The Last [Mage] King - Chapter 34: - Through Smoke and Stone (Patreon)

The room was a small thing, one for storage, judging by the boxes and assortment of random items stacked around it. One of said objects was a massive mirror, but Exia did not care about the mirror, he cared more about the idiot sat with his back against it. The idiot who shot him.

“You’re…you’re just a lad…” the idiot said, eyes wide with shock and horror.

“What an observant moron you are,” Exia hissed. His skull was still pounding, blood still running from the gash across his forehead.

“Please!” he begged. “Y-you don’t have to do this!” 

“And you didn’t have to shoot me in the head!” Exia spat.

“I…I have a wife, I have a family, I have—I don’t want to die like this!” he pleaded. The man was shaking, trembling in fact, and with tears and snot streaming down his face. This was a hopeless man wishing desperately for another chance at life. It made Exia angrier. Where was the fight he was promised, where was the combat?. After all this anticipation his first kill was going to be this, this? A gloveless cripple with a wet patch between his legs. “The world is wicked, child…but you do not have to be,” he whispered pathetically, as if to punctuate Exia’s fury.

There was nothing cool, or epic, or story-worthy about any of this. And still he’d gotten shot in the fucking head. “Fuck you!” Exia roared and saw the man flinch away from him.

Right then and there, Exia had made his decision, and there would be no turning back.

###

“There’s several of them,” Captain Sasha Osin helpfully informed Exia, as he set his eyes upon the several Angels currently surrounding them.

TSixtywenty to be exact, and all Angels of Gnev judging by the fox form they had taken. They were big, but none as large as the one the first one they had killed, these Angels were mostly in their mid-forties and a few touched the low sixties. Still, there were a lot of them, and the Mages who failed to recognise the inherent strength in numbers that weaker opponents carried simply did not live very long.

They widened their maws, and Exia saw all three score of them building a pit of fire at the backs of their throats. A pit of fire which would very soon bathe the forest in golden death.

“Turn around, we cover each other's flanks!” The Captain ordered, and Exia obeyed.

He turned his back to her, she did the same, and the violence followed. First as multiple streams of orange-red destruction death beating into the darkness that coalesced around him. His shadows drank the power greedily, eating away at it and leaving him unharmed within its maw. Echo was a spell he certainly knew he would be making quite a lot of use of.

Exia dashed to the side, away from the torrent or fire and released the mass of magic as one concentrated stream. It slammed into an Angel, carved it in two and melted several layers off other the creatures behind it. 

The magic died, the beam ceased and then they were upon him, Angels of every size, leaping, and roaring and clawing at every inch of what they had collectively deemed to be the most pressing target of the pair.

Exia saw the Captain’s flames slam into one and send them flying, but she could only do so much. Exia had to handle this himself, and so he did.

His tentacle came forth like a whip, wrapping around an Angel’s leg and slamming it into another. They both went flying in pieces. One leapt on his back—a particularly large one judging by its weight—and locked its jaw around Exia’s shoulder. He growled.

Coat!

And his entire body erupted in an inferno of blue fire. It must have done damage to the creature, but Exia had no delusions about such a thing hurting it. Angels did not feel pain. Father used to say they were cursed to bring onto man a gift they could never receive. Well Exia was going to push that theory to its limits.

Another came for him, particularly small and especially fast, and he brought a boot down on a itsparticularly small one’s head, crushing the fox underfoot and watching having its jaw erupt in a spray of crushed rock and thick magma.

An angel moved for his ankle and Exia let it—he had to focus on the big one on his back, and he doubted the small thing could leave more than a few scratches. Exia reached an arm backwards and with a roar pried the large bastard’s jaw off of him. The moment he felt no more teeth against his skin, he threw the thing into the snow and crushed the one locked around his ankle.

The large Angel came again, and so did the rest of its pack. From the corner of his eye, Exia saw the Captain leap on one, and then he was focused on his battle once again.

Limbs of death whipped around with a maddened ferocity, swinging Angels in the air and bringing them down harshly against their very own kind. Smite! He thought, and blue flames rained down from above, lighting the Angels of fire, and slicing through their numbers.

He killed, and he killed, and in truth he did not enjoy it. They were cruel things, made to do cruel things by cruel gods, but there was no satisfaction in bringing them death. Zcigmagus was enjoying himself however, as he enjoyed all things to do with breaking the toys of the lesser gods. He imbued Exia with tiny trickles of power for each he sent back to their creator, and Exia sent them forth with impunity.

The creatures scratched, at his flesh, tore and bit and clawed at every weakness they thought might be apparent, and found themselves wanting at every turn. Perhaps even just a week ago, Exia might have humoured the idea of loss; he might have not entirely dismissed the idea that this fight, and this fight alone might be the one which might finally put him in the dirt. After all, you can never tell; one could never truly know. But that was a week ago, and that was before, not now, when he sat at the Eighty-Third Magnitude.

So Exia killed, and killed and killed, like he always did, except easier, and with far less enjoyment. He was panting when it was done however, and so was the Captain. She seemed in a worse condition than he was, but even her injuries were limited to a gash on the forehead where particularly nasty claws had raked her.

She set strange eyes upon Exia, and he tried to imagine what it must be like as a SixtySeventy-NinthFirst to set eyes upon a creature so vastly beyond you in Magnitude amidst a field of corpses that you could not hope to recreate. Harrowing perhaps, oh how he loved being powerful. Why didn’t everyone else just do it as well. 

“Do you think that’s all of them?” The Captain asked, apparently snapping herself out of her thoughts.

Exia looked out into the woods and found himself confident that it was in fact all. Not because he didn’t could not see anotherone, but because though Angels felt no fear, they were not stupid. When they saw a threat, they attacked in the most ideal way they could think of—however rudimentary such an approach would be. If there were any left, it would be because they were hiding in cowardice, which Angels would not do, or they had fled, which Angels would not as well do either.

That meant they had in fact been victorious. It was an obvious fact, and one that surprised him the Captain did not know. Then he remembered that prior to this, her job had been fighting Sorcerers, not magical creatures.

“We are,” he told her.

And the Captain nodded, trusting in his judgement. Wordlessly, she stepped towards a corpse, punched her fist into its belly with a wet squelching sound, reached up into it, and with one swift motion, pulled out its heart.

It was a curious looking thing, circular where a mundane creature’s would have been irregular, and hissing against the cold air.

Exia had done well not to injure the hearts during the entire ordeal, and so had the Captain. Angel hearts were the entire back bone of the Republic's military and Exia imagined that obliterating them in his frustration just might have gotten him yelled at. And so he had not.

The Captain gently placed the heart in the snow and carefully withdrew the hearts of all other Angels littered across the forest. When she was done, she took off her red jacket and delicately wrapped them up in the red and greens of the Republic.

“We’ll find a better place to store them and deliver this to the closest Academy—they’ll know how best to distribute them,” at that, she took off her gloves and stuffed it into her pockets—Exia already had, as he doubted he needed to be empowered for the great task of standing around while someone else did all the work.

That was when he saw the Captain’s eyes widen, and heard the click behind him.

The Captain reached for her pockets and froze at the words that followed.

“Touch those gloves and I’ll burrow a hole in the King’s head!” were the words, the words of Captain Vetrova to be exact.

Slowly, Exia raised his hands up to either side of him, making it clear that he was of no threat, and giving her no excuse to send anything burrowing through his very precious cranium. He turned around and saw the Captain Vetrova’s hot eyes on him, burning even. In her hands was a pistol, held in two hands and with a pose that left no doubts about her proficiency with the firearm. It was one of those new models, the ‘automatics’ people were calling them. Exia had read a report from one Colonel Sidorov reviewing the things. Small-calibre, but a quarter-inch slug was still deadly enough for ungloved flesh. The remarkable thing was how fast it cycled, Vetrova could have three or four rounds squeezed off within a second. At this range, there’d be no missing with any.

If he reached for his pocket, Exia would be dead long before before he could touch the threads of his gloves. “The…” the woman tried, and Exia heard her voice crack against her throat. She inhaled, hissed and tried again, this time her voice trembled, but was held together by the seething rage wrapped around them. “The world is wicked, child, but you do not have to be.”

Exia felt the breath escape him at those words. He knew them. And he knew them well. He would never forget them, and now he knew that they would never forget him eithertoo.

Captain Vetrova saw the recognition in his eyes and it lit something in hers, a confirmation, a satisfaction, but not a remedy, for it was a bandage to a gash. A festering one. “I have been waiting…my entire life, for this moment.”