Ocfort’s runic Gamidalr tattoos had begun glowing in an eerie crimson and black light, burning like a fire and causing my magical barrier to deteriorate. The spell I’d cast to stop time within this finite area was already fading with each passing minute. I continued to stand in one place, and sure, I considered it might be interesting to see how long it would take for Ocfort to render this spell null, but that could take too long.
Looking back and forth between the throng of men, members of this deranged cult, my eyes surveyed the massive cathedral-like room made of stone hidden deep within a cliffside cave as I was devising my attack strategy in my head.
But my thoughts were interrupted by Joycie’s voice trembling with fear behind me as she suddenly asked me, “Um, excuse me, but… uh…” She sounded like she was dreading what she was about to say.
I looked back at her to see she was fidgeting with her fingers and evading eye contact once she saw my turn my head around. “Come now. You must not be afraid to speak your mind.” I told her this advice firmly. “Go on. Out with it.”
“I-I’m sorry, but, can you really beat all these men in a fight by yourself?”
I laughed out loud. “Haha! I have had more than enough people in the past question my abilities, but I suppose since we just met, it is understandable.”
“That’s not what I mean!” Joycie fretted as she balled her hands into fists and shut her eyes tightly. “You’re at a horrible disadvantage here! How can you be so confident that you’ll win?! You could seriously die! And you said you’d save me, how can you possibly hope to do that when it’s fifty against one?!”
That was when it donned on me. “Hmmmmm…” I contemplated as I lifted one hand to the back of my head and scratched it. What if these cult members try to take Joycie as a hostage, or worse, kill her while I am distracted by the fight? I had already promised to save her, and I never go back on my word, especially to a fair, innocent lass such as her.
But then I got an idea. I approached Joycie and then, in one swift motion, crouched down at her side, reached my left arm out, and pulled her body closer to mine. She was getting flustered, I could tell. Her body heat was rising and her cheeks were blushing bright tomato red. All at once, I stood up, picking her up off the ground, carrying her with my arm wrapped around her abdomen. Her legs and arms flopped downward, and she made a surprised “WAAAAAAHH!” sound as she got lifted.
She looked up at me, and I knew what she was going to ask, but I interrupted her first, “This will be the easiest way to assure your safety during the fight. Well, at least, it is the best I can think of on the fly.”
She was about to say something, but that was when Ocfort’s runic tattoos extinguished my time barrier spell at last. The cult members who were all frozen in time began to move again, screaming a warrior’s cry. They raised their weapons—swords, spears, sickles, and all—ready to slice me up. But I was already prepared for them.
The first few men that came at me slashed their blades at me, but I dodged every strike, shuffling my feet and zigzagging across the floor. I also ensured that none of them laid a single finger or a sword on Joycie, and the whole time she screamed.
At a fraction of an inch in front of either hers or my skin, I always blocked each attack with the palm of my one free hand and used my magic to speed up the time in every weapon’s hourglass. A glowing yellow, light purple, or dark violet magic circle appeared in the palm of my hand every time, its symbols in a language long since forgotten by mortals. This caused the metals, even those enchanted with magic, to rust, wither, chip at the edges, and break so much that the weapons began to disintegrate into nothing more than dust.
But of course, the cult members had an arsenal of more weapons at their disposal. They just pulled out a new weapon from underneath their cloaks to replace the ones I destroyed, each a different type from the last. It was mind-boggling to guess how many items their cloaks was able to carry.
Joycie shrieked in terror every time a weapon came way too close, and it was starting to get annoying. Would it have killed her to have a little faith in me? Then again, I was a total stranger to her, and one man fighting to the death with nearly fifty others did seem vastly unfair.
“Quit screaming. You will bite your tongue,” I finally snapped at her after a few minutes.
Just then, I sensed a cult member attempting a sneak attack from behind me. I saw him coming using my Magic Sense, ducking below his bladed sickle as he swiped it across the air aiming for my neck. As if all of time had slowed, I spun a one-eighty counterclockwise still crouching while the guy behind me was about to retract his sickle, but at the same time, he had left an opening exposed for me to strike from where I was positioned.
“Hope you are ready to die!” I exclaimed as I thrusted the palm of my right hand into the guy’s abdomen.
Pushing my magic circle into him, it looked like a sharp blade made of powerful wind impaled him, but really, I used this physical contact to get a back grasp on his hourglass. Once I caught it in my metaphysical grip, I used my magic circle to speed up the moving sands within until none remained in the top half of the hourglass. I opened my eyes again and found this cult member was aging so rapidly that he went from mid-forties to over a hundred years old in a matter of seconds.
And he kept aging even after his soul left his body, and even then his mortal remains kept decaying. His skin turned gray and sunk into himself exposing his bones. His eyes disintegrated out of their sockets, and his black hair turned elderly white before falling out of his scalp in clumps. It didn’t take long after that when his skin and flesh flaked off of his bones, and then his bones turned into a pile of dust that fell to the floor. His cloak stayed unaffected, however, and it fell on top of the dust pile.
Still with my arm stretched out where I had struck the guy, I felt the remaining forty-nine pairs of widened eyes glaring at me and the feat of my power. They paused in shock, ceasing their attacks for only a moment or so. Some of them seemed to have become afraid now. I even heard Joycie covering her gasping mouth as she was at my side, having witnessed the whole thing from up close. I imagined she might be traumatized now.
But these folks have not seen anything yet.
Once most of the cult members regained their senses, merely encouraged even more now that one of their own had perished in front of their very eyes, the several of those who were nearest to me encircled the perimeter, allowing little chance for evasion. They had their short swords and hooked swinging chains raised above their heads as they closed in.
Their tactics were so predictable, it was child’s play, honestly. Pretty much embarrassing for them to call themselves adults much less an occult.
I lifted my left leg and quickly stomped my foot to the ground, creating a giant magic circle made of golden light. It was encrypted around the circumference with symbols from a language long since forgotten but was basically the foundation of my power that I had mastered some centuries ago. This circle engulfed the entire floor, glowing so bright that it burned my enemies from the feet up to their waistlines. Almost all of the cult members were soon acting as though they were completely on fire, screaming in pain and choking from the heat and smoke, even though they really weren’t. I was just manipulating their hourglasses all at once to tweak their sensations to feel pain from an experience in their memories.
Yes. My power let me do that, but it required a massive amount of magic.
“What-what’s going on?” Joycie suddenly asked. “Why are they all screaming like that?”
“Oh, they are just remembering an event involving a burning temple, in which they used to be doubled in numbers,” I informed the girl.
This memory in particular was from sometime before I had first joined this cult. But I recalled some of them talking over a round of brew about how they had lost half of their inventory and fellow men to an accidental blaze while they were sheltering in an old, abandoned temple that they had wanted to transform into a place of worship for Gamidalr.
Now, as the cult members continued to writhe in their own remembered excruciating pain, I decided it was time for Joycie and myself to take our leave because of what I knew was coming next. I calmly and casually slipped past each man in my path, still with Joycie slumped under my arm that was carrying her, without them noticing us. In no time, we made it from the room’s exit doorway to staircases descending away from that room, and then into a long corridor that had candlesticks mounted along the walls and they lit up like magic as they sensed our presence passing by.
“Um, are you sure we should just leave?” Joycie soon asked me, breaking the silence accompanied by only my echoing footsteps down the corridor. “Won’t they just come after us once they’re free of whatever spell you put on them?”
That reminded me. I was still carrying her, and my arm was getting tired. So I set her down back on her shoeless feet before saying with an inviting, smug grin, “I would not worry about it if I were you. Those men will be taken care of by each other soon enough, after all.”
And as soon as I finished that last ominous statement, the sounds of manly warrior’s cries and metal slicing through flesh and bone echoed down the corridor toward that room. Joycie and I immediately looked back in that direction. Her hands were lifted to her chest, her fists clenching over her heart, and her pulse jolted out of her skin. I was not surprised, however. This only lasted a minute or two before these noises ceased and there was nothing but silence again. A gust of wind blew down the corridor where we were, dimming the candlelight as each little fire was sent sideways but not making them go out, and then they stilled straight up and kept burning on their wicks.
I then turned around to continue walking down the corridor toward the building’s exit as I heard Joycie say, “What was that about? Did they…did they all just kill each other?” She asked that last part in a whisper.
I chose to enlighten her just so she would not ask again later. “Oh yes, they did indeed. It turned out that the temple fire was merely the beginning,” I began to explain “The toxins burning within the blaze that night were actually a curse to have those men see their fellow companions as their worst enemies and sent them into a murderous rage. The slaughter that followed resulted in them losing half their numbers in just one day.”
Then I saw the gears in Joycie’s brain turning around as it donned on her. “Wait, you told me you were not a follower of Gamidalr.”
“That is correct.” I said.
“So how do you know of so much about this cult, then?” she asked me. I paused.
Suddenly an arrow made of dark magic tinted a glowing deep purple flew through the air and whizzed by both Joycie and me. It missed her, merely whipping through a fringe of her bright red hair, and it grazed the right half of my face, opening a slit wound just below my lower eyelid, but I didn’t even flinch. I knew it was not going to hit something vital, so I didn’t even bother moving much less dodging.
But that was when I felt it throbbing and the veins around the wound pulsed with a pain that made my balance stagger. I almost lost my footing from where I stood, and I immediately knew what this was. However, poison magic was a type of dark magical arts that only a select few were able to use let alone master.
Joycie got closer to me with her face and stance full of worry. She reached her hands out towards me to try and help me stand better, but then we both heard a familiar voice coming from the shadows further down the corridor.
“I knew there was something off about you from the very start. Letting you join us was a huge mistake, but I shall make up for it. Here and now,” Ocfort said as he emerged from the darkness, another magical purple arrow hovering above one hand and carrying the severed head of one of his loyal followers in the other.
ns216.73.216.141da2
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