The hole appeared beside them, turning the wall into an opening with a dozen foot drop. The warehouse beyond was filled with crates and cages, the latter occupied by downtrodden people who’d been given a glimmer of hope at the sudden onset of violence.

  The guard had advanced on Ellen’s signal and could be seen attempting to force all the doors of the warehouse open. This occupied the bulk of the thugs as they fought to keep the doors secure.

  Four people stood, ignoring the threat outside, focusing instead on the hole that had opened. Unlike the thugs and bookkeepers, they’d been dealing with thus far, these were clearly people of violent means. Each bore weapons and armor for fit more for adventuring than crime, and they had a confident indifference to the fighting around them.

  The first to act was a large man, shirtless with just a belt, breechcloth, and giant axe. What made him stand out more than all that however was the glistening oil over his giant muscular form. He was already charging at them when the gnome behind him began casting.

  “Fireball!” She shouted, moving to counter despite knowing the futility of it in the anti-magic zone.

  Beside the wizard, a human male, with a clean-shaven head, wearing black form fitting robes, did a backflip off the crates they stood on, disappearing behind them, while the fourth and final member—female elf with a bow—pulled out a small pan flute and began a simple melody.

  The mote of fire formed in the hand of the gnome wizard. He wore a robe that billow despite the lack of wind indoors.

  Ellen completed her counter spell, even as she ran for cover up the stairs. Her spell completed, to both her and the enemy wizard’s surprise, the ball of flame vanishing before it could completely form. The gnome didn’t have much time to reflect on that surprise however, and he caught a glimpse into his utter insignificance in the face of the eldritch beings beyond the veil of reality.

  He let out a high pitch scream, and dove of the crate in a far less graceful manner than his friend.

  Bill and Grom held the bottom, as Syril struggled to reload his crossbow. Linar retrieved a pouch from beneath his cloak and pulled out a glass vial that contained writhing living flames.

  “No alchemists fire!” Syril yelled. “There are slaves out there in cages.”

  Linar sighed, pushing the vial back into the pouch, pulling out another that had a yellow grey fog within.

  “Where did you get a bag of holding?” Syril demanded.

  “You said I couldn’t have one, that doesn’t mean I agreed to it” Linar said, tossing the glass vial out into the warehouse. He pulled a full-face mask with glass eyeholes and a strange canister over the mouth, and jumped off into the fog.

  The bottle shattered, and a yellow mist immediately began to fill the space. The elf stopped playing her flute in time to jump out of the way, gracefully landing on the ground and skirting outside the edge of the growing cloud. The shirtless man failed to outrun it, despite his head start, and he slowed slightly as he convulsed, fighting the urge to vomit.

  Even from their distance away, the group could smell the rank odor of the stinking cloud.

  Inspired by her spell’s success, Ellen was thinking of the best spell to cast when the black robed man appeared out of a shadow above her on the stairs, immediately moving to push her in the chest. She brought her broom about, catching the fist just in time, but the strength of the punch was too much for her, and it pushed the broom into her chest with the full force of the blow.

  He followed up his punch with another, and Ellen attempted to cast a shield, only for the spell to fail due to the anti-magic field. The strike hit her square in the face, and she tumbled over backwards down the stairs.

  Syril, finally having reloaded his crossbow, fired the bolt at the unarmed assailant, and the man slapped the bolt out of the air, sending it into the wall beside him.

  “Stupid thing,” Syril muttered, dropping the weapon and drawing his rapier.

  He always wore the weapon, and trained with it regularly, it was rare however that it was a better option than his magics.

  Checking only briefly to make sure Ellen was alive, Syril ran at the martial artists meeting him with a thrust. Much like with the bolt, the man pushed the blade to the side with his hand, but unlike with the bolt, Syril was able to correct. With a flick of his wrist, he freed his blade from the deflection and pierced the man in the shoulder only to take a knee to his lightly armored hip in return.

  In the absence of the sound of the pan flute, another sound could be heard rising over the din of battle. A scampering chittering grew and grew until the source became impossible to miss. From all corners of the warehouse, rats emerged—squeezing through cracks and out of boxes at the haunting call of the pipes.

  They ignored the thugs, making their way to the four intruders with unnatural focus.

  In the cloud, Linar made contact with the barbarian who’d been caught in its putrid haze. Protected by his mask, Linar took advantage of the man’s retching, stabbing him in the back. Despite the dagger penetrating deep, the man looked unconcerned, far more occupied getting his vomiting under control.

  And he did, the pain of the dagger seeming to have focused him, allowing him to push past the odor. He stood straight, swinging his axe blindly at Linar, who only narrowly dodged by ducking under the blow. While no longer incapacitated by the gas, the shirtless warrior was not operating at his full potential. The pair traded blows, the larger of the two ignoring Linar’s pinpricks as he swung recklessly at the dodging and weaving rogue. He knew he only needed a single blow to down the lightly armored sneak.

  Ellen recovered at the bottom of the stairs, and it took her a moment to recall what had happened.

  “Get up!” Grom called, holding his shield to cover the bottom of the opening while Bill attacked at the enemy over it.

  The words clicked the past few moments into place, and her keen mind put together the pieces she’d been thinking through before a fist had interrupted her thoughts.

  Her counter spell had worked where all the other’s she’d tried had failed. The counter spell she’d learned from the spellbook imbued with a touch of… something else.

  Climbing to her feet, she made her way up the stairs just in time to see the onset of the swarm of rats. Testing her theory, she cast a spell, and three birds with seven wings, three eyes, and eight talons between them entered the warehouse in front of her. They immediately went for the swarm of rats, flying over the swarm and picking them up in their talons even as they swallowed them whole—their beaks opening far more than should be possible for birds of any size.

  The three birds broke the unnatural coordination of the rats in the warehouse as their instinctive fear of birds of prey overwhelmed their magical compulsion, but that only lead to a mass exodus to hide, the best place being up the stairs Ellen stood atop.

  Trusty broom in hand, Ellen swatted and swept up the rats as they climbed up the wall and through the mysterious hole with in it, as she did, she scanned the warehouse with her magic detection active, looking for the source of the—apparently extremely selective —anti-magic field.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  An arrow flew at her through the cloud, missing her by inches.

  “There’s still an archer out there!” Syril called to Linar.

  Ellen sent a mental command to one of her birds to keep the archer busy and continued to scan the room.

  She found it just as the gnome attempted to cast another spell at her, having mustered his courage and snuck around the cloud to spot her. She sensed his magic as soon as he began casting and met it with another counterspell. The spell she attempted to counter was more powerful than the last, and she felt as her mind was pitted against the other casters in a moment that dragged out in the strange plane where such mental battles took place.

  Whether it was a remnant of the last such counter or an aspect of the spell’s enhancement itself, Ellen felt she had an edge in the battle. She could sense the fear in the gnome and feeling of overwhelming insignificance that made him feel as if his magic were little more than a child’s first card trick.

  And then, she won, his spell broken along with another small part of his mind.

  “The gong!” Ellen called, once she’d bested her foe.

  “The what?” Bill demanded.

  “It’s an instrument,” Syril called from where he was losing his fight.

  Ellen noticed and sent Newt a command to aid the bard. The bird came swooping in, only for his target to disappear into a shadow and emerge on the other side of Syril. This must not have been the first such time this happened, for Syril was ready for the move, performing his own feat of acrobatics as he did a backflip down the stairs as soon as his opponent had vanished.

  “Destroy the big circular thing!” Ellen called, the rats regaining some of their composure as there was only one bird left to disrupt them.

  Falling back to another modified spell, Ellen cast again, bringing an invisible servant into existence at her feet. It immediately took off; driven by the command she’d had in mind at its creation.

  Unseen by all save for a small sense of disquiet that couldn’t exactly be placed, the servant ran through the rats which parted at the advance of the invisible figure. Once in the smoke, its outline became visible. While the spell had once had the form of a small fairy, now it was a writhing mass of tentacles and limbs that rolled as much as it used its appendages to move itself.

  The invisible abomination made its way through the smoke, scaling the crate that held the gong easily and knocked the device off its base. It crashed to the ground with a resounding gong and Ellen was certain her magic had returned to here.

  “Now!” she shouted, and the tides turned.

  Grom voiced a prayer, and two of the slain thugs at his feet began moving, life returning to them as they rose to their feet.

  The thugs didn’t understand what was happening at first—though to be fair, neither did Bill or Grom.

  The newly risen zombies shambled to their feet and turned on their former allies. It took a moment for the living thugs to realize what had happened, their mental efforts helped along when one of their former numbers bit a chunk of the face of the nearest goon.

  They began attacking the zombies, freeing Grom and Bill up to support those on the stairs.

  Bill pulled a hand axe of his belt and threw it at Syril’s opponent. The man once more deflected the attack, but Syril shouted, “You suck!” infusing the words with his magic. Instead of pushing the axe aside as he’d done many times, he swatted at it too soon and lost two fingers for his attempt.

  Hissing in pain, he disappeared into a shadow.

  Ellen borrowed Newts vision to find the location of the archer, then sent bolts of magical force through the gas, each striking their target, taking her utterly by surprise. Newt took advantage of the spell, adding a couple more eyes to his growing count.

  A flash of light blossomed in the fog, blinding the barbarian, with Linar using the opportunity his alchemical device gave him to flee.

  Bill saw this and leaped down the dozen foot drop swinging. Through some supernatural sense, the barbarian—eyes still blinded—brought his own axe up to meet Bill’s. Bill’s axe met the haft of his foes, and while the block was unexpected it didn’t surprise him nearly as much as the ringing pain that shot through his hands as his axe stopped cold, his enemy not budging the slightest at the full weight of his attack.

  The shirtless man spun around, kicking Bill in the ribs, and the warrior went flying across the room where he broke through a crate, disappearing inside it.

  “I think he might be magically strong,” Linar said to those above.

  “No, really?” Syril said, reaching for his flute.

  He played a note, and the mad rush of the barbarian halted as he stumbled and his body began heaving, not out of disgust, but laughter. The laughter built, forcing him to take deep gasps for breath, each inhale more of the still lingering cloud. Whatever force of will that had allowed him to power through the stench before left him with his control over his sense of humor, and his bouts of laughter were broken up by waves of vomit.

  The party spread out, Grom commanding the remaining thugs by their door to surrender, each—whether through magical compulsion or good sense—complied. Those who’d been holding the door saw the writing on the wall and broke, leaving a desperate few behind to hold it shut. Those that stayed didn’t out of misguided stands of valor, they’d simply been the slowest on the uptake.

  It ended rather quickly after that. The gnome wizard was found cowering in a jittering pile of terror, having locked himself in an empty cage. The archer was found to still be alive and in a similar state.

  She sat in the fetal position, muttering to herself.

  “It sees all that there is to see and all that cannot be seen. It is the darkness that shine in the light.”

  She repeated it endlessly and other similar gibberish. The barbarian and her were thrown in the cell with the wizard, and all weapons and magical items—easily identified by Ellen’s detect magic—were taken from them.

  “The new effects of your spells are a little horrifying,” Grom commented.

  “They’re alive aren’t they?” Ellen said. “We were prepared to kill them, this is better. Right?”

  “I’m not so sure,” Grom said, looking at the two cowering wretches with pity.

  ?

  Patreon for up to 20 advanced chapters.

  Discord.

  KU and Audible.