“Is... Is he dead?” I asked, crouching down to poke Kanda’s inert body.
He is only sealed, Tomas replied in my mind. He will be unable to change form for a while, but he is perfectly healthy.
Looking closer, I could see that he was right. Kanda’s chest was rising and falling regularly, and he didn’t look injured. For all intents and purposes, he was sleeping in the middle of the field. I heaved a quiet sigh of relief and stood up once more. I was sure you were going to kill him for what he did to Matthias, even on accident.
Matthias is not dead. He will take a while to recover, but recover he will.
That reminds me. You owe me a lot of explanations when this is over.
“Kill him!” A voice shouted from a fair distance away.
Looking over, I could see Rictus Veridian, the Grand Reaper, pointing at me with a look of fury in his eyes. For a bewildered moment, I thought I’d heard him wrong. But as I saw Reapers charging forward into the field and the other apprentices falling back, I discounted that theory.
“What?” I stammered. “Why? What did I do?”
It’s me they’re after, Tomas said. I will not be able to possess you for another hour. Run!
I didn’t even think to question the order, but turned on my heel and ran full-tilt for the other end of the field. As fast as I was, I had no chance of outrunning my pursuers. The first Reaper, a tall bespectacled man with a huge axe, was in front of me in the blink of an eye, swinging his weapon down. I knew enough from my training that trying to parry an axe was suicide, so I tried to dodge. Unfortunately, he recovered at once and swung sideways.
The talisman I’d been given for the final event saved my life for the first strike. It flashed a bright blue color as the axe hit me, stopping me from being cut in half. Still, the force was enough to knock me off my feet, sending me flying for nearly ten feet, and the talisman curled into flames. Fear closing my throat, I scrambled back to my feet and tried to attack my would-be killer back.
I nearly connected, but another Reaper had launched his attack before I’d even regained my feet. A solid wall of aura, faster than I could hope to contend with, slammed into me and knocked me down again. The guy in front of me raised his axe, a look of fierce determination on his face. He didn’t care who I was or what the order to kill had meant, I realized. This was just work for him. The bronze edge of his axe began his descent.
A flash of light burst from the space between us, and the Reaper attacking me was pushed back. Bewildered, I looked around for my savior. Master Mikel had joined the rush of Reapers coming after me and had stopped that stroke from killing me. At his side, Marisha moved in a blur, her daggers out and ready to tear into her opponents.
Marisha hit the man with the power of a lunging panther, slamming her shoulder into his chest and knocking him prone. Surprised by the treacherous attack, he wasn’t able to muster his defense in time to stop her quick dagger slash. Even a novice like myself knew that was a lethal stroke. I turned my face from the still body, my stomach churning.
“Get up, Silas!” Mikel yelled, sending another Reaper flying with his bare hands. “You must flee!”
A dozen bursts of light formed in the air around him, sending a wave of Reapers flying back before they could even reach him. Pandemonium reigned over the battlefield now as more combatants entered the fray, unsure of where their enemies stood. The problem was that several of their number were attacking their comrades as Mikel had done.
Then Ivan and Tamotsu were there at my side, forming a literal wall of aura to block the Reapers from reaching me. I couldn’t make sense of any of it, and even more, Reapers were falling to Mikel and his students. One exception to this rule was Selena, who seemed to be opposed to Mikel. She saw the devastation that he, Tamotsu, and Ivan had caused, and his face changed from confusion, to fear, then to rage.
“Traitor!” she spat at Mikel. “You dare attack your comrades?”
“You don’t understand what is at stake, Selena!” Tamotsu shouted back. “Stand down, so that we do not have to harm you.”
“Never!” She howled, her staff appearing in her hand. “You will face your crimes!”
What began then was the fastest and most savage exchange of blows I’d ever witnessed, without a doubt. Selena spun her staff in a blur, sending a dozen flying balls of mana in our direction. Mikel took out most of them with more of his pulses, and Tamotsu cut the rest into nothing before they could make contact. Then Selena blinked forward, literally blinked. She appeared between Mikel and Tamotsu, her staff swinging out to strike the Japanese Master.
Ivan grabbed me and threw me several feet back, also jumping back to give Tamotsu room. He intercepted a flurry of strikes from Selena with his curved blade, then knocked her back with one of Mikel’s pulses. Undaunted, Selena sprang to the attack again, her weapon too fast for the eye to see. Metal sparked against metal as she and Tamotsu exchanged strikes, sparks lighting the area around them.
“Go, Silas!” Ivan shouted. “If we fall, we can come back. If you fall, it’s over!”
I stood on shaky legs and lifted my weapon, wanting to defend Tamotsu, but he pushed me again. “Go!”
I finally started to move, running as fast as I could again. I ducked low as a bolt of electricity flashed over my head, splintering a tree into a thousand pieces. I didn’t even bother to see who had sent it, trusting the others to hold the Reapers off. I even put more aura into my legs to boost my flight, hoping that nothing was able to reach me. Before I knew it, I’d reached the Chena river that surrounded the forest on all sides, and I was jumping over it to safety.
Kanda and Matthias were lying behind me as if dead, and so many more were also truly down. It may not have been me who’d killed them, but it was obviously my fault. Worst of all, I didn’t even know what had gone wrong. My mind swirled with doubts, fears, and misgivings as I continued to run. I kept moving my legs until exhaustion took me over, several miles away from the Crucible site, where I finally collapsed onto a fallen tree, my chest heaving and shifting back into my human form.
I am truly sorry for putting you through all this.
I ignored Tomas, staring down at my hands with wide eyes as if expecting to see them coated in blood. They were as clean as before, of course, but my stomach still turned as I thought about the bloodshed far behind me. It all finally became too much, and I turned my head and threw up.
I vomited until there was nothing left in my body, eventually dry-heaving for several minutes until I collapsed on the other side of the log. The ground was freezing cold this late in the evening, which helped steady me a little. Where had the time gone? When the game had started, it was only noon. How had it gotten dark so fast?
Silas. Tomas’s voice was full of sorrow and sympathy.
“Shut up,” I said, shocked at how shaky my voice sounded. “Don’t talk to me.”
He didn’t leave me, but stayed there, in the back of my mind, watching over me as I shivered on the ground. My clothes were plastered to my body with sweat despite my minimal movement, and my good coat was coated with dirt and leaves. This didn’t matter to me at all at the moment. I closed my eyes in the vague hope of getting rid of the vision of violence in the clearing, but this was no better than having them open.
I had no way of knowing how long I stayed there, shivering uncontrollably and fighting with my own thoughts. Tomas didn’t try to speak to me, letting me suffer in silence. Eventually, though, I felt him move in closer. He gently nudged me to the side, taking control of my body and forcing me to stand. I didn’t even have the energy to fight him as he started walking again. I just floated there, a passive and uninterested spectator to the world around me.
Tomas led me on a wide roundabout trail through the forest, wending between the trees until we came back to the river. He followed it downstream for a while, until he came to a small fishing shack, encountering nobody, neither normal human nor Reaper. I closed myself off, only vaguely aware of him muttering something. When I became aware of our surroundings once more, we were standing in front of a handsome manor house with dark windows.
Where are we? I mustered with a tired air.
“We are at my home,” Tomas said. He even sounded exactly like me. “My home in the Gray Plane. You need rest. Then I will explain everything. For now, sleep.”
He went inside and into the master bedroom then, crawling into a huge soft bed. He returned my body to me then, and despite my tense nerves and spinning head, I felt my eyelids drop at once and fell into a deep sleep.
