Clark looked at Adam and suddenly smiled. "Nameless apprentice, are you interested in my magic? Interested in the Magefoe?"
Adam watched him in silence, not caring in the least what tricks Clark was playing. In truth, Adam had no absolute confidence that he could take Clark alive—capturing a man and killing a man were two entirely different difficulties. If Clark had some escape method that could instantly slip beyond his senses, there would be nothing he could do about it. But this was like raking the grass to flush out a rabbit: fine if one came bolting out, no loss if it didn't.
Now that Clark was willing to waste breath, Adam could use the chance to cast a rather difficult spell. If the construction succeeded, his odds of keeping Clark here would rise considerably.
"I come from the Om family. My grandfather is an elder of the family—a full-fledged Mage," Clark said, showing off his pedigree. There were two layers to it: first, to lay out his background so Adam would think twice; second, to try to recruit him.
Clark went on, "If you're willing to follow me and join the Om family, a talent like yours would make you a rising star of the clan. You'd have resources beyond counting—a future far brighter than rotting away in Mordo Elemental Tower!"
Adam tilted his head. So this was how the Magefoes passed down their inheritance—binding the secret of the meditation method with family and bloodline. What an idiotic way to do it. How could the bloodline of a single clan, with its handful of people and its limited wisdom, ever push knowledge forward? No wonder they could only be culled by the mainstream and hide in the shadows like rats.
Clark didn't notice Adam's contempt; he seemed lost in his own feelings. "Follow me. Help me complete my final accumulation. I, Clark Om, am about to become a full-fledged Mage. As my first follower, you will be granted supreme status!"
Adam pointed at Fone's corpse. "And then be abandoned, like him?"
Clark stalled, his expression shifting from seduction to embarrassment, but he quickly hid it. "No, no, no. Fone was a fool. He wanted to betray me..."
The spell's construction finished. Adam suddenly laughed. "Mm. He wanted to betray you, but I want to catch you. Surrender quietly, you fool."
A startling surge of mana burst from Adam. Clark knew his persuasion had failed and immediately tried to retreat and flee—but just then he felt everything around him turn thick and syrupy, as though an invisible force had bound him, and the more he exerted himself, the harder it dragged him the opposite way.
"What did you do?!" Clark asked in panic.
Adam naturally didn't answer. The spell was called Gravitational Pull, taken from the highest floor of the Mordo Academy library that Adam was permitted to enter: it used gravity by calculating constants. The computation required and the mana it consumed were so enormous that an ordinary apprentice could hardly learn it, and even Adam needed a long time to prepare it.
Getting no answer, Clark's face darkened. "You have a death wish! Feel the power of the Om family—perhaps that will sober you up." With an effort he pulled a scroll from his robes and tore it open toward Adam.
Adam saw his surroundings plunge into sudden darkness, as if the light were being devoured by the gray pouring out of the torn scroll. That gray was so dense, its presence so heavy that it stood at odds with the whole environment; its energy fluctuations were warped and sinister. The next instant the gray scattered and shot toward Adam, and within every strand of gray light the faces of countless creatures writhed, utterly evil.
"Despair! Wail! Be destroyed beneath the power of the Om family!" Clark's face was fanatical as he shrieked, an edgelord at his absolute peak.
Clearly this was of one root and one source with Clark's earlier negative-energy magic, but it was surely the upgraded version a full-fledged Mage had cast. Adam didn't dare take it head-on. He was just about to dodge when he felt a fierce, craving hunger from the abyss egg in his hand, so he lifted it before him with psychokinesis.
Then something happened that made Clark's jaw drop: the abyss egg sucked in the gray light as greedily as a black hole. The gray radiance that had been hurtling straight at Adam actually bent, and every last ray landed on the egg.
Having absorbed all the gray light, the egg actually gave a satisfied belch. The shell creaked, and a few shallow cracks appeared.
"Is it about to hatch? Or about to break?" Adam eyed the abyss egg with a strange expression, and saw that there seemed to be another layer beneath the cracks. So he looked at Clark again—at that absurd face still frozen between edgelord fervor and disbelief—and said, "Very fine magic. Got any more?"
"Soul Devour was eaten? Eaten by the egg of a mere abyssal creature?" Clark howled, coming apart at the seams. "How is that possible?"
Adam was puzzled by that too. From what he knew, abyssal creatures had no fondness for souls, nor any particular resistance to them—what they loved was flesh and energy. So this egg looks more like a devil's egg? But its outside is plainly an abyssal creature's egg?
Clark grew frantic. He knew his once-prized negative-energy magic did nothing to Adam, and that the upgraded scroll had been countered by an egg. All he could do was keep hauling ordinary elemental magic scrolls from his robes and flinging them at Adam as though they cost nothing.
Apprentice-level magic had no effect on Adam. With gravity pinning Clark in place, Adam casually cast spells to cancel the scrolls and, at the same time, did something unexpected.
He slammed the egg savagely into the ground.
The shell gave a crisp crack—plainly it wasn't about to finish hatching. It was about to shatter.
Clark was overjoyed. Destroying your own trump card in the middle of a fight? He couldn't believe anyone could be that stupid. Wild with delight, he pulled out yet another scroll, and another Soul Devour was triggered, blotting out the sky as it swept at Adam.
Adam didn't raise his head, still staring at the egg as fragments of shell pattered down. His slam hadn't destroyed the abyss egg; it seemed instead to have restored its true face, revealing a flowing, gaseous gray protective layer. It could no longer be called an egg. It was more like a balloon.
That gray looked very... Adam couldn't put a fitting adjective to it for the moment (actually, I can't find one either). The gaseous protective layer flowed smooth and even, except that the master-servant contract that occasionally surfaced on it spoiled its wholeness.
Adam fished it up with psychokinesis; Clark's Soul Devour was absorbed once more. Adam saw the gray grow denser, and the emotion it carried was no longer obscure but unmistakable, pure joy.
Adam held up the balloon toward Clark. "Do you know what this is?"
Clark, of course, wasn't stupid enough to answer. Without hesitation he used his final trump card: ether so intense it could bend reality itself descended in an instant, Adam's gravitational binding was shattered outright, and Clark abruptly vanished from where he stood.
"Teleportation magic?" Adam didn't lose his head, because the mana he had left on Clark was still within his sensing range. Clark hadn't gone far.
Adam shot up into the air and flew at top speed toward the mana fluctuation.
Clark's luck was rotten. He had teleported to the outskirts of Blan Town, several kilometers away.
In Blan Town, the apprentices watched helplessly as the negative-energy magic polluted a great swath of the runic barrier, then waited, nerves jangling, for the attack that should have followed on its heels—but the follow-up never came. Just as the tension peaked, William's sharp eyes caught the figure that had appeared out of thin air outside Blan Town.
"Look—who's that?" William shouted, pointing at Clark.
The gray haze wreathing Clark was as good as a signboard. Zach and Thomas recognized him as a Magefoe at a glance, and without a word, two runic shells flew at him.
"It's a Magefoe—those son-of-a-bitch bastards!"
Everyone scrambled back to their runic weapons, attacking without pause while staying on guard against the Magefoe's creepy tricks.
But they soon saw that something was off: Clark didn't dare come anywhere near Blan Town. Terry asked weakly, "Is he... running away?"
In his not-so-short life, Clark had never known a moment as helpless as this. Born into a Magefoe family, he had shown astonishing talent and been kept at his grandfather the full-fledged Mage's side for grooming since childhood. Resources of every kind were never lacking; every spell was his for the asking; slaves stood in herds.
If the family hadn't required him to earn his own advancement resources, he would never have come to the Mage Continent; if he hadn't come to the Mage Continent, he would never have met Adam; and if he hadn't met Adam, he would not be in this state now.
"Flee—I have to flee! Once I'm back with the family, I'll make you die, every last one of you!" Clark was flying too, but he was no master of elemental magic; his flight was slow, and those infuriating runic energy attacks slowed him further. All he could do was pray for luck.
But luck has always belonged to the strong—or rather, to the strong, luck doesn't matter at all.
Adam came up from behind at several times his speed, and when he saw where Clark was, he couldn't help but laugh. Is this what they call walking into your own grave?
Because their relative positions had changed, the gravitational constant he'd calculated earlier no longer applied—but that didn't stump Adam. He raised a hand and sent several spells that scored wounds across Clark, then successfully drove him down to the ground.
In that instant Clark's heart went cold and dead. The will that his rank and birth had propped up collapsed entirely, and he said to Adam, "Kill me."
Adam looked at him oddly. "Kill you? Dead, you're worth nothing to me. It's only alive that you're any use. Now tell me—what is this?"
Mainstream or Magefoe, the profession of Mage was cruel at its core, because they were researchers, scientists—and on a supernatural plane especially, they had no moral concepts whatsoever. When a Mage tells you that you are useful to him, what waits for you is a life worse than death; they never scruple to use the coldest attitude and the cruelest methods to cook up their test subjects.