Chapter 162. The Necromancer.
The atmosphere in the cellar, where the Black Star wizards still sat in their cells, was bleak and heavy with hopelessness. The men's eyes had long since lost their usual spark of life. With their pale faces and gaunt figures, they could easily have been mistaken for corpses were it not for the rise and fall of their chests. Even the group's leader had shed his former defiance, though he was still capable of feeling things beyond exhaustion and the steadily encroaching despair. One of those things was surprise, when two headless bodies were brought into the cell opposite his, followed shortly after by the heads themselves.
The Magister had long since accepted that no rescue was coming, but beyond his iron character, he possessed a steel will and had no desire to surrender, least of all his purpose. Still, the sight of the decapitated corpses filled his mind with unpleasant images. More than once he had pictured himself lying in their place, and the thought made even him shudder. No matter how unbreakable one's will, almost everyone feared death, and he was no exception. And watching his team, ready at any moment to meet Merlin in the next world, yet still following him to the end, filled him with both pride and the weight of responsibility for their lives.
Cold and hard as he was, over these months he had come to feel genuine respect for them. Not everyone could endure this and still hold their course.
Because of that, the Magister had already decided: the next time their jailer came down here, he would bow his head and surrender. There was no point in enduring any more of this when they were almost certainly presumed dead. The arrival of that bastard from the Gold division had confirmed it, and overhearing with his enhanced hearing that the Black Star was prepared to pay ransom only for Lavr had all but killed any remaining hope. Severus's return unharmed had taken care of the rest.
He was retreating into his thoughts once more when a familiar figure appeared in the center of the room out of thin air, drawing from him a surge of thoroughly unpleasant feelings.
Severus didn't spare the Magister a glance. He walked past his cell and stopped in front of the one holding the two bodies.
"Hm. I didn't notice who she caught..." he said, his gaze fixed on a pale, bald head that immediately reminded him of Voldemort, except this one still had a nose.
He opened the cell and stepped inside. He had decided to leave Nagini in the sitting room. He did not want her to witness what was about to happen. Extracting memories from a corpse was not a pleasant sight. But first...
"I've had occasion to use this spell a second time... are you listening?" he said, addressing the Black Star wizards. "Once you see it, you will have exactly two choices: death, or full submission." He raised his palm toward the blood-soaked bodies. A cold gray aura began to gather around him, and within seconds it dropped the temperature in the room sharply. Those in the cell nearest to the bodies began breathing vapor and trembling as though they had been stripped naked and thrown into a frost.
What happened next made every witness flinch. A body that had shown no sign of life twitched, and then, before their eyes, began to rise.
I've learned some of the spells from the school of Necromancy, but they don't come easily to me. There's the problem with opposing elements: a light mage struggling to use dark magic. Fortunately, I'm only fire, so the restriction doesn't hit me at full force.
When the body finally stood, it walked over to the head lying on the floor, bent down, picked it up, pressed it to the neck, and in a matter of seconds, it sealed back into place. Standing before Severus now was the Necromancer himself, the one who had badly injured Toby and who was almost certainly the team's leader, or at least its mind.
Severus found that the raw fury he had felt earlier had been suppressed, exactly so he wouldn't do something foolish. Right now, he couldn't use his full strength, and he had no idea what other items the woman might have in reserve. Attempting to attack them could lead to consequences he couldn't allow in his current state. Too much was at stake. He simply couldn't afford to act recklessly.
The Black Star members who had watched the whole thing grew even paler as the meaning of his words settled over them. Raising the dead as revenants was the kind of magic that carried a life sentence in virtually every country in the world. And these people had seen it. Memory modification wouldn't save them. He was never going to let them go, and they all knew it, because any one of them would have done exactly the same in his position.
"We submit," came the group leader's voice, weary but still cold, as he stared at the living corpse and then shifted his gaze to Severus's back.
The eyes of the other wizards, hearing those words, came back to life.
"Glad to hear it. I'll get to you shortly. First I need to finish with these two." His palm descended onto the Necromancer's head and he closed his eyes, but in the next instant the dead man's arm stirred and snapped forward, seizing him by the throat and driving Severus into the steel bars with a crash. A bloodthirsty snarl spread across the dark mage's face.
The sudden turn of events shocked every member of the Black Star present. Even their leader had not expected it, though he was already bracing for the worst. Severus was one thing; he had studied him long enough to know he wouldn't kill them yet. This unknown was something else entirely, and nothing good could reasonably be expected from him.
"YOU BASTARD! HOW DARE YOU TURN ME INTO AN UNDEAD?!" the Necromancer snarled directly into his face. Severus looked back at him with mild surprise.
That the dark mage had retained his mind was genuinely unexpected, but within seconds he understood why as he felt a faint chill at his throat where the magic had touched him.
Interesting. The moment you became undead, your core reached the middle Magister rank, and that allowed you to keep a fragment of your mind. The thought came from a book on Necromancy he had studied, which described how peak-rank Magisters had a small chance of retaining their minds at the moment of conversion. The chance was three percent. For middle-rank Magisters it was effectively zero. That was why he had not checked for retained intellect.
"What are you babbling about? Think you can distract me with your nonsense?!"
"Not at all. Just thinking aloud." He tapped the dead man's arm lightly, and to the man's evident astonishment, his grip loosened. Severus walked calmly past him. "I'll remember this. Thank you for the lesson."
"What did you do to me?!" The undead man realized in horror that he could not move so much as a finger, as though he had been buried neck-deep in concrete.
"When you tried to drain my life force," Severus said, and the man went rigid, "I added a slave-seal. Apologies, I'm not particularly skilled at Necromancy." He pressed down on the man's shoulder and forced him to his knees, then laid his palm on his head again, but without any of the previous detachment. "So you wanted to turn my servant into your slave. Ambitious." He had caught a fragment of the Necromancer's memories before the man's mind had woken up. "I promise that before you reach whatever hell awaits you, I will give you a send-off you won't forget." His voice had lost all of its youthful quality. To the dark mage, it was the voice of something from a much deeper darkness, and not only because of Severus's sour mood. The slave-seal he had pushed into the man's body was amplifying every fear directed at him by a factor of a hundred. "You're undead now, but don't worry. You'll feel every bit of it."
"W-wait, I'll tell you everything you want to know, j-just plea... AAAHH!" A scream tore through the cellar—inhuman, filled with pain and absolute despair. The Black Star members, who had looked death in the face more than once, trembled like children, understanding in their bones what that creature was experiencing. But the leader of the Steel division's sub-group saw something else in that moment. It was vengeance, and not for someone close. It was vengeance for a servant, someone all but given up and forgotten by his own organization. To the Magister, that was something unexpected and impossible. Yet he could see it plainly in Severus's expression and in everything radiating from him. He was not performing. This was real.
Perhaps... this might not be a bad choice after all. The treacherous thought formed before he could stop it.
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