Chapter 72
O’Hara had seen her boss, Major Chon Sook, in a variety of moods. But she’d never seen him angry and…scared at the same time.
Scaring an elite battle wizard specializing in lightning strikes was virtually impossible.
Whoever had done it was in big trouble.
“I heard you, Lieutenant. Get everyone together and wait for orders from me.” The major hung up and locked his fingers.
O’Hara was itching to say that using a black wizard had been a bad idea from the start, but she bit her tongue in time.
That would have been pushing it too far.
“Find the seal center,” the major drawled, deep in thought. “O’Hara, give me a city map.”
Without asking why, the Fae stood. Her high heels clattered as she walked to the filing cabinet and pulled out a paper map. Chon Sook hardly ever used tablets or anything else digital.
The major spread the map on the table and leaned over it with a thoughtful air.
“The seal center,” he said again. “Maybe…? No. Or… Where we first encountered the Mask?”
O’Hara instantly pointed at the second port berth. It was a curious correlation: the Mask’s first attack had happened right above the Guards’ base.
“And second?”
O’Hara pointed at a different spot. The major highlighted it.
“Mark all the rest.” He handed the highlighter to his subordinate, who marked five more locations. There were a total of seven.
“Seven…seven…”
“…apexes!” O’Hara and the major exclaimed together. Using a ruler, they connected the highlighted dots and drew a circle through them. The seal they came up with centered around…
“Goodness.” The major dropped into his armchair. Grabbing his smartphone, he dialed Gribovsky. “Lieutenant, get everyone to the Arena. Now!”
Pressing a red button, the major dialed another number.
“Major Chon Sook. Authorization code: alpha, bravo, seventeen, jango, forty-five, whiskey, twenty-one. Requesting backup at the Arena, Myers City. Threat code: red. Respond immediately. I repeat, requesting…”
He continued speaking, but O’Hara was no longer listening. She was busy leafing through the paper folder of case materials they’d opened before they’d even known it would lead to a series of demon summons.
“Major,” O’Hara whispered, pointing at the date of the very first case record. “Look.”
Setting his smartphone down on the table, Chon Sook leaned over the folder.
It was a day of discoveries when it came to the head of the demon-fighting department.
For the first time ever, O’Hara heard the major use that kind of foul language.
***
Elie was on the ground with a broken arm and a wounded leg. Jing stood over her, reeling and barely conscious. There were magic glowing tiger paws flashing and fading around his legs.
Leo-Leonard was inside a magically generated black box held shut with heavy, smoking chains. Even his power wasn’t enough to get out of the creepy artifact.
Mara was applying pressure to Travis’ slashed artery with both hands, but his face was growing paler with each passing second.
Still, even in their condition, they looked better than the rest of the teams. Everyone else who had reached the finale, a magic battle royale, was dead, the torn pieces of their bodies scattered around the ravaged magic forest the stadium arena had been transformed into. It was gradually shedding the illusion of magic verdure, its true appearance beginning to peek through.
The stands were becoming visible, too. Clouds of dust and stone dust billowed into the sky. Sparks showered down from the smashed stadium lights. A few fires flared up.
People were screaming. Some were trying to pull loved ones out of the rubble. Others, in a state of complete shock, were silent in their seats, their empty eyes staring straight ahead like living glass.
Just a short time before, they’d been having fun, enthusiastically cheering on their favorite teams. That had been before the terrorist the media had dubbed the Mask had disguised himself as one of the contestants and turned the place into a hell on earth.
Lilac fire devoured the stands. The ground shuddered as it was pummeled by giant pieces of cement. The screams were so loud they drowned out the sounds of helicopters and the sirens of police cars and fire engines rushing for the Arena.
“My life didn’t prepare me for this,” Travis said, trying to crack a gurgling joke. He was humorous even on the verge of death.
“Stop.” Tears were running down Mara’s cheeks.
“Did…we…wound…him?”
Mara turned to look at the Mask. A torn black cloak fluttered behind him, his gauntleted hands clutching a battle magic storage shaped as a grimoire, and his face hidden by a heavy mask with narrow eye slits.
He walked unhurriedly across the soft grass as it wilted and shriveled beneath his boots, turning into smooth sand. The Mask seemed to drain the life strength from everything around him. He literally oozed black magic.
“It’s…the professor…for sure,” Travis said as his eyes closed.
“Trav!” Mara screamed. “Trav, wake up!”
But the redhead was silent.
Wailing, Mara turned toward the dark figure.
“Professor, we trusted you! Even after you sold us out in the second tour, we still trusted you. How could you? How could you do this?”
The Mask (Alexander Dumsky in disguise, something the B-52 group had suspected all along—they’d actually asked him to be their coach so they could expose him as a terrorist) took another step forward.
Mara peered through the slits, but she couldn’t see the arrogant, green eyes on the other side.
How could she have been so wrong?
Even when everyone was saying what he’d pulled in the financial district was just a distraction, Mara had still trusted him. Because…because…
A yellow circle flashed in front of the Mask. Clutching Travis against her chest, Mara squeezed her eyes shut.
Her heart took a beat. Then another. And yet another.
But nothing happened.
Mara finally opened her eyes to see…not really a bird, but something similarly winged and flying.
A sports car, two giant raven wings flapping in place of its doors, crashed into the belly of the Mask, who’d just turned toward it. That was all he had time to do. No magic burst from his seal, which was already dissolving.
Falling out of the car, to Mara’s and Jing’s total astonishment, came Professor Alexander Dumsky.
He was bruised all over, an eyebrow gashed, a shoulder dislocated, and his clothes torn. Collapsing onto the sand with a dirty swear, he hit it with his shoulder to crunch it back into place.
“…bitch!” the black wizard finished his foul expression. Standing up, he trudged past the Mask toward his students.
“Professor! You—”
“Thank me later, padawans,” the professor interrupted Mara. Stopping, he pulled her hand away from Travis’s neck to empty a small vial right into the wound.
Nothing happened for a moment. Then all the blood lost by Travis’ body swirled up into the air and whooshed into the wound, which instantly closed. All that was left was a thin scar.
Chavert, gasping as if he’d just been rescued from drowning, sat up to gawk at the professor with round eyes.
“You…”
“Aqua Viva,” Mara whispered with admiration, interrupting her confused friend. “But how did you…?”
“I always keep some for myself,” the professor interrupted in turn before swearing again. “I must’ve been a lousy coach for the five of you if you can’t bring down one little lich.”
The professor straightened up, glancing over at the still-living Mask and then back at the students.
“Lich?” Mara asked in bewilderment.
“I’m going to teleport you outside the Arena,” he said in a composed, even distant voice. “Once you
get there, look around for a tall, red-haired guy, very angry, and tell him to shoot their super-duper-gun here if I’m not done in ten minutes.”
“What?”
“But I hope I can pull it off. And give you imbeciles a hellish practice session so you stop looking like a flock of whiny puppies. It’s going to last all six years you study at First Magic.”
“A pack,” Jing corrected. “It’s a pack of puppies.”
“I don’t give a fuck, Jet Li.” The professor flashed his middle finger tattooed with Doom. “Well, whatever. Let’s go.”
He spread his arms. Between them, an imposing black seal flashed as black ravens darted out of it.
“But, Professor! The Mask is—”
“Just a distraction,” the professor replied. Flying in circles around him were hundreds of graveyard birds. “Now he—”
But before he could finish, the earth shuddered again, that time not because the arena stands were collapsing. It was the boiling force of the giant magic seal all the open ground beneath their feet was gradually turning into.
The lines and borders of the monster were rivers of blood. The living crimson flowed from beneath the rubble, threading away from the dead bodies to fall into the bottomless magic chasm, adding more and more color.
The professor made a brief gesture. A hundred ravens surrounded his students, digging their claws and beaks painfully into their bodies and lifting them into the air.
“What about you, Professor?” Mara shouted at his rapidly receding figure.
“Just another day at the office,” he called back, his reply reaching the girl’s ears a moment before an impenetrable magic dome slammed shut right in front of her nose, walling off the whole Arena. The professor, the Mask, and the giant bloody seal were all that was left inside.
Chapter 73
Alex, oblivious of the fact that he was walking through the revived blood flowing into the chasm formed by the magic lines of the giant seal, came over to the Mask, who’d been hammered into the sand. Stooping over the still breathing (if one can say that about a lich) body, he lifted the mask.
Thick black hair scattered over the white sand. Blue eyes flared brighter than the stadium lights. Only the face looked gray, burned, and dead, like a creased paper bag.
Alex ran his palm over the seal painted on the forehead, dissolving it like watery ink and restoring light to the eyes. It wasn’t for long, however. The mind trapped in the undead body was about to be lost forever.
“You grew up so handsome, Sasha.” A cold, shivering, dead hand touched Alex’s cheek.
But, Loki knew, Doom hadn’t felt so warm in a long time.
“You didn’t change at all, Anastasia,” he whispered.
She tried to smile at him, but her dead skin and muscle wouldn’t comply.
Although Alex was looking down at a creepy lich, a creation of Supreme Necromancy, it was still…it was still Anastasia. The girl who had made him tea. Who had taught him how to play the piano. Who had always been there for him.
He loved her.
Not as a son loves a mother.
As a man loves a woman.
He’d never told her that.
She was Robin’s girlfriend and twice as old as him. She would never have seen him as anything but a little boy.
But still, he loved her.
“Liar.” Anastasia’s voice turned more and more machine-like as the magic of death left her body. “Did you learn…the third act?”
“Yes, Anastasia,” Doom replied with a nod. “I did.”
“Good. Very good.” She closed her eyes. When they opened again, they were totally black.
Her dead throat produced a scream that resembling a banshee howl. A clawed zombie hand reached for Alex’s neck, but before it could rip his Adam’s apple out, his palm, enveloped in lilac fire, touched the burned undead face. The whole body flashed with black-magic fire and crumbled to ash.
“I’m going to keep my word, Anastasia.”
All that remained beneath the smashed car was the old, torn cloak, the steel gauntlets, the mask, and…
The grimoire had vanished.
It was that very storage that Anastasia, resurrected as a lich, had filled with the energy of death. O’Hara, with her guess about reaping, had been very close. She’d just jumped to conclusions.
A few thousand deaths weren’t enough for real black magic.
That took tens of thousands.
Alex knew that.
But he’d been asked a different question, and there’s no reason to say things you don’t have to.
Clap. Then again: clap, clap. And once more: clap, clap, clap.
Alex straightened up to see who was hiding in the folds of light.
“Bravo, Alexander.”
Stepping out of the light was Julio Lupen, rector of First Magic University. A light wizard at level 62nd with an incredible mana reserve of 6,298 points.
The architect of the terror that had held sway over Myers City for the previous few years.
“Oh, don’t be so surprised,” Julio said with a dismissive wave. He was wearing his usual sweat suit, the usual chain around his neck. “You’re not the only one who learned the art of lying by speaking the truth from Goddess Danu’s people.”
His vow.
He hadn’t wanted things to be what they were. He’d made them that way.
“Raewsky, that old man… He never wanted to look just a bit father ahead. I told him. Tried to persuade the stubborn Russian to help me. But he only wanted a better life for black wizards—the devil could take the rest. And that’s after what the two of us saw during the Magic War. After we recaptured his home city from the Icy Giants! After we buried my dau—” Julio shook his golden mane. “That evening, Alexander, I came to him with my final offer. But he turned it down. What else could I do? Sit and wait for humanity to become so fat and weak they’d be devoured by the monsters? Or…”
Lupen stopped short again. In his hands was a crimson-glowing grimoire festooned with stripes the color of the rainbow.
Demon magic.
Julio looked up at the sky on the other side of the impenetrable dome.
“Poseidon’s Shield,” he said. “That’s the real name of the artifact. And it wasn’t there to hide Atlantis from the rest of the world. No, it was made to help humans defend against the ones we now call our elder brothers. The fae, elves, orcs, trolls, ogres, dwarves, and other ungodly creatures.”
Alex winced slightly. Lupen believed.
“Raewsky, it won’t be long before they turn against us. Before the United Races Organization becomes just a mocking echo of the past, a past where humans were so stupid as to wrap their arms around those freaks of nature.”
Alex didn’t know if the Guards’ weapon could penetrate the defense created by the artifact. He didn’t even know if it was true that the Guards had launched a magic weapon of mass destruction into space. One theory held that magic was just a particular kind of magnetic field produced by Earth—the farther from the planet, the more of it dispersed and was lost, with not a single drop reaching as far as the Moon.
“It’s time for everyone to wake up,” Julio went on. “It’s time to open humanity’s eyes! The monsters are no longer at the gate. They live among us. Dress like us. Talk like us. And we do nothing! We let them live in god’s world!”
Another mention of the name lashed Alex’s chest like a fiery whip.
“Do you have any idea how much sales of battle grimoires have gone up over the past year? More people are studying battle magic. More volunteers are showing up to join the magic military than they can accept. The Monster Hunter Guild is growing every day. And it’s all thanks to me.”
Alex said nothing.
The sand beneath his feet was white as snow. Doom had always loved snow. It made even the blackest things pure.
“But that’s not enough!” Lupen said, his voice raising. “Not enough! Today I’m going to show the world how weak man has become. When the ashes
settle and millions of people are done mourning their nearest and dearest, their rage will awaken. From it, like from the finest metal, they’ll forge their weapons of war. The war that’s coming, Raewsky!”
Alex wasn’t sure if Julio was talking to him or his late friend. Not that he really cared.
“Sooner or later, it’s coming! The world can’t belong to us and them. There can only be one. And I don’t want it to be the ungodly monsters! Earth was created for man. It’s our home! And it’s time to wash it clean of the filth that infests it.”
The weather forecasters had promised rain. Alex couldn’t tell if it was coming through the shield.
“I want you to see it! It’s our game of chess, and now it’s time to make a sacrifice. A big one, yes. A bloody one. But I’ve thought it through. When I let the duke demon into the world, I’ll be in complete control.” Lupen pointed at the grimoire he had in hands. “Six years. Six long years I’ve been preparing for this day. And you’re not going to—”
Lupen stopped short. It was like he’d stumbled in the middle of his speech, stopping to stare at Alex. With very different eyes.
“Don’t you get tired of talking?” Doom asked, keeping his hands in his jeans pockets. “Loki and the serpent. Do you supervillains all use the same guide? Or have you just seen too many Marvel movies? Actually, no. Judging by how gloomy your whole shtick is, it was probably DC.”
“You—”
“I,” Alex interrupted, “couldn’t give a shit about anything you just said. I don’t care if everyone in this world goes crazy and kills each other. All I care about is getting you.”
“Six years ago,” Lupen whispered, “I sent Anastasia to the port. But the Guards’ base turned out to be right there. Supreme liches retain some shards of memory, so she escaped through—”
“Through High Garden,” Alex interrupted again. “Right where I was drinking my tea on a bright summer day.”
“In a week, there was news that a black wizard had gotten away from the cops.”
“You don’t serve the main course right away,” Doom said with a nod. “The appetizers come first.”
“That was when you first got spotted—”
Dark Wizard's Case Page 39
