Chapter 28 - The End of the Second Tribulation

I looked behind me and saw a man nearing middle age walking toward me, deftly avoiding the fallen corpses and regarding them with undisguised revulsion. He was at least forty years old and had a long beard peppered with gray. A few gray hairs were also mixed in with his black hair. Beside him was a woman of similar age whose hair had turned almost entirely gray; she walked calmly, as if she were not on a battlefield filled with corpses.

“Stop! I’m afraid I must refrain you from killing her,” the old man said in a confident voice that could only come from years of ordering people around. He had pensive brown eyes, and deep creases on his forehead added character to his brooding face.

“Bah, don’t listen to this senile old man. Go ahead and kill the princess. I couldn’t care less about her; she’s not even from my kingdom,” the old woman said in a cold voice. Her face was bland, with only her aquiline nose being the most prominent feature aside from her deep blue eyes, which spoke volumes of a deep-seated cynicism.

“What I care about, however,” she continued, “is the fact that you’ve ruined this annual war.”

At the periphery of my vision, I saw Princess Amara tense as a look of recognition passed over her face upon seeing the old man. She was likely going to attack me while I was distracted, but the likelihood of that succeeding was zero, since I was keeping her in the corner of my eye while facing the two old people.

Before she could initiate her surprise attack, I dashed the short distance between us and knocked her unconscious with a carefully aimed strike at the back of her unprotected neck. She fell forward, hitting the ground with the grass somewhat cushioning her fall, though not by much. It must have hurt.

I could not kill the princess just yet, not knowing the relationship between the two newcomers and her. A few small suspicions about who the two strangers were were already forming in my mind.

“You killed her, you bastard!” the old man shouted, firing off a yellow blast of magic at me. It traveled at a speed akin to that of an arrow.

I did not care to find out what his magic would do and countered with my own blast of black magic. Both spells collided and canceled each other out in a small explosion about three feet in diameter. It made me think that it was fire magic he had cast.

The old man looked surprised for just a second before determination quickly replaced it.

As he began to prepare a larger amount of magic, the woman interrupted. “Now, now, you demented old man. Can’t you see that the girl was only knocked unconscious? Seriously, how did you get a job as the royal mage of Sendarid Kingdom when you’re this incompetent? I can’t believe you are my rival mage.” She said this calmly in an attempt to placate us both, but it would have been far more effective had she not added the veiled insult toward the man.

The old woman, most likely the royal mage of Laben Kingdom, was the one to be most wary of out of the pair. She had not been surprised to see that I could use magic.

I was also lightly fatigued from the battles I had just fought and could sense that the two mages would be troublesome. I did not wish to invite more trouble onto myself, but I needed to kill the princess and her camp followers for my own survival.

Seventeen thousand had already died, so what was one or even a thousand and a half more? It would barely add to the count of deaths that had occurred today.

Still, I was in a dilemma that could be easily solved by killing everyone here. However, a fight with the two royal mages would best be avoided. After all, I was not too familiar with the prospect of magic, whereas the two in front of me were relatively more experienced.

“We should not be hasty in getting into a brawl. The stranger over there is an unknown factor, and judging from the battlefield, a very dangerous one,” the old woman said cautiously. “He must think the same of us.”

So, I thought, the woman mage was of the same mind as me. Interesting.

“Nonsense!” the old man interjected. “If you join me, we will easily overtake this bastard who was trying to kill Princess Amara.”

The woman mage raised both her eyebrows at that. “Oh really? Do give me one proper reason why I should help you undertake such a task when I should actually be thanking this kind stranger for turning the battle into a tie. Granted, he did interrupt our three-year winning streak.” She chuckled loudly at that.

I gave the old woman a small nod at her implicit permission and gathered magic into the soles of my feet. I shot it forth toward the unconscious princess, and the black magic almost instantly summoned a four-foot-tall earthen spike, impaling the princess right through her heart, armor and all.

It was a cold reality: the princess would never know how she had died, nor would she ever live to be queen of her kingdom.

Had she been conscious, I could almost imagine her saying, “Heh, here are your other twenty-five gold coins I promised to pay you...Verath. Take it with you to your grave, bastard.” She would then pause in contemplation and softly say in a quiet voice, “I guess I will never become queen, huh...there were still so many things I wanted to do.”

That was most likely what she would have said, but now she was dead, a four-foot spike impaled in her heart, her short blonde hair in disarray and a mess of blood on her armor.

Never again would she smile, never again would she feel the sunlight on her soft brown skin, and never again would she command an army. The only thing I could say in sympathy for her was that she had died painlessly and quickly.

“You bastard, you’ve killed her! What am I going to tell the king now? That his daughter died at the hands of an unknown stranger? Fuck!” the old male mage shouted in frustration. After a few more moments of frustrated screaming, the man finally calmed down, his face etched with determination. “I’ve failed my mission to watch over her and have lost my honor. The least I can do is pay you back in full, stranger.”

Yellow magic suddenly gathered in his hands, and he shot forth dozens and dozens of spheres the size of fists. They must have numbered in the hundreds and were so numerous that I could not even see the old mage behind the wall of spheres. Lined up in huge, long rows, the spheres instantly split apart in various directions and curved back toward me.

The control the old mage had over his globes of magic impressed me, a feat I could not duplicate. Each sphere individually was probably not very strong, judging from the density of the magic, but the sheer numbers made up for that shortcoming.

The old mage, however fine his control over magic was, would undoubtedly lose against me. The restriction to transform into a dragon, after all, did not apply to these two strangers.

Throwing the short sword held in my left hand at the mage halfheartedly, I quickly spread my black magic to cover my entire body and turned it into transformation magic.