Evan was moving before the sword was fully clear. Boniface was down and struggling to rise — a death mage's instincts, not a fighter's — and the oil was working against him. Evan was across the distance in three steps, blade already extended in the motion that had been burned into him through repetition until it required no thought at all.
The rapier found Boniface's throat and went through.
For one second, Boniface looked at the sword in his neck with complete disbelief. Then green light blazed in his eye sockets, and Evan felt something building — he pulled the blade free and stepped back and away, putting thirty meters between himself and the spot in the time it took to draw a breath.
Boniface's body exploded.
The force of it left a crater in the ground. When the smoke cleared, a skull-shaped shadow hung in the air, its voice carrying a wet, furious quality: "I'll be back, Boniface will be back—"
It dispersed.
Evan stood and looked at the crater and felt the particular fatigue of someone who has just narrowly not died. The technical gap between them was real — Boniface had elemental will, which Evan didn't — and the fight had hinged on three things: Evan's precision with the Death Gaze, the Grease timing, and the flintlock, in that order. Take any one of those away and the outcome changed.
He found the remains of Boniface's hand not far from the crater's edge. The storage ring on the finger was intact. He took it and sorted through what was inside: alchemical materials, a couple of scrolls, several magic cores — fire and wind alignment — and a jade pendant he didn't recognize. No dark-element cores, which meant Boniface had used them before the fight. No books, which he'd been hoping for.
The magic cores interested him. He'd never seen one up close. They were dense, multifaceted, radiating their element clearly — exactly what he'd expected from the description in Ashton's memory, and different enough from what he'd imagined that the description hadn't fully prepared him. The jade pendant had no obvious analog; jade wasn't valued in this world the way it had been in the one he came from, which made its presence in a high-level mage's storage ring worth noting.
He put the ring away and turned toward the Lia Fellwood.
He didn't look back at the castle.
A month later, a second Inquisition party arrived at the site. The Hell's Projection was still active — without its sustaining caster, it would eventually fade, but three months hadn't passed yet. They fought through what remained of the undead constructs, found an empty castle, burned it, and filed their report. On the Inquisition's roster, Nicolai Ashton moved from ninety-second place to seventy-sixth. Notices went to Prime Church chapters across the region.
Evan spent the next month in the Lia Fellwood.
For most people, the Fellwood's interior was a death sentence. For a Lich moving quietly and without the biological signatures that most magical beasts keyed off of, it was simply terrain — dangerous terrain, but navigable. He moved through its outer layers without going near the core regions, and the beasts that claimed territory in the areas he crossed either avoided him or eventually forced a confrontation that he won.
He accumulated over twenty magic cores. He also developed something he hadn't had before: a faint infrared perception that let him read heat differentials in the dark. He recognized it for what it was — temperature as a proxy for molecular motion, which he'd learned about in a physics class during one of his brief periods of being well enough to attend school. He thought about the teacher who had explained it. He thought about that classroom. He thought about the distance between that room and this forest, and felt the vertigo of it for a moment, and then set it aside.
He'd been thinking about the magic elements again. The infrared ability made him think that the world's underlying physics might be identical to Earth's — the same molecules, the same heat dynamics — and the elements overlaid on top of it, genuinely real but perhaps not fundamental, perhaps describing some deeper structure he couldn't see yet. He didn't know. He filed the question for later.
He was sitting by a fire when he heard hoofbeats in the trees. Multiple horses. He stayed still and opened his low-light perception.
"There's a fire ahead," a woman's voice said. "Someone's out here."
"Let's see who," a man's voice answered. "Bess — stay close."
"My lord, let me check first," a third voice said, rougher and louder. "Anyone who survives in the Lia Fellwood is serious. Give me a moment."
Evan watched a bearded man in traveling clothes emerge from the treeline and approach across the firelight. Not in armor, but he moved like a knight — low-rank, by the way he carried himself.
Knight ranks ran from Squire Knight through Low-rank Knight, Knight proper, Great Knight, and Epic Knight — originally a pure ability hierarchy, though the lower ranks had become partially title-based over time. This man's movement suggested Low-rank Knight, meaning competent at arms but nothing unusual. He stopped in front of Evan and gave a formal salute.
"Sir. I'm Rein, knight to Baron Aymon. My lord is hunting and the hour grew late. We saw your fire and hoped to make camp here, if you have no objection."
"None at all," Evan said. "I could use the company." He also wanted to know what was happening in the world he was about to re-enter.
The young man who came forward was seventeen or eighteen, with a careful step and callused hands — knight's training, clearly, though his actual rank was harder to read without seeing him in action. A baron's son. The girl at his shoulder registered as a Magic Apprentice the moment Evan's perception touched her magical signature, which told him something about the Aymon household's resources.
"Knight Felix Aymon." The young man smiled as he sat. "And you are?"