A Kind of Magic

  I began running in the darkness and among the roots, but scarcely made it a dozen steps before I tripped over a fallen branch. I lay on the ground, considering the benefits of staying down for a moment, interrupted by firm hands on my shoulder, then Clarence helping me stand up. I walked from then on.

  I caught myself, and realized I should be doing things. I began casting the spellrod once again, I couldn’t be caught without protection against spells with Xem’s apprentice still somewhere in the woods around us. I dialed in towards Artemis with the party ability and simply kept walking while I chanted the incantation for the complex spell, looking at the impossible sigil in my spellbook as I did so. When I was reaching the final lines of the spell I thought I had begun hallucinating.

  Jea’s face appeared five feet in front of me, clear as day. I shook my head, and I noticed the outlines of the pseudoportal spell. I increased the pace of my chanting the best I could, but it wasn’t fast enough. She finished her spell first. A blood vessel in her eye burst, leaving her left eye filled-in red, while I fell on the ground screaming. My every nerve ending felt like it had been set on fire. I focused my attention to my health in the HUD spell, and saw that it wasn’t going down. The pain faded not long after. But the spell I had been casting was interrupted.

  “Pick up the pace. She needs line of sight, we’ll try again once we lose sight of the portal,” Anna said.

  “She’ll just cast it again,” I said.

  “She doesn’t have the mana,” Anna said.

  “Blood magic. She has either multiple abilities with it or a massive health pool. It hardly hurt her to cast that spell at me through the portal,” I said.

  “She still has to recover. Come,” Anna said, helping me stand up.

  So we left the sight radius of the pseudoportal and I began trying to cast my spell again. And again her face appeared, as if she had known what we would be up to. Hardly took a genius to figure it out, I guess. Pain. Ground. Faceful of moss. Friends helping me stand back up.

  Anna set the portal on fire this time. The magic wouldn’t hurt Jea, but it would blind her to anything on the other side. I began casting immediately after, but she got another portal out from a different angle, and we were hit by an area of effect spell that completely muted all sound around us. Without speech, the casting of the spell didn’t work, so we moved on once again.

  “Let’s just keep moving. If she could kill you through the portal she would have done it already,” Anna said.

  “Ignore her?” I said. I dreaded it. She was focusing me down, attacking with spells designed to inflict pain, fatigue and frustration, and I was already at the point of breaking.

  On the other hand we were no more than five miles away from Checkpoint now. I thought I even recognized some of the surroundings. And her blasted face appeared in front of me once again. I wasn’t even casting a spell to interrupt, and her face was covered in crusting blood from blood magic, but she did it again, and this time opened up a conjuration pseudoportal through the pseudoportal and it spewed wet, skin-colored leeches directly over my head, covering me completely.

  I panicked right away, pulling against them and shouting as each circular toothy maw pierced my skin around my eyes, my nose, my neck, until I heard through the pain Anna shouting.

  “Fire resistance! Fire resistance now!” she called, and I only managed to cast that spell because it had become more or less a nervous tic since that time I nearly got burned to death during the first challenge. Almost instantly after that I was incinerated from head to toe and there was first a near-screaming hissing sound, followed by dozens of pops. The leeches were gone then.

  “I imagine you may not want to hear this, Alex, but that looked like it knocked her out. This might be your only opportunity,” Clarence said from the direction of the portal.

  Still, I didn’t try for the spellrod right away this time. Instead I cast the stasis field spell as quickly as I could.

  When it took effect I almost passed out from relief. I was in. And there was nothing she could do. Only the hag had been able to interact with the stasis field in any way after it was cast, and I thought that that had had more to do with my nightmares than it did with chronomancy as a discipline. When I knew that I wouldn’t lose consciousness I took a few deep breaths and cast spellrod, staff variant. And I let the stasis field elapse.

  “Thank god. Alright, we still need to be on the move,” Anna said. I was more or less beyond words at that point and I kept marching, the slight tug from the party ability towards Artemis and Checkpoint almost a physical crutch I held on to with all my ability.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  About ten minutes later I felt a burst of mana. I smiled. Jea had tried to cast the pseudoportal with me as its target. It hadn’t worked. Fuck you, I thought.

  And then I should have seen what would happen next coming a mile away, but I was so bone tired and relieved that I was safe from her, that it took her face appearing in front of Anna for me to put two and two together. She didn’t bother with pain or torment when it came to her, perhaps reasoning- correctly- that the death of my friends would be another way to torment me. Gleaming crystals of ruby, or perhaps blood flew from tiny sigilized portals all around Anna, sharp as daggers and flew towards her at deadly speed from only a few feet away. I cast shields as fast as I could, and I interrupted a few, but at least three hit her and she cursed and doubled over in pain as they hit her in shoulder and midsection.

  I rammed my spellrod in her portal, and thankfully it worked as I had hoped- the portal disappeared instantly, and I rushed towards Anna, but she was already casting her self-immolation spells to heal her wounds, waving me off and getting up to walk once again.

  I could feel how close we were getting, but it was not close enough. We still could not see the lights of the settlement, nor could we hear the sounds of the siege that was supposed to be ongoing. And every few minutes an increasingly bloodied, but frequently recovered Jea appeared via pseudoportal and tried to kill either Anna or Clarence. I could do nothing but spend my quickly depleting mana to intercept her attacks, never getting all of them. It was a march of attrition, and by the time an hour rolled around it was clear that we would not make it home safe.

  “We could split up. Alex at least would make it with the antimagic staff. Maybe us two can survive somehow. Maybe she won’t bother if you’re not around,” Anna said. She was looking even worse than I felt, but still managed to hold her voice straight.

  “Weren’t you complaining about my hero complex an hour ago?” I said.

  “You had a choice then. We don’t now,” she said.

  “We all make it, or we don’t,” I said.

  “I expect I am with Mr. Vorhal here. There is no difference if she picks the two of us off while we’re away from Alex or not. So we may as well attempt to be together,” Clarence said.

  “So what? We just let her kill us slowly,” Anna said, and this time she let her frustration raise her voice.

  “Hold on. Hold on. I will figure something out,” I said, stumbling to a halt.

  Something had to change. We needed a new strategy. Hell, a new tactic would help. Some thought. If only I wasn’t so fucking tired. The fucking portal appeared in front of us again. Jea cast a spell through it once again, but this time it wasn’t an attack on any of us. Instead it was a simple illusion, burning letters appearing in the air before us.

  You rely on your Mind too much, foolish baby boy.

  Were the words that appeared in front of us.

  “I really hate this bitch,” Anna said.

  “Ditto,” I said. But I was always happy to have an enemy that liked to play with her food. A pragmatic murderer would have killed us several times over by now. That she was playing games with us meant that we had a chance to escape. Which, I suppose, meant that I also should have preferred to have Xem as an enemy now that I thought about it.

  “We rest here,” I said. My voice was weak and uncertain as I said it, but there was nothing to it. Clarence still looked to be in relatively fine form, but Anna and I were entirely spent, stumbling and limping in our much slowed gait.

  “She’ll kill us,” Anna said.

  “I can manage a full standard spellrod. Four hours. More than enough time to get our strength back,” I said.

  “She’ll come in person then,” Anna said.

  “Sure. Any better ideas?” I said.

  “Do it,” Anna said.

  I shattered my spellrod, and it unleashed the ten minute duration version of the anti-magic field. It didn’t interfere with my spellcasting, so I began casting the full version. It went up. Jea could do nothing to stop it without being here physically. Immediately after I got down on the ground and began pulling my tent out of the backpack. I didn’t even put it up all the way, just the central rod to make sure it was distinctly a space instead of a piece of cloth around me and I got in. I heard my comrades getting to their own recovery abilities outside, as I awaited mine to kick in.

  I dozed off almost instantly, and awoke to angry shouts before the recovery had run its course.

  I poked my head out of the tent. We were surrounded by beastmen. Hundreds, at least, on every side, there were glowing red eyes, and they advanced into the spell-sealed area. Clarence was already engaged in melee with five of their vanguard, but I could see that this was a hopeless fight even as Anna incinerated dozens more. But I was nearly full on mana, and so I had options.

  “To me! Get right beside me!” I shouted towards them, and immediately they disengaged their fights and rushed over to me. I covered the ground between them and the approaching monsters in as many icicle elementals as I could. Here I could finally see the little creatures- though not as little as I had imagined them. By now the rank of the spell combined with my growing arcana had made them easily corgi-sized each, and upon conjuration they all separated in vaguely humanoid forms. All had razor-sharp ice-knife arms floating near a dense ice body. Some floated in the air, others walked on more sharp icicle feet. And when the monsters approached, the icicle parts moved in eviscerating slices of audible speed.

  When Anna and Clarence got within a dozen feet of me I began casting invisible barriers. I encased us in several layers of the spell. I hoped they would not realize that there was damage transfer in this spell, but it was not like I could do anything else.

  “Now what?” Anna said, huddled near me sitting among the ruins of my collapsed tent.

  “Now we try something I’ve never done before,” I said.

  “New ability?” Anna said.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  I pulled out my Journal and I flipped over to the Chat page. I wrote five words in it.

  Chat

  Artemis, please, we need help! -Alex