Chương 14: The Trap

Sumi started to rise from the bench. Val caught her wrist.

"Don't."

"Val, he's bleeding out. I can—""I know what you can do. So will they if you walk over there." Val's voice was low and steady.

"Seven armed strangers, Sumi. They find out you're a healer, and suddenly they have a reason to not keep walking." Sumi looked at her. Then at Enzo. He shook his head.

"She's right, Sumi. Maybe you can save him. Maybe you can't. Either way, they might decide it's your fault or that you're going with them." Enzo didn't add what he and Val would do if that happened. It didn't need to be said. The group passed the bus shelter without stopping. One of them glanced over, a woman with a kitchen knife in her belt, and called out without slowing.

"Don't go that way. The bridge is dangerous." They didn't respond. The woman shrugged and kept moving. Sumi sat back down. She watched them until they disappeared. Her hands were flat on her knees. They were trembling.

"I'm sorry," Sumi said quietly.

"I wasn't thinking. If I'd walked over there..." Val slid an arm around her shoulders.

"You have nothing to apologize for." Sumi leaned into her for a moment, then took a deep breath and straightened. Enzo understood her impulse. Over the last few days, he'd learned she was partway through her pharmacy doctorate, which was how she and Val had met. Some research overlaps in their studies had turned into a friendship that stuck fast. For Sumi, watching a man bleed out wasn't an abstraction.

She would have done clinical rotations to understand wound care, blood loss, and the narrowing window between intervention and irreversibility. And her magic built on that foundation. Heal wasn't just a spell form. Enzo knew from creating Lock that spells required intent and understanding of the mechanisms the magic manipulated. Sumi's medical knowledge wasn't separate from her magic. It was the reason her spells worked. Which meant her sitting back down was probably a tough thing to do.

Nobody spoke for a long moment.

"The bridge," Val said eventually.

"Is there another way?" Enzo shook his head.

"Boats are no good. Anything with an engine is out, and I'm assuming none of us know how to sail?" Val and Sumi murmured agreement.

"That leaves detouring around, which would take hours and force us to cross two even longer bridges. There's no guarantee they'll be any safer." Val already knew that. But he understood the need to say it out loud. To be certain. Those people had been a group twice their size, and whatever they ran into was bad enough to send them fleeing the other way. With wounded. It didn't matter.

Their parents were on the other side of that bridge, hopefully safely tucked away in their house, with Dad's rainwater tanks and Mom's gardening keeping them going. Getting home was non-negotiable. Even if the bridge was swarming with Eaters. That just meant they'd have to clear it in stretches. Enzo broke the silence, changing the subject.

"I want to get your thoughts on something. Watch this." He held out his hand and fired two Bolts in quick succession. Both shot outward, the first already a dozen meters away when the second left his fingers. They raced away, one chasing the other, two streaks of compressed arcane mana, before dissipating, not quite reaching the other side of the multi-lane road.

"My spell range is only nine meters, but those clearly traveled much farther," Enzo said. He frowned.

"I'd guess that was about thirty to forty meters."

"Thirty-five, give or take," Val said, stuffing another piece of jerky into her mouth. She chewed slowly.

"So what?" Sumi bumped Val with her shoulder, drawing a scowl from his sister.

"The spell range is how far you can manipulate mana to cast a spell. The origin point. Simplified Invocation seems to force you to cast it through touch or wherever you gesture, though."

"I'm assuming it's not a coincidence that Bolt traveled roughly four times as far as my spell range, then."

"I don't know. Nobody at the hospital could cast at range except through mana threading when we were there." Sumi shrugged.

"But I'm thinking you're right. It's something we'll need to test when we have time." Enzo nodded, thoughtful.

"Yeah, I agree. Here's another odd limitation." He cast Shield. The barrier materialized in front of his outstretched hand, a shimmering circle of condensed mana. He maintained it, feeding a steady trickle from his reserves to sustain it.

"Now I'll try to cast something else." Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. He pointed with his other hand.

"Bolt." Nothing happened. Sumi looked at him, at his hand, then back with a frown. Val kept chewing noisily.

"While I'm sustaining another spell, actively pouring mana into it to keep it going, I can't cast a second one through invocation. But watch…" He focused, maintaining the thread of mana feeding the shield, then drew on more, shaping them in the air until Bolt's spell form appeared, perfectly stable. It took him almost thirty seconds of careful effort. Then the spell form snapped into place, and a bolt of purple energy shot off into the distance.

"I can still manually form the spell." He released the Shield.

"It's harder to do while maintaining another spell, even an Invoked one, but it's possible." Sumi leaned forward.

"That has serious implications. If you could master threading one spell while casting another with Invocation…" She trailed off. Enzo nodded.

"Two spells at once, instead of sequentially. You could maintain an existing spell and continue fighting with another. Or attack with two completely different spells at the same time."

"Here's another oddity," he said.

"Shield." Except this time, he focused his intent on the shape. The barrier sprang into existence as a square, instead of a circle. Sumi stared at it.

"How?"

"I was experimenting in the workshop when I was trying to develop Telekinesis," Enzo said.

"I realized it might be possible after seeing the spherical shield produced by the ring I made. At first, when I tried just threading mana into a square, nothing happened. Then I had the idea of wanting it to be a barrier of solid mana, just like when I created Shield. And it worked." The spell vanished once its mana ran out.

"After I'd done it once, I was able to Invoke it in the shape of a square just by focusing on it. This time, I'll try to cast it as a triangle. Watch." He reached out once more.

"Shield." A circular barrier appeared.

"It didn't work," Val said.

"Are you sure you're a wizard?" He ignored his sister and released the spell. Then he concentrated and quickly wove together three threads of mana into a triangle, layered with the intent to form a shield. It snapped into existence with three pointed corners. While the others watched, he held out his hand.

"Shield." A second barrier appeared, also triangular.

"See?" Sumi chewed her bottom lip for a moment.

"That means the forms might be more artistic than specific. One person's spell might look completely different from another's." Enzo released the magic.

"It also means we might be able to do a lot more, even with the basics." Val grabbed a bottle of water and began pouring it for Murph to drink.

"It's not fair. I need someone to bounce cultivation ideas off of. You two wizard nerds don't say anything that makes sense." Enzo reached over and flicked her ear.

"Ouch." She rubbed at it, giving him a glare that promised retribution.

"Anyway, we should get ready to go."

"I need to refill my reserves first," Enzo said. He settled onto the bench, straightened his back, and brought his hands into the absorption pose. Eyes closed. Breathing steady. The mana came easily here, dense as it was, and his reserves began filling fast. Once the flow was stable and his mind had settled into the familiar rhythm, he opened his eyes while maintaining the pose. The absorption continued, mana streaming into his mind. It was harder, though, with his eyes open, and the stream slowed noticeably.

The visual input competed with the meditative focus, creating a constant tension he had to manage rather than resolve. But it worked. He tried removing his hands from the pose next. Slowly, one at a time, letting them rest on his knees. The flow wavered. Thinned. Held for a trembling second, and then collapsed entirely. His reserves stopped filling, the connection severed as cleanly as if someone had turned off a tap. He could feel the shape of the problem. The hand pose wasn't doing the work.

It was stabilizing something, providing a physical anchor for a mental state that wasn't yet strong enough to sustain itself. The same way training wheels didn't make a bike move but kept it upright while the rider learned balance. It would come. With practice, time, and the gradual strengthening of whatever internal framework made absorption work out of the guide-box. But not today. He returned his hands to the pose and closed his eyes.

When his reserves were full, he pulled up the notifications he'd triggered earlier. — Mana Control (Level 8) → Mana Control (Level 9) Spell Forms (Level 4) → Spell Forms (Level 5) Shield (Level 3) → Shield (Level 4) — Enzo read them with surprise. He hadn't expected his demonstrations to result in anything tangible. Then again, thinking about it now, casting Bolt manually while maintaining the Shield invocation had been a genuine challenge.

And he hadn't gained a level in Shield or Spell Forms when he created the square-shaped variant, so perhaps it was cumulative growth. He dismissed the notifications and opened his eyes. Murph had been hooked back onto the lead, while Val and Sumi were already sitting on their bikes, ready to go. Enzo mounted his bike, slid his cane between the bungee cords, and rolled out to join the others.

Without a word, they pushed off and made their way through the toll plaza, weaving between abandoned vehicles and around bodies. Something they'd become all too familiar with. The Golden Gate Bridge rose ahead of them, massive orange-red suspension cables sweeping upward toward the first tower. They crossed onto the bridge, and the world changed. The last of the trees faded away behind them, giving way to water that stretched out in every direction, the bay shimmering under the afternoon sun, vast and indifferent.

A cool breeze washed over them, carrying the salty scent of the North Pacific Ocean. Ahead, the distant green-brown ridgeline of the Marin Headlands waited at the far end, close enough to make out the texture of the hillsides. Home was just a short ride away, on the other side of those hills. Maybe another hour at the pace they were making. They rode in silence, the only sounds the wind, their tires, and Murph's claws clicking alongside Val's bike.

More abandoned cars dotted the lanes, but it was manageable, with plenty of room to navigate. A few minutes later, Enzo saw it. He slowed to a stop. The bridge ahead looked wrong. For the next hundred meters or so, vehicles had been rearranged. Dozens of them, shoved into clusters, turned sideways, others flipped onto their sides or roofs. The wire fencing separating the road from the walkways had been torn apart in places, cars pushed through the gaps to block the paths as well.

What remained was a maze of metal and glass stretching across the full width of the bridge, with narrow paths winding between the wreckage. None of it looked accidental. And just before it, more bodies. And blood. Fresh blood. Val pulled up beside him.

"That's obviously a trap. Right?" To his left, Sumi nodded.

"Definitely a trap." Enzo stared. At the cars on their sides, each one weighing over a ton, deliberately moved and positioned in a way that implied planning. At the bodies, and their story of violence and death.

"Yeah," he said.

"That's a trap."