Chapter 24: The Village of corpses
"Aah—" Karn caught his breath, hands on his knees. "This is exhausting."
"It is," Zangika said. "What you're experiencing is your body learning to maintain new pathways under continuous use — like suddenly becoming aware of a muscle group you didn't know you had, and then being asked to exercise it for hours. It'll become easier once the passages fully settle." A pause. "Now. Let me show you what comes next."
"There's more?"
"We have mana intake and circulation. We have star formation. We have a few combat applications. Now we learn the spells that were actually written down in the book — the ones the original owner spent time codifying."
"Alright. Walk me through it."
"First one: Fire Fist. Gather mana and concentrate it around your fist and palm. Then convert the outer layer to fire."
Karn tried it. Flame appeared across his knuckles — thin, unstable, but there.
"Now double the mana concentration at the fingertips specifically. Keep the rest running in a continuous loop around the fist — circular current, not static. It should look like a hand on fire rather than a hand holding fire."
"Shouldn't this be harder?"
"It is. You have me. Stop questioning it and hit the tree."
He hit it. A small scorch mark appeared and a shallow divot. Not impressive.
"Release mana on impact," Zangika said. "Not at the fist — into the object you're hitting. The moment of contact, push mana through the surface."
He pulled back and hit it again — this time forcing mana outward at the moment of contact rather than holding it back. The tree blew apart from the inside, the wood catching fire before the pieces hit the ground.
"There," Zangika said.
"Dam," Karn said.
They drilled it for half a day — punch, release, feel the transfer, adjust the ratio — until the technique had the same unconscious quality as the Fire Blast. Then Karn's reserves ran dry and Zangika refilled them from the stones and they moved to the next.
"Fire Meteor," Zangika said. "Grow-with-you spell. Means the better you become, the more powerful it gets. Every improvement to your fundamental mana control and output makes this one stronger without additional effort."
"What does it do?"
"Massive concentrated fire mass — summoned at height and directed downward. Think of what Lucia did with the ice glacier. Same principle, fire application." She paused. "The book also specifies it's intended for a minimum two-star mage. The mana requirement is significant."
"So we skip it."
"We don't skip it. I reviewed the footage of Lucia's cast. She didn't form it at range — she formed a seed version in her hand and propagated it outward by converting the ambient mana in the target space. Chain reaction. Property change at distance." Zangika was already working through the problem as she spoke. "We can't replicate that biological process. But we have a spear nozzle and void space transfer. If we eject a pre-formed compressed mana charge through the void to altitude and ignite it there, we get the same effect from a different direction."
It took an hour of failed attempts — the timing, the transfer, the ignition sequencing, the mana quantity that needed to go up versus the mana that needed to come from the stones to compensate. An hour of nothing working followed by one attempt that worked completely.
A sphere of fire the size of a large building dropped from the sky and landed on what remained of the test mountain.
The mountain was not a mountain anymore. It was a hole.
"They could probably make a new lake out of it," Zangika said.
Karn fainted.
(The Fire Meteor, under normal circumstances — a single-star mage, no lineage, three days of foundational training — should not have been achievable. The mana cost alone would have been prohibitive. Under normal circumstances. But Karn had Zangika running stone compensation in real time through the suit, which was not a circumstance the book had accounted for.)
Zangika, while Karn was unconscious, moved through the remaining two spells methodically.
Fire Sword — mana coating for a carried weapon, converting the surface to an active fire medium. The principle was the same as Fire Fist but applied to metal rather than flesh, with the additional requirement of keeping the mana flow fast and even to prevent the blade from taking heat damage. She worked it on the spear through several hundred repetitions until the output was completely stable, then noted the technique for when Karn woke up.
The last spell in the set was shape control — directing formed mana into specific geometric configurations. They had already developed this independently with Fire Blast. She marked it as covered and moved on.
When Karn woke up she explained Fire Sword in thirty seconds. He produced it cleanly on the first try.
"Looks like I'm getting the hang of it."
"That's my baby," Zangika said.
They wrapped the session. The full spell set was done.
"We also created a spell ourselves," Karn said as they walked back toward the city.
"What do you think Fire Blast is?" Zangika said.
"Oh. Right."
"The schedule going forward: mana gathering before sleep, mana gathering after waking. In the dungeon — rely on magic more than tech wherever possible. Use tech where the situation demands it or when combining the two gives a better result. Experience will improve output and efficiency faster than any further drilling here."
"Got it."
* * *
Five Days Later
The routine held. Morning mana gather. Day. Evening mana gather. Sleep. Repeat. The dungeon reopened and they ran two floors before pulling back — the magic application was messier in real combat conditions than at the lake, which was expected, and the process of integrating it with the suit's systems in live scenarios was its own kind of problem to work through.
On the fifth day back Karn went to the guild.
"It's been five days," Karn said as they walked in. "Let's see how the investigation is going."
The guild floor looked normal. No elevated tension, no crowd around the boards. Karn moved to Cersy's counter.
"Please go to another receptionist," Cersy said without looking up. "I don't have any answers for you."
Karn stood at the counter for a moment.
"Worse than I thought," Zangika said. "She genuinely believes it. I want women to keep their distance from you but I don't want them thinking you're — that."
"Thanks. Very helpful."
He moved to the adjacent counter. The receptionist there — Isabela — had warm eyes and the particular energy of someone who was good at her job and knew it. She looked at him as he approached, then glanced briefly at Cersy's direction, and something in her expression suggested she had already been briefed.
"Looks like you had some trouble with Cersy," she said pleasantly. "She came back from that mission and I've never seen her that worked up in my life."
"It was a misunderstanding," Karn said.
"It always is." She smiled. "She'll come around. She acts like she doesn't care but she's a good person." She pulled out a report sheet. "You wanted an update on the Edward situation?"
She ran through what had happened. The duke's knights had worked around the clock and found nothing usable — the dungeon had, as dungeons do, cycled through its own restoration process and erased most of the physical evidence. What they had found was the aftermath of what was clearly a significant battle, which matched witness descriptions of strange sounds and pressure disturbances from that period, but no bodies, no trails, no residue they could track.
White Draco had gone in and run all the way to the twentieth floor without finding anything. The squad had assessed two possible conclusions: either the parties responsible were strong enough to sustain themselves indefinitely in the dungeon's lower floors and were still in there, or they had already left before the investigation began.
"The consensus is that they left," Isabela said. "The investigation has been officially concluded. Dungeon is fully open again as of two days ago."
"And the explosion reports?" Karn asked carefully.
Isabela's expression shifted slightly — the particular look of someone about to describe something they personally found disturbing.
"You heard about those too? People have been reporting explosions in the hills for about a week. Getting louder over time. Most assumed it was high-level mage training. And then—" She paused. "One of the mountains in the hill range to the east disappeared overnight. Not collapsed. Not eroded. Just — gone. White Draco went to investigate the area and found a crater where it had been. The edge of the crater was cut clean — not blasted, cut. Like something had sliced through the rock at the base and then the mass above it had been removed." She shook her head slowly. "Nobody can figure out what kind of power does that."
"Hm," Karn said. "Strange."
"I wonder who could have done that," Zangika said.
From two counters away, without looking up, Cersy said:
"Don't talk to people like him."
Karn left the guild.
* * *
The Mission
He spent the rest of the day restocking — food supplies, medical herbs, a few potion bases he had been running low on. The evening mana gathering. Sleep. Morning gathering. A standard day.
"It's been boring lately," Karn said the next morning.
"Tomorrow we go to the guild and find something worth doing," Zangika said.
The next morning, Cersy's counter was empty.
Isabela looked up when Karn approached.
"I know why you're here," she said, and her usual lightness was slightly absent. "Cersy took a reconnaissance mission this morning. She left with three C-rank adventurers." She paused. "We told her to contact you and bring you along. She didn't."
"Where'd she go?"
"The forest of Dimlliyas. There's a small village just outside it — serves as a rest stop for adventurers heading in, resupply point, local trade. They send someone to the city daily. We haven't heard from them in five days."
"And she went alone with three C-ranks," Karn said.
"I know how it sounds." Isabela's hands were flat on the counter. "You know what the current situation is. The devils, the dungeon, everything still unresolved. I'm worried about her."
"If I go after her she'll think I'm following her. And she already has the wrong idea about me."
"Keep your distance. She doesn't need to see you unless she's in trouble." Isabela leaned forward slightly. "I'll pay ten thousand silver."
"We're running low on funds," Zangika said immediately. "Take it."
Isabela took a breath, then stepped around the counter. She closed the distance between them and took Karn's hand in both of hers.
"Only you," she said. "I trust only you with this."
She leaned closer — past the point where the interaction was professional — and then did something that surprised both of them. She leaned to his ear and very lightly ran the tip of her tongue across it.
"Special reward if you bring her back safe," she said quietly.
Karn stepped back. Isabela was visibly red — the flush of someone who had done something they had never done before and were immediately recalculating.
"I'm giving her the Glock ninety-nine treatment," Zangika announced.
"Zangika—"
"What did she just do to your ear—"
"She's embarrassed," Karn said quietly. "Look at her."
Zangika ran a passive scan. Isabela's heart rate and autonomic responses indicated genuine distress rather than calculated seduction. Her physical posture had collapsed inward the moment she'd done it, which was not the posture of someone executing a planned manoeuvre.
"She was telling the truth," Zangika said, slightly deflated. "That was her first attempt at anything like that."
Karn leaned slightly toward Isabela — enough to close the awkward distance that had opened up.
"You don't have to do any of that," he said. "The money and a thank you is enough. It just shows how much you care about her."
He was looking at her face when he said it — directly, no distance, genuine.
Isabela's heart rate increased
"He didn't do anything special and she's about to collapse," Zangika observed.
He got the details from Isabela — direction, approximate travel time, the carriage route Cersy would have taken — and left.
* * *
The Forest Road
"One hundred and ninety miles per hour," Zangika said as he cleared the city gate.
"That'll work."
He ran. The road to Dimlliyas forest unrolled ahead of him, the city falling behind fast, the countryside opening up into long grass and then treeline. An hour in, Zangika pulled up the drone feed and zoomed the HUD.
"Carriage ahead. Adjusting speed to match distance."
The feed brought the carriage into resolution — Cersy visible through the window, coat buttoned, posture rigid. Three adventurers with her. Two of them were visibly taking up more space than necessary, the way men do when they've decided the situation is an opportunity. One leaned toward her. She pressed herself against the far side. The third said something and laughed.
"Are you seeing this?" Karn said.
"I'm seeing it," Zangika said. Her tone had gone flat. "The adventurers she hired are not behaving professionally."
Through the drone audio, fragments came through:
Through the drone audio, fragments came through — do you have someone, please keep personal questions off the table, feisty I like that, laughter, back off there is space, oh showing some attitude—
Cersy's internal state, visible only in the controlled tightness of her jaw:
She wanted to kill every single one of them. She had the capability. She was a guild receptionist in the same way a knife is sometimes a letter opener — technically accurate, not the full story. She breathed through it. Cersy. Control. These were assets she had hired and she needed them functional. Control.
The carriage reached the edge of the village and stopped.
Karn had maintained enough distance that the carriage was a shape in the distance. He slowed, moved off the road into the treeline, and watched the feed.
"Drone launch. Extending range."
* * *
The Village
Silence. The village had the silence of somewhere where all the sounds that should be there aren't.
Cersy stepped in first. The three adventurers followed. The drone fed it to Karn's HUD in real time.
Then they saw it.
Bodies. Everywhere. Not fallen in place — arranged was wrong, scattered was wrong too — just present in every direction, in every configuration, in the specific way of a space where something terrible had been happening for days and nobody had been there to stop it.
Blood on every surface. Body parts distributed across the village in ways that implied thoroughness rather than violence for its own sake — the intestines hanging from a window frame, the heads stacked against a wall with the arrangement of someone who had been doing it incrementally over time. Women bound by their hair at the back of one building. All dead.
The three adventurers vomited. All three of them, nearly simultaneously.
Karn, watching through the drone feed from the treeline, vomited too.
"Karn," Zangika said.
He didn't answer immediately. He was looking at the feed and not looking at it at the same time.
Then a sound from inside the village. A voice — familiar. Two voices.
"Looks like we got caught."
"I told you to eat faster. Five days. You want to savour it, fine, but not while we're exposed."
Karn knew both voices.
Leon and Lucia stepped out from between two buildings. No masks — their faces visible for the first time. Leon was eating something. He didn't stop when he saw the group.
Eating humans is fun, Leon said, with the tone of someone describing a hobby. I wanted to enjoy it properly.
"Why?" Cersy said. Her voice was controlled. "Why kill innocent people?"
"We didn't want to," Lucia said. Her voice was flat in a different way from Leon — not casual, more like someone who had decided not to feel anything about it. "We needed to recover. The prince set us back significantly. We needed to restore our energy and restore our power. There aren't many options for that in a forest."
"Why are you telling her that—" Lucia started.
"Classic villainous oversharing," Leon said cheerfully. "Oh well. We're almost done here anyway. A few more fresh ones wouldn't hurt — they're starting to smell."
"I will kill you," Cersy said.
She turned to the three adventurers behind her. Both of the ones who had been making the carriage ride uncomfortable had already wet themselves. The third was shaking so badly his sword hand was useless. Their faces were the faces of people who had understood that what they were looking at operated at a completely different level from anything they had prepared for.
"We need to go now," Karn said.
"Wait," Zangika said.
"Cersy is right there—"
"Wait. Watch."
Leon moved first. Three sharp shards of ice formed in the air in front of him — precise, oriented, aimed at the three adventurers. They shot forward simultaneously, each one finding a heart before any of the three had time to register the motion. Three bodies dropped.
The fourth shard — aimed at Cersy — formed and launched.
And stopped.
It was still in the air in front of her. Not deflected. Not caught. Frozen in place, a foot from her chest, vibrating faintly as if straining against something it couldn't push through.
Cersy had not moved. She was looking at the shard. Her expression had changed completely — it was the expression of someone who had just accessed something they had been keeping very carefully unused.
"What is happening?" Karn said.
Zangika was qu
iet for a moment — the silence of someone running rapid analysis.
"The receptionist," she said slowly, "is not just a receptionist."
End of Chapter 24