Chapter 28 Night On The Town?
Isaac was furious. The intense drowsiness from the nearly lethal level of sleeping gas was finally cleared away by a mixture of fresher air, Lenna’s healing, and enough death flames to turn a city block’s worth of people into black dust. “Benedict.” Isaac spoke as calmly as he could. “If you don’t give me a good enough reason to spare your life, I am going to kill you by throwing you through as many walls as it takes to make your brain look like a dropped bowl of stew. You have ten seconds.”
The reason that the poison was nearly at lethal levels for Isaac, was of no fault of Benedict, but that didn’t really matter to Isaac and Lenna. The fact that Isaac was not actually as resilient as his dossier would lead one to believe had come back to bite him. The amount of sleeping gas per amount of breathable air was set to knock out people at the twentieth level with mid to high constitution stats. Isaac was only level fourteen and his constitution was only at the upper levels of what would be considered ‘mid’. The fact that one of the two present was a paladin meant that poisons of any kind were going to be actively fought against which led to the near instant infusion of the gas into the air. Unfortunately, that meant that Isaac hadn’t even had time to realize that he was falling unconscious until his eyes were closed in a dreamless sleep.
“You can’t go to the slums.” Benedict told him. “I just planned on keeping you here, just until the duke and captain sent people to handle you. No one was going to die or anything, I swear.” His voice was pained from his dislocated shoulder, sprained and hyperextended elbow, and two broken ribs. “Gia’s grace be upon me.” He groaned out and mana started to stir around his left hand that was resting against his broken ribs. He sucked in a sharp breath as the ribs were forced back into place by his spell. He rested his head against the wall and eyed the pair standing over him. He could feel exactly how dangerous Isaac was and he knew from experience that Lenna was an unstoppable force. The only question that he would not ask the duo was how they managed to get through both an Antimagic Field and a Reality Bubble while dealing with the sleeping gas that obviously worked on Isaac.
“Why can’t we go to the slums?” Isaac demanded and barely managed to keep himself from kicking Benedict while he was down, literally.
“I won’t tell you.” Benedict replied. “Even if you kill me, someone will just bring me back later. It’ll be unpleasant, and I might forget some things, but it won’t matter in the end.”
“He won’t come back if you overload his mana pathways.” Lenna told Isaac. “Specifically his core will need to be ruptured before he dies.”
“I do remember reading about that somewhere…” Isaac trailed off in thought. “Oh yeah, it was in the section about the risks of forcing a level up as a sorcerer. I guess I’ll have my first test subject.” He stated and stopped wasting power on his death flames. The sleeping gas was mostly dissipated and he trusted Lenna to cleanse him if she noticed him passing out again.
Benedict’s eyes looked like they were about to fall out of his head. He almost seemed to shrink back into the corner as he desperately tried to find a way to escape. “Cloud Forests’ embrace.” Benedict chanted and a small bead of compressed fog started to form right in front of him. His heart fell as Isaac reached out and crushed his spell with his bare hand. Usually that would have done literally nothing to the spell but Isaac’s hand had so much mana in it, with the same order as the hand itself, that the spell was utterly smothered.
“No.” Isaac purred. “No more spells for you.” He told him as he leaned in.
Benedict’s hand shot to his unfired crossbow and he pulled the trigger. The bolt hit Isaac’s boot and exploded much like the one that had hit Lenna’s armor. Just like the other one, vines exploded outwards from each of the pieces of shrapnel. Unlike the other one, it was not Lenna’s fire that had turned it to ash. Apparently the nature of the vines created by the effect on the crossbow was light aligned. Upon contacting Isaac, the slightest twitch of dark mana, that instantly turned into death flames, caused the entire vine to wither into dust in an instant. In the half of a second that it took Benedict to shoot his crossbow, and the following half of a second that it took for the vines to expand and then turn to dust, Isaac had already planted one hand over Benedict’s face and the other against his chest.
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“I left your mouth uncovered so you can explain how it feels for me, for science, you understand.” Isaac told him with a scowl and started forcefully pushing his dark mana into the man. It was nothing but pure dark mana in such high amounts that Benedict’s mana pathways immediately started to rupture.
“Stop! I’ll tell you everything!” Benedict screamed out in pain. For his part, Isaac did as requested and withdrew his mana from the man. “Help heal me before I bleed out!” The older man ordered frantically. The mana bleed that was actively happening was localized around his core. This meant that he was incapable of casting spells and actively losing his magical essence.
“Speak first.” Lenna told him and knelt down next to him.
“Heal me first, I’ll die before I finish explaining!” He shot back.
Lenna pressed her hand against his chest and started healing him. The only problem was that her healing was going to end up putting him into fever induced unconsciousness. By the time she was done, Benedict was both out of mana and unconscious. “There.” Lenna said with a sigh. “I don’t have the mana necessary to do that again.”
“You could refill with your Mana Stone.” Isaac reminded her. “That’s why we bought it. Have you ever even used it, once?”
“I’m saving it for an emergency.” Lenna told him defensively.
“It takes like three seconds to get the mana out of it, when have we ever been in a fight where you had three seconds to yourself where you could actually use it?” He questioned her rhetorically. “It’s for times like these when you have a moment to refill but not long enough to do so naturally.”
“It has just enough mana in it to power Resurrection.” Lenna told him. “If something takes you out, but not me, I’ll probably use all of my mana to kill it. Afterwards, as long as it hasn’t been too long, I’ll need the mana to bring you back.” She explained.
Isaac sighed. “Fine.” He conceded. “Oh look, he’s already stirring.”
Benedict groaned as his eyes fluttered open. He was immediately reminded of the awful dream that he had just had. It took his, still feverish, mind a moment to realize that it hadn’t been a dream and that the pair in front of him were perfectly capable and willing to give him his final death. “Shit.” He sighed.
“If I do that again, there will be no stopping it, spill it.” Isaac ordered him.
“The woman that runs the slums is named Topaz, or at least that’s what she goes by. She is, or was, I don’t know, in bed, literally, with the duke. Her brother, the captain of the guard, his name is Fernando Stine, and is the father of the duchess’s newborn son.” Benedict dropped an entire wagon load of dirt on the people at the top of the food chain in Sapphirestone.
“Fuck.” Isaac said in a disbelieving chuckle. “This place is a mess.”
“Lua have mercy.” Lenna swore at the same time.
“Where do you fit into all of this?” Isaac questioned Benedict. “What aren’t you telling us?”
Benedict sighed as looked up at Isaac. “I owe a lot of money to both the duke and Topaz.” He explained. “I lost basically everything in the underground casino.”
“More than once.” Isaac surmised. “How much money are you talking about?”
“The duke cut me off at one hundred thousand, plus interest.” Benedict explained.
“And Topaz?” Isaac pressed.
“Five hundred thousand with three times the interest that the duke gave me.” Benedict spoke dejectedly.
“So around what, a million gold in total by now?” Isaac continued his interrogation.
“Eight hundred thousand, only because Topaz takes favors as payment, sometimes.” The Guild Master explained. He sighed deeply again. “I’m finished.” He spoke more to himself than to Isaac and Lenna. “My career is over and I’m in too much debt to ever be free.”
“Yeah.” Isaac agreed. “But one last thing before we leave you to pack your bags and run for the hills.” He told the battered ranger.
Benedict looked up at him with weariness before surprise suddenly overtook his features. Lenna stepped back out of the way as Isaac hauled Benedict to his feet and drug him away from the door. He stopped three steps from the closed door to Benedict’s office. The entire time he had been ramping up his boosting skill. With one smooth motion Benedict was yanked around him and thrown into the door shoulder blades first. The older man yelped and then yelled and then was silenced by the impact. The door shattered under the impact, as did at least one of Benedict’s vertebrae, and the soon to be former Guild Master tumbled across the ground until he slammed into his desk. The lamp that had been sitting on the edge of his desk toppled off of it and bounced painfully off of his cheekbone.
Isaac dusted his hands off on each other and took a quick and contented sigh. “I feel better now.” He told Lenna.
“As do I.” Lenna replied. “I was originally planning on breaking down the door with him, but he dodged.”
“Well, it’s dinnertime, want to get something to eat and then spend the rest of the night on the town?” Isaac asked his mate with a smirk that spoke of trouble and probably no small amount of bloodshed.
“Always.” Lenna replied with a smirk of her own. “For both, the food and the workout afterwards.”