Chapter 533 - The Rising Moon IX

  The tavern was filled with light. Activating one of the most basic spells in her arsenal, Arciel unleashed a beam of arcane magic. Her mana, which was so thick that it was practically a solid mass, twisted into a spiral edge as it crossed the room and bored a hole in the minotaur’s chest. Practically spanning the width of his shoulders, it was a massive, gaping wound. And the spell wasn’t over. Still running rampant, her magic leeched into his flesh and drove an epileptic attack.

  It would have killed him if he was anything but Cadrian. Still foaming at the mouth, the warrior pushed himself off the ground with a scowl and wiped his lips as his heart and lungs regrew.

  "Coward! Barbarian!" Rancid saliva spewed from his lips as he sputtered. “How dare you attack without warning!?”

  “I do not wish to hear that from you. Did you not just attempt to poison me?” asked Arciel. She briefly considered maintaining the speech pattern and accompanying facade, but dismissed the idea with a frown. There was no point. They already knew who she was.

  “I was offering you a choice, yellow-belly.” The minotaur ground his teeth and spoke in a growl. “Unlike you, we fight with honour.”

  “If you are referring to the event with Lord Ephesus, I do believe the responsibility lies with your princess. Your king declared as such himself.”

  “He was just covering up your crimes.” He trembled with rage, ready to explode at a moment’s notice. Still, he took a few steps back and lowered his stance. Many of the surrounding men did the same. Considering that they were functionally assassins, the whole song and dance was nothing short of absurd.

  Looking around the bar, Arciel confirmed that not everyone was an enemy. The bartender was cowering beneath the counter while the crossdressing server was trying to usher him out of a building. The elf gave Arciel an apologetic smile when their eyes met as he continued to escort the staff outdoors. The surrounding patrons were likewise not hostile, but neither were they quite as cowardly. They watched the event unfold with interest, with some asking the very-annoyed server for more drinks even though he was in the midst of retreat.

  Though, at a glance, it was easy to mistake them as assailants. Like her attackers, the observers were slowly forming a circle around her, albeit just to get a better view of the battle.

  “Men.” The minotaur grinned. “Attack!”

  “Why must it always come to violence?” Arciel breathed a sigh. All she’d wanted was a drink to help her get to sleep. The last thing she wanted to deal with was a whole horde of idiots.

  The first wave of attacks came in the form of a dozen spells. Half of them were massive bursts of magic fired with exactly no concern for any allies or idle observers. Perhaps if she were in a better mood, Arciel might have tried to defend the crowd. But already tired and cranky, she couldn’t bring herself to bother.

  She formed a circular barrier that repelled all the incoming magic. Made of dense mana with no formula inscribed, it was a simple deflection shield.

  The result was chaos. Explosions rang through the space as the fireballs and lightning strikes flew off in random directions. One of the most powerful spells, a magic missile loaded with a whole mage’s worth of mana, erupted into a mushroom cloud that blew the roof right off the establishment.

  “The citizens!” cried the minotaur. To Arciel’s dismay, the fool was still alive and kicking. “How dare you deflect our magic and harm our citizens!? Where is your pride!?”

  Arciel gave him a fed-up, incredulous look. She didn’t have the energy to answer him or otherwise play along with him or his lack of brain cells. She was beginning to suspect that the attack’s mastermind had only sent him to test her patience. It was the second time in one week that she’d been forced into a conflict with an absolute moron.

  She had to admit, she was beginning to see why Claire was so jaded.

  Deflecting another wave of spells, Arciel took a moment to glance around the rooftops. She was half expecting Cadria’s intelligence workers to step in. She had no doubt they were present despite her inability to find them. Their lack of intervention, she took as implicit permission. After all, the confrontation was effectively a street fight; such encounters were so common in Valencia that there was one on every other street.

  Backed by another barrage of spells, the melee fighters closed in as she entertained the thought. They were surprisingly fast and organised; the steady, marching line proving again that the group was hardly a ragtag band of ruffians. They were soldiers and knights—some were even wearing pieces of armour with noble crests upon them.

  Just a few months prior, the assault surely would have brought her to her knees. They were stronger than the group that had killed Matthias. But Arciel had grown since—precisely on account of—that particular event.

  The Vel’khanese queen raised her wand to eye-level and closed her eyes. It seemed risky with so many people and projectiles inbound, but her vision was entirely unnecessary. Nothing would reach her before she finished her spell.

  It began as a circle beneath her feet, a magic inscription as wide as the tavern. Hundreds of shadowy hands rose from the formation and latched onto the people within. Their whole bodies were covered, mummified by the phantom limbs and dragged into the murky pool that had suddenly appeared at their feet.

  It wasn’t a lethal or even a damaging spell. All it did was restrain her enemies so that she could follow up with whatever she so happened to please. Arciel, however, was too fed up to entertain the Cadrians any longer.

  “If you’ll excuse me, I must leave. I believe I have an excess of business to attend to, and no time to spare.”

  "Get back here, Coward!" screamed the minotaur. His voice was muffled by his bindings, but he continued to kick and scream. "Run away now, and everyone will always know that you are nothing but a spineless leech!"

  Arciel frowned. She wanted to ignore him and continue on her way. She knew that he was a bumbling buffoon, spouting everything and anything that happened to come to mind, but his particular choice of words stayed her hand. She wasn't quite fuming, but the label had readily reminded her of the whore she'd foisted off the throne. Still, she stopped herself short of flying into a rage. She was annoyed, but she wasn't so annoyed that she would readily pull a Claire and jump straight to murder.

  "My departure is to your benefit. I am sparing your lives, and I shall continue to do so for as long as my patience holds." She channeled her mana into her surroundings, flooding it with pure, unadulterated power. "Do not test me. I am not against changing my mind." Her voice was quiet, but low. Paired with her trembling magic, it instilled a sense of dread into her assailants.

  But not everyone in the crowd was equally weighed down.

  One of the mages broke free and fired a blast of light that kept her from entering the portal. Arciel groaned and turned to the caster, who’d already planted her staff into the ground, just in time for the zebra-striped centaur to cast another spell.

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  The world warped. All of a sudden, they were standing in an active volcano. Flames burst from all around them, but the worst of the heat didn’t come from the fire and brimstone. It radiated down from the solar goddess, who was close enough to the planet for there to be nothing but blinding light. It was a domain, a bounded field wherein she was subjected to a set of world-bending rules.

  Pursing her lips, Arciel raised her wand to prepare a spell, only to find that her arm refused to move. In fact, her whole body was frozen solid, locked by an arbitrary, nonsensical restriction.

  A disquieting laugh came from the caster, whose strange form was obscured by the sun, but the chuckling was cut short as Arciel launched a shadowy tentacle. Immune to the condition that bound her movement, the magical projectile surged at the caster’s chest.

  It was a shame then that it didn’t manage to close the distance.

  The other mage launched into a counterspell and negated the tentacle’s actualization.

  “It’s nice to meet you. I am Percia Maximus, the 57th disciple of Grand Magus Allegra Cedr,” said the zebra, with a grin. “Arciel Vel’khan, your time is up. None of your spells will ever reach me.”

  Arciel immediately crafted a thousand projectiles of various shapes and sizes. Spears, swords, lances, axes, and glaives—all manner of weapons made of condensed shadows. But true to her word, the zebra cancelled all of them out. A simple wave of the wand saw every last missile erased.

  Groaning, Arciel crafted an even larger spell, a pillar of darkness that would eat through the sky. It was not the sort of lazy, typical cantrip that she’d been using so far, but a powerful hex derived from the dusk witch upgrade that had stemmed from her time in the mountains. The attack was not just powered by shadow, but conjured with light intertwined with the darkness. It used the full force of the moon’s power to overwhelm the target with a display of open force.

  But again, it broke before it completed.

  The enemy caster faced her with a cocky, obtuse grin. “I told you. None of your spells will land. I’m the better caster, leech. I don’t know why you lied about being an aspect. Everyone was going to find out the moment you walked onto the stage.”

  Arciel bit her lips.

  She tried to fight back her irritation.

  But they’d pushed far too many of her buttons, and she still hadn’t gotten the drink that she’d set out for in the first place.

  She’d only been holding back because she didn’t want to commit mass murder in a foreign country, especially not one that had yet to devolve into open hostilities. But she’d had enough. The constant mocking was the last straw, especially when accompanied by precisely the sort of insult that hit home.

  She still couldn’t move her arms, so she led with an all-encompasing attack. Like her previous spell, it was fueled by dusk magic. But unlike her previous spell, it wasn’t one of the weakest attacks in her repertoire. As with her blinding spell, it started by sucking the light from the world around her. It sucked all of the photonic energy straight into Arciel’s wand and distributed it throughout her body, endowing it with a faint but visible glow.

  That was the first half of the spell, the half that empowered her magic.

  Then came the part where she replaced all the former light with darkness.

  The whole realm was blotted, blighted, soaked in the consuming monochrome mana. Its element was of no relevance. It may as well have been arcane with how heavily it leveraged its raw power; everything that was touched by the spell was eroded away, ripped apart by an unending wave of magic.

  And her opponent was no exception.

  Her body was torn into a million pieces, broken and splintered until there was nothing left.

  Arciel waited for the realm to fade before she cancelled the spell. She stretched her awfully stiff limbs and finally proceeded towards her portal.

  Only for everything to distort again.

  A second magical barrier with a second dysfunctional world contained within.

  The second time around, it was a dark forest brimming with life. Insects of all shapes and sizes buzzed around the undergrowth, rapidly approaching from every which way.

  Leading the charge was a thoraen man with a staff and a wizard’s robe.

  “Arciel Vel’khan, my name is Opiter Eulogius, the 109th disciple of Grand Magus Allegra Cedr. I have come to ensure your doom.”

  “I think not.”

  Arciel unleashed another burst of magic—a lunar flare that ripped through Opiter's barrier and body alike. He fell to his knees, screaming as a black and white flame sprouted from the point of impact. Fueling itself with his mana, it only continued to grow until it consumed his flesh and turned it all to ash.

  The thoraen caster's realm was gone.

  But somehow, she found herself enclosed in yet another realm. She was deep underground, standing in a sewer filled with filth and rot. Her opponent, a lamia, slithered through the grime without a care in the world as she brandished her wand.

  The advance came with another restriction on her movement. It was not a part of the realm's capability, but something that stemmed from the serpent's eyes, a magic that was slowly but surely turning her body to stone.

  "My name is Cecilia Parkins, and I am the Grand Magus' 872nd disciple. I have come to bring your doom."

  "Is this meant to be some manner of cruel joke?" Arciel muttered the question as she created a moonshard in the space between them and blasted the lamia to pieces. "Why did I even put up with those fools? I could have left whenever I wished."

  Frowning, Arciel invoked Claire's magic as Cecilia's barrier faded.

  But though she'd cast the spell with practiced ease, the dimensional rift never manifested. The portal she'd made before she was magically kidnapped was still present, so she tried falling back upon it, but a series of golden chains captured the gate in their grasp and prevented her entry. They weren't just physically blocking it off. She tried sticking her hand through the gaps, but it was to no avail. It was like the gate had turned into a brick wall.

  A set of larger but otherwise identical chains flooded the heavens, blotting out the stars above.

  "It's an artifact." The words came from the minotaur who'd served her drink. It took a moment for her to register that he was even present; his body had grown to nearly fifty times its previous height, and all she really saw were his hooves and ankles. "It’s made to block teleportation. We prepared it just for you."

  Arciel craned her neck up to look upon the giant bull and found more than just his size changed. His body was covered with markings—tattoos and symbols of power, glowing with a fierce light.

  "Surprised?" he asked, with a grin. "I am one of Vella's chosen, one of the champions who wields her spawn."

  A mechanical spider crawled up his leg as if on cue. Attaching to the back of his spine, it formed a heavy suit of pleated armour that perfectly captured his body. It didn't look like anything modern. Rather, it was a set constructed in the same jagged, obtuse, mechanical style as Vella's lower body—the same style that Boris adopted when he sprouted from Claire's back.

  "This armour makes me immune to your magic. You will never harm or defeat me."

  Raising her wand, a very annoyed Arciel fired a burst of mana, a shadowy blast powerful enough to topple a Langgbjern mountain.

  But as it turned out, the spell accomplished nothing.

  It bounced right off of the minotaur's armour while he delivered a kick and turned her flesh into a stain upon his metal boot.

  Arciel’s body reformed right after, quickly repairing itself from its inky state.

  But another attack came right as she was restored.

  A warrior in a gaudy, gem-laden suit of armour descended from the heavens with a heavy cleave. The blow landed directly on Arciel’s shoulder and claimed her dominant hand.

  It should have been a non-issue.

  She could easily heal her wounds by absorbing blood, darkness, or light.

  But though the shadows extended and stretched, her body never went back to normal.

  A quick look at the spear revealed the reason. Though made of multicoloured diamonds, and though it had Aemilia carved into its edge with hearts to replace the dots, the spear bore a curse powerful enough to overwhelm Griselda’s greatest blessing.

  “Good evening, Miss Vel’khan. You uh… darn, what was the line again? I can’t seem to recall.” The warrior flashed a confident, playful smile as she twirled her spear and removed Arciel’s other arm. “Oh, I remember now. You’ve insulted Cadria too many times. For your pride and hubris, I, Aemilia Acampora, Countess of the Acampora lands and the Grand Magus’ 81st disciple, will be taking your life.”

  And then, raising her spear, Aemilia aimed at the monarch’s crown.