Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  It was the kind of thing Lysette could do. No. Actually, I don’t even know if Lysette could’ve made that shot, not at that distance.

  I found myself staring down at my pistol, more to have something to stare at than anything else. This was not possible. This was where I might’ve come if I had progressed to something approaching Lysette’s level of skills. But I’d been stuck nowhere near her level, permanently stuck.

  What had happened to me?

  All I could think of was that damn blue light coming out of the booth as the sphere purged its energy. It had been blinding, pushing through my eyelids down into the center of me.

  Maybe it had been doing more than that. Adjani had set up his monitoring station a floor below the actual booth, with safety wards in place in the concrete between the fourteenth and fifteenth floors as a precaution, like lead shielding for a nuclear reactor.

  Maybe as the sphere purged itself and the Intron Code ran through the booth in an unbalanced manner, due to the damage Kel had inflicted on the machine, the same energy that had vaporized Lysette spilled out into the room… nowhere near as much as in the booth, but a fraction of it.

  Spilled out into the room, and into me.

  It’s the only thing I could think of, the only explanation for the sudden surge of power I began discovering within myself. The Intron Code was designed to dramatically magnify the magical potential of the subject by changing their very DNA. And there I was, inexplicably an order of magnitude more powerful in Physical Magic than I was before... or could ever have hoped to be.

  I stood and stared and wondered, wondered what to do with myself, wondered what it all meant. All those people who fought and suffered and died over that machine and that Code, all in the pursuit of power, and here it had been handed to me by nothing but dumb luck and circumstance.

  Maybe it is nothing but a freak accident, but like those smiling neighbors helping each other in the aftermath of Kel’s apocalypse, I prefer to think of it as one last parting gift from my friend.

  Part of me was anxious to see what else I could do, what other abilities had been unlocked as a consequence of whatever I’d been exposed to in that room. Part of me was a little afraid of it.

  They say power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I can’t let that happen to me. I owe it to Lysette.

  She struggled her whole life with becoming too powerful at too young of an age, without the social support and guidance she needed to keep herself on track. Then there was Kel, a product of abuse and terror and violence, for whom power was a method of control over what she saw as a malevolent world. Adjani chased power because he thought it was owed to him, because he saw himself as above everyone else due to his intellect, and he wanted the power that he considered his due.

  But that doesn’t have to happen to me. I’ve got friends to help me keep my feet on the ground. Dread, for starters. He’s about as solid of a rock as I could hope for as far as moral centers go.

  And then there’s the others to serve as an example. Jolly’s talents are so exceptional that he could make himself a millionaire, and he gives his gift away for free, for no other reason than it’s the right thing to do. Shifty is so good he might one day be a Maestro, and he’s never strayed from the path. And Mickey… all the terrifying things she might do with her abilities, and all she wants to do is hug her cats and take bubble baths.

  And then there was Lysette, who turned her back on her quest for perfection to sacrifice herself for her friends.

  Power can be used for good, not evil. People can use their talents to improve the lives of others, to stand as a light against the darkness, to make the center hold so that things do not fall apart.

  That’s my job, after all. It’s what I do. It’s who I am.

  I’m a Mage Hunter.

  Epilogue

  The tall, thin death mage sat at the roadside diner with his shoulders slumped. Nothing on the menu looked good. Nothing in his life looked good. Here he was, on the run again, stuck with nothing but the clothes on his back and the money in his pocket.

  Yes, the clothes on his back were expensive, but he’d been wearing them for three days straight now. And yes, there was money in his pocket, but it was only there because he’d pawned his rings and his watch. It wouldn’t last much longer.

  He was so caught up in feeling sorry for himself, that he didn’t notice the two figures approach his booth until they actually sat down across from him. A man and a woman, the man older, both with the look of arrogant authority, both with faces familiar to him.

  “Motherf...” Fly began to say.

  “Please,” Matthias said. “Spare us your insistent use of that particular profanity.”

  Fly tried to collect himself, put on a hard exterior even though his heart was racing. “You always talk like this?”

  “Always. Do you always dine in such… extravagant surroundings?” Matthias said. “You don’t exactly blend in with that very excellent suit you’re wearing.”

  Fly sat back. “I’m sure you didn’t go to all the trouble of tracking my ass down just to mock my circumstances.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t any trouble to find you. Let me assure you of that.”

  “So, what? You two motherfuckers are… excuse me. You two individuals are here to take my ass out because I was with Kel?”

  “You’ve got it all wrong, Fly. Fly. Such an unusual name. Our last encounter at the mall was so brief, we never had a chance to get properly acquainted. I am Matthias, and my associate’s name is Valentine.”

  “Speaking of unusual names.”

  “She is an unusual woman. As I was saying, Fly, you’ve got our intentions all wrong.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Kel is dead. Everything she and Dr. Adjani were working on… the entire project at Revival Technologies… is up in ashes. Over an entire decade of work, an extraordinary level of investment, all gone.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “Of course not. But you are in a unique position. You see, death magic is a… marginalized specialty. There are so few practitioners. Kel was the only one we knew of with anything more than a cursory knowledge of the subject. But you… you spent quite a bit of time with her, didn’t you? And I’m willing to bet, you learned quite a bit from her as well.”

  “So you’re not here to kill me.”

  Matthias leaned forward toward Fly. “No, I’m not here to kill you, Fly. I’m here to recruit you.”

  “The two of you,” Fly said. “You’re street mages. Like me.”

  “Such a derogatory term,” Matthias said. “We prefer the term ‘shadow mage’. And there’s more than just two of us. Many more.”

  Fly looked from Matthias to Valentine. Matthias looked like a cat who’d just caught a mouse; Valentine looked like she was wondering what Fly would look like if she turned him inside out.

  “I’m curious, Fly,” Matthias said. “What did Kel tell you…. about the Cabal?”

  Author Notes

  Thank you, Gentle Reader, for allowing me to share my daydreams with you. I hope you found the time well spent.

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  Know that any support you choose to offer, and any feedback you choose to give, is greatly appreciated.

  And here we are, at the conclusion of a three novel story arc that started with Cass and Dread and Wreck Squad Four going into t
he headquarters of Revival Tech, and ends with them coming full circle and returning to finally put an end to the nightmare.

  First off, introns… non-coding portions of DNA… are a real thing. I learned about them years ago, and was fascinated enough with them to write one of my first novels, also called “The Intron Code”, based around the idea of introns being a secret code that one could crack and utilize to transform themselves into something else.

  That novel never really saw the light of day, which is a good thing. I think it might’ve been the third or fourth book I’d ever written, and was therefore as clumsy and dreadful as you might imagine. All I could salvage of it was the title and the concept, which fit in perfectly with the story arc of “Mage Hunters”.

  Auto-cannibalism. It’s a writer thing.

  We get to learn a lot more about Kel in this book; I really enjoyed writing the chapters from her perspective that shines a bit of a light on the kind of an upbringing that can produce a megalomaniacal killer like her. Scrambling for survival since she was an infant, always the victim of abuse, when she finally gets some measure of power, it becomes a tool for her to crush others before they can crush her.

  We also see the effect of years of Kel’s enslaving the dead to do her will; she comes to despise the living and prefer the company of the dead, so that she need never hear a dissenting opinion. She builds a carefully constructed fortress of compliance all around her, but it’s a hollow existence, devoid of any real human connection or caring.

  Real human connection is messy. It’s uncomfortable. It forces you to do the hard work of re-examining thoughts and beliefs that you previously had assumed were perfectly formed. It reminds us that we’re not the hotshot we think we are.

  Is it better to be loved or feared? Kel would say the latter. And her answer to trying to fill the void created by her isolation, is to seek more power, more dominance, more compliance with her will. She won’t be happy until the world is dead and completely under her control, and even then, she’ll still feel like it’s not enough. And she’ll never figure out that what she’s been missing, is that same messy human interaction that she’s been running from.

  We get to know Lysette, the tight-lipped Physical Adept, a lot better in this book, as well. In Book Two, “Resurrection Day”, a lot of hints are dropped about Lysette’s dark past that put her into prison in the first place, and in this volume, we finally get a deep dive into what makes her tick, and we find that beneath her stoic exterior, lies a lot of doubt and self-loathing.

  Her story arc was always intended to be one of redemption. As I started thinking about Physical Magic… the kind of magic that enhances strength and speed and other physical characteristics… and how that might work, one of the details that occurred to me was the need for the mage to start young, in order to be able to develop the bones and tendons to handle the increased stresses.

  That got me thinking about how so much power, so young, might affect a child’s psychology. I started thinking of Lysette almost like one of those child movie stars, who start pulling in ungodly amounts of money as a child. With that money, comes power, and we all know that cliché about power corrupting. If that child star has solid parents who are willing to put a torch to all of that money in order to provide some structure and guidance and limits, that kid has a chance to grow up as a well-adjusted adult. At least, as well-adjusted as the rest of us misfits stumbling our way through life.

  On the other hand, if the parents of the golden goose get seduced by the money, and are unwilling or unable to impose some controls in fear of financial reprisal, then that child becomes a terror, a tyrant without restraint. The result is something we’ve all seen on TMZ or True Hollywood Stories or some other reality program about a former child celebrity turned dumpster fire.

  Lysette is the ultimate expression of a highly talented person without solid parental guidance, who is taken advantage of by anyone who sees a potential use for her talent. First her trainers and the military, who are only too happy to use her up without thought of her long-term future, then the black ops handlers who also see her as a perfect tool for their goals.

  One of Marvel’s most popular comic book heroes, Captain America, isn’t special because of his extraordinary strength. It’s his unwavering moral center that is his defining characteristic. Lysette is sort of like a Captain America with no moral center. All of that deadly power, and no compassion or sense of duty to temper it.

  But, she falls in with Cass and company, who show her a better way, and her great victory is that she overcomes her dark past to learn the value of human life, and comradery, and compassion. Unlike Kel, Lysette turns it all around.

  I’ll miss writing her, but from the time I thought of her character, she was always headed for that booth at Revival Tech in the end. She needed to. That was her great victory. No longer like Achilles sulking in his tent, thinking only of his bruised ego, Lysette becomes a real hero by taking one for the team.

  It wasn’t all darkness and gloom. We did get to have some fun along the way. The little section with Jolly rallying his neighbors and MacGuyvering them with prison tech into a misfit army was a lot of fun to write, and gives us a little light-hearted comic relief in the midst of all the death and destruction.

  Little side note… that story about buying the sword at the Renaissance Faire after a few too many ales? That may or may not be based on a true story, and I may or may not still have a broadsword gathering dust in my closet as a result.

  And now where are we left, at the end of the story? Revival Tech and their research to bring back the dead is gone, along with Dr. Adajni and Kel. However, we have seen some glimpses of another threat, the Cabal, who have emerged from the shadows just enough for Cass and her team of mage hunters to catch the scent.

  If you’ve enjoyed these books and characters and this world they live in, I’d love to continue writing more of them. First, I have to see how well this series is received; i.e., what the sales and reviews tell me about the viability of dedicating the time and effort into continuing the series for another, say, three novel story arc. To put it plainly, if enough people buy ‘em, I’ll keep writing ‘em.

  After all, I live for this.