The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 420

The oppressive gusts of void wind pressed in on me from every direction, blinding and deafening me. I could sense nothing but the rapidfire beating of my heart and the cold metal pressing against my wrists. Even the omnipresent hush of the ocean lapping against the shore was obscured.

“You two, get the tempus warp packed up for travel.” Muffled by the spell, Wolfrum’s voice was distant, only barely audible. “The rest of you, over here. I’ll lower the spell. Disarm her and move her outside of the shield. Scythe Dragoth Vritra will be here soon.”

The darkness changed, swirling as if it were being moved by the wind. I felt its hold on me lessen and smoothed out my expression, unwilling to give Wolfrum the satisfaction of seeing me struggle.

Just as the void wind spell faded, strong hands took me by the arms, and something sharp dug into my back.

“How anticlimactic,” Wolfrum mused, studying me. “I’ll admit, I did sort of idolize you when we were younger. Now, I have no idea why.”

I lifted my chin, not flinching away from his unnerving gaze or his words.

“Still, you’re quite the prize for Dragoth. With a little…incentive, I imagine there is a whole lot you can tell us about Seris’s operation, hm?”

I didn’t fight back against the mages holding me, letting my arms sag in their grip. “Nothing that will save any of you,” I said, keeping the quaver out of my voice.

Something small and bright caught the sun above and behind Wolfrum, and I tensed.

Mana surged, and a ray of black light shot from it. Wolfrum, sensing the mana, grimaced in surprise as he spun, attempting to conjure a shield of soulfire at the last second. The soulfire passed just above his shield, striking him at the base of one horn.

With a resounding crack, the horn shattered, spinning off into the sand. Wolfrum howled in pain as his eyes went wide with rage.

“Reinforcements!” one of the mages shouted, letting go of my arm as they conjured a spell.

The sharp object at my back pulled away, leaving only one mage still holding on to me. I drove an elbow up into his nose, snapping his head back, then wrenched forward out of his control.

My blade was on the ground at my feet, knocked from my grasp by the manacles. Catching the blade with a toe, I kicked it upright so that the handle stuck in the sand with the long, scarlet blade pointing straight up.

There was a second burst of mana, but the lance of soulfire flew a few feet to Wolfrum’s left. It bypassed his shield and struck my blade. The scarlet steel burst into black soulfire.

With all my manaless strength, I drove the chains down on the point of the burning blade, and several things happened all at once.

The four mages were shouting all around me, caught between searching our surroundings for their attackers and stopping me from escaping. Wolfrum had both hands raised, one emanating the fiery shield, the other—pointed at me—swirling with void wind.

Utilizing the limited pool of mana I had already charged into it, two additional silver shards released from the bracer and rushed into orbit around me, firing off lances of black fire. Wolfrum reacted with lightning swiftness, reshaping his spells and combining them into a vortex of ashen wind and fire, absorbing the barrage of attacks.

The point of my sword lodged up through one link in the manacle chains. My pulse spiked as the sword’s handle sank deeper into the sand, deadening the force of my downward strike. Then it caught, buttressed by something hard deeper down.

The flames clawed through the Imbued steel, and the chains shattered with a bright spark.

Something cold and sharp slashed across my hip, and I dodged forward, pulling the scarlet sword from the sand and slashing behind me as I moved.

A steel-hafted spear blocked my rushed strike.

Finally, I got a good look at the four Redwater mages surrounding me: a Shield, two Casters, and a Striker.

Both Casters were holding fire in their hands. The Striker was already spinning his spear around to go on the offensive. Sand formed into metal discs and floated up to defend them as the Shield retreated to a safe distance. They were potent mages, and as my sense for mana returned, I got a feel for their power. Their mana signatures suggested emblems, but Seris had encouraged our forces to cover their runes, so I couldn’t be sure.

The vortex shield around Wolfrum exploded outward.

Conjuring soulfire along my blade, I stabbed into the ground. A shield of fire sprung up around me.

The third orbital shard—the one I had “lost” while descending the cliffside—flitted past Wolfrum to join the other two, and they shifted into position just outside of the shield, their mana resonating with each other. I gritted my teeth as I struggled to maintain focus on both the soulfire and the artifact.

When the shockwave hit, the orbitals sent out a pulse of mana to counter it. They held for a full second before being knocked out of position and sent tumbling away behind me. I braced for impact as the soulfire shield emanating out from my sword quivered, cracked, and then flared out. But the remaining strength of Wolfrum’s spell was only enough to set my hair waving in the resulting light breeze.

The mages were huddled behind several metal discs, and their Shield was sweating profusely. Wolfrum had apparently been willing to destroy his own men without a second’s thought.

“I doubt you’ll be welcome at any more Vritra-blooded parties looking like that,” I said, standing and lifting my sword to point at his shattered horn. The bracer drew on my mana, and the three orbitals flitted back into place, hovering around me defensively.

Wolfrum snarled as he fingered the broken stub. “So, I’m not the only one hiding their real power. I should have guessed. Are you hiding your horns as well? Is it that bracer there on your arm or”—he focused on my pendant, which had slipped out of my shirt in the fighting—“that little bauble around your neck? An illusion? That would be Seris’s way. Go on, I want to see who I’m really fighting. Show me, for old time’s sake.”

“It’s almost a shame you decided to be a Vritra lap dog.” I conjured soulfire along the scarlet blade again, causing it to writhe with black flames. The other mages were holding back, waiting on Wolfrum’s command. I could now see the boat in the distance, being rowed swiftly along the shore. “If you’d ever actually listened to what Seris was trying to teach you, you could have been so much more.”

Wolfrum conjured black fire in each of his hands as he adjusted his stance. “I think you’ll find I learned much more than you.” To his soldiers, he barked, “Bring her down. Kill her if you have to.”

The spear-wielding Striker lunged forward. Twin bolts of fire followed, tracing a smooth arc through the air as they passed him on either side. In the distance, a large, transparent panel of mana shimmered into existence over the hole being held in Seris’s shield, cast by one of the two men who had been in charge of the tempus warp. The other, a Caster, conjured a cloud of caustic green haze to stain the air and make the path to them impassable.

Two lines of soulfire met the flame bolts, launched from the orbitals. The soulfire burned the spells to nothing. A third ray targeted the Striker. When one of the metal discs lurched into position to defend him, the soulfire scorched right through it, but the Striker was fast, and he’d already dodged. Still, the flames scoured the ground at the Casters’ feet, making them jump back and interrupting their next spells.

Behind me, Wolfrum thrust both hands forward, unleashing a torrent of soulfire pushed on a gust of void wind.

I lunged to meet the Striker. His spear licked out twice, three times, four, with the quickness of a lightning bolt. I parried each strike without breaking my stride, the soulfire wreathing my weapon burning through the spear so that when he thrust for the fifth time, only the short end of the ruined steel remained. He realized his defenselessness too late, and the edge of my blade effortlessly parted his armored uniform, mana, flesh, and bone.

In the wake of my blade, a crescent of black fire rolled toward the two Casters. Bullets of bright yellow flame shot back, flying all around me, a few scorching my flesh. All the metal discs shifted into position to block the soulfire, but it wasn’t strong enough. Not nearly. The black fire devoured the shields, then the Casters behind them, and the barrage of bullets ceased.

The Shield turned to run. As I focused on his back, I pulled on the three orbitals, like squeezing the trigger of a crossbow, and three rays of black flame lanced through him. His body tumbled in pieces.

Channeling mana into one of my runes, I conjured wind to push at my heels, speeding my flight as Wolfrum’s soulfire licked at my back.

I had no choice but to rush straight into the acidic cloud of water-attribute mana. It hissed and popped against the mana cladding my body. On the other side of the shield, standing atop the outcropping of rock in front of the tempus warp, the Caster waved his hands and the cloud condensed into viscous drops of rain, which immediately began burning through my protection. _{frёeωebɳovel.com}

Releasing the soulfire wreathing my blade so I could focus on both the wind-attribute spell and the orbitals, I aimed at the two mages beyond the shield. Twin lances of fire ripped through the barrier cast by their Shield, burning a large hole in each mage’s chest. The final orbital fired backwards blindly as I hoped to disrupt Wolfrum’s concentration.

I felt his soulfire clash against mine as the inferno surged. Risking a glance behind me, I saw the full effect of his spell for the first time.

A huge, smokey skull, its mouth wide and eyes empty as death, trailing a twenty-foot trail of pure soulfire, was closing in on me. The orbital’s attacks were vanishing into the skull’s open mouth, never reaching Wolfrum.

I aimed for the tempus warp. With the way clear, there was no reason to stand and fight. Not when a Scythe was closing in on me.

A bead of dark mana condensed in the air above the opening. Wild lines of void wind began reeling out of it, spiraling downward until they touched the ground to form a cyclone that blocked the way.

I sprinted straight at it while recalling the orbitals, wind-attribute mana pushing me forward faster with every stride. They snapped into place in the bracer, and I released the mana and concentration powering it just as my blade flared with soulfire once again.

Slashing at the air with my sword, I felt a thrill of success as soulfire carved through the artifact they’d installed to hold Seris’s barrier open. The metal melted away as if it were woggart butter, and the arch collapsed. The shield around it flexed, pushing inward.

In my periphery, I could see the darkness of the encroaching spell starting to surround me.

Wrapping myself with wind, I leapt, making myself as narrow and aerodynamic as possible, shooting forward like an arrow.

The shield closed around me.

I was immediately picked up by the void wind cyclone, which cut through my own wind mana effortlessly. My senses reeled for a moment as I was spun end over end, then the cyclone released me.

Catching my balance, I rotated my body to land crouched on both feet, one hand pressing into the sand for stability.

Fifty feet out in the ocean, the tempus warp splashed down into the water. It had been lifted by the cyclone, then tossed away as the wind’s momentum vanished. My stomach plunged with it.

“If it makes you feel any better, we didn’t program the tempus warp anyway, Lady Caera,” Wolfrum said from the other side of the shield. “You were never going to leave here.”

I spared him no words. He was no longer a threat to me. The approaching ship, however…

The boat was close enough now that I could sense the monstrous mana signature emanating from it. Even as I watched, a silhouette, somehow still looming large even from such a distance, floated up from the deck and hurtled toward me, onyx horns gleaming.