– Era of the Wastes, Cycle 218, Season of the Setting Moon, Day 83 –
Terry had entered the hall with his king spear held in his right hand. His appearance and particularly the drawn blade quickly caught attention. Guests rushed out of the way while some of the bodyguards moved their hands to their own weapons.
Alexander was hurriedly walking to Terry. The look in his eyes was indignant.
Terry ignored all the movements around him. He only had eyes for the invisible vampire bats. He slowly raised his left arm, circled mana into the inscription wraps, and softly flicked with two fingers.
His movement was harmless enough to avoid triggering any of the tense observers, but it was sufficient to send a small surface of translucent golden mana into the vampire bat at the center of the strange purple that was spreading towards the guests.
In an instant, everything turned chaotic and many things happened in quick succession.
The strange purple was interrupted. Immediately afterwards, countless attack spells were shaped from the ceiling with the most prominent guests as their targets.
A large barrier of divine mana appeared to separate the ceiling from the guests. Ambient mana suddenly contracted and rotated into focus refractors to unleash disruption and slice the spell structures apart before the spells could be ignited.
The most capable personal and palace guards jumped into action and prepared their own counters to protect their charges.
A powerful chained spell was successfully activated and dozens of intense fire spears were assaulting the divine barrier.
The divine barrier stood fast while a second layer of translucent golden mana shaped up as additional protection. This successive barrier left a small gap.
In the blink of an eye, a blue-green metallic spearhead pierced through the gap in golden mana to unleash electric havoc on the still invisible vampire bat.
“We’re under attack!” shouted a senior officer from the palace guards.
In the confusion, many guards were pointing their weapons at Terry, who had already half-ascended towards the ceiling.
“Not by him you dimwitted bastards!” roared an elven woman with a black glossy leather mask and dress. Intira removed her mask and crushed a few spheres from her storage bracelets. A group of phantoms rose up and listened to her whispers.
“Vampires at the ceiling!” shouted a dwarf in a much more elaborate variant of the usual city guard uniform. Edmund cursed under his breath and began barking orders.
Alexander’s hurried walk had come to a sudden stop and he was staring with wide eyes. His eyes darted to Daisy and then above. He took off his mask and drew his rapier that rapidly transformed to emit an intense light. “Knights with me! Protect the guests! Protect the Cooperative! Protect our Freedom!”
In a matter of seconds, many Knights of Labor answered Alexander’s call and raised rapiers of light and other aspects next to him.
Terry kept his mana detection focused on Daisy, but his eyes were firmly glued to the bloodied figure forming behind his divine barrier. His lightning blast had torn half of the vampire’s body away but it had not been a killing blow. The damage to her circulatory system had evidently not been sufficient to kill the vampiress.
Strong.
Not strong enough to worry him for his own life, but in combination with the other vampires, it was worrying enough that he had to stay focused. He couldn’t split himself in half, so he had to make a decision.
Terry blinked the distracting purple in his mana sight away while he observed the mana flow in the vampires that were now all undoing their bat transformations. The initial chaos of attacks and counter-attacks had come to an unexpected halt.
“What is this?!” cursed one of the palace guards. He grimaced at the suffocating sensation.
“What is this?!” cursed one of the vampires. He struggled to harvest mana for his spellwork and as soon as anything resembling a proper spell structure was shaped up, it was already torn apart.
This was naturally Terry, who had unleashed his disruption domain. Even though he tried to focus his spell slicers on the vampires, he could not avoid spreading a higher concentration of his naturalized mana – the reason for the suffocating feeling of mana suppression in his vicinity.
“Hey, whose side are you on?” Intira glared at Terry. Her controlled phantoms were cowering next to her – shrinking away from the rotating army of intense spell slicers.
Terry did not move his eyes away from the strongest among the vampires. He was confident he could win, but that was not his primary concern.
[Use the northern exit for the evacuation.] Finger runes shaped up in front of Edmund and the other guards that had taken charge. “What?” exclaimed Edmund gruffly. His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Who…?” [Thralls incoming from the east.]
[Stay close to Daisy and leave.] Another order appeared in front of Alexander’s mana sight. [Be wary of thralls hidden among the guests.]
At various locations around the city, many stronger mana users suddenly found glaringly bright finger runes shaking them out of their drowsiness.
“Just do it!” Terry shouted. He did not have time to elaborate. The suspiciously diverse and still coordinated group of people approaching from the east was bad news when paired with strong vampire presence.
Terry adjusted his divine barriers to dart to the side with the vampires and immediately closed the gap afterwards. He knew that at least some of them would have read his finger runes too.
Once again, the room broke out in chaos.
The vampiress leader emitted an ear-piercing shriek and several guests drew daggers to assault their neighbors, only to find their weapons transfixed in the air. Terry might not be able to identify all the thralls present, but the whole hall was within his casting range. He would be damned if he let any physical object do something he didn’t want to happen here.
Alexander and his Knights of Labor began battling some enthralled guards. With Terry’s support, they performed a fighting retreat while helping the sane guests evacuate. Alexander struck an elegant figure fighting and protecting while giving orders to his fellow knights. The dashing sight almost made Daisy forget her fear.
“Focus on—”! One of the vampires pointed at Terry and wanted to say something, but was interrupted by a blinding light.
Terry furiously circulated mana into his inscribed items. Everything so far had proven his initial suspicion. Those vampires were hostile.
Under the cover of radiating light, he darted on divine barriers and infused a controlled amount of mana into the king spear’s pole to blow the vampires’ heart apart. He used his other hand to place immovable needles around the ceiling.
The vampires were still reeling from the unexpected disruption domain, but they would manage to recompose themselves eventually. Terry wanted to take down as many as possible before that happened.
Darkness descended above the divine barrier. A vampiress had unleashed a veil of darkness to contest Terry’s radiating light inscription. Light banished darkness. Darkness erased light. A battle of mana that Terry did not like wasting.
Terry stopped powering his magic glove and instead embraced the darkness with his mana touch. While the blind fighting posed no problem to him, he soon discovered that his divine barriers were impaired by the darkness aspect and he had to switch to his old style of moving through air with the help of immovable metal. The quarters were narrow anyway and it would conserve mana.
The source of the descending darkness soon found herself assaulted by a sequence of spell slicers, lightning blasts, and keen daggers. Terry did not like the feeling of being impaired in his fighting style and made his displeasure known painfully.
Another vampiress arrived with a weird halberd shrouded in shadow and reeking of blood. She managed to save her subordinate but the darkness had already been vanquished.
While vision returned, the vampiress was dazed by the spear thrust that moved slower than it should given the speed of the hand that held it. When she opened her eyes widely to make sense of the sight, weak but agonizing whips of golden light assaulted her vulnerable eyes.
The pain from the divine pebbles caused her to close her eyes. A piercing spearhead and the successive blast of lightning that roared through her veins all the way to boil her heart prevented her from ever opening her eyes again.
Like a ferocious beast, Terry tore through the vampires. He kicked one of them right onto an immovable needle. He whirled his arm around and a divine hammer smashed a second vampire onto another transfixed needle.
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Terry’s rampage did not end there and many palace guards were staring with horror at the damage to the building from the lightning blasts and the retaliating vampires who were beginning to group up.
The vampire groups dedicated one member to try and block the disrupting spell slicers from reaching those focused on spellwork. They began empowering themselves with self-target spells that were harder to disrupt before engaging Terry in direct combat. They also switched to spells with flexible casting centers to bypass the divine barrier while a few specialists worked on breaking them.
Truthfully, the vampires had reacted quickly. Even so, their blood had already transformed the hue of Terry’s divine barrier from a bright golden into an ominous crimson. It was a sight not only to haunt the attackers, but also the evacuating guests.
Where there was a certain elegance to the fighting retreat of the Knights of Labor, Terry only displayed a savage brutality when eradicating the assailants. Efficient but brutal. Even to those that understood who were the aggressors, it looked like a battle of a monster against monsters. A battle of beasts.
While Terry was facing increasingly well-shielded attack spells, he still had to pay attention to strengthening and replacing his divine barriers to safeguard the evacuation and to allow the stronger guards and guests like Intira into the fight.
When Terry sensed that some of the strongest bodyguards only cared about their direct charges, he shifted a few ill-tempered divine barriers to persuade those powerful mana users that fighting properly was in their best interest.
An irritating voice in Terry’s head told him how much the Preacher would agree with forcing the strongest to fight their fair share.
Piss off.
Terry knew that his divine barriers were what allowed them to avoid the brunt of the attacks to begin with. He protected them when necessary, but he needed them to step up to do their part, because even with his increased mana reach, he could not be everywhere at once. He had his own priorities.
He could sense that many of the hunters and the city guards had reacted to his finger rune signals. Even if they did not trust the source, they were at least ruffled enough to confirm the situation for themselves.
Good.
Someone had to deal with the thralls outside. Even if Terry was directing the evacuation to stay out of their way, they still had to be dealt with. Terry found it hard to put into words how he knew those people to be thralls. A part was the way they moved and another how they grouped up. He could identify some of the different mana sources and those people had little to do with each other.
However, a large undercurrent in Terry’s suspicion was a simple hunch. A hunch driven by something he had believed to see when his mana sight had flashed purple. He did not understand it, but he was sure that he had felt it.
Explosions began reverberating around the area.
The palace guards were hurling lightning at the vampires.
The vampires were summoning walls of fire combined with howling gales and kinetic push spells.
Intira blasted a pillar of rock apart with an empowered spell and shrapnel tore into one vampiress with high speed. As soon as the vampiress began reshaping her body from blood, the blood froze with another spell ignition from the elven huntress. The ice infiltrated into the vampire’s veins and crimson crystals covered her face when she was slowly breathing her last.
Terry broke through another wall with one vampire in his grasp and three more on his trail. The vampire tried to force his dagger-hand away, but he was too weak. Even without relying on mana bursts, Terry could overpower the vampire’s enhanced strength and the red eyes quickly displayed a look of terror.
The fight was as brutal as it was bloody. Terry only had a bit of experience in dealing with vampires, but he understood enough to know that there was no clean way to kill a vampire. The folks infected with the ancient mana curse called vampirism had strong regenerative abilities based on blood. The more powerful the vampire, the more damage had to be dealt to their circulatory system before they could truly be called dead.
Terry used the opening he had cut with his keen dagger to pierce his hand into the vampire’s chest. It wrapped around the heart, crushed, and ripped the remnants out. He kicked and added a blast of lightning from his king spear to be sure the vampire would not reshape again.
His mana-enhanced ears picked up the mumbling: “He’s the problem! We fail, we die! Him or us!”
His mana sight suddenly flashed with the purple layer again and Terry’s attention was immediately drawn to the vampiric leader he had seen before. He found her silhouette enveloped in blood and her eyes glaring at him.
A strange song emerged from the mouth of the vampiress.
Terry felt… nothing. He did not pause to wonder what it meant and instead burst forward with furious mana and a sizzling king spear. He could see confusion enter her eyes, but even so, she managed to dodge and maintain her distance from him.
She was relying on her smooth levitation, while he was jumping circles around her on divine mana with janky shifts of direction triggered by shifting burst techniques or relying on immovable pearls of septimum.
Terry repeatedly interrupted her rapid casting. He obstructed her mana harvesting with his own mana. He ripped the shaped spells apart with disruption discharges. He sensed and dodged the surviving spell structures while the spells were being aimed.
The vampiress was an excellent caster, but her mana foundation and her physical speed lost out to Terry in every way.
Eventually, the vampiress emitted another ear-piercing shriek. Terry was prepared thanks to the early warning signs in his mana perception. He had slowed down and softened the sonic assault by transfixing his helmet to have the immovable septimum interrupt the sound vibrations before they could reach his eardrums.
He retaliated with another thrust of his king spear.
The blood surrounding the vampiress erupted in a furious storm of crimson blades that collided with the dense net of lightning.
Another flash of purple entered Terry’s mana sight and he realized that many of the other vampires had stopped their own fight to instead mumble some kind of chant. The rhythm of the chant matched the movements of strange purple he saw around himself.
Terry still did not feel anything. He unleashed a disruption pulse just to be cautious.
Something finally tipped off the vampiress that their combined magic wasn’t working and she muttered: “Impossible.”
It was too late.
Terry had finally found the perfect opening to unleash the heaven’s fury underneath the open sky and a lightning blast more intense than anything he had displayed in the battle before tore the vampiress apart.
The vampiric leader did not shame the rumored resilience of vampires and she still glared at Terry even while all of her lower body and half of her face were missing. “...what are you?”
By now, Terry had an idea of what was going on. He continued unleashing a flurry of attacks and sneered. “Soulless. Tough luck for you.”
The dying vampiress stared at him and huffed a word he did not expect to hear: “Liar.” She gurgled blood and forced out a spiteful last hiss: “This changes nothing!”
The longer they fought, the easier it got. More mana users awoke from the noise or by those whom Terry had tipped off with finger runes. Not long after the first hunters had made contact with Intira, all of them were roaming the streets for vampires and thralls alike. The city guard, too, was out in full force.
Soon, Terry was free to catch up with Daisy and to escort her back to the Flower House. He made sure to continue sending messages to the various people defending the city. He transmitted the locations of the remaining vampire bat signatures. There weren’t many.
Nearly none of the vampires had attempted to escape. A part of Terry wondered why, but he had more urgent and more important matters to attend to.
First, he had to make sure that Daisy remained safe. When he arrived at the Flower House, he could not help but raise an eyebrow at the cloaked signature he felt inside.
No wonder I didn’t find him among the hunters.
Terry had wondered why the leader of the hunters and the Import-Export Cooperative was not among the guests of the masquerade ball. Surely, the Whisperer would warrant an invitation. However, it appeared evident that the man preferred other company over the various elites attending the ball.
Terry could feel that Thiago was inside together with Jasmine. He could also tell that the man had placed skeletal warriors and a few hunters to guard the Flower House.
Terry ignored the hunters glaring at him and led Daisy inside. He glanced at Jasmine and asked: “Everything alright?”
Jasmine did not answer and first rushed to hug the shaken Daisy. “Thank mana you’re safe.”
Terry moved his eyes to the man next to Jasmine and saw Thiago nod at him. That man and his hunters had made his life in the city unbearable by making it impossible to earn the money he required to get home to Arcana. Now, Thiago stood there and casually nodded a greeting as if nothing had happened. As if nothing was happening. Completely unperturbed by the nightly assault.
What a strange man.
Terry felt strangely detached from the situation. On the one hand, he felt like punching Thiago to vent his financial frustrations. On the other hand, he was relieved to see another person stepping up to protect the Flower House this night.
Above all, Terry had other things to worry about. He had barely registered when Alexander and his knights had taken their leave. He had not talked much with Daisy for the rest of the way either. He had barely processed what had happened.
All because his mind was furiously racing to make sense of the purple layer in his mana sight. Instead of returning to the inn, Terry sat down in the Flower House’s reception hall and retrieved a fresh notebook.
Even though it was true that he had always been busy, Terry started to suspect that he had put the topic of the purple mana sight off for too long. Clearly, there was something about it. Something that could be the difference between understanding a situation and remaining ignorant.
Terry had acted on a hunch when he poked the vampires into action. Without the strangeness of the purple that had been spreading in his mana sight, Terry might not have persuaded himself to take action at the risk of unnecessarily poking his nose into someone else’s business.
Deep down, Terry still believed this was someone else’s business. The magic that resulted in the purple spread had also targeted Daisy and as her bodyguard, that had made the attack his business. For the evening that was.
However, Terry very much doubted that those vampires had Daisy or the Flower House as their real target. According to Alexander, the masquerade ball hosted the most important people of the country. As such, Terry could come up with countless scenarios that had little to do with the Flower House, or him for that matter.
Perhaps the previous rulers were staging a restoration coup? This wasn’t Terry’s country as those like Tamsin or the receptionist at the Guild liked to remind him. He was mostly ignorant of the country’s history and he was just passing through. He didn’t feel entitled to choose a political side, nor did he truly feel invested in it.
Perhaps some cooperative was trying to get rid of competition? Or a second-in-command looking to accelerate their succession? Why would he care about beasts biting at each other?
Or perhaps someone had their financial livelihood sabotaged by the cooperatives and finally snapped? Terry could certainly relate, even though his own retaliation fantasies had never gone beyond a good pummeling.
No matter which way, it seemed like none of his business. He was planning to leave the city. Let the Guard Cooperative do what they are paid to do.
Terry got busy scribbling and testing different mana circulations. He did not feel like sleeping. He felt the urge to master the purple layer in his mana sight. Previously, his focus had mostly been on how to get rid of it when it appeared since it was distracting. Now, however, he wanted to control activating it. That would be the first step in understanding it.
***