Chapter Twenty-Three: Dark Cultivator
Both of the papers flashed as the curses spilled out of them, surrounding the area around us. The cultivator landed in a crouch, and I got my first look at her. She was young, or at least she appeared to be young. It was hard to tell with people who had inhuman bloodlines, and it was even more difficult when said person was using life enforcing magic that might be able to slow aging.
Regardless, she didn't look any older than twenty, with long dark hair, skin that was an unnatural gray-blue in color, and eyes that were pure black voids. The instant she saw my spells light up, a fierce grin spread over her face.
"So it's true – you did avoid our artifact."
Before I could even rebut, she slashed her hand out, and I got to see the difference that a few layers of a perpetual core could make. Where my initial attacker had been able to use blasts of shadows and rend my skin with claws, when she flicked her hand out, the shadows in the entire street started to seethe and boil over. They exploded up, rushing for my face even through the misfortune curse locking onto her, and I pulled on my bloodline.
I just barely managed to stop the strike from cutting me in half, but even its trailing edge left long slashes in my uniform, and hot blood spurted from my chest. The tide of shadows continued, slamming into one of the brick walls that made up the alley, and the solid brick exploded into dust.
She leapt forward, her skin flowing with a technique that seemed to cycle shadow through her veins, and her hand, covered in claws made of shadow, slammed down at my chest. I cast Etherstep, burning one of my few spare bits of teleportation alloy to dodge the strike, then landed on my broom as it zipped from my locker.
I raised my wand and began to summon. Wadjetktt burst into life, their wings flaring wide as they took in the assassin and began to spray their white hot sunvenom at her. She hissed and skittered back, easily evading the sprays, and I made a show of flicking my wand off in the direction of the school. I didn't actually know any long range communication magic, but she didn't know that, and it was well within the remit of a mage to be capable of such an action.
She launched her hand out, and spears of darkness exploded from the alley. I pulled up, shooting into the sky, and the wings of my wadjetktt flared as they tried to do the same, but it was too late. The sharpened shadows skewered their serpentine bodies, and they were returned to Effervesce's realm. Even with how fast my broom was able to move, one of them slammed into my greater arcane armor, shattering through the planes of arcane force and stabbing me through the leg.
I let out a short scream, only managing to choke it down with sheer force of will and the shock of the battle. When I looked down, I could see that the spear hadn't been a clean stab. It had skewered through my spell and drilled about an inch and a half into my bones. Shards were everywhere, even as blood poured down my leg and pooled in my shoe.
With one hand, I reached into my Etherius locker, while with the other, I cast spells. An energy barrier tuned to shadow chi formed around me, followed by three bright blue shields. They spun and layered together just in time to stop another shadow spear, which broke through two of them before my energy barrier managed to rob it of enough power for the last to be knocked aside.
I ripped the wax stopper off the bottle I'd pulled from my locker and downed the bright, glowing liquid inside. Immediately, the power of the healing magic rushed through me. Healing potions weren't quite as good as a comparable miracle or the ministrations of a restoration wizard, but they were better than nothing, and I felt my cuts on my chest and the wound on my leg start to scab over, the blood loss staunched for now. My leg still throbbed painfully, and I knew that I'd need to get a healer before I put more pressure on it, but it was fine for the fight.
The cultivator leapt into the air with a speed that could have rivaled Gerhard's best jumps, and swung her hand at my head. This would have been a killing blow if she'd had her claws out, but her hand was wreathed in a different technique, a bubble of shadows and nightmares that I thought might trap me in dreams for a while. I barely managed to block her hand and knock it aside with a palm strike, and it burnt almost half my fire to do so. Seren began flowing his own to me to recover some, and I raised my wand. With her at point blank range, I fired an arcane missile, infused with dragonfire. The ballista bolt of force exploded from me, but she simply flowed around it, her body moving with the fluidity of shadows beneath the waves. She struck out again, and I tried to conjure a pair of fire elementals to unleash sparks in her face, but they were sent back to their home planes immediately.
I was about to leap off my broom and hope it wouldn't cause any permanent damage with my leg injury, when I heard it.
"Many are better than one, for they have a good return for their labor: If one of them falls down, another can help them up. But pity anyone who falls alone!"
A sharp sword of golden light sliced through the shadows and dreams that were enclosing around my head, and I saw Jackson floating in the air, his beard ruffled slightly by the whipping flyte magic. His sword was normal sized, not the enormous one that he'd used to cut an ember-roc in two, but it's powerful shimmering light seemed to cause the shadow chi to be pushed back.
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Fingers gouged into the assassin's back, and Yushin was there, her hand held aloft, fingers sharpened like claws of her own. Blood sprayed from the cultivator, and she whipped around. The instant she saw Yushin, her eyes lit up, and she lunged for my friend.
I released another dragonfire empowered arcane missile into her back, and it joined with the other wounds that were rapidly being knit together by the woman's chi, even as Jackson swung his blade to interpose the attack.
But again, the woman proved exactly how much of a difference a few layers of a perpetual core could make. She flowed around the blade, somehow stepping on air, and launched herself at Yushin. Shadows boiled, and a wave of darkness as thin as a sheet of paper fired for her neck. It would have struck home and cut Yushin's head clean from her shoulders, if not for Salem's timely intervention.
He stepped into the alleyway, holding his hand aloft, as if he were presenting some grand treasure. I could see nothing, but the instant he stepped into the alley, The attack was jerked off to the side, and the cultivator fell from the air. She slammed onto the ground, leapt to her feet, and lunged for Salem instead. She had a look of desperation on her face, as if nothing else in the world mattered more than the nothingness that he was holding aloft in his hands.
Though it might have been a minor waste of ether, even as I cast my other spells, I also flicked ethersight on, and saw… nothing.
After a moment of squinting, peering, I finally managed to spot the cloud of ether in Salem's hand. Though it was fainter, I could also see threads, like the ones that he had manifested when partially transformed into his loup garou form, unwinding from his heart, up into his head, and then spinning out into the cloud of ether, reinforcing and changing the spell.
The main reason that it was so difficult to notice was that the threads and ether were barely even dancing around the mind of the cultivator. They'd burrowed into her skin, and into her brain, to the point that even my magical sight didn't see them.
Frankly, if that cloud of ether and thread had been targeting my mind, rather than the assassin, I wasn't sure I'd have been able to resist. I would absolutely have needed to empower my rite of centered mind with ether and dragonfire if I wanted to stand a chance.
It wasn't that the attack was so much stronger than the nascent immortal attack that had attempted to force me to speak the truth. Comparing the power of magics I could smell, like bloodlines, and the power of what the ethersight spell allowed me to see was difficult at the best of times, but I was absolutely confident that the technique that had ensnared me had more power, and by a fairly considerable margin at that.
It didn't matter.
As professor Alydia had demonstrated when she'd used only a handful of arcane missile spells to take out students with terrifyingly powerful affinities, power was only one factor. It was an important factor, certainly, but it wasn't the only factor.
The way Salem's magic drove itself into the mind of the woman was so precise and subtle that the poor cultivator didn't stand a chance.
She snatched at the air where Salem's hand had been, and only then did she seem to realize that she'd been tricked. The cloud of mist and threads blew away from the woman's head, all save for a single thread that was already melding in flawlessly.
Chi exploded from the cultivator and for an instant, the world itself seemed to turn black and white as she drew her hand up. A guillotine blade of shadows appeared, ready to execute Salem for the offense of whatever the mental illusion he'd shown her was.
But while I had been curious about what could captivate someone so thoroughly, I hadn't been so curious that I'd forgotten to cast other spells. Thankfully, neither had Jackson or Yushin, and all three of us exploded into motion.
During the time that I'd been summoning, Jackson had been creating fire. Now, a ball of fire large enough to have completely filled one of our dorm rooms blazed overhead, the gold of his magic mingling with the silver of his soulfire. Before my eyes, it compressed down until it was the size of a horse, then the size of a person, then a watermelon, and then an apple. Then, as if fired from a bow, it arced across the sky and landed on the left arm of the cultivator.
Yushin had landed and conjured a massive cloud of poisons. I knew some of them came from her temporarily altered bloodline, some of them came from brews she'd created in her alchemy class, some were produced by her assassination affinity, and some were the byproduct of more normal spellcraft, but the result was a vibrant field of multicoloured hues that streaked in to slam into the assassin's side with shocking speed, even as she swept out for a slice with a hydra knife.
None of them would be enough to permanently injure a cultivator as powerful as the one we faced, but that was the point. We didn't want to kill her, we wanted her to take some of Yushin's blood and run tests on it until they could clear her name.
For my part, wadjetktt and gadhar hounds shot through the skies, and all of them unleashed their bloodlines onto the woman with waves of white sunfire and blue barking. The poison that was the sunfire ate away at the shadowy chi, while the barking knocked it off course, and between the pain of the fire, the distraction of Yushin's toxins, and my own efforts, the execution technique fell apart.
She still reacted admirably, however. Even as her hand was burning into ash, shadowy claws raked out, and slammed into Yushin's chest. Blood spurted, exploding over the cultivator, over Yushin, and over Jackson.
I urged my broom forward and pulled out my second healing potion, shoving it down Yushin's throat, even as Salem and Jackson pressured the assassin with spells of flame and wind. The thread in the back of the assassin's mind whispered then, as the idea of what to do with the blood entered her head.
Between her missing hand, the fact that Yushin's chest was starting to scab over, the fact that I was already turning to direct my summons at her, and the implanted idea of running tests on the blood all over her and her clothes, it was enough. The cultivator fell into the shadows and vanished.