The cannon. Again.
Boniface heard it from outside the projection's boundary — the same sound that had ended the Fangs Mercenary Company — and the hatred in his chest contracted into something very hard and very small.
Then the spatial disturbance appeared before him, and Yaltu staggered out of it, soaked in blood, barely standing.
Boniface was a Lich. The Prime Church was his enemy now, with no reconciliation possible. He didn't hesitate.
Before Yaltu's eyes had finished adjusting to the light, Boniface had taken his life. A Lich's method: the vitality drawn out, the soul following — his own body filling out for a while as the borrowed life settled in, enough to pass for living at a glance, though any mage who looked closely would see the death-aura underneath. A temporary measure. But useful.
He considered the castle beyond the projection's grey boundary.
He'd watched the Inquisition go in and not come out — not most of them. Ashton had beaten a full Inquisition unit. That cannon had done most of it, and Boniface knew exactly what a cannon at close range felt like from experience, but still. The Lich inside was not making this easy.
He decided to wait at the boundary. Ashton would have to come out eventually.
Evan, meanwhile, was getting ready to leave.
He packed methodically. Everything he wanted to take went into the storage ring — gold coins, roughly a hundred thousand pieces, along with the better materials from the laboratory. Everything he couldn't take went into a sealed underground cache. He loaded the flintlock pistol and tucked it inside his robe. He checked the sword-cane. He pulled his hood up, arranged the cloak, and took a last look around the castle he'd spent six weeks turning into a fortress.
He noticed, in passing, that he'd put on weight.
Not much. But the parchment-over-bone appearance that a Lich was supposed to have had softened — not enough to look human, but enough to look less immediately dead. He couldn't explain it. The nameless technique was still running — he could feel it during the deep meditative states, the cool current cycling through him — but he'd noticed no dramatic effect, just a slow quiet change he kept discovering after the fact.
He stepped out of the castle.
Boniface saw him immediately and flattened himself behind a tree. Finally. His attention sharpened. He pictured the expression on Ashton's face when the ambush hit, and something that wasn't exactly satisfaction moved through him.
He didn't notice that somewhere between the castle and the tree line, he'd become the kind of person who hides in bushes waiting to ambush people. He'd have recognized that quality with contempt in someone else. He didn't recognize it in himself.
Evan walked south. He'd been inside this world for just over a month. He knew almost nothing about it from direct experience — Ashton's memories covered large territories and specific subjects, but they weren't a substitute for having been somewhere. That was about to change.
He was two hundred meters from the projection's edge when the feeling hit him — the same sensation he'd had the night Darren was in the castle, a pressure of being watched that his body registered before his mind caught up. He'd paid attention to that feeling since. He stopped, oriented himself, and looked at a specific tree.
Green light flared briefly in his eyes. His nose brought him something — a faint impression, an image forming in his perception: a figure behind the tree, shaped wrong for bark and shadow.
"Whoever you are," he said, "come out."
Boniface came out. His face had filled in somewhat from Yaltu's vitality, but the green-lit eyes were unmistakable. He saw Evan's similar appearance and assumed the same explanation: stolen life, absorbed from the Inquisition members. He didn't know there was no Soul Vessel to fund the alternative.
Evan placed him in the same moment: the survivor from the Fangs Company. The tenth-level death mage who had run.
"You became a Lich," Evan said. "Of course. That wound would have left you no other choice."
Boniface's voice came out as something near a snarl: "Nicolai Ashton. I won't let this pass. I'm going to kill you for what you did to my people."
The black smoke rose from him. Hell-bats formed in it — many of them — and swept toward Evan in a wave.
Evan's response was unhurried. He looked at the bats, felt time seem to slow — the same phenomenon he'd experienced before, the world briefly going clear and still — and spoke: "Death Gaze."
Two beams of pale grey light left his eyes. They found the junction point of the swarm's flight path and struck it exactly.
The bats scattered into black smoke and were gone.
Boniface stopped.
He was better than Evan, technically. He knew it. He'd built his whole approach on that fact. But what he'd just watched was not a matter of raw magical strength — it was precision, the kind that came from seeing exactly where the weak point was before the attack arrived. He had never managed that. He didn't know how.
He raised his staff to cast something larger.
Evan cast Grease.
Boniface, mid-incantation for a focused Undead Calamity, felt his footing go and broke the chant to stabilize himself. The incantation collapsed.
The flintlock pistol appeared from inside Evan's robe. The range was a few meters. He pulled the trigger.
The shot hit Boniface square in the chest. Lich bodies don't register pain — but they register force, and the force combined with the slick ground sat him down hard. The stolen vitality fled the body all at once; his form shrank back toward what a Lich actually looks like.
The sword came out.