Arcanist In Another World-Chapter 33: Boundaries

The Lifesurge threads squished tight between the intricate canals of the web, pushing their way across the stretch with burning ambition. Valens kept one eye over them, the other eye resting on the wriggling Wards too stubborn to quit.

They had him fixed there on the ground by several tendrils. Time and time again they lashed at him, and Valens kept them at bay with waves of lifemana. He couldn’t make a move at them without messing up his control over the Lifesurges. He couldn’t spend another thread to deal with them both. He needed them alive to reach the Necromancer’s web. He needed them alive—

But damned if it hurt. It hurt so much. His body was aflame, veins burning under his ribcage, waves of excruciating agony lancing up from his thighs. Blood pooled in the mud beneath him. Painted it a vile, brownish crimson. The air reeked of his own life seeping away, and the rot of the monsters stuck with him.

His teeth crunched against each other when he clamped his jaw shut. He focused solely on the sound vision, on the Lifesurge threads trying to find their way into the Necromancer’s dot. They bashed against the edges of the canals, lost their course mid-way, and got jerked around like mindless stones rolling down a maze of caves.

Until finally, they came across a particularly large dot blinking dangerously bright. There was no way to skirt around it. He had to pass them through it if he wanted to reach the center of the web. Clenching his teeth, Valens sent his surges drilling into the dot, paused when a surprised hiss dinned in his ears.

Is this an Oarfang?

Lifeward pushed right after the surges. Painted the creature’s frame in his mind. Heavy bones, full of waves sloshing with the Necromancer’s rot. His surges splashed into it as if Valens himself had laid a hand over its sturdy structure, and speared their way up to its core.

Untying the knots of the sourceline, he hardly had the time to check the notification before he continued his way. One source line after another, the Oarfangs hissing, the Olifants screaming in his mind, the chaos, the zest of it all, burning deep in his chest, burning him with the dangerous satisfaction.

Miles and miles of canals. An endless pursuit in which he came close to losing himself. Too much. There was just too much in this web for him to understand. How was the Necromancer doing this? How giant of a mana pool would you need to keep an army of them fed all at once?

He was a fly, a tiny insect against this terrible magus’s deep reserves. But tiny as he might be, he just needed a single hole to dig his way in. He wouldn’t even see it coming. The bastard was busy fighting off the Undead Lich and the Lightmaster both.

Resistance on the way. Valens felt his control growing weak. Felt the strength seep through his fingers. His skin prickled. Then it went cold. A sudden cold that had him shiver senseless in the din.

He was about to succumb to it. Getting too tired to continue. What was he thinking? He was no Warmagus of the old, the ancient masters who could wield any element by their will. He had no experience. Blocking the pain and acting as if he didn’t feel anything, thinking he could just do it by simply relying on Apathy.

Foolish of him. Foolish and pointless. This wasn’t his world. He was lost. Had nowhere to go back. His bones rattled as the emptiness in his chest started gnawing at his flesh. There was scarcely any mana left in his body to keep at it. He should have stayed his hand. Let the monsters of this world fight their own battles.

Another tendril caught him below the chin. It stole the breath out of him, digging deeper still, trying to wrap around his windpipe and crush it. Valens jerked a hand up and caught it hard. Pulled at it as blood poured from between his fingers. Flames coated his palm and splattered up to the stubborn limb.

They burned, and Valens watched. Numbness spread around his arms and his chest. Pain became a distant thought. Too much of it that he couldn’t feel it anymore. Awareness was lost in the waves of agony.

The ground started shaking. All around him, the human and undead alliance pressed into the Necromancer’s horde. Towering giants fell in waves of thick dust and broken bones. They were gaining ground. Bit by bit they clawed away the numbers of their godless foes.

Dark lights poured forth. The Lightmaster screamed, Lord Zahul weaving a barrier of green fog before them to stop the barrage of streaking rot. It disintegrated into a mess of blinking lights, then those streaks moved on, wrapping around their limbs like elastic whips. They yanked at them and pulled them down to the ground, dragging them like beasts caught unaware by their masters.

Valens could see the reason for it. The fewer beasts the Necromancer had to keep being fed, the more he could use his rot against the two Magi. His army was a terrible force, but a liability around his own reserves at the same time. If he let all his animated minions die away and hoard all the rot by himself…

But there was something else… Something was pressing down on the ambient mana.

A soft voice in his mind. Whispers of an unknown origin. Valens paused. He seemed to hear a word from the dark of the Necromancer’s web, coming from somewhere beyond he couldn’t see. Telling him about the time he’d spent carving a life from nothing. How he made a Resonant Healer out of that tiny little orphan. Being afraid, being conscious of his shortcomings, pitying and cursing the fate he’d been chained with.

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After all that he had pulled himself through. That was him, back in the institute. The nobody who suddenly became a genius. The nobody people didn’t even look in the eye, only to start buttering up to him when he showed his worth, knowing not he’d spent all his youth trying to make it.

Didn’t matter if he was in another world now. He had to live. Somehow he had to stay alive. Master Eldras had told him he could do it. Once again, he had to do what that pitiful orphan did. He had to make himself known.

His chest rose as he heaved a wheezing breath. Sinews bulged around his neck, stretched tight when he forced the Lifesurges to seep through yet another Oarfang’s dot. Demolished the sourceline and continued on. One more, and one more again. Onward.

He lost track of the time, falling into a trance where nothing really mattered anymore. Notifications blinked in the corner of his mind. People screamed. People died. Magic strangled every part of the air with its insidious force.

Then he started hearing it. Whispers of a strange mind, of souls screaming, of regrets pooling and growing wider over the din. Men and women, both. Broken in their death, kept away from their rest. It was all there in the Necromancer’s mind, and he was laughing. A mad laughter that yearned to see the world’s ending.

Anger caught Valens tight in its arms. Fed into his Lifesurges as they slashed at this terrible mind. They bounced back from the invisible barrier around it. It was being protected by a spell, one that seemed pointlessly simple in Valens’s sound vision. He smashed through it with ease and found himself facing the Necromancer’s brain.

Then he froze, looking at the brain tissue. It was alive. Not too different from a healthy, breathing man perhaps thirty years of age. It sat underneath the scalp, all too normal even as it orchestrated the cruel slaughter for some time.

A living person’s mind.

Valens’ hands started shaking. All his youth he worked to become a better man, to serve and use his skills for the common good. Morality wasn’t something that he could judge. His job was to fix people, no matter how hideous their crimes were. It had always been him and the operation room, assistants by his side, the body laid over the stretcher just another hour of work.

But now he felt different. It was with these surges that he brought hundreds of people back to life, and he was beginning to realize that just as easily he could use them to cut up a brain. Carve pieces of it, then the body would go limp. Poke it around and there was nothing anyone could do against it.

Warmagic. The boundaries blurred in his mind.

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“Ah!” came an angry scream, shocked at the intrusion to its frenzy. “You— How?!”

Valens jerked back at the sound, regaining his focus as the Necromancer caught his presence. The mind barrier he’d just broken tried to pick itself back up and establish yet another hold around the brain, but Valens was already inside. Seeped deep into the dark magus’s mind.

“I can kill you,” he said, his voice feeling strange in his ears. Who was this man talking so lightly about a notion as terrifying as death? He hadn’t the authority to reap another man’s soul. That belonged to… Whom did it belong to, exactly?

“You wouldn’t dare!” the Necromancer said, restless.

“It’s the truth,” Valens said with a voice biting cold. “There is nothing wrong with your brain. You want this. You are willing to do this. What purpose does it serve, killing all these people?”

“What purpose, you ask?” the Necromancer said. “It is to cleanse the filth! Reclaim the world that’s promised. Bring justice to the Damned! This world is a lie, young man. Your kind should know, but they were gone, weren’t they? Banished like us. You can’t control a man’s ambition. You can’t save people who seek not the true peace!”

Valens pursed his lips. “You seem to be mistaken. I have nothing to do with these people.”

“Then why must you do their work?” the Necromancer pleaded. “Join me. I can only promise you the truth. The undead, the Damned, the Broken Lands… This is all governed by a sick mind. You have to believe me! I’m doing this because they have sunk too deep to see it for themselves. I must bring—“

“You’ve done a lot of killing,” Valens said. Somewhere deep in his mind the cold apathy made itself known. Told him this was just a simple numbers game. Kill the Necromancer and you’d stop the senseless killing. Let the man live, then people would keep dying. “It’s time for you to stop.”

Lifesurge threads lashed at the brain tissue like a pair of polished scalpels, their sharp tips cutting smooth lines across the mind. They plunged deep and made a mess of the wrinkles of the matter, drowned them down in blood as Valens heard the Necromancer gurgle out a wheezing breath.

Everything fell still around him when he finished his work with a last surge. Straight down through the Necromancer’s spine. Better to make sure he’s dead than to give him another chance. You wouldn’t know what a good number of stats could do, anyway. Nothing was natural in this world.

Bones came crashing down in his sound vision. Hundreds of skeletons and skeleton soldiers, Oarfangs and Olifants, Wards and other twisted creatures buckling as if someone cut through their lifeline. They fell in heaps and the alliance army scuttled back, watching with wide eyes the horde of the Necromancer crumble into pieces.

Valens clutched at his chest as his world started spinning madly. He was losing the ground, feet slipping, fingers shaking, mind too fuzzy and disoriented as the notifications rained in. A great number of them screaming in his mind. Blending in with the sound of his own blood spilling forth from the holes around his body.

He patched them with minute focus, chest aching as his mana pool drained further away, but pain had become something of a remedy, and there, a moment after, Valens found his breathing again, the will to pry his eyes open and glance upon the aftermath of the battle.

Hundreds of faces filled into his vision. Men and undead both. All looking at the Necromancer’s listless body with blood oozing down his nostrils and bony staff rolling across the floor, seeming to be baffled by the fact that other than that little blood, there was nothing in the man’s face to suggest he’d been killed in a heated fight.

But the operation was done in pure discretion. Done by a man who ought to have been a healer, against all the oaths, carried by his will once he decided to kill for good. That had been the just way of doing things. That had been the right thing to do.

Right?

The boundaries… he couldn’t feel them anymore.

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