Chapter 206: Parker
The moment the man appeared, Ling made her dislike plain.
"There's a devil's stench on him. How did he get into the Black Forest?"
He glanced back the way he had come, curling his lips into a cold, chilling grin, then looked around and produced a scroll. At the one crossroads any traveler would have to pass, he tucked the scroll into the leaves of a tree, set out several more magic items nearby, and only then hid himself behind a boulder.
Ling wanted to move in at once, but she thought of Evan. He was a lich, and Shuang was his pet — his presence carried an unpleasant air too, and yet he wasn't a bad person, and Shuang seemed no worse off for following him. Now here was another man reeking of the devil. Ling hesitated, and decided to wait and see who he meant to ambush.
Parker's luck had been rotten. Boniface had decided to move against Tina and sent him to the New Church's new parish on the continent of Taerxi to find a chance to seize her. Tina looked delicate enough, but she turned out to be Catherine's own disciple and a martial younger sister to Monroe, the Sword of the Tulip. Not only had the abduction failed — the Tulip Guard had caught him completely off guard.
Worse than the failed kidnapping, he'd torn apart a network he'd spent two years painstakingly building. What galled him most was that Tina's group had latched onto his trail and hunted him for over half a month without losing him. She seemed to have some kind of secret technique; he simply couldn't shake her.
Only now did he understand — Tina was every bit Holy Knight Catherine's disciple. Not only had her swordsmanship already reached a formidable level, but the dagger she carried, wherever she'd gotten it, was clearly no ordinary magic item. He'd never seen one handled with such fluid, precise control.
At least half his companions had died to that blade. One flash of white light, and they dropped where they stood.
He hadn't meant to enter the Black Forest, but with Tina's group pressing so close, he'd had no choice but to flee into it — and they hadn't given up the chase either, following him in.
He had just finished setting his trap when three horses came into view. Tina had arrived. Shuang spotted her at once and lit up with delight, telling Ling, "That girl is called Tina. She's a good person."
Before Ling could act, another figure appeared on the far side — one Shuang also recognized: a tall young man, bald-headed, Iris's nephew Ronaldo, a huge case slung across his back and wrapped in a black cloth sack.
Tina reined in her horse. Behind her rode Joe and Jed. Ronaldo stopped as well, having noticed all three were knights, the emblem on their armor marking them as members of the Tulip Guard. He pressed a hand to his chest and gave a slight bow.
"Good day, knights of the Holy Church. The Lord's blessings upon you."
All three pressed a hand to their chests in return and bowed from the saddle.
"Good day. And His blessings upon you as well. May we ask — have you seen a tall, thin, middle-aged man pass this way?"
"No, I've been alone out here. Two days now without seeing a soul — you three are the first people I've come across. Are you looking for someone?" Ronaldo grinned as he spoke, revealing a gap where his front teeth should have been, though nothing in his voice betrayed it — by rights, a man missing his front teeth ought to have whistled through the gap.
"We're hunting a devil worshipper," Tina said. "We rode out from Luwang Bridge. We've been chasing him for more than half a month."
"A devil worshipper? What's his name?" Ronaldo asked.
"All we know is that his people call him Parker. Whether that's his real name or an alias, we don't know," Tina said.
"Parker — you don't mean Devil's Hand Parker?" Ronaldo looked puzzled. "Since when did that man join the devil worshippers?"
"His people call him that too, come to think of it. How do you know him?" Joe cut in, suspicion thick in his voice. His hand drifted to his sword hilt, and the air between them turned tense.
"I have no connection to him," Ronaldo said quickly. "My name is Ronaldo. I've simply been traveling the world. I have an aunt named Iris, an elder of the Dominion Society. I heard the name Devil's Hand Parker from her. She said he's treacherous and cunning, and while his magic isn't bad, he's no match for me — but she warned me to watch for his strange footwork. It looks like some technique out of the East." He wasn't worried about naming the Dominion Society; the Tulip Guard belonged to the New Church, which didn't regard the Society as heretics the way the Old Church did.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
The tension eased visibly from the three knights' faces.
"Sounds like you can handle yourself too," Tina said. "We won't keep you, then. Catching Parker matters more."
They lingered there talking while Parker crouched behind the boulder at the crossroads ahead, watching the four of them chat and growing more anxious by the second.
Tina and Ronaldo finally finished talking. She pulled the reins and set off again, and Ronaldo made no move to stop her — he simply fell in behind the three of them.
Just as they were about to ride into the ambush, a sense of wrongness rose in Tina's chest. At that very moment, a voice rang out.
"Sister Tina, don't go any further — it's a trap!"
Tina's heart jumped and she hauled on the reins. Joe and Jed, hearing the warning, drew their swords in an instant and reined in as well, all three peering ahead together.
Parker, waiting for them to step into the trap, spun around at the sound of the voice and found a snow-white unicorn behind him, a flower fairy perched atop its head.
He had noticed the unicorn earlier, off in the distance, and paid it no mind. Only now did he spot the fairy, and fury flared in him.
"Who told you to open your mouth, you little pest!"
His body blurred and shot toward Shuang. Ling gave a cold snort, and lightning erupted from the horn on her head — a dense tangle of branching bolts that filled the air before her in an instant.
Parker's body drifted aside like something caught on the wind, slipping clear before the lightning could fill the space, as though he were riding the air itself. It was clearly a fusion of wind magic and footwork, but no ordinary wind mage could move like that; his technique went beyond simple magic.
By then Tina and the other two were already wreathed in white light, rider and horse moving as one, their swords blazing, and they spurred straight for him.
Parker's smile turned strange. He shouted, and a black hole tore open in the space before him — the scroll's magic taking hold. It was a scroll of banishment, meant to cast people or objects into another dimension.
At the same moment, several beams of dark red light flared to life, cast by the magic items he'd hidden — beams that could melt gold and shear through iron. The horses screamed and reared. There was no retreating; the beams waited behind them. There was no advancing either; the black hole waited ahead.
But that alone would have underestimated Parker. A pull rose from within the black hole, dragging the three of them toward it, while the hole itself surged forward to meet them. A stench of sulfur seeped out from within it. In moments, all three would be trapped with no way out.
Tina dropped low in the saddle and cut with her sword again and again, a swarm of sword-light pouring out to meet the black hole head-on.
The black hole visibly staggered. In the same instant, the unicorn's lightning struck it, and the hole shuddered as though it might come apart. A wand appeared in Shuang's hand; she cried out a single word — "Break!" — and a blinding flash of white light filled the hole almost the same moment the lightning struck. The black hole burst apart entirely with a thunderous crack, and a great wind tore through the air. Joe and Jed's horses touched down, and the two of them charged forward, swords flashing, cutting straight for him.
Green light flickered in Parker's hands, and two dark green orbs, each the size of a man's head, formed in his palms. He hurled them at the two knights as they closed in.
Their swords struck true against the orbs. With a thunderous crash the orbs burst apart into a swarm of green arrows, black smoke billowing in right behind them. Fortunately, white light was already rising from both men's armor — and more than the light alone, the defensive runes worked into the plate hummed to life, throwing up a thick barrier of protection, with the faint shapes of translucent white wings visible at their backs.
Numerous as the arrows were, the runes on their armor held, the light flaring wildly under the impact but never breaking. Even so, the attack stalled their charge, and as the black smoke coiled around them, the two knights felt as though they had waded into a bog.
Tina let out a sharp cry, and the white light around her flared brighter still. Two wings of white light spread from the back of her armor, nothing like the wings on Joe and Jed's — these looked almost solid, almost real. The light along her blade surged as well, and she launched off her horse into the air. Her wings snapped open, and a blade of light, cold enough to cut to the bone and sharp beyond measure, fell straight toward Parker.
Parker's face went white with shock. A ring on his finger shattered at his word, and a sheet of clear, water-bright light rose up to meet the blow — he'd sacrificed a magic item to save himself. The sword's edge crashed into the light; it rippled violently, flickered twice, and then burst apart into scattering droplets with a soft splash.
A second crack followed, and another ring on Parker's finger crumbled to dust. Black smoke billowed up and swallowed him whole. Tina's sword cut down through it — but when the smoke cleared, Parker was nowhere to be seen.
All three of them started. A scream tore through the air behind them, and when they turned, they found Ronaldo standing there, a rapier in his left hand and a greatsword in his right, the rapier reversed and driven backward, green light flickering along its length, buried in Parker's stomach.
As it turned out, Parker had burned through two magic items in a row. Both rings had saved his life more than once before, and today they'd finally reached the end of their service and been destroyed for good. It pained him to lose them, but he still counted himself lucky to have slipped free of the trap — especially thanks to the second ring, which held a sealed blink spell. The range was short, barely over a hundred cubits, and the direction hard to control, but it had gotten him clear. Once he had a moment to spare, breaking away from here wouldn't be difficult.
Unfortunately, he had blinked straight into Ronaldo's path. The instant he appeared, Ronaldo grinned, his gap-toothed mouth stretching wide, and the case strapped to his back shot into the air. The black cloth sack fell away, revealing what lay inside.
It was a case built to hold weapons. The moment it touched the ground, it stood upright before Ronaldo, who reached back with his right hand and drew out a greatsword. The blade hummed and lit with sword-light, and he swung it down at Parker's head without pause. Parker's form drifted, an uncanny motion, forward rather than back, gliding straight into the path of the greatsword like a ghost, faster even than the blade itself.
The greatsword cut through empty air. Parker was already at Ronaldo's left side.