Chapter 34: Playing Dead
"GET AWAY FROM THEM! YOU WANT A FIGHT? COME AT ME!"
The instant the words left his mouth, every black-clad head turned toward him. Uriel's stomach dropped.
No time to be scared. The nearest operative was already moving, blade catching the light in a rising arc aimed straight at his face.
Uriel snapped backward.
The edge passed close enough to stir his hair.
At the absolute limit of the lean, he drove his right hand — still holding most of a bottle of pomegranate juice — hard against his own chest and up toward the sky.
He'd only taken a few sips. What a waste.
The bottle gave way, and deep red liquid burst out, soaking straight through the front of his shirt.
In the same motion, he kicked off the ground, let the backward momentum carry him, and went down hard.
Thud.
He even bounced once, the way a fighting-game character does after a finishing blow lands clean — physics rendered with real commitment.
"Gh— ah—"
He delivered a strangled, gurgling sound that communicated, with total conviction, mortally wounded, and then went still.
The juice, having been launched skyward, came back down across him like the spray pattern of an actual hemorrhage. He lay in the middle of his own "blood pool." The only flaw in the illusion was that it was a slightly too-dark shade of red, and smelled distinctly of fruit punch.
Silence.
Then a short, sharp scream from somewhere nearby — a girl's voice, genuinely frightened.
Followed by a second voice, low and gritted through clenched teeth:
"You absolute —"
Footsteps shifted, winding up to charge.
Then they stopped.
"…Mana?"
Confusion.
A voice from the operatives' side cut through it — flat, controlled, no inflection at all:
"Come with us quietly."
A blade swung through the empty air. A sharp, terrifying whistle. A warning shot in physical form.
"Or this idiot is what happens to you next."
Uriel didn't move.
The smell of pomegranate filled his nose, sweet and just starting to turn cloying.
He'd flattened his breathing to almost nothing, let every muscle he could control go slack, and held the limp, boneless posture of a dead man as convincingly as he knew how.
Footsteps moved off in another direction.
Receding.
He tracked the distance without opening his eyes.
Not yet. Someone's still close.
He kept his hearing tuned as fine as it would go.
Wind somewhere distant. Some noise from inside one of the buildings.
Quieter. Quieter.
He waited it out — waited until the juice on his shirt started gluing itself into a tacky film, until the hardness of the ground had become a genuinely uncomfortable fact pressing into his spine, until the smell of pomegranate slid from sharp to slightly nauseating.
That's probably it.
His focus started to drift.
The ground was cool. Lying flat against it like this was, weirdly, kind of nice. Would be better on grass. Better still with a pillow. His eyelids got heavy.
No. Don't fall asleep here.
He mentally slapped himself, hauled his drifting attention back, and moved his lips just enough to produce sound:
"…Clear?"
"Clear."
The voice came from right beside him. Close. Right there.
Uriel's eyes snapped open.
Blue sky. White clouds. The edge of the corridor roofline.
He angled his gaze toward the voice.
Nobody there. Empty air.
He pulled in a sharp breath. The air tasted like air. No color, no flavor, no detectable poison.
He stared at the empty space and went very still inside.
No one there.
There was a voice. No person.
I heard it. I can't see anyone.
I'm lying here. I heard a voice. There's nobody —
Am I actually dead?
"Uriel?"
Same direction. Same voice. A note of confusion in it now. "What's wrong? You can get up now."
…
"Uriel?"
Something about the voice tugged at recognition. He forced a word out of his throat:
"…I can't see you."
Then something in the air shifted.
Light bent, folded, like someone peeling a sheet of clear film off their own body — the fold of light unspooling from head to foot.
Tian stood beside him, perfectly visible now. Her expression wasn't panicked. It wasn't even mildly concerned. It was the look of a mother watching her toddler perform a slightly confusing school play.
"…You didn't know I could turn invisible?"
Uriel pushed himself upright, sat back on his heels, and looked at her.
"No. Wait. When did you even learn that?"
"Middle school," Tian said, recalling it with total casualness. "You told me back then — keep your distance at school, don't get too close. No deliveries, no notes, no snacks, nothing. You were worried the other students would gossip if they saw your big sister showing up with things for you. So I figured out a workaround. Sneak in invisible, leave it on your desk. Pretty good, right?"
…
Middle school.
Embarrassed about being seen with a classmate.
So she learned invisibility. Just to drop off snacks without being noticed.
Something complicated moved through Uriel's chest, somewhere between speechless and resigned. What eventually made it out of his mouth was:
"You can turn invisible. So what was the point of all that just now?"
Tian thought about it seriously.
"You looked really cool jumping out like that."
"And that line," she added, with total sincerity, "'get away from her' — that had a lot of presence."
Uriel's mouth twitched. He fired back on reflex:
"…I didn't run out there for the compliments."
That was technically true.
But getting praised this earnestly, this directly, to his face — it landed like a heavyweight punch thrown straight into a pile of pillows.
Every bit of the panic, the secondhand embarrassment, the I-am-the-clown-in-this-story feeling he'd built up over the last five minutes just deflated, with nowhere left to go.
He sighed, ready to let the whole thing drop.
Tian studied him and apparently read something like dissatisfaction into the silence. She tilted her head, tone shifting into pure, uncut consideration.
"Was that not enough? Mommy can say more, if you'd like."
"…No. Stop. We're done."
Uriel took a breath, closed his eyes, and forced his expression back to neutral.
"Get up," he said through his teeth. "Let's go."
"Mm."
---
He climbed to his feet, brushed off the back of his clothes, and looked down at the front of his shirt. The deep red stain spreading from his collar down looked genuinely alarming in the daylight — like he'd actually been run through.
He stood there looking at the damage for a long moment, then exhaled.
"…This shirt's probably ruined."
"I'll wash it when we get back."
The voice came from beside him, matter-of-fact.
He didn't turn his head.
"…That's not the point. The point is whether it comes out."
"It'll come out. There's nothing I can't get out of fabric."
He glanced at her sideways.
That's probably also just true.
"…No. That's not the point either."
"Hm?"
He turned to face her fully, a flicker of confusion crossing his expression.
"Earlier. I tried to cast something."
"Mm."
"It wouldn't come."
He paused.
"Not completely, I mean — something was pushing back against it. I focused, pulled at the mana, did everything I normally do, and it just wasn't responding. I forced it and barely got a trickle out."
Tian nodded calmly, waiting for him to finish.
"It felt like it cost five times the usual output for the same result."
He looked at his own hand.
"I'm not even sure I would've gotten that much."
"Mm. That tracks," Tian said.
Uriel looked up at her.
"That barrier. It's not suppressing mana. It's cutting the connection."
"…Cutting the connection?"
Oh. So you already caught that too.
"Yes." Tian clasped both hands behind her back, the way she did when retrieving something from memory, and spoke at her usual unhurried pace. "Normally, when you cast, you draw on the mana inside your own body and send out a request to the mana in the air around you. It answers, and the spell forms. Like calling someone's name — they hear you, they agree, and they come help you with something."
She considered how to phrase the next part.
"But that barrier generates a lot of noise."
"Noise?"
"Mm." She nodded. "Not the kind you hear. Mana-level noise. Once the barrier's active, the whole space fills with interference. Your request goes out, but the ambient mana can't hear it through all that static."
Uriel was quiet for two seconds.
That phrasing.
That is extremely her.
"So when you couldn't get the spell out just now," Tian continued, "spending five or ten times the usual cost is basically you shouting louder. It still barely works, because the noise floor is too strong."
"…So how were you using magic, then?"
Tian blinked.
"I don't shout."
…
"I don't request," she said, in roughly the tone someone might use to describe a minor convenience. "I just weave it myself."
Uriel looked at her.
"A request," Tian said, lifting her right hand, fingers spread slightly as if plucking an invisible thread from the air, "is you asking the mana: can you help me with this? It answers, and the spell forms. But if it can't hear you—"
She crooked one finger.
"—you stop asking. You do it yourself."
The air brightened, briefly.
Between her fingertip and some point in the empty space, a thread had been plucked — a ripple, there and gone, almost too faint to register.
"You weave the mana directly into the shape you want. No request. No waiting for a response. You just build it."
Uriel stared at her fingers.
No request. Just… build it.
Is that something a person can actually learn?
"Try it," Tian said, withdrawing her hand and tipping her chin toward him.
"Here?"
"Mm."
"There's still a barrier—"
"Barrier or not, same principle. It's just that requesting is easier when there's no noise. If you want to use magic anywhere a request might fail, you have to learn to build it yourself."
Uriel was quiet for a moment.
Then he raised his right hand, palm up.
He focused.
Reached directly for the loose mana drifting in the air — the scattered, fine-grained motes that usually only needed the lightest call to gather — and instead of calling, touched them with intent.
Pulled them together.
The air above his palm began to warm.
A point of light. Unsteady, swaying like an infant standing for the first time, wavering once, twice, in the center of his hand.
Then — fwmp.
A small flame hung suspended above his palm.
Not large. Fist-sized at most. Orange shading to blue at the edges, the shape unstable, trembling faintly, in time with his fingers.
But it hadn't been requested. He'd built it.
Uriel stared at the flame, the flickering orange light reflected in his eyes.
"…It's out."
His voice came out quiet. Barely convinced of itself.
"Yeah. It's out," Tian said from beside him.
Then —
"Wow—"
Both hands came up to her chest. The stars in her eyes burned brighter than they ever had before, and the pride in her voice was loud enough to flip the whole walkway over.
"Little Uri is absolutely amazing! First try, and it worked! I only explained it once! Once! And you got it perfectly! My son really is the best the smartest most brilliant genius in the entire world Mommy is SO proud of you!"
"Wait wait wait — lower your voice —"
Uriel nearly lost his footing under the sheer pressure of the praise. His hand twitched, the flame jolted with it, and almost caught his own sleeve.
"Don't you think the operatives might still hear us?! And this is literally on fire in my hand right now! There's a time and place for this!"
"Okay," Tian said, instantly dialing the volume down. The stars in her eyes did not dim even slightly, and the corner of her mouth refused to come back down.
Uriel looked down at the flame still hovering over his palm.
Still trembling. The edges cycling from blue to orange and back, like it was testing the temperature of the world around it for the first time.
Magic I built myself.
This is how a Radiant-tier Hero casts. And she just handed it to me like it was nothing — like she developed the technique herself.
He blinked, and the moment broke. He shook his hand and snuffed the flame out.
"Right," he said, voice back to its usual steady register. "This isn't the time for a magic lesson. We need to figure out what's actually going on."