The Circle Won't Let Go
Even then, he still hadn't felt his life was in danger. The moment he tried to step back, though, a vast force clamped down around his body, as if insisting he would never get out.
Chris looked behind him. Scott bowed his head with perfect courtesy, but his lips were smiling. Chris didn't look at him. He looked past him at the tower, and the one rising at his back was vibrating harder than any of the others.
He thought it over. The tower isn't what's running the formation. Its role, it seemed, was to keep whoever was being drained of mana from ever leaving the circle. They mean to suck him dry to the last drop. Stay where he was, and he would be wrung down to the marrow and die.
Chris smiled as he spoke.
"Mind pulling me out?"
Scott answered in a tone of polite regret.
"Once a formation activates, it doesn't stop until the transfer is finished."
"I'm not telling you to stop it. I'm telling you to pull me out."
"Removing you is impossible, No. 4. As you know, my ability simply isn't up to it..."
"Should've trained harder, then."
"I suppose I should have."
While Chris and Scott talked, another ten people collapsed.
"Twenty left."
Scott spoke as if he were a bystander, someone the whole business had nothing to do with.
"So it seems."
"Is there a prize for lasting to the end?"
"A prize?"
"Getting out of the formation in one piece. Or being sent along to the ruins with them."
A low, shuddering hum tore out of the formation, and light surged up from its center.
"The transfer's starting," Scott said. "Hold on a little longer."
"It's rough."
Another ten fell in the meantime.
"Ten left now."
"Yes. You've made the top ten, No. 4. Top ten among the handpicked — remarkable."
"I am rather remarkable."
"With a staff, you might have gotten out. You got too caught up in the disguise. A pity."
"No. Even with a staff, Sikbae can't get out. You'd need Chukhwan before you could even try."
"If a man with experience says so, then it must be so."
"You, though."
"What about me?"
"I had you down as a simple man. Looking at you now, you're a heartless bastard."
His eyes went wide.
"You thought I was simple? Why?"
"You were, the first time I saw you."
"How unexpected."
"Unexpected?"
"I never acted simple at the camp. I worked hard to seem grave and serious. I can't imagine what about me struck you as simple."
Five more collapsed. Only five remained.
Scott stuck up a thumb.
"Remarkable. You're in the top five."
"I know I'm remarkable without you telling me."
"So remarkable, and still you can't come out."
"I can come out. I'm waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"For the formation to fire successfully, and for those five monsters to disappear."
"You're waiting for success, not failure? Why?"
"If I step out now, the formation stops, and the transfer fails because of it — you think those five monsters will leave me be? They'll chew me down to the bone."
Two more died. Three remained. In that instant the light at the center flared brighter.
Now.
Chris hauled up every last scrap of strength in him and turned. His torso came around, his hips followed, and his feet tore free of the ground and stepped.
Scott stared, aghast.
"How?"
Each step Chris took landed with a heavy thud, one after another, until he was clear of the formation. Light burst outward as if something had exploded, then died just as fast. The five mages vanished with it.
Putting distance between himself and the circle, Chris looked back at the two survivors still being drained of mana and life. The five mages had already transferred, and still the formation kept stripping those two of mana and vitality. The survivors would have their names on the list of sacrifices soon enough.
"Nasty piece of work, this formation."
The words were barely out before he vomited blood the way a drunk retches, and it soaked the ground into mud.
"Are you all right?" Scott asked.
"If I ran for the center right now, could I still make the transfer to the ruins?"
"Hard to say. I'm curious myself. Why don't you try it?"
"I can't. I'm in terrible shape. I think I'm about to die. You don't happen to have a potion?"
"I don't."
"Put in a good word for me with No. 1."
"Saying what...?"
"That I worked myself to death, ready to let my realm drop if that's what it took. Tell him not to forget the credit I'm owed."
"I'll be sure to pass it along."
In that instant the sole of Chris's foot drove into the earth. Muscle honed to a grandmaster's level coiled like a spring and let go, and he moved like a bolt of lightning.
"Hhk—!"
A mage — a badly wounded mage who had just been vomiting blood — closing this fast with no magic at all. Scott had never considered it. So he only watched as the hand came in.
Chris had assumed he would be carrying a defensive artifact, the way Cyril had, and he put everything he had behind the blow. As expected, Scott did have one. It wasn't on Cyril's level. Jenyeom and Sikbae measured wealth on entirely different scales; perhaps that was only natural.
Chris felt the resistance and didn't stop. His hand smashed through it and punched clean through Scott's solar plexus.
"This is..."
Scott's lips parted, and blood ran down in a sheet.
"What are you doing?"
Chris flung him into the formation and gave him back the words he had once said to Jerome.
"You're a mage, aren't you? This can't be the first time you've hurt people, or the second. You don't get to feel betrayed."
Even as he said it, it felt unfinished, so he added to it.
"You little shit. That's not a line for a man who killed five hundred people today."
Then he ran along the rim of the formation, watching Scott where he had fallen inside it. The circle was already drinking his mana. At the sound of the scream, Chris sneered.
When you were sacrificing everyone else, you never imagined you'd be on the list.
The man who led the second camp to join the formation was a Jenyeom-realm mage named Tiller. He had been watching the circle run, concentrating in the hope of learning even one thing from it. It had never occurred to him that a sacrifice might walk out, so he was late to notice that something had gone wrong.
By the time he looked, Scott was rolling across the formation like refuse, and the man who had done that brutal thing was already running straight at him.
Tiller saw him arrive in a blink and recoiled. He had been over there, and then, between one moment and the next, he was here.
His training held. Even in the instant of panic he cast, and mana from his staff wrapped around him. Shielded, he began to prepare an attack.
The response was textbook: raise a barrier, make yourself safe, then strike. Against someone of a similar level, it would have worked. Chris was not a mage who fit any standard. Fighting with his body came easier to him than magic, and it hit far harder besides.
He was faster and stronger than when he had struck Scott, because his body had been recovering at speed ever since he left the formation. Mana pouring out of his Thought Space stirred every cell, and his muscles answered with greater force.
His fist broke the barrier with ease. Before the attack Tiller had prepared could detonate, Chris struck the staff. It crumpled. Mana lashed backward, Tiller's face went white, and Chris's fist came down on that white face.
Breaking another person's flesh and bone is an unpleasant thing. Using your hands makes it worse; the sensation comes through too clearly. So Chris didn't hit hard enough to pulp the face. He hit just hard enough to take the man's consciousness, then kicked him in the side and sent him flying into the formation. Like Scott, Tiller groaned as his mana was drained away.
Three left.
Chris marked the nearest and ran.
The leaders of the three camps saw him smash Tiller in a single breath. Scott, taken down before that, was already withering into a mummy. The sight killed any thought of standing and fighting.
"He's a master!"
"Even a master couldn't get out of there."
"Then what is he?"
"This is not the time for that. Run!"
The three broke in different directions. That way, at least one of them might live.
Dalton laid a speed spell over his body and, at the same time, a strength enhancement on his legs. He still wasn't faster than Chris.
"Damn it. Rotten luck."
He swore as he ran.
"Why the hell is he chasing me first?"
Dalton knew that if this kept up he would be caught, so he yanked out a carpet and flung it down. He threw himself onto it as it spread wide, cursing Scott for dragging a monster like that into their midst.
The carpet lifted and climbed. It wasn't fast the way Donna's was. A carpet in the hands of a Jenyeom mage being plainly slower than one used by a Chukhwan mage was, perhaps, only to be expected. Own anything good, and a mage above you takes it.
Chris watched the carpet's speed and tilted his head. Flying on that thing is slower than running. Why take it out? Then he saw it keep rising into the sky, and understood. Ah. He thinks if he goes up, I can't follow. The man didn't believe Chris was a mage at all. If I were a knight, you'd be right. But I'm a mage.
He had sneered at the mistake before he realized, a moment too late, that the mistake was working in his opponent's favor. Chris was a mage, but he didn't know flight magic. He could work the wind to some degree through wind mana, enough to lift his body and even fly, but the speed was so poor it was nearly useless in a real fight. At his best he flew no faster than an ordinary young man at a quick march. He could not chase anyone through the sky.
Not having learned magic properly is a weakness even here.
The regret didn't stop him thinking. I can't fly. I'm still a mage. From Jerome he had one long-range attack worth using. He turned fire mana into magical force and cast. A fireball formed faster than before and tore up through the air.
The fleeing mage saw it rise and recoiled.
"Damn it, he's using magic."
Confusion hit him, and with it the unfairness of the world.
"A man who isn't even a mage — using magic."
He had never heard of a magic swordsman that strong. Even so, panicked as he was, he moved his mana and fired a water orb.
Fire met water, and the fireball crushed the orb and kept climbing. Dalton was aghast. A mercenary's fireball outmatching a magic-tower mage's water orb made no sense at all. Even in his shock he didn't forget to form another water orb and drop it — and in that moment a wind blade sheared through the carpet.
Chris had never thought the fireball would catch him. It was a feint, meant to rattle the man. The real aim was the wind blade.
Ruined, the carpet spun through empty air and fell. Dalton abandoned it and threw himself into the sky. Seeing him keep flying instead of dropping, Chris licked his lips.
"Flight magic."
It still wasn't faster than the carpet had been. Chris formed two fireballs and sent them, then drew his sword and threw it.
While Dalton dealt with the fire, the sword flew like a shaft of light and punched through his heart. He screamed and fell. No one dropped from that height with nothing but his body and lived. Chris didn't look back. He turned and went after the next one.