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Arcanist - Chapter 24
🕑 Added 2025-03-09 12:24:10 +0000 UTCBlasting flames scorched the bones, ate away whatever rotten flesh was left dangling from the skeletons, and sent a foul reek across the cave. Valens’s nose was full of the smell of his terrible deed. Walls groaned behind him. Men yelped and fell back, wide eyes staring up at the rising waves.
The world faded, and he was left alone standing there, feet over the rock, hands stretched out toward the tide like a priest about to relieve the dead from their unsolved miseries. They burned, and he watched, Apathy tattering in the back of his mind.
Why work around the wounded when you can rid yourself of the source?
Why help the senseless men at all?
It was simple work down in the cave—him and the screaming corpses, men watching in awe, not knowing quite what they should make of him. All a matter of perspective, now that Valens thought about it. A slight adjustment was all it took to twist things in their favor.
There was a satisfying crunch to it when the bones snapped, a gratifying well of zest rising in his chest when he saw how they broke against his spell.
Looked like all he needed was two hands, after all.
You have managed to defeat [Skeleton Soldier - lvl 64]! For killing a creature above your own level, you are granted bonus experience.
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
You have managed to defeat [Skeleton - lvl 65]! For killing a creature above your own level, you are granted bonus experience.
You have managed to defeat [Skeleton - lvl 59]! For killing a creature above your own level, you are granted bonus experience.
You have managed to defeat [Skeleton - lvl 61]! For killing a creature above your own level, you are granted bonus experience.
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
…
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
Mana gurgled out in sloshing waves from his hands, feeling stronger than ever, thicker than what he dealt with in the past. It was pure thrill tasting it on the roof of his mouth, seeing them get slathered with flames and crumble there in pieces.
Ding! [Inferno(Adept): 2 > 3]
Ding! [Mana Manipulation(Master): 8 > 9]
Ding! [Mana Manipulation(Master): 9 > 10]
The Resonance rang loud in his mind as he kept his sound vision around the burning din. He saw a stubborn Skeleton Soldier trying to drag itself away from the chaos, its left leg riddled with cracks that stretched further up with each step, stumbling its way through the others and setting the back lines in flames.
Another one was thrashing over the ground, bony hands digging the dirt and plastering mud around its ribcage, hoping either it’d keep it safe from the storm or keep the rot alive just enough to live through this hellish nightmare.
Valens’s fingers strained, and for a moment mana grew still in his chest. He paused at the sensation. The fiery threads were still blasting heat forth in an uninterrupted stream, rolling in waves about the wavering line, but there was a clog to the spell, building a sort of pressure that tried to rip his fingers off.
That tore his mind away from the strange lull he’d found himself in watching the scene. He blinked. An emptiness gnawed open his chest and lingered there, like a part of his ribcage had suddenly gone missing. But there was nothing wrong in the Resonance. He was all well and healthy, at least on a cursory glance.
Warmagic was dangerous for a reason, Master Eldras had always said. The Magi of the old weren’t unrooted just because they were a warmongering bunch. The more they delved into the arcane, the more they’d become something higher than a human, but perhaps lesser of mind, which was the cause of instability.
Or, Valens then thought, this sudden self-reflection could be the result of a shackled mind. Of a history twisted and told by the winners. Of an authority so scared of a time long past that it decided to drill into the newer generations a certain fear so that they would behave in a way that was appropriate.
For who?
Was it possible that even he could’ve been the victim of their paranoid practice without knowing? He was of Empire born, lived all his life under the same authority that forced him to cage his talents, to play the same role as most of his peers. Never yearn for more. Be grateful for the things as they are.
But that didn’t work, did it? No matter what they did, Valens had never managed to quench the fire burning in his heart.
After all, even the mind of a person had its frequencies, and the Resonance showed clearly that there was nothing wrong with his head right now. A little avid, sure, and a bit more excited than he would’ve liked, no doubt. Apathy should’ve not only hampered the negative emotions but the positive ones as well. The thrill of success could be just as dangerous as hesitation in some cases.
But other than that, Valens felt… fine. In control, more than ever. Unbothered by the voices whispering behind the walls, slithering snakes waiting for a misstep to stab a stake through his chest.
Some movement around the back of the Skeleton tide.
Valens snapped awake. He couldn’t see it through his sound vision, and the blazing flames were too radiant for him to catch anything other than his own storm. Until a giant sword rose, cleaving the flames apart and clearing a lane across the storm to reveal the one holding it.
[Skeleton Oarfang - Level ???]
This time Valens managed to see its name, written in a dark red like blood dried over a long gash. It lumbered through the burning lines, feet thumping on the ground, its skeletal frame hulking over the armored men who stood behind Nomad and Celme.
“To the lines! To the lines!” Nomad was screaming, one hand wrapped tight around his sword. He planted his feet right before the gap on the wall, green fog rolling about his shoulder plates and down his chest. In a moment he was clad in an ethereal carapace of the Lich’s magic, as men scrambled to take position behind him.
Celme’s blood was burning hot, her face flushed with heat and adrenaline, her Resonance spiking over the chaotic frequencies like a stubborn spear. There was a sharpness to her now, eyes a deep crimson, the knuckles of her fingers straining white.
A tinge of pain rose within Valens’s chest as the Skeleton Oarfang crushed waves of the Inferno. The spell was a web of intricately woven threads, every part of it connected by tiny knots. He could stretch it as one might stretch a flexible rope, and bind the broken threads should there be a need for it, but he couldn’t keep up with the speed at which that creature kept snapping the threads.
They crossed eyes with Nomad, and Valens gave him a nod, pointing with his brows at the hulking skeleton as he let the Inferno dissolve into nothingness.
Nomad leaned in the moment the firestorm ceased, and then he was off, the worn chest plate clanking as he led the men into the newly formed opening.
The human lines, with Nomad and Celme out in the front, stabbed into the disoriented skeleton tide like a sharp arrow. It was easy work dealing with the half-burnt corpses. Beyond, toward the cave’s entrance, the deadlock of the two forces began to disintegrate as that part of the Necromancer’s horde found itself squashed by two sides.
Valens could tell the Skeleton Oarfang’s purpose from over the large rock. It was a patch, a last-second measure to deal with this sudden breach, and it looked strong enough to provide a momentary relief to this heated chaos. The humans certainly seemed tiny enough that they’d be crushed under the toes of that freak of nature.
But they were pressing still, carried by Nomad’s momentum, using the creature’s eerie obsession against the one who caused this change to weed out the other lesser skeletons. Valens found himself staring at the Oarfang’s sockets, in which burned a rotten light that seemed to be fixated on him and him alone.
You’re furious, then?
It was time to move.
Light Feet carried him onward to the fighting lines, breath rasping in his chest. He felt the Gravitating Earth with the tip of his fingers as he coursed freely in the opening. Trouble was, there was only so much space he could use Light Feet to distract the creature, and Gravitating Earth was a spell that took some time to manage.
But… I’ve learned the spell, haven’t I?
A smile tugged at his lips as Valens gauged the distance and the Oarfang’s thumping steps. He decided to try it. He pulled at a rather shaky part of the ground with the spell, littered with bones and bits of crushed metal, and the moment Oarfang decided to step in, he pushed the patch to sink deep into the earth.
The left leg of the lumbering giant dipped heavily into the newly formed hole in the ground, the other leg snapping with a loud crunch and the sword clanking down at its kneecap. Valens winced at the sight, at the sharp side of the sword tearing into the yellowish bones, at the tangled form of the beast as it tried to flounder back to its feet.
“The beast is down!” Valens yelled at the battling lines as he prepared a Fireball in his right hand. The mana within his chest dwindled dangerously after that last Gravitating Earth, but a simple spell like Fireball was still something he could manage.
No help came.
He peered around. It was hard to single out the Undead from their oddly similar cousins in the din, and the humans were too lost in the battle to spare a glance at the real problem. Valens glanced back at the hole in the wall from which they’d just spilled into the real battle. He scowled. There was a group of Skeletons there, halted by a line of armored men carrying the same patch of double-headed snake on their shoulders.
They must’ve opened a new hole in the back.
Breathing in deep, he tried to get a clear sense of the situation through the Resonance. To his left, the Skeleton tide was about to be dealt with, which meant that the Undead and human alliance would fill into this opening quite soon. To his right, Nomad and the humans accompanying him were trying to hold the other lines and assault the Skeleton tide from the back at the same time.
And down in the middle of this was one single Skeleton Oarfang, with Valens keeping it company.
The choices were clear. Either keep the beast stalled or kill the damned thing like how he dealt with that Ward.
Too dangerous. Nothing is holding it back—
A hand crunched into the Oarfang’s face, hard. The beast reeled with the impact, the sword nearly slipping out from its fingers and bones grinding like metal. Another hand was coming at it fast, fingers clenched painfully tight, smoke wafting off from the skin over them.
“Move, healer!” Celme’s voice was raspy and hoarse, her face twisted up in senseless fury. She’d seemed to hack those words out with her teeth rather than speak them like a normal person.
She leapt up, bringing her left fist in heated momentum, and drove the punch right underneath the Oarfang’s chin. The giant beast’s head snapped back as it tried clumsily to raise the sword. But the weapon was too big and too slow to catch the stubborn Berserker who weaved around it like a fish in the sea.
Valens perked up, aiming the Fireball toward the Oarfang’s left leg, which was still halfway deep into the pocket he’d carved with the Gravitating Earth. He let the spell sail away in a streak of crimson and felt it squelch into the bones. Tongues of it crawled up through the inner skeletal frame.
The Oarfang shook its ribcage off in mild displeasure. The Fireball might as well have been a tiny candle for all it cared. Even as the Berserker kept battering its bones with a flurry of punches, it tried to jerk itself back and laid the sword on the ground in an almost lazy fashion. Then, with two hands, it began to haul its left leg off.
Cursing, Valens moved closer and jabbed his hand sideways, pushing a pair of columns of hardened soil to fix the creature’s leg in place. It was the only thing they had against the beast, and he couldn’t let it find its footing once again.
“Arms!” he said shortly after, gazing at Celme. “We need to get rid of those arms so I can deal with this freak. I’ll hold them in place; can you break them?”
Celme’s bloody eyes spared him a furious look, then they widened as the woman slowly came to herself. She gave a look toward Valens and down at the beast. “Do it, but don’t get too close. Keep that pretty head of yours safe, or that bastard—”
“Now!” Valens said as with another Gravitating Earth, he raised two thick columns and caught the Oarfang’s right arm between them. He tried to jam a third one into its chest as well, but the tip of it splintered as the creature’s bones proved too hard.
Celme was on the arm now, delivering one jab after another to the Oarfang’s shoulder cap, while Valens strained to hold the beast in place. It tried to swat away the annoying fly of a human with its other arm, but the way Valens placed those two columns protected Celme from a straight blow.
That was when the Oarfang decided to simply break the columns. Its bony hand crunched down hard at the left column, which was exactly what Valens hoped it would do.
What else can you expect from a mindless set of bones?
With the force of its own hand and Celme’s insistent blows on the shoulder cap, the arm squashed between the columns finally gave in and snapped off from its cap like a bottle’s cork. It fell in a cloud of dust, with Celme throwing herself away at the last moment.
Once the annoying human was off of it, the stupid beast gave a blank look at its stub of an arm. There was nothing there.
Valens used the gap in the beast’s judgment to pinch its other arm between a pair of columns, a sharp pain jabbing him in the corner as his mana dipped painfully low. But they were close now, the lines receding, the humans and the Undead closing in. Them keeping this beast in place allowed Nomad and his strange group to widen the gap.
When the last arm was locked and secured, Celme restarted her work. Her punches rang loud over the din of chaos.
Valens closed in, preparing a Lifesurge in his right hand. The creature kept flailing, but with one leg deep in the ground and the remaining arm being battered by a mad Berserker, it hardly had time to spare Valens any attention.
Finally, Valens placed a hand on its body and sent the Lifesurges coursing into its rot. It took him only a moment to find a similar yellow river in its body, keeping it animated, but unlike the Ward, this one’s river was one roaring body of water that sloshed upward in rolling waves.
He followed their trail, the Lifesurge threads tearing the river with their sharp tips. Already, he could feel the core that was tied to the Necromancer’s magic. He had yet to learn how this source could fill in something so decisively dead and animate it, but right now snapping that source line was more important.
There you are.
He paused as a Lifeward painted the picture in his mind: a molten core of sizzling rot and pus, bound into a dangling rope that stretched further into somewhere beyond his sound vision. He didn’t linger long and instead focused on the tiny knots around where the source line was bound into the core.
He pulled them off one by one, his recently strengthened mana tearing easily into the twisted magic. The pulsing lifeline grew dimmer and dimmer still, and Valens pushed, with teeth clenched, one final time to break the last one apart.
Something slammed into the Resonance. The lifeline pulsed, ever so slightly, as the frequencies jammed into a wavelength that weighed down on Valens’s mind. He tried to jerk his hold away from the molten core, but the Lifesurge threads remained glued there, being sucked by a strangely familiar force.
Sounds and voices poured into the space. Thousands of them. Jaws clacking, bones rattling, screams, roars—the din growing dense. It was a multiplying chorus of lingering thoughts, all restless and bleak, as if forced unwillingly from death by something so deep, yet insidious, that even Valens, in full health, struggled against its hold.
“Curious,” thumped a voice in his mind, sounding like a thousand vipers hissing all together at once. “Left out here all alone, are you, little one? Cast off from your flock, a tiny sheep too weak to carry the weight, eh? I would’ve spared a moment of pity for you, and perhaps taken you under my wings, had you not been such an annoying bother in my godly work here.”
“Who are you?” Valens gasped and clawed blindly at the voice, but it felt like grabbing smoke with his bare hands. Deep in the Oarfang’s core, there was nothing, but the Resonance never lied. The strange presence pressed over it as though a giant hand wrapped around his neck, its claws sharp and venomous.
“I’m the shepherd,” the voice said. “I’m the father of this flock, and protector of the forgotten. And you… You are playing a dangerous game here, little Mage. You have tested my patience, but I dare not say no to such a gift delivered to my doorstep as well. Now, lend me your precious soul, will you? You have my word that I will make good use of it.”
The Apathy broke. Every single thought that had been caught by the intricate net poured into his mind. The zest and the thrill, the anger and the fury. They became whole, and it was painful around his head, a sharp agony drilling down through his chest.
He was awake to see it all, to feel the higher authority press onto him again. How and where wasn’t important. All that mattered was that it was happening again. Different world or not, someone was trying to bind him with the same shackles.
“I’m…” Valens hissed over the blinding agony in his chest. “I’m sick and tired of people telling me what’s dangerous or not. My soul… you won’t have it. Nobody can have it anymore!”
The rattling of his cage, the sharp voice of the twisted being—they all receded into somewhere deep in his mind. And then Valens was reaching for the last knot, Apathy stitching itself back around his mind. He willed the Lifesurge threads to lash at the core and tear that rotten tether apart.
‘Ding’ You have managed to defeat [Skeleton Oarfang - lvl 117]! For killing a creature above your own level, you are granted bonus experience.
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
…
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
The Resonance shifted. The air stirred. Valens came to himself with a weary sigh and blinked down at the chaos. Something was different there in the din, in the chaos that hung thick in the air. He caught it in the Resonance. It sounded a lot like freedom. A defiant cry in his ears.
That and the Necromancer’s eyes staring at him from behind the skeleton lines. The bastard looked… confused.
……
