Anton
Anton
Anton, the Master of Magic.
His command of the arcane was, without question, exceptional.
A genius who excelled in both the Transmutation and Manifestation Schools, his boldness—using his own body as a testbed for magic without a second thought—brought him early and significant renown.
But that judgment only held when measured against the average mage. In absolute terms, his raw magical talent was never what one would call overwhelmingly brilliant.
What elevated him to the rank of Master of Magic was something else entirely: pure obsession.
A fixation on his target so absolute that casting magic came without a single thought for his own safety.
A ruthless disregard for the conventional shackles and limits of magic, chasing nothing but efficiency.
That was what made him a master.
A description alone struggles to paint the full picture, but there was no helping that.
Watching him work, one couldn't help but question whether magic was even the right word for it.
For example, this:
A forest thick with mist. Warrior Monks, thrown into disarray by the sudden appearance of the woodland, scattered and charged straight at Anton.
The old man ran to meet them head-on. Legs that should have been frail carried him forward as he leveled his heavy repeating crossbow at the oncoming Warrior Monk.
Twang—twang—twang!
Death scattered in salvos. As the bolts flew, the Warrior Monk racing through the trees threw his shield forward and ducked low.
Clang-clatter, clang!
Deflected bolts skipped off the shield and rolled across the forest floor. Just as the Warrior Monk kicked off the ground to accelerate, Anton's lips curled upward and he murmured:
"INCENDENT."
A stressed incantation. The scattered bolts on the ground glowed cherry-red and detonated.
FWOOOOSH!
A single Warrior Monk was swallowed by the roar and flash of the blast. As he collapsed, trailing acrid smoke and the stench of cooked flesh, another Warrior Monk lunged over his body.
Anton didn't hesitate. He snapped the crossbow back into position and fired straight into the dirt at his feet.
Thud!
The Warrior Monk had no time to wonder at the bolt buried in the earth. Anton was already retreating as a colossal tree erupted from the very spot where the bolt had struck.
"Guhk!"
The Monk was sent flying as if kicked by a giant. While he tumbled through the air like an overturned beetle, Anton dropped to one knee mid-retreat and pulled the trigger.
Twang—twang—twang—twang—twang!
Five shots screamed out. Meticulously aimed—each round precisely pierced the gaps in the Warrior Monk's carapace. The Monk hit the ground, spewing blood, and tried to rise. Anton intoned again:
"INCENDENT."
A single spell. One incantation whose meaning shifted with the syllable he chose to stress. An incantation crafted solely for Anton.
"Aaaargh!"
Crunch.
Twisting the world as Anton perceived it, the bolts embedded in the Warrior Monk detonated and killed him.
"You son of a bitch...!"
"Surround him! Cut off his retreat! Rush him all at once!"
More Warrior Monks surged through the scattering fragments of carapace. Behind them, a blurred, grim shape. Anton threw himself sideways without a second thought.
Crash!
An axe whistled through the space he'd just vacated, splitting a tree trunk and lodging deep inside it.
The eyes of the stealth-approaching Warrior Monk widened. Anton rolled to a stop, his twin hand-crossbows—strapped to his wrists—already aimed. Death, pregnant in the chambers.
Crack!
"Gah...!"
A precision shot to the knees. Both kneecaps of the axe-wielding Monk were shredded by bolts. In the same breath, Anton snatched up the repeating crossbow he'd discarded and intoned:
"INCENDENT."
Expansion magic this time. The embedded bolts swelled to nearly ten times their size, obliterating the joints. As the Warrior Monk collapsed, a follow-up bolt from Anton's repeater punched clean through his skull.
Thwip!
The body sagged to the ground. Anton was on his feet instantly, crossbow leveled, finger on the trigger.
Every volley he loosed produced a different effect based on which syllable he stressed.
Bolts that lodged in carapace gaps and exploded. Bolts that swelled. Bolts that burst into fire.
Sometimes, a bolt planted in the soil would sprout into a brand-new tree.
From atop the magic tower, the expressions of Aslan's companions ran the gamut of emotions.
Some looked on in awe. Some in bewilderment. A few in pure fascination.
But one shared sentiment was unmistakable.
Now they understood why Aslan had so badly wanted to recruit him.
Anton, the Master of Magic, was, in a word, a figure cut from the same cloth as Aslan.
He hadn't acquired the same breadth of tools, but the ones he possessed were far more lethal.
And he was an old man who knew exactly when and where to use them.
His pinpoint marksmanship, his exceptional magical prowess, and a body repeatedly modified to move with a speed that defied his seventy-odd years—each element alone was practically a weapon of mass destruction.
A Warrior Monk charged, and Anton blocked the attack by summoning a tree from a bolt fired into the ground.
Dropping to one knee, he fired another bolt into a carapace seam and blew it apart.
As his coat-tails billowed through the shower of chitin, Angie let out a low whistle. 'That old man's something else.'
The Warrior Monks were reaching a similar conclusion.
A frontal assault on the Master of Magic was suicide. Encirclement was useless.
At this rate, they'd all be slaughtered.
Belatedly, they understood.
The forest surrounding Anton's tower wasn't a natural defense. It was a killing field, purpose-built for the day Warrior Monks would come. A place meticulously calculated to deny them any chance of capturing him without catastrophic losses.
His supreme marksmanship, his magic, his magically-enhanced physique—all cultivated in perfect harmony.
The lack of traps near the forest's edge was by the same design. He'd lured them in. Deliberately.
He'd concluded he could handle any number of Warrior Monks on this ground, and so he'd drawn them into it.
The Monks looked at Anton, and at the trees crowding in on all sides. Then they took stock of their own bodies and their predicament.
They chose to adapt.
If closing the distance was near-impossible, they'd either stack the odds to force an opening, or eliminate the need for it entirely.
Their first gambit played out like this:
A Warrior Monk charged. Shield raised high to weather the bolts, he advanced with the momentum of a bull. Anton answered with a single, stressed syllable.
KWA-FWOOOSH!
The bolts superheated and burst. One Monk was swallowed by flame.
No matter how powerful a Warrior Monk became, his vitals remained those of any mundane creature.
That was the price of embodying divinity as a tool for martial arts. No escaping it.
So fire was lethal. He would die in moments.
A single breath's span, at most. Only his thicker physique bought him even that.
Anton's eyes met the Monk's, and the old man read his intent in a flash.
A living shield. A second's obstruction. Blotting out Anton's sight so the others could close in from blind spots.
A fleeting vulnerability—but for these Monks, it was enough.
Just before his life-sense cut out, the burning Monk hurled himself forward to block Anton's line of fire.
The other Monks dashed behind the massive body. The instant the charred wreck of their comrade sloughed away, they swung their weapons over the falling corpse.
Crumbling chitin crunched and gave way, and blades came crashing down toward Anton beyond it.
A hideous axe-head plunged toward his skull. Anton twisted his body and thrust out his arm.
Crunch!
The severed arm spun through the air. Anton grimaced—but as he faced the surging Monks, he smiled.
Even a mighty priest, in the end, could be reduced to scheming.
And the schemes these Monks had settled on—using their own dead as a bridge—struck Anton as so laughably absurd he couldn't help but grin.
The sight of them charging with grim resolve, as if he were some epic foe, was simply ridiculous.
Their desperate, comrades-trampling struggle to kill him was nothing short of nauseating.
So Anton laughed, and then he bit down hard.
His severed arm hit the ground, purple blood pooling thick on the earth. The high-held axe came slashing down at his head.
Anton looked away from the blade about to split his skull and swept his eyes across the surroundings.
Five Warrior Monks left. Using one comrade's sacrifice to close in, the encirclement was crushingly dense.
No reinforcements.
No point in hesitating. Anton tilted his head slightly aside and felt the axe grind through flesh and bone from his collarbone downward.
It raced toward his heart, shattering ribs on the way. Anton waited until the blade had carved deep—then tossed his crossbow aside.
The weapon clattered away across the ground. Anton breathed out the word:
"INCENDENT."
The air condensed. Wind whipped into a vortex. Flame shuddered and bloomed.
Aslan felt a cat brush past his ankles—the one Anton had left behind—and watched the explosion rip through the clearing below.
The condensed flame erupted from within Anton's own body. A self-detonation. A secret technique that indiscriminately blended the Transmutation School with fireballs and other potent magics.
Suicide bombing.
KWA-WHOOOOOOM!
The blast roar swallowed the sky. A pillar of flame swallowed dozens of meters, the shockwave screaming past. A shimmer of heat-haze and shrapnel slammed into the tower, rattling its stones.
"Woah!"
"What the—!"
Fwooooom—the wind hammered the tower with a sound like a funeral dirge.
When the echoes faded, the group stared at the scorched-black earth below.
Air superheated by the blaze moaned and seethed, a shushing hiss rippling through the thrashing trees. The party looked at the spreading char and let out a collective breath.
"Uh, uh, Aslan... the old man..."
"Oh, hell..."
They swallowed hard, gazing at the churning heat and fire beneath the tower.
A thick confusion passed between them. Rumel watched from the window with sorrow in her eyes, Fay with shock. And then—
Aslan slowly turned his head and looked at the cat.
A cat from which something like dust was seeping, drifting outward in lazy streams.
The motes seeping from the cat's body began to coalesce.
As if a process of scattering into dust had been played in reverse, it reconstituted itself in the empty air, taking form and substance.
A human figure materialized out of nowhere. The party tensed and drew weapons—except for Aslan.
Because the shape taking form was Anton.
"Tower's been compromised. We need to leave, fast. I've tidied things up downstairs, so pack your gear."
Anton materialized with the fluidity of a rewind, touched the floor, scooped the cat up onto his shoulder, and spoke as if nothing had happened.
This was the magic that elevated him to the rank of Master.
A spell Anton had developed after hearing Aslan's casual talk of a fictional being called a lich.
Anton had listened to the concept, to the mechanism of a phylactery, and then he'd modified his pet cat.
Mobilizing the Transmutation and Manifestation Schools alongside a battery of other disciplines, he'd arrived at a principle even he couldn't fully explain: turning the cat into a kind of phylactery.
It wasn't identical to the phylacteries Aslan knew from game lore, but the effect was comparable.
Countless suicide bombings, a fighting style built on using his own body as bait—and through Equalization, he could resurrect every time.
In all of Geladrion, Anton was the only one audacious and unhinged enough to use magic like this.