Chapter 342: I Shall Return

The chains were searching for something to hold, so Noah lay still and let them look.

He could feel them moving through him, weaving deeper into the territory that most magic never reached. They were looking for his soul. The complete, unified thing that a compulsion needed to sink its roots into if it was going to hold.

What they found instead was wreckage.

If only they knew that Osiris had long since shattered his soul into pieces. The shattering had taken place after months of brutal torture, and what remained of Noah’s soul was not a single surface but a collection of fragments, each one separate, and each one capable of functioning independently but none of them the whole.

A compulsion needed something complete to bind to. You couldn’t chain a shattered thing. The pieces would simply shift and the chain would find nothing.

But he needed to give them something if he wanted to slip out of their grip.

He quickly reached inwards and found the smallest fragment of his soul that he could locate. A sliver. The piece was barely enough to qualify as a piece of anything. He turned it carefully, examining it, making sure it was isolated enough that whatever was written into it couldn’t reach the rest of him.

Then he offered it up.

The purple chains found it immediately, the way water finds the lowest point in a room. They surged towards it, coiling tight, and he felt them sink their intent into the fragment with an efficiency that would have been impressive under other circumstances.

The compulsion settled in, clear and legible, its instructions running through that small piece of him like words carved into metal.

Answer to the royal family. Follow all commands given by the Queen and the High Magus. Protect Camelot and its people.

He read it the way you read a sign you have no intention of following.

The ritual ended.

The purple light drained from the floor, the chains dissolved, and the circle’s glow faded ring by ring until the hall was lit only by its wall torches. The mages around the perimeter straightened, several of them exhaling.

Edric stepped forward and extended one hand towards Noah, a diagnostic spell spreading outwards from his palm in a thin wash of pale light. It moved across Noah’s body slowly, checking for a confirmation.

Noah kept his face slack and his eyes forward.

The diagnostic light finally faded, and Edric’s expression settled into something satisfied.

“Remove the chains,” he said.

The suppression cuffs came off.

The difference was immediate and total. Mana flooded back through his channels like a river finding its bed after a long drought, rushing into every available space, filling him from the inside out. He kept his face blank and his breathing even and gave none of it away.

Edric looked at him directly. “Go with the mages. Follow their instructions.”

Noah nodded once, slowly, then followed.

They took him through corridors he hadn’t seen before, away from the cells and deeper into whatever this building was.

The architecture changed as they moved, the bare stone of the lower levels giving way to plastered walls and proper flooring.

They went up two flights of stairs, then through a door into a room that had a bed, a wardrobe, and a bathroom attached.

One of the mages told him to clean up and change. Clean clothes had been laid out already, folded on the end of the bed.

Then they left him alone.

Noah stood in the silence for a moment. Then he walked into the bathroom, filled the basin, and lowered himself into it.

The hot water found every bruise and strained muscle without mercy. He ignored it, closed his eyes, and pulled up his status.

[Status:]

[Noah Webb]

[Race: Dark Dragon]

[Rank: B]

[Potential: SSS]

[Affinities: Darkness, Fire, Void, Decay, Hunger, Ink, Bone]

[Core Attributes:]

[Strength: B]

[Endurance: A+]

[Agility: A+]

[Mana Capacity: SS]

[Magic Control: S+]

[Skills: Roar (FFF-Rank), Dark Furnace (SS-Rank), The King’s Dominion (SS-Rank), Decay of a Thousand Ages (SSS-Rank)]

[Spells: Utter Annihilation (SSS-Rank), Null Stride (A-Rank), Feast (S-Rank)]

He looked at the spell list for a long time.

The Mana Leech had been thorough. It had stripped away everything except these three.

Utter Annihilation was SSS-rank. He couldn’t cast it without raising his mana capacity and magic control to the max, so that left Null Stride and Feast, the two spells he’d rather have if he was told to choose.

It had to be destiny.

Null Stride had gotten him here, through everything, and it would get him out. A single cast, one destination, and he would be gone before anyone in this building understood what had happened.

Feast was the other half of the equation. With it, he’d be able to replenish himself with the necessary spells that would become his firepower.

He would need to build himself back up from the depleted state the Leech had left him in. Every spell he’d lost had been learned once. They could be learned again, or replaced with something better, but only if he had the foundation to support them.

Which meant getting out first. Then finding sources worth consuming.

And then, when he had rebuilt what had been taken from him, he would come back.

He thought about the ritual circle. About the compulsion sitting in that small sliver of his soul, issuing its instructions to an audience of one fragment that couldn’t act on them even if it wanted to.

He thought about Edric’s satisfied expression as the diagnostic confirmed success.

He thought about what it meant that these people, the ones who had summoned him into this world without his consent, had then decided that his autonomy was an inconvenience to be corrected.

The resentment that had been building since the infirmary, since before that, since the very first day he had opened his eyes in a new world and found himself in a throne room surrounded by strangers who wanted something from him, settled into something quieter and more permanent than anger.

He would leave. He would rebuild. And he would return.

Then he’d burn down everything they had tried to protect for what they had done to him.

[][][][][]

Aldred Kael stood on burnt grass and looked at what remained of the Royal Academy of Magic.

Earth and stone mages moved through the ruins in teams, rebuilding what could be rebuilt, and clearing what couldn’t.

The central spire was gone entirely, and the faculty building was a memory. The eastern dormitory block had been reduced to a foundation.

New walls were rising where old ones had stood, but they were rising wrong, the proportions slightly off, the stone too clean against the scorched ground around them.

It wouldn’t be the same. He had accepted that already.

The student casualties had been contained, which was the only thing that allowed him to look at the rest without his legs giving out beneath him.

They’d had a few scattered losses across several groups, and the entire second year male Bronze-tier dormitory, but the rest of the students were safe.

Each name on that list sat somewhere behind his eyes and would not move.

The staff losses were worse.

The guards were mostly gone. The captain, who had served under him for eleven years, had been among the dead.

Of his three B-rank teaching staff mages, Oliver was dead, Faye was still confined to recovery, and Cecilia had not woken up.

His eyes moved to the newly constructed infirmary building at the edge of the grounds.

Whatever Lady in Dark had placed inside Cecilia’s mind, none of the healers had found a way past it. The barrier sat there, patient and immovable, and Cecilia lay behind it in a sleep that showed no signs of ending.

Kael exhaled slowly.

He would do what he could. The rest he would have to leave to those more capable than himself.

It was not a comfortable thought for a man who had spent his entire life being the most capable person in the room.

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