“Hex bolt,” he said, opening his palm to show me the fat ring of metal. “They’re all over the floor here. Throw one hard enough, and it makes a decent bullet.”
“Nice job,” I said, legitimately impressed.
“A patch job,” my father replied grimly, his glowing eyes focused on the corner where the enemy was regrouping. “There’s another pack of guards behind us as well.” He clenched his sharp teeth. “We should have kept running. If I had my fire, it wouldn’t matter, but I can’t hold a hallway with one hand and a bunch of spare bolts.”
“Almost got it,” I assured him, pressing his clawed finger back to the wall as I drew and drew and drew. I knew it was going to take a lot. Huge spells like this always had a bajillion fail-safes to prevent exactly this sort of tampering. But no fail-safe held up forever, especially against a brute-force attack that wasn’t actually trying to change the spell’s nature. I wasn’t trying to redirect the magic or change the prescribed outcome. I was simply setting everything I could reach to zero, because nothing important in a spell was ever set to zero.
It was a stupid hack and an embarrassment to professional magic, but if there was one part of Thaumaturgy I’d always been good at, it was breaking shit. Sure enough, after I’d zeroed out half the variables on the wall to our left, all the spellwork in our immediate vicinity began to short out. It didn’t smoke or spark or anything like that—much as I hated to admit it, Kauffman was a really good mage, which meant his spells didn’t explode—but I could feel the normally taut power around us going slack. Grinning, I reached out to grab it, my smile going even wider when the power didn’t snap back this time. It still felt absolutely dreadful, like grabbing a handful of screaming blood, but at least all that terrible power stayed in my hands this time, which meant we were back in business.
And not a second too soon. I was so excited about what I’d done, I didn’t even hear the gun go off until my dad pushed me out of the way. He dragged us both to the floor, covering my body with his as a hail of automatic fire sailed over our heads. Snarling like the monster he was, he ripped a pipe off the wall and hurled it at the guards who’d flooded into the hall behind us. The two-foot length of metal hit the tallest of the men right in his bulletproof face-shield, dropping him like a stone and sending the others scurrying back. But not away.
My father growled low in his throat. He didn’t even have to say it. I knew as well as he did that we had enemies ahead and behind, which meant we were trapped. At least, that’s what they thought.
“Cover me,” I whispered as I scrambled back to my feet. “I’m going to make us a way out.”
“Can you open a door out of here?” Yong asked hopefully, ripping another piece of pipe off the wall and hurling it at the guards to keep them scattered.
That was my plan, but not the way he meant it. Shorting out the spellwork had released the magic, but we were still deep in the Gameskeeper’s domain. Way too deep for me to reach the DFZ’s power that allowed me to tunnel through the city. That was okay, though, because I wasn’t just a priest. I was also a mage. One that didn’t suck at magic anymore.
I reached out to grab a huge armful of the slack, sagging arena magic. The bloody power screamed when I grabbed it, but that just made me clench down harder, holding the picture of what I wanted it to become like a beacon in my mind.
“Fire in the hole!”
I slammed all the magic I’d just grabbed into the cement like a battering ram. As it hit, the spellwork-covered cement wall exploded, shattering all the zeroes I’d drawn and everything else to open a gaping hole. I jumped through the moment the jagged pieces stopped falling, diving into the next room, which turned out to be an electrical closet.
“Good job!” my father said, jumping through after me. “But where are we going?”
I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. My whole brain was occupied with gathering up enough magic to do it again. Fortunately, supply wasn’t an issue. Now that I’d cracked the spellwork holding it in place, the soup-thick magic of this place was practically shoving itself down my throat. All I had to do was give it an opening and the power rushed in, filling me with blood and screams as I stepped forward to slam my magical hammer into the next wall. The blast sent up an even bigger cloud of dust than the first one, making me cough and blocking my vision, but I didn’t need to see where I was going. The shortest distance between two points was always a straight line, so that was what I made: a razor-straight tunnel of destruction between “us” and “out.”
I had to punch through ten walls, one bar, and a ticket office, but it worked. We jumped through each hole as it opened, my dad keeping my back safe as I pounded whatever was in front of us into dust. The Gameskeeper’s security teams tried to stop us. There were more guards than ever, all of them fanatically shooting, but while my dad wasn’t at full strength, he was still a dragon. An old, experienced one. He kept the
