Nate heaved, trying to catch his breath and ignore the torment that was his partially melted chest.

“What other Master tier Sigils do you know?” demanded Caroline Lambert.

“Right, left, release,” he muttered, spittle dripping down his chin.

“What nonsense are you on about?” demanded Fabien, brandishing his burning wand again which caused Nate to flinch.

Caroline put a restraining hand on the young noble's shoulder and pointed to the table in front of Nate.

“Draw them,” she demanded.

Nate struggled to pick up the pencil, his muscles twitching from being clenched through the pain of being burned. He began to scribe out all three Sigils, detailing their Apprentice tier versions that he knew. Even in his pained and delirious state, he refused to give them what they wanted. So long as they thought he had a use, they would keep him alive. Burned and scarred, but alive.

Spinning the paper around to face Caroline he spat some blood on the floor from where he had bitten his own tongue while Fabien had been melting the skin on his chest. As he looked back up he didn’t get a chance to react as Caroline’s open palm slapped him across the face, jostling his broken jaw. The numbness from the potion she had forced down his throat was all that kept him from screaming again, but even that was starting to fade.

“You think I can’t recognise an Apprentice tier Release Sigil?” she hissed, her purple eyes locking with his green.

When she saw the defiance in his eyes she ground her teeth before leaning back and nodding to Fabien who happily stepped forward, flaming wand in hand. Nate closed his eyes and prepared for round three. Or was it four? It was getting hard to keep track. Either way, he could take a little more, even as a tear trickled down his cheek. He just hoped it would end soon.

*************

Kiri stared through the window into the room where they were holding Nate from her vantage point on the opposite side of the warehouse. Between Soul Shift, A Hidden Soul and her spell Wisps of Shadow she might as well have been invisible to these people. It was just fortunate they couldn’t sense her emotions because the white hot fury she felt as she saw them start burning Nate was so all encompassing that anyone with an emotional sensory Skill would’ve been able to feel her from a kilometre away. There was one thing she was certain of and that was that tonight a lot of people were going to die. Drawing her Dagger of Torn Soul she prepared to go to work on each and every person involved in harming her friend.

Soul Sense covered over a hundred and fifty metres which let her know roughly how many opponents she had. There were fifteen in the warehouse, not including Nate and herself. She debated whether she should go and get Deverell for backup but instantly discarded the idea. They were torturing her best friend. Even if Deverell was in his room, which wasn’t guaranteed, the precious minutes spent getting him could cost Nate his life. It would also cost her a sizable portion of her soul energy to use Soul Shift over such distances quickly. It didn’t help that the docks, where this warehouse was located, were on the opposite side of the Capital to the Adventurer’s Guild. Besides, she thought, I can take them.

Creeping forward she moved around a set of crates to take out the first lookout. His eyes slid over her even as she approached him quietly. A Hidden Soul was a very odd type of stealth skill. Unlike most stealth skills, which concealed the user using things like shadow or light, A Hidden Soul focused on the mental act of awareness. Even as it drained away her soul energy, the Skill convinced her target that she wasn’t there. His mind simply refused to see her, even as her hand covered his mouth and her enchanted dagger, coated with her own soul energy courtesy of Soul Imbuement, slipped into his throat. She made sure it kept going till it cut through his spinal cord, and like a puppet with its strings cut, the man collapsed to the floor.

Stepping over the pooling blood she vanished, Soul Shift taking her to her next target. Everything was going fine until she reached her fourth target. The skinny rat-faced man glanced up as she approached and she felt a wave of soul energy attempt to wash over her, sliding through her skin to attack her mind directly.

“Stop,” the rat of a man said confidently, slowly standing.

A smile crept onto her face as she ignored his mental Skill with only a small amount of difficulty. Using her own Command the Soul would take too much of her soul energy and she wasn’t convinced it would work on the Mentalist, so instead she dashed at him as she enhanced herself with Soul Imbuement.

“Intruder!” yelled the rat of a man even as he barely made it two steps before she was on him.

One dagger became nine as she finally unleashed Tethered Soulblade Dancing to her full capabilities, seven arms made from soul energy and mana blooming around her as she drew forth daggers from her recently evolved Soul Storage. The blades flashed in a hurricane of strikes, leaving the Mentalist dead from over fifty stab wounds in less than a couple of seconds.

She was annoyed at herself as she stepped over the corpse. She had hoped to take down more of them before she was discovered. Now she was going to be forced into battle with at least ten unknown combatants. Walking forward, blood dripping from her fanned out tethered arms she glared forward. Everyone in this place was going to die for harming her best friend. Every. Single. One.

*************

Nate glanced up, catching his breath even as his chest screamed in pain. What was the word he had just heard? Intruder?

“Find out what is going on Darren!” demanded Caroline as she stared at the door worriedly.

The mercenary opened the door, moving to step out. Instead he was knocked back into the room as a body impacted him. It was followed a moment later by the sound of shattering glass as a second body was launched through the window, knocking Fabien to the floor.

Nate, his mind hazy and thoughts sluggish beneath the pain and alchemical mixture, took that moment to strike at the distracted Mana Suppressors. Throwing as much of his mana as he could channel at the suppression he was rewarded with a groan of pain from the man in the middle. Continuing to try and flood the area around him with his mana he grinned as the man's nose started to bleed, his eyes beginning to roll up into his head.

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There was a flash in front of him as Kiri appeared, her tethered arms flashing out at the mercenary leader. Instead of the expected blood the man weathered the blows with his body before punching Kiri so hard she flew back out of the broken window. A moment later the mercenary was out the window after her. It didn’t matter though. She had bought Nate enough time and distraction. The unconscious man across from him was all he needed to see. Three mana suppressors had managed to keep him down, but two were just not going to cut it. Forming a rune from memory was hard, but far from impossible and Runic Creation coupled with Empowered Runic Artistry let him form a Mana Gathering runic array with enough power to brute force the suppression. As mana rushed into the room he sent a burst of his own mana into the room, activating True Teleportation which took him out of his chains and across the room even as flames engulfed where he had been held captive just a moment ago.

Farsight of the Runic Artist bloomed with his mana no longer completely suppressed and he activated True Teleportation two more times, teleporting his robe directly onto him from outside the room where it had been draped. The second was his spatial storage ring which he teleported into his pocket for now. His robe rubbing against his melted chest was excruciating but his anger was far worse than any pain could be. How dare they take him and torture him just because he had something they wanted! It was his fear of being put in a box and used ratcheted up to the maximum. He had never wanted to hurt anybody as badly as he wanted to hurt Fabien at that moment, and he knew, even before he acted, that he would never lose a wink of sleep over killing these people.

Flames rushed at him but he teleported again to the other side of the room, watching as the flames torched a second of the people who had been suppressing his mana. Caroline was curled up in the corner and he could sense a barrier had sprung up around her. It seemed she hadn’t completely squandered the knowledge he’d traded with her. Runic Creation formed his barrier rune as he linked it with his powerful fire rune through Empowered Runic Artistry. The third wave of flame that washed over him did nothing, just as it had done nothing in their previous fight. His second rune was twofold. An Illusion of himself using his Illusion Control runic array that left him invisible even as his illusionary double appeared on the opposite side of the room next to the last mana suppressor.

The mana suppressor yelled in fear even as Fabien screamed in rage and fear, unleashing a wave of fire that melted the woman into her seat, her mana suppression Skill failing to prevent the flames from reaching her.

Nate hadn’t wasted any time, forming a third runic array made from his Life and Drain runes. Dropping the illusion Nate walked slowly towards Fabien, his chest itching as his Life Drain runic array slowly funnelled energy to him from the flaming second son of some Earl.

“No! No! No!” Fabien kept repeating as he launched fireballs ineffectually at Nate’s fire resistant Barrier.

Nate kept walking towards him, forming a runic array he hadn’t used in a long time. It was hard to directly influence another person's body with mana if you in any way, shape, or form, were going to alter their mana. Teleporting obviously meant moving their mana. Draining or suppressing their mana, obviously. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t affect other aspects of their body. Like increasing the heat, or in his case, draining away the water. He’d always wondered if it would be made easier through physical contact.

Reaching out, even as Fabien pressed his back against the wall, Nate gently took Fabien’s hand. With his barrier removed from his hand he could feel the gentle skin of the noble's hand against his own. Then he activated the Water Drain runic array and pulled the water from Fabien’s body. Blood and clear water flowed out of the man's orifices even as his skin withered.

Nate stepped away to crouch down in front of Caroline, ignoring Fabien’s desiccated body and the flow of processed mana into his Class Core. The sound of battle continued in the warehouse but he wanted to make sure the Enchanter didn’t get a chance to escape his wrath. Besides, Kiri could handle herself. She’d yell if she needed him. With a small smile he reached out and touched her barrier with his unprotected finger.

“Not bad work. The problem with barriers is they take a lot of mana to keep up unless you can aspect them correctly. This looks like a very standard barrier though. Which means it’ll wear down pretty quickly I am thinking,” he explained in a monotone voice, unable to muster his anger and fury now that Fabien was dead.

Stepping back he withdrew a small metal bar from his spatial storage. Caroline had been right about it. It was only Rare quality. What she had failed to recognise was that it had an affinity. Activating Conceptual Automation he used Conceptual Intent to force the resulting construct to target the Enchanter, finally adding the subconcepts of crushing and unrelenting to the mix. The small Gravity Construct slowly formed as a hazy image of a planetary body. He sensed through his sphere of awareness as it began its attack and ignored Caroline’s scream as he walked out the door to see how Kiri was doing.

*************

Kiri had the strength of a gryphon flowing through her soul as she charged at the hulking man in front of her, using her shoulder to launch him into and then through a stack of crates. She had been hoping to save the gryphon's soul for grading out of the intermediate Combat subject. But using it now was a small price to pay, as far as she was concerned, for the freedom of her friend. There were only two souls left in the room above and one of them was Nate. He was fine, which meant she was free to vent her frustration against the durable piece of shit before her.

She watched as Darren climbed out of the latest set of crates she had launched him through, barely a scratch on him. She had quickly realised he was over level sixty. An Embodiment for durability was her prime suspect, as he hadn’t used any Skills that she could see. Even his soul energy was durable, resisting the draw of Soul Drain to an extent.

Shaking himself, chips of wood falling off of him, Darren grinned at her, “Ya’r tough girl. I’ll give ya tha’. Fuckin’ fast as well.”

Kiri dodged the attacks as Darren came at her again, Soul Imbuement flooding her with a ridiculous amount of soul energy. She would gauge Darren at being tougher than she was. In strength she thought they would be evenly matched until the gryphon’s soul was fully expended. But in terms of speed she left him in the dirt, dancing around his strikes with ease.

“Fucking fast is right,” she quipped, whipping a dagger at his eye so fast that he didn’t even get to blink as it slid in a centimetre. The scream of pain was music to her ears. She only wished she could make him suffer more.

She backed away and smiled brightly as Nate appeared next to her, once more clothed in his dark blue robe.

“He seems annoyingly durable,” commented Nate, his voice hoarse and tired.

“I was just waiting to make sure you had everything under control,” she explained before glancing at the man and expending almost all of her remaining soul energy.

“Go to the Etrua Adventurer’s Guild and tell them how you kidnapped Nathaniel Weber,” she intoned, her words driven by Command the Soul. The Skill had taken a full quarter of her full soul energy capacity, but it was doable considering her Size of a Soul meant she could hold over four times as much soul energy as the average person. The mercenary instantly responded by dashing through the closed warehouse door in the direction of the Adventurer’s Guild, leaving even more broken wood on the ground in his wake. She just hoped he would stick to the roads on the way to Guild.

There was a short scream from the room above before she felt the last living soul in the building vanish. Processed mana flowed down towards them both, though she suspected Nate was ignoring the level up notification just like she was.

She watched as Nate sat down on the floor and scooted up next to him, putting an arm around him.

“It’ll be okay,” she whispered softly. “I even got you a present!”

Nate’s laugh in response broke the dam of her own emotions as she wrapped her arms around her best friend. She had come so close to losing him. Holding each other they sobbed for a few moments until a small bloom of soul energy appeared, forming into a small blue goblin that looked up at them excitedly.

“Hey Boss, what’d I miss?!?!”