Chapter 111: The Fallen Angel's Tear
The others stood frozen. "Professor Evan," Jessica said, "you're saying the materials weren't ever really missing — he hid them himself?"
Evan nodded. "That's right. Everyone's been looking for that shipment, and it wouldn't have simply vanished on its own. In Burk Town, only the three major gangs and James had the reach to touch it — no one else comes close. The Druids sold this shipment, and both the goods and the people carrying them disappeared together. That narrows it down to the parties I've already named. I already know the two gangs never actually saw the shipment — otherwise they'd never have bothered taking Lidis and Raight in the first place. That leaves the Order Keepers and James. James, by rights, shouldn't have the reach for something like this — his standing here falls well short of the three big gangs. The only reason he can operate above them at all is Hollingburton's name behind him. He's been working with the Order Keepers privately, and I'd guess the Order Keepers have their own grudge against the Druids — which would suit them perfectly. This wasn't one side acting alone. It was the two of them, working together."
The reasoning had some gaps, admittedly. If Evan had laid out everything he'd worked out about the relationships between the major powers behind all this, it would have carried far more weight — but he had no intention of sharing that, not with any of them, not even with Ortlando himself.
Still, what he'd said sounded reasonable enough to the others, and every eye turned toward James. He gave a bitter laugh. "Working that much out — I'll admit, you're clever. Pity clever men rarely live long. Did you think I'd spend twenty years here without a single contingency?"
Evan let out a slow breath. "You had one. That's actually why I've been willing to put up with you this long. If I hadn't let my guard down tonight and gotten tailed by Rose, I wouldn't have wanted to force things this early either."
Jessica spoke up then. "James, give it up. That alchemical explosive you buried under the house, mixed with a lethal poison — I've already disarmed it. Professor Evan planned for this from the start. Why else would he spend the whole day supposedly asleep?"
"What?" This time James genuinely paled. He'd buried that device meaning to use it only as a last resort, and he'd been close to triggering it just now — held back only by some lingering hope of using it as leverage instead. Now it turned out Jessica had already dismantled it. She held up the trigger — a magical detonator, meant to set off the explosive through mental focus within a certain range — its sigil array already stripped away.
"Why?" James burst out. "I ruined myself getting hurt for Hollingburton — stuck at sixth tier forever because of it. Twenty years, and I've tried everything, and I haven't advanced a single step. Yes, I was bitter. Yes, I drank. Hollingburton dropped me here and forgot about me, only bothering to send a team once a year when they wanted materials. Then one day, Rose — she'd made some mistake, I never learned what — had her own source sealed off. A woman, stripped of her magic, and a beautiful one at that, suffering every kind of humiliation for it. I pitied her. I saw myself in her. We became close. She told me the seal could be broken — it needed the life force of four mages, one each of earth, water, fire, and wind, and it needed a water mage to help her channel their essences into her body. I did it for her. Four members of a gathering team, five years ago — the whole team died. I worried for a long time afterward, but nothing came of it, aside from a couple of low-ranking gang members dying. She got her power back, killed every last person who'd ever humiliated her, and rose to become priestess of the Order Keepers. She told me there was one more way — a sacrifice of ten lives, to consecrate a Fallen Angel's Tear — that might finally heal what was broken in me. And this shipment happened to have exactly that in it. Ha! Why couldn't you have come just a few days later? I'd have finished it by then. Gods above, was what I wanted really so wrong?" James's laughter turned wild as he finished the story, and the room fell into silence.
Evan let out a breath. "You're pitiable. Rose is pitiable. But weren't those four mages pitiable too? Weren't the people you two destroyed along the way pitiable as well? In the end, you're not just wretched — you're pathetic. Surrender."
James's laughter cut off abruptly. His eyes flooded red. He reached for his ring and wiped a hand across it, and a beautiful gem surfaced, glowing faintly blue like a real teardrop, faint gray mist coiling around it in ten thin wisps. He pressed it to his forehead. The stone dissolved into his skin like water. He let out a wild roar as ten faint, dim strands of grey mist wound around his entire body, and something began swelling beneath his skin, as though a dozen rats were burrowing beneath the surface. His presence surged outward with a roar — a water mage's aura, yet what pulsed off him now belonged to the school of shadow. His power climbed relentlessly — seventh tier, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh — and still climbing.
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He burst into laughter again. The stone hadn't finished its full working yet, but a Fallen Angel's Tear was a Fallen Angel's Tear regardless. His power finally leveled off at the peak of eleventh tier, and six wings unfurled faintly behind him — half black, half white.
Everyone else stumbled back a step. Only Evan didn't move.
"Now," James announced, "all of you die."
"James, do you really think you've won?" Evan said, entirely unshaken, firing off one question after another. "Eleventh tier — that's Arcanist territory. Are you really an Arcanist? Have you actually grasped elemental will?"
"Ha! Big words from you. I'm above every one of you now. Die!" He launched into an incantation, and the temperature around them plummeted, ice spreading outward in a rush, faintly black frost surging in with the snow. Everyone's faces changed at once, and they threw up spells of their own — light flaring in every color — but the ice and snow swallowed them all in an instant. No one had been hurt yet, but every one of them had already lost the ability to fight back.
Evan watched the pale black ice sweep over the others in a heartbeat, everyone trapped and struggling. Some part of him found the spell genuinely interesting — not the water magic itself, but the fact that it had mutated. Ice should have been clear, pale blue — this was black, clearly carrying a strain of dark element woven through the water. Strange, indeed.
Evan raised a hand, offering no incantation at all, only pointing and murmuring a single word: "Recede." The response was immediate — the black stain across the ice retreated at once, and the ice itself followed. Everyone froze in astonishment. This wasn't spellcraft. It looked like something closer to a miracle.
"What kind of magic is that?" James asked, stunned as well.
"No magic at all," Evan said. "Just an influence on your elements. I already told you — you haven't grasped elemental will. Did you think being an Arcanist meant having more raw magic power, nothing else?" He didn't elaborate further. If James's spell hadn't carried a thread of dark element within it, Evan couldn't have done what he'd just done. An Arcanist, by definition, had grasped elemental will enough to command the elements around their own body — but only their own element. Even Evan hadn't quite expected that a single word from him could push back both the dark and the water at once.
"My turn now, James. Grease," Evan said. No one had expected it — Evan finishing this exchange with nothing more than a zero-tier spell. James himself barely knew how to react, fury rising in him. This was contempt, plain and simple — the elements around him rippling with disdain, not even worth the trouble of visualizing a proper spell to answer with.
Just then, Evan pointed at the ground and smiled. "Sha'er's Mist." Grey haze rose out of the grease at once. Sha'er, in legend, was Hadir's wife — a ghost-like presence, one the Creationist Church refused to acknowledge. This spell had been built around that legend, ranked alongside Spear of Hadir in reputation — though instead of an explosion, it produced this thin black mist, which found every gap and crevice once it touched a target, slipping past even most ordinary magical defenses.
"I won't accept this. If I die, I'm taking all of you with me!" James pulled a scroll from his ring — no ordinary scroll, this one made from the hide of a white water rhinoceros, a beast that yielded only three sheets of scroll-worthy skin per animal, and this the finest of the three, prized material with no equal on the open market. Most scrolls were made from ordinary parchment or the bark of certain magical plants — common paper couldn't hold a scroll's working at all.
James made no move to defend himself at all. Sha'er's Mist had already crept up past his waist and was climbing toward his chest, and he seemed not to notice or care, his face twisted with a reckless, feverish resolve as he poured every last drop of his remaining magic into the scroll. Normally, a scroll only needed to be torn to activate — but he was channeling his entire reserve of power into it instead, and its potential surged in response. He laughed wildly, indifferent to what was happening to his own body, magic swirling around him like a boiling pot. His torso below the chest had already turned an ashen grey, but he paid it no mind, power pouring into the scroll in waves until it blazed in his hand like a small sun, radiating a cold, biting light.
Evan's expression turned grim at once. He abandoned every offensive spell he'd prepared. "Everyone — to me, now!" The others scrambled to his side, throwing up whatever defenses they could. Evan shouted, "Endless Bone Wall!" and countless walls of bone shot up in overlapping layers, white bone rising like a rolling tide.
Evan could have teleported away — a short-range blink would easily have carried him clear of what was coming. But the others couldn't have escaped it. He gritted his teeth and chose to hold the line with the Endless Bone Wall instead, layering it further with Water Curtain from the water mages and Fire Barrier from the fire mages, one shield after another blooming inside its shelter.
The scroll — and James along with it — vanished from sight entirely. A sphere of icy storm expanded outward from where he'd stood, freezing everything in its path, stilling everything to silence. The servants, whose skeleton guards had dissolved into black smoke the instant James unrolled the scroll, had bolted the moment they saw it happen — and it hadn't been enough. The storm caught up to them in an instant, and they froze solid where they stood, turned to statues of ice.
Evan's Endless Bone Wall took the storm's leading edge and froze solid within a heartbeat, the outer layer collapsing all at once under its own weight. A thick shell of ice crusted over the bone wall's surface — but the bone itself, inside that shell, dissolved into black smoke in the very same instant, and even that smoke froze in place, unable to escape the cold.