A Familiar Void

Chapter 16

Fouquet cursed her luck as she stumbled away from her golem. Her right hand gripping her bleeding left arm, the sound of tiny footsteps behind her was the reason she had stopped to at least cover the wound in a bandage.

Things had gone wrong. Sure she wasn't expecting things to be easy. This was the academy that thought the future mages of the country, so she expected trouble.

The first was the fact that when she had tried to transmute the door directly. She knew that the walls around the Vault couldn't be affected by magic lower than a Square-Level, which meant as a Triangle Mage she couldn't touch it.

Unfortunately, even the doors seemed to be placed under the same enchantments. But it was a gamble that it could be affected anyway.

When sneaking wasn't an option, she opted to exploit another weakness that she was told of.

Physical Force.

While the walls were enchanted to prevent transmutations, they weren't enchanted to withstand heavy blows to the walls themselves. She figured that a Golem would possess enough strength to punch through the wall.

Unfortunately, either the information that she got was wrong or they had decided to double down on their security. Because when she struck the tower, instead of it crumbling under her Golem's fist, all that happened was it hitting a barrier around it.

A barrier that wasn't supposed to be there, from what she could tell.

And if her plan crumbling into pieces wasn't enough, after she failed to make a dent in the wall a witness had to show up.

It was a creature, one that she knew from her time in the academy. And if having a Familiar witness her crimes wasn't bad enough, its Master had to show up soon after.

Fouquet tried to just scare the thing away, swat close to it so that it ran away. Maybe even get its Master to pick it up and run the opposite direction.

Then it Screamed and tore off the arm of her Golem, while knocking her off the shoulder that she had been perched on.

And just when she thought that it couldn't get worse, it struck her with its arm and cut into her own.

Now she was running away, and the worst part was that she couldn't just hide away and take off her costume.

Not with the Familiar chasing after her, she doubted her disguise would stop it from tearing a hole in her neck considering what it had done.

Nor could she summon a Golem and just step over the wall, with the creature following her. If she stopped running, she'd leave her back exposed.

Her thoughts were cut short by a worrying sight. The gates that she thought to leave through were no longer unguarded. Two of the palace guards were standing there, wands at ready to face against the thief.

With the Familiar behind her, she turned to the double doors of the main tower. She heard the guards by the gate shout for her, but she ignored them.

She released her wounded arm and grabbed her wand. Pushing through the door, she turned and waved her wand.

The earth responded to her call, and grew into a dome that covered the main entrance.