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 skeleton archers burst from a gap in the unfinished wall. They advanced at frightening speed, faster than most people could sprint at full tilt, firing low-powered arrows as they came.

Their arrows were shaped from magical molten metal and burning magical matter, flying in low arcs.

After crossing the trench, the arrows lost cohesion and broke apart into fine, searing rain.

The two soldiers caught the monstrous attackers by surprise, shooting and stabbing them from behind. Somehow, in the span of only a few seconds, they had miraculously left the trench and appeared at the enemy’s rear.

Chen Jin’s second—and most useful—ability was short-range teleportation through shadows. Apparently, it had become strong enough for him to bring a passenger along.

Once the immediate enemies were cleared, the two soldiers approached the unfinished tower and wall to complete the final objective of their mission.

The roughly cylindrical black structure loomed above them, silent and grim, with neither roaring magical flame nor crackling lightning.

Though the tower appeared finished from the outside, the dark masons building it had been pulled back in haste when the first resistance members were detected moving into the area. As a result, the tower’s enchantments had not been fully completed.

The soldiers searched uselessly around it for a way in, looking for some place where their limited power might damage it.

Of course, they were never going to find one. The invaders used their towers very differently from the way we imagined.

Their towers—at least the smaller ones erected around the city—were not fortifications with soldiers stationed inside to fire back at advancing enemies.

They were enchanted to fire by themselves.

Basically, they were oversized wands. And if you were careful when making a wand, you did not leave unnecessary hollow spaces or structural weaknesses inside it.

In fact, you made it as solid as possible, which Zhou Xiaorui learned very thoroughly when he tried shooting the tower.

Aside from the crude Gothic ornamentation, the tower was essentially a solid cylinder of metal, just as the wall was essentially an extremely thick metal plate.

Then, exactly as we had expected, the invaders began closing the net.

Dozens of skeleton archers poured in from every street leading back toward the city center. More emerged from hiding places behind the wall, their numbers swelling, their momentum fierce.

Zhou Xiaorui sprayed fire into the first few ranks, but the damage was negligible. Left with no better option, the two soldiers began to run.

Hundreds of enemies followed, steadily encircling them. The enemy did not care about spending hundreds of soldiers’ lives to overwhelm a handful of resistance members. They had already slaughtered a city of two hundred thousand people to fuel their brutal war machine.

Then, just as Chen Jin and Zhou Xiaorui were on the verge of being trapped and killed, I arrived.

I tore through the enemy’s front ranks like a meteor.

Skeletons burst apart, molten metal spraying in every direction. Then I looped back and landed solidly between the horde and the two soldiers, openly daring the enemy to attack me.

Naturally, the undead obliged.

Their attention shifted to the more dangerous, more powerful opponent. They ignored the soldiers’ movements, since the soldiers could not truly harm them anyway.

That was when the two men removed the one-centimeter-thick, one-meter-long metal rods from the magically warded lockboxes strapped to their backs.

Even while fighting my way through the mob, I paused for a fraction of a second and stared at those two metal cylinders.

To anyone who saw deeper than appearances, the two wands beat against the senses like war drums, filled with a vast power that was almost impossible to contain.

Making those things had been miserable work. Afterward, Chi Li had been exhausted for hours, and during the process, the safe house had almost exploded eleven separate times.