Reud watched the slowly unfolding chaos with a smile.
The spell was working perfectly, exactly as he had intended. A self-replicating reanimation spell, primed with a mind that imparted a voracious need to attack anything still alive. A spell designed for war, to sow chaos and death in the ranks of an enemy army, without the need for a necromancer to put themselves at risk to raise each individual undead. Already, he could see at least three independent zombies from where he was stood in the shadow of a building, each seeking out three separate targets. None of the out-of-control amalgamation he’d had in the spell’s previous iterations.
No, that particular mistake would stay locked far beneath Srinaber forever.
As far as he could tell, the spell was consuming the mana charged to it at the expected rate, all drawing from the locus body, the Seeker whose soul was fuelling it. The spell had around fifty more replications left before it burned through its mana and the man’s soul, hopefully more than enough to take out the entire enclave. Reud had been a little conservative with the mana allotted to it, unwilling to risk any mistakes this time around.
After all, this close to the rest of the city, a mistake could have disastrous consequences.
A shout, followed by the clatter of metal on stone, signalled that another sentry had been brought down. The men manning the walls for the night had abandoned their posts to investigate the commotion, an action that brought them swiftly to their demise.
Fools. Despite how competent they’d seemed, these were men who had never seen combat, didn’t have the vigilance and fear that risking their lives would have instilled into them. That made them complacent.
Easy to exploit.
Casting out his mana, Reud bolstered the undead, topping up their energy reserves in preparation for combatting the Seekers. Soon he would have more than enough to push on through the main barracks, and then on to the chambers the Seeker mages resided in. He’d have to be careful to exclude them from the auto-reanimation spell before they died.
He wanted their corpses for himself.
A flare of new undead sprang into life in the core of the barracks, the mana remaining in the spell dropping drastically. Evidently, a large fight had just ended there, with the Seekers once again coming up short. Which meant it was time for him to move.
Reud walked across the empty ground of the compound, bouncing his liberated crossbow in his hands, shivering slightly as a chill wind cut straight through the tunic and breeches he was clothed in. The Seeker armour he’d worn to walk right in to the enclave he’d discarded in the magebane-laced central building, its mana draining properties far outweighing the protection it provided.
The barracks interior was a scene of true horror. Well, to anyone but Reud, anyway. Bunk beds that had once lined a long room lay in tatters, their sheets torn and discarded, the wood broken. Here and there, weapons lay discarded on the ground, some tangled with the Seeker armour, likely due to their previous wielders haste to brandish them.
And everything was stained with blood.
Undead shambled towards the far end of the room, their bodies exhibiting a vast variety of wounds. Reud took the opportunity to pull some swords free from zombie bodies, the undead immediately strengthening as the magebane cores of the weapons no longer drained the undead’s ability to fight. He wanted them to be at their peak condition for what came ahead.
A flare of mana caught his attention, coming from the next room. The canteen, from what he’d been able to scout out. Evidently, the Seeker mages, unlike the soldiers, weren’t in their beds.
And they had joined the fight.
Urging the horde on, Reud pushed through into a corridor that led to a pair of double doors, then through into the room beyond. The room was huge, easily large enough to fit a hundred people. On the far side of it, a dozen Seekers faced down an equal number of undead, fending off the horde from behind a makeshift barricade of overturned tables. At their centre stood three men, each with eyes of blazing amethyst, and in their middle with eyes blazing brightest of them all stood the man with the spiral scar.
Reud’s eyes narrowed. This man would die tonight for the crimes he’d committed against the Rudean people.
Spiral-scar stood at the centre of a maelstrom of mana, flashes of light flickering out to consume undead after undead, sending them reeling. The distinctive magic of a mentamancer, or illusionist as they were otherwise known, wielding spells that could confound the mind and muddle the senses. And this one was strong, if he could even befuddle the senses of Reud’s minions.
As one of the flares of light settled on a zombie, it turned and struck one of its companions, sending them both stumbling. The soldiers behind the barricade took the advantage of the opening to lash out, cutting the back of the undead’s legs and collapsing it to the floor. A small victory, but a hollow one.
There were more than enough undead to replace those that fell.
The other two mages beside spiral-scar were a kinetomancer, his body glowing with faint light as he struck out again and again at the upcoming horde, and a biomancer, the man dashing between any instance of injury and instantly healing it away. Only through the tireless efforts of the three mages was this final pocket of resistance able to withstand the great horde bearing down on them.
The healer was by far the greatest threat, able to let the group fight more recklessly and ignore all the minor injuries that would have drained their strength. He would have to die first.
Reud raised the crossbow, sighting down its length. It was a sturdy construction, well-made, without any discernable flaws. It was all curved lines and strategic cutouts, and it was both lighter and stronger than any that had been available in his time. Above its trigger, a small tube had been affixed, with a cross inscribed on each end, presumably to help the wielder to sight their shots. The bolts it took were thin, with a barbed tip and a spiral of magebane running along their length. All in all, it was a fantastic piece of weaponry, a fact that irked Reud to no end.
He hated admitting when Lightire did something right.
Closing one eye and looking through the tube, Reud lined up the biomancer’s chest at the centre of the cross, and squeezed the trigger. The crossbow kicked and blasted the bolt out, straight and true, the whistle of its passing barely audible over the din of the battle.
And thudded home right into its target.
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The man grunted and slumped back, surprise filling his face as he stared down in horror at the bolt sprouting from his sternum. He raised his hand to the wound, his face twisting in an effort to do… something. Heal himself, probably.
But the magebane impaling him put a stop to any of that.
The attack, however, had alerted the Seekers to Reud’s presence. First one soldier, then the rest, let out cries as they gestured towards him, finally attracting spiral-scar’s gaze.
“You! Who are you?!” He shouted. “How dare you attack the Seekers!”
Reud shouted back. “You must have known that child kidnapping would eventually come back to bite you, right?!”
“Child kidnapping?” Spiral-scar spat and gestured with one hand, sending a pulse of light out that sent the zombies stumbling back. “You filthy primitive barbarians, you should learn to know your place in front of your betters! We’re doing valuable research here!”
“Valuable research!” Reud felt a flare of anger break through his otherwise calm thoughts. “You think that taking-”
A knife tore through this shoulder, sending a lance of pain through his body. Reud stumbled but caught himself, gritting his teeth in annoyance. Of course, launching into a dialogue in the middle of a fight was a stupid move, especially with enemy mages on the other side.
No, enough talk. It was time to finish them.
The kinetomancer raised another knife, his arm glowing with even brighter light. Reud ordered the zombie horde to close ranks, creating a wall of undead between him and the mage, unwilling to take another knife anywhere in his body. The pain was easy to ignore, especially when he knew he had the ability to wish it away at any point, but that didn’t make it pleasant nor desirable to experience.
Despite the loss of the biomancer, the Seekers were still doing an admirable job of holding the undead off. Behind the barrier, spiral-scar and the kinetomancer were a flurry of mana and mayhem, the protection the pile of tables provided just enough to tip the balance in their favour.
So, Reud had to remove that barrier.
Raising a hand, Reud grabbed a zombie, bolstering the spell that animated it with so much mana that it glowed with a faint green light. More spells went into it, binding its flesh together tighter, enhancing its muscles even further. The strain of such magic would shred the soul even faster than it was already deteriorating, but that was of no concern to Reud. It had exactly one task to do, and by Vistol it was going to do it well.
Then, with a thought, he sent it sprinting forward.
At the last moment, the zombie wall opened to let their comrade through. Spiral-scar turned, spotting the creature barrelling towards the barricade. Light speared out from him to consume the undead, trying to befuddle it into uselessness.
Too little, too late. Right now, Reud was fully in control.
The zombie threw itself forward, bouncing over the barricade and slamming into the soldiers behind. Panicked screams filled the air as the soldiers hacked at the creature that had suddenly appeared in their midst, but their blades could do nothing but scratch its skin. The rest of the horde surged in, tearing the now-unmanned barricade away, before charging through the breach.
A memory surfaced in Reud as he watched the ensuing melee. A similar situation, long long ago. The battle when he had lost Lilia, deep in the depths of the East Rudean Dungeon. He’d used the same tactics then too, with similar results. Though, what had followed had been…
No! He had to focus.
Reud turned his attention back to the fight. Zombies clawed out at panicked Seekers, bringing them down in droves. Some still wielded the weapons they had carried when alive, and they were using the blades to devastating effect. Only the two mages seemed to be able to combat the onslaught, desperately pumping out mana, barely holding back the ever-building tide of death. The soldiers, on the other hand…
It was a slaughter.
Then, suddenly, the surge of mana from spiral-scar cut off. Reud frowned, peering through the mass of zombies, trying to spot the man. He didn’t seem to be dead, but why had he stopped fighting? What was he-
Ah. He should have known.
The man had pulled a silver pendant out from under his clothes, and was fumbling with the clasp. It popped open, an azure crystal revealed within, shimmering with an internal light. The same kind of crystal Sar had used to escape and destroy Srinaber.
Spiral-scar pulled it free and glared at Reud, a snarl spreading across his face. “You brought it to this, mage!”
The kinetomancer’s eyes widened in horror. “Lord Seeker, no, you can’t! I’m still here!” He shouted.
Spiral-scar wasn’t listening.
He crushed the crystal, unleashing the magic bound within. Immediately, the blue light spread out from that point to cover the man’s skin, the intricate spell distorting the air with the sheer mass of its mana. Soon, the spell would teleport the man away, and bring a sphere of destruction here in his place. A sphere that was likely already surging into life at the other end.
But Reud had seen this magic before, studied it in detail before, and burnt to death for his efforts in doing so. He certainly wasn’t going to be caught out twice.
He threw out a hand to the activating magic, throwing out every scrap of mana he could summon. It slammed into the spell, weaving through the delicate whorls and spirals of the magic, threading itself deep within.
He’d spent a lot of time thinking about this magic over the last few weeks, ever since Sar had used it to escape, considering its flaws if ever he faced it again. It was a spell that identified a person, then swapped them with a second spell right on the verge of detonation. Spatial magic of the highest complexity, implementing concepts that hadn't even existed back before the war. It had two main flaws, from what he could tell. The first was that the component that identified a person was fragile, forming the majority of the spell’s intricacies. The second was that the sphere of destruction that it dropped had to have been building before the teleportation occurred, being swapped only when it was too late to prevent its detonation. A fantastic approach to ensure its deadliness.
That, however, had given Reud an idea. A hypothesis that he hadn’t been able to test, but he’d kept in the back of his mind for just an occasion such as this. What if something were to disrupt the identification of a person? In that case, the magic would not transport the user away, and more importantly, would not transport the orb here in their place. The orb that was primed to go off in moments.
Which would be a real shame for whatever facility these spells were coming from, now, wouldn’t it?
The spatial magic, however, was far too complex for Reud to unravel in the moments before it activated, but that didn’t mean he had to helplessly watch it go off.
After all, if you can’t pick a lock, you can always kick the door down.
Reud wrenched his mana back through the portion of the spell that identified a person, tearing the delicate magic to shreds in the process. Instantly, the blue glow that consumed spiral-scar fractured, chunks of azure light skipping out across the walls and floor, the remains of the barricade, the zombies and remaining soldiers, the body of the fallen biomancer, the kinetomancer fighting by his side.
Horror twisted spiral-scar’s face. “What have you-”
Then the spell activated.
The magic shattered as it collapsed under its own weight, chunks of the fragmented spell burning through the mana in the air in their attempts to complete the working. The frayed ends of the magic latched on to other parts of the spell, cannibalizing those workings too, causing a cascade of out-of-control disruption that tore the magic to pieces. Everything touched by the blue light vanished, then reappeared, switched with each other randomly.
An action deadly to anything touched by it.
The whole end of the room turned to a mass of red that exploded out to splatter across the floor. In an instant, a melee of almost fifty bodies turned into a sea of gore, the parts of the combatants so thoroughly annihilated that Reud couldn’t feel even a single anchor for a soul left. The weakened walls collapsed into the mess with a shower of broken stone, the cascade taking out great chunks of the ceiling too.
Reud held his breath, waiting for the appearance of the wall of fire that would send him back to oblivion. But it never came. A fierce smile broke out on his face at that. His theory had been proven true, the spell had never arrived, which meant it had detonated at its origin point.
It was high time the Seekers had a taste of their own medicine.