged at Isaac and Isaac blocked the swing and followed it up with his own effortlessly. Fen wasn’t nearly as good at swordplay as Lenna was despite obviously being older. The shard of reality was back to block Isaac’s attack. The two continued roughly the same exchange while Isaac repeated the spell back to Fen. ‘Chant? Check. Mental image? Check. Power? Check. Knowledge of the spell form? …That’s what extra power is for right?’ Isaac thought to himself as he finished casting Fen’s spell back at him.

Isaac’s own shadow tendrils started to form, pulling mana from him without him having to mentally direct it further, and they tried to wrap around Fen. Isaac’s tendrils were noticeably weaker and Fen easily pushed through them even though they were coiling around him. “You are too weak for my spell.” Fen mocked.

Isaac shook his head. “No.” Isaac replied while he continued to win the exchange of blades. “You are cheating. There is more than just dark mana in those tendrils.” Isaac shot back.

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Fen exploded with a yell again throwing Isaac backwards. Isaac quickly recoated himself in shadows while he was still in mid air and appeared behind Fen and stumbled back a few steps. Fen whirled on him and tried to press the attack. “Only using dark mana would be idiotic.” Fen countered. “It lacks any natural stability.”

Isaac smirked and poured ninety percent of his regen into summoning a sword made of nothing but compressed dark mana and parried Fen’s next swing with it. “You just aren’t using enough.” He replied with a grin clear in his voice and plastered across his face.

Fen’s eyes went wide at the massive surge of power and at the fact that his own blade was stopped by nothing but pure dark mana. Fen’s shadowblade was reinforced with reality magic to maintain its shape and cutting edge, light magic to bend light around the blade to prevent light from weakening it, and fire and ice magic to maintain the temperature of the blade and the area around it so the molecules would always vibrate at the same frequency for extra stability. Isaac had blocked a sword made from a spell that had been specifically crafted to summon a sword stronger and sharper than any steel blade with nothing but mana.

Isaac had never practiced with two weapon fighting so he was honestly quite bad at it but that didn’t stop him from pounding on Fen’s reality shield relentlessly with both of his swords. Fen was instantly put on the defensive once he realized that Isaac was starting to only attack him with both swords simultaneously. Isaac was planning to exploit the fact that the shield could only be in one place at a time and Fen was desperate to not take any more damage.

The amount of mana that Isaac was pouring out caused Jala to drop to her knees after half a dozen seconds of watching the battle. “What level is he, really?” She whispered.

Lenna smirked behind her faceplate. “He didn’t lie.” She replied. “Six or seven.”

Jala’s skin turned an ashy gray as all color drained from it. She was quickly losing faith that her husband could handle a man a third of his level. She also knew that Lenna could end her before she finished a single spell chant so there was no use in trying to resist. She understood that she was at the mercy of her niece and her niece’s master. Her Lord as she called him. The Lord of Darkness itself. She did not like her odds of survival at that very moment. What made matters all the worse was that Jala knew that not a single alarm ward had been triggered on their way in, so even if she did somehow manage to escape there was no way to know when the pair would suddenly reappear. This was officially the worst job she had ever taken.

Fen was getting desperate. His mana was continuing to drop and the man, monster, in front of him was burning through mana at a rate of a quarter of Fen’s own maximum mana per second without a care in the world. Isaac had decided to keep the sword as a singular mass of dark mana just to prove his superiority instead of turning it into compressed shadows which would have been more mana efficient. He cut the power to his shadow tendrils as they were doing nothing and decided to put that mana to better use.

Fen tried firing another lighting bolt at Isaac while they were engaged in melee but Isaac closed the distance between them and caught Fen’s arm under his so the sorcerer couldn’t aim the lighting bolt at him. The lightning bolt still went off but it only managed to trash more of the room. Fen felt a chill run up his spine but he didn’t know why. It was then that the shadows covering Isaac’s face faded away and Fen could see Isaac’s predatory grin and unrestrained maniacal glee.

A void opened up behind Fen and a moment later his shield had to block an impact on the back of his shoulder. Isaac’s one sword was useless as that arm was being used to pin Fen’s offhand against Isaac’s body to protect him from future lightning strikes. Isaac’s offhand sword was bound up in Fen’s only sword causing the two men to be at a stalemate as they were both about the same strength. What Fen couldn’t have expected was that Isaac hadn’t been going all out from the start. Isaac had one trick left up his sleeve.

The bone claw that slammed into Fen’s left shoulder was intercepted by the reality shield which left his other shoulder wide open. A set of reptilian jaws clamped down on Fen’s right shoulder he was immediately ripped to the ground under the weight and pain. Before Fen could hit the ground however he turned into shadows and twisted. He rolled through the bone dragon’s skull, onto his hands and knees and then tucked his shoulder to continue rolling. He finished the rotation as he sprang to his feet.

Fen saw his newest opponent just in time to take a lightning bolt through the chest. The fact that he was made of shadows helped dampen the damage but his insides were still ravaged. He dropped to a knee and turned back into his normal form and started coughing up blood onto the ground. He didn’t stop coughing. More and more blood came out. Fen couldn’t put up any resistance after that last hit. He was done. He was dying and there was nothing Jala could do about it.

Jala and Fen’s relationship was a complicated if not usual one. Politics had led them into an arranged marriage that neither of them had asked for. Fen was right, neither of them loved each other in the romantic sense. At best they were awkward friends who lived together and were expected to have at least two children. Jala could only watch as the man that she had been with for over a century was dying twenty feet in front of her in the middle of her laboratory surrounded by blood and corpses. She couldn’t help but think that if they had refused her brother’s request none of this would have happened.

Isaac strode over to Fen. “Surrender to your better, sorcerer.” He ordered the dying man.

Jala took the lifeline Isaac had thrown and threw herself onto the ground. “We surrender! Please, don’t let him die!” She begged.

Isaac let go of all of his mana and the shadows and dark mana surrounding him dispersed into the air. “Do you swear your loyalty to the human demigod of darkness?” Isaac asked her while tilting his chin up and to the side to look as far down on her as he could.

“Yes! I swear it!” She exclaimed.

Isaac grinned. “Good.” He replied with that same deep, dark, amusement in his voice that promised violence and horror. Chills went down Jala’s spine and she swallowed but made no move to take back her vow.

Isaac bent down and placed a hand on Fen’s back. He dumped death mana into his body and shrouded it in death flames. In a matter of moments Fen was laying face down on the bloody ground breathing deeply. Isaac withdrew his mana from Fen and used it to make a chair made of hardened shadows. He sat down and crossed his arms. He then lazily looked down at Fen who was conscious and healed but nearly out of mana. “Now,” Isaac began. “what do I do with you?”