Dead Serious

Bjorn cursed as Vanya leaped at him, covering more than ten feet in an instant. He leaped back with superhuman agility. "What kind of twisted game are you playing?" he bellowed at Jason as he dodged another strike.

Vanya teleported behind him, forcing him to catch her strike and redirect it to the side as he ducked out of the way. If things were different, Jason might have stood there and gawked at their dance. Vanya hadn't even bothered drawing her weapon, trying instead to beat him down with sheer force. Bjorn on the other hand, dodged and weaved his way through the onslaught.

Unfortunately, Jason had a lot more on his hands. Nora had pulled out another knife, but he couldn't reach out to stop her with the mine still active around him. He jumped in front of her in an effort to keep her from getting herself hurt.

Jason doubted even a surprise attack from the girl would be worth Bjorn's notice. He was on an entirely different level than the soldiers they had killed.

He needed to do something before Vanya or Bjorn hurt each other, but what could he do? On top of that, his magic had completely disappeared. He could still feel his mana the same as before, but he couldn't use it any more than he could outside the barrier.

Worse actually. Before he could at least manage small things. Now he couldn't even make his hand invisible. It had to have something to do with his boots. They had almost completely fallen apart, and he had a horrible feeling that something terrible would happen if they disappeared entirely.

It had to be something to do with the sparrow being gone. He hated that she hadn't bothered telling him the extent of the mana she was siphoning from him, but there had to be a reason. He would have to turn off the mine.

He pulled out the box and got ready to flip the switch, but stopped himself. Perhaps he could kill two birds with one stone.

Jason waited until Bjorn dodged close to him, and…"Take this!" he yelled to the man.

Bjorn instinctively grabbed the box out of the air as it flew at him, and collapsed to the ground seconds later. Jason gasped as he passed through the barrier, and most of his mana disappeared into the sparrow that appeared at his feet.

"What's going on?" the sparrow asked, but Jason didn't have time to talk. Vanya, seeing her opponent falter, was preparing another attack. Jason barely had time to recognize that his boots had reappeared in pristine condition before he was diving towards the unconscious Bjorn.

He arrived just before Vanya, and, growing more and more accustomed to passing through the barrier, he was able to create a shield to block her blow.

Fortunately for his arm, Vanya pulled back before she hit him. Jason hadn't been sure whether or not she would, and he definitely hadn't been sure that the shield would be enough.

"Get away from him before I cave your skull in too," she warned him, sounding like she meant every word of it.

"So after all of this you're going to kill me over one random guy? I figured you had more faith in your tellers than that."

"That isn't some random human," she retorted. "A random human wouldn't put up a fight like that. He is strong enough to pose a serious threat to my people and you think that I'm just going to let him go?"

"Regardless, this man saved your life."

"Only because of that disgusting form you put me in," she said coldly, but that only hardened Jason's resolve.

"First of all, that was my wife's face, and you'd best watch yourself if you're going to keep insulting it. Second of all, I don't care what you say, he is a good man and I'm not going to let you go around killing people like him. Especially not while he's defenseless."

Vanya looked like she was about to attack anyway. "And you should know," Jason continued, "I knocked him out using the same mana mine that took you out so if you get close to him, then you're going to look just like him."

She stared at him blankly. "So why are you perfectly fine there?"

"It's one of the perks of being the Demon Resplendent," Jason shot back.

Vanya looked at him, visibly struggling to decide what she should do. Nora had approached quietly as well, waiting for Vanya to do something no doubt. Jason didn't like how much the two had in common.

"You may be the Demon Resplendent, but I can't just stand by and let a man who will go on to kill hundreds of my kind if I don't finish him now. You wouldn't understand." She pulled out her sword, but Jason didn't wait for her to strike.

His magic had returned and he intended to use it. He set the world spinning around him. It wasn't actually spinning, but to Vanya and Nora, it appeared to be. He added an extra gravitational pull on each of them, pulling them to the side to deepen the illusion and even created fake gusts of wind to blow them back.

To them, the world would be spinning like a top with Jason at the center and them hanging on for dear life, getting pulled in circles and pushed by the wind. To him, though, they looked like a couple of drunks walking on an uneven sidewalk.

Jason was glad that he hadn't dove too deeply into what illusion magic actually was. It felt almost contradictory in some ways. He could make images appear in people's minds and alter the way they sensed things, but he could also conjure a perfectly viable shield out of nothing and shapeshift a body into a totally different shape.

Where was the line between what was real and what was imagined? Were the winds that he was making Vanya experience real? And if so then why didn't he feel it. If it was just in her head, then how did it push her back? If his shield was just something imagined then how did it stop real arrows mid flight?

He should have had so many questions, but he didn't. Everything just felt right to him. He didn't know why some things worked and others didn't, but there were rules of a sort. Asking him to explain the rules would have been like asking a toddler who had just learned to speak why he said 'I eat' instead of 'Eat I.'

"Stop whatever you're doing," she yelled over the wind that wasn't there. Jason could hear the strain in her voice as she muscled her way through. "He is too dangerous to be left alive!"

Jason knew that she was probably right, but he couldn't just let him die. It wasn't that he was human. Jason couldn't have cared less about most of the humans he had met so far. If Bjorn had been one of the soldiers or even one of the people in the village, he wouldn't have fought so hard, but this man?

Everything that he had done since Jason found him had been kind, and not for some kind of benefit of his own. He had just genuinely cared, which was something that Jason hadn't realized that he had craved so much. This man was a better man than Jason himself by a longshot.

Jason imagined fireworks, the biggest ones he had ever seen, flying up into the air. Vanya and Nora looked in awe at the things as they filled the sky with colors despite the still bright sky. Was he enhancing the colors himself?

It didn't matter. The colors weren't why he did it. He sent up another wave of fireworks, these ones as big and loud as he could imagine. Through the battlefield of noise, he imagined a phoenix taking Bjorn in its talons and flying him as far away as it could go.

Jason felt the heat from it's flaming wings as it grabbed the still unconscious Bjorn and ripped him away. It wouldn't make it far as Jason's magic disappeared instantly as the mine flew away with the phoenix, but the spinning ground would make it impossible for Vanya to quickly determine which direction it had gone.

"Is this some kind of joke to you?" Vanya growled as his magic's effects disappeared.

I'm dead serious," he said. "Now we had better get out of here soon, everyone within miles of this place will have seen and heard what happened. It would probably be best if we aren't around when they arrive."

Vanya stared daggers at Jason, but she reoriented herself quickly. "Get you bag girl," she ordered Nora. "It looks like we're leaving."