Davey was hurt, but the pain was not as severe as it should have been. The miracle cure the Warlock had packed into the gaping wound in his back had worked wonders. With each step, Davey felt his strength returning. He tested the range of motion in his shoulder, pleased with the results, despite Taylor’s earlier admonitions to avoid such actions. His ribs also hurt less. He had no idea how the Warlock’s cure worked, just as he didn’t understand Cypher’s runes, but he was fine with that. As far as Davey was concerned, the Magi could keep their secrets. He was a man who hit things until they stopped moving, and that was enough for him.

However, the headache was another matter. What had started as a faint sting at the edges of his awareness had grown into a throbbing discomfort with each step. Davey decided he would ask the Warlock about it once they passed through Brixton station. They were close now, and he braced himself for whatever awaited them there.

“Are you alright, Lieutenant?”

Davey blinked, momentarily disoriented by Walker’s voice. It took him a moment to realize she was speaking to him. This was not a good sign.

“Yeah, fine. Just my head hurts,” he whispered back.

“You were muttering to yourself.”

“Was I? I don’t remember…” He trailed off as a sharp pain made him stop and shut his eyes for a moment. When he reopened them, he saw Walker’s face contorted with concern. Before she could speak, an arrow made of bone struck her in the neck. As her body crumpled, another arrow pierced her chest, and then another. She was dead before she hit the ground.

“Ferreus murus!” Cypher yelled, conjuring a curved wall of iron sand with a sweeping gesture. The party dove behind the makeshift barrier as bone projectiles rained down around them.

“Damn it, Cypher. I thought your runes concealed us from sprites,” Warren growled.

“They do!” insisted the Runelord. “These must be human raiders holed up at Brixton station.”

“Not human,” the Hollow Knight said. “Not fully sprite either. Something else. Something… different.”

Warren’s anger simmered beneath the surface. He was growing weary of the relentless changes in this new world. He had barely begun to understand how things worked and had just started to carve out some semblance of a life for himself. Now everything was shifting again—not in a sudden flood like the decade before, but in a glacial, insidious pace that had happened without him noticing. Confronting it now, he felt a fierce urge to burn it all down.

"Captain, if you and your men move in a tight formation, I can protect you until you get close enough to the station,” Cypher said, trying to coordinate their counterattack. Unfortunately for him, Warren’s temper was already frayed.

“Bloody hell, Siddiq, you absolute coward,” roared the Warlock over the hiss of arrows. “Is this all you ever do? Hide behind your walls while others do all the fighting for you?”

Sid was visibly taken aback, and Captain Marshall looked stunned. Warren was relentless in his fury.

“For the past ten years, all you’ve done is sit in your secret bunker and play on the internet!”

“I’ve been developing my runes,” Sid retorted, his annoyance evident. “They’ve helped people…”

“What a convenient excuse for your complete lack of action!" Warren barked back "The only reason you’re here today is because you couldn’t find anyone else to go to London for you.”

“And what about you, Warren? The last few years, you’ve been hiding behind Canterbury’s walls.” Sid sniped.

Warren set his jaw and snarled.

“I retook that city, you pillock. I’ve bled to rebuild the South East.”

Warren’s hand brushed against the pouch at his waist, where he kept a memento from his mentor. Her final words echoed in his mind: “We magus have power. With that, we must become beacons that shine in the darkness. For the sake of humanity and the world to come.”

Sid watched the Warlock's hand, and wanted to interrogate further. However, now was not the right time.

“So what do you propose, Warlock? That you and I just rush in, defeat the monsters, and save the day?”

“Sounds like the perfect plan,” Warren shot back.

“This isn’t a game,” Sid snapped, frustration creeping into his voice.

Cypher’s protests were drowned out by the roar of the Warlock of Canterbury as he vaulted over the parapet, spear in hand, charging through the swirling mist towards Brixton station.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Ignis Arma!” the Warlock commanded before his boots even touched the ground. Runes etched along the shaft and blade of his spear ignited with a searing yellow glow, enhancing the power like a trapped inferno. As he ran, he spun the spear in a wild arc, sending torrents of flame bursting from its tip. The intense heat and fiery torrents created a powerful updraft around him, disrupting the trajectory of the arrows raining down and forming a protective barrier. Warren was grateful that the runes enhanced the spell's ability by generating wind, though he couldn’t bring himself to thank Cypher for the knowledge that had enhanced its effect at that moment.

A ramshackle wall emerged from the mist, a crude fortification constructed from scavenged train parts, remnants from Lightbringer’s time here. Dark figures stood atop the makeshift rampart, drawing arrows and taking aim at the advancing party.

“Zonam Calor!” Warren chanted, extending his free hand towards the wall. Brilliant blue flames erupted from his fingertips, reaching out over twenty feet and igniting the air. Retracting his fingers into a claw, he condensed the flames into a focused beam of searing plasma that tore through the thin steel sheets. The Warlock punched a gaping hole through the wall, large enough for him to leap through. Molten droplets of steel cooled to slag as he passed.

Inside the wall, Warren found himself amidst the enemy—around thirty of them, by his estimate. These creatures were grotesque patchwork abominations, made from disfigured scraps of animal and human parts, contorted into shapes barely recognizable as living beings. They stared at him with an animalistic hunger, their eyes reflecting a primal, unblinking darkness. Some wielded clubs and short bone spears, while others sported more refined metal weapons and scraps of armor. The Warlock cared little about their weapons or their appearance; he was already fully engaged in his task.

Preserving his mana, the Warlock led with his blazing spear, sweeping it in wide arcs to ignite the fur and flesh of the monsters closing in on him. Despite the flames searing through their ranks, they pressed on. The Warlock deftly dodged a massive club swung by one of the abominations. Pivoting on his heel, he thrust his spear into the decaying canine head of the attacker. For a brief moment, an aetherial light flared within the skull before the creature disintegrated into a heap of twitching limbs.

A violent explosion rocked a section of the rampart behind him, signaling Cypher's arrival. The creature perched on top was hurled into the distance, an arrow narrowly missing Warren’s head. The Runelord stepped through the breach in the wall and joined the fray, as the Warlock had instructed him to target the creatures' heads.

“Ferro Meteoron!” Cypher shouted, brandishing his runed silver high above. A flurry of molten scrap fell from the mist, scattering across the battlefield in front of Warren. While it did little to harm the reconstituted abominations directly, that wasn’t Cypher’s intention.

“Discharge!” he commanded, shielding his eyes with a free hand. Warren followed suit, though he was a moment too slow. He partially saw arcs of electricity snaking between the droplets of falling metal. The low buzzing crescendoed into a keening screech within a few heartbeats. Warren braced himself, momentarily concerned for his own safety. Cypher summoned another protective barrier, and the Warlock crouched beside him as the area in front erupted with the deafening boom of a thunderclap.

The blast tore the creatures apart, the enchanted stitching that held their grotesque forms together disintegrating under the force of Cypher’s attack. Muscle was reduced to sludge, and bone shattered into fragments. Yet, even amid the devastation, the monsters remained where their skulls were intact.

“Finish the ones that have been downed; the next wave is mine,” the Warlock commanded, spotting a new wave of monsters streaming from the interior of Brixton station. He charged towards them, his spear still blazing with entrapped fire.

“Ignis Consumet,” he murmured, not igniting a target but himself. The Warlock became the very embodiment of fire. His spell did not harm him but instead cooked everything within a ten-foot radius. As the monsters drew closer, their movements became erratic as their tendons shrank from the intense heat. Chunks of scorched flesh sloughed from their bones before the Warlock finished them off with swift, precise strikes of his spear.

Some of the creatures began to express fear and confusion, calling out to one another by name.

A few turned to flee, but the Warlock showed them no mercy, as the sprites had shown humanity in the past decade.

Turning back towards Cypher, who was dispatching the remaining creatures by elongating and retracting his silver wand into a piercing stake, the Warlock spoke.

“See, Sid. That wasn’t hard.”

“Shut up, Warren,” Cypher retorted. “I’m a support mage, damn it. Attacking like that drained sixty per cent of my mana.” He punctuated his frustration by spiking another skull.

“Well, that was an impressive display regardless. Now, are you going to tell me about those new spells you’ve been working on?”

“Do you really think it’s appropriate to discuss this now? What if we’re attacked again?”

“Let them come. I’ve got time to burn,” said the Warlock, the flaming avatar of Warren Orlock. "although, I'll only have about twenty-five per cent of my mana remaining once this spell wears off in ten minutes.

“Fine! I’ll keep it brief,” Cypher said, spiking another skull with a disgruntled grunt. “Preston Hashimoto was the genius behind the MetaTEC. He was a computer scientist who went a bit off the rails and started exploring occult symbology. He realized that language is just a way for humans to categorize objects and emotions, both through written symbols and spoken words. Try describing fire without speaking or writing it down—it’s impossible.”

The Warlock took a moment to ponder Cypher’s rhetorical point, dismissing interpretive dance as a silly alternative. Cypher spiked another skull and continued talking"

“When Hashimoto built the MetaTEC, he designed its internal circuitry to reflect archaic sigils. He knew this apocalypse was coming and provided us with a tool to defend ourselves.”

“Well, he didn’t do a good job of preventing it,” snapped the Warlock.

“Maybe he was prevented from doing so, but that’s beside the point. Hashimoto loaded the software with a pre-selected set of spells for us to use. I’m not sure why he chose Latin as the base language—perhaps it was a safety measure to prevent accidental activation during normal conversation.”

“That makes sense,” said the Warlock, as Cypher spiked another skull.

“However, his work was incomplete. There’s still room for those who’ve figured out Hashimoto’s coding language to modify the software and create our own spells.”

The importance of Cypher’s words dawned on the Warlock, and he felt a pang of embarrassment for snapping at his friend earlier.

“So, in theory,” Warren said, “someone could develop a spell to end all this chaos?” He gestured to the swirling mist around them. “The world could return to normal?”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been working on for the past ten years, holed up in my bunker, you absolute idiot,” Sid said, angrily stabbing at the final skull on the floor. “Along with trying to help humanity survive, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to win this bloody war.”

“The BT Tower. You want to use the antenna and satellite array to turn the building into a weapon?”

“Well done,” Cypher said, clapping slowly to mock Warren. “You figured it out. Almost. Even with the power of the leyline beneath, the best we could manage is creating a sort of anti-Sprite field—a continuous electromagnetic pulse. In the grand scheme, it’s not much, but it’s a start.”

“Why didn’t you mention this when you recruited me back in Canterbury?”

“And give you false hope? It’s a theory, little more than half-baked guesswork. How could I stand there among all those people and proclaim that I had found a way to save the world? This plan might make things worse, or it might do nothing at all. But it’s worth a shot.”

Sid’s MetaTEC dinged and buzzed as the Runelord reached level twelve.

“Congratulations,” Warren said reflexively. “Let’s find somewhere safe for you to rest, so you can level up, restore your mana, and select a new spell. Then we’ll continue with our quest to save the world.”