Dark Wizard's Case

by Kirill Klevanski

  “Relax, Jet Li,” Doom waved aside. “I have a great idea.”

  “And please,” the Asian guy continued, far exceeding his normal self-limit of talking, “stop trying to nickname us. We all have names. Please use them.”

  “What are you talking about, Jackie Chan?” Alex unscrewed the bottle to drop some ice into his mouth, rolling it around for a while before swallowing. His students winced. “Your nicknames have already been issued and assigned. So here you go. Donnie Yen. Rupert Green. Jared Leto. And…”

  Alex looked at Mara and Elie. For some reason, he wasn’t able to associate them with actresses from the golden era of film.

  “…and you two. Your job is to try to make me stand up.”

  The students gaped at him. Then they slammed their mouths shut and exchanged glances.

  Mara took a step forward, confirming Doom’s initial guess that she was the informal leader of the good-looking bunch.

  “Excuse me, Professor? What do you mean by that?”

  “Exactly what I said. Magic tournaments are a rough contact sport, aren’t they? So, work the rough contact. You can use any spells you know regardless of the grimoire and school. Knock yourselves out. See what you can do.”

  Silence again.

  “But, Professor? There are five of us.”

  “Miss Glomebood. I already know you have potential as a burglar, but being so bad at counting… Don’t make my disappointment, as they say in High Gar—” Alex bit his tongue just in time, although the students were too startled to notice his slip of the tongue anyway.

  “But…”

  “Here, let’s get this going.” Alex lifted a hand. A small ball of lilac fire formed on each of his fingertips, shooting off toward their targets trailing smoke behind them.

  None of the five students evaded. Only Jackie was fast enough to put a defense up. The others found themselves down on the sand, struggling to catch their breath.

  “I can do that again.” Alex held his bottle against his head. “So, you’d better use the best defense: a good offense.”

  Chapter 41

  Alex wasn’t expecting anything special from the students he apparently had to win that bloody tournament with if he was going to finally get Pyotr and the Syndicate off his back.

  To make things even worse, Mara Glomebood and company were Magic Theorists. In the tournament, they’d be confronted by the full force of the Practical Magic Department spearheaded by its Battle Magic School.

  On closer inspection, only the fan of Asian martial arts was someone to be reckoned with.

  [Name: Jing Wai. Race: Human. Mana level: 802.]

  A Practitioner at the 8th level. Eleonora and all the rest were at level 6.

  [Name: Leo Stone. Race: Human. Mana level: 647.]

  The pretty boy struggling to regain his wind and stand back up wasn’t just a great fashion magazine model. He also knew a thing or two about magic. At least, judging by his mana level.

  Alex wasn’t going to be able to draft a winning strategy until he saw the youngsters in actual combat.

  [Name: Travis Chavert. Race: Human. Mana level: 652.]

  The redhead who’d surprised Alex with his superior command of magic power appeared to be not much stronger than Leo. That was odd. And confusing.

  Then there was the last team member. (Doom skipped blondie, as he’d scanned her before the ill-fated museum tour.) The informal leader. Mara Glomebood. Half-dwarf, half-human. Doom didn’t want to know which of her parents was which.

  Although, considering she was a member of the Glomebood clan, it had to have been a human woman bedded by a male dwarf.

  She must have been really drunk, Alex thought, recalling Bromwoord, the bald traitor. Blind drunk.

  [Name: Mara Glomebood. Race: Human/Dwarf. Mana level: 610.]

  Just as one would expect of a half-blood, she was the weakest of the five. For some unknown reason, people with half magic race blood always progressed slower through the magic levels than purebloods. Regardless of which races they mixed.

  Travis came to first, just as Alex expected. He looked the most vigorous of the five.

  Lifting both hands, Travis started to move them, drawing signs and placing them inside a green hexagram. Simultaneously, dense flows of dust were sucked from the ground into his seal.

  “Not bad,” Doom said. His lenses didn’t display the magic school or mana amount used by his opponent. That feature was rumored to only be enabled for the lenses used by special forces—neither the military nor the police had it. “An Earth Magic spell. To reduce mana usage, you added a physical element. That saves you twenty percent of the mana, but…”

  With a loud crack, Travis’s pentagram shot out a big hammer. At least, it was a big lump of earth shaped like a hammer.

  Gaia’s Hammer, Alex said to himself, recalling the spell’s name. As it had been cast by a Practitioner at just the sixth level, it didn’t look all that impressive. When that same spell (included in most of the grimoires available on the market) had been used against Doom by the Adept coming to arrest him, it looked like fantasy game art.

  “There’s just one problem.” Alex held out a palm. He didn’t actually need his hands to form a seal, but showing that to the students was a bit too much for their first day of practice. “By adding that element to your spell, you make it too physical. And physical objects can be stopped by other physical objects.”

  A gray seal flashed on Doom’s palm. With a nasty bony screech, a skeleton pulled itself out of the ground. It was so weak and fragile it would have crumbled if someone had spit on it. Alex had only put ten mana points into it.

  The hammer crashed into the half-transparent skeleton to send a dusty storm soaring into the sky. When it settled, Alex was sitting exactly where he had been, leaning against the gate. A startled Travis examined the site of the collision.

  His hammer had been shattered and scattered around the whole practice yard, the skeleton gone without a trace. But, far more important, the spell collision hadn’t affected the professor in the slightest.

  The redhead’s friends looked as startled as he was.

  “And that does it,” Doom said with a disappointed sigh. “None of you pampered kids has never been in a real battle.”

  “But—”

  “School duels and street fights don’t count,” Alex interrupted. “How much magic did you put into that spell? A hundred and forty? A hundred and seventy? That used up almost a fifth of your reserve. And I spent exactly ten points.”

  “But that’s impossible!”

  “Physical objects can be blocked by other physical objects.”

  “But the hammer should’ve destroyed that skeleton!” blondie screamed with such ardor that the words came with a sway of her brea—

  No.

  No, no, no. Stop that.

  Alex still hadn’t had sex since getting out of prison, extending his abstinence past the four-year sentence, but they were kids. It didn’t matter that they were just four years younger than him.

  They’re kids. Kids. They even haven’t gotten their multi-purpose IDs yet.

  “The skeleton had explosive magic,” the karate kid said. “That’s why the hammer exploded when it hit it.”

  “Damn!”

  “Shit.”

  The students looked at their professor with different eyes.

  Suddenly, they better understood how he’d bypassed the faculty dean’s defensive artifacts and survived the battle with the demon.

  Professor Dumsky was just out of everyone else’s league.

  In the meantime, Alex, still holding the bottle of ice to his head, was hit with more recollections of his lessons at Follen School.

  “My turn!”

  Eleonora Wessex, the aristocrat, had probably had plenty of excellent practice with strong wizard tutors ever since she was young, but…

  Yes, she used both hands. Yes, the seal was formed quickly. Yes, the fire she summoned was pure magic, without a physical element. />
  It would have burned through a ten-meter-thick steel wall without meeting any resistance. Steel, after all, belongs to the physical world, and her fire was pure magic.

  But still…

  “Too slow,” Alex said, waving a hand.

  Flying toward him was a Practitioner-cast Pyromancer’s Storm, a fire flow as thick as a Russian pyramid ball, but still too slow. Two hundred mana points wasted.

  From the ground beneath blondie’s feet, a bony hand appeared, gripping at her ankle and jerking her to the side.

  “What the fu…” The end of the aristocrat girl’s filthy curse was drowned out by a loud smacking sound. She had fallen face first into the long-jump landing pit, the sand cushioning the impact.

  “That must taste nasty,” Alex smirked. “You’re strong and have excellent technique. But your speed… My granny could have done it faster. She’d have cast ten spells in the same amount of time.”

  “I…”

  “You’re already out.”

  Before Glomebood could lift her hands to form a seal, she was surrounded by three wolves burning with black fire.

  [Spell used: HELL HOUNDS of the Black Magic School. Mana used: 75 points/one + 45 points/min.]

  Half-bloods. Magically weak, but with their special skills. Almost like espers.

  Underestimating either half-bloods or Espers was stupid. And a stupid black wizard was a dead black wizard.

  “When did you…?”

  “Before I blocked Travis. Kiddies, you keep forgetting that the tournament is a team event. I asked you to try to get me to stand up, but I didn’t say you had to do it one at a time. So—”

  Alex saw something flash before his eyes. Acting on pure instinct, he sent his will to his magic source, drained a healthy helping, and formed a lilac lightning bolt that snapped out of the seal instantly appearing in midair.

  “You can cast hands-free?!”

  “A lot of Adepts can’t do that!”

  While Elie and Travis admired (and somewhat resented) him, the karate kid suffered the impact. The tiger tattoos on his legs still glowed with blue magic energy, but he was already flying backward into the stands, a bloody trace behind him and a black burn mark on his chest.

  “Damn,” Alex cursed.

  He’d instinctively used a battle spell on the kid. Who would have expected one of the five to actually be good?

  He was a shaman. A real, hereditary shaman capable of summoning animal powers. Meeting him among that bunch of pampered kids was…unexpected.

  “Jing?” Leo turned to his friend who, after smacking into the concrete wall loaded with crystals, collapsed motionless to the sand. “Jing, bro. Hey! You good?”

  “He’s all right,” Alex called over. “Take him to the hospital when he wakes up.”

  “Jing, get up, you stupid dog!”

  Saying that Alex was surprised to hear that would be a severe understatement. In a split second, Leo’s voice and posture had changed completely. He hunched over slightly, becoming shorter.

  The boy who didn’t look dangerous at all held out a perfectly manicured hand.

  “This motherfucking shit again?”

  “What’s go—”

  “Professor, watch out!” Mara shouted. “That’s not Leo.”

  “What? Not Leo? What do you mean?”

  In the meantime, Travis started warily toward his friend.

  “Hey, Leonard, let’s not get worked up and—”

  “Shut up, you red monkey.” Leo…Leonard turned. And when he saw his face, Alex realized that it really wasn’t Leo. It looked like his evil doppelganger, with completely different eyes and all of his wizardry aura gone—Doom could no longer feel a tingle in his fingertips. How’s that even possible? “So, you were the one who knocked Jing down, you nerd? Pray, scumbag.”

  Leonard threw out his palm. For the first time in a long while, Alex was truly scared for his life.

  “Run, Professor!”

  Chapter 42

  “Run, Professor!” called a young voice from next to Alex.

  Still sitting by the gate, he was trying to figure out if his eyes were failing him. A moment before, he’d been looking at a kid no one would sell alcohol to at a club, but now…

  Some kind of dangerous criminal had appeared in his place. Doom had seen plenty of his kind when he was a gang member and later in wizard prison.

  But the transformation was more about Leo’s abilities than his appearance.

  Leo Stone the wizard was gone, replaced by an esper.

  An esper who was close to the B rank. Enough power to hold his own against low-level Adepts (if one could describe any Adept as low-level), meaning that the prostrate Doom was on the verge of passing on to hell.

  Leonard, or whatever his name was, shot a ray of bright white light from his palm. Instantly, the ray expanded to become a river of light a dozen feet wide and just as many tall. It carved a trench in the ground that was large enough to house a skating rink.

  “Not bad,” Alex said once he’d recovered from his initial shock. In front of him, four small seals formed, one after another. Each shot out a black bolt of lightning. Entwining together, they formed a dark glowing raven that flew screeching into the current of light.

  Against the broad wave of snow-white light, the black bird was a miserable dot. However, it used the pure Darkness glowing from its beak to cleave through the flow of light.

  Rushing by on either side of Alex, the two trains of brightness reduced the soccer goal and the referee stand to melted, shapeless lumps of red-hot metal.

  The open ground and grass smoked when the raven grabbed Leonard by shoulder, piercing it through, to jerk him up into the air and fling him against the concrete wall next to where the Asian shaman had landed.

  The impact knocked the air out of Leonard’s lungs. The esper fell to the ground, unconscious.

  The practice yard lapsed into silence.

  Exhausted, Alex shook his head, opened his bottle, and took a gulp of delicious cold water.

  Two of his students were out cold. One was suffering from open wounds and burns; another had at least a fractured clavicle.

  The aristocrat girl had just gotten back to her feet, presenting the world with her smeared make-up. Smashing your nose up isn’t the best look.

  The redhead and the half-dwarf were in the best shape. (Not counting Alex, of course.)

  “Would you care to explain what happened here?”

  However odd this might sound, it took Alex a second to realize that he wasn’t the one who said that.

  It was Miss Perriot, the history teacher who’d been with Alex in that museum, complete with peach hair, bright eyes, a white blouse, and jeans.

  “Oh goodness!” she screamed, darting down the stairs. Running up to the unconscious Leo and Jing, she checked their pulse, then pulled out her phone and started tapping nervously on the screen. “Is this the hospital? We have an emergency on Range One. Two people wounded, both with dark magic injuries. What? Ah, Professor Dumsky’s group.”

  “Uh-oh,” Alex sighed. “She ratted me out.”

  Miss Perriot finished and, paying no attention to Doom, called over to the students.

  “Mara, hold Jing’s head up so he doesn’t choke on his tongue. Travis, hold Leo’s wound closed with a handkerchief or your T-shirt. Elie, don’t look up.”

  “Wow,” Alex drawled, “looks like you know more than just history.”

  To Doom’s surprise, the students jumped to follow Perriot’s instructions. For her part, she finally spotted Alex and started over in his direction. The pebbles beneath her feet swirled faster and faster with each step until some of them flew into the air to form miniature asteroids orbiting around her.

  Strange things were happening with Leia’s hair too. It looked like Medusa’s hissing snakes, alive and wriggling furiously.

  “You,” the esper literally growled. “How dare you attack—”

  “No, you got it all wrong!”

  Th
at time, Alex wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t him talking. Making excuses wasn’t his thing.

  He wasn’t about to get up, either.

  The kerfuffle had joined forces with his hangover, and his head was throbbing. Doom wasn’t sure he would have held onto the semblance of a breakfast he’d had that morning if he’d stood up.

  “Travis is right, Miss Perriot,” Mara joined in as Elie held her T-shirt to her nose. Stripping out of it, she was left in just a sports bra, making it even more challenging for Alex to convince himself that she was a child, and not a breathtaking young aristocrat beauty. He’d never bedded an aristocrat woman. “The professor didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Is that right?” Perriot screamed indignantly, though she stopped. Of course, the pebbles kept sizzling around her like the ammo belt of a machine gun in action.

  “We asked him—”

  “Asked him what?”

  “To train us for the tournament,” Mara blurted out. “But things got out of control, and Leonard came out.”

  Silence fell again, with no sound but Alex sipping water from his bottle. He wished he had some popcorn, too. Watching everything unfold was as good as a trip to a movie theater.

  On the other hand, just thinking about popcorn (like any other food) almost made him vomit.

  “Are you insane?!” Perriot raged on. “You asked a black wizard to train you for the tournament? You, magic theory majors? Knowing Leo’s condition?”

  So, Miss Perriot knew about Leo/Leonard, Alex said to himself. She knew what he is. How can you be an esper and a wizard?

  “And what for?” the peach-haired woman went on. “For the prize money? Or just to show off? Putting your life at stake just for some—”

  “We have a good reason,” Elie interrupted, although she might as well have kept silent. Her words were barely audible anyway.

  “For the fuck's sake,” Perriot spat out. The words sounded obscene coming from her, the woman’s gentle appearance forming too stark a contrast. “We’ll talk later.”

  The conversation stopped when a few male nurses wearing blue uniforms with a red cross on the back came running onto the practice field. They quickly loaded the two students onto flying mag-suspension stretchers and rushed them to the hospital.