Mother of Learning. Arc 3 Incomplete

«I grow tired of this,» the lich responded. «He is alive enough for your purposes, and this way he’ll struggle less. And you should watch your tone, little whelp — you’re not in charge here and I could kill you whenever I want without anyone batting an eye. Enough of your ‘information’ has turned out to be incorrect that your value is being questioned.»

«I told you, we have a leak,» Red Robe said. «That’s why I need Zach intact.»

«You don’t need him intact to rip the information from his mind,» the lich said. «Do your thing and be quick. There are already reinforcements from the city on the way here.»

Red Robe seemed to want to say something, but the lich had already returned to scrutinizing Zorian some more and eventually simply bent down to Zach’s motionless form and started casting some complicated spell before placing a hand on Zach’s head.

Zach’s motionless form suddenly blurred into action, as Zach revealed himself to have just been pretending to be unconscious and tried to punch Red Robe in the face. Sadly, while Zach wasn’t totally unconscious he wasn’t in top form either, and Red Robe deflected the attack before slamming Zach’s head into the floor several times until he went limp and then repeating the spell.

The lich chuckled hollowly. «Now who’s being too rough? You could’ve cracked his skull with that stunt, you know? Living beings are such fragile things…»

«The aranea?» Red Robe said after a while. «I can’t believe it, I’d never have thought those thrice-damned bugs would be… no matter, I have to go. Time to go tie some loose ends.»

«The aranea were never part of the—» began the lich, but Red Robe already teleported away. «Hmph. I am killing that fool when I meet him later. He’s more trouble than he’s worth.»

He turned back to Zorian after a few moments, and people around him edged away from him.

«I hated her, you know?» the lich said conversationally, pointing at the smoking remains of the vampire girl. «She thought she was so much better than little old Quatach-Ichl. I was a relic, she said, while she was the next generation of undead or some bilge like that. Now look at her, killed by a precocious student with a simple fire spell. Still, while I find the situation amusing, I can’t exactly let you get away with it, you know? She was kind of important, much as it rankles me, and I can’t just go back home and say ‘Remember that Zoltan House heir you told me to take care of? I kind of lost her, oops’. The head of house will at the very least want your head for this, if not your soul.»

Crap, crap, crap. So he ended up killing some kind of House heir now? On the other hand, it was nice to have a confirmation that the lich was Quatach-Ichl. Quatach-Ichl was male, wasn’t he? He could stop referring to the lich as an ‘it’ now. Now if only he could get out of this with his soul intact…

«I don’t suppose you would accept a bribe to pretend you couldn’t catch me?» asked Zorian with as much calm as he could muster, taking out the silver disc Kael gave him and flinging it towards the lich.

Thankfully, amazingly, the lich reacted just as Zorian expected him to: he extended his hand and snatched the coin out of the air. Zorian had figured the lich would do that instead of knocking it aside with a shield or something, as he seemed to consider himself invulnerable — not an unwarranted assumption considering those weird bones of his. In any case, the moment the lich’s skeletal hand closed around the silver disc he froze in place for a moment before collapsing to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

«What?» one of the students behind him asked. «What happened? What the hell did you do to him?»

Zorian ignored him. Instead he rushed towards Kyron and Zach and started examining their injuries. A few seconds later he was pulled away by a girl who looked a few years older than him and who claimed to be a trained medical professional so he let her do her thing.

Instead he pulled a telepathic relay out of his pocket and closed his eyes in order to contact the aranea and see what was happening on their front.

It had started so well. The red robed intruder, presumably the third time traveler, walked blithely into the trap, his confidence buoyed by the familiar layout of aranean defenses near the entrance, as well as several victories against the sentries that the matriarch had purposely sacrificed in order to lull the enemy into a false sense of security. The moment he was near the center of the room, the floor turned to liquid and he sank into it before it froze solid again.

The aranea and the human mercenaries the matriarch had hired for the evening attacked immediately, dousing the area in sedatives and disabling spells.