22. Reaching the Magic Tower

Reaching the Magic Tower

I lay powerless in the street, a faint, exhausted smile tugging at the corner of my mouth.

My abilities still did not let me create fire directly. I had not unlocked anything that convenient yet.

What I could do was use Forcefield Creation with a little cleverness. In two cylindrical spaces of roughly one cubic yard each, I used Force Adjustment to dramatically increase the heat contained in the fluid medium.

Then, with Persistent Force, I permanently attached those forcefields to the two shadows.

From that moment on, no matter how they moved and no matter where they fled, the heat in the air around them would increase exponentially.

Soon enough, the shadows began to tire.

Every time they reappeared after a “jump,” they had been burned more badly than before. The interval before their next jump grew longer as well, giving the flames more time to gather heat and burn hotter.

At last, they stopped moving.

Over five or six brief seconds, the color of the fire shifted from the red of heated metal to a dazzling, lightning-bright blue-white.

Then the forcefields that had caused the effect abruptly vanished, their anchor points destroyed, and the shadows disappeared with them.

Meanwhile, two soldiers who had already made some progress toward becoming stronger and more magical ducked into a massive fissure split across the street.

The crack plunged down into darkness, all the way to the sewer below.

This was Zhou Xiaorui’s second magical ability. With it, he could rapidly excavate deep trenches through concrete and even hard stone.

Three skeleton archers leapt into the trench after them.

Two, with near-superhuman agility, found an unstable balance on the jagged spikes of concrete and brick that formed the trench walls.

The third was less fortunate. It failed to catch itself and dropped through the gap at the bottom, falling headfirst thirty meters into the dark.

It did not die immediately, but the two skeleton archers trying to keep their balance were not going to be so lucky.

Zhou Xiaorui raised the weapon that was not, strictly speaking, a rifle, and pulled the trigger.

It was more like the physical expression his magic took when he used it, the same way a fireball or a magical shield might be.

During the three days that old hunter Zhao Linshou and the outsider Liya had spent teaching him and his friends, he had gradually become accustomed to using magic as a weapon of considerable power.

So one night, his real rifle had simply disappeared and been replaced by this rifle-shaped form of magic.

Things like that happened in magic.

A continuous stream of magical energy shot toward the skeleton archers with the force and speed of a hail of bullets.

Some bolts missed, slipping through the empty spaces between bones and drilling holes into the ground behind them. Most, however, struck the bones held together by molten metal rather than ligaments.

One might assume that bones joined by molten metal would make for a fragile arrangement, but people were often surprised when such enemies failed to fall apart under casual attacks.

In fact, they endured the first few strikes. Even the first dozen.

But this gunlike magical weapon had several advantages: it never ran out of “ammunition,” never overheated from sustained use, and had no recoil.

Three seconds of holding the trigger down shattered the skeleton archers into pieces and rendered them completely unable to fight.

The other soldier preferred close combat.

He moved like a ghost, flickering from one skeleton archer’s side to another’s, his long blade darting in and out. Every precise thrust severed a spine.

It was nothing like when he had first arrived here, when he had still needed to carefully dodge the gargoyles—those flying, fireball-spitting nuisances most people kept mistakenly calling imps.

Now, by striking bone instead of liquid-metal joints, he could dispatch enemies before they even realized he was there.

Another squad of…