Lillene

Enjoy!

Serenity triggered the mini-wand, then dropped it back into a pocket. He’d fish it out later and spend the time to re-infuse the spell. For now, he hurried forward, triggered his footwraps, and slid around the corner quickly. A snake lunged at him as he turned but didn’t expect him to be able to curve while he was in the air; it caught a live manablade to the face instead of his shoulder.

Two more snakes came from the opposite direction, but Serenity pushed the entire area with the spell and knocked them into the wall. It was draining, but he had the mana capacity to support the drain. 

He jumped up as another snake tried to strike him, clearing the snake’s height easily and bisecting it as it moved past him. It was roughly Tier Two, like the others; plenty to be threatening to the guards but not enough to really handle Serenity. It did mean that the beastmaster was almost certainly Tier Three; this was more snakes than someone usually had the Skills to manage at the same Tier, but a Tier down would make a big difference. Tier Four or Five would make even more sense but, despite his own progress, Serenity had a hard time believing many people were that high after less than two years.

Was that enough fancy maneuvers to sell the persona? Serenity hoped so; he had another six snakes to kill and while he’d finally cleared the corner, two were on one side of him and four were on the other. Only two at a time could attack from each side, but that was still three more snakes than he wanted to fight at once.

The two that were unsupported were the pair he’d already slammed into the wall once, so he did it again as the other pair tried to catch him. Serenity just kept moving; he wanted to get past the two he’d just dazed again.

One of the two snakes was a bit less dazed than the others; it managed to snap at Serenity as he went past. It caught his arm and slammed its fangs into him. 

Serenity was certain it expected to pump venom into him with the strike, but it caught the arm of the robe instead of his unprotected skin. One of the snake’s fangs actually snapped; Serenity hadn’t expected it to be quite that effective. It must have hit at exactly the wrong angle.

Then Serenity was past them. 

With snakes only able to approach from one direction, the fight went from a true combat to little more than butchery. Serenity still had to be careful, of course; a wrong move could still get him hurt.

He didn’t make a wrong move.

The entire fight didn’t last long; no more than five or six minutes passed from when he ran into the first two snakes in the hall to when the third-to-last snake in the cross-corridor fell. Serenity expected the last two snakes to come after him, but they hung back. 

They were clearly in communication with the beastmaster; he must have told them to hang back. On the other hand, he was now well outside the range of anyone else’s notice; the only person who would see if Serenity broke his cover as Tom Cooper was the beastmaster, and Serenity really wasn’t worried about that. It wasn’t likely anyone would believe the beastmaster’s word that Serenity wasn’t there if the official story was that both Tom and Serenity captured him. That ought to cover any mistakes Serenity made.

Serenity decided it was time to take the easy way out and threw a Death Magebolt at the farther snake. It didn’t have time to evade it and simply fell where it was. 

Before he could launch another, the snake dodged around the corner. Unfortunately for the snake, it was the same corner Serenity had come from; the sound of gunfire told Serenity that it would be the last mistake the snake made.

Admittedly, it was probably the beastmaster’s mistake, rather than the snake’s. The snake still paid for it.

Serenity checked around himself; there was no sign of any more large snakes. There were some smaller creatures that had been hidden by the presence of the snakes; they were lower Tier than even the snakes as well as being far smaller. 

Serenity was certain that some of them, probably all of them, were natural creatures that had moved in over the past few months; despite all the efforts to keep A’Atla relatively pristine, small creatures were still making it onto the island. Even more importantly, A’Atla itself seemed to be adding creatures; it was apparently very important to have the right bugs in the soil, for example, and A’Atla was clearly programmed to manage that along with removing excess salt and adding plants.

The beastmaster might or might not be able to see through their eyes; it depended on the Skills he had. Serenity didn’t want to kill them to prevent being seen. It helped his preferred option that killing them wouldn’t help too much; unless he killed everything small in his aura, the beastmaster would be able to track where he was by where he couldn’t see.

If he had the correct set of Skills, at least. Serenity would just have to hope that he didn’t. He did seem to know that his beasts were dead; Serenity wasn’t about to credit coincidence when the beastmaster started running through A’Atla’s tunnels less than a minute after the snakes died.

Serenity directed his mind towards what he could control instead of what he couldn’t.

It was a good thing Serenity had access to a map of A’Atla’s interior. While he could find the beastmaster with his aura, it didn’t tell him how to get to the man or his giant snake. Even better, with the map he could arrange to approach the beastmaster from behind and cut off any chance of a retreat to the surface. It took longer to work his way around, but the chance to cut off the beastmaster from help was worth it.

The largest concern was that the beastmaster might try to get away. 

Serenity was able to track the beastmaster and it seemed like the beastmaster could do the same, probably with the small creatures Serenity decided to leave alive, because he wasn’t running towards the exit he had to have come in by. Instead, he seemed to be running away from Serenity, but without the ability to open doors he kept running into dead ends.

It was almost funny, in a way. Serenity suspected that it would have actually been funny if it were a little less serious; as it was, it was more of a relief that the beastmaster wasn’t escaping. It became a game of cat-and-mouse where both participants could see each other but only one could see the area they were in. It took a while, but it was fairly straightforward to pin the beastmaster into a blocked-off area. Serenity couldn’t quite predict which room the fight would be in, but he could make certain it would be only him, the beastmaster, and his beast.

That meant it was time to plan for the fight. Serenity could only feel two presences; he was assuming they were the beastmaster and another snake, but he had to remember he could be wrong. In many ways, another snake would be the worst answer; he’d already used up the easiest tool he had to control a fight.

The mini-wand was only good for one evocation of the spell, so it was a very good thing that the spell itself lasted for a while and could be directed repeatedly. It was too bad, however, that “a while” was measured in minutes and not very many of them. It was enough to make handling the snakes one at a time easy, at least, but it wasn’t going to last long enough for him to reach the beastmaster.

It was also too bad that Serenity didn’t have a second one. As much as he wanted to have more, he was already spending over an hour every day infusing spells. There was a balance between being prepared and having time to do other things, so he’d settled on a wide variety of spells instead of several of the same spell.

The best option he had available for this fight was probably his Quickness and Slowness spells. They were still not that much of a boost, but when he combined them with his naturally higher attributes from his tier and the fact that he was trained to fight and had far more experience than the beastmaster, he didn’t think there was much question of the outcome. 

Even so, he pulled out a couple of other mini-wands with harmful spells on them and put them where he’d be able to reach them quickly; they’d be his emergency backup. He’d use his Skills as well, but the infused spells had a large advantage: they were infused as Tier Eight spells. If he really had to kill something, they’d do it.

Serenity caught up to the beastmaster in a large room that strongly resembled the one he’d found his parents in when he first arrived on A’Atla. It was also empty with a rocklike spire at the center. The largest difference was that there were five doors that led out of the room instead of one.

Naturally, only one was open and it was the only one that the beastmaster could get through. He was trapped.

The beastmaster wasn’t the first presence Serenity saw when he entered the room. Instead, he saw a giant hound with tightly-wound wiry fur.

No, that wasn’t a hound. It wasn’t the giant badger that it resembled more than a hound, either; that was a Demon of Wrath. A Demon of Wrath under an illusion of some sort, if he had to guess; the image of the wiry-haired dog seemed to flicker over the demon even though it wasn’t convincing for more than a moment. 

Serenity suspected that he’d broken the illusion as much because of his own tie to Wrath Demons as because of his better senses, though his senses undoubtedly helped. Now that he was close enough, though, he could feel the presence of the Wrath Demon plucking at his self control, pushing him to shift into his matching form. 

He would enjoy matching himself against the small Wrath Demon; more than that, it would let the young Wrath Demon measure himself against someone Greater than he was. It was a good test for a young Wrath Demon like this one, to see how far he’d come from the near-mindless Lesser Wrath Demon that threw itself straight at everything.

Serenity kept a firm grasp on both his temper and his form. Shifting definitely wouldn’t help matters here. It would make it almost impossible to get information out of the beastmaster, especially if the man managed to piss him off as much as Serenity suspected he was about to. At least in his “Tom Cooper” disguise Serenity wouldn’t accidentally eat him.

Serenity had a moment of self-doubt; could the giant snakes also have been demons of some sort? 

He couldn’t entirely dismiss the possibility, but Serenity doubted it. Not only had he not felt any oddness from them, they both looked and acted like giant snakes. Demons tended to not be quite so natural-looking. Yes, the snakes were too large, but that was the only weirdness about them. They were monsters; that alone was enough to explain their size, though not where the beastmaster had gotten them.

The beastmaster himself didn’t look like someone who would have a demon as a “trained beast.” In fact, he didn’t look like a beastmaster at all. He was dark haired, pale skinned, and short, probably barely over five feet tall. He was dressed in clothing that was clearly enchanted; Serenity could see the magic emanating from the dress that he’d probably insist was a robe. 

He was also just standing there staring at Serenity.

Serenity chuckled. There was really only one way this made sense on modern-day Earth. “You’re a summoner, I assume?”

The summoner looked surprised at the question. “You’re not going to ask me why I’m here or how I’m planning to get out of this?”

Serenity shrugged. “I don’t see much point in that. Other people will ask those questions if I leave you alive, so I figured I’d ask the question I actually care about.”

Serenity hadn’t meant to be quite that threatening. He was apparently a little on edge because of the presence of another Demon of Wrath. It was probably fine; the summoner was an enemy, after all.

Lillene

The best way to survive a hostile encounter with Serenity (other than just not starting one, of course) is to get him talking.

Not that the summoner knows that. If he did … he might well not have been allowed to talk.