I Became the Bully Extra in a Novel I Hate

They came from every direction at once.

Arthur felt them through the network before the first boot hit stone.

The group had maybe twelve seconds before every exit sealed.

Arthur looked at the holding chamber door ahead of them.

Then at the corridors on both sides.

Then at Vexis.

Vexis looked back at him.

’I know,’ Vexis said.

Arthur looked at his hands.

He’d been careful about Hellshade.

Careful about what he showed and to whom and in what context.

He’d been careful.

He looked at the converging signatures and a sealed corridor and a room full of chained children behind a door he hadn’t reached yet.

Forget it.

The thought arrived clean and without ceremony.

We go all in.

He raised his left hand.

The air around his palm compressed immediately as he pulled the surrounding molecules inward, rotating them fast, tightening the rotation until the compression built heat, until the air between his fingers was hot enough that it shimmered faintly visible in the torchlight. Shadow gathered at his right hand simultaneously, threading up from the floor, pooling at his fingertips in the specific formation his hand had learned.

He brought both hands together.

The shadow and the compressed air merged at the point of contact and the color of it wrong for both, dark at the center and ringed purple-red at the edges where the heat met the darkness and argued about which one it was.

He pointed his right index finger forward.

Aimed.

A Covenant swordsman burst through the left corridor.

Arthur fired.

The projectile crossed the hall in a single blur and struck the man square in the chest.

The impact folded him around it.

His body left the ground, crashed through two soldiers behind him, and all three disappeared into the stone wall hard enough to shower the corridor with fractured rock.

Silence lingered for half a heartbeat.

Then Arthur fired again.

Another blast.

A mage trying to form a spell disappeared beneath the explosion of shadow and compressed air, thrown across the hall before the incantation left his lips.

A third shot followed immediately.

The corridor broke apart into chaos.

Every Covenant soldier who tried to advance found themselves forced back by explosions that weren’t quite explosions, shadows that struck with the weight of siege weapons. Arthur moved with the rhythm of his own network, Vexis feeding him targets faster than he could consciously think.

’Right.’

Arthur fired.

’High.’

Another shot.

’Three together.’

Arthur adjusted the angle.

The Hellshade Composite ripped through the center of their formation, throwing bodies across the corridor and forcing the Covenant into cover for the first time since the alarm sounded.

Even Solenne glanced toward him.

Not because she’d needed help.

Because whatever Arthur was doing...

...was unlike anything she’d ever seen.

Arthur counted without looking.

Three shots.

Maybe two left.

Then—

The fighting changed.

Arthur felt it before he saw it.

One signature.

Dense.

Steady.

Moving through the converging Covenant soldiers without slowing, every fighter instinctively stepping aside before it reached them.

The network shifted around the newcomer as though acknowledging something heavier entering the battlefield.

Purple hair emerged first.

Then the long black coat.

Then the pale eyes Arthur remembered from the forest.

Soltice walked into the corridor without urgency.

He looked once at the shattered stone.

At the bodies Arthur had thrown across it.

For the first time since Arthur had met him...

...the man’s expression tightened.

Not surprise.

Irritation.

Cold.

Measured irritation.

"So," Soltice said quietly.

"You found it."

His eyes moved over Solenne.

Cael.

Veris.

Then stopped.

On Sable.

The irritation vanished.

It became something sharper.

"You."

Silence settled over the corridor.

Sable didn’t answer.

Soltice stared at him for another second, disbelief giving way to understanding piece by piece.

"I wondered how they found this place." His voice lost its calm. Only slightly. Enough to hear the anger beneath it. "It was you."

His jaw tightened.

"You little—"

Arthur fired.

The Hellshade Composite crossed the corridor in a streak of black and violet before the last word left Soltice’s mouth.

It struck him square in the chest.

The impact detonated against his coat.

Stone exploded behind him as Soltice was hurled backward through the corridor, crashing into the wall hard enough to leave a crater in the rock.

Arthur was already forming the second shot.

Everyone was staring at him.

The Covenant soldiers who’d been mid-charge had stopped mid-charge. The mages behind them had stopped. Even Cael had gone still for a half second, his vines paused at the walls, looking at what Arthur’s hands were doing with the specific expression of someone rapidly updating a significant assumption.

Solenne looked at him from three meters away.

Arthur didn’t look back. He was counting. His aetheric blood volume had a ceiling and Hellshade composite drew from both his shadow reserves and his compression capacity simultaneously and he needed to know how many shots he had before the ceiling arrived.

Four. Maybe five. Then he’d be running on network and Stima alone.

Soltice pulled himself off the wall and Coughing blood.

Slowly. Deliberately. He looked down at his chest where the impact had caved the front of his coat inward and left a scorch ring at the center. His white eyes came up.

"You." His voice was the same deep register from the forest ambush. Calm in a way that was worse than angry. "You use Black magic."

Arthur aimed the second shot.

"It’s composite magic." He closed his left eye. "You fool."

He fired.

Soltice moved this time. Fast enough that the shot clipped his shoulder instead of center mass and still spun him sideways and Arthur was already pulling a third compression when the mage to Soltice’s left launched a bolt of blue fire at Arthur’s flank.

The network caught it.

’High left,’ Vexis said. ’Step right. Now.’

Arthur stepped right and the blue fire passed close enough to heat his ear and he dropped the compression and converted it into a shadow bind that caught the mage’s feet from his own shadow and snapped him to the floor.

’Two more. Behind the far soldiers.’

"I see them."

He fired a Hellshade at the one on the left. It hit. The soldier’s body flew into the one beside him and both of them went into the wall and the shadow spread across them both and they stopped contributing to the problem.

Three shots used. Two left before he had to switch modes.

The corridor became something that didn’t have a clean word for what it was.

Solenne moved like the room had been designed for her.

Her rapier was black at the edge in the torchlight, Stima running through the blade in a thin dark line that the Covenant’s swordbearers saw and recognized and the recognition made them hesitate and the hesitation cost them. She didn’t give space back once she took it. Every recovery the Covenant made she was already past, already at the next position, the rapier moving in arcs that left Stima marks in the stone where it passed because the Stima in her strikes was that dense.

A swordbearer from the far corridor recognized the blade work and said something to the fighter beside him.

"That’s Von Castellane." His voice carried in the chaos. "That’s the Elercross princess."

The fighter beside him hesitated.

Solenne hit them both in the next three seconds and kept moving.

A Taller Covenant fighter appeared from the main hall entrance. Tall. Red hair. Broad. A two-handed blade that had relic signatures etched along the flat of it that pulsed when he raised it. He looked at Solenne directly.

Solenne looked at The red haired man

The red haired man looked at Solenne.

He raised the relic blade.

She raised the rapier.

And both blades clashed.

Roz left Arthur’s shoulder.

He didn’t announce it. He simply wasn’t there and then the nearest cluster of Covenant mages was dealing with something that had arrived among them in a motion too fast to have been tracked, purple fire moving in controlled precise bursts that found spells before they finished forming and dismantled them at the component level.

Cael’s bellus, the dark-furred creature Arthur had never seen fully extended before, moved through the lower shadows of the corridor in the spaces Roz wasn’t occupying and fired a small wind slash. When it hit something it hit it once and moved to the next one.

Cael himself held the left corridor. Vines from every crack in the stone, from the gaps between the torch brackets and the floor joints and the places where old mortar had failed, filling the space with a density of growth that the Covenant soldiers were fighting through rather than past. When a soldier cut through one vine two more replaced it. When a mage tried to burn them the fire found nowhere to travel because the vines weren’t coming from one place.

Sable stood in the center of the group and raised both hands and the loose equipment in the corridor, dropped weapons and dislodged torch brackets and a section of fallen ceiling stone, lifted simultaneously and held position and then flew at coordinated angles into the mages who’d been trying to find clear shots.

Not Reversal. Telekinesis.

"You goddamn traitor." Soltice’s voice came from further down the corridor. He’d repositioned. Still upright. "You understand your family is dead after this."

Sable’s hands didn’t drop.

But his body locked. Just for a second. Just long enough for the objects he was holding to waver in the air before his jaw tightened and they steadied again.

He didn’t respond.

Theodore and Thalon hit the holding chamber door together.

It opened. The smell hit first. Then the sound, which was worse than the smell, Theodore looked at the chamber and his face did something that he didn’t try to control.

Elven Children against the far wall. Adults shielding them with their bodies on instinct. Emerald hair dull with poor light and insufficient water. Eyes too large for faces that had become too thin.

Thalon was already moving to the chains.

Theodore looked back at the corridor. At the fight. At Arthur holding the Hellshade composite in his right hand and the network in his left and managing both simultaneously. At Solenne trading strikes with Red haired man and the Stima on her blade cutting a groove in the corridor stone with every blocked swing.

He looked at the ventilation shaft on the south face.

Sixty centimeters wide.

"Maya," he said.

She was already looking at it.

Arthur fired his fourth shot and switched modes.

Shadow only. No compression. His left hand dropped to his side and he pushed everything remaining into the network and the network spread wider than it had gone in the corridor, filling the chamber and the holding room and the corridor behind simultaneously, every shadow in the fortress feeding back to him in one sustained screaming picture.

Forty-one elves in the chamber. Theodore and Thalon working through the chains. Solenne and the red haired man in a stalemate that was costing Harren more than it was costing Solenne. Roz dismantling mages in a systematic path from west to east. Cael’s corridor holding. Sable’s telekinesis keeping the center clear.

And Soltice.

Repositioning again. Moving with a specific intention now, not toward the fighting, around it, angling toward the holding chamber entrance.

’He’s going for the elves,’ Vexis said.

Arthur stepped into the angle and raised his hand. "Hey."

Soltice stopped.

"Where’s Malvric?" Arthur kept the network running and his voice level. "Didn’t feel like showing up today?"

Soltice looked at him and extended one hand. "Die"

Not toward Arthur.

Arthur felt it through the network before he understood what it was. Not fire. Not compression. Something that didn’t register as magic in the conventional sense. It arrived without building and without announcing and without the specific signature that spells had, just a point of force that traveled in a straight line too fast for the network to parse and hit Veris in the chest.

Veris went back.

The sound of it was not the sound of an impact. It was the sound of something structural failing. Something load-bearing giving way all at once.

Arthur turned.

Veris was against the wall. Her chest was missing. Caved. Blood came immediately, too much and too fast, and she looked down at herself with an expression of confusion and terror.

She vomited blood.

Her eyes rolled.

She went down.

The corridor went very still.

Arthur stood and looked at Veris on the floor and felt the network running through his hands and felt absolutely nothing for exactly one second.

Then Soltice raised the same hand again.

The network screamed. So did Vexis.

Arthur moved.

Something hit him from the side, not the blast, a body, Solenne’s shoulder catching him hard and driving him sideways and past the line of the attack, and the force that had unmade Veris’s chest passed through the space where Arthur had been standing and hit the corridor wall and the stone didn’t crack.

It caved. A meter deep. Just gone.

Solenne’s sword came up as she turned and the Stima on the blade met the edge of whatever Soltice was still producing and the collision was not a clash of steel. It was wrong in the same way Veris’s chest was wrong. A sound that didn’t belong in a corridor. The sword held for half a second.

Then it shattered.

The blade went in fragments and the force carried through and hit Solenne’s chest plate and the armor shattered and she flew back and hit the wall and the wall cracked behind her and she slid and didn’t immediately rise.

Arthur watched her go down.

He stood in the corridor with his network running and Veris dead on the floor and Solenne against a cracked wall and Soltice’s white eyes on him across the corridor.

Roz’s voice came from somewhere behind him. Not calm this time.

Vexis was at his ear.

Screaming his name.

Arthur looked at his hands.

Then at Soltice.

What—

What magic is that—