Chương 166: Magic Trick

Lilia weakly slammed her fist into the ground, narrowly avoiding a puddle of her thrown-up stomach contents. The hovering debris that floated around her was replaced with a chill mist mixed with blood. She cursed to herself and looked up with half-shut eyes — blood dripped down and peppered her face; two corpses sat impaled on massive stalagmites formed above her into a white-boxed structure of ice.

The scent of acetone radiated from the puddle of vomit; her breath fell short, rushed, panicked — she felt dazed; her body and back ached all over. Her vision felt like it was on the verge of splitting. However, rest was not something she could afford in the moment; there was a third foe unaccounted for… The Mage. Lilia placed her other palm on the floor and pushed herself off her knees into a staggering walk through the maze, back to her posse.

She didn't need to fight the mage; she preferred to avoid confrontation anyhow, and the longer she lingered, the higher her odds of being discovered by other forces became. Her bruises would heal swiftly, and her cuts would scar over quicker, but her bones… required rest to heal on the spot. She didn't have the boons of a body affinity, nor did she have a hidden card up her sleeve that could lick her wounds in a satisfactory time frame.

Lilia staggered through the hedge maze, clambering over debris and stepping over corpses. Her face was stuck in a constant wince; each movement caused her a great amount of pain. An inkling of thought wished she had experienced combat before, while the part that held reason remembered that her life would hopefully return to normal if… she simply escaped.

'We don't need to go back for the posse? N-no, we should? Right?' The reserved alter sighed a shaky internal breath.

'We can't just leave them…'

'…' After a few minutes of staggering and clambering, Lilia made it back to where she left her posse behind, and the moment she got there, her stomach twisted tighter than her wounds ever could as her eyes zipped over to several new corpses — three, maybe four — lying strewn and mutilated near the collapsed archway where she had left them. Not killed in a fight, but executed… tortured even...

the wounds on their bodies were like a biography on the killer; these kills came from someone who had all the time in the world and no reason to rush. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

'Shit…' The rest of the posse knelt in the dirt, hands bound behind their backs with what looked like conjured restraints — thin bands of blue light. A few wept silently. One young man, barely even an adult, stared at nothing, off into the distance, at nothing. The missing mage sat cross-legged atop a fallen pillar, swinging one leg idly, like she'd been waiting for this exact moment and had grown a little bored of it.

"There she is, the woman of the hour!" the mage said, brightening.

"I was starting to think you'd left them just for little ol me, as a parting gift. Weird, though; usually gifts aren't found through rings of detection!?" Lilia's hands curled into fists. Frost bloomed unbidden across her knuckles, and she didn't bother reeling it back this time.

"Let them go."

"Mm, make me." The mage hopped down, unhurried, and crouched beside the young man who'd been staring off in a trance. She rested two fingers against the side of his throat — not choking, just resting there, a promise more than a threat.

"See, here's my problem. Your friends back there —" she nodded vaguely toward the direction of the two corpses Lilia had left frozen and impaled, "— cost me a coordinated team I spent months assembling. Months, Lilia. Do you know how hard it is to find a half-decent swordsman and a cultivator who actually listened to me in this cult!?" Lilia's eye twitched.

"That's not my problem."

"It is now." The mage's fingers pressed, just slightly, against the young man's neck.

"So here's what's going to happen. You're going to come with me, nice and calm, and your little herd of sheep gets to keep bleating. Or you can try something clever, and I get to see how many of them I can play with before you close the distance. I've heard you're fast; you're a Dreamer after all, so I have a little enchantment on me that goes kaboom when I die! You may be faster than fire… but is everyone else?" Frost crept further up Lilia's wrist, past the point she could safely call controlled.

She could end this — one clean cast, the mage would never see it coming — but the young man, and a few others, were close enough that a spell wide enough to guarantee the kill would take some of them with her.

'Sister, if we strike now—''We can't. Not with him this close.'

'Then what do we—''We do what she wants.' The frost receded, reluctantly, retreating back beneath her skin like it resented being told no.

"Good girl," the mage said, straightening.

"Was that so hard?" Lilia said nothing. She let them bind her wrists in the same pale light, let herself be pulled into the line of prisoners, let the posse's eyes fall on her — some grateful, some accusing, as if her strength should have been enough to save them all without cost. Maybe it should have been. The mage led them forward, humming something out of tune, toward the center of the parterre — toward whatever, or whoever, was waiting there.