Chapter 174: Electromagnetic Magic
Pu Weizi's temper flared. "I've no wish to kill anyone. But your actions leave me no choice."
With a ring of steel, clear as autumn water, his blade came free of its sheath — slender, thin-edged, unlike Evan's rapier, a blood groove running along its narrow tip, clearly the finer weapon of the two.
"Since you already know a portion of our organization's secrets, the choice isn't yours to make," said the man, and three figures emerged from the darkness. Evan studied them without reaction — two carried curved blades, the third seemingly empty-handed. Looking closer, Evan saw he wasn't unarmed at all: both hands were fitted with gauntlets forged from black metal, plated even across the knuckles.
Evan and Jessica stayed still. Pleasant as the conversation with Pu Weizi had been, it hadn't reached the point of real obligation, and Pu Weizi understood this too — he had no wish to drag them into his own troubles.
"We'll leave. No need to involve anyone else," Pu Weizi said calmly, wanting to spare the others entirely. Hearing this, whatever wariness lingered in Evan and Jessica eased at once — sometimes the measure of a person's character showed itself in exactly such small gestures.
The three newcomers eyed the group seated by the fire, a cold glint in their eyes. "Worry about yourself first," the empty-handed one said, and threw a punch, his gauntlet flaring yellow.
Pu Weizi's blade moved like a living serpent, exploding into a storm of afterimages, dozens of phantom blades seeming to converge on the attacker from every angle at once — a rain of swords. Evan found himself genuinely startled, not by the man's raw strength, but by the sheer number of feints in a single strike. Evan's own swordwork had grown from a knight's battlefield style — direct, unadorned, no flourishes at all. Seeing a technique like this opened up something new in his thinking entirely.
The attacker didn't bother with subtlety, simply driving his fist straight through the storm of blades, his gauntlet's yellow light scattering most of the phantom strikes before colliding with the real one. Only then did the blade burst into a flare of white light. There was a crack, and the man staggered back three steps, while Pu Weizi retreated two steps of his own, the light along his blade fading — not broken by the enemy's strike, but withdrawn deliberately.
The man glared at Pu Weizi, then spoke to the other two curved-blade wielders. "Finish those three off."
Both men's faces twisted into cruel smiles, turning toward Evan's group. Pu Weizi startled. "This has nothing to do with them! How could you do this?"
While he was speaking, the first man seized the distraction, giving a low growl and throwing another punch, gauntlet blazing — timed perfectly. Caught off guard, Pu Weizi's blade flared white again, sweeping in an arc to meet the fist, and both fighters staggered back several steps from the impact. He gave the man no chance to recover, dropping low and unleashing a flurry of punches like a storm, driving straight at Pu Weizi.
His strategy, admittedly, worked well — exploiting Pu Weizi's one weakness by threatening Evan's group to force his hand, with no real concern at all for whether the three of them lived or died. He'd killed plenty before; a few more meant nothing to him, and even carried a certain satisfaction.
Evan understood the man's calculation at once — he wasn't going to spare Evan's group, and Evan wasn't inclined to spare him either. They belonged to the Gonuo Society, already sworn enemies of Hollingburton. After Hollingburton's sweeping retaliation, the Society had supposedly gone entirely underground — and yet here they were again. Seeing the two curved-blade wielders charge, Evan and Jessica exchanged a glance and struck as one. Jessica summoned a ball of crackling electricity and hurled it forward.
Evan barely moved at all — seemingly doing nothing — yet the curved blade in his attacker's hand suddenly buckled under some tremendous force, one that seemed to rise from within the blade itself rather than any outside source. The man lost control of it entirely, watching in horror as the blade swung toward his own body. He tried desperately to fling it away, but too late — the blade drove into his own flesh, and he collapsed with a scream, looking, to Xiaoshuang and Jenny's eyes, as though he'd simply killed himself.
Evan had used his newly grasped electromagnetic magic to push the blade silently from within — an effect he could only achieve because the blade was metal. Since electromagnetic magic belonged to Evan alone, and this was his first time actually using it in combat, even he hadn't expected it to work quite this cleanly.
A bone staff appeared in Evan's hand, and a thin wisp of black smoke seemed to slip into it — the man's soul, already drawn into the staff.
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At the same moment, Jessica's ball of lightning struck the second man square in the face. A flash of white light — his own blade swung to meet it — and the sphere detonated, bathing the surroundings in searing brilliance, the man himself glowing like a lantern at the center of it, wreathed in white light even as the current crackled violently through wherever his sword-force had touched.
The white light faded quickly, the electricity dissipating with it — but even the thin residue left behind was enough. The man convulsed violently, and Jessica gave him no quarter, raising her hand as a red magic gemstone ring on her middle finger fired a crimson beam straight into his chest. He collapsed as well.
This was Hollingburton's strength on full display — plenty of its teachers carried enchanted items suited to exactly this kind of emergency, especially those traveling on school business. What looked like mere ornamentation in ordinary times proved decisive in a real fight.
Evan's staff moved again, drawing another thin thread of black smoke from the second corpse into itself.
Their fight had already ended, and Jenny's mouth hung open in astonishment. Off to the side, the man facing Pu Weizi had seized the advantage, unleashing a flurry of punches, his aura surging, sword-force gathering into a solid mass that broke free of his fists entirely, streaking toward Pu Weizi like a bullet.
Just then, Jessica's ball of lightning struck home, a burst of blinding white light and crackling static filling the air. Both fighters, mid-clash, blinked hard against the sudden glare — though the attacker never faltered, pressing his combo of punches without pause, while Pu Weizi, facing away from Evan's group, found the flash less disruptive despite its brightness. He swept his blade in a circle, dispersing most of the compacted sword-force, and stepped forward directly into his opponent's charge — he knew that in a clash between two fighters, retreating almost always meant defeat.
His sword-force extended five or six cubits along the blade's edge, ghostlike, and struck with pure speed, no flourish at all this time — ignoring even the blow that landed on his own body, trading a wound for a kill. There was a wet sound as his blade drove into the attacker's chest. He gave it a twist, withdrew, and stepped back. The man couldn't hold himself up and collapsed to the ground.
Pu Weizi coughed twice, a thread of blood at the corner of his mouth, though he didn't notice the thin wisp of black smoke rising from the corpse, drawn straight into the bone staff in Evan's hand.
Jessica saw it all clearly enough, though it didn't trouble her — she knew necromancers had the gift of making a soul speak, and these had been enemies regardless. She had no objection to Evan's methods; if anything, she felt a flicker of envy for the ability itself.
Evan gave a small flick of his hand, and the bone staff vanished. None of what he'd done registered with Jenny at all, but Dark Xiaoshuang had already surfaced, watching the whole scene with rapt fascination, finding nothing at all excessive in Evan's soul-collecting — quite the natural thing, to her mind.
Dark Xiaoshuang perched on Evan's shoulder, thoroughly entertained. Strange, really, that she didn't appear every night — most of the time she simply rested, surfacing only occasionally, meaning that within Xiaoshuang's own nature, her lighter self held the clear, dominant share.
Evan pulled a vial of potion from his ring and offered it to Pu Weizi, seeing him wounded.
"A healing potion?" Pu Weizi asked, interested.
"An alchemical brew — good for your injury. Extracted from herbs, then refined through alchemy. Far more potent than the raw herb alone," Evan said.
"Then I won't refuse." Pu Weizi drank it down and grimaced. "Whatever world you're in, potions always taste awful — bitter, and something strange underneath besides. But the effect's immediate. My chest was burning a moment ago, and now it feels fine. Thank you."
"No need to thank me. Your wound came largely from splitting your focus toward us — if you hadn't been distracted, you'd never have been hurt at all. I've only contributed a bottle of medicine," Evan said.
Pu Weizi settled back down, and the conversation turned again to his travels. He explained he'd crossed a desert on his way to Tyrenese, and that the white double-humped camel had been acquired there. Evan asked where he planned to go next, and he said he intended to spend some time in Tyrenese first, then perhaps travel on to Kunlun Continent — what the Tyrenese called the Barbarian Continent. He'd met a few dark-skinned Kunlun slaves before and found himself curious about their homeland, though for now, during his time in Tyrenese, he'd developed a genuine interest in its magical items, and wondered if there was anywhere nearby where he might find some for sale.
Evan smiled. "You've come to exactly the right place, then. About an hour's walk from here is Deep Pit Ridge — there's a magical market carved into the cliff face within the valley there. Worth a look." He pointed toward a distant peak, barely visible under the starlight.
Pu Weizi smiled. "I'll go take a look tomorrow, then."
As they spoke, a crescent moon rose over the mountains, its pale light spilling down through a thin mist gathering around them. Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled, joined by the cries of other beasts. This was Jenny's first night camping in the wild, and though she knew she sat among genuinely formidable company, she couldn't help a flicker of fear.
Evan and the others had long since grown used to it. Jessica reassured her. "Don't be afraid. Wild beasts don't harm people without reason — if anything, they fear us more than we fear them."
Evan smiled. "Beasts aren't what's frightening. People are what's frightening."
"True enough. People are the most frightening thing of all," Pu Weizi said. "An animal that's eaten its fill won't hunt again. Only people are never satisfied — never stopping to consider that, in the end, a person needs no more than a small plot of earth to be laid to rest in, and everything else is illusion. And yet people chase after it, tirelessly, without end."