Lucas had his left hand stuck in his shoulder pouch while his right held up his book like a flimsy shield when the mage entered the room. The man was younger than he would have thought, but he wore the same dark robes that the other mage had worn on the night of his arrest. 

Does that mean it's the same guy or that they’re part of the same order? Lucas wondered. He didn’t have answers. 

Wizards did wizard things, and the rest of the world simply tried to adjust. During his time in Lordanin, he’d seen red robes, blue robes, and black robes. He didn’t know what any of it meant, but he wouldn’t be surprised if they had something to do with rank or purpose. 

None of that mattered right now. All that mattered was that the young man who was looking at him with a wand in hand had an obvious chip on his shoulder, and when he opened his mouth, Lucas could barely resist the urge to punch him in the face, even if it meant getting stabbed. 

“Do you have any idea how long you’ve made me wait, peasant?” the weasel-faced mage asked in a tone so nasal that it was begging for a wedgie at a minimum. “I’ve been forced to wait here for weeks when my best spells failed to find you anywhere in this awful city. Come now, apologize to your betters, and perhaps I will deliver you to the Prince with all of your… appendages intact.”

Lucas had the feeling that the man wasn’t referring to his fingers with that strange comment, but he ignored it anyway. Too much thinking about what a weirdo like this did or did not mean was bad for your health. 

“Whoa!” Lucas yelled. “Why don’t you put the spell down, and we can talk this out. I’m not the guy you’re looking for!”

The dagger twitched as the mage pursed his lips in annoyance. “Not the right man?” he laughed. You think you can lie to a man that’s holding a spell locked to your very existence?”

With the man’s final word, the weapon shot forward with blinding speed. Rather than embedding in Lucas’s eye socket, though, it merely sliced his cheek before orbiting the back of his head and scoring another shallow slash down his left arm before returning to its original spot, floating between the two men. 

“You should know that right now, all this simple little spell wants to do is return to its owner. It wants to embed itself in your heart, and I’m the only one keeping you from bleeding out. Do you understand?” the mage asked, in a tone that dripped with so much superiority that Lucas could have taken another few cuts for the chance to punch the man in the mouth. “Now you’re going to apologize for being a stupid little worm, and then you and me are going to walk to the district guard post so that they can take you to the castle. I hear that the Prince is positively desperate to talk with you.”

A dozen different thoughts flashed through Lucas’s mind at that moment. How he didn’t want to die and the fact that this miserable mage scared him more than that giant spider was right near the top of the list, but nothing topped his certainty that he would never go back to that fucking palace. He’d heard the way that they treated their other prisoners, and he’d rather die here and now with a knife through the heart than spend days getting tortured for his secrets. 

It’s not like he had a lot he could tell them anyway. I have these little windows that pop up whenever I see a potion or a reagent. No, I’m not crazy. It wasn’t exactly a skill he could transfer. The way that the mage seemed to look at the empty air now and then as he looked at Lucas indicated that his magic might operate in some similar way, but honestly, he couldn't care less how this asshole’s magic worked. He just wanted to get away. 

“I’m very sorry,” Lucas started, holding his breath for a moment. He readied himself for what came next while he watched the mage’s smile brighten. “...that you’re such a prick!”

As he spoke, he pulled his hand free from his pouch and etched the man’s look of consternation deeply into his mind. He threw the vial in his hand on the floor, smashing it to bits. 

Noxious Potion of Camouflage (1 dose): Create 30 cubic feet of choking smoke for 10 seconds. 10% chance of nausea. 

Lucas barely had time to flash the asshole a grin before the whole room was filled with white, noxious smoke. There was no fire or anything. He hadn’t gotten around to trying his hand at fireworks, but he’d made this little gem by accident once upon a time when he’d been trying to make a potion of natural armor. 

Instead, he’d discovered that stinkweed was not in any way appropriate to replace bog Lilly. Instead of making the potion his client had asked for, he learned that a combination of pulverized stink weeds, alcohol, and salt produced a stink bomb big enough to clear a room and make vision impossible for at least a few seconds while the cloud billowed out. 

The white billowing clouds wouldn’t last long, but hopefully, it was enough for what was going to come next as he braced his book in front of his chest. Hopefully, that asshole meant heart literally instead of figuratively, or this is going to be the shortest escape on record. 

He didn’t have to wait long, at least. A moment later, he had his answer, as the book he was holding shuddered under the impact, and the knife pierced it all the way to the hilt. 

The blow was so strong that, for a moment, it drove Lucas back against the wall, and he struggled to keep the recipe book from impaling him. Of all the times not to have a fucking strength potion, he thought as he struggled. 

In the end, it was only the embarrassment of dying this way that gave him the strength to push free. As the smoke started to fade, Lucas took three steps forward and clocked the mage hard with the spine of his ledger, sending the wiry young man to the floor. 

“Not so tough without a knife to my throat, are you?” Lucas taunted. He regretted it almost immediately, though, because the mage leveled his wand at him. 

Lucas kicked the mage’s arm just as he yelled out, “Vertenbraserria Karatethimusium!” 

Lucas felt the air gust by him like he’d been standing a little too close to a train as the wall behind him disappeared. Disappeared might have been too strong a word. It violently exploded, pelting the building on the other side of the street with bricks and sending debris everywhere into the back alley. It also removed a key structural support, and the whole structure around them shuddered. 

Lucas ran out of the hole in the wall like a shot. The mage might strike him dead before he could get out of the young man’s line of sight, but the building would certainly crush him if it fell down on top of them. 

The mage had time to yell, “Vertenhavalia—” and then whatever else he’d planned to cast died with him as the three stories of rubble fell down on top of him, silencing whatever his last words were. 

Lucas practically collide with the far wall before he managed to turn right and run down the alley as the building continued to collapse behind him, sending up a wall of dust and debris. At the end of the alley, he paused to catch his breath. It was there that he realized that the dagger that was impaled in his journal was still writhing and trying desperately to stab Lucas. 

“That motherfucker is still breathing?” he asked, unbelievingly, as he watched the dagger writhe. He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe it. Even as the pulverized dust billowed, he stood there baffled. “There’s no way. This shit has to be enchanted or something because—”

Somewhere behind him, there was an explosion, which was exactly the sort of sound that Lucas would expect to hear if a mage was throwing a cosmic sort of temper tantrum in an attempt to dig his way out of his own grave. He didn’t delay after that. He ran down different streets, one after another, turning from thoroughfare to alley and back again. 

He wasn’t aiming for a specific place. Away was the only destination that mattered for the next five minutes. People looked at him like he was a crazy person as he passed them. 

Lucas didn’t blame them. He was covered in dust and bleeding, and to top it off, he was holding a book out in front of him like it was a bomb or something. 

It was only after he took a break that he realized the dagger was no longer struggling against his grip. He stood there for a moment, fearing some kind of trap, before everything finally clicked. 

“Oh, I finally made it out of range,” he said dumbly as he looked at the thing. 

He had no idea if that was enough to cancel the spell or if the thing would return to life as soon as the mage got close enough to him once more. He wasn’t about to find out, though. He took the thing out of his book and jammed it into a crack in the wall of the alley he was resting in and then kicked it repeatedly with his boot until his foot was aching and it was so wedged between the stone and the wood that someone would need an axe to get back out. 

Only then did he relax and try to calm himself up a little bit. “Man, Gerwin is going to kill me when he sees what I did to his shirt,” Lucas sighed as he washed his face in a rain barrel. Once that was done, he popped his healing potion and watched his wounds evaporate. After that, he scrubbed his shirt in the barrel to get rid of the worst of the stains, and then he tried to figure out where he was. 

It only took a few minutes of looking at the street signs to realize he’d run practically to the harbor. Lucas took the next twenty minutes, taking the long way around back to the stables that held his donkey on the street of hammers. He had to cross the river twice, but it was worth it to avoid the mere chance that he’d run across that damn mage again. 

Both the guard and the stable boy looked at him funny when he showed up looking like shit, but Lucas ignored their stares before finally saying, “What? Someone tries to roll you; you gotta kick their ass, right?”

That at least got a nod of recognition. These simple bastards only really recognized force as a means of resolving conflict.  

“You won, though, right?” the guard asked. 

“You’re god damned right I did,” Lucas growled as he walked past them. Of course, he won. He was going to keep on winning, too, and he wasn’t going to let the gangs or the mages stop him from getting what was his.