“Hey, pumpkin, why am I hearing about this for the first time just n—”
“Agent Gribovsky,” the major said calmly, and the lieutenant stopped talking at once and just squinted at Alex. The latter ignored him.
The two were on opposite sides of the barricades. Doom didn’t have to inform the officer of every little thing going on right under his nose.
“In just a few hours, Mr. Dumsky, you’ve given me more information than our analysts have been able to in three months.”
“Three months? Has that masked guy been roaming the city for three months?”
“Masked?” Chon Sook stopped contemplating the view and stared at Alex. “He was wearing a mask?”
“Yeah,” Doom replied with a shrug.
“Why didn’t you mention that right away?”
“Because, unlike everyone else here, I’m still not used to sitting in the headquarters of a non-existent organization, discussing a problem that, according to everything there is to read in Atlantis, also doesn’t exist.”
Chon Sook just nodded. Then he went over to the vault, opened it with an ordinary-looking steel key, retrieved two very thick paper files, and slid them across the table to Alex.
“What are they?” Doom asked.
“The first is our set of statutes. The second is all the information we have on the Mask’s case.”
“The Mask, sir?” Gribovsky looked depressed. “We already nicknamed him! He’s the Elusive Demonologist.”
“If I hear that name again, you’ll get a jeep as your new car.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll shut up.”
“You may go, Mr. Dumsky. Agent Gribovsky will drive you back to your apartment. Until you’re called on again…try to keep your job.”
“And what happens if I get fired?”
“Then you’ll be flying business class to one of two destinations: the island or…”
The major didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t need to.
Taking both files, Alex stood and, without saying goodbye, left the office.
Wizard levels:
1. Apprentice (0-250)
2. Practitioner (250-1000)
3. Mystic (1000-3000)
4. Adept (3000-6000)
5. Master (6000-13000)
6. Grandmaster (???)
7. Archmaster (???)
8. Archmage (???)
Chapter 21
The first day of school at First Magic University began the same way it did every other year. At the central gate, a crowd of freshmen gathered to pretend they were really entering the holy of holies in New Earth’s magic education system for the first time.
They were accompanied by proud parents.
Proud-looking parents, at least.
Some of them had actually raised a child who’d secured a scholarship at an institution where the cheapest major cost 50,000 credits per semester. Few families could afford that much. After all, you had to multiply that by eight to calculate the total cost of an undergraduate degree.
Then there was a master’s degree, four times as expensive as a bachelor’s. The doctoral was…well, only those with grants and scholarships were accepted. Not even the city mayor’s children could take doctoral courses just by paying the tuition.
And that was even though the mayor of Myers City was a sort of king for all of Atlantis, which was a sovereign state…or maybe it wasn’t. That was an affair too complicated for any Sphynx to ever tell heads or tails of it. Although one Sphynx did actually try.
So, the happy parents celebrating with their children represented a variety of backgrounds, from happy middle-class professionals and small-time entrepreneurs to the heads of aristocratic clans.
Yes, Atlantis still had an archaic institution like the aristocracy. It was just modernized, with boatloads of money and power concentrated in their hands.
Each clan had a skyscraper of its own, and they vied with each other to see who could make theirs the tallest and most luxurious. Currently leading the charge was the Liebeflamm clan, fire wizards rumored to be descended from the Ifrits, or Arabic fire spirits (if spirits can have a nationality, of course).
Luckily, the pompous ceremony, complete with speeches delivered by the rector, the prorector, the deans, the best students, the alumni, and the benefactor money bags didn’t last long.
Shortly afterward, the uniformed crowds of students (both males and females) rushed through the gate and onto the campus. Most of them flocked into the central building where, after checking the schedules handed out by their course leaders, they hurried off for their first lectures.
The B-52 lecture hall was packed to capacity just fifteen minutes later. The twenty-three tiered rows buzzed with anticipation like a panicking anthill.
“Have you heard?” a voice came from a bunch of girls wearing make-up too ostentatious to stay unnoticed. “The professor’s only twenty-one!”
“That’s impossible,” a guy one row higher shot back. “It takes dozens of years of practice to become a professor in any area of magic, not to mention lots of research articles published in peer-reviewed journals and a good impact factor.”
“How do you know?”
“My grandpa is a professor.”
“Fuck your grandpa then, kid.”
The girls laughed. The young boy flushed, hunching up to hide his head like a tortoise in its shell. While he was apparently one of those lucky enough to be born with a head on their shoulders, the girls mocking him were just lucky to be born. At least, if they had brains, they weren’t in any hurry to show them off.
Everyone was excited about their introduction to legendary black magic. The thrill had as much to do with the fact that it was prohibited as it did the mysteries that enshrouded it.
There was just one group of three guys and two girls huddled up in the farthest corner of the hall that wasn’t inspired in the least. In fact, they were withdrawn and looking kind of even doomed.
Like a man going on a date despite being diagnosed with incurable impotence earlier that morning.
Yes, it was that kind of doom, one worse than what a prisoner sentenced to death feels on their way to the place of execution.
The prisoner knows that their pain is about to be over.
But for those five, the real pain was about to start.
“They have no idea what they’re waiting for,” the red-haired guy named Travis sighed.
“Who’s waiting?” A young man with A-list celebrity good looks took his eyes off his reflection in a small mirror. “I’m totally booked for today. Two fittings, four photo shoots. Sorry, guys, I can’t just—”
“Shut up, Leo,” Travis, Elie (the blonde), and Mara (the small pretty girl) barked in unison.
Jing, the Asian, stayed impassive, peering off somewhere into the distance. Not into the lecture hall, but into himself.
“What exactly did he tell you, bestie?” Elie whispered…or rather hissed. Beautiful as she was, she was far from Leo’s level. “That he wasn’t listening to you?”
“I think he just wanted me to think so,” the gray-haired girl smiled naively. “Maybe he’s not that bad, after all.”
“Not that bad?” Travis flared up instantly. “I asked my brother to dig up some info on Alexander Dumsky, and you know what?”
“You told us already,” Elie replied, rolling her eyes. “A good twenty times. But whatever, go ahead. For the twenty-first time.”
“I’ll say it a twenty-second time if that’s what it takes to get it through your thick skull. No. One. Has. Ever. Heard. Anything about an Alexander Dumsky in any of the Old Earth countries. Eastern or western Europe, the Americas, Asia, the Gulf, none of them. No. One. Ever. Anything! And when he tried to find out more about the so-called ‘professor’ here in Myers City, he was told to let it drop. And he’s a Central Office detective!”
“All the personal info you could need about our supervisor,” Elie said, stressing the last word, “is available for everyone to check out on the site.
You can read his work, check out his articles, look through pictures from conferences. Do you really think he could have faked all that by himself?”
“I don’t know, Elie. I don’t know.” The boy sighed. “But next month, my brother is going to a conference in China. He’s going to visit a friend who lives there—I spotted him in one of the pictures you say are such good evidence. We’ll expose the bastard and—”
Whatever else Travis was going to do with the black wizard would forever remain a mystery shrouded in darkness and terror. A young man kicked the door open and stepped into the lecture hall.
Paying no heed to the students who fell suddenly silent, he took a deep pull of his cigarette, let the smoke join the cloud already around his head, and sat down at his desk, hands in pockets.
He cursed happily as he rummaged through the drawers, his cigarette tucked in his mouth. But only the first few rows heard how nasty his language was.
The lecture hall became even quieter.
The professor of black magic, a genius who’d earned this rank by the age of twenty-one, a handsome man with short haircut styled the way it was done in the 2010s, a character dressed in a very expensive suit, put his feet up on the table and, still smoking his cigarette, opened in front of him…
Not a grimoire. Not a book on dark magic. Not some other book or even a course syllabus, but a very fat porn magazine complete with a lurid cover.
The lecture hall got very quiet.
A small feather fell from the ceiling, easing its way through the air. Every little rustle it made echoed like raging thunder in the spring.
“Ah, right.” Checking himself, Professor Alexander Dumsky carelessly opened the laptop and pressed several buttons. On the large graphitic board (so backward) behind his back, projected by a previous-century apparatus, appeared a giant magic seal.
The very sight of it left many of the students there giddy, a group that used to think of themselves as some of the best and brightest young minds in the city.
Never before had they seen such a complicated, involved, and intricate tangle of magic symbols, signs, figures, and other shapes.
“Whoever doesn’t solve this by the end of the semester will fail my exam and be expelled,” the professor declared in the distant voice of a person engrossed in whatever they’re reading. “The clock starts now.”
Travis was about to say something when his gaze was met by the bright green stare of the black wizard.
Hiccupping, he got to work copying the seal onto his tablet.
“Did he hear me?” he muttered. His whole figure seemed to shrink.
A couple of moments later, everyone in the lecture hall was sliding their styluses across their tablets.
***
Alex dove into the dossier on the Mask, using the Asian’s preferred term for the guy in his head. And he wasn’t reading because he had to. Not because it was his job. Just because…
Well, because he hadn’t told the Guards everything he knew. He’d actually revealed just a tiny bit of what he’d learned about the demonologist in that apartment. And if even half of Alex’s guesses were true, hard times were about to come crashing down on him.
They were going to be much, much harder than those four years in the wizard prison. Much harder than playing guard dog for humanity’s defenders.
“Professor?” Out of the corner of his eye, Doom saw a girl timidly raise her hand.
Slamming the dossier shut, he peered at the young prodigy.
[Name: Tasha. Race: Forest Elf. Mana level: 650. Open the extended dossier?]
The extended dossier? Ah, sure. He was a professor, and the bunny girl was his student. That’s why the lenses offered him more info.
Damnation. All demons of hell.
An 18-year-old elf at the sixth level? Were all the other young prodigies there going to waste his precious time, too?
“What?”
The elven girl (rather good-looking, which was why Alex responded to her) seemed to shrink as she squeaked.
“What are we supposed to do with the seal?”
Alex shifted his gaze from the elven girl, the magic Pandora still ringing on the wrist of her raised hand, to the seal, then back, then to the seal again.
He’d already memorized all the demons of hell.
What morons.
“You’re supposed to distribute the energy flows so that the spell consumes a max of 1,200 points instead of 1,900. So, you’re in it up to your neck. Funny, yeah, up to your neck. Start working! The sun is high, and I haven’t gotten any solutions yet.”
After that, Alex donned his headphones demonstratively and got back to reading the dossier. He’d had more important things to take care of the previous night.
If he was going to meet the demonologist face to…well, face to mask, he wanted to be 147% ready.
***
Once the professor put his headphones on, no one in the lecture hall dared whisper or even look up from their tablets. No one but the redhead.
“Reduce 1,900 to 1,200? Cut mana consumption by seven levels?! I can’t even figure out the outline! That’s impossible! And—”
Once again, Travis’s words would remain shrouded in secret and mystery forever. The shroud that time, however, was made up of the excessively strong smell of perfume coming from the short, plump, and balding dean entering the hall.
B-52 was visited by Travis Lebenstein in person, rather colorful as he was. And what he saw was more than he could take in.
So, he decided to go with his usual tack, distracting the professor and asking, “What’s going on here?” in a voice so thunderingly loud that it almost shattered the windows.
The way Alexander Dumsky pulled a single headphone out of his ear was enough for many of the students to grip their protective charms.
They sensed that blood was about to be shed.
Chapter 22
Alex turned to see what the sound was.
Standing by his lecturing desk was a puny, disgusting-looking man. Although, he wouldn’t have been that bad if he had merely walked around with the looks he’d gotten from Mother Nature. But no, he had to top all his flaws by interrupting Alex’s lecture.
Hell. Doom had spent half the night searching his notes for the spell he’d been working on for the past five years.
Tired of doing it alone, he’d decided to let the hundred students rack their brains over it.
“I’m sorry, but who are you?” Alex asked.
He should have just kicked the creature out, but he wasn’t a street gangster anymore. He wore a suit for a reason. Alex Doom was now a professor, and he needed to behave accordingly to stay in the Guards’ good graces.
The last thing he wanted was to fall out of those good graces.
Anything but that.
“Who…who…who am I?!” the man squealed. “I’m the department dean! I’m Travis Lebenstein! I’m—”
“The terror that flaps in the night, I get it,” Alex interrupted. “I feel like we’ve met before. Hm…are you a regular at the Merry Sailor? They hired me to put up a magic defense to keep the ladies out once. It’s a men-only bar, and they have a reputation to uphold.”
“I’ve never been there.” Alex quickly learned that the guy’s fat, balding face was capable of taking on any color of the rainbow. “What flapping terror are you talking about?!”
“Darkwing Duck, sir,” Doom replied indignantly. “You don’t know that?”
“What bloody duck, Dumsky?! Are you crazy?”
Alex turned to the students. They seemed to have departed from that reality, staring blankly ahead. There was no way they were going to get the joke and recognize the phrase about the terror that flaps.
Shit. Where is this world going?
“Now that you ask, I guess I am,” Doom sighed in dismay. “The very fact that I got myself stuck in this hole makes me wonder about my sanity.”
“This hole?!” The dean drew more air into his already large chest. “Hole??! How dare you�
��you…you…”
“If you can’t think of a swear word bad enough, I’ll be happy to help. Just not until I finish my lecture. Dear Mr. Dean, would you be so kind as to turn around and close the door behind you? Considering your numerous academic degrees, I think you’ll be able to figure out which side you should be standing on when you’re done.”
The small fat man choked in the middle of a word, then took a step forward as he slipped his right hand beneath his jacket.
The bookworm, who Alex definitely knew from somewhere, was not that dumb.
But it was even better that way.
Doom needed to test his theory about his place in the institution, and he was happy to get that out of the wa—
As ill luck would have it, the glass screen of a smartphone in the first row flashed.
The dean wheeled around instantly, venting his righteous indignation on his new victim.
“You? Recording? Me?!” In a few surprisingly long strides for such a vertically challenged body, Lebenstein appeared in front of the girl recording the incident. “Stop it! Now!”
He grabbed the phone from her and was about to smash it on the floor when he froze. It wasn’t that he was shocked; he’d suddenly lost the ability to move.
The audience gasped.
Running down Alex’s palm was a small drop of blood. Glowing over his fingers, emitting steady red light that seemed to penetrate the depths of every soul in the room, was a magic seal.
“Blood magic, my dear students.” Alex stood up, walked over to the dean, and waved slightly with his hand.
The tubby man straightened up to attention and saluted with the hand holding the phone. The first, very soft giggles came. Measuring his pace out, the dean, whose eyes were popping out of their sockets, turned around and came up to the girl. Bowing low, he returned the phone to her and started a walk back to the lecturing desk.
The whole thing was accompanied by moves of Alex’s hand.
“Very tricky to use. Prohibited since 2073 to everyone but those naturally predisposed towards black magic. But you are free to study its theoretical foundations. And you must study the practical techniques of defense. Or…”
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