“Magia…!” Salmasius began to chant once more.

  What was he doing? Surely, he knew I would just use the counter-charm again.

  “Vas terrae!” I shouted, and both of us stumbled as a vast amount of mana was drawn from our cores.

  “...apparet impetus!” Salmasius said, finishing the chant pointlessly.

  My brain started to burn from overwork. The sensation meant I was down to half of my mana reserve, and the headache would only get worse as I approached my limit. In an instant, I realized Salmasius’s intention. Counter-charms completely canceled the effects of a spell, but they required the defender to use an equal amount of mana.

  “To think that you were able to counter two of my empowered [Mana Bolts]. You are much more skilled than we originally thought,” Salmasius said, wincing heavily in pain. He was obviously feeling the effects of mana drain much more heavily than I was, though a cruel smile was still plastered over his face like the rictus expression of a dead man. “Unfortunately for you, I have not yet reached the limit of my power. This is where your road ends, Lord Thale!”

  I stayed silent while Salmasius gave his long villainous monologue. What was it that Sun Tzu said? Don’t interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.

  “Magia apparet…!”

  “Vas terrae!”

  “...impetus!?”

  Once more, the [Mana Bolt] fizzled, and the increased headache burned like a lance in my forehead. Salmasius, on the other hand, completely fell to his knees, and his staff clattered away from him.

  “How!? How do you, a mere child, have more mana than I do?” Salmasius said, slowly raising himself to his feet.

  “I cheated.”

  Two Wind Knives shot out of my wand, and Salmasius was barely able to block them with his Shield. With the next Ice Spear, I shattered the conjured barrier. I dropped concentration on my [Blood Enhancement], opening up some extra processing power in my brain to attack more fiercely.

  “Mulciber ignis tormentum!” I chanted, firing a Magma Cannon out of my staff.

  Simultaneously, my wand flew through the air like a conductor’s baton, slashing at Salmasius’s charred body with condensed blades of air. Adding to this merciless assault, I conjured two Hellfire sparks and hammered them into my opponent’s blackened chest.

  “W-wait…” Salmasius croaked quietly, somehow able to speak despite the immense damage I had already done to his body. Any normal person would have already entered a state of shock, and his nature as a [Necromancer] must have been the only thing keeping him standing.

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  With one last flick of my wand, I fired an Ice Spear through his chest. Based on the location, I knew instantly that I had pierced his heart and spinal column. He fell to the ground in a burning mound of half-melted flesh, and I knew he was dead. Salmasius was still a human, after all. Destroying his heart would kill him.

  I looked around, surveying the scene to make sure Kinro and Miriam had eliminated their enemies. Kinro was busy sawing the head off the prone [Death Knight], though his clothes were marked with new tears and blood stains.

  Realizing the danger was passed, I holstered my wand and looked down at my opponent’s corpse. In that last second, Salmasius pleaded for mercy, so I couldn’t exactly claim this was an act of self defense. Ultimately, I had to kill him. Some people in this world had to be killed, and Salmasius was certainly on that list. I was simply doing the job of the state and executing a dangerous criminal. That’s how I justified it to myself, anyway.

  “Are you done over there, Kinro?” I asked, leaning on my staff and pinching the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger. Based on my memory of my fight and the headache pounding in my skull, I must have used about a hundred mana after I hit the halfway point of my mana reserve. Doing quick math, I figured that I had about 130 mana left in my tank.

  “Yeah,” Kinro responded shortly, lifting the disembodied head of the [Death Knight] as he rose to his feet. Spending time around Beltane and me, Kinro picked up one of the basic facets of undead hunting: cut the head off of undead you really don’t want to get back up. As long as an undead’s brain was still connected to its mana core, it could keep moving. Anything less than complete decapitation was a half-measure.

  “What’s the next move?” Kinro said, throwing the head into the basin and sheathing his katana.

  Miriam peered sideways at the charred and ravaged corpse of Salmasius the Necromancer. Fear and disgust colored her expression in equal parts. In an eerie way, Salmasius’s corpse looked very similar to the bodies of the outlanders after Armond Feldrast killed them all those years ago. The only recognizable feature left in his blackened skull was a set of brown teeth contorted in a pained scream.

  “Next,” I said, trying to distract myself from my sins, “I need to interrupt the ritual. It should be easy for me, but I need to be careful. If I make any mistakes, all of the built up mana could… cascade.”

  “Cascade?” Kinro asked.

  “It would explode,” Miriam said, filling in the blanks for our swordmaster.

  Stopping the ritual was not easy, as it turned out. I’m pretty sure I almost caused a cascade twice. Whoever created the ritual inscribed the angles and lines with machine-like accuracy.

  The process was uncomfortably close to a bomb-defusal, except with me drawing chalk lines on arcane runes instead of cutting wires. Twice, Thale had to shout at me to not mark that line, and I stopped just in time. Eventually, the active elements of the ritual were cut off from the rest of the circle, and the ongoing spell lost its cohesion. Though there was no indication of this fact to an outsider, the spell was no longer cohesive enough to explode.

  I let out a heavy sigh, doubling over in relief. I was barely able to undo the ritual. If it hadn’t been for Beltane’s long lessons on wards and arcane circles, I would have exploded, or the process of interrupting the ritual would have taken several hours.

  Slowly, I rose from the uncomfortable kneeling position that I had been in for the past few minutes, using my staff to keep my balance.

  Calling out to Kinro and Miriam, I said, “The ritual has been stopped. Now, I’m going to break the circle and let out all the trapped mana. There’s a lot of it here so make sure to prepare yourself mentally.”

  After a few seconds, I scraped my staff harshly against the ground, and a wave of invigorating mana washed over me. It felt like a draft of water on a hot day, and I could feel my mana cores collecting some of the flowing mana as it passed through me.

  “What a strange feeling,” Miriam remarked.

  “By the gods, it’s giving me a headache,” Kinro said, rubbing his forehead.

  “Come on,” I said, realizing that my mana reserve was still severely depleted with a sigh. “There’s still much to do.”