33. Gateways

Chapter 033
Gateways

Standing still in the empty living room inside Vazen’s house, Zorian stared unhappily at the splatter of green gunk in front of him that was currently eating through the floor with an audible sizzle. One could hardly tell that, not too long ago, the acid slime in front of him used to be a stack of important documents stored in Vazen’s safe. The merchant really didn’t want anyone to take a look at these, it seemed.

The operation started well. Everything started well. Not seeing the point of reinventing the wheel, Zorian used his past method of entering Vazen’s home, then began dismantling the protections on the safe. Aside from the already familiar explosion trap, he also found a sleep trap which aimed to knock any prospective thieves unconscious the moment they touched the safe. He disabled both traps and, having found no further spellwork protecting the safe, immediately tried to remove the documents.

He promptly triggered a mechanical mechanism that dumped some kind of powerful acidic mixture on top of the safe’s contents. The good news was that he managed to avoid getting any of the gunk on his hands – considering what the stuff was doing to the floor at the moment, it would have probably eaten right through his bones before he managed to get it off of him. The bad news was that he failed to salvage any of the safe’s contents before the gunk ruined it. He managed to levitate the contents out of the safe, yes, but the gunk was almost like glue in the way it clung to the papers. He was unable to separate it from the surviving documents before it ate through them all and then happily continued to dissolve the floor beneath them.

He shuddered. He was really, really glad he managed to yank his hands away in time to avoid getting any of that stuff on them.

Once again, Zorian was forced to leave Vazen’s place empty-handed. He was sorely tempted to rig the entire place to explode in Vazen’s face the moment he came back home as revenge, but that would be petty and stupid. A murder of such an influential man would attract a lot of attention, plus Alanic was probably paying very close attention to the man. And he had tried to rob the man after all, so he had no right to be particularly outraged anyway.

Still… Zorian was now absolutely certain that Vazen was involved in some very shady things, and he wasn’t talking about tax fraud or industrial espionage. There was no way that Vazen would rig his safe to destroy things like business contracts and production blueprints in the event of discovery – the sheer amount of money he’d lost doing that must have been exorbitant. There had to be something more in there among those papers. Something incredibly illegal and incriminating, to the point where Vazen would rather lose everything than be discovered possessing it.

He was definitely coming back in the next restart. Maybe the man’s misdeeds were unconnected to the Ibasan invaders gunning after Cyoria or the group targeting soul mages around Knyazov Dveri, but somehow Zorian doubted it. It cost him nothing to check, in any case.

Well, unless Vazen had even more horrifying surprises waiting for him should he overcome the second layer of his defenses. Next time he was bringing a 10-foot pole with him, because there was no way he was putting his hands into that safe anymore.

– break –

The day after he had survived the failed ambush just outside Alanic’s temple, Zorian arrived at his next meditation session feeling more than a little bit apprehensive. And not just about the possibility of another ambush – he did not like the looks Alanic had been giving him when he was giving his statement and Zorian was worried about what that meant for him. However, the lesson that day had been wholly unremarkable – there had been no second ambush, and Alanic gave no indication he was upset or suspicious of him. Thus, he put it out of his mind and decided to follow Alanic’s example by carrying on as if nothing happened.

Now, three days later, Zorian could safely say that had been a mistake. Being dragged into the temple courtyard for a ‘test of his combat skills’ sounded suspiciously like punishment to his ears.

As an aside, why did a temple have a battle arena in its courtyard instead of a nice, peaceful garden or something? Between that and the dungeons in the basement he was starting to get really dubious about this building’s spiritual credentials.

“Err, not that I don’t appreciate your help in shoring up my modest combat capabilities, but we really should be focusing on getting my inner soul sight functioning,” said Zorian, shuffling uncomfortably in place. “You told me yourself that this skill requires total focus from me to master correctly.”

Alanic simply continued staring at him, silent and impassive, from his corner of the arena.

And then he gestured with his staff at Zorian and threw a fireball at him.

Zorian was not surprised at the attack. He had been expecting something like that, to be honest. What did throw him for a loop was that he chose that particular spell to open combat with. Fireball wasn’t something you threw at a junior mage to test them – it was far too lethal for that! Even a stunted one was capable of killing a human on a direct hit, and a regular shield spell could not protect against it. No matter how powerful, it was still just a disc of force in front of the caster – the expanding sphere of fiery energy would just flow around it and envelop the caster behind it.

The shock lasted for but a moment, however, and then he immediately erected a dome of force around himself – not just a shield, but a full-blown aegis that protected him from all sides at once. The fireball hit the dome not long after, and Zorian’s view was momentarily blanked out by a blanket of fire.

When the fire cleared, he found himself standing in front of Alanic again, the priest as silent and unmoving as he had ever been. His apprehension at the situation dropped slightly. The fireball had been a very weak one. He knew because one of the retired mages he’d helped in his aimless wanderings prior to his arrival in Knyazov Dveri had taught him how to get feedback from his defensive spells, and his aegis had held strong against a spell that should have taxed it to its limit. Zorian was sure the man in front of him could have done much better than that if he had wanted to. The fact he hadn’t immediately followed up on his fireball with something to finish him off enforced the idea that this really was some kind of test.

A very messed up, dangerous test, but he was kind of used to such things at this point.

He sent a single magic missile towards Alanic. He could see the man scoff as he lazily raised his arm to block the puny attack, and suppressed a smile. Though it looked like a magic missile spell, the projectile was anything but – it didn’t so much smash into things as erupt into a spherical wave of force, much like a fireball that used force instead of fire. A forceball, if you will. Alanic will almost certainly use a regular shield instead of a full aegis against a puny magic missile, and then the forceball will-

The space in front of Alanic suddenly warped and shimmered, and Zorian’s forceball promptly winked out of existence. A dispelling wave of some sort, if he guessed correctly. Dammit. Then Alanic decided it was his turn again, and Zorian was too busy dodging bolts of fire and incineration rays to focus on internal cursing.

Zorian quickly learned that Alanic loved fire spells. Even after Zorian switched from all-purpose shields to variants specifically designed to tank fire magic at the expense of performance against other damage types, he persisted in using them. After his initial barrage of weak, fast-casting, numerous fire projectiles failed to overwhelm Zorian, he switched to trying to steamroll him with gigantic, slow-moving spheres of fire that didn’t explode and instead simply tried to envelop him in their flames. After Zorian managed to dispel them, he responded with more fireballs – and this time he wasn’t holding back.

Zorian tried to counter-attack whenever he spotted an opening, but all of his attacks were neutralized with contemptuous ease. Trying to kick up dust and other visibility obstacles failed because Alanic could somehow cause a gust of wind to disperse such attacks away from him without making a single gesture or visibly exerting himself. Items were useless because he could telekinetically hurl all projectiles away from him with a simple sweeping gesture, and any magical projectiles were blocked, intercepted or dispelled. Even after Zorian started launching projectiles in complicated parabolic, zigzagging or spiral trajectories, the priest seemed to have no problems tracking them and responding.

Finally, Zorian was nearly out of mana and decided to go out with a bang. He put most of his remaining mana into a ray of force that he promptly fired at Alanic’s face. The attack would have killed the priest had it really connected, though Zorian knew it would never connect. Sure enough, the man simply side-stepped it and Zorian collapsed on the ground in exhaustion, his arms raised in surrender.

“I give up,” he panted. “Whatever point you wanted to make to me, you’ve done it. Though if this was all for the sake of showing me I’m not the biggest fish in the pond, you needn’t have bothered – I’m well aware how screwed I’d be in a face-off against a veteran battle mage.”

“The point was seeing how long it would take before you started resorting to lethal moves,” Alanic said, walking up to him and offering him a hand. Zorian internally debated the merits of casting the ‘shocking grasp’ spell and electrocuting the jerk, but in the end decided to be a bigger man and simply accepted his help in getting up. It probably wouldn’t have worked, anyway. “I’m rather disappointed it took until you were on your last legs to go for the killing blow.”

“Oh screw you, Alanic!” snapped Zorian. “What kind of nutjob tries to kill their opponent in a freaking spar!?”

“You?” Alanic tried, a smirk dancing on his lips. “You did try to kill me at the end, didn’t you?”

“That’s… I knew it had no chance of actually succeeding.”

“Yes, and I’m certain you realized that a minute or two into the test. You should have stopped holding back at that point, or at least followed my lead in what is an acceptable level of force.”

“Actually, let’s refocus on that issue instead,” Zorian said. “What if you had ended up killing me? Some of those spells you tried to hit me with would have put me into a hospital for months if I hadn’t tanked them. Possibly kill me outright! The skills I used to survive your ‘test’ aren’t something you had any right to expect of me!”

“I can control what my fires burn,” Alanic said matter-of-factly. Zorian was honestly stumped at that. That kind of thing was possible? “I also have a divine artifact that can heal any burns so long as the victim is still alive. Regardless of how things looked to you, you were in very little danger. Still, you clearly thought I was being excessively aggressive and you still held back against me. That kind of hesitation will get you killed some day. As it almost did a few days ago.”

“I knew this was about those riflemen I disabled,” Zorian mumbled.

“Yes. Disabled. They tried to kill you, with an ambush, no less, and you went out of the way to simply knock them out. There is being merciful and there is being stupid.”

“Are you sure you’re a priest?” grumbled Zorian.

“A warrior-priest,” Alanic clarified. “Not every religious order is about peace and forgiveness. And even those that are usually make exceptions for self-defense, in practice if not in theory.”

“Fine, fair enough,” Zorian conceded. “But why do you care? Why is this so upsetting to you?”

“That’s a stupid question. I don’t want you to die, that’s why.”

“Um,” Zorian paused, momentarily stumped for a response. What the hell was that supposed to mean? He really wished Alanic wasn’t so utterly unreadable to his empathy. “Look, I’ll be honest with you – I wasn’t really being merciful. You’re misreading the whole thing. I simply attacked them in the best manner I had available.”

“Please,” Alanic scoffed. “I know very well how difficult it would be to take down a group that large non-lethally. Do you really expect me to believe that was the method of attack least dangerous for yourself that you had available?”

“Well, yes,” Zorian said. “I guess it would help to know that I’m a natural mind mage. I sense all minds around me, regardless of physical obstacles or line of sight, and I can launch a crude mental assault on them if I so wish. Using that, I could knock them out outside of their shooting range, before they could pin-point my position. Actually killing them would have entailed entering their attack range so I could cast something more deadly at them. Which I felt was rather suicidal at the time.”

Alanic gave him a curious look. “An interesting ability. I note that not all of the attackers had been disabled by the time the Guild taskforce had arrived. Did you simply not have time to go through them all or…?”

“It’s a weak attack,” said Zorian. “It’s not hard to resist.”

Alanic nodded. Zorian hoped the priest would not question him on the exact mechanics of his ability, as he was not sure he could deceive the man convincingly. Thankfully, it did not seem he would push the issue at the moment.

“What would you have done if no reinforcements had arrived?” Alanic asked.

“Tried to lure them into a mine field,” Zorian shrugged. “So yeah. I was fully prepared to blow them up into tiny pieces if they continued to go after me. There’s a lot you can accuse me of, but being suicidally merciful isn’t one of them. You don’t have to worry about me.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Alanic grouched. “But it does seem I have misjudged you somewhat. Walk with me.”

Alanic walked back into the temple proper and Zorian followed him. He soon found himself sitting in a small kitchen that he had never seen before, though that wasn’t saying much. He had never really explored the site, fearful of drawing Alanic’s ire if he stepped foot in some private sanctum that non-clergy were supposed to never witness. Most temples had at least a couple of those as far as Zorian knew.

“Misunderstandings aside, the test was quite real,” said Alanic once they were seated. “I really did want to see what you were capable of combat-wise.”

“And?” asked Zorian curiously.

“You are better than I thought you’d be,” said Alanic. Zorian preened at the praise. Alanic didn’t seem like the sort to hand it out lightly. “But it’s clear to me you’re no legend in the making. I estimate that your natural mana reserves are average at best, perhaps even below-average, and your spells have the feel of a mage who has practiced a lot rather than those of a talented beginner.”

Zorian scowled, his earlier pride forgotten.

“A mage as young as you should not have experience in fighting that extensive,” continued Alanic. Uh oh. “I had suspected it for a while now and now I am certain – you are not some recent graduate going for a round of wandering before settling down. Or a traveling mage who stumbled onto something way over his head. You are someone who actively looks for trouble. Had been looking for trouble for a while now…”

Zorian said nothing. He was about to claim that it was trouble that looked for him, not the other way around… but when he really thought about it, that wasn’t really true at the moment. He really was looking for trouble right now. It was one of his core goals in Knyazov Dveri. He had a good reason for it, but still.

“I’m not going to ask you to tell me who you are. People who start fighting as young as you must have started to get as good as you are aren’t usually the trusting sort. You’d never tell me, and truthfully I have no reason to push you in that regard. No, what I want to know is what your immediate goal is here. I don’t believe that you really stumbled upon Lukav’s encounter with the boars accidentally, or that the soul marker stamped on your soul is really unconnected to the enemies after our heads. Considering how helpful both me and Lukav have been to you in this past several weeks, I believe we both deserve a little more honesty from you. What is really going on here, Zorian?”

“Regardless of what you may think, my reasons for coming here were exactly as I told them to you,” Zorian said. “I really did get caught in the aftermath of a soul magic spell. I really did come to Lukav, and by extension you, because I wanted to understand what had happened to me. None of those were fabrications. But…”

“Yes?” Alanic prompted.

“I had done some research on the people behind my attack – the original attack that resulted in the marker on my soul, I mean – and uncovered some pretty heavy stuff. They are connected to Cyoria’s leadership somehow, and have links to the local branch of the Cult of Dragon. As far as I can see, they are Ibasan in origin. One of the reasons I had for coming here, aside from seeking out your help, was that I wanted to get out of their territory.”

“And you think our attackers belong to that group?” surmised Alanic.

“Considering how large and organized the Ibasan group was, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some kind of organization branch here. And the fact both groups make use of undead and soul magic is kind of indicative to my eyes. But I don’t actually have any proof, and I’m far from certain.”

Zorian wasn’t comfortable about sharing everything with Alanic. For instance, telling him about the invasion or the primordial ‘summoning’ plot was out of the question, as Alanic would no doubt insist on notifying the Cyoria authorities about those and that could alert Red Robe about Zorian’s whereabouts. He did, however, tell him about a lot of other things… like the other disappearances in the area. His own investigation into them had pretty much stalled for the moment, so he had little to lose by telling him about them at this point.

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After several exhausting hours of back and forth, Alanic all but threw him out of the temple, claiming he had to think about things. Zorian was glad for that, as he was thoroughly sick of the entire conversation by that point… even if there was a good chance Alanic would want to have nothing to do with him by tomorrow.

Oh well, even if the man refused to see him after this, there was always the next restart. There wasn’t that much time left in this restart anyway.

– break –

Zorian was in the process of affixing a left arm to the wooden golem he was building when a human mind suddenly appeared in his room. He would like to say that he reacted immediately and decisively, but the truth was that he was momentarily paralyzed by surprise and fear, spent several moments fumbling for a response, and then realized that his mysterious ‘attacker’ was actually Alanic.

He glared at the priest that had just teleported into his room without warning, trying to set him on fire with his eyes. Sadly, that ability wasn’t one of the things in his repertoire, and Alanic was completely unfazed at his glare.

Note to self: find a spell that lets you set whatever you’re looking at on fire.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Alanic?” Zorian snapped. “I could have shot you if I hadn’t realized who you were in time.”

Alanic glanced at the half-disassembled rifle on Zorian’s bed and raised an eyebrow at him.

“Well not with that, obviously,” Zorian groused.

“You didn’t turn up for your evening lesson,” Alanic said with disapproval. “I felt it prudent to check up on you.”

“I kind of thought I should give you some time,” Zorian said defensively. “You seemed pretty annoyed yesterday.”

“I was disturbed, not angry,” Alanic said. “I needed some time to think. If I wanted you to skip on your lesson I would have said so.” He looked at the half-finished golem and raised his eyebrow at Zorian. “A curious choice of materials for a golem.”

“It’s a prototype,” Zorian said. “I don’t expect much from my first golem, so I wanted to make it out of something cheap and easy to work with.”

Alanic shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, really. I suppose I can give you a day off from lessons for one day. Tell me, though – is there anything else you forgot to mention to me yesterday?”

“Not really, no,” said Zorian. Nothing except things he had purposely kept to himself, anyway. “Although I’d like to ask you a question, if I may. As a soul magic expert, do you think it’s possible to kill a soul?”