23. A Conversation in the War Room

A Conversation in the War Room

A dozen ironbeaks plunged from the sky, their sharp mouths opening to spew roaring flame.

Chen Jin and Zhou Xiaorui raised their new weapons.

Deep crimson fire erupted from them in torrents as thick as a human torso, surging upward to meet the monstrous birds.

Every stream struck a giant iron bird with perfect accuracy. In an instant, each was engulfed, as if swallowed whole by a sea of fire.

Most of the enemy’s forces used flame in some form during battle.

Fire breath. Molten metal. Pursuing fireballs. Superheated blades. Their methods of attack were full of it.

They also possessed great resistance—one could almost say immunity—to ordinary fire and heat.

But they could not withstand a particular kind of magical flame, one that generated itself by drawing energy out of the surrounding environment.

The first ironbeaks struck began to wobble. Their flight lost stability, then stopped. They dropped straight down like twenty-ton lumps of metal.

Flame still poured from their mouths, but not because they were trying to attack anyone. The fire was being forcibly drawn out of them.

They tried to move, but their motions were clumsy and slow. The internal heat that kept parts of their metal bodies pliable had been sharply reduced.

As the deep red flames around them grew stronger, the ironbeaks’ bodies turned rigid and brittle. A skin of frost even formed across them.

At last, under the stress of uneven heating and cooling from second to second, their bodies shattered.

The enemy’s other airborne units soon met the same fate.

Even at a great distance from the battle, Chi Li could clearly feel a surge of power flooding into her, as if a flame had been lit in the depths of her soul. After all, the killing had been done through magical weapons she had made with her own hands.

The distant battlefield wavered, flickered, and finally faded away. The real world intruded once more upon Chi Li’s awareness.

By then, the two wands’ energy had been completely exhausted, and Chi Li could no longer track anything through the remnants of power there.

Besides, I and the soldiers were deep in enemy territory, far too distant from Chi Li. Without a special connection, she had no way to scry on us.

Chi Li stood, stretched, and tried to coax feeling back into stiff muscles.

Sweat had soaked her clothes until they were damp and foul-smelling, while the surface of her body felt dry and oily at once.

She decided that the next time she performed a scrying ritual, she would do it in the bathroom.

By the time Chi Li had washed herself and reached the war-planning room, it was almost empty. Only Liya remained, studying the city map with focused attention.

As each team advanced across the battlefield, the map continued to update, and Liya extracted more information from the enemy’s movements.

“Why did you send Sister Lin with those two soldiers?” Chi Li asked, without bothering to circle the question. “They barely contributed anything substantial to the mission.”

“Because if I had not, they would have been in danger of dying,” the human-shaped outsider replied without hesitation. She had clearly expected Chi Li to ask.

Chi Li was full of curiosity. She badly wanted to know what face lay beneath Liya’s childish mask.

Would she look like an alien from a movie? A blazing demon from the depths of hell? A mass of formless energy? Or something mysterious that human beings could neither understand nor imagine?

“Also,” Liya continued, “after the long and exhausting week Miss Ye has endured, she needed someone she could talk to. Did you not notice? The younger of the two soldiers made it very easy for her to open up, to speak about herself, and to forget the anger she felt at not being taken seriously.”

“You could have sent me with her,” Chi Li insisted. “I’m her best friend! I should have been by her side while she fought.”

“After completing that delicate piece of magical work, successful though it was, you were in no condition to participate in combat.”

The illusion of the city map flickered, clearly showing the movements of several teams.

Zhao Linshou’s team was fighting fiercely through a large mass of enemy soldiers in the shopping mall.

Cheng Rui’s group at the city zoo had been raiding hardware stores, gathering materials for his tinkers and craftsmen so they could build some new, super-secret weapon. As for the details, they refused to say more.

Principal Matthew of the private school downtown was busy managing more than twenty superpowered middle and high school students. Judging by his situation, the poor man deserved pity.

The “Barbarians” from the trailer park were dismantling another tower on the city’s east side, their progress steady and methodical.

And there were more than a dozen other teams Chi Li had not even known existed, each carrying out its own mission in the monster-occupied city.

None of them could inflict destruction on the enemy the way my team or the Barbarians could.

But every one of their efforts mattered.

Because the city was packed with monsters.

Not dozens. Not hundreds. Thousands upon thousands of enemy groups were skulking through the streets or flying through the black sky above.

That Liya could track so many enemy movements at once was astonishing.

“If you think a little scrying and two decent wands have brought your power anywhere near that of the enemy commander, I assure you, you are very wrong,” Liya said, as if she could see directly into Chi Li’s thoughts.

Of course, with her abilities, she probably could. “Do you remember what I told you when you showed great interest in the enemy’s magic and I agreed to teach you?”

“You said that if I did something beyond my ability out of greed or teenage overconfidence, you would kill me so that I and my friends would not fall into the horrors that would follow,” Chi Li recited almost word for word.

When your teacher solemnly informed you that failing at your studies could be fatal, it was not exactly the sort of thing you forgot.

“Exactly. Sacrificial magic is not something to be treated lightly, even when the sacrifices are your enemies.” Her bright black eyes fixed on Chi Li’s, and there was a frightening intensity in them.

“Sometimes especially when they are your enemies. Apart from the initial contact with magic, it is this conscious, personal act of sacrifice that truly strengthens one’s power. Do you really think making such choices again and again leaves a person’s mind untouched?”

“The careless ones, the ones who reach beyond what they can bear, eventually become no different from your enemies. They deliberately create lives that can be sacrificed, for the sole purpose of laying them on the altar of their so-called supremacy.”

“I… can you teach me other forms of magic?” Chi Li asked.

The deeper she learned, the less certain she was that she wanted to keep learning this magic, even if it was for the sake of saving lives.

“Why do you keep asking questions when you already know the answer?” Liya replied in the weary tone teachers reserved for exceptionally stubborn students.

“Magic must first be discovered and understood by the individual before it can be taught. Telling someone how you believe magic works before they have built their own foundation is often harmful. Perhaps not immediately, but there is an internal reason why those who learn magic by rote memorization can never perform at anything close to their potential.”

“Really?”

It was not all that surprising. If Chi Li had tried to think about magic with a numerical skill like Cheng Rui, perhaps she too would have awakened a skill panel that made leveling magic easy, instead of the ability to create almost any magical effect within the broad theme of fire.

“When we were about to talk to Sister Lin about monsters and magic, did you steer that traitor into our path?” Chi Li demanded.

“No,” my teacher denied.

Another change rippled through the map. Large numbers of enemy groups began withdrawing from the city center.

Chi Li ignored it. All her attention was on the person who had nearly gotten Cheng Rui killed.

“After you found Ye Lin, someone capable of seeing through the traitor’s schemes and powerful enough to matter, and before the traitor could forcibly turn hundreds of civilians into ghosts, before the people he had already recruited could fully develop their powers, I led your group into his path.”

More red enemy icons than ever poured into the outskirts of the city. Thousands of enemies filled the streets to the northwest.

Chi Li did not look at the shifting map. Right then she did not care. All she wanted was to slam the door, go out, and burn a monster to death.

But her magic had not recovered. She could not do it.

So Chi Li turned and left in silence, unwilling to let Liya take satisfaction from her agreement.

We were in a war.

To win a war, sacrifices had to be made.

It was through learning this new magic that Chi Li came to understand that truth more deeply than ever.