I Became the Bully Extra in a Novel I Hate

Krail's face went the color of old paper.

"You—" His mouth worked around the words like they didn't fit. "You were never captured."

"No." Solenne's voice had gone flat with fury. "This was a setup. Someone fed the Council false intelligence, and you marched an army through their gates because of it."

Outside, the sound of it kept building. Steel and screaming and magic detonating somewhere close enough to shake dust loose from what remained of the ceiling. Elves fighting humans who thought they were rescuing a princess. Elves fighting because armed strangers had breached their walls wearing the crest of an empire that had just been granted an audience with their King.

Nobody left standing in that fight had the full picture. Nobody was going to stop long enough to get it.

"We have to move." Solenne was already pulling Arthur upright by his good arm. "Thalon, get Theodore. Cael, help Vexis. I'll clear a path."

She stepped out first, sword raised, shouting something in the direction of the nearest cluster of fighting, an order, a plea, anything that might cut through the noise.

A wall of water slammed into her chest before she finished the sentence.

She went down hard, skidding across broken marble, and didn't get up right away.

Elves nearby had turned on the sound of a human voice and stopped listening the moment they registered a threat instead of a princess. The relic that had carried her words all week was gone, lost somewhere in the collapse, and without it there was nothing left to translate intent. Just two panicked armies, cutting through anyone wearing the wrong face.

"Solenne!" Arthur's voice cracked on it.

"Krail!"

The captain looked over immediately.

"Princess!"

"Order your men to stand down!"

Several soldiers hesitated.

One lowered his sword.

Another looked between Solenne and the elves surrounding them in complete confusion.

"But… Your Highness…"

"I was never captured!" Solenne shouted. "This kingdom is not our enemy!"

An Elercross battlemage stepped forward, disbelief written across his face.

"We received a priority dispatch bearing your royal seal."

"I never sent one."

"The message stated you were imprisoned inside the palace."

"I wasn't!"

The mage faltered.

"But… the transport relic…"

"It was forged!"

For a heartbeat, uncertainty spread through the soldiers.

Weapons lowered.

Across the courtyard, however, an elven battlemage saw armed humans gathering around Solenne.

He never heard the conversation.

He only saw steel.

Water exploded from the ground beneath him.

"AMBUSH!"

The spell crashed into the Elercross formation.

Immediately the humans retaliated.

The fragile pause shattered before either side understood what had happened.

Solenne closed her eyes for the briefest second.

"…Too late."

She was already scrambling back, blocking a strike aimed at her skull, buying seconds instead of ground.

Arthur turned his aetheric blood toward the pillar where the doppelganger stood, still smiling, still doing nothing but watch.

Arthur fired.

The water marble screamed through the air.

The doppleganger tilted his head.

The attack missed by inches.

Arthur fired again.

Another miss.

Again and again and again and again.

Each shot carved chunks from broken pillars, shattered marble, gouged black holes into the palace walls.

Not one touched the smiling figure.

'Arthur!'

"I know!"

'No, you don't!'

Another shot.

Another miss.

Vexis suddenly flew directly in front of Arthur's face.

'STOP SHOOTING!'

Arthur froze.

Blood dripped from his forehead.

Warm.

Sticky.

Only then did he notice it running into his left eye.

Half his vision had become a blur of red.

The explosion…

Something must've struck him.

"You can't even see him properly!" Vexis yelled.

Arthur wiped at his eye.

More blood replaced it instantly.

'Move!' Vexis shouted.

Arthur fired one last desperate shot.

The Doppleganger stepped sideways almost lazily.

The dark water marble tore through the pillar behind him.

Nothing more.

"VEXIS!!"

Cael's voice echoed from somewhere behind.

"Leave him!"

The words finally broke through.

Arthur clenched his jaw.

He hated it.

But Cael was right.

The Doppleganger wasn't trying to kill him.

Not yet.

The people behind him mattered more.

Arthur backed away one step.

Then another.

His eyes never left the smiling doppelganger.

That stillness scared him more than anything it could have done with force.

Magic chased them through the ruined corridor.

Fire.

Ice.

Wind.

Nobody cared who the spells were aimed at anymore.

Roz did.

Purple flames burst from his hooves with each leap.

He ricocheted between shattered pillars faster than Arthur could follow, intercepting spell after spell.

A lance of ice.

Gone.

A fireball.

Split apart into harmless sparks.

A spear of compressed wind curved toward Cael's back.

Roz slammed into it headfirst.

The impact sent the little bellus tumbling across broken marble.

He rolled twice before catching himself.

"Keep moving!" he barked.

Another spell.

Another interception.

Purple fire filled the hallway like brief flashes of lightning.

Arthur had seen Roz fight before.

Never like this.

Every deflection stole another breath from the

Bellus.

By the fifth spell, Roz landed harder than before.

By the seventh, his breathing had become noticeably uneven.

Still…

He never stopped.

"This way!" Cael said, hauling Arthur's good arm over his shoulder, and they moved, all of them, toward a narrow gap between two collapsed buildings that led into the quieter side streets.

They got Theodore down into an alley a block clear of the worst of it. Thalon knelt over him fast, checking his breathing, his pulse, whatever he could manage without a healer's training.

Cael shifted Theodore's weight higher across his shoulders.

"Still breathing."

"Barely," Thalon answered, checking the boy's pulse.

"We need a healer."

"We need to survive long enough to find one."

Cael looked toward Arthur's ruined arm.

"You?"

Arthur glanced at the cauterized stump.

"I'll live."

"Good."

No sympathy.

No comforting words.

Just acknowledgment.

That was enough.

Thalon stood.

"If we're lucky, the fighting stays near the palace."

"If we're unlucky?"

Thalon looked toward the rising smoke above the city.

"…Then we're already standing in the battlefield."

Then Theodore's eyes opened.

He grimaced immediately, a sound tearing out of him that didn't sound like words at first.

"Wha—" His hands scrabbled at nothing. "I— what's happening . Cael. Vex—"

"I'm here." Arthur got down beside him, ignoring the fresh pain screaming up his own ruined arm. "I'm right here, Theo."

"The kingdom's being attacked by our own Council," Arthur said, low, urgent. "It's a misunderstanding. A massive one. They think Solenne was taken captive."

"We need to move now," Cael said. "This alley won't hold if either side pushes through it."

Then Arthur felt it.

A pull in the air, subtle at first, then unmistakable — like the whole radius of the street had started drawing inward, gathering, a pressure that had nothing to do with wind.

His shadow network screamed.

Something's coming. Right here. Right now.

Black gathered a foot away, condensing out of nothing, and the doppelganger stood beside him before Arthur finished registering the warning his own senses had given him.

He was already kneeling in front of Theodore. Palms open. Arms extended. A red orb bloomed between them, gathering fast, aimed square at the boy on the ground.

Arthur's whole world went red at the edges.

Roz didn't react in time. Vexis didn't either.

Thalon moved.

He crossed the distance in one motion, tackled the arm before the orb left it, and the magic detonated anyway — a full blast, close enough that Arthur felt the heat strip past his own face.

Dust and debris settled slow, drifting down like something that had all the time in the world.

Arthur opened his eyes.

Cael was beside him, half-buried under a fall of pale marble, groaning but breathing.

In front of him, Thalon's body lay in pieces that had stopped being a body. Both legs gone. Most of his torso missing, blood spreading fast across the frozen ground, his eyes still open, still fixed on nothing.

Arthur felt his stomach come apart, and forced it back down, forced himself to look up instead of away.

The doppelganger stood where it had a second ago, its shape sliding, black peeling back off the edges like paint running in the rain. Underneath: black hair. Dilated red pupils, fixed on the wreckage without a trace of concern for what he'd just caused.

Both Arthur and Vexis knew the face at the same instant.

"Malvric."

Arthur stood, fury pushing everything else out of his chest for one clean second. His aetheric blood rushed toward his index finger, dark and dense, compressing fast into something meant to end this right here.

A cry cut through it.

"—arckkghk. Vex. Cael. Help."

The magic Arthur had been building dissolved on its own, forgotten.

He turned.

Theodore's legs were gone below the knee, both of them, burn scarring spreading up one side of his face and neck. His eyes had gone white, unfocused, tears cutting clean tracks through the soot on his cheeks.

"Vex." His voice broke apart on the name. "Please. I can't feel my legs. I can't — I can't see. Vex. Vexis. Where are you. Cael—"

Cael still hadn't moved, buried half under marble, unconscious.

"Please. Somebody. Please."

Arthur's heart dropped somewhere past the ground itself, and for one full second he couldn't make his legs carry him back to Theodore's side at all.