Chapter 77 : The Holy Skull Again
Evan ignored Jam Kinsas and kept him in his peripheral awareness. A mercenary who practiced both magic and blade was worth noting — and the performance of rage without the follow-through suggested exactly that: performance.
He addressed the two Gonno Society men instead. "You're right that I've killed a few of your people. They came after me over some relic called the holy skull that I don't have. When they didn't believe me, I had no choice. That's the whole of it."
"Enough." The eagle-eyed man cut off whatever Jam was building toward and tossed a coin purse in his direction without looking at him. It landed with a solid clunk. "Take your people and go. This isn't your level of problem."
Then to Evan: "You say the skull isn't in your hands. Can you prove that? And regardless — you've killed Gonno Society members. That debt doesn't disappear."
A flash of relief crossed the mercenary's face before he arranged it back into grief. He helped the remaining men up and steered them toward the door, sparing one last meaningful look at the room before leaving.
Evan watched him go without expression. "If you're that certain, there's nothing more to discuss. Shall we?"
"Remember my name," the man said. "Gustav Serei. I'm the one who kills you today." His eyes swept the room once — cold, dismissive — and the remaining customers found reasons to be elsewhere very quickly. The innkeeper's wife said nothing and tucked herself behind the counter.
Four people left in the room now, with the dead man still on the floor. Evan noted the innkeeper's wife still present, and somewhere behind the Gonno Society men, a sense that another person was positioned near the back. He filed it without examining it closely.
He glanced at the pale young man, who hadn't said much. The young man met his eyes and offered two words: "Yoash Jana."
Evan nodded. "This is an inn. Take it outside."
Serei's expression twisted into something amused. "Mercy for the surroundings. That kind always dies faster." His aura detonated outward — not the focused quality of a trained knight but something rawer and more violent.
In the same instant Jana's hand moved. A throwing knife appeared and left his fingers at a speed that was almost too fast to parse, aimed at Evan's throat. The two attacks were coordinated: Serei's aura as cover, the knife as the real strike. Without Shuang's voice threading a warning directly into his ear a fraction of a second earlier, it might have worked.
"Wind shield." Evan's hand came up, the bracer array activated, and a pale green barrier materialized in front of him. The knife hit it, the light flickered twice, and the blade fell to the floor.
Serei's eyes went red and the transformation finished. Berserker. The body swelling slightly, muscle and vein rising, raw output doubling. Evan understood now why something had felt slightly off about Serei from the moment he walked in — Berserkers were extremely rare in Tarenxi, more common in the Savage Continent and Numonxi, and almost unheard of here.
He threw a fireball. It hit Serei squarely in the chest and accomplished nothing. The memory came back immediately: professional combatants carried innate resistance to magic below their tier, typically two to three levels below their own. He had simply forgotten, because the knights he'd encountered had always fought in runic armor that he'd assumed was the source of their resilience.
While he was recalibrating, Serei closed the distance with two curved blades — one long, one short, the long one leading and the short one tracking behind it. Jana produced two more throwing knives simultaneously.
Evan threw Grand Disintegration at Jana and drew his sword in the same motion, sending the sword-aura toward Serei. Jana's knives made it halfway before the disintegration reached them, broke apart in midair, and the fragments reversed back toward their sender. Jana saw it coming and retreated immediately — he had no intention of letting a disintegration spell catch him.
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No one was watching the innkeeper's wife.
She moved in the gap Jana's retreat created, and the kitchen knife in her hand carried sword-aura — clean and white and clearly Great Knight level. It came down in exactly the window when Jana couldn't change direction. The disintegration's trailing edge swept over him a half-second later, and whatever remained after the knife's work came apart under it. His skeleton stood for a few seconds before it too gave way and collapsed.
Serei's double-blades came in hard. The aura on them put him somewhere in the upper knight tier — the long blade leading, the short one following in a pattern designed to create conflicting defensive responses. Evan met the long blade with a thrust, felt the impact transferred up his arm, stepped through it with a curved footwork pattern, parried the second exchange, and on the third found the short blade extending around his guard in a motion that shouldn't have been possible given how much the previous exchange had committed the long blade.
The Mind Strike was instinctive. A faint blue-white shimmer pulsed outward — it caught on Serei's magic resistance and barely got through, but barely was enough. The short blade slowed for less than a full second.
Evan dropped under it, felt the sword-aura pass close enough that a few hairs fell from his head.
"Medusa's Shield!" He shouted it with full intent behind it, and the shield manifested with the serpents already active, Medusa's eyes already open. The petrification beams hit Serei's chest — and spread slowly, far more slowly than they should have, the Berserker rage having elevated his resistance to a level that was genuinely startling. Even at Arcanist rank, Evan's death magic was finding serious friction.
But slow was not stopped. Serei's movement degraded. His blades couldn't quite maintain the speed the rage had given them.
Evan's expression went blank with effort. He drove the sword forward. The sword-aura found its point. Serei brought his blades up to intercept and found he couldn't quite close the distance in time.
He hit the floor.
Evan let out a breath and turned to the innkeeper's wife. The fight had lasted only seconds, but the last exchange had been genuinely close. Without her intervention on Jana, the pressure would have been considerably worse. "Thank you. Who are you?"
"Iris Vidal. I'm a member of the Dominion Society — a senior figure behind the scenes, though most people aren't aware of that. The Society was betrayed from within and barely exists anymore." She studied him without visible tension. "I want to ask about the holy skull. I understood Blood Rose Teresa carried it off. I heard the governor of Kansas City dismantled her operation — is that true?"
Evan relaxed slightly. He told her what he knew: Teresa in Waltersdorf with Tina, the skull presumably with her. Iris absorbed this and exhaled slowly. "Poor child. Her father asked me to look after her when he was dying. She and he had a falling out, and she went off to Kansas City on her own. And it ended like this."
"She's the one who put you in the middle of all this, isn't she," Iris said, with a slight smile. "Do you know anything about the holy skull itself? What it actually is?"
"Stop there. I don't want to know. Please don't tell me."
She raised an eyebrow.
"I have enough complications," Evan said. "Whatever the skull is, it stays out of my life."
"All right," she said, and let it go with the ease of someone who has made her point. "If the others had shown your restraint, none of this would have happened."
The back door opened. A large young man came through — close-cropped head, a gap where a front tooth had been, the kind of build that suggested considerable physical work. He looked at Evan and scratched his head with what appeared to be genuine good humor. "Lady Vidal gives up on people who don't want to listen. Hello. I'm Ronaldo. Her nephew." His eyes were considerably sharper than his smile suggested.
"You little —" Iris's voice dropped to the particular register of family authority. "Every time, just like your father. Not until you can do the reverse cross-blade form in your sleep. Not one step."
Ronaldo's expression became the expression of someone who has heard this many times.
Iris turned back to Evan. "This mess is mine to clean up. If you're not getting involved in the skull business, then you have no reason to stay."
"Shuang." Evan's voice carried up toward the ceiling. She descended and settled onto his shoulder. He nodded once to Ronaldo and walked out.
"Humans are so strange," Shuang said, once they were outside. "Killing each other for reasons I can't even follow."
"The Sacred Text would say humans are the mixture of devil and angel. Cultivating the self, restraining desire, elevating the soul." He said it with perfect seriousness.
Shuang gave him a deeply suspicious look. "Wang, why are you quoting the Sacred Text?"
Inside, Iris stared after them for a moment, genuinely puzzled. She had seen death magic — high-level death magic — and yet here was a flower fairy in voluntary contract with the man who'd cast it. She had been trying to work out whether he was actually a death mage, or something else, and finding no clean answer.
Evan's voice drifted back from outside: "What's wrong with it? The Sacred Text makes perfectly good points."