Chapter 8: 7.1: Consequences

Four enemy oathholders remained. Five, including the Caël duelist.

None of them were going to see the sun rise.

I took a step forward, then another. By all rights, I shouldn’t have been able to walk on my own, but it looked like my patron had chosen to smile upon me today. It felt like there was more magic flooding my veins than blood, Inome’s blinding power drowning out the pain I was supposed to be feeling.

“Hey!” I heard someone shout. “One of them’s still up!”

I saw three robed figures and one in heavy armor turn towards me. Good. That meant they wouldn’t be killing my friend just yet. I still had time.

There was a dull roaring in my ears, a comfortably familiar ice-cold hatred mixing with an entirely new sensation of amped-up magic power to make a concoction that was somehow keeping me going.

One of the robed mages met up with the armored one and cast something on the metal plates. They glowed red, either with magic or heat. One Igni oath.

The armored oath started lumbering towards me, picking up speed as he went.

I built magic power, and it came with ease. Whereas typically it might’ve taken me an entire minute just to empower my flail for a single fight, now it flowed not just into my flail but across my entire body in a matter of moments.

The armored one disappeared into shadow, their body dissolving into wispy nothingness piece by piece.

Not an oathholder of the core eight. Lessons from long ago passed through my brain, prompted by a vague hint of familiarity.

Cyang is one of the most prominent non-core gods. My father had told me this once, sitting in on a lesson with a tutor. It is the god of concealment, and oathholders to it tend to be assassins. If you ever see someone vanish, or your senses start to become befuddled, you should keep your gu—

“Shut the fuck up,” I snarled at the memory. I don’t need your advice, traitor.

If that oathholder refused to make themselves seen, then they would simply have to die in the dark.

I sprinted forward with magic enhancing my steps, the grass dying and crumbling to dust where I ran.

The other oathholders weren’t staying idle as we closed the distance between each other— I could see each of them entrenching their positions and forming magic patterns, ready to cast some sort of coordinated barrage of spells.

I didn’t care.

As I came within throwing distance of them, I brought my flail down, smoothly arcing it in a crescent with everything I had in me and even more.

The spiked ball made contact with the ground.

My patron’s magic, lent to me in my time of need, met the ground, and the area around me knew destruction.

 

Dirt had become dust had become nothing. Grass withered and crumbled into that same unforgiving void. As the air, stilled as if the world itself was holding in a breath, began to clear of dust, the aftereffects of my blow became clear.

I was standing in a half dome, all matter within the reach of my flail annihilated so that the sides of my little crater were perfectly round.

And at the edge of the effect was half of an armored body, cut in two by the raw power of this unstructured magic. Their face and much of the front part of their body had been destroyed, and the body had fallen backwards, the weight of the armor dragging it down. Even in the dim light, I thought I could see what must’ve once been a heart pumping out its last desperate spray of blood, coating the dessicated surface of the depression I stood in with blood and the remnants of an oathholder’s body.

One down.

The rest of them didn’t even flinch at their teammate’s grisly demise, spells still forming.

A red magic pattern coalesced into a projectile, and it crackled with energy as it flew towards me.

I reached out, unstructured magic flooding the air around me, and the projectile fizzled out as it hit me, any nasty effect it carried with it dissipating into thin air.

I turned towards the mage that had cast the projectile.

“You’re next,” I whispered.

I could have let the hatred melt into rage so easily, but anger made people sloppy. Better to control it, to bury it and let it become something more controlled, easier to direct.

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I stepped out of the dip in the ground I had made and started running again, flail in hand.

The oathholder didn’t even try to run. Instead, they started focusing on casting another spell, one last attempt at stopping me.

Their teammates helped them. As I ran, the ground between me and the mage began to shift unnaturally, walls of earth rising from the field.

Tsau oath. Another non-core oathholder. Who were these people? Having a non-core oath shouldn’t be all too rare, but multiple in one team were highly uncommon.

It didn’t matter. At the end of the day, they would all die the same.

The dirt was rising rapidly, multiple walls already half again my height, and past experience told me that they would likely be as durable as the toughest armor. I knew where my target was, though, and I wasn’t going to let myself be stopped by a silly thing like a meter thick enchanted wall when there were more pressing matters.

I sprinted straight into a wall, and for a brief, heart-stopping moment, my magic fought against the enemy’s, an unnamed god pitting itself against the god of earth, but it was just that— a moment. Inome’s blessing devoured the wall ahead and around me, and I ran through it with no resistance but the wind in my hair.

One wall, two walls, three walls, four. Each time I threw myself into a barrier and each time I came through unscathed, the mounds collapsing into inert dirt behind me.

Nothing was left between myself and the projectile mage. They shouted in alarm as they saw me, but it was already too late.

The last wall had been formed just five meters away from my target. They’d coordinated, ensured that the walls didn’t block themselves off, but they must not have been expecting me to simply run through them because they were not positioned in a way that allowed them to respond to me charging straight ahead.

I came out of the dust already swinging the flail. It had always been my preferred weapon when I was younger, the inhuman coordination required to use it effectively drawing me to it like nothing else, and even now it had never failed me.

The weapon passed through the projectile mage like a hot knife through butter. They weren’t even able to scream, the top half of their body flying off to one side while the bottom fell to the ground.

Two down.

I sprinted towards the other two, not even fully processing what was happening as I shrugged spells off like water. The fact that none of them were fleeing even as their allies had fallen one by one made my job a lot easier as well.

A thrown dagger, arcing high and true, buried itself in a robed mage’s torso. I looked away, and he died screaming.

Three down.

The last oathholder flitted forward with bursts of speed, magic power bursting from their body.

I blinked and they were on me, knives crackling with flame and lightning. The knife, enchanted with something stronger than the spells that I’d been ignoring earlier, managed to break through my layer of defenses.

The dagger slid into my side, but I couldn’t be bothered to care. I wheeled on my attacker and simply punched them, fist wreathed with power. I connected a solid blow, the force of over a decade practicing my form and honing my body providing a measure of power and an entity beyond my comprehension providing the rest.

Skin folded like paper under my fist, and I encountered barely any resistance as I simply punched through their torso, slick blood and muscle painting my arm with viscera but not stopping its path.

I looked at this final oathholder, watched as their eyes ceased to move and their lips stopped drawing breath.

Four down.

I had never felt this powerful before, and yet… it felt like something was missing. Something that could have made this even more of a one-sided slaughter, that would have made my power complete.

I turned, searching for the Caël oath that had been duelling the adventurer’s Caël oath in a mirror match earlier, and saw the tired adventurer barely managing to keep themself standing, but standing they were, victorious over the broken form of the final oathholder.

That was… relieving in one way, dissatisfying in another. Whatever the case, the job here was done.

I pulled my arm out of the dead oathholder, the cold hatred I’d been feeling slowly ebbing away with the lives I’d taken.

As the hatred left me, so did the magic power.

The pain came slowly at first, an aching in my foot, a burning in my lungs, and then it rushed back all at once, my body finally remembering what it was supposed to feel when utterly broken.

I dropped to my knees, then down onto the ground.

The darkness that came for me wasn’t the one of unconsciousness.

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