Discordant Note | TBATE

Chapter 71: The Vicar of Plague

I slammed fire and sound mana together, forcibly amping the heat. A thin beam of red plasma shot from my extended fingertip, moving too quickly to follow with normal senses.

A slim wall of bright green acid coalesced in front of my attack, forming nearly too fast for me to see. My beam of plasma sizzled on contact, and I could feel the mana within being broken down.

I grit my teeth, a dozen orbs of solid plasma hovering in the air around me. They cast a dim red light around me, a promise of searing destruction.

Then I sent them on, each one darting around like a fly. They came from a dozen different directions, streaks of white and red converging on a single point.

Mardeth smirked, waving his hand dismissively. A torrent of horrid green rushed from him, splashing against the floor and swallowing my plasma spells like a sea swallows a ship.

The spell tracked toward me, bubbling with decay. Unwilling to let myself be consumed, I pushed against the floor. I attached myself to the ceiling, lashing out with a plume of fire as another spray of acid tracked after me. The acid ate through my attack almost faster than I could conjure it, but the brief delay allowed me to move out of the way.

The acid splashed against the ceiling, eating through the stone quickly. I watched in abject horror as I easily guessed what would've happened to me if I'd been hit.

I turned back to Mardeth, narrowing my eyes.

"He is playing with you, Contractor. Once he wishes you dead, you will dissolve just as that stone," Lady Dawn said with increased urgency.

I snarled. I don't care. Naereni and Karsien are still in this place. I just need to give them time to escape, then I can as well.

I concentrated on my template spells, an idea forming in my head. If this man wasn't going to take me seriously, I'd use that for all I could.

A dozen different spells winked into the air around me. Fireballs, plasma, and solid variations of both circled around my position on the ceiling, growing larger as I fed more mana into them. I started to feel the heat as they swelled, even though I knew none could hurt me.

"You won't be able to play with me any longer," I said, the power of the Will reinforcing my words. "I'll make you tell me what I need to know."

Mardeth smiled a leering grin. "Play with you? Oh, little mage, you don't know anything."

My spells surged toward the floating vicar. He hadn't moved a single inch during this entire confrontation, and I was counting on him continuing to underestimate me.

As before, a tide of green acid soaked from the vicar's robes, attacking the mana of my spell and trying to make it decay. My spells, fortified with far more power than I had inputted before, resisted longer. A couple of the plasma spells nearly singed the man's horns or bit at his robes, their searing heat inexorable even under the Vritra's decay arts.

But the overwhelming heat and firepower I was throwing at him was constantly destroyed. Each attack was systematically broken down, the hunger of the basilisk mana unrelenting. The room was cast in shades of red, orange, and green as swells of our power clashed. The walls shook at the onslaught, the rumbling making the entire structure shudder on its foundations.

My brow was sweating from the stream of spells I was throwing at the vicar. Oath and Promise hovered behind me as I focused on a special spell in my palm, my attention split between my foe and my task.

I caught Mardeth's wry smirk through the flashes of red. He was unscathed by the power I was hurling at him. His lifeforce was as steady as ever, the pulse of his heart unphased. Those specks of blackness at the center of it seemed to yawn wider.