Chương 191: 186 — Book 4, Chapter 30 — The Grand Design, Pt 2

Leo had dreaded facing his parents again for years. They were technically archmages, after all. For a very long time Leo had thought this meant that he stood no chance against them. That if they chose to act against him, there would be nothing he could do about it except agree to whatever choice they made for him. It was what he had done so very long ago, when they sent him to Brightscale to gain control of his magic. He believed—or perhaps he had merely wanted to believe—that they had made that choice out of love.

He had to be sent away because even the smallest exposure to his magic could drive anyone in their village to madness, and he could return once he had true control over his magic. His friends didn't agree with him, he knew. He could see it in their eyes whenever the subject came up. His parents were archmages. It would have been no great effort for them to handle his education themselves, for them to acquire some kind of artifact that could help seal his labyrinth mana if it was really necessary.

And there was no way they could have been affected by his labyrinth mana. That one night his own mother had nearly stabbed him... He had told himself desperately for years that it was because she had been driven to madness by his labyrinth mana. But they were well aware of the dangers of his magic, and he knew by now that any palewater mage could create a barrier that would filter out certain types of mana. Cale had been the one to teach them the technique. Leo hadn't been able to face him during that lesson.

He could feel his mentor's gaze on him, sympathetic and yet unbearably patient, waiting for Leo to come to the right conclusion by himself. He could feel his friends looking at each other, worried about him but not wanting to push him into isolating himself. They all knew that he wanted to believe the best of them. He had fragmented memories from his early childhood of his father playing with him, of his mother laughing when he spat out all the food she tried to feed him.

He knew they had loved him once, before his mana aspect had revealed itself. He knew also that they had abandoned that love for him long ago. A part of him had always known it. Leo supposed it was high time he ignored his own voice of reason. Seeing them again after so many years blew away all semblance of the illusion that they might still love him. Part of him wanted to know why, of course. What could drive them to so easily let go of their love for their own son? Maybe there was a reason it had come to this.

Maybe he could put the blame on the propaganda that the Red Hunters had spread about wild mages, or perhaps they had encountered a wild mage themselves that had forever colored their view. But it didn't really matter, did it? They had made their choice a long time ago. And though he hadn't known it at the time, so had he. He had his own family now, and unlike his parents, it was a family that had chosen him.

A family that he knew would choose him, even if it was a hard choice; even if that choice came with difficulties, like an obsession with points and a refusal to confront certain facts about his parents. As if something within him had been waiting for this revelation this whole time, Leo felt something within his mana core settle. There was no better word for it, really.

He hadn't even known that there was anything wrong with his palewater, but where before it had rushed with turbulence through his core and his mana channels, it now flowed smoothly, creating a rushing warmth within his chest.

"Leo," Damien whispered.

"Your eyes are glowing."

"Are they?" Leo grinned. Whatever this was, it felt good. He reached to move his mana in the right patterns, to perform that palewater exercise he was so used to, only to find that his mana was already flowing in that pattern; he exhaled, and a small cloud of palewater came with his breath.

"Weird. Didn't read about this in any of the books. We'll have to ask Cale about it when we find him."

"Not worried about it?" Flia asked, raising an eyebrow.

"This feels like the sort of thing you'd normally worry about."

"Nah," Leo said. It was something he would normally fret over, but he knew instinctively that this was good: he'd simply taken the next step with his magic. There was space in his mana core that wasn't there before, like it was waiting for him to accept a new power, and Leo knew just where he was going to get it. But first, there was the matter of dealing with his parents. The Brightscale Academy's wards were good.

They were one of the reasons the Red Hunters had never been able to infiltrate and sabotage them as deeply as they had the other magic academies. In Haelforge they had managed to alter class schedules, infiltrate the faculty, and manipulate all kinds of circumstances. In Brightscale, however, they were reduced to having a single archmage on the grounds specialized in stealth and infiltration.

They had to get the students to do their work for them, and although they had made progress over the years, that tactic had ultimately cost them. Akkau had, at this point, ousted every single Red Hunter agent left in the school, and made it very clear to all the students how they had been used and manipulated. There wasn't a single Red Hunter sympathizer left in Brightscale Academy, and that was important for two reasons. One, the Brightscale wards operated partially on the academy's collective knowledge.

It identified hostile magic and individuals that were perceived by the students and faculty as enemies to the academy. In other words, the more people believed that the Red Hunters were a threat to the school, the more power would be routed against any Red Hunter violating its rules, even if they were on the school grounds on "legitimate business." Two, Akkau had upgraded the wards very recently.

Not only had he imbued them with more power (courtesy of mana donations from Cale), but he had also implemented a number of features. One of those features included magical attenuation: if enough people believed the wards were acting with excessive force, the wards would pick up on them and reduce the routed power accordingly. They were in a relatively isolated corridor of the school, but that didn't mean that no one was passing by.

Students had begun to gather at the end of the hallway, drawn by the confrontation; they were murmuring amongst themselves, casting dirty looks at the two Red Hunters caught in the wards. Exactly as Leo expected, not a single soul thought the wards were using excessive force. Both Eli and Mia were hanging upside-down in the hallway, bound by thick ropes of neutralizing mana.

For Eli, who specialized in fire magic, the mana was attuned to water—every time he tried to cast a spell, water mana surged through his skin and into his mana channels, forcibly shutting it down. Mia, on the other hand, was bound with a mixture of metal and earth. Her specialization was lightning magic, but every time she tried to cast, the wards absorbed her magic and redirected it right back into her.

She'd given up after the first few tries, her fur singed by her own lightning, and was now glaring hatefully at Leo. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. For archmages, they were pathetically weak. Leo supposed his sense of scale was off. The archmages he usually hung around might as well have been gods, so it was hard to remember that this was the level of power the average archmage usually had. But even then, they had darkwood cores.

If they knew how to make use of their mana, they would have been able to overcome the magic of the wards. The amount of mana fueling them was overwhelming, but it was raw, unsupported by the intent of any mage. The whole point of evolving their mana cores to darkwood was that they should have been able to overcome any magic that wasn't at least darkwood, even if it was built specifically to neutralize them. Could they not even do that? Leo found himself strangely disappointed.

He had expected more of a fight than this.

"What do you think you're doing?" Eli roared as he began to walk past them.

"Don't you ignore us!"

"You will let us out of these wards this instant!" Mia shouted, struggling against her bindings.

"We're your parents! Are you just going to ignore us?"

"What, like you ignored me for ten years?" Leo scoffed.

"You're not worth my time. Especially if you can't even get out of those wards. Just stay in there and think about what kind of cause you're really supporting."

"You—" Eli cut himself off, though the older minotaur was clearly infuriated by his words. He was struggling with something, but Leo had decided that was no longer his concern. Some part of him mourned what they had been to him, but he couldn't lie to himself about what they were any longer. He walked past both Eli and Mia, and his friends came with him, following his lead in ignoring them both.

They passed underneath them, one after the other, and though they kicked and struggled, neither made any progress in escaping the wards. Then Leo felt something and stopped, giving the others a signal to do the same.

"Fine," Eli ground out. The word was flat, almost like some part of him had snapped.

"Just remember that you asked for this, son."

"Eli?" Mia asked. The haughtiness had left her voice, and its place was something like concern or worry for her husband. It occurred to Leo that he could no longer remember what his mother sounded like when she was worried about someone else. More proof that he was making the right choice in this.

"You know what we must do," Eli said to his wife, though his gaze didn't leave his son. Leo could feel it searing into the back of his neck.

"Wild mages need to know their place. If they won't even listen to their parents, who knows what kind of destruction they could cause?" Ah. He was no longer their son, was he? He was just a rogue wild mage, now. Leo would have ignored him if not for the fact that he could sense that Eli was about to do something stupid. So he began to turn, his eyes narrowing.

"I didn't ask for anything," he clarified.

"And whatever you're thinking about doing—" Too late. Leo felt it more than he saw it: Eli's soul ignited, blazing into a sudden conflagration of fiery power, and a near-solid wave of aberrant power exploded from him. Only the signal he'd given the others prepared them for it. Flia snapped into action, her eyes tight with anger—she no doubt recognized the power of an Abyssal at work. A shield of water formed in front of them, packed with the innate power of the Abyss.

It was enough to allow the four of them to stay standing despite the destructive waves now pouring off of Eli. The students that were watching fared much worse; they were bowled off their feet and sent sprawling to the ground. Worst of all, the wave of power cracked the academy's walls. The wards holding the two Red Hunters flickered, then failed, releasing them back to the ground. A Red Relic, Leo thought grimly. He hadn't expected the Grand Magus to hand them out so easily. What was he playing at?

He ran through what had just happened in his mind—both Eli and Mia had their limbs bound and their magic sealed. There should have been nothing left that they could do unless they actually figured out how to leverage their mana. But Eli had squirmed loose just enough to move and prick his thumb on something. That must have been the activation condition for the relic. Leo cursed to himself, annoyed by the oversight, even as he rapidly adjusted his plans and assessed the effects of the relic.

Based on what he felt, it forced a mage's mana core to evolve, burning away at their very souls to do it. Both Eli's core and soul were ablaze with a deadly violet flame, an unnatural color for the stage it was at, which meant...

"And now?" Eli bellowed.

"Are we worth your time now, Leo?" Artificial wyldfire. The Grand Magus had designed a relic that could create an artificial wyldfire mage, only there were obvious flaws with that design: the fact that it burned the soul to do it meant that it could only be used once, and it would not last for long before it killed them. Leo had wondered why the Grand Magus would entrust one of his relics to Eli, of all people, but it was easy enough to guess, now.

"The Grand Magus is using them to test the relic," Leo said out loud to his friends. Flia was practically trembling with rage.

"What do you say we send him a message?"

"Yes," Flia spat out.

"Are you sure?" Damien asked, ever the concerned one.

"They're still, you know..." Leo snorted.

"Yeah, I know. They don't matter to me anymore, but it doesn't mean I want them to die. They're just pawns. I have a plan that will screw up his data and send him a message."

"Just tell us what to do," Syphus said.

"Are you still ignoring me?" Eli spat. He sent a surge of fire at them, not even bothering to coalesce it into a spell. As one, the four apprentices layered their barriers into a wedge. The fact that they opted to redirect his magic rather than block or nullify it saved them; even with that, they struggled under the weight of the blast, quickly finding themselves forced back by it.

By the time the blast ended, the mana had melted through the reinforced stone of the Academy's walls, and the four apprentices exchanged grim looks.

"Good enough to survive that, at least," Eli muttered.

"But barely. All four of you are wild mages, aren't you? Incredible. I suppose these are the only friends you could find? Other freaks of magic like you?" Leo didn't deign to respond. Instead, he focused on analyzing the details of how the relic worked. Mia was unaffected by the blast, despite the fact that she was standing right next to Eli, and she had sounded worried when she realized Eli was about to use it... There was a link between them. A mana tether that was so faint it was nearly impossible to see.

Was she somehow using her magic to sustain the effects of the relic and keep Eli alive? It was taking all of her concentration, clearly, or she would have spoken already.

"I am a wyldfire mage, now," Eli sneered, stepping forward. Mia stepped forward with him, perfectly coordinated, and Leo adjusted his analysis. Maybe they'd both been bound to the relic ahead of time, and this was how it was meant to operate, with a second soul bolstering the first.

"How many of those have you faced, wildlings?" That broke Leo from his analysis, though he was done anyway.

"Are you kidding?" he snorted.

"Don't make me laugh. I face one every day." Before Eli could respond, he slammed his palms together, channeling one of his newest spells. [Teleport to Labyrinth, Level 1] [Third Tier, Active (Unique)] [1, 000 Mana] Teleports you and your selected targets to the closest available labyrinth when a physical signal is given. The range of this spell is limited to 50 feet, but may be improved by adding additional mana.

An instant later, all six mages found themselves within the closest labyrinth—the one in Damien's dorm, and the same one they needed to find Cale. Eli could have used his newfound power to resist the spell, but Leo was not at all surprised to find that he hadn't. He wanted to teach them a lesson, after all. But Leo had learned plenty of lessons at Brightscale already, and chief amongst them now was one of Cale's. Always use the environment to your advantage, Cale had said.

As the only minotaur around capable of navigating a labyrinth without losing his mind, Leo intended to do exactly that.