48.

A thin steel door was all that was between him and Abraham. Santi stared at it for a moment before opening the door and walking in. The room had been stripped down to the bare concrete floors. Floor to ceiling windows had been broken away and a wind ripped through the room in a constant howl. Abraham stood in the center of the room with his people spread out all around him, weapons pulled out.

Santi looked them over and let his grimace of disgust show. They outnumbered him nine to one and they were scared. He could see it in their eyes, their gaze’s filled with anxiety. They shifted their weight back and forth and were sweating visibly. He wondered where the rest of the cowards were, but he really had come for Abraham. The others would come in time. He started to release his tightly contained mana into the atmosphere.

“Hello, Santiago. I’m sorry about what happened to your father. It must have been hard to see him die again,” Abraham sneered.

“Again?” Santi felt the tug of curiosity rattling the black rage that consumed him.

Abraham pulled a battered and torn up journal from behind his back and tossed it at the floor. It landed with a sharp crack on the ground and Santi took a look at it briefly while staying alert for a surprise attack. It took only a moment for him to realize what it was.

The last time he had seen the journal it had been sitting inside of his college dorm room. Right after Akthyr had visited him and placed the geas on him. Santi had a sudden burst of understanding as the foggy memories became clear. The Grandmaster had blocked his memories of it, blurring it all away.

“How’d you find that?”

“We’re scavengers. Went through that dorm you had and my guys found some stuff with your name on it. The journal was a surprise. It made it all make sense to me,” Abraham said, his voice low and whispery as he began to scowl. His features furrowed, distorting his face as rage crept through him.

“You knew! You knew this was coming and you did NOTHING!” spittle sprayed out of his mouth as he screamed the last word. The others had anger begin to bleed through their fear.

“Yeah. I knew.” It felt good to say it outloud. To finally say it to someone who would remember, even if they weren’t going to be alive for much longer.

“And you just let it all happen? All of this!”

“Couldn’t stop it from coming. Just rode it out the best I could and planned for what I knew I could do. Is this why you killed my Dad? For some misplaced thought of revenge?”

“Vicente was an accident. I didn’t realize he was so fragile, and my own strength took me by surprise.”

“Incompetence killed my father? Is that what you’re going with?” Santi asked, his voice like ice.

“Your incompetence killed the world. If you had figured out how to stop this, nothing would have gone this way!”

“There was no stopping it. It's beyond our control. All I could do was ride it out and save what I could. Which I did.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t really care.” Santi had been releasing his mana into the surrounding environment since the moment he had walked into the door. His power suffused the area, filling the area with his magic. It made it easier to seize the initiative when he cast {Air Manipulation] and ripped all the air out of the room. He created an airtight barrier around them all and watched with satisfaction as their judgemental eyes became panicked as all the air leaving created a brief whirlwind before there was silence.

All nine of them stood in an airless barrier, grasping and scratching at their throats as panic overrode basic thought. They weren’t in immediate danger of asphyxiation, their evolution would stretch out what oxygen they had in their blood before they died. They weren’t comfortable with their new bodies and were panicking, scrambling and grabbing at their throats as they fell to their knees, wasting precious time.

The barrier was thin and fragile. With the power he currently had, twisting a basic spell like this into something complex like the barrier would leave it weak. If they stopped gasping like fish on land and started working towards survival the fight would become closer to fair.

Santi watched them gasp and claw and die slowly. He stared at Abraham, never looking away from the man’s bulging, fear filled eyes. Santi hadn’t had enough time to really think of how he would feel about killing the man. He had been in a state of shock, letting his anger and pain lead him here.

Now he was staring down at his father’s killer as he choked to death. And he felt nothing.

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“Maybe it’ll come later. When the kill notification comes. What did you think when my Dad’s kill notification pinged you. Did you feel shame, or hate, or did you just think it was your right? Because you were strong? That’s what your whole problem with me was, wasn’t it? I was stronger than you and you couldn’t bully me into what you wanted,” Santi said as he waited for them to finally die. Aside from the thin bubble of air around him, the entire floor was in a vacuum. They couldn’t hear him.

Santi felt a weight in the shadows behind, just outside of his barrier. He glanced backward looking at the empty doorway and the familiar presence. He really didn’t want Daniel to see this, but maybe it was good for his shadow to see the depths of the world.

A blade flashed at Santi, shattering both his outer barrier and his own personal air pocket. He jerked to the side and a burning pain ripped through him as a long cut opened up on his left arm. Santi slashed out in return, his own blade slicing the air in front of the unfamiliar man.

A rush of air entered the vacuum in a burst of power, the flash of air throwing the man’s hood backward. Santi’s eyes widened in horror as he stared at one of the Apostates. The man was plain and of average height. Mousy brown hair and flat brown eyes with a medium build. It was a face he had seen before, in the ritual circle, younger and less lined and without scars.

Santi was forced back immediately as the assassin struck three more times before he could blink. His form shifted as he struck, blurring at the edges and then appearing at a different angle. [Gust] billowed across the small space between them and picked up the assassin and threw him back through the doorway. The killer disappeared as he went through the door, his body melting into the darkness.

A hammer whistled through the air and Santi spun and fell to his knees, sliding across the polished concrete. His morph blade took the woman’s legs at the knee, her scream shrill and piercing as she fell in pieces to the floor. The other eight of Abraham’s crew were coming fast at him but he couldn’t worry about them. Another regressor was much more dangerous than the entire squad Abraham had.

He had to get out of the building and do it right now. [Gust] was cast in a full circle around him and Santi poured as much mana into as he could, his body straining under the pressure. The entire scavenger team was picked up and thrown like leaves in the wind and Santi was running toward the windows instantly.

One unlucky soul had been tossed free, sailing through the window with a truncated scream. Santi watched the man fall and leapt out the window, aiming for across the street. The skyscraper across from them was in worse shape, all of the windows broken and easy for him to clear the distance with a quick cast of [Gust] to help propel him a bit further.

He flew into the other skyscraper, landing hard and rolling fast to his feet, his heart pounding. The entire time he had come here to kill the bastards who had murdered his father, he hadn’t felt an ounce of fear. That knife coming out of the dark had sparked an icy thrill that had his heart hammering away.

Santi took in the area he was in. Another ruined office space with lights hanging from their wires, scattered papers and broken furniture. A primus was looking at him confusedly for a second before Santi removed its head. He had to move and move quickly.

Fighting Abraham and his entire crew was already going to be difficult enough, but with the Apostate here he would need to run. There was no way he could fight a mage killer with the full support of a squad of Acolytes. Santi crossed the distance to the doors and shoved them open and looked down at the winding staircase.

It wasn’t going to be fast enough. His eyes were drawn to the closed elevator doors and he acted. There was no time to think things through, he just had to move. Ripping the doors open was easy and he looked to see the elevator cables were still intact.

Santi turned the morph weapon into a hook and grabbed onto the cable. With a thought he closed the hook and jumped down. The morph was able to tighten with a thought, slowing him down as he dropped like a rock. He hit the elevator with a crash, his knees buckling and sending him sprawling. He used the morph to slice apart the top of the elevator in a second, sending a square of metal falling to the interior of the elevator.

Santi hopped in and gagged instantly. A pair of moldering corpses were strewn about, their flesh mostly decomposed but sealed by the doors. Holding his breath he sliced the bottom of the elevator away and fell again, repeating his trick from earlier. He had to guess where he was in the tower, but he thought he was close to the ground floor.

He forced himself to stop and looked for an elevator door. It took a few moments of blind searching before he was able to pry it open, using the morph weapons as a pry bar. The moment the door opened he could hear the hoot and scream of the heavy apes as they came flying toward him.

The alpha had to be close by. The fear Santi had sown in them was gone, overridden by their own anger. Santi booked it straight toward the doors, heart pounding as he screeched out of the door. A pair of apes leapt at him and he disemboweled both of them with a single strike.

He started sprinting, trying to head toward the outer edge of the downtown district. Santi caught a flash of light and dodged, [Air Shield] stopping a wash of flame from overwhelming him. The odds that Abraham’s second rate crew had two pyromancers wasn’t high, but apparently his luck was shit.

The man was posted up in the tower he had just left. A good tactical place to be standing to rain down pain on people on the street. There was little he could do except keep running and casting his shield between the two of them.

The shadows pulsed to his right and he brought his blade up, catching the knife striked headed toward his neck. Icy pain filled his side as a second blade from behind entered his side. Santi bit back a cry and pulsed [Gust] dispelling the shadow magic that had just stabbed him.

His morph blade lengthened and went whip like and he slashed away the shadows around him. A spike of earth came flying at Santi and he was forced to throw himself into the ground floor of another building. Smaller than the scrapers, it was a run down brick building with its windows having been boarded up. The door was solid wood and smashed under Santi’s lowered shoulder as he rolled away from the burst of magic.

He grabbed at his bleeding side, his arms still weeping scarlet. There was no getting around it, he was in a bad spot.