The young wizard’s fireball was strange to Baltasar. Non-standard. Unusual. It was a little spherical barrier, which presumably contained flammable gas, covered by a cloak of flame. He guessed that the barrier would be dismissed upon impact, creating a large blast and preventing the loss of any fuel during flight. It was clever.

In the brief moment that it spent flying toward him, his ancient mage-mind of ninety years’ experience broke the down spell into a curated list of meaningful qualities. He compared these against a discriminatory selection of possible countermeasures, and decided out of an abundance of caution to deploy an additional ward – singularly strong and exhausting – of his own grand design, alongside the other wards that he regularly maintained. Unnecessary, perhaps, but his opponent was no regular wizard. He was the apprentice of Kaius.

Gregor carried himself with predatory poise, though he was meant to be prey.

With respect to this, Baltasar was tempted by his abundant experience with the ineptitude of youth, accrued through tiresome engagement with the young mages of the university, to dismiss this instinct-detected danger as a false conflation between the reputation of the master and the abilities of the apprentice, which wasn’t an uncommon misapprehension among sorcerers. But in this case, he knew that to be deathly folly.

The master here was Kaius, a wizard who most worldly powers considered to be something of an environmental hazard. Baltasar knew this first-hand because he was often hired to tell important people exactly that.

He had advised emperors and kings and senates and dictators, and most carried in their playbooks of state some sort of ‘Kaius Contingency’ – a plan to be enacted in the case of a Kaius Catastrophe, wherein Kaius set himself against them, either by the entreatment of their enemies or by his own rouge intention. Some had even sought preemptive treaties with the wizard to ensure that no Kaius Catastrophe would ever occur.

Had Baltasar not been assured beyond any possible doubt that Kaius was dead and that there would be no retribution for Gregor’s murder, he would be avoiding the boy at all costs. Even a peaceful interaction would be undesirable.

Thus, an apprentice of Kaius was a wizard for whom caution was certainly warranted, no matter how young he may be.

Additional ward speedily summoned with the aid of his wand, Gregor’s attack landed after only a second of flight, and Baltasar never would have guessed that it wasn’t really a fireball at all.

There was no great conflagration, no clouds of fire or smoke. Instead, the cloak of flame that clung to the spherical barrier died, no longer being necessary for camouflage, and the gas inside ignited.

Baltasar’s grand ward covered his whole body. This proved to be nearly useless, because the entire force of the explosion’s concussive emission was focused ruinously upon a single point.

There were no eyes quick enough to see what happened next, but Baltasar felt it.

His grand ward was penetrated by a spike of superheated gas travelling at speed sufficient to seem instant, along with all his other wards too. The spike then went on to pierce his chest, exhausting itself in his lungs. Then, with similar speed, the rest of the explosion followed it in a plume, like the haft behind a spearhead. This less-focused plume of gas expanded within a fraction of a second to fill the space between Baltasar’s wards and his body, threatening to grow the new hole in his lung when the it found that it had run out of free space to fill.

Before he was ripped apart and crushed at the same time by this newly excessive quantity of explosion inside his wards, Baltasar was whisked away by his emergency teleportation charm, which had been triggered by the catastrophic failure of his defences.

Which is to say, he was teleported almost in the instant that Gregor’s attack landed, saved by an impossibly small margin from gruesome death.

The charm only took him several meters to the right, and left him dazed, knowing little about what had just occurred, sure only that he was gravely injured and that Gregor probably had the means to do it again, thus, he chose to flee. Unfortunately, everything had transpired so quickly that an appropriate reaction just wasn’t possible. His mind hobbled by magical and physical trauma, Baltasar hesitated a moment too long.

Fear for Gregor was the last thing that he felt, and his world went dark with a blast that he never heard.

Gregor stared at the corpse for only a second. His new spell had brilliantly passed its first combat trial. However, he had no time to be pleased with the results of this experiment. How long had he been occupied? A minute? Two? It was far too long.

He had to get back to Mildred, lest he fail again.

He needed to leave.

Theoretically, this was a brilliant trap – he was locked in an egress-deficient room within a pocket dimension administrated by some uncompellable other.

As it happened, it was the prevailing opinion among sorcerers that exactly this hypothetical scenario is impossible to escape, which was likely the reason that his captor had chosen to employ this method of detainment. However, in this case, and as is almost universally true, the prevailing opinion was profoundly stupid.

Here, he could simply employ the same method he’d developed to escape his tower during the course of committing his previous failure. Forty feet? No, fifty. Gregor recalled what he could of the building’s bizarre architecture, judging his destination as carefully as urgency would allow.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

With an ear-bursting crack and an eye-searing flash, he ripped space to appear high in the air above the professors’ lodge.

The sun sat sleepy on the horizon and there was no storm. This meant something, he was sure, but hadn’t the luxury of lengthy consideration.

Learning from his previous experience, and not having the time to fall, Gregor teleported down to the ground before he could really begin plummeting. Being that teleportation preserves momentum, his bad leg buckled painfully upon landfall and refused thereafter to bear any weight. That was no problem, because neither did Gregor have the time to walk.

He flashed again to the doors of the lodge, and then again, and he was inside.

Again and again and again he teleported, each time travelling as far down the corridors of the place as he could see, sparing no thoughts for exhaustion. Failure was threatening to manifest.

The corpse of a mage lay supine before the office of Kaius, and gunshots echoed up the twists and turns of the many-doored hallway. Gregor didn’t stop.

He kept flashing and flashing, and eventually he came upon two mages taking cover behind an open door, which somehow didn’t care about the lead that Mildred was sending over to dent it from the around a bend in the hallway.

With all the enthusiasm of adrenaline and hate, Gregor sent his staff whirling end-over-end toward them.

Evidently, they heard the thrum, because the pair turned in time for one of them to witness the coming of his destroyer. The tip of the staff came down hard upon the front of his skull through his feeble wards, digging in and bulging his eyes quite disgustingly. He slumped to the ground, seizing and gurgling.

The other froze and Gregor did not.

He sent a spike of ice toward the mage and it shattered against his wards. At this, the man recoiled, and Gregor swiped telekinetically with his bloodied staff. The mage’s defences crumpled under the blow, and the he lost his throat.

The shots stopped.

“…Gregor?” Mildred called, peeking from around the corner.

She was mostly fine. Her knuckles were bloody and bruised and she had a great bleeding cut on her cheek, but she was mostly fine.

Still, Gregor’s rage grew. These were not the people of the Worldeater.

The enemy had begun opportunistically recruiting locals.

***

The laboratories had not been hard to enter. Astonishingly, there was no need to break in, though they had fully intended to do so.

Instead, the doors were open, and a steady trickle of nocturnal students came and went, with nobody bothering to check that anybody else belonged there, so Mildred and Gregor just walked in, signing false names in a logbook by the door in imitation of several others, and went about their business as if nothing were amiss.

Something was amiss, obviously. The bodies of several important mages were stashed in the walls of the professors’ lodge, but nobody would know that for a while. Probably.

Whether the university decided that he was in the right or in the wrong (neither was to be counted upon), and even discounting the depth of the conspiracy that might be afoot within the institution, Gregor now doubted very much that he would receive speedy permission to use the facilities here, so he didn’t plan to ask.

Instead, he planned to be as quick as possible, for they were now very possibly engaged in conflict within unfriendly lands.

With this mercenary assault upon him, the matter of Mildred’s safety had escalated beyond mere pursuit and ambush. These were enemies raised in levy against him, as might the army of a neutral nation become involved in a dispute between its neighbours. With this, there now existed clearly defined hostile territory, and an enemy who fought him with organisation, rather than merely chasing him and Mildred as they made their way toward hopeful sanctuary.

Thus, he no longer considered this to be some protracted series of fights, but a war – a planned, organised conflict between parties who hoped to compel the other to obedience through the establishment of a monopoly over force.

They wished to compel Gregor.

His offence at the notion could not be understated.

Very well then, he would meet them in war. As it happened, Gregor’s combat doctrine of choice was ‘disproportionate preemptive retaliation’. His enemies would soon know this.

In combat, nothing should be prolonged, so Gregor planned to complete what work was possible in the night, and they would leave in the morning, condensing their time in Harsdorf to the period of a single day.

In fact, he had initially planned to abandon the construction of his eye and leave the city immediately, but Mildred’s staunch refusal had managed to detain him for the night, and as they poked through the laboratory building, she found that his rage had not diminished.

Seeing his steel glare and clenched jaw, she rather responsibly took it upon herself to act as the spokeswoman of the pair and obtain by means of her womanly charm directions to the nicest nearby enchantment chamber, for if Gregor were to interact with any more mages, and in the interest of expediency in finding his way, he probably would, she suspected that the university would quickly run out of corpse-free walls, and then they’d be left without anywhere to hide them.

It occurred to Mildred thereafter, walking beside Gregor to a destination she had obtained guilelessly through the feminine manipulation of an obviously woman-deprived student, that she had killed someone today, which was shocking for the fact that it hadn’t yet consumed her mind.

This marked a stark departure from the last time Mildred had been forced into killing. Back then, her mind had become a terrible mess even in spite of her ablility to justify the act. It had felt as if she were refusing to accept that justification was possible and reasonable, which made her feel so very stupid and naive.

More than that, though, she’d found herself blaming Gregor for not doing it himself and sparing her the trouble of moral anguish, which had been an intensely uncomfortable thing to realise then, and was just as uncomfortable to recall.

But now, there was nothing. The matter of killing had become something that could just slip her mind. It spoke undeniably to a slow and silent change in herself, which was chilling.

Had Mildred adapted to the constant looming certainty of altercations to come? Was Gregor’s casual brutality corrupting her? She felt guilt at the thought, but it was a thought unavoidable.

She didn’t know.

It felt as if she had lost some vital part of herself, which was a sensation curiously similar to grief.