Mob Sorcery 5 - Ch21

Note: Ch19-21 are being posted together.

The rainbow bands of the octagram seared the ground beneath Vince’s feet. Noxious fumes rose from the asphalt where the spell sank into it. The center of the magic circle barely surrounded his dragon, and the “wings” of the octagram extended a good dozen feet. They rose slowly, like a piece of old construction equipment that should have been replaced by the cheapskate foreman a decade ago.

Magma raced through Vince’s veins and he thought his magic was backfiring. Was he melting from the inside? His vision swam. Even without the prismatic aura created by the octagram, he struggled to see past the spell.

“Focus,” Daji whispered in his ear, both demanding and gentle at the same time. He felt her nine tails run along his skin. “You’re not dying. The spell consumes all magic it touches. That’s what the golem was doing earlier. We need to escape.”

His entire body shaking, Vince willed himself to remain standing and see clearly. Or as clearly as he could manage.

The octagram rose slowly. Given the length of each wing of the eight-pointed star, he suspected they would meet at the top and entrap him. Once that happened…

Well, he suspected the pain he currently felt would be nothing.

A thought occurred to him. Wasn’t this like Juliet’s abyss spell?

“The end result, perhaps,” Daji said. “But she deposited you in an endless ocean. You’d eventually grow tired and drown. This is a vat of lava. Intended to reduce you to slag as rapidly as possible. It must be a channeled spell. If the unicorn can slay the sorcerer, we’ll be free.”

“Gaby!” Vince called out.

Then he saw the unicorn fighting furiously outside his cage. Her face twisted in fury as she hurled her fists and magic through the undead and foxes. Half the Yakuza had been felled, yet come back to haunt them. She tore them apart, desperate to get at the five-tail fox who continued to hurl elemental spells at Vince from above the octagram. Ice lances and wind spikes fell down, too.

Beams of light and glimmering golden barriers shot through the air to block the attacks, even as Gaby battled several undead foxes at once. Her barrier had cracked at least once. Blood ran down her belly from a nasty gash in her shirt. The skin had already healed thanks to her powerful healing magic.

Vince loosed a breath and closed his eyes.

“I suppose we find our own way out, then,” Daji said, but he heard the satisfaction in her voice. “You should give her a reward after this. A nice, long—”

“Focus,” he said, and the huli jing barked with laughter.

He’d never seen Gaby like that, let alone fighting to protect him at all costs. He wouldn’t screw things up and let himself be disintegrated by some random sorcerer.

“I might be able to jump out with my shoes,” Vince said, recalling his enchanted shoes allowed him to jump higher. “What do you think happens if I touch the octagram?”

“Best case, it bounces you back. Worst case, it tears all magic from your body and reduces you to a lifeless husk instantly,” Daji said. “The aura it’s emitting suggests the spell projects between the tips of the octagram. You would need to clear it entirely by leaping several dozen feet into the air. Short of growing wings, it’s a no go.”

The octagram had closed roughly halfway by now. Vince guessed he had maybe thirty to forty seconds left. A minute, tops. He’d always been bad at math and this felt like an applied version of trigonometry.

Guess his math teacher had been right to say failing trig would come back to haunt him one day.

Daji half-laughed, half-tittered in his ear. His dragon curled tighter around him, even as the octagram burned it away. A headache assaulted Vince.

For a moment, he wondered if this would be it.

Then, while staring at the shifting rainbow hues of the octagram, an idea clicked in his mind. Or perhaps he simply decided to try the only card available to him.

Vince popped the top off one of Ally’s infusions and downed it. It made the headache go away, but with the octagram still vaporizing his dragon the burning sensation in his body remained.

He held his cane toward the air and pumped all the magic he could muster into it. That might have been next to nothing, or a tanker’s worth. Vince couldn’t sense a damn thing with his veins burning like magma tubes.

Slowly, with great care, he began to speak the incantation for his fire tornado. He maintained an exceedingly specific image for how he wanted it to appear. Every second of focus felt like a railway spike being driven into his skull. He pushed on.

Ten seconds passed in complete and utter focus. Gaby’s roars of fury became a soothing reminder of what he was fighting for.

Daji remained eerily silent. Perhaps she understood how important the spell was. Or she expected it to fail and had given up.

After twenty seconds, Vince knew he needed a few more. While he’d brought his tornado down to this cast time, that was under ordinary circumstances. Being caught in a deathtrap was far from ordinary.

He opened his eyes and swung his cane down. His mouth whispered the final words of his fire tornado incantation.

Fire consumed the world above Vince, as if Surtr had brought down his flaming sword and kicked off Ragnarök in this exact spot. A tornado formed of nothing but flames, embers, and Vince’s utter fury descended from the cloudless sky and crashed down around him. It was barely wider than the octagram, even as it reached hundreds of feet into the sky.

The octagram stopped moving.

Prismatic light continued to burn away at the dragon, and even at the tornado. Its flaming fury never touched the ground, as the magic-consuming octagram ate it away completely before it could. But Vince knew the effect had taken hold.

The burning sensation ripping through every part of his body doubled and he fell to his knees. A soft hand ran through his hair.

“What a hard-headed approach,” Daji said. “Even if this is too public, my power remains available to you. This was the perfect opportunity to use it.”

Had that been what she wanted? For him to rely on her?

Hardly the first time she’d bailed him out of an extremely dangerous situation at the last second, even if she tended to wait to offer her help or let him blunder into it.

Vince downed a third magic infusion and knew he’d regret it. A little. He’d done this so often over the past few months he wondered if his blood would turn as pink as the infusions.

Pulling himself to his feet, he pushed his senses back into his dragon. Daji continued to hold the reins so it didn’t disintegrate from the octagram while he channeled his magic through it.

An endless inferno gushed from the dragon’s side while flames streamed from its mouth. The octagram consumed everything. The tornado continued to empower Vince’s magic while disrupting the enemy spell, still descending from the sky even as it was eaten.

Cracks began to form in the otherwise perfect prismatic bands of the octagram. Vince kept pumping more and more magic into the octagram.

When a spiderweb formed across the octagon beneath his feet, he knew the final push was here.

His dragon spun its maw to face the sorcerer in the distance. Flame lasers gathered in its mouth and then spewed forth.

The octagram exploded.

Vince’s vision turned white and the ground shook with the force of an earthquake. He lost his footing and struck something hard and rough. Shouting echoed around him, and even more alarms went off across the street.

“Vince!” Gaby screamed in his ear, pulling him to his feet.

He still felt his dragon and shrugged her off. His barrier remained intact, even if cracks ran across the entirety of its surface.

“Are they still here?” he asked.

The screech of an undead fox answered him. Vince and Gaby stood in a crater the width of the street, surrounded by the wreckage of cars and trees. Burst pipes leaked water, soaking his shoes. He wasn’t sure if a gas line had been ruptured. It hardly mattered.

His dragon spun and blasted the fox aside with a series of fire nets. More phantoms continued to gather around the crater, and shadowy hands grasped at their legs from within the murky water.

“Fucking Hamelin,” Gaby spat as she dragged Vince out of the crater. “When I see her after this, I’ll rip her undead arms off and shove them up her scrawny ass.”

Vince didn’t waste time cursing an enemy enforcer. He looked around for Pola as they reached street level again. The only surviving Yakuza was the five-tail, who had pulled out his phone and barked into it while an ice dragon tried to battle Vince’s much larger conjuration. Silver Teeth and the harpy hovered nearby, but the harpy had fled to the edge of the park. Her helmet had shattered at some point, revealing a heavily burned face that glowed with a curse.

“He’s wounded,” Silver Teeth shouted. “Oi, college boy. Do that once more and this will be—”

Something black and furious descended through the arrogant enforcer and his words ended in a bloody gurgle. A thin line split him in two from head to crotch. His body began to fall apart, only for powerful winds to erupt around him. Silver Teeth’s corpse, clothes included, whirled around before compacting into a tiny red bead. A crack rang out across the street.

Kiyoko stood there, her runic silver katana in one hand, and face a mask of fury. Her eyes had shrunk almost to pinpricks as she scanned the street and her wings quivered.

“I grow tired of these farces and the constant despoilment of a once-great institution,” Kiyoko uttered, her voice somehow deathly quiet and booming as wind magic blasted it outward.

The five-tail stared at the tengu. Vince knew for certain terror lay behind his white kabuki mask, especially as his tails drooped like a dog who knew he’d displeased his owner.

“Help!” Pola called out.

Vince turned away from the imminent massacre of the remaining Yakuza, his blood pumping upon hearing Pola’s panicked cry.

The wolfgirl battled a small army of phantoms and two undead foxes. Half the bodyguards had rushed out in an attempt to aid her, but struggled to keep the phantoms at bay. Anything less than wizard-tier spells bounced off the undead beings. The remaining bodyguards flung what spells they could spare while trying to hold their own at the restaurant. Countless wounds adorned them, and it was miracle only two had gone down.

Flame columns blew apart a small mass of phantoms, and Gaby shot over in a streak of light. The undead foxes pressed Pola despite their intervention. Her barriers had shattered and she bore countless scratches and wounds. They’d ruined her dress and she furiously threw wind magic with her rapier to keep them at bay.

Vince gathered a huge mass of magic in his dragon, ready to vaporize the foxes.

Then the street shimmered with walls of distorted air. Telekinesis.

Nine telekinetic blades sliced through the undead, blasting apart phantoms and undead foxes alike. They delicately avoided Gaby, Pola, and the Lionetti bodyguards, sometimes by inches.

Kiho landed amid the evaporating mist of the phantoms, completely untouched and covered in a solid white barrier. All six of her red tails flicked and force blasts blew away nearly all the remaining undead around Pola. Vince unleashed his fire magic to vaporize the rest.

More phantoms continued to come, and he kept up a barrage of fireballs.

“My apologies,” Kiho said, pushing her long red hair over one shoulder. “The vampire has proven much sturdier than I expected. The rumors of their invulnerability are not understated.”

Vince did his best not to stare at the fox incredulously. Had Kiho assumed she could simply kill Juliet outright?

Then again, weak vampires could be killed with brute force, and Kiho brought that in spades. Vince sure as hell didn’t want to fight her. He’d barely defeated Teru with the help of Nina and an entire team. Kiho might call herself rusty, but she’d kicked the shit out of a clan guardian once.

“Did you think I was going to fall to some no-name fox like you?” Juliet said.

The vampire appeared in a burst of shadow further down the road. Her cape billowed behind her, and with all the wind magic being hurled around, it might be genuinely blowing for once.

“If you can’t climb over a nameless rock like me, what hope do you have to ascend the great mountains?” Kiho asked with a mocking smile. “I will never understand the arrogance that drives the weak like you.”

Juliet’s hair practically rose in anger as her eyes bulged. She flung an arm into the air. “Bitch, just for that I’ll make you my primary target. I need a new team to rip Vincent’s balls off anyway.”

Prismatic light gathered around the vampire’s arm, and Vince immediately recognized the spell. It was Juliet’s immortal killer. The one that directly struck at the magical essence of its target.

“Kiho!” Pola said, dashing in front of the fox while slashing Juliet with her wind claws.

A mass of phantoms surged in the path of the spell, exploding into mist but leaving Juliet unharmed. The vampire needed only seconds to cast her spell and had likely been preparing it or another spell even as she spoke.

Kiho’s tails quivered with white light while she shifted her stance. Her eyes narrowed but she showed no sign of dodging.

Vince swore. Whether she knew it or not, that spell could kill her. Even Gaby couldn’t shrug it off.

Other than blasting Juliet with fire magic, what could he do? He had a second or two to act. His mind raced, as if in slow motion.

Daji? he called out in his mind.

“You’re not even going to fuck her. Let her fight her own battle,” Daji chided him.

Daji!

“Fine. Place your dragon in the way and channel my magic. But I’m telling you it’s a waste.”

His dragon burst across the street, a flaming plume behind it. It crashed down in front of Kiho. Juliet’s arm swung down and the prismatic light erupted, transforming into wind. Kiho didn’t move, but her tails twitched.

Vince grasped Daji’s soul egg in his pocket and tapped into that endless mass of magic. Her tails cocooned him while she whispered sweet nothings in his ear. Fire seared his veins. Not in a painful way, but a sweet, loving heat that promised greatness. An intoxicating feeling.

His dragon flared with black flames for an instant, right as Juliet’s invisible blast of “wind” struck it.

Then nothing happened. Vince didn’t feel a thing. Kiho had vanished.

“I ate it,” Daji said. “And I told you it was pointless.”

Juliet hovered in the air, but not under her own power. She gurgled up a black, bubbly liquid and clawed at the blade of the naginata sticking out of her chest. Its blue sheen shined with red blood, instead of the strange black substance Juliet always produced.

“You think this hurts me, bitch?” Juliet gasped out, twisting her head to sneer at the fox behind her. Her shadows began to retreat.

“I know it hurts you,” Kiho said. “I may not be able to kill you, abomination, but I’ve learned that if you cut down a monster enough times it learns not to raise its hand against its betters. Japan tamed far greater beasts than you.”

“You—”

Kiho didn’t bother listening to Juliet’s taunt. Her tails flickered with telekinetic magic and the vampire exploded in a shower of black gore. What remained of her splattered all over the street.

The “victory” was as short-lived as anything Vince achieved in Lionetti Tower. Juliet’s body bubbled and reformed within seconds, clothes included. She teleported across the street in a burst of darkness.

Kiyoko stood there, her barrier bathed in blood from the foxes and undead. The mysterious sorcerer had vanished, along with the five-tail. The same couldn’t be said of the harpy.

When the tengu turned to face Juliet, the vampire’s eyes shrunk to pinpricks. “Oh, shit. Fuck off.”

She teleported to a street intersection and pointed at Vince. “This isn’t over, Vincent. These foxes may have failed to uphold their end of the bargain, but—”

Blue flames washed over her back and a bronze figure rammed into her from behind.

“Vince! I knew it was you,” Goro Miura called out, his arms ablaze with blue foxfire.

“Master, kill the vampire now!” Cora snapped as she held her palms together in a strange pose.

Several five-tail foxes in suits accompanied Gora and Cora, along with nearly a dozen four-tails wearing Houou’s security logo. A corporate enforcer team. This was their territory, after all.

Juliet screamed and flailed about, her darkness magic battling the foxfire eating away at her. She slammed face-first into a telekinetic cage summoned by Cora.

For a moment, Vince thought he’d won. He gathered what magic he could in his dragon and prepared to join in.

“Fuck this. Fuck all of this. Why are the Yakuza and Houou working together against me! I thought you hated this asshole?” Juliet screeched.

Then she exploded in a mass of shadow, a moment before Goro’s fist crashed through the space her head had been.

With the vampire’s disappearance and the destruction of her remaining allies by Kiyoko, silence nearly descended. Calming flute music floated over the scene, as if this was a movie.

Then the sound ceased and Vince remembered the necromancer hiding nearby.

A petulant scream came from nearby, “Juliet, you bitch! Don’t leave me behind.”

Gaby’s eyes nearly popped from her skull. “Hamelin, I’m going to rip you apart.”

The unicorn charged at a nearby building and bounded up it, using her light magic as climbing hooks for purchase on the vertical surface. Kiyoko frowned and considered following, only to stare at the small army of foxes approaching and instead flutter over to Vince’s side.

“We shall leave imminently if they pose a threat,” Kiyoko said. “I am concerned about the lack of police presence.”

“You shouldn’t be,” the familiar, if annoying, voice of one of the Miura twins said from behind them. “REAT’s busy down south. It’s not often anyone starts a fight in our territory. Let alone in such a blatantly illegal way.” The twin looked at the destruction with an exasperated sigh. “A vampire assassin, a hit squad, Yakuza, undead, and even a hired sorcerer hiding his identity—although we can probably trace him from that showy spell. Maybe the old man offered you too little, V. Living through this mess? No wonder they want to keep you out of the civil war.”

- - - - -

Commentary: Juliet survives a little longer, but with her binding weakness discovered, her days are finally numbered as an enemy. I sidelined her with Kiho to avoid the fight being too repetitive after her earlier appearances in the series.

The nature of this trap also gave the girls a shine imo. Vince does a lot of the fighting himself, thanks to his dragon, and he can't always be up against absurdly strong opponents like a six-tail. A plan intended to overwhelm him and shut him down with a big spell tailored to counter mages works a lot better than trying to constantly out-punch the guy with a dragon-sized fist. Once Houou's civil war starts in earnest, I'll hopefully be able to use more big opponents, more often.