The Fusionist Book 2 -- Chapter 44

Chapter 44

“Is that—? What happened? I thought you said you secured the door?”

Irritated, Ricardo snapped back at Phyllia. “I did! Someone must have let him out.”

He cautiously moved ahead, the unbelievability of the situation thoroughly confusing him as he looked around. As he closed in on the entrance to the room, he could see pebbles and thick stone dust all over the tunnel floor where there hadn’t been much of anything before, due to all of the moving in and out of the room Ricardo had done while preparing the room.

But there was no sign of the door or even pieces of the door, which he expected to see.

When he finally made it to the entrance, he peaked inside, assuming it would be empty – but he was wrong. The half-breed was on the floor where Ricardo and the trainees had left him, his legs still misshapen lumps underneath his robe. He was slumped over with his head on his chest, his back propped up against the far wall, completely unmoving. Ricardo took a moment to look and see if Larek was breathing, but he couldn’t see any movement.

“No! He’s dead, you moron! I was supposed to kill him!”  Ricardo whipped around, looking at Marano. “I thought you knew what you were doing!”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” defended the Martial trainee, holding up his hands. “You said he had Body Regeneration, so that shouldn’t have been anywhere near enough to kill him.”

“Yeah, but you must’ve hit something vital and he bled out internally or something.” Ricardo was really ticked off. Yes, the loss of additional questions being answered was significant, but what he was really angry about was the fact that he wouldn’t be the one to finish off the half-breed. That was half the reason he wanted to do this in the first place and it had been snatched away from him.

“No, I know what I was doing—”

“I don’t want to hear it. Help me get everything out of here and get rid of the body in one of the abandoned rooms further down where it’s unsafe to travel. It won’t look as bad if he’s eventually found there in the far future, because they’ll just think he ventured where he shouldn’t have.”

Both Marano and Phyllia moved into the room and headed for the body, with a disgusted Ricardo slowly bringing up the rear. How did this happen? I’d like to continue blaming the meathead, but that really shouldn’t have killed the half-breed.

As he took a single step into the room, he felt an unfamiliar tingle of magic coming from somewhere ahead of him just as Marano reached down and—

—swept his hand through the illusionary image that was placed on the floor.

Ricardo’s shock lasted only a second before he suddenly felt a blast of intense heat sweep over him and he instinctively threw himself backwards. As he passed through the entrance, he felt a momentary resistance before he slammed against the stone wall of the tunnel. Reaching up to his head, he winced as the exposed skin on his face and hands felt tight and itchy, as if they had just been burned by passing through a fire.

Looking up as he heard a pair of screams, he watched as Marano and Phyllia beat against some sort of semi-opaque barrier of hardened air without being able to pass through them. Completely flabbergasted by what he was witnessing, he watched as the leather and cloth on their bodies suddenly caught fire, followed by their skin seemingly melting off their bodies—

He looked away and threw up at the horrible sight of the two Martial trainees being burned alive, something that all of his time at the Academy and the Scissions he’d witnessed and now fought as part of the defense force hadn’t prepared him for. Nothing like that should even be possible, and his mind was in too much shock to try and figure it out.

“Ricardo. I should’ve suspected.”

The voice of a dead man shook him out of his stupor as his head whipped around into the darkness beyond the room where his partners had stopped screaming. When he looked ahead down the tunnel that led further into the abandoned section of the massive storage area Ricardo saw absolutely nothing, even after he lifted his Illumination cube out toward where he heard the voice. There was a small ripple of something, but with how messed up he was still after witnessing such horror, he couldn’t think straight.

“Half-breed? Did you do this? They’ll send you to the Diregate for sure, if they don’t kill you outright!”

“You’re still calling me a half-breed? I know who my parents were, and I can assure you that neither of them was one of these so-called mythical ‘Great Ones’.” The flat tone of the voice was completely without emotion, something that sent a spike of fear shooting through his entire body, causing him to freeze up. Then he realized what he said about the Great Ones being mythical, as if Ricardo had just been making them up. Anger surged through his blood, thawing the ice that seemed to keep him frozen, and he took a step forward.

“Give up now and I’ll make sure they send you to the Diregate rather than having you, your parents, and the rest of your family executed,” he promised after learning that the half-breed thought he had different parents – and, of course, intending nothing of the sort.

It seemed as though Larek already knew that. “You were going to kill me anyway, and now that you seem to suspect that I’m a half-breed, I’m sure tracking down my family wouldn’t be too hard for you to do. However, none of that’s going to happen.”

“Oh, yeah? Why is that? It’s not like you can stop me; you can’t even cast a spell.” Even as he spoke, Ricardo began surreptitiously forming an Air Blast spell pattern in front of him, the same that had blasted in the door to Larek’s room earlier that day. With how tight the tunnel was, it would slam into anything and everything in its way, including wherever the murdering half-breed was hiding. All it would take now was to feed his Mana into the pattern and—

“Because I don’t need spells when I have Fusions. Activate!” the half-breed suddenly shouted with voice so powerful that the sound shook dust from the ceiling and walls. It was so loud that he lost concentration on his spell pattern and it broke apart. Just as he was quickly reassembling it with his Pattern Cohesion, he was suddenly hit by a barrage of elemental projectiles that seemed to appear out of nowhere. A small fireball splashed into his leg, knocking him back a step while setting his robe on fire; a stone the size of his fist cracked into his shoulder and he screamed in pain as he felt his collarbone snap; a spike made of ice pierced his belly, sinking deep into the flesh but fortunately not passing all the way through to exit out of his back; a stream of high-pressure water passed across the top of his head, tearing out his hair as he ducked under the deadly jet, preventing it from doing any more damage.

Ripping out the spike of ice out from his stomach was even more painful than the initial impact, especially with his broken collarbone hindering him, but he managed to get it out and toss it to the side. Pressing his hand to his stomach, he cast Minor Mending to stop the bleeding and repair some of the internal damage, though he knew it would take more than that to fix him completely. With a quick spell, he extinguished the flames on his robes by robbing them of air, before looking out into the darkness again. He had no idea how the half-breed had cast so many different spells at him, seemingly at the same moment, but he could only assume that he had brought friends with him. If that was the case, then he was in trouble.

“Look, how about we just go our separate ways—”

“It’s too late for that. You already crossed a line and if I allow you to leave, then you’ll just cross another one, and another, and another. You hurt me, hurt my friends, and were going to kill me without seeming to feel any remorse about it. I heard you speaking with the others; you were disappointed that you weren’t the one to kill me.”

As the half-breed was talking, Ricardo was backing up step by step, forming a Wind Blade spell pattern in front of him; the more Larek spoke, the more he was pinpointing his location, even if he couldn’t see him. With a final flourish, he finished the pattern off in a split second, injecting his Mana into it; as the crescents of hardened air with a sharpened edge to them emerged from the filled spell pattern and shot toward the source of the sounds, he took off running back down the tunnel to the way out. If he couldn’t kill the half-breed and his friends out here, he’d get help and tell everyone that Larek killed Marano and—

“Repel!”

There was the voice again, but instead of being shot in the back by multiple projectiles, two powerful blasts of air slammed into his front, picking him off his feet and sending him soaring back down the tunnel toward the half-breed. He landed on his back and cried out in pain as it wrenched his injured shoulder and ripped apart his partially healed stomach wound. Looking around as he scrambled to his feet, he noticed a wall of hardened and opaque air fade just in front of where he suspected Larek was located.

Did he just block my Wind Blades with a Wind Barrier? How is that even possible?

Panting from the pain that reverberated through his upper body, he shouted toward the invisible half-breed. “IS THAT ALL YOU GOT, FREAK?!”

Ricardo finally saw movement down the tunnel as Larek emerged from seemingly nowhere, leaning down to pick up something on the floor. Out of thin air, he picked up a wooden Mages staff of all things. When the half-breed saw him looking, he stared at Ricardo with eyes that burned with an anger so intense that it was almost a palpable force.

No matter what he claims, if that’s not the sign of a half-breed, I don’t know what is.

“No; I was just getting started. Activate! Activate! Activate! Activate!”

Out of reflex and pushing through the agony of his wounds, Ricardo quick-cast his own Wind Barrier spell, creating a layer of hardened air around him that would block the damage of whatever projectiles were coming at him. Once it was up, he immediately began constructing his next spell, but he flinched as his Barrier shattered, hit by a barrage of fireballs, fist-sized stones, and even a jet of water that seemed unending. He staggered backwards as he was pummeled and cut by the foreign spells, but the worst was yet to come.

Spikes of sharp ice cut through his robe to impale his body, none of them doing tremendous amounts of damage by themselves, but they kept coming. Looking up through the blood that was somehow dripping into his eyes from a headwound he hadn’t even noticed receiving, he saw that it wasn’t anyone casting the spell at him; instead, it was the half-breed holding a Mage’s staff and pointing it at him, causing Ice Spikes to form on the tip before being launched in a straight line.

Over and over and over again as he continually shouted, “Activate!”

What is going on? How did he—?

The next thing Ricardo knew was that he was on his back staring up at the darkened ceiling of the storage tunnel, all feeling in his body below either numb or on fire by the pain. He attempted to create a Minor Mending spell to heal himself, but he couldn’t even concentrate well enough to access his Pattern Cohesion. The one thing he noticed was that he couldn’t hear the word, “Activate,” being shouted anymore, but he heard the crunch of small stones underneath a boot as footsteps came closer to him. Unable to turn his head as his muscles wouldn’t obey him for some odd reason, he moved his eyes as he saw the half-breed approach on his left side. Fear shot through what was left to be felt in his body and he opened his mouth to plead for his life; his words died in his throat as he saw the glint of the faint light coming from the open room behind him on what appeared to be the head of an axe. It wasn’t a battleaxe or one that the Martials would use, but one he vaguely recognized as being used for chopping wood.

As he stared up at the burning anger contained in a pair of eyes that promised no mercy, Ricardo knew then and there that he had greatly miscalculated the strength of the half-breed. That miscalculation was going to cost him his life.

And so it did, as the last thing he witnessed in the world was the sight of a sharp axe descending out of sight, to a spot located just below his chin.

Book 2 Chapter 45: https://www.patreon.com/posts/fusionist-book-2-84172468