Zalier's Folly
Folmers's voice was thick with bewilderment.
"What in the world is going on?"
A servant had shaken him awake in the dead of night, and the guards had filed in close behind—followed by Joseph, staff in hand and a robe thrown over his shoulders, and behind him a man whose leg was bent at a grotesque angle.
"Just what do you all think you're doing?"
The servants and the guards merely glanced at one another and said nothing. They did not seem to understand the situation any better than he did.
"I apologize for the late hour. The matter was urgent—I had no other choice."
Joseph, who had been standing at the very back, stepped forward and bowed. Folmers's expression twitched. Joseph's voice was uncharacteristically rigid, as though it were clenched around a barely contained fury.
Sensing that something was seriously amiss, Folmers let out a small sigh.
"Explain the situation to me first, if you would."
"Thank you."
Joseph immediately pointed to the man with the broken leg behind him.
"A short while ago, that man entered my room and tried to kill me."
"I beg your pardon—what did you just say?"
Folmers's eyes went wide. At this hour, inside the castle—someone had tried to do what? The story was so sudden, so absurd, that his thoughts could not keep pace with it.
Paying Folmers's confusion no mind, Joseph dragged the broken-legged man up beside him and pressed the butt of his staff down on the snapped limb.
"Aaagh!"
The man screamed and collapsed to the floor at once, but not a soul moved to stop it. After what Joseph had just said, every servant and every guard in the room had gone deathly pale.
Joseph pulled a dagger from the man's clothes and held it up for Folmers to see.
"This man snuck into my room carrying this."
"What in heaven's name..."
Folmers looked down at the man sprawled on the floor, cold sweat running off him in sheets. The wrinkles carved into his face made it plain he was well along in years. He kept his head pressed to the boards, panting, and offered not a word—but the terror he felt toward Joseph, and toward Folmers himself, was unmistakable.
"W-wait a moment. Would you start from the beginning and tell me what happened?"
"Of course."
Joseph laid it out from the start. The servants had been excessively fearful of him as a mage, watching him with a wariness that had gotten under his skin, so he had taken out a little insurance—a precaution that would alert him the instant anyone entered his room. This man had triggered it, and Joseph had caught him.
"If you inspect my chambers, you'll find the floor smashed where he set it off."
The color drained from Folmers's face. If this was true, something truly outrageous had taken place. Short-staffed or not, this was a count's castle. Someone had stolen inside it and tried to murder a mage. This was not the sort of affair that ended with one or two bodies hanging from a rope.
The servants and the guards had begun to grasp that as well. A few of them had started to tremble.
"How in the world...?"
Joseph answered the mutter.
"He says someone inside the castle provided him with information."
"Wh-what?"
Folmers looked down at the man. Slowly, the assassin nodded.
"...It was Mage Zalier."
The name stopped Folmers's tongue in his mouth. Why was that name coming up? Zalier spent most of his hours in the laboratory producing artifacts, true, but he also helped Folmers with administrative work from time to time. He would certainly have been able to guide someone to Joseph's room without a soul noticing.
But to think he had handed the castle's security over to an assassin so that Joseph could be killed...
"Wh-why would he do such a thing?"
Even Joseph could only shake his head.
"I don't know either. I've only met the man face-to-face once."
He exhaled and went on.
"According to this one, he did it because he was afraid I might threaten Mage Zalier's position."
At that, Folmers found himself picturing the man. An arrogant mage who threw his weight around on the strength of the Count's prestige. Folmers had known, since the war began, that Zalier lived in fear of falling out of the Count's favor for being useless in a fight. He had known, too, that the man chafed at his own paltry gifts, which could not begin to be compared with those of the Fire Mage on the battlefield.
Zalier certainly did not know of the arrangement Folmers had made with Joseph. If he had been clinging to the title of the Count's only mage...
No. That's not it.
After a moment's thought, Folmers shook his head.
"...I know his character well enough. But I find it difficult to accept this account on these words alone."
They were, after all, only the words of this old man and of Joseph. He could not simply take the word of a mage he had only just met.
"I expected as much."
Joseph nodded as though he had been waiting for exactly that, and continued without missing a beat.
"Then let's go confirm it ourselves."
"...Come again?"
Dawn was not far off. The lights in Zalier's laboratory were still burning.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Zalier bounced his leg without pause, his eyes flicking again and again to the laboratory door. Torbin's report was overdue. By now the man should have killed Joseph and come to tell him so. But no matter how the minutes stretched, Torbin did not appear. If he had been caught, there ought to have been some commotion in the castle—and yet the halls were far too quiet. The silence only fed Zalier's unease.
"Don't tell me that ungrateful bastard..."
After a long wait, Zalier ground his teeth and shoved himself up from the sofa. The thought that Torbin might simply have run was just forming, a curse rising to his lips, when—
Knock. Knock.
Someone rapped on the laboratory door. Zalier's gaze snapped to it. He watched the wood in silence, then slowly opened his mouth.
"...Who is it?"
"It's... Torbin."
The old mercenary's voice trembled through the door. Zalier frowned. There was far too little strength in it.
"Come in."
The door opened. The moment Zalier saw him, he swallowed. Torbin's face was deathly pale, his whole body soaked through with sweat—and one leg was bent at a hideous angle, as though he might collapse at any second.
"Wh... what happened? Don't tell me you failed?"
Torbin shook his head.
"...I killed the mage."
He said it, and immediately threw something onto the floor. A tunic, soaked through with red blood.
"I succeeded in putting my blade through his throat. He put up a fight before he died, though, so I took a bit of a beating."
He shuffled a little to the side of the door, sank onto the floor, and sat there gasping. Zalier picked the tunic up. It was, without a doubt, the same shabby thing that mage had been wearing.
His heart began to pound. The certainty that the mage who had threatened him was gone brought a smile unbidden to his face.
"You'll have your pay once I've seen the body. As for you—get out of the castle before the sun comes up, and see to it yourself."
A thin, unpleasant smile on his lips, he tossed the tunic into the brazier. The red cloth caught at once and went up in flames.
Now nothing threatens me.
The thought drew a laugh out of him—and because of that laugh, he was slow to notice that the laboratory door was easing open once more.
At that sharp voice, Zalier's expression froze solid.
"You—!"
And faster than he could turn around—
"Flame Bite."
⟨ Flame Bite ⟩
A mass of fire came howling in. It burst the instant it reached him, scattering a great bloom of flame through the room.
"Gaaah!"
Zalier was hurled into the laboratory wall. He hit, dropped, and rolled across the floor screaming, his whole body wreathed in fire.
"You son of a bitch. You try to murder a man just because he doesn't sit well with you?"
Joseph stood in the doorway and watched him burn.
Joseph waited in the doorway for him to get up. Then light flared in the fallen Zalier's hand, and tree roots began to push up from the floor around him. They lengthened, folding over his body, and—impossibly—the flames clinging to him leapt from his skin onto the wood.
"Hhhk—!"
Zalier crawled away from the burning roots, dragging harsh breaths. It was already too late for his skin. Fluid from the burns was weeping across him in patches.
Joseph glanced back. Folmers stood behind him with his eyes shut, his face a mask of wretched dismay.
Joseph had no idea what the man was feeling, and no intention of concerning himself with it. Not now.
This bastard.
The image of Zalier smiling as he fed Joseph's tunic to the fire rose up, and the anger came with it, hot and immediate. An old man who had lived long enough to know better, behaving worse than a child. That he had gone this far over such utterly asinine selfishness—Joseph's blood simply would not cool.
Zalier snatched a wood carving from the table in a panic and shouted.
"Take form!"
⟨ Wood Shaping ⟩
The carving flashed in answer, then surged upward, swelling in an instant into an enormous log.
"Burst!"
The log detonated.
"Return!"
⟨ Return ⟩
Joseph threw three layers of Return up in front of himself in a rush, and in the sliver of an instant that the barriers caught the spray, he flung himself behind the sofa. Return was a one-use spell—it bounced a blow back and was gone. It could not hold against an attack that came in a storm of pieces.
Hundreds of wooden shards ripped the sofa to tatters.
This lunatic—!
Joseph came up from behind the wreckage and cast again at once.
"Flame Bite!"
⟨ Flame Bite ⟩
Zalier's face twisted. He swallowed a breath.
"Grow!"
Light flared in his hand again, and a thick trunk shoved up from the floor to wall him off. He started to say something more, but Flame Bite was faster. A fireball packed dense with mana struck the wood and erupted, a sheet of flame tearing through it. Heat flooded the room in a single breath.
"Graaaagh!"
The trunk blew apart with the blast, and Zalier, who had been crouched behind it, was slammed backward again, a wet, rattling scream tearing out of him. Splinters of wood stood out of him in a dozen places. He looked even worse than before.
He scrambled on all fours and dragged himself behind the table, already casting again.
"Durkua!"
The word was mashed past recognition, but it seemed to serve well enough as a spell. Vines burst from the floor in a sudden tangle—though not, apparently, where he had wanted them. They sprouted well away from Joseph.
"Fire."
⟨ Fire ⟩
Joseph burned the writhing vines off the floor in a single pass.
"Hhk—!"
The sound of Zalier sucking in a breath came from behind the table.
Joseph swung his staff and began to form Mana Orbs. He was done with fire. He meant to smash the table and the man behind it in one stroke. The orbs rose around him one after another, until ten spheres of raw mana were circling his body.
White light bled off the orbs; red light crawled over the burning laboratory. The two hues wavered and slid across each other—and in that flicker, like an insect lunging after a flame, Zalier burst from behind the table.
"GRAAAAAAH!!"
He came screaming, both hands full of wood carvings much like the one he had used before. Joseph flicked his staff and sent a single orb at him. It struck Zalier square in the gut—and scattered, as though something had been shielding him.
What?
Caught off guard, Joseph fired the rest of them in a single volley.
The impacts landed in a rapid, brutal string. One he could stop. A dozen he could not. Zalier was battered across the floor, tumbling, and then he was coughing blood—something inside him torn.
"Kh... kkh..."
He still would not quit. With a face half gone from behind the eyes, he shoved himself back onto his feet. The sight of him was grotesque enough that even Joseph faltered for a breath.
"Flame—"
Joseph clicked his tongue and started to burn him where he stood.
"Stop! Stop this at once!"
Folmers, who had been watching from the rear, stepped in.