Mob Sorcery 5 - Ch35

Note: Chapter 34-40 are being posted together. Be sure not to read them out of order. Commentary will be in Ch40.

Vince raised his cane at the same time his dragon rammed its head toward the descending Qilin. Lightning met fire as he unleashed every drop of magic he could muster in a split second.

A thunderclap rang in his ears as Kigenai cut through his desperate defense. She collided with the head of his dragon, using her lightning bolt like a spear as she descended from the heavens. Arcs of electricity sheeted over the dragon’s flaming scales and danced across the concrete.

Yet while Vince felt her power rock him, his dragon remained intact. His magic flooded into the dragon to repair the damage, and Daji held the reins of the summon in case Kigenai used something to dispel it.

The Qilin stared down at him, her feet planted atop the blazing lizard. She wore her usual dark suit, but Vince didn’t appreciate her cleavage tonight. Her Yakuza pin was nowhere to be seen and she lacked much decoration, save for the jagged, shining horn jutting out from her forehead. A crackling lightning barrier covered her body. Her pupils had merged with her violet irises at some point, making her look almost blind.

“Why return after rejecting all that was offered to you?” Kigenai asked, her eyes boring into Vince.

The air itself ruptured, forcing her to leap away in a blast of lightning. Pola’s wind claws met Kiyoko’s more concentrated wind blade, and the tengu’s spell won out, carving through everything in its path.

Kigenai landed next to Juliet and spared the vampire a glance. “Make yourself useful or leave.”

Juliet threw back her head haughtily but held her tongue. Rather than answer, magic welled up inside her once again. Another of her meister-tier spells. Not her immortal-slayer at least.

A crack signaled Kiyoko’s descent, and she stopped dead in the center of the truck yard. Her usual fashionable clothes showed burns, but no serious damage. Kigenai had breached the tengu’s barrier in such a short brawl. Kiyoko had drawn her silver katana and it gleamed with runes.

Straightening, Kigenai conjured a length of lightning in her arms. It took the form of a bow before a thin beam appeared, acting as an arrow.

Kiyoko’s eyes widened, and Vince knew to batten down the hatches. Fire columns forced Juliet to retreat, while his dragon gathered a flame laser in its maw. Kiyoko raised a palm and walls of wind ripped concrete from the ground between them and the Qilin.

Then Kigenai loosed her lightning arrow. It shot across the parking lot too fast for Vince to follow, moving like the lightning it was. Only the explosion of sparks it created on impact with the wind wall told him it had struck.

But the arrow somehow still sat in Kigenai’s “bow.”

Another explosion appeared in the wind wall. Vince barely caught the tiny glimmer of air as Kigenai fired her lightning arrow and summoned another. Bolt after bolt rammed into Kiyoko’s defense, as if the Qilin was firing one of those old-fashioned machine guns from the Great War.

“I suppose this is how she fought the Mongols,” Daji said.

This wasn’t the time to admire Kigenai’s ability to unleash death. Vince lurched to the side, his dragon following him and fired his flame laser.

The moment he left Kiyoko’s protective wall, Kigenai pivoted. It was like being tracked by an aimbot in a video game. She spun to face him so fast he swore she teleported.

Her first arrow crashed into his barrier before he even realized she’d fired, sending sparks glittering across his vision. A headshot.

“Vince!” Kiyoko snapped, a mixture of anger and panic filling her usually calm tone.

His flame laser roared, even as he ducked behind his dragon. A cacophony of booms shattered the air as Kigenai emptied her metaphorical quiver into the fiery blast for an instant that lasted years.

Alarms sounded, and he knew she’d dodged. He rose and focused on the senses of his dragon rather than his eyes. Every spell he could manage chased the magic signatures, and he fired a flame laser at the closest target.

Only to spot Juliet grinning at him from above a wall of darkness, standing atop a mangled truck.

His heart sank, and he felt the pain in his chest before his spell even struck her.

A wall of light snapped up in front of his flame laser. It shattered when he hit it, but weakened the blast enough that what hit Juliet was a far cry from his beam of certain death.

Something cracked his barrier at the same time Juliet’s body exploded into inky bubbles. An explosive sigh of relief escaped him.

“I said to stay safe, you idiot!” Gaby cried out as she charged into the parking lot.

Unlike Kiyoko, she showed clear signs of being wounded. A suspicious hole lingered in her clothes and the fur trim of her jacket had been incinerated. Her powerful healing magic had brought her back into the fray.

Lightning crackled nearby, and Vince cursed. Even a couple of seconds being distracted allowed Kigenai to prepare a meister-tier spell.

He looked over to see exactly what he feared. A crackling sphere of lightning surrounded Kigenai, repelling Pola’s desperate attacks and even one of Kiyoko’s wind blades.

Her outstretched arm crackled with unconstrained magic, which rippled between blue and indigo over a good ten feet. Arcs of electricity shot off her horn. Another second and she’d carve them all apart.

Kiyoko slammed into the sphere, sword-first. The runes of her blade lit up like a Christmas Tree and the barrier winked out of existence. Her wings glowed bright white, as did one of her palms. She struck Kigenai with a palm strike.

A rainbow afterimage of Kigenai separated from her. His magical senses swore there might be two of her, or that she’d been split in two.

The Qilin’s meister-tier spell burst apart into shards of prismatic light, and Kigenai winced in pain. Something about Kiyoko’s attack made her lose focus.

Then she spun and struck Kiyoko with a palm strike of her own. A solid beam of lightning shot out of her hand, directly into Kiyoko’s chest. The tengu’s barrier exploded. She rocketed across the parking lot with a sickening crack that had to be her ribs shattering. Blood trailed along her wake.

Kigenai straightened and cracked her neck. Her muscles tensed. “I appreciate a good battle, but there is little glory in killing those I respect. You should not be here.” The patter of raindrops sizzling on her renewed barrier only emphasized her words.

“This is my city,” Vince said. “It’s not Korea, and it doesn’t belong to Mei. Or you.”

“It didn’t belong to the British before they conquered it. It didn’t belong to the European migrants who traveled west. It didn’t belong to the Lionettis, or the sorcerers, or the demihumans who claimed it from the US government.” She stared at him. “Korea lay in the hands of a conqueror, after multiple attempts. One should know when they’re beaten.”

“It sure as hell isn’t now!” Nina roared.

Kigenai lazily turned, summoning a blade of lightning in her hands in preparation to repel Nina.

A blonde blur descended from the sky and crashed down, amber light coating her entire body. Magic massed around her gauntlet.

She’d landed thirty feet short and slammed her gauntlet into the concrete. All that power surged into the ground.

The world exploded, nearly deafening Vince. A circle of the parking lot around Kigenai transformed into a plume of dust and debris. Nina’s explosion meister-tier spell had blown the entire place to pieces, creating an immensely powerful bomb.

Vince fired a flame laser into the dust along with as many fireballs as possible. Earth spikes skewered the area.

Kigenai’s roar made it clear she lived. She shot out of the wreckage, suit tattered and body covered in small scratches and wounds. Her lightning sword cleaved at Nina. Vince’s flame laser narrowly missed, as the Qilin blinked forward with a blink of purple light.

Nina shifted her stance even as she summoned earth walls to defend herself. Kigenai blew through them without slowing.

Abruptly, Kigenai leaped into the air.

A distorted ripple of air blew apart the concrete she’d stood on. It left a gouge several feet deep that ran twice as long.

Another ripple swung at Kigenai, who caught it with her sword. The clash of magic ruptured in mid-air, creating a prismatic explosion that briefly turned rain into rainbow steam.

“For fuck’s sake, just because she’s a lightning deer doesn’t mean she needs lightning everything,” Ashley whined from behind Vince. “I’ve fought lightning elementals with worse reflexes than her.”

“When?” Nina asked. “There’s no fucking way you’ve fought a lightning elemental and won.”

“They’re not all the age of the planet, you know. Elementals come and go with changes in nature.”

Kigenai tried to take advantage of their bickering by summoning her sphere barrier again, as it grew from her body like a storm. Two flame lasers burst against it, pausing its growth, before Nina slammed dozens of concrete spikes into the Qilin.

“Numbers can only go so far in a hunt,” Kigenai said, but her expression had lost its grim arrogance from earlier. Her eyes darted around, as if looking for openings. “Each new member offers an opening.”

When she stared at Pola, who battled Juliet alongside Gaby, Vince felt a chill run down his spine.

Kigenai snapped Nina’s spikes with a wave of an arm, then dashed forward. Vince teleported her backward, and she stumbled.

 “A cheap trick,” she said.

“Got plenty of those,” Ashley said.

The fox demon bounded forward, her body wrapped in an aqua barrier. Blue light glowed along her arms.

Kigenai snarled and drew her bow. Too slow.

Ashley’s hand came down, and the sky turned to ice. Tens of thousands of raindrops congealed together into ice spikes roughly the size of a fist. Surprisingly, they did nothing but continue to fall.

Only when a tornado whirled up around Kigenai did Vince realize the trick. At first he assumed it was Ashley’s work, but Kiyoko hovered into view. The fox demon bounced backward, grinning.

Wind blades tore at Kigenai’s barrier while icicles bombarded her. Nina conjured up dozens of spikes of concrete and hurled them into the vortex each second, digging into the ground with her gauntlet.

Vince hesitated, only to be tapped on the back.

“Tag,” Gaby shouted at him as she flipped over him. “The vampire’s pissed we’re keeping you away from her.”

“I will wear your sister’s tail as fur underwear,” Juliet screeched in the distance.

Yeah, he needed to stick to the plan. Fia’s flame laser indicated she was providing what support fire she could muster, meaning the wards were in place. If everyone was assisting, it was time to act.

He summoned one final fire column beneath Kigenai, and she responded with a bolt of lightning on herself. While he couldn’t see her, he imagined her blinking in surprise as her teleportation failed.

Over in the newly created truck graveyard, Pola moved as a green blur while flinging offensive wind spells at Juliet. The vampire attempted to break away, but a golden barrier cut off part of the parking lot now. Teleportation wards didn’t block short-range teleportation, but he wasn’t sure how far she could go in her shadow world.

Juliet blew apart a series of trucks with her dog head spell, forcing Pola to retreat. Shadow tentacles chased the wolfgirl. Summoning a triangular barrier with a magic tool, Pola stood her ground and slung her wind claws at the vampire. Juliet vanished into her shadows.

The moment the vampire reappeared, Vince greeted her with fireballs. He kept running while his dragon bounded into the mass of ruined trucks and trailers. Steel, aluminum, wood, and bags of various construction materials lay everywhere. He hoped none of them contained anything hazardous or explosive. So far, they’d been lucky not to hit a gas main beneath the parking lot.

“Finally!” Juliet said, whirling to face Vince even as her body melted from his spells.

She barreled toward him through the air. His dragon followed her, but she flew past it. A flame laser missed her as he misjudged her speed.

“Vince!” Pola shouted, perhaps a tad unconvincingly. He spotted her waving her arms in an odd way as she fired an azure spell into the air.

Juliet paid zero attention to the wolfgirl. Once again, a blanket of darkness billowed out from her cape, attempting to consume Vince.

This time, he remained stationary. For effect, he fired a flame laser at her. But as her eyes met his, they both knew he intentionally let her catch him with her meister-tier spell.

Her darkness enveloped him and the world turned into a void for the third time in his life.