Chapter 10 ： Lich vs. Lich
When the cannon's roar reached him from inside the castle, Boniface recognized it immediately. That lich again, using a cannon — he cursed under his breath. A lich who fought like a common soldier, setting up artillery ambushes. The memory of the Fang Company's end rose in him, and the hatred that came with it.
Then space rippled like disturbed water and a blood-soaked figure stumbled through. It took Boniface a moment to recognize Yalta.
He didn't hesitate. A lich had no grounds for negotiation with the Creationist Church — they were enemies to the death by definition, and Yalta was wounded and disoriented. Boniface struck before the man could collect himself.
He drained the soul, drew out the vital essence. A lich had methods for taking another's life force and wearing it like a mask, passing briefly for a living person — though the death energy in the body couldn't be hidden completely, and the effect didn't last. It was one of the reasons the Creationist Church hunted liches so relentlessly.
With Yalta dead, Boniface felt something loosen slightly. He had not chosen to become a lich willingly, and he had no desire to end up on the Holy Inquisition's priority list. From what he'd just observed, Nicholas Andrew ranked fairly low on the Church's threat assessments — they had sent only a handful of low-ranked Inquisitors to deal with him. That was useful information.
He stared at the grey-black fog hanging over the castle. Should he go in? The lich inside had apparently come through the fight without injury, which Boniface found hard to accept at face value — but then he thought about that cannon, and about what a Hell's Projection did to an uninvited lich who entered it. He stood at the boundary for a long time and ultimately did not go in.
He didn't realize what the cannon had done to him. The courage had drained out somewhere between the roar of the shot and the memory of his companions dying. Without courage, the advantage shifts even before the first move is made.
He would wait at the boundary. Nicholas Andrew would have to leave eventually. The moment he stepped outside, Boniface would have him — and then he could search the castle for the soul vessel and finish this properly.
Inside, Evan finished his preparations. Everything that couldn't be carried he sealed in the underground storage room. His storage ring held gold coin — roughly a hundred thousand pieces — along with various valuable materials. The flintlock pistol went into his coat, already loaded. The staff went into the ring; he carried the sword-cane in hand. He had dressed for the role he intended to play: a wandering adventurer, one with some magical ability, nothing that would suggest undead.
There was also an unexpected development he'd been turning over in his mind. He had put on weight. Not much, and he was still lean, but he was no longer the skin-stretched-over-bone that a lich should be. He had run tests on himself to confirm he was still a lich — he was — but the body had changed in a way he couldn't fully account for. The only thing he could point to was the unnamed technique, the one that had started running on its own that first night and hadn't stopped since. He could barely feel it anymore during normal activity, only when he settled into a meditative state, where it still registered as that faint cool current cycling through his organs. Whatever it was doing, it wasn't harmful. The body was proof of that. He left the question alone.
He put on the black cowl and robe, took the sword-cane, and walked out of the castle.
The moment he appeared, Boniface saw him and went still behind the trees. Finally. He watched Evan cross the courtyard, already playing through what would happen — the ambush, the surprise on Nicholas Andrew's face, the satisfaction of it. For you, brothers.
He didn't notice that he had stopped thinking about honorable engagement entirely. The change had happened without his awareness. He had always looked down on that kind of approach. Now he was crouched in the undergrowth finding it perfectly natural.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Evan moved south, toward the edge of the Hell's Projection. This world was still almost entirely unknown to him — just over a month in it, and most of that spent inside the castle. He had Nicholas Andrew's memories but no lived experience to put behind them. That would change now.
He was nearly at the projection's boundary when something made him stop.
The feeling was familiar. He had felt it once before, the night Dyna was watching him from the alchemy room — that sense of eyes on him from a fixed direction. He had dismissed it then and nearly paid for it. He hadn't forgotten the feeling since.
He went still and let it register, turning his attention gradually toward its source. His eyes shifted and green light flashed briefly in them, and at the same moment his nose caught something he couldn't name — and out of nothing, as if projected onto the air itself, a faint shape appeared at the edge of his perception, barely visible, standing behind a tree. The same thing had happened once before, when he was tracking Boniface after the Fang Company attack.
The shape behind the tree felt Evan's attention lock onto it and hesitated.
"Whoever you are," Evan said, his voice flat. "Come out."
Boniface stepped forward, expression dark, eyes carrying all the hatred he'd been holding since the Fang Company died.
Evan took in the green eyes and understood immediately. "So you became a lich as well. Given the wounds you took, I suppose you had no other choice."
The flesh on Boniface wasn't skeletal — he had drained Yalta's vitality to fill himself out — and Evan read this as simply normal, assuming Boniface had found someone to drain. Meanwhile Boniface looked at Evan's own relatively healthy appearance and reached the same conclusion: the Inquisitors, probably. Drained and used. Which meant his brothers' deaths had fed this lich's body.
That thought hit something raw. "Nicholas Andrew." His voice came out steady despite it. "I'm not letting you walk away from this. I'm going to kill you for what you did to my brothers."
The black smoke rose around him, thickening fast, and a mass of Hell's bats took shape within it and launched themselves at Evan.
Evan's expression didn't change. This wasn't how he'd expected to spend the morning, but here it was. He was inside the Hell's Projection, which gave him a real advantage, and Boniface didn't know that his actual level of comprehension was lower than Boniface's — though level and combat ability weren't the same thing. Evan had inherited Nicholas Andrew's battle experience, had come through two consecutive victories, and was in his own territory. Psychologically he was ahead.
The bats were still crossing the distance when something shifted in Evan's perception. Time didn't slow exactly, but his awareness of the attack became extraordinarily clear — he could see exactly where each bat was heading, what path it would take, what space it would pass through. He didn't know what this was or where it came from and had no time to examine it. His hand moved, and he chanted: Death Gaze. Two pale grey beams shot from his eyes and intersected precisely with the bats' flight paths at the critical junction. The entire mass dissolved into black smoke.
Boniface stared.
His Hell's bats, broken that easily. And the Death Gaze had landed not through raw force but through precision — placed exactly where it needed to be, no wasted energy. He couldn't have done that. The thought arrived before he could stop it, and once it arrived it settled in and began quietly undermining everything else.
He had been carrying this seed without knowing it — the sense that Nicholas Andrew was somehow beyond him — and now it had germinated. It was affecting his performance already. On the other side, Evan carried the weight of two victories and simply expected to win, which had its own effect on how he moved.
Boniface let the black smoke dissipate and raised his staff, preparing something larger. A lich who had comprehended elemental will was, all else being equal, stronger than one who hadn't. He began the incantation for a small-scale Undead Calamity — a spell with a longer chant, but decisive.
Evan cast Grease. No incantation needed, at his level — that was a caster's privilege, though a Magic Apprentice would have needed the words. The spell spread across the ground beneath Boniface's feet just as he reached the midpoint of his chant. His footing went out from under him. The incantation broke.
Boniface grabbed at his own stillness spell to stabilize himself. In that fraction of a second, Evan's hand was already inside his coat. The flintlock came out, loaded, pointed. He pulled the trigger. The flint sparked. The shot went off with a crack and a puff of black smoke, and at this range — only a few yards — the ball hit cleanly.
A lich felt no pain, but the kinetic impact was real, and the ground under Boniface was still slicked with Grease. The shot knocked him flat. The flesh that Yalta's drained vitality had filled out deflated immediately, his body contracting back to something nearer its true state.
A blade rang free of the sword-cane, and Evan lunged.