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Arcanist - Chapter 109
🕑 Added 2025-05-30 12:39:40 +0000 UTCWarm air splashed hard against his face. Lights gleamed painfully bright all around him. Golden lights. Stabbing lights. Lights meant to kill rather than illuminate. The hymn of the Priests echoed deep in his ears.
Valens’s chest rose in the heat of it, crawling and creeping chills over his back. He cast his gaze around and saw young faces there, by the giant gate of the Golden Cathedral, peering with questions in their eyes toward their group.
Screams tore through his ears. Wailing cries of men and women against the backdrop of a giant horde. Up high in the air, a pair of great wings supported a mighty man’s weight as the Bishop faced the incoming blasts of dozens of spells all by himself. Green fog washed off over him as each spell battered his already bruised form.
Down near Valens, four figures had ripped a path open for themselves in the undead horde and were now drawing back as groups of people rushed toward them. Normal men, with eyes crimson and disturbingly blank, minds resting in a lull that hampered their thinking. A gaze at them told Valens that these people weren’t aware.
They didn’t know.
They came at the Templars with nothing but their hands and feet.
[You have felt the presence of a Divine.]
The light motes hovering in the air like little mischievous fireflies got drawn toward him. He felt in each of them a speck of the Bishop’s divine aura, boring down on him, forcing itself over his shoulders like boulders of rock.
[Divines have no authority upon an Ancient’s soul.]
Then the pressure was gone, and Valens sucked a sharp breath while taking in the situation of his companions. Celme looked lost. Confused, with fingers lingering hesitantly around the handle of her weapon. Nomad was staring across the endless horde, but his unnatural eyes lacked focus.
They’re sending humans against the Church while the undead and Shifters stand to the back, waiting.
The side of his face twitched when he breathed in the thick stench of blood. Priests were attending the wounded young men by the gate, pouring their lifemana over wounds bigger than his fist. It would take weeks for those young disciples to even walk, let alone return to the battle now.
Weeks and likely months, which didn’t seem all too efficient.
What do I do?
Ghostly pain in his chest. Decisions here and decisions there. Someone had to make them. Leave the young men alone, and they would die a pointless death. Attend them one by one, then he’d be risking an apocalypse.
Where was that damn woman, anyway? Inside the fog, was she? Had she already crept into the Cathedral, perhaps?
The boundaries can’t stop her. If she has an Ancient’s blood in her, nothing in this Church can stop her.
“Order!” Nomad growled all of a sudden, one hand stretched out toward the wavering lines of young disciples of the Church. He strode off with his sword raised and eyes squinted in fury. “Man the lines! The lines! Order!”
His attempt at working up something of an order across the confused lines was met with equally confused looks from hundreds of young men and women. Who is this man, those eyes seemed to say, Is he mad that he started yelling all of a sudden?
“I’ve dealt with young pups before,” Nomad said, voice rasping as he looked down upon them, then turned slowly to Valens. “The siege is too wide, but they’re focusing on the main gate. I see the Templars are deep in the lines, and drawing back. Can’t do that here. Not when you have men looking up to you.”
“They’re sending people against them!” Celme argued, staring wide-eyed at the Templars. Four men of unwavering will, but other than deflecting the senseless people back with occasional blows, they did nothing to stop this madness. “What would you have them do? Kill the people in front of their sons? Daughters? Cousins? They have—”
“Family don’t mean shit when they’re all dead and buried under the same pile, woman!” Nomad growled at her. “Ask any dead man around, they would prefer their sons and daughters to live than share the same damned fate. You get dealt with a horde of mindless people, then you teach them how to be sane about it. Hesitation will only make matters worse.”
A stray man came stumbling from the tide, through a number of disciples who stared, muted at him, nearly buckled down on his own knees, only to push forward, bloody fingers raised as though they were claws. He managed to find his way to their little group, frothing at the mouth, coming at Valens with nothing in his eyes.
This…
Valens froze. The man looked so weak, so brittle that even the heat from an Inferno would be enough to melt his skin and bones. Send him sleeping in a pile of ashes. That’d give him some peace. That’d be the cruel, but fast way of doing it.
Instead, Valens lunged in and reached for the Gravitating Earth, pinned the man’s legs down to the ground as earth answered his call. Another pair of limbs jutted out from the stone and wrapped themselves around the man’s arms, leaving him completely still.
“This will sting a little,” he said for courtesy before placing a hand on his forehead. The man tried to bite, to chop a piece of him with his teeth, but he was nothing more than a rabid dog caged in steely confines now.
Nomad and Celme moved in beside him. The disciples, through a mutual understanding, established a tight circle around them with Nomad at the helm. The newly-fitted undead had a different air about him now. A sense of control, a feeling of confidence. It took him another string of orders before the young pups of the Church became his in the din. They looked at him expectantly in the eye as if they had finally found something to lean their back against.
Let me get the hang of this. How’s the fog taking control of you?
Lifeward, in. Valens focused on his sound vision as the frequencies of the man’s body painted a picture in his mind. The lungs and the liver. The limbs and the veins. The heart and the mind. All looking normal. All seemingly in place, as they should be.
But Valens knew that the Damned used insidious methods to take control. They didn’t care much for a person’s body. No, what they sought was the soul, hidden inside the chest cavity, resting beyond an ethereal Gate that hid the core.
When he seeped into the man’s cavity, a Hexsurge opened the Gate with little effort, the simple structure creaking gently and revealing the man’s soul beyond.
[You have arrived at the Spiritum.]
There was mist everywhere. It spilled from the Gate into the man’s body, and Valens felt its chill through the Lifeward like a poison meant for the mind. He resisted the sensation as he dug deep, and before long he came across a pitiful soul being choked in the midst of this strange sight.
A man’s soul fighting a losing battle against the mist.
How could anyone do anything against this?
Valens could, and he did, by sending his Lifesurges drilling into the fog. They hissed against his touch. Churned dangerously as the disturbance grew in their midst. Life poured into the Spiritum’s endless reaches and ate away the fog, the confusion, the merciless attempt at taking a man’s mind away.
He hated it. Hated with passion that forces in this world had the habit of depriving a man of his own free will. Made puppets out of them. The undead and these pitiful fools. They were all the same, suffering from a terrifying practice that seemed prevalent in all higher life forms.
It just so happened that Valens proved the cure for them. Funny how it all turned out. Started in the Necromancer’s Rift lost and alone, then warped into an effort of becoming a Warmage to claim his fate. Through the twists and the changes, and Valens now stared at his own hands, playing the Healer again.
Perhaps, he rather thought, this world needed not another warmongering Mage. Perhaps, he felt, there was some sense in the name of his Trial and his Class.
That was what it told him, wasn’t it?
The Trial of the Arcane Healer.
Well, good thing he could be both the Healer and a Mage whenever he wanted.
He swept the mist choking the man with masterful precision. Tendrils of it scampered back in fear, fluttering away into the distance, vanishing in the endless reaches of the Spiritum, leaving the man’s soul alone.
Valens removed the Lifeward and blinked down at him, got stared back at by a pair of shocked eyes.
“You’re still alive,” he said to the man, a middle-aged man dressed in an old suit. Who knew how his day started out? Out for another day of relentless work, likely braving the hard times to earn a living. He should’ve been lauded, praised for his efforts, not turned into a mindless slave used in a shady plot of some faraway being.
“I-I—” the man stuttered, staring at his hands, looking like a fish out of a bloody ocean. He didn’t know what to do with himself, Valens could tell.
“Take him,” he said to a young man standing behind him—a Pretrial disciple of the Church, one of the members of the Brotherhood. He’d grow into a Templar in the future. “He is harmless. Take him somewhere safe.”
The young man nodded as he sheathed his sword clumsily and reached for the middle-aged man, took him by the arm and dragged him to the main gate, vanished in the crowd in no time.
That’s one.
Valens nodded, turning slowly to face the sight ahead. He’d saved a man from the pile, but there across the undead horde were hundreds—thousands—of them waiting. He couldn’t go through them one by one. He couldn’t save everyone.
Not until he dealt with the real reason behind it all.
“We have to go inside,” he muttered, Celme frowning at him while Nomad was busy ordering around the young disciples who wore the golden armor resembling the Templars’. The quality wasn’t there, but it gave them a sense of unity, a sight of synergy, and Nomad stuck out like a sore thumb between them with that new, baby-soft skin of his.
His sword betrayed his appearance, however, as he crushed an Undead Soldier with a move, moved in and crushed its skull with the pommel of the weapon, turned it round so that all the disciples could see it. Then came another one, lunging overhead with a mighty leap, a jagged sword stabbing with furious speed. Nomad tapped the weapon’s tip with his own, stepped sideways, and caught the undead by the back of his armor, plastering him flat across the ground.
Done, just like that.
“Healer!” came a voice from the din, Valens’s skin prickling as he raised his chin and peered into the approaching golden lights. Inside the golden shroud, he felt familiar frequencies, clad in the robust armor of the Blessed Father and holding swords alive with golden flames.
“Captain!” Valens called out to them as Celme shifted uncomfortably beside him. He gave her a look that told her she had nothing to worry about while the disciples moved with their shields to protect the Templars’ flank.
Valens immediately rushed toward them, heart thumping in his chest. A cursory glance across the four of them showed him a grim result. Armors were dented, breached in some places, and blood trickled out and dried over their shining surfaces. Mas got the worst of it, with a hole around the side of his torso that still bled profusely.
“Take a knee,” Valens told him as they exchanged glances with the Captain. Garran and Dain stood silent to the side, swords clasped in ready grips.
“I don’t need some heretic—”
Valens didn’t even see it, but when he blinked, Mas had already buckled down to the ground, holding the back of his helmet as the Captain loomed over him.
“Do it,” Captain Edric said firmly, which proved enough for Mas as he stood silent, letting Valens deal with the wound.
“Who is that guy?” Garran questioned meanwhile, pointing a finger to Nomad, who was out there ordering the disciples. “Dain, you’re seeing him?”
“Uh,” Dain grunted.
“Captain, that man’s leading the youngsters. Doing a fine job of it, I admit, but can’t have a stranger go rogue in our battle, right? I’ll go take—”
“Let him,” Valens said, managing the last stitch underneath Mas’s armor, refusing to hear the bigot’s grunts and grumblings. That earned him a glance from the Captain, who had removed his helmet. “Something is wrong inside the Cathedral, Captain. We should go in. The undead army and those beasts, even the people they’re sending against us… These are all distractions.”
“What distractions?” Captain Edric frowned. “Explain yourself.”
“It’s the fog,” Valens said. “It’s taken people captive, and it’s not doing it by itself. Someone is behind this. Someone who belongs to a particular family line.”
“The Evercrest Family,” the Captain’s face grimaced.
Valens blinked. “You know?”
“I do now,” the Captain said. “There can’t be another explanation. The Chimeric Order only listens to the commands of the Evercrest Family, but whoever’s leading them should be behind the lines, waiting for their army to wear us down. We’ve already sent a signal to the Broken Lands. Help is on the way, and once it’s here, we’ll sweep Belgrave clean of these creatures.”
He doesn’t know… That damn woman isn’t here to take over the Church—she’s here to start the apocalypse!
“I’m afraid if we wait for the help to arrive, it’d be too late,” Valens said, picking himself up to his feet. “I think the fog has already seeped inside the Cathedral.”
“Captain, let me teach this heretic—”
“Shut your damn mouth!” Valens jabbed with a thick finger into Mas’s face the moment he opened his rotten mouth. Flames flared alive over his fingers as he stared at him. “This isn’t the time to spout your nonsense. I’m telling you that a member of that Ancient Family is inside the Cathedral, digging deep through the floors, trying to open—”
“Open what?” the Captain demanded while Mas glared down at him.
“Open the Gate of the Core Dungeon,” Valens finished with difficulty. “She’s going to bring Broken Lands to this place. The Necromancer’s Rift, the Brackley mines and the Weeping Horror, those murders, the rituals Jack taught to those women, the fog that never leaves this city alone… Everything has been a part of her plan. This has been her purpose all along. This has—”
A shrill cry exploded across the sky. The golden lights spattered over the clouds began slowly condensing on a single point. The Resonance changed as Valens froze against the sudden rush of frequencies. The giant eye in the sky swiveled against the movement, turning to face the point where the golden motes of light formed the outline of a hand.
“Blessed Father,” Mas muttered, his eyes gleaming with golden lights. “Salvation has come. He will save us.”
The Captain’s eyes gained that same hue after a moment, and before Valens knew it, the other Templars and even the disciples were all sparkling with lights.
That hand…
The mere sight of it was suffocating, but Valens managed to pull himself out of it and gazed demandingly at the Captain.
He looked troubled. Confused, likely, since he didn’t expect Valens to know the existence of that Gate. But this wasn’t the time for questions and answers.
“Go,” the Captain said finally, waving a hand at him. “Take Garran and Dain. Meet up with Lenora by the cells. She knows the way. She could lead you down.”
“This…” Mas muttered, turning to face them. There in his eyes were words he wanted to mutter, things he wanted to say, but just as he was about to talk, his hand went to the hole opened around the side of his armor. He felt the skin there, looking soft without any blemishes. He searched Valens’s eyes, then kept his silence.
Valens nodded with strength, then took Selin and Celme with him as he made to the main gate. Dain and Garran followed them closely. Before Valens reached the entrance, he crossed eyes with Nomad.
I’m not letting you go this time.
He gave him a look that demanded his presence, and this time, the undead obliged, pulling himself out of the chaos and closer to their new group.
Odd group.
But then, there was nothing normal about this whole situation.
……
