The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

Evan rose to his feet, unhurried, though to Boniface the movement felt less like a man standing than the mountain itself lifting beneath him. Something warned him instantly this wasn't going well. A flash of green in his eyes sent two beams of deep blue light lancing toward Evan — Summon of Death, the upgraded form of Death Gaze.

A difficult spell to defend against — anyone struck by the beam would see the specter of Death itself before their eyes, feel a great scythe hook into them, and often lose their soul along with it. Seeing him unleash it, Evan smiled faintly, and Medusa's Shield rose before him, its serpent-hair writhing, countless heads rearing up, eyes flashing grey-white petrifying beams straight back at Boniface.

The serpents on the shield went still under the deep blue rays, as though Death's own call had claimed their lives, but the shield held the beam back all the same. Meanwhile, Boniface's own petrifying rays met a bone dragon, which froze rigid before dissolving into black smoke. Both opening moves were mere probes — neither achieved anything of substance.

Evan began an incantation, and a flash of white light in the air brought forth his Legend Beast, spitting sword-light straight down at Boniface's head.

Boniface startled. "What magic is this — not a trace of death in it. Impossible. How are you doing this?"

He flung up a hand, and a wall of bone shot skyward to meet the blade-light. The strike crashed against it, bone fragments scattering, but the wall regenerated as fast as it broke, the blade-light achieving nothing.

"Do you think I'd tell you?" Evan said flatly.

"You can summon. Do you think I can't?" Boniface snarled. His own incantation followed, black smoke coalescing into a zombie dragon, which locked in combat with the Legend Beast, neither gaining the upper hand.

Boniface gave a cold laugh. "Nicholas, you didn't bring anyone with you? Where do you think you'll run now?" He gave a sharp whistle, and two figures appeared flanking Evan on either side — clearly no ordinary people, alive but plainly damaged in mind, standing there vacant and unresponsive.

Evan smiled. "You think turning these two into half-zombies gives you any chance against me?"

"Whether it beats you or not, it just needs to hold you down," Boniface said, a bone staff appearing in his hand, dark flame rising from its tip, two souls wailing within it — clearly belonging to these very two men. "Take him down, now!"

Two threads of green smoke shot from the staff's tip, and the vacant-eyed men let out a roar and charged Evan. Naturally strong-bodied to begin with, and further reinforced by Boniface's crude alchemy, though nowhere near true zombies in raw durability, some fragment of intelligence still clinging to them made them fiercer, more dangerous than mindless undead.

Evan produced a scroll — forged the day before, each one costing ten gold, made from beast hide and beast blood ink ground with fine magic crystal powder mixed in. Costly, but worth every coin.

He tore the scroll open, requiring no mana at all, and Meteor Fire Rain crashed down from the sky — both scrolls held the same spell. As a lich, Evan's own magic leaned heavily toward the dark element; a fire-based scroll countered this particular technique of Boniface's rather neatly.

Under the meteor shower, both half-zombies, fierce as they were, burned into human-shaped candles, still charging at Evan even as they screamed, collapsing before they reached him, twitching in the dirt, the sickening reek of charred flesh thick in the air.

"You don't seem up to this," Evan taunted, though he stayed carefully outside the array beneath his feet. Overhead, both summoned creatures had grown faint, and with a crack, both vanished at once. This surprised Evan — he'd expected his own Legend Beast to fade first, having arrived and attacked first. He didn't realize his creation, being his own invention, carried a built-in advantage.

Seeing his summons vanish, Boniface produced a sudden reek of sulfur, and a burst of blue flame exploded into being, forming a wall of fire that bore down on Evan.

Hellfire. Evan wasn't entirely surprised — one of the few spells he'd never bothered mastering himself, since Hellfire demanded refining one's own body with sulfur, letting the reek seep into the flesh before the flame could burn blue at all.

The Hellfire carried little actual heat, but the stone before Evan melted to lava instantly beneath it, the wall of fire pressing forward with nowhere for him to retreat.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Evan smiled, and a wall of bone shot up around him at once. Boniface laughed. "You clearly don't know this is Hell's Refining Flame. Did you think a bone wall could stop it? Laughable."

Blue flame surged forward, the bone wall hissing and crumbling rapidly under its touch. Boniface laughed aloud — then felt something wrong, turning to find a whirlwind trailing several cubits of lightning bearing down on him, a crescent blade wrapped somewhere within it.

Startled badly, he split his body into three afterimages, scattering in three directions. The lightning passed, one afterimage vanishing entirely. He grunted, the other two afterimages merging back together — and phosphor fire spat from his mouth. He'd taken a wound.

Evan knew all three afterimages had been both real and false at once — a fleeing spell, the Threefold Wraith Split, an odd technique that let its user diffuse like a wave. Boniface merged back together and only then discovered a fresh ring of bone had risen not far behind him — Evan had already slipped free of his original bone wall entirely, in a maneuver resembling his own Threefold Wraith Split, though no such technique existed for bone-wall magic. Evan had clearly invented it himself.

Boniface's guess wasn't wrong. Evan had borrowed the principle of diffusion escape and folded it into his bone-wall technique, using the wall to draw the enemy's attention while his own presence diffused and reformed elsewhere — behind the enemy, for instance.

In truth, the Threefold Wraith Split counted as a form of diffusion magic, and a particular kind at that — encountering it had reminded Evan of wave-particle duality from quantum physics, as though the macroscopic world of magic had somehow reproduced a microscopic phenomenon. Of course, with only a scattering of modern scientific knowledge to draw on, Evan's grasp of it stayed impressionistic at best.

Looking back at the bone wall consumed by Hellfire, he found it already gone entirely, and he'd already withdrawn his crescent blade — no wish to reveal too much of his hand just yet.

Wounded as he was, a flicker of satisfaction showed in Boniface's eyes. Evan pointed a finger, and the ground churned — an ordinary Earthquake spell. Boniface startled, then quickly shifted his gesture, chanting an incantation, triggering his own array in a rush. A great hexagram burst up from the ground, countless smaller hexagrams and pentagrams appearing and rapidly weaving together.

But before many of the smaller stars could finish weaving in, Evan's shape blurred, dissolving into black smoke and slipping clear of the array in an instant.

Before the array could finish activating, Evan had already broken free of it — something Boniface hadn't anticipated. He'd clearly underestimated exactly what that array could do — a lich, whatever else could be said of him, was still an Arcanist, and Evan had never once underestimated a lich's capability. The moment he'd arrived, he'd sensed the massive array buried underground and known it was no simple thing. Even having escaped it, his face showed not the slightest trace of triumph.

Evan had used the bone-wall technique for cover while Boniface unleashed Hellfire, diffusing himself instantly to Boniface's rear, and had used that opening to trigger the array himself — channeling the earth-aligned array in his bracer to disrupt as much of it as he could. Boniface hadn't anticipated this, but a full array wasn't so easily destroyed all at once, especially one with no single central core — Evan had only managed to disable a portion, the rest still activating regardless.

Seeing Evan escape the array's grasp, Boniface showed no real alarm — he'd never expected to finish him off in one blow anyway. Evan clearing the array's range seemed to fall within his expectations exactly, as the glowing stars scattered across the array began flowing steadily toward him.

Evan understood at once what was happening. Boniface meant to use the array to strengthen himself — with some cost afterward, certainly, but for a brief window, it could double or triple his power, and with that boost, perhaps enough to kill Evan outright. This hadn't entirely surprised him — though he hadn't guessed at this specific method, he'd anticipated some other means of Boniface boosting his own strength regardless.

Since it had come to this, Evan showed no restraint of his own. A black, gleaming spiral spear appeared in his hand, black smoke gathering swiftly, the spear growing brighter by the moment. Before Boniface's power-gathering could complete, Evan's Spear of Hadir was already loosed. A thunderous boom, and a mushroom cloud rose, a skull emerging at its center, jaws splitting wide, drawing in the vitality of everything around it, a wave of grey decay spreading outward.

The hexagrams and pentagrams surrounding Boniface lost their glow at once, dissolving into the air, leaving only a thin residue that folded back into his body — his strength boosted, but by less than double now.

"How do you like this, Nicholas! Take my Death Orb!" Boniface pointed forward, and a black sphere formed at his fingertip, swelling rapidly from the size of a fingertip to two or three cubits in diameter, seeming to hold countless wailing souls within — the mere sight of it enough to unsettle the mind.

Evan stepped forward instead, pointing a finger — Yin-Chill Strike — a column of thin white mist surging straight for the Death Orb.

The orb faltered, black energy churning within it as though countless spirits howled inside — Evan felt his own strike, whether measured in physical or spiritual harm, entirely absorbed by the orb, which seemed to die in the process, exploding outward all at once.

Black mist filled the air. Evan didn't stop moving, his sword-cane appearing in hand, a hum of steel as sword-force flared to life along its blade, condensed into a pale rainbow of light, a grey-white aura wreathing his whole body, as though he himself had become a being of pure light. Sword-force surged as he charged forward, driving straight for Boniface's chest.