Chapter 654: Magic Cancer

In a city like Lot, survival was already a daily negotiation with hunger and cold. I had given them freedom, but I had also given them a future that looked as cruel as the tables they had been strapped to.

I kept moving.

The third lair was a mansion in the wealthy district, its gardens trimmed and its fountains still running.

The guards here were better trained. They came at me in formation, with shields, spears, and coordinated spells.

I broke the formation with a single step forward, and the rest was arithmetic.

When the mansion had the silence of death, I stood in the grand hallway and listened to the water in the fountains. It sounded obscene.

The fourth lair was a mine. The fifth was a ship anchored in the bay. The sixth was a cellar beneath a bakery. Each one fell the same way. Each one left the same taste in my mouth. Each one added another layer of blood to the blade and another weight to the question I could not answer.

The last lair rose in front of me sooner than I expected. It was a fortress at the western edge of the district, built into the wall itself.

Two guards stood at the heavy doors. They opened their mouths to shout, but the katana moved first. One horizontal slash took both of them and the doors themselves in the same motion.

Wood and iron and flesh parted together. I did not wait for the pieces to finish falling. I stepped through the widening gap and into the heart of the facility.

There was no conversation. No warnings. No listening to offers of gold or rank.

I simply moved through the chambers—fast, thorough, and without hesitation. Every living signature that still carried active magic, every researcher, assistant, and guard, fell in the space of a few heartbeats.

When the last body hit the floor I turned the blade on the machineries. The entire facility died in the same moment its people did.

I stood in the center of the ruin and felt the weight of what I had done settle over my shoulders.

Blood dripped slowly from my cheek and the ends of my hair. The katana was no longer pale and clean; it was dark with innards and half-clotted blood that ran down the fuller and onto the floor in thick, quiet drops.

I could hear my own breathing inside my head, loud and steady, and somehow separate from the rest of the world.

All the research facilities in Lot were gone. The work was finished.

***

At some point the ground beneath my boots had begun to tremble. Distant thunder rolled through the stone, not from the sky but from somewhere deeper in the city. The sound was continuous now, a low, grinding roar that never quite faded.

Benjamin.

He must have already entered combat with the strangers who had appeared earlier.

He had told me, clearly and without room for argument, that I was not to come unless he called for me.

But my concern had grown too much to ignore. No one had given me the task, but I had decided that I would be his guide and his guard while he moved through Thaad. Whatever be the cost and risk, I needed to be at his side.

I turned toward the source of the noise and began to run.

The closer I came, the more certain I knew that this entire section of Lot would never be inhabitable again. The density of magic in the air had climbed to dangerous levels in only a few short hours.

The ground itself was cracked in long, jagged lines. Walls that had stood for decades now leaned outward or had already collapsed into heaps of broken stone.

Even though the battle was still some miles away, the pressure of the conflicting forces had reached this far and left its mark.

The streets were empty. Every house I passed stood with its doors open or hanging from broken hinges.

The people had fled, and they had been right to do so. Anyone who had remained would already be dead, crushed by the sheer weight of uncontrolled magic saturating the air.

People like me—those who could regulate the flow of magic through their vessels, and could draw it in and release it again without letting it tear them apart from the inside—might still survive in these conditions.

But for everyone else, the city had become a grave waiting to be filled.

Folks who weren’t used to this kind of training would have their cells forced to adapt whether they wanted it or not, and that "forced adaptation" was exactly what people called Magic Cancer.

Their bodies would start reshaping themselves on the spot just to try and hold the massive amounts of magic pouring in from the air, but the process was never clean or controlled.

I had seen it happen once before, years ago, in a mining town near the border. A man had wandered too close to a ley line rupture. Within minutes his skin had begun to bubble and split, new growths pushing through the cracks.

Unlike me—I could simply breathe the excess magic back out again with a few steady techniques I had practiced for years, and it barely hurt because my own cells had already grown used to handling large amounts of magic without tearing themselves apart—these ordinary people would find their bodies turning against them from the inside.

The cells would go wild under the pressure, feeding on muscle and organ just to keep up with the density, slowly eating the host alive.

I was still turning that particular horror over in my head when I walked straight into a young man coming the opposite direction.

The impact was solid enough that he stumbled backward hard and landed on his backside on the cracked street.

Dust puffed up around him, and his hands scraped against the broken stones.

He scrambled up immediately and reached out with both hands like he was trying to steady me instead of the other way around.

But something was strange about him.

I stepped back and looked at him properly.