The Third Step: Chapter Seventy-Two (Patreon)

I didn’t like the arrows. First of all, I wasn’t an archer, so I couldn’t even use them as intended. Second of all, it wasn’t my power. Something like the Frozen Time let me better use my own power, and even the cyan crystal would operate not too horribly dissimilarly to my Ephemeral Rebirth. Other, more permanent, equipment could amplify my power in its own way or become a true part of my style. The arrows weren’t my power, they weren’t tangential to abilities I already had, and they weren’t going to become a part of my style. It would be like letting someone else fight for me.

But there were four of them, and each one was a seventh gate attack. More than that, they offered some strategic benefits. I could teleport them or stab them like a small knife, and only one other person in the top thirty-two would even have the possibility to know how many I had. 

I swallowed my pride and picked up the bundle of arrows. As soon as I had, the Patriarch appeared at my side, the blast of wind around us indicating that he hadn’t teleported, simply moved the distance faster than I could track. He removed the stone tablet-amulet-thing again, but before he opened the portal again, he looked curiously at me. 

“You did not reach the full potential of your growth spells prior to ascending.” 

“It came down to a matter of stability. I pushed myself a bit too hard, and was forced to ascend early.” 

“Is that unusual for you?” 

Dusk chimed in with a peal of laughter, before shaking her head and telling him that no, it most certainly was not unusual. The Patriarch made a noise of agreement, then created the portal and ushered me out, explaining that he had to go find the third highest scorer. I nodded, then Dusk and I headed back to our room, where I stepped into her realm and met with my friends and allies. Kene looked concerned, so I focused on them first. 

“What’s wrong?” 

“Well, you know the promise you made to the Sekhem Court. I was wondering when you’d get on that? We don’t know how long the person with the earring is going to be around, let alone if they’ve already been eliminated. If we wait until after the tournament, I’m not sure it will be around. Then there’s the prophecy that the Headsman’s daughter gave us. You need to make the acquaintance of someone competing for Elohi, but from Feng Chui. I know you need a lot of training, but is a day or two of less training really going to make a difference?” 

“That… is a fair point,” I agreed. “Unless I spontaneously find four bronzepick pills laying on the ground, I won’t make any substantial leaps in power in just a few days. I could sketch another spell and create the circuit for it, but I can’t actually master or ingrain it. I can make some incremental improvements, but anything big will take more time than I’ve got.” 

Dusk made a sound like a braying donkey which was especially strange, since as far as I was aware, she didn’t have a donkey in her. But the content of the braying noises was far more important. She pointed out that Dario’s friend might fit the requirements of the sword mage, so I should try and meet her. While the earring was a little more obscure, it was a blood magic artifact, and we had seen a mage using Kamal’s name and blood to disable him completely. What were the odds that there would be many more blood mages in the tournament, or that someone who wasn’t a blood mage would have found and kept an artifact with a veil on it that seemingly was just a blood ruby? 

“Someone from Mossford, the City of Sin, or Delitone might. Or anyone with an interest in history,” offered my grandmother. “Blood rubies were the standard highest denomination of currency among the Empire of Death, and saw a lot of trade throughout that region. They’re valuable to blood mages for magic, true, but if this was old enough, it may have more historical value. Frankly, I’m more concerned that you owe a debt to the Sekhem Court. They’re not a power to be trifled with.” 

“Malachi threatened to kill them all,” Kene offered, and I spluttered at him. I had done something similar to that, but… 

“You’re taking that blatantly out of context,” I accused. “And besides, I wouldn’t have killed them! Just destroyed their power base. Vampires can be good. Like Riley!” 

“The worst part is, they believed him,” Kene continued. “One of their Princes, Prince Dhruv, was forced to barter with Malachi like an equal.” 

“Again, there was context to these–” I started to say, but was cut off by Meadow’s slightly-hacking laughter. 

“He also broke their high-powered ward scheme. The thing could have stopped most Occultists from teleporting in or out, but he demonstrated that he could slip through with only a second or two of effort.” 

“It was just a loophole, they’d protected against–” 

“And of course, he reminded them that if they killed him, that they’d have the debts he owes to the Analyst.

My grandmother was looking rather faint at that, her eyes bouncing between Kene, Meadow, my father, Dusk, and me. I held up my hands in surrender, while Dusk was laughing so hard she was at risk of falling off her cloud, and my father just looked confused. 

“I’m going to go scout around,” I grumbled, teleporting across Dusk’s realm to demonstrate my displeasure. I didn’t need to, but it looked dramatic to vanish midway through the conversation. Kene and Meadow had brought this on themselves, so they could deal with the aftermath.

I stepped back into my room, then paused, debating who it would be better to go out as: the fox competitor, or Malachi the sensory mage. In a way, it depended on who I found. The blood mage would have no reason to connect Malachi to my fox guise, so that should be safe, but if I met him in the fox guise, I’d need to give him a false name. If I met Dario and his friend, though, they’d know me from the tournament, and wouldn’t know me as a sensory mage. I hummed for a moment, before using Mold Aura to spike my more human mana aspects, especially life and death, started working to blend my mana into the environment around me, and forcibly pulled my tail into my soul mana.

From there, I opened the window and teleported onto a nearby roof, then down onto the ground. Competitors and tourists alike swarmed through the streets in throngs, and there  was a distant roar from the arena as some event or another had a twist in it. I thought the hundred-li foot race might be going on right now, but I wasn’t entirely sure. I had briefly considered competing in a footrace event, but Ikki’s complete lack of any faith or trust in my abilities was ultimately too much of a deterrent. If he thought I stood no chance, I probably stood no chance. 

I started casting my senses through the crowd as I walked, keeping my net as wide as possible, looking for any of my targets. I didn’t know if I’d have any luck in finding them out here, but most competitors didn’t have access to an expansive other world to pop in and out of. They’d be entirely cooped up in the small hotel-like rooms most of the time they were around, and if they wanted to go out, it would be here, in the city surrounding the arenas. 

I was wandering through an alley, chasing down a faint trail of blood magic that could have been the blood mage I was looking for, a vampire, or simply a healer who had done something unique with their magic, when I caught four forms in my spatial senses. They slid into the alley from either side of the street, and as I turned onto an even more dimly lit alleyway, they picked up their pace. There was a wall at the end of the alley, and the faint hints of blood magic .

I was considering teleporting to the top when the four figures stepped into the light of the crystal enchanted paper lanterns that had been strung up to celebrate. One and all, they raised weapons: one held a pair of knives, another held a gun, one had a saber I thought might be called a dao, and the final one lifted her index finger, sparks of fire drifting down. 

“Give us your money, foreigner, and we’ll let you leave the alley alive,” the one with the dao saber said. “If you don’t, we’ll cut you down where you stand. Don’t mess with us. We have a cultivator!” 

I focused my senses on the group somewhat more pointedly, though I didn’t bring the power down on them. I wanted to look, but I didn’t want them to know I was looking, not yet. The man wielding the dao sword was about forty, and felt like an ungated mage, but there was something wrong with him. His spirit felt like he’d tried to use some elixir to open their magic, only for it to go wrong and damage his spirit. It wouldn’t have been unfixable when it had first happened, but it had gone untreated for years, maybe decades. The dao itself had spots of rust along its blade. I didn’t know much about swords, but even I could tell this one was in bad shape. 

The man wielding the daggers, and the one with the gun, were both also ungated mages, and their weapons didn’t look like they were in much better shape than the dao was. They were young, even by my standards, no older than fifteen. They looked malnourished, with sunken eyes and pallid skin, but they could have passed for brothers or even twins. 

The woman with the sparking finger was the only one of the group with any gated magic, but she was still only a first gate solar mage, and her spirit felt pure in a way that I could only usually feel in mana sources. She was in her early to mid-twenties, but I was betting that she’d only ever been able to learn a single spell. 

“Well?!” demanded the man with the sword, and I looked them over one more time. They were threatening to kill me. Perhaps I should have felt angry, and struck them down with impunity. I was fairly certain that the laws in Zuanzhe would have been on my side in a way that even self-defense laws weren’t in Mossford. Instead, I just felt pity. Apparently having decided that I’d been silent for too long, the man charged at me with his sword, the woman in the back shot an orb of flame, the kid with the knives circled me to my right, and the kid with the gun shot me.

I stepped into the sword blow, incidentally dodging the bullet as I did, knocked the dao out of the older man’s hand with a sharp blow to his knuckles, caught the sword as it fell, spun it to bring the flat down on the forearms of the kid with knives, and tilted my head so that the orb of flame whizzed past my left ear. Both of the kids bolted, while the mage raised her finger, sparks beginning to build, and the remaining man threw a punch at the side of my head. I dropped the dao and stepped forward again, using one hand to knock aside the punch, and the other to slap down the fire orb before it launched, then raced forward, catching both of the kids by the backs of their shirts and pulling them back into the alley, tossing them at the other two. 

My motion and lack of attention must have caused me to stand out, even to their weakened mana senses, as the woman’s eyes widened in fear. 

“Fourth realm…”