I could have killed him right there.

  There was no time to ruminate on what could have been though. In a fight my body always operated on auto-pilot, especially when faced with a clumsy enemy like Charlie. He was full of openings that I couldn’t resist exploiting to my advantage, even if it kept me from taking the risk path of trying to concentrate and sever his spine while throwing him into the hilt of his knife.

  I was internally timing how long it took for Charlie to snap and start firing magic bolts like a raging bull. This kid didn’t know the first thing about winning a real fight. He had made it this far by abusing the power that his dear old dad gave him – throwing overwhelming force at his problems until they went away in a cloud of rubble and red mist.

  He was also the overconfident type. He never witnessed what I was truly capable of during our previous bout, and it was doubtful if he listened to the warnings dispensed by his father once they learned my identity. I was a girl around his age, nothing more, and that meant he should have been able to brutalize me without a problem.

  But there was a problem. I’m a trained killer – not a teenage girl.

  There was that flicker of hesitation in his eyes. That opening salvo was revealing. He wouldn’t be able to reliably beat me by doing reckless stuff like that. I had his knife and was threatening to put it to good use. There was still space behind him to fall back. I took a step, and so did he. I wasn’t getting any closer.

  “What happened to all of that confidence?”

  “It still hurts to get stabbed!”

  “Then maybe you should have considered a different line of work.”

  Charlie roared and charged at me again. I tucked the knife in close to my stomach and stepped into his attack, stabbing it through his abdomen. His momentum continued to carry him, so I was forced to lower my centre of gravity and lift him up over my head using my back. He flipped through the air and came down with a heavy thud, rolling over and clutching the dagger buried into his stomach with a cry of pain.

  That seemed to be his intent. He pulled it free and tossed it aside, the flow of blood stopping so quickly that it didn’t even stain the white shirt he was wearing.

  “Why the hell are you doing this? Just because your father told you to?”

  “Shut up!”

  The timer was up. I ducked away when I saw his hand moving. A powerful bolt of energy flew through the air and shattered the window behind me. Shards of glass rained down onto the marble floor.

  “You’re a child! You shouldn’t have the foggiest damn idea what you want! You don’t even know what a republic really is!”

  “I said shut up! I’m going to kill you, bitch!”

  “Such foul language from a young man. I’m going to clean your mouth out with soap first.”

  If he wanted a battle of magical talent, then he would get one. Firing dumb bursts of energy was effective enough, but he could hardly curve those attacks around corners or utilise any spells more sophisticated than that. I doubted strongly that he could hone his senses at all, never mind use the currents in the air to detect disturbances and locate his enemies.

  He fired several more of them, attempting to rip through the wall and get to me without exposing himself. That dagger wound still hurt him. He couldn’t bleed all that well, but he still felt every injury that was doled out. The brain had a funny way of shutting down when you were placed into an agonizing situation.

  I was focused on evasion. I could feel a big attack coming, so I moved away from the corner and ran as fast as I could to put another wall between me and him. Charlie met my expectations and then some – launching an overkill blast that tore through the walls and half demolished the room that separated us.

  “Where the hell are you? Don’t run away from me!”

  I wasn’t running. It was smart positioning. The last respite of the loser was to assert that the foe’s tactics were somehow underhanded or ignoble. If he was going to smash the sanctum to pieces using his spells – then I was going to minimize his advantage by playing the long game.

  I took my chance and lobbed a bolt of lightning his way, striking him in the chest. It shot through the dust and rubble and blindsided him. His arms pulled into his sides like he was being bound by a length of rope, before he lost control of his legs and fell onto the floor in a heap. It didn’t last for long. He crawled back onto his knees and looked in my direction, returning fire with another low-power attack of his own.

  With my head refusing to pop out and get blown away, he resorted to the only strategy he knew. A barrage of increasingly powerful spells were thrown recklessly in my general direction, tearing down walls and tossing furniture every which way in the process.

  It lasted for so long that he started to second-guess his assumption about where I was hiding. Thinking that I had moved away to another part of the interior – he started to attack whatever walls he could see that could possibly conceal my body. He was wrong to assume. I was still in the same spot, hiding at the base of a demolished wall. It was rigid enough to resist the blasts, being connected to the foundations of the building.

  That would change if he truly unleashed the kind of power I witnessed during the funeral in the city. Still, this building was sturdier than the kind of two-story home one would find in an urban, working-class area. It was built from stone, marble and possessed a strong foundation.

  All of this was on my mind. I grinned to myself, hearing the frequency of his attacks slowing down as he discovered that he wasn’t getting the results he wanted. Many of the rooms were left half-standing.

  “You think you’re smarter than me?” he panted.

  “I think you’re inexperienced and na?ve.”

  “That’s the same thing!”

  “Nobody expects you to be anything else. You’re only a child, like me.”

  I finally emerged from my hiding place, preparing to summon a shield at a moment’s notice.

  “To be frank, this is a silly position to find yourself in. I’m sure there are more productive uses of your time and energy than terrorizing people using your magic.”

  He spat a gob of bile and blood onto the floor and ground it into the carpet using his boot.

  “Kids like me only get to go to the workhouse.”

  “What a load of rubbish. Your father’s a well-known researcher.”

  “And it doesn’t pay well enough for a good education. That’s what he told me.”

  Na?ve was the right word. Charlie never considered the possibility that Landon was lying to his face. It took a special type of asshole to lead your kid by the nose, but Landon was checking all of the boxes based on what I knew about him. It wasn’t too expensive. He just didn’t expect Charlie to be around for long enough to make the investment a worthy one...

  “And where do you get the right to criticise me like this? You’ve been murdering people all over the bloody place! You’ve got even less reason than me to be here!”

  “I’m here because I’ll be dead otherwise.”

  Charlie couldn’t say the same. There was no pressing need for him to join in on his father’s plot. He zipped his lips once again and readied his next attack. We were in a showdown. I never liked westerns though. Despite my projection of confidence – this was a fairly dire situation to be in. Charlie opened and maintained a gap that made it impossible for me to outfight him.

  Whenever someone used magic around me I could sense it. It was like the smell of wet pavement in the sun, and a slight tingle on my skin that made my body hair stand on end. A shiver ran through my entire body from head to toe.

  Charlie gripped his knuckles so tightly that they turned white. He drew it all inwards. The energy in the air suffered a violent reversal, whipping towards him as the eye of a towering hurricane. In my half-focused state, I could still see the magical currents being manipulated by his immense power. In full focus the threat was even more apparent. I was staring dead at the sun.

  “Die!”

  It was a simple statement of intent before a simple means of achieving it. He unfurled his hands and thrusted them in my direction. A booming wave of magical and physical energy rolled down the hallway, ripping up furniture, stripping wallpaper and shattering windows. As the walls ran parallel to the blast they remained firm, and served as a convenient channel to accelerate his attack.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  I was going to die. If that thing hit me, I was going to die. There was no doubt about it.

  In that moment there was only one thought blazing in my mind. I was not concerned with the optics of what was happening, or the damage we were causing to the building, or the potential for bystanders to be harmed. I interlaced my fingers with my palms facing outwards and projected my desires onto the physical world in front of me.

  Go away.

  I pulled my hands apart. I had an epiphany somewhere during that process, seeing the wave of energy coming my way, and recollecting everything I thought I knew about nihility magic. Nothing about this power was supposed to be rational. I was a fool for using it to simply break the bonds between the molecules in a physical structure.

  The blue tide parted. The air between us was emptied of all matter and light, leaving nothing but a gaping black void that generated an incredible amount of force. The air around us was being pulled in to fill the gap – but not fast enough to allow his magical attack to continue travelling.

  The breach closed as quickly as it opened. The parts of his attack that avoided the void in reality whipped past my body and shredded the walls on either side of me. Debris flew in every direction, raining down from above like rain on a dreary morning.

  Charlie was stunned. He stood with his hands outstretched and his mouth held agape. Nobody had ever managed to survive that kind of attack before. Not the police, not the soldiers who defied the conspiracy he belonged to, not the many walls and buildings that stood in his way. Everything was ripped to pieces and scattered to the four corners of the continent.

  Until now.

  That damnable noble was standing proudly. Why was she still standing before him without any signs of injury? Why did she look so pleased with herself? Why was she not cowering in fear at his immense power?

  I laughed.

  Charlie tensed up as that characteristic high-pitched shrill, bouncing up and down like suspension of a pothole filled road, filled the air between us.

  “What’s so funny? What the hell was that?”

  Xenia was right. I wasn’t using this correctly at all!

  I laughed and laughed, and laughed a little more until Charlie was red in the face with a scowl filled with fury. His grand attack had dissipated into thin air, or rather, the complete lack of it. I’d simply deleted it from existence – or shoved it into some unknowable pocket dimension that was going to serve as my personal trash disposal. That was the power of irrational magic. Fuck the rules, I was going to snap my fingers and delete matter if I wanted to!

  There was a slight problem. While I was glad that upping the ante hadn’t turned me into a withered pile of dust as every spec of magic was ripped from my body, it was still comparable to what would happen if I cast my normal nihility spell on a grand scale. I’d erased enough of an opening to cover my body and then some. I could barely stand without falling over and exposing my smug laughter for the theatre that it was.

  On the other hand, Charlie had done the exact same thing as me. No matter how doped up on demon’s blood he was – there was still some type of throughput limit to his mana reserves. If he couldn’t pull the energy evenly from his entire body then more of it would come from his natural well than the blood itself.

  He staggered towards the wall and propped himself up against it. His breathing was heavy. This was the first time since the operation that he had felt the upper limits of his strength being reached. The sanctum had been torn to pieces. I could see clean through one side to the other through several destroyed rooms and brick walls.

  “You don’t have the blood. How did you stop my attack?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  “Brute strength is an advantage to be sure – but it can always be defeated by someone who understands the rules and methods better than their foe. Suffice to say, I’ve been training with the best magical tutors in the country for almost a year. Your wave can’t hit me if there’s no air for it to travel through.”

  It was a gross understatement of what he’d witnessed. That wasn’t me creating a simple air vacuum using my magic, it was a temporary breach in the fabric of our reality, one that didn’t even pass through into the Veil like I anticipated. There was simply nothing on the other side.

  Durandia handed me a potentially apocalyptic level of power. That meant she expected me to use it to achieve her ends. Just how profound was the threat that we ultimately faced? What kind of malicious being or out-of-control incident required the ability to erase segments of reality for a moment?

  Xenia was angry because Durandia was contravening their golden rules. They were not permitted to hand out divine abilities at their leisure, not without approval from their peers and a very, very good reason.

  Perhaps erasing the air alone would be enough to stop that wave of energy from turning my organs into paste, but that was an elegant, precision operation for which I was not equipped to handle. If I was going to do it – it was all or nothing. I staggered towards Charlie using whatever strength I could muster into my legs. He was temporarily unable to use more magic as his system circulated the mana-filled blood.

  He frantically searched the ground for any sign of the knife he’d used at the start of our battle. It was nowhere to be seen, blown across the area by his wave and embedded into a stray piece of wood or wreckage. It was too late. I ran up to him and performed a textbook double-leg takedown, wrestling him to the floor and mounting him.

  Charlie put up his dukes in a poor attempt to block the rain of punches that were coming at him. Each one hit with a gunfire crack, whipping his head back and knocking it against the marble floor. The tangled carpet did nothing to assist with the blunt force impact. I kept going until I started to see blood leaking from his nostrils and busted lips.

  His resistance was weak. The wind was knocked out of his sails, and without his magic he had no way to effectively fight back. I gripped his shirt and held him up from the floor.

  “Why this?”

  “What do you mean?” he panted.

  “Your dad is taking advantage of you. You shouldn’t be doing this, putting your life in danger for a cause that only he believes in.”

  Charlie stared into my eyes impertinently, but as the confrontation stretched on his expression started to soften.

  “He’s my dad.”

  “That’s it?”

  “He’s doing this for me.”

  “How so?”

  Charlie growled in frustration at my questions; “The reason he decided to help them was because of me. He thought that this demon’s blood stuff would stop me from kicking the bucket. I was sick as a dog for years. They said I didn’t have long left, so he was willing to try anything.”

  He felt indebted to his father, then.

  “If he was so concerned about your health, why is he sending you out here to do this dangerous stuff?”

  “Because I’m bloody invincible! You’ve seen it for yourself, haven’t you?”

  “It’s because he’s a cynical piece of shit who wants to use you like a tool!”

  That finally roused Charlie from his passive state. He pushed back against me and wrestled free from my grip, rolling over and crawling to the nearest wall so that he could try to get back to his feet. His sense of balance was still shot from the head trauma I’d inflicted. That was something the anti-coagulant properties of his blood couldn’t prevent.

  “Dad would never... he’d never do something like that! He’s doing this for me!”

  “You’re in for a very harsh lesson, Charlie. Parents have a responsibility to look after their children, but don’t think for one second that it comes with unconditional love. Parents can harbour the most intense hate of all.”

  Landon wanted fame. Genta was right about that much. It was what ultimately motivated him. He wanted to be famous, have a campus named after him, the whole nine yards. He wanted to stand amongst the pantheon of great Walserian thinkers like Henry Snow. Revolutionizing warfare in a time of great turmoil was the exact type of magic trick that would get him there.

  Even if he created that turmoil himself.

  As for how he felt about Charlie – that remained a mystery. I couldn’t discount the possibility that in that black heart of his there was a genuine desire to keep his son from passing away. It was hard to accept given the consequences of what he did to make it happen. Genta was also confident in his assertion that eventually all of the subjects injected with the demon’s concoction would die of heart failure.

  Mana was a type of energy. In extremely high concentrations it could erode the molecular structure of whatever it touched. It was a crude form of how my nihility spell worked. Normally this was not a problem, as the human body only accepted it in small quantities. Even a grade five mage would see negligible effects when unleashing their most powerful spells.

  The demon’s blood was a one-two punch of bad news. Not only was the mana content so high that it could potentially weaken thin tissues and other important structures like veins and arteries, but it was dense enough to make the heart work overtime to pump it through them. High pressure, weakened tissues and walls, and an overworked heart was a recipe for a major cardiac event. The points of failure were too numerous for Genta to name, and Landon’s claims of dilution were unavailing in his expert opinion.

  Everything worked out until it didn’t. There was no long-term testing being performed before they launched the large-scale deployment of the stuff. They gathered vagrants and true believers and went to town with no regard for their safety. The tipping point was unknowable, but it was somewhere on the horizon.

  “Go ahead then. Finish me off if you’re so bloody confident about it!”

  I wasn’t. That defence I performed had almost caused me to pass out on the spot. I counted my lucky stars that for whatever reason the increased power of the spell didn’t come with a matching cost to scale. It would have killed me otherwise. Mustering the energy to use my normal version and sever his spine was out of the question. I needed to be awake to rescue Thersyn and get out of the palace without being exposed.

  Amongst the assembled rubble of a once-illustrious palace, we were once again trapped in a stalemate. I could beat him all day but it wasn’t going to kill him. He was too tough.

  The sound of flapping wings drew our attention. A wave of dust flooded through the area and blinded me, and a strong gust of wind knocked me off balance and towards the half-demolished wall to my rear. As if that sensory assault was not enough – we were then subjected to an ear-piercing wail as a previously unseen half-hawk peered through the now-open exterior wall.

  I already thought these stinking, hulking beasts were terrifying from my brief encounter earlier, but it was an entirely different thing to see one of them up close and personal. The sheer size and scale of their hybrid bodies turned them into living battering rams.

  “I think it’s time to run away,” I suggested.

  “Run? I’m not going anywhere-”

  I grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt and scowled, “Unless you plan to be bird food in the next ten seconds - I suggest that you move those legs and come with me.”

  His eyes darted back to the sharp eyes of the predatory monster, and the saliva that dripped freely from the dangerous yellow beak that sprouted from a head covered in fluffy down. The choice was made for him. It sprang into action, squeezing through the gap and into the building with us. Whether he wanted to or not, his legs moved in concert with mine and we fled back towards the room where the stubborn staff member was hiding with the key.

  I could feel it at our backs. It saw a meal, and it wasn’t taking no for an answer. My fears were realized in the most terrifying of circumstances. It crawled through the hallways like a moving roadblock, threatening to bowl over and shred whatever got in its path.

  “In here!”

  My mental map of the sanctum came in handy. I pushed Charlie through a narrow corridor and towards a closed door. I dived after him, barely managing to avoid the hawk swooping down and snapping at me with its beak. It slammed into the wall, too wide to make it through and pursue us further. I scrambled back on my hands and knees, taking a quiet moment to behold the living face of these rare creatures.

  I preferred seeing them on seals and shields. I could very much do without the real-life examples. It squawked in frustration and persisted, ramming into the gap over and over without success.

  “We have to get out of sight or it won’t leave,” I declared.

  “Yeah, so get out of my bloody sight...”

  “It’ll be another pummelling if you keep running your mouth, Charlie.”

  We ducked into the room beyond the door and closed it behind us.