Chapter 202 – Prophet’s Wrath

Prince Rehiz was already on the move as Mirian flew through the palace, sending servants and bureaucrats scattering. With enhanced detect life, she could see the a large group moving down a hallway towards the north section of the palace. The tight formation moving in synchronization around a single individual meant it was almost certainly the prince. Based on how dim the souls looked—indicating spell resistance—at least two of them were Holy Sentinels. Likely, they were making their way towards some sort of fortified room.

Several groups of guards were ahead of her in the halls and junctions. Mirian used force blast on the nearby window, sending tapestries billowing, and she flew out, bypassing the guards and moving in parallel to the fleeing group until she passed them. She cast prismatic shield, then smashed another window and flew in ahead of them.

She cast two spells simultaneously: grounding, around the prince, and greater chain lightning, coated with soul energy to pierce the Sentinel’s robust resistance.

Thunder shook the palace as her lightning flashed through the hall, blinding in its radiance. They were all so tightly packed that the electricity chained through them all repeatedly, forming a ribbon of electricity. The guards didn’t have time to scream. They simply dropped to the ground, smoldering. Two of the nearby tapestries caught fire. The nearby windows had all shattered. Scorch marks dotted the walls.

“Tell me the route they took,” she demanded, dismissing the grounding protection that had prevented him from getting caught in the attack, as well as her own shield.

The prince looked around in horror at his dead bodyguard. He was shaking. “You… you…”

“I am one of the Chosen you fool! Or was doing the impossible not enough for you?”

He had grown pale, but he at least had recovered some of his wits. “I have your Torrviol allies hostage. If you kill me—”

“Killing them is meaningless. The way this all works isn’t what you think. It’s a time loop. That’s how I know possible futures. The world ends soon. The Ominian needs us to stop it. All you’ve done is open up the possibility that the most powerful necromancer in memory gains information that could lead to the annihilation of all life on Enteria. Now tell me. Where. They. Went.” She cast light of the Prophet, then conjured two orbs of raw fire in her hands.

The prince took another step back. “Promise to spare me.”

“Very well.”

“Straight north to Alkazaria. But you’ll never—” Mirian bound his soul to recharge her repositories, then smashed the two orbs of fire into his face. She dismissed her illusion spell and replaced levitation with accelerated levitation.

She blasted back out the window, heading north.

Palendurio was closer to Alkazaria, but whether it was close to the cavalry she needed to catch depended on how far they’d gotten. Either way, taking the Gate back north would mean needing to pass through territory held by Ibrahim’s armies. That might give Ibrahim or Atroxcidi the very information she was trying to prevent falling into their hands.

The accelerated spell was mana hungry, but the extra force push it incorporated meant it could break the horizontal speed limitations of the base spell, just like an airship. The wind whipped by her, sending her dark hair streaming behind her.

Since she’d emerged from the oasis, Mirian had done little with her auric mana as it had accumulated. Now, she spent it. She rocketed north.

***

The larger the Southern Range grew, the more worried Mirian became. The wind had cleared away most evidence of the riders, but detect eximontar continued to pick up on their droppings. Her prodigious mana reserves were growing low, but even with a layered lens spell, Rehiz’s riders were still out of sight.

Several hours of flight had drained most of her mana. She had only brought a single mana elixir, and had consumed it an hour ago.

As she’d been flying, she’d had plenty of time to think; the vast desert was stretched out before her, and there was no civilization between her and the Southern Range. The life in the desert was scattered, but like the Endelice Mountains, a surprisingly large number of myrvites lived scattered through it.

She had started doing estimations in her head. A binding took a small quantity of soul. A force blade spell, a small quantity of mana. Using mana siphon to turn soul energy into mana took a small quantity of mana, and resulted in mana depending on the soul used and how much was siphoned. Mana was notoriously difficult to quantify, but she could quantify the mana costs of each spell as a ratio and compare that to how many minutes of accelerated levitation it would give her. For very small souls or weak souls, the ratio was obviously unfavorable. As she did the math, though, it seemed that if she spent a few minutes killing and draining the soul of a two-headed vulture, she could make that time up as long as the deviation from her route was less than around 30 degrees. The cost in time and distance deviated from her line north could be compared to each other. If she wasn’t busy flying, she would have made a table, but rough estimations would do.

For something like a desert drake or manticore, the ratio was much more favorable, and both the time spent and the degrees off course she went could be increased while still letting her have an overall increase in distance covered.

Jei would be proud, she thought.

The first two-headed vulture in her path was only about a thousand feet out of her way, mostly up. She bound it, killed it, and siphoned its soul into mana without needing to pause her flight. By the time its carcass hit the ground, she was already a few thousand feet away. Detect life picked up a desert drake hiding in its dune burrow. Some sort of natural spell they used kept the sand around it from collapsing. Mirian killed it, needing to pause only briefly, then she was on her way again.

She became a flying butcher. Vultures, drakes, manticores, and dessication hounds all fell to her force blades. She left a trail of corpses behind her, all to gain just a bit more mana for a little more speed.

The sun set and she continued on, sacrificing a bit of valuable soul energy to buoy her stamina with the Last Breath stance. Under the light of the Luamin moon, she continued on. That night, the slaughter continued. It took hundreds of myrvites, but she was able to not just reverse the drain, but achieve net mana gain. She still had to be cautious of soul destabilization as she took in and swiftly burned the B-class mana, but she could feel her auric mana had grown.

It occurred to her that she had broken open a gate, and now that she had, there was no closing or fixing it. This type of travel would let her reach high speeds no other arcanist could reach without an airship.

All she had to do was kill myrvites by the hundreds.

As she flew, she approached another metaphorical gate.

By now, Mirian had killed a lot of people. Killing the Akanan spies and soldiers was easy. They had, after all, literally killed her first. The soldiers, even Marshal Cearsia, were deceived by the RID before they were whipped into a frenzy, but they still had no compunctions slaughtering the people of Torrviol. Her friends. Her second home.

She had no problem killing the conspirators of Palendurio. The Pure Blade mercenaries. The corrupt bishops. Corrmier and Castill. Here and there, she had killed out of convenience. She still felt a pang of guilt thinking about Everad—and yet, would she not do it again? By dying a few minutes early, he saved her an entire cycle. She still worried they might discover the cycles were limited.

Now, she had set herself to kill again. Some two hundred of Prince Rehiz’s soldiers. They were following orders, as they had been trained to do. They weren’t attacking her. And yet, she had to hunt them down.

For the greater good. She’d read that in a philosophy book somewhere. Pontiff Oculo had said he was working for the greater good. Too much could be justified by that.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Her own justification rang hollow to herself. They’re all dead anyways. What couldn’t she justify by that thought? It was true, every time. Did that mean she was bound by no morals at all?