Chapter 71: The Vicar of Plague

Toren Daen

"A monster," Lady Dawn said with restrained anger.

Mardeth, I thought, gritting my teeth as my neck creaked under the force of his killing intent. The vicar didn't look different from when I last saw him. 

Yellow-green blithe stains spotted his gray skin. One eye was a milky white, yet it seemed to stare through me despite its supposed blindness. His lips curled at the edges, malicious enjoyment seeping from seeing me kneel. His horns came to sharpened points that could gore a man.

He hovered in the air, his shredded vicar's robe shifting casually.

I started to push myself to my feet, gripping Oath and Promise tighter. The blades shimmered as I funneled mana into them.

The pressure redoubled, slamming me down into the ground hard enough to crack it. My telekinetic shroud–which I'd finally raised–creaked from the sheer attention of the mage before me. My panic heightened as I was forced onto my face, the most powerful mage I'd ever met hovering not ten feet away. My arms burned from straining against the pressure, the air freezing in my lungs.

I couldn't breathe.

"You already pushed past my intent once before, little mage. Show me you've changed."

My teeth creaked from how hard I clenched them.

"Get away from this lessuran," Lady Dawn said, her anger tempered somewhat by apprehension. "You are no match for him."

I felt the Will drifting closer to my mind. It lashed its tendrils out, bringing my own thoughts into its embrace. The Phoenix within denied the power of the Vritra-blooded mage bearing down on me.

I fell into my first phase, the glowing red chains superimposing themselves over my clothing. The familiar warmth pushed back against the pressure around me, allowing me to slowly draw myself to my feet.

Mardeth watched me with a crinkled eye, smirking slightly as I righted myself under his constant pressure. The air returned to my lungs as my own power rose in a swell.

"I think you'll find I've changed plenty," I said breathily. I felt a warmth under my eyes where I knew runes glowed like hot coals. Mardeth's red lifeforce flared solemnly, yet there was a strange flickering blackness at its core that seemed to drink in the light.

Mardeth cocked his head. "Is that all, little mage? I was expecting more." He held his arms behind his back. "Do you know why I left you alive last time we met?"

I shifted, my eyes darting to Oath and Promise.

"No, it wasn't because of those toothpicks you hold. The Doctrination preaches a Truth, one that even a lesser such as yourself must understand."

I couldn't run. Naereni and Karsien were still in the warehouse somewhere. If I left, they'd be easy pickings for this monster. I felt Lady Dawn's reservations and her advice that I leave, but I pushed it aside.

"What are you doing with those blithe routes?" I hissed, shifting my stance to be more aggressive. "And what did you do with all the people you took from the streets?"

"You want to know?" the Vritra-blooded vicar asked, splaying his gangly arms wide. "Fight me, little mage. Take the answers from my broken body."

His voice made me shudder internally, but I didn't let it show. I couldn't be bullied like before.

I pointed the hand holding Promise at the vicar, raising a single finger from the hilt. "I'll kill you, Mardeth."

The vicar laughed. "Oh, do try. I want to see what you can do."

I slammed fire and sound mana together, forcibly amping the heat. A thin beam of red plasma shot from my extended fingertip, moving too quickly to follow with normal senses.

A slim wall of bright green acid coalesced in front of my attack, forming nearly too fast for me to see. My beam of plasma sizzled on contact, and I could feel the mana within being broken down.

I grit my teeth, a dozen orbs of solid plasma hovering in the air around me. They cast a dim red light around me, a promise of searing destruction.

Then I sent them on, each one darting around like a fly. They came from a dozen different directions, streaks of white and red converging on a single point.

Mardeth smirked, waving his hand dismissively. A torrent of horrid green rushed from him, splashing against the floor and swallowing my plasma spells like a sea swallows a ship.

The spell tracked toward me, bubbling with decay. Unwilling to let myself be consumed, I pushed against the floor. I attached myself to the ceiling, lashing out with a plume of fire as another spray of acid tracked after me. The acid ate through my attack almost faster than I could conjure it, but the brief delay allowed me to move out of the way.

The acid splashed against the ceiling, eating through the stone quickly. I watched in abject horror as I easily guessed what would've happened to me if I'd been hit.

I turned back to Mardeth, narrowing my eyes.

"He is playing with you, Contractor. Once he wishes you dead, you will dissolve just as that stone," Lady Dawn said with increased urgency.

I snarled. I don't care. Naereni and Karsien are still in this place. I just need to give them time to escape, then I can as well.

I concentrated on my template spells, an idea forming in my head. If this man wasn't going to take me seriously, I'd use that for all I could.

A dozen different spells winked into the air around me. Fireballs, plasma, and solid variations of both circled around my position on the ceiling, growing larger as I fed more mana into them. I started to feel the heat as they swelled, even though I knew none could hurt me.

"You won't be able to play with me any longer," I said, the power of the Will reinforcing my words. "I'll make you tell me what I need to know."

Mardeth smiled a leering grin. "Play with you? Oh, little mage, you don't know anything. "

My spells surged toward the floating vicar. He hadn't moved a single inch during this entire confrontation, and I was counting on him continuing to underestimate me.

As before, a tide of green acid soaked from the vicar's robes, attacking the mana of my spell and trying to make it decay. My spells, fortified with far more power than I had inputted before, resisted longer. A couple of the plasma spells nearly singed the man's horns or bit at his robes, their searing heat inexorable even under the Vritra's decay arts.

But the overwhelming heat and firepower I was throwing at him was constantly destroyed. Each attack was systematically broken down, the hunger of the basilisk mana unrelenting. The room was cast in shades of red, orange, and green as swells of our power clashed. The walls shook at the onslaught, the rumbling making the entire structure shudder on its foundations.

My brow was sweating from the stream of spells I was throwing at the vicar. Oath and Promise hovered behind me as I focused on a special spell in my palm, my attention split between my foe and my task.

I caught Mardeth's wry smirk through the flashes of red. He was unscathed by the power I was hurling at him. His lifeforce was as steady as ever, the pulse of his heart unphased. Those specks of blackness at the center of it seemed to yawn wider.

He's not trying at all, I thought. Whenever a person's heartbeat picked up, their lifeforce surged to match it. He's completely calm. Not even exerting himself.

A quick glance at my own chest showed my heartfire flaring wildly, the tongue of red flame licking at my veins and fighting to escape my chest.

"Is that all?" he asked, somehow able to be heard over the spellfire. "The purest Doctrine which the High Sovereign himself taught was that of struggle." He paused, pretending to think as he tapped a wicked finger against his chin. "Do you know how Agrona Vritra grew so strong? "

I let the man prattle on, focusing on my own mana. A beat later, I threw the spell I'd been crafting. A large sphere of solid sound mana rocketed toward the mage, moving through the searing heat unaffected. Its insides whirled with an oily sheen, an extreme condensation of power compacted with singular intent.

Mardeth lashed at the sphere with a tendril of green acid. As expected, it punched straight through the solid plating of my spell, seeking to decay anything inside. The mana inside began to wither away like a rose deprived of water, shriveling and falling inward on itself.

It was a strange sensation to experience, my connection to my own mana cut off in an almost slow, tenuous draw. But this was what I planned for. I smiled, then clapped my hands together.

The awesome sphere of power exploded, but the outcome wasn't directionless. The wave of sound was funneled by my mana through the connecting tendril, smashing mana particle after mana particle together in a cascading wave. Mardeth's spell shuddered upward, carrying the force of a truck. Then the shockwave hit him.

For the first time, the vicar's body was affected. He visibly convulsed as the spell thundered across his insides. His milky eye was blown wide as he coughed, a single drop of blood dripping from his dark gray lips. He tilted slightly midair, his concentration disrupted.

The premise of the spell wasn't far off from my normal sound shroud, which caused internal damage to an enemy by delivering a blow to the body. Instead, I directed a shockwave through a different medium than my fist. But I couldn't let up now.

I rocketed from the ceiling, reaching for Promise. I moved as fast as I could through the air, pulling on the back of Mardeth's head with telekinesis and pushing against the ceiling at the same time.

I blurred through the air, my dagger flashing with red plasma and a promise of death. I swung at Mardeth's throat, feeling a swell of hope. My own eyes could barely track my speed, and my body ached from the g-force, but I had a chance. The vicar was disoriented by my earlier spell, and I was moving so fast.

Red steel flashed. Blood sprayed.

Mardeth held the blade of my dagger in a heavy grip, the steel inches away from his stringy throat. The edge had cut all the way to his bones, and red blood tinted with flecks of lifeforce streamed down the weapon.

"Not bad, little mage," he said, licking a stray drop of blood from his lips, seemingly recovered from my attack. "But you misunderstand something."

I watched in horror as the vicar's hand squeezed further, blood spurting from his digits. Green acid began to seep from the wounds, coating my weapon and eating at the material. I felt more than heard the red-layered metal creak and groan under his grip.

"The Sovereigns are strong for a reason. Do you know why?"

I tried in vain to pull my dagger away from that monster's hand, but to no avail. His fingers sank into the edge like a hand through butter.

The vicar's palm latched onto my face in a blur, making me yelp. I clawed at his hand as my telekinetic shroud creaked. I pulled on Oath from far away, hoping it would give me a way out. My other weapon surged toward me, but the vicar batted it away with a tendril of acid, sending it out of my control.

"They felt pain, little mage. Pain at their betrayal. Pain from their exile. And pain from being forced to rule over us lessers! Pain from being pitted against the mighty dragons of the Indrath clan!"

Mardeth threw me at the wall with the force of a train. My vision blurred as I slammed through the stone barrier, and then shot through several wooden crates. Wood splintered around me as I choked, my telekinetic shroud shattering on impact. My vision flashed as I fell in and out of consciousness with each crash. Dust and debris rose around me as I came to a stop., the broken walls and splintered wood around me telling a story all on their own.

It took me a long second to grasp my situation. My body was embedded in a thick wooden crate, a Toren-shaped hole holding me like a stern grip. For some reason, I was coated in a green substance. The smell of it was pungent, invading my nostrils and fighting for space in my brain.

I rolled forward, dropping from the splintered crate behind me with a groan. I looked through the mess of shattered wood and toppled crate towers in front of me.

It took me another moment to recognize the substance coating my body. The green fluid that had splashed onto me from being thrown through the crates.

Blithe.

"Move, Toren!" Lady Dawn called into my mind, spurring me into action. The adrenaline returned to my veins as a beam of green acid–darker than the blithe around me–shot like a bullet toward my prone form.

I used a telekinetic push against the ground, throwing myself into the air. I barely avoided the bullet as it ate through the crates near me, hissing and popping.

My adrenaline returned in full force, ideas and worries and plans thundering through my mind as I took in my situation. Mardeth had thrown me into the main section of the warehouse. But that could also be to my advantage. I was terrifyingly mobile with my telekinesis, and there were a dozen more places I could–

A tentacle of green sludge smacked me out of the sky. I slammed back into the stone floor, causing it to shake slightly. My telekinetic barrier–already covered in cracks from being thrown around–simply melted from the blow. Stray particles of the green spell still sizzled through my mana barrier, biting into my flesh and making me grunt.

I threw up a hasty wall of plasma and telekinetic force as the tentacle slammed back down. The plasma actually managed to burn away some of the spell above me, but it was eating away at the mana I shoved into it.

My arms burned as my mind raced, searching for a way out. Come on! I thought desperately as my mana left my veins and entered the only thing keeping me alive. I was running out of reserves at a startling pace. The tendril slammed back down, crushing me into the floor again. The earth around my back cracked, my bones creaking from the pressure. There's gotta be a way out! I need to run!

The tendril came down like a whip, cracking against my bare defense. Drops of green acid ate through my spell, dripping onto my telekinetic shroud and eating through that too.

"But I don't have an Indrath to fight," a voice as putrid as the acidic tentacle above me stated.

Another tendril appeared out of nowhere, snaking from the side as I focused on the impending doom above me. It cinched around my ankle, devouring the mana around my foot with hunger. I screamed as the decaying spell ate into my flesh, melting past my best defense with ease.

The tendril yanked me across the floor, hefting me up. For a moment I was weightless, my eyes darting around as I tried to catch a glimpse of my enemy. I saw a flash of grinning teeth, malevolent eyes, and a roaring heartfire, before my body was cracked into the floor.

The ground shuttered, a crater ten feet across opening under my body. My telekinetic shroud shattered in its entirety, my grip on the Will weakening as pain threatened to consume me. The runes on my arm flashed as the basilisk within reared, its attention drawn by both the light of the phoenix and the pain that lanced across my everything.

"Move yourself, Toren Daen!" my bond urged, her words distant as the breath was driven from my lungs. "He is coming!"

I couldn't bring myself to move, the pain so pervasive it dulled my mind. The Will flickered in my mind, my consciousness grasping for purchase.

"It has been so long since I felt pain, " a voice said from above me. "Pain of body. Pain of mind. Pain of emotion."

My eyes focused on Mardeth, who loomed over me like the basilisk that he derived his bloodline from. A crooked smile was on his face as he knelt, a swirling vortex of acid around us. I noted absently that his wounds were healed somehow, his hand mended as if I'd never cut it.

"Pain is what drives us to our greatest heights."

The sadistic mage reached out toward me with a long, disjointed grey finger. The nail on it was black, twisted, and sharp, and my breathing picked up as I tried in vain to move myself.

Don't let him touch you! Don't let him touch you! Get out!

But my body wouldn't move. My limbs failed to respond, the burning from exhaustion and acid making them worthless. My red chain flickered on my arm. The basilisk within shifted, almost awake.

Mardeth drew his finger across my face in an almost tender gesture, wiping a drop of blithe from my cheek. He drew that finger over his tongue, shuddering with a perverse sense of something . His good eye closed, but a twitch in his face made me unable to tell if it was from agony or pleasure. "You're going to feel pain, little mage. Pain as you dealt me. I'm going to forge you into the Kezess to my Agrona." He drew his finger down over my face, drawing a thin cut that leaked too-crimson blood. "Will you break, or be like the Sovereigns?"

This man is insane, I realized with wide eyes. I struggled anew, but my movements only grew weaker. My core was near empty, the salvo I had thrown earlier a drain on my reserves and my last desperate defense wearing me down further. My telekinetic shroud refused to reform.

The vicar leaned forward, grabbing me by the hair and yanking me toward him. His breath was putrid as it scraped against my face, his eyes alight with almost manic glee. I moaned pitifully as I was wrenched from the crater my body had made, my arms limply trying to grasp at Mardeth's hand. "You're special, little mage. Only the witch who gave you those swords sees it. But I do. I'll make you see it, too."

He leaned even closer, his putrid lips right against my ears. "But if you try and stop me again before we're ready, I'll hurt you. Pain can only do so much before it breaks a thing rather than builds it stronger. All the people I've taken? Their lives are in your hands."

I barely had time to process Mardeth's words before the vicar slammed my head into the stone beneath me, and everything went black.