Chapter 105: Revenge
"Ptooey!" A mouthful of bloody spit flew out — though not as far as Holred had hoped. He'd grown far too weak for that. The spittle barely cleared a cubit before falling limply onto the long table. Evan didn't spare it a glance, still talking as he turned the scalpel over in his hand. "Where should we start? The right arm, or the torso?"
He held the blade up, studying it, watching Holred out of the corner of his eye. For all his bravado, Holred's fear had reached its breaking point — he was close to shattering entirely. Sensing the moment was right, Evan moved, cutting straight into Holred's right arm. A wave of agony tore through him, and he screamed. "I'll talk! I'll talk!"
Evan withdrew the blade and cast a quick healing charm, closing the wound. Holred spilled everything after that, the whole story pouring out of him without restraint.
Listening to it, Evan wanted nothing more than to cut him open right then and there — two rival gangs joining forces to strike at a Hollingburton gathering team. But he held the impulse down and walked into the back room instead, murmuring an incantation to open the Mage's Secret Room.
Inside, a woman hung bound to a cross, her clothes in tatters, her face fine-featured but drawn with exhaustion. Hearing footsteps, she lifted her head groggily, her eyes burning with a hatred worn all the way down to the bone. What she hadn't expected was that the man walking in wasn't the fat one at all — it was someone she'd never seen before.
The sight lit Evan's anger back up. "Don't be afraid," he said. "I'm a teacher from Hollingburton. I'm here to get you out."
At those words, Lidis's whole body trembled, and tears began to fall. Evan waved a hand, pulling the anti-magic spikes free, and lowered her down. She could barely stand, but her eyes still burned. "Where's Holred?"
Evan, sensing exactly what she wanted, asked gently, "Can your body even take it right now?"
"Where's Holred?" she asked again.
Evan sighed. "I've already subdued him. He's lying out there. Don't worry — he isn't going anywhere. Nobody who lays a hand on Hollingburton gets away with it."
Some strength she hadn't known she still had carried her out of the room at a run. Evan followed close behind. Holred still lay stretched across the long table, stripped bare, the old light gone entirely from his eyes.
"You beast. Look at you now," Lidis said, throwing herself at him at once, clawing and tearing. Evan watched, understanding what these last few days had done to her, and what she needed to let out.
Holred laughed anyway. "Whatever I say I did to you — you can kill me, but it won't change a thing."
"I'm a mage. I'm not some ordinary man's daughter who just shrugs off being bitten by a dog. Look at you now, you beast. You're going to die — and so is everyone else in your gang." A faint glow bloomed in her hand as she spoke, striking him squarely between the legs — a scorching ray of fire magic. He let out a scream as his groin charred black.
He spat out a stream of curses. Evan gave a cold snort and pointed a finger. A silencing spell locked Holred's jaw open, his mouth working uselessly, no sound coming out.
"Thank you," Lidis said, and let loose another small fireball, this one catching his left leg — the smell of cooking flesh rising into the air. Evan made no move to stop her. He simply watched, cold and impassive. Whatever suffering Holred endured now, he had earned every bit of it himself.
Fireball after fireball, left leg and right, until Holred's breath had all but given out. Finally, Lidis drove a scorching ray straight through his mouth, piercing clean through his body. His back arched violently — and then he stopped moving entirely.
She let out a long breath and sank to the floor, drained. Evan searched Holred's quarters and found a set of women's clothes for her to change into. Seeing how thoroughly spent she was, he sighed. "The rest can wait until tomorrow. Right now, I need to find you somewhere safe to stay."
Exhausted herself, Lidis asked, "Where are you staying?"
"With James."
"Why would you stay with him? He's a traitor."
"I suspect him too, but I have no proof. He's been rooted in this town for over a decade — not easy to move against without something solid. Do you have proof?"
Stolen novel; please report.
"No. But it's very likely he's the one who sold us out. He was the only one who knew we were coming, and he'd already met with us once. We never even saw the goods, and yet six of us got hit by two gangs at once. Four died. I ended up with Holred, and Raight ended up with Fiat. The strange part is, they kept demanding we hand over the Fallen Angel's Tear — but we never had it. How could we hand over something we never saw? They didn't believe a word we said."
"That is strange," Evan said, frowning. "Before this, I questioned Holred myself. He claimed he saw with his own eyes that you'd received the goods. Something doesn't add up. He didn't strike me as lying. So where did things go wrong? James claims he never even met with you — that's the piece that troubles me most."
"If that's true, then it's no wonder Holred kept pushing me so hard. Something clearly went wrong somewhere," Lidis said, equally baffled.
"Let's go. Since you can't go back to James's place, I know somewhere else — an abandoned house. You can spend the night there," Evan said, and led her there.
The bookshelf still stood as he'd left it; no one had touched the room since. A bed sat inside, though without any bedding — fortunate, given how strangely warm the weather had turned this autumn, since blankets wouldn't be needed anyway. Evan left her some gold coins and set a protective ward around the bed before speaking. "I'm heading to the Gael Advance Corps. Rest well here. I don't know yet whether Raight is still alive. Whatever the case, since they've dared to strike at Hollingburton, they'd better be ready for what Hollingburton brings down on them in return."
"I'm coming with you," Lidis said.
"No need. You're in no shape for it. Get some proper sleep. Fiat is a seventh-tier warrior with excellent thief skills — I've already looked into that much. I can slip in alone without drawing attention. This isn't going to be a head-on fight. Don't worry," Evan said.
Lidis considered his reasoning and found it sound enough — and she genuinely wasn't fit to fight anymore. She nodded.
Though Evan had said he intended to slip in quietly, that wasn't really his plan at all. He was a lich, after all, and necromancers and liches alike excelled above all else at one thing: summoning skeletons. On any battlefield, a necromancer was prized precisely because he could call up hundreds, even thousands, of skeletal soldiers to throw at the enemy.
The moment Evan reached the Gael Advance Corps' headquarters, he began summoning. The gates stood shut, the hour somewhere around two or three in the morning, the streets outside empty. Two lamp posts flanked the entrance, glass-shielded oil lamps burning inside them — fueled by nitrocellulose seed oil — the only points of light in an otherwise pitch-black street, casting a dim yellow glow into the dark.
The gate itself was an iron grille, opening onto a wide courtyard with a neatly kept lawn. The surrounding walls stood barely taller than a man, their stone foundation only about a cubit high, forming a shallow V-shape that stretched out into the darkness on either side, topped with iron bars whose upper edges rose into a row of spearhead points. It was an open compound — easy enough to see straight through from the street. Inside, across roughly a hundred cubits, stood three buildings in a Gothic, steep-roofed style.
Evan rose off the ground and drifted down into the courtyard. A gatehouse stood near the entrance, its night watchman dozing at his post. The moment Evan's feet touched ground, black smoke poured outward, and skeletons rose from the earth one after another. The watchman stirred at the disturbance, lifted his head — and a rusted blade was already buried in his throat before he could make a sound.
Evan had made up his mind to leave nothing standing. He meant to use a massacre here to strike fear into every gang in Burk Town. Skeletons surged across the lawn toward the three buildings, and still unsatisfied, he waved a hand and summoned two gargoyles and several ghouls as well, all of them pressing forward into the dark.
The gargoyles shrieked toward the tallest building and dropped in through a skylight. A moment later, the front door burst open with a crash, and skeletons and ghouls poured in after them. Most of the men inside were still asleep. Many woke to nothing but chaos and noise in the darkness, unable to make sense of it before the screaming started, punctuated by the wet sound of ghouls feeding.
"What's happening?" a voice called out.
"We're under attack — something's not right, it's skeletons, and — ghouls, god, there's a gargoyle too, ah—" The scream cut off mid-sound.
"I'm Fiat. Who are you, and why are you doing this? Where have we wronged you?" a voice called out, claiming to be Fiat. As the words rang out, a figure shot forward at speed, and every skeleton in its path was torn apart in an instant.
Evan gave a cold laugh. He sent a gargoyle flying toward the figure, its claw slashing for the head. The man spun, a greatsword flaring with a cold blue light as he met the blow head-on. The impact shattered the gargoyle into pieces that scattered across the ground.
At the sound of Evan's laugh, Fiat's body vanished abruptly. Evan murmured something about cheap tricks and pointed. A second gargoyle dove toward an apparently empty patch of ground, its claws whistling through the air — and the emptiness there rippled like disturbed water, revealing the man beneath. A blade of sword-force lashed upward, sending the gargoyle flying high into the air, the strike missing its mark. Fiat swung the greatsword up over his head in a circling arc, eyes fixed on Evan. "Who are you?"
"I come from Hollingburton. Surely you already understand why I'm here. Whoever wrongs Hollingburton pays for it — no matter how far he runs," Evan said, his tone leaving no room for doubt.
"So you really came, after all. Coming after my Gael Advance Corps — whoever you are, you might have asked whether I'd allow it first," Fiat said with a cold laugh. His body split abruptly into three, converging from left, center, and right at once, each shape moving like a bolt of lightning, each wielding a different weapon — a long dagger on the left, a greatsword in the center, and on the right, a curved blade shaped like a crescent moon, every one of them crackling with sword-force.