Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 231: Fish in a Barrel

If they had been ordinary sixteen-year-old girls, they would probably have screamed, and louder on the second beat. After a first sharp gasp, though, both Lucia and Anya kept their emotions in check. They had been working with the Disciplinary Committee since March, now late June, and they had seen plenty of crime scenes. Their nerves were stronger than most their age.Lucia drew her sword. A hot red glow skimmed over her frame. She watched the wavering tree-shadows with wary eyes and kept Anya behind her. Anya picked up her academy-issued hand-lamp, edged closer, and crouched to look.

The light fell on a bloodless face in the grass. It was indeed a first-year on patrol, a boy from their own cohort. His eyes were wide open. A clear wound marked his throat, blood soaking outward in a baleful dark red.

“Also a first-year, from the Potions College. Someone pierced his throat,” Anya said, a cold tide rising in her chest.

Students from the Potions College were not as combat-capable as those from the Battle Arts College, but to make the Committee you still needed real strength, at least a beginner mage or swordsman. To die without a sound like this, how strong was the killer?

“Where’s his partner?” Lucia asked.

“I, I don’t know, he was probably wounded somewhere else and only fell here in the end. The one who killed him should still be nearby,” Anya said. Her hands trembled as she turned the body and reached a new judgment.

The early-summer wind carried a copper tang across their faces, sticky and sickening. When Anya stood up her legs shook. She pinched her thigh quickly.

She had seen a lot these past days. Except for that one time Yvette had saved her, every killing they had encountered was after the fact, more like forensics, less dangerous than breaking up tavern brawls between adventurers. Now a Committee member as strong as her, perhaps stronger, lay dead almost under their noses. It was hard not to think that the next second might be her turn.

The only good news was that the victim had not been killed in one instant. That meant if danger came, maybe she could at least flail a little.

From deep in the beast-pen quarter the roars grew wilder. Above, clouds swallowed moon and stars and poured a killing chill over the ground.

Just as the two were about to move and report to the on-duty instructor, a black dagger, edges flashing silver, shot at Anya’s neck.

Lucia reacted fast. One cut met it and stopped it. Blade covered in combat art clashed with dagger, flinging visible motes of element that quickly thinned into nothing.

“Who’s there?” Lucia turned toward the side.

They stood on a path paved with white stone, grass and trees on either side. The path linked the theory-building sector to the broad beast-pens. By the weak glow of a far cast-iron streetlamp, they saw a shape step from behind a palm tree, a figure with a black hood.

It was a jarring sight. That first strike said he was formidable, a man who should not lack money. Yet his clothes were shabby, a patched hemp shirt like a beggar who had wandered into the wrong place.

“Me? I’m just a lowly ant. Even if the highborn ladies of the academy know my name, what then?” His voice was hoarse, the words self-belittling, yet full of mockery and a sickly thrill.

“I’m no lady, and I’m hardly highborn.” Lucia, a country girl, bristled a little at the phrasing.

“Heh.” He sneered, a trace of scorn in the sound. “Deny it if you like. Soon you’ll be just like me, no, worse than me. Hahaha.”

He finished laughing and lurched toward them, boneless as if his frame could not hold him up.

“Careful,” Anya blurted, drawing her sword. Lucia moved even faster. She met the thrusting dagger with her blade. Flame burst and in that flare the two eye-holes cut in the hood lit up, the muddy eyes within flashing one instant of shock.

Clearly, in the hooded man’s reckoning, she should not have stopped that blow. The end should have been a swift slaughter.

Steel rang. At arm’s length the two traded cuts. Light from combat arts streamed and curled in the air. After a dozen breaths Lucia caught an opening and drove a single thrust through his body-shielding mana into his chest.

The hooded man stared at her in disbelief, then down at the sword in his chest, as if even at the last he could not fathom how he had lost so easily.

Lucia pulled her sword free. The hooded man’s body folded and fell. Anya stood staring for a beat before she said, “You…”

“…are you alright?”

“I’m fine.”

Anya let out a shaky breath, then burst out, “That was so fast. Lucia, my gods, you’re incredible.”

“He was strange.” Lucia tipped the hood back with her blade. A gaunt, malnourished face came into view.

She frowned. “His mana pressure was at least mid-tier swordsman, higher than mine, but it was like he knew nothing, swinging wildly like an amateur. I’ve only seen this in village kids who just started sword class.”

She gave thanks for the witch’s improved combat arts. They let her fight above her weight and stop his strike. Otherwise, even as a novice in his first battle, he could have seriously hurt her. The Committee member who died earlier was likely crushed by that same difference in mana pressure, brute force flinging bricks, so to speak.

“You mean,” Anya raised a brow, thinking of one possibility, “the strength wasn’t his. It came from a Benediction?”

“That is the only way to explain it,” Lucia said.

That answer calmed them a little. At least the enemy was no longer unknown. They could not be certain which cult, but with no records of any other cult active in the City of Truth lately, the arrow pointed straight at the Witch Cult.

Shaking the blood from her blade, Lucia set out with Anya for the on-duty instructor’s office. They did not know whether that man was an exception, but the fact that he had bypassed Beast Spirit College’s magic array, the Truth Barrier, and entered was bizarre on its face.

They now suspected there was a secret tunnel on campus and that cultists were flowing through it into the grounds.

A moment later, dodging suspicious shapes along the way and carrying no lamps, they felt their way through the dark to Lingxi Hall, the closest building to the entrance. It was the college’s central court. Beside it stood the administration block, with the on-duty instructor’s office on the first floor.

The hall felt nothing like it had a few hours ago. Pillars and cast-iron lamps showed damage. The fountain’s statue had lost half its body. A few corpses lay slumped by the path, some Committee, some unknown outsiders. A huge four-legged furred beast sprawled in a collapsed wall, blood everywhere, clearly dead.

Keeping to the shadows, they crept to a window of the teachers’ office and rose on tiptoe to look in. Papers littered a wrecked room. The all-important alchemical handset was smashed to pieces. The instructor was nowhere to be seen. Given that his contract beast lay dead outside, even beginner practitioners like Lucia and Anya felt their unease sharpen.

“How did it come to this?” Anya drew back, her body trembling.

Beast Spirit College covered more ground than any of the Nine Divisions. With its pens, its footprint was almost the sum of the other eight colleges, which was why it sat on the district’s edge.

Their theory-building sector had not been deep, yet Lingxi Hall was still a decent distance away. With the roars masking sound, they only now realized that a battle had already swept through here.

Flami will be alright, won’t she, Anya thought, worried.

Lucia felt lost as well. When you met a problem you could not solve, the Committee’s fallback rule was to find a teacher. Now the instructor was missing and clearly in trouble. What next?

She was quiet a moment, then thought that there was still a “teacher” at home.

She was in District Nine, but if they found her, everything would be alright.

“We leave the college and get help,” Lucia decided.

There were public alchemical handsets outside. They could alert Committee HQ and have Palea wake Yvette.

Anya had no objection. She made a tense sound of assent. She was not particularly brave and her strength was not enough. In a moment like this, she would do what Lucia said.

They moved at once, still keeping to the shadows, edging toward the perimeter wall.

Nothing unexpected happened along the way. They glimpsed figures that did not belong to the Committee flicker through the campus, yet none spotted them.

Just as they reached the wall and put hands to climb, something went wrong. An invisible barrier rippled like water and stopped Lucia as she reached the top. Adjusting the Committee armband did nothing. Taking it off did nothing.

Both hearts sank. The Truth Barrier recognized Committee members automatically. Without the mark you could not enter at all. Now outsiders had entered the college and they, as Committee, could not leave. It was hard not to think that the array’s control core had changed hands.

Which meant they were fish in a barrel.

The whole of Beast Spirit College had become an island cut off from the world.

“Anya, wait here for me a moment. I am going to the Hall of Truth to look,” Lucia said after a pause.

Every division had a Hall of Truth, usually at the division’s center. It served two daily purposes, to venerate the statues of Founding Dean Rosalyn Sien and the Foundational Mentor, the Silver Witch, and to act as the Truth Barrier’s array core, the heart of the college’s security system.

Normally there was always a department chair or professor of Archmage level on duty there. They were the campus’s highest authority at midnight. The on-duty instructor had vanished, true, but there was no body. Likely he had gone to the Hall of Truth because of the barrier and was checking it now.

“No,” Anya objected at once. “That’s too dangerous. The instructor’s contract beast is dead and it was high-rank. If you go, you’re throwing your life away.”

Lucia fell silent. Anya was right. A high-rank contract beast was the equal of a five-thousand-mana practitioner and up. That gap in mana pressure could not be bridged by the multiplier on the witch’s combat arts alone. Lucia had only one thousand mana. Her stage lay in the future, not the now.

She still found it hard to accept. After a struggle, her violet eyes steadied. “There must still be people alive in the college. If everyone thinks the same way, a situation that could be salvaged will be lost.”

She drew a breath. “Even if we can do nothing, we should at least go see. I am a member of the Committee, after all.”

“You cannot. The Committee is not the Throw-Your-Life-Away Committee,” Anya snapped. “Are you hinting that I am a coward?”

“No, not at all. I did not mean that. I only meant we should at least scout the situation,” Lucia said, flustered, and shook her head.

Anya said nothing. Her delicate face took on a sidelong, angry look. After more than a minute, seeing the resolve in Lucia’s eyes, she pressed her lips together and softened. “Do what you want, but I am not going with you. I am not as strong as you, and I do not have your sense of duty. I only want to stay alive.” She did not add that she would only drag Lucia down.

“Someone should wait here anyway. If things go well and the barrier resets, you can be the first out to call for help,” Lucia said after a thought.

“Thanks for the consolation.”

“I mean it.”

Lucia disappeared quickly, swallowed by the dark trees. Anya stood where she was, watching her go with a complicated look, worry and annoyance in her eyes, and a hidden thread of admiration and yearning. She sighed, glanced around, and suddenly realized that cultists or other dangers could show up here as well. With Lucia gone, what would she do?

She could fight, but even the instructor’s contract beast was dead. If something happened, could she really protect herself?

Her face fell. She squatted down where she was and wormed into a clump of shrubs. If she had known, she would have shamelessly begged her sister not to go. Now that her thigh to cling to had left, what was she to do?

Would it be like last time, danger on a knife-edge and a terrifying, cool witch suddenly showing up to save her?

Dozens of kilometers from Beast Spirit College, on the roof of a row house in District One, a figure in an elegant purple gown stood steady, high heels planted on damp stone.

A woman wore a half silver mask that flashed coldly in the thin light. She looked out over the sleeping city streets, only a few windows still lit by night-owls. Then she tilted her head and looked at the sky.

Even through thick cloud she seemed to see what hung above the cover, the Sky Realm, an aerial garden floating there as it had for centuries.

She did not know how long she stood. She lowered her head, checked the time on the mechanical watch at her slender wrist, and turned to face another point in District One.

A smokestack like a giant tower stood there, venting white vapor into the sky day and night, a sight every resident of the district knew.

It was the City of Truth’s magitech supply hub. Because magitech carried a heavy fire element load, imbalance produced a light elemental pollution called heat radiation. The hub needed a foundry-like smokestack to dump heat with basic water cooling.

Rumor said that beneath the hub lay the Elemental Furnace, the very reason the Legendary Mage had chosen this site five hundred years ago to found the City of Truth.

When the time struck the hour, a deep toll rolled from a far clock tower and echoed over the night. The woman in the purple gown vanished from the roof, as if she had never stood there.

Blossom Street, Scholars’ Haven Apartments.

Yvette sat bolt upright from sleep, bleary eyes turning in a certain direction, mouth falling open in a yawn.

Something felt off, though she could not say what. After thinking a long while, she understood. Her link with Anya had been cut.

She had left only a very small shard of spirit in Anya. It was meant to scare her a little and collect information on a schedule, a way to keep watch. As Anya grew more and more well-behaved, Yvette had stopped recalling the shard for checks, keeping only the long-term link to lock onto her position.

Anya should be on duty at Beast Spirit College. Under normal circumstances that array did not sever her link. Something was different tonight.

She stretched lazily, that unquiet, out-of-tune feeling in her mind, and decided to go out and take a look.