“That,” Wayne said with a sigh, “is what I’m afraid of. I heard about what happened to your daughter, but this is here and now, that isn’t. Are you going to be stable in there? Are you going to keep your head?”
“I will get the job done,” Genoa snapped. “If Nel can find my daughter, I will move mountains to recover her.”
That didn’t give Wayne any peace of mind.
The lights on the roof blacked out before he could say as much.
“Try to keep up.”
Genoa pressed her hand against the rooftop access door. It melted to a puddle of flowing metal in seconds.
She strode through without a glance back. The metal trailed after her heels.
With one last look at the cloudy night sky, Wayne followed.
He pulled out his heavy tome and started filling it with magic. Pages full of spells charged to a faint glow, each ready to cast a complex spell that might otherwise require multiple mages. He performed the first spell upon himself.
Time appeared to slow as his mind burned through magic. Information flooded into his brain, was processed, and stored or discarded as unimportant. It happened far quicker than any regular human could hope to achieve. He didn’t accelerate his thinking to his limits. Experiencing one minute as ten was tedious and unnecessary for walking about.
But he wanted the edge of faster reactions. Wayne would be the first to admit that he was rusty. Not only because of the hospital stay. Teaching was a safe and relaxing job. Normally.
Being brought down by that jezebeth was an embarrassment that wouldn’t have happened in his prime.
Genoa’s hasty strides down the staircase turned to a casual walk in his perception, though her face lost none of the intensity. A scrap of flesh hung from a railing. One of the doors was dented inwards with bloody handprints.
A corpse lay still in front of the door. One hand still reached up, gripping the door’s handle.
Its eye twisted up to the rooftop access doorway.
Genoa’s head didn’t move towards the corpse. Wayne couldn’t see her eyes, but he doubted they were focused on it. She hadn’t made any move to destroy the corpse.
In fact, her focus wasn’t in her hand. It spun through the air in slow-motion while her hand moved to catch it.
For a brief moment, Wayne had half a mind to wait. To test his partner in this exercise and see if she was everything he had been told about her.
By the time his foot touched down on the first step, Wayne was ready for his second spell.
A ball of flames gathered between the pages of his tome. It took off down the staircase at a speed that appeared normal even to his heightened perception.
The zombie didn’t stand a chance.
Zombies were too dangerous to be used as a test. While their fluids lost potency to propagate the magical virus within seconds of being removed from the body, a single bite or scratch from a ‘live’ zombie could spell doom for their mission.
And he had never got a straight answer out of Spencer as to how she cured Ward.
While his thoughts flashed along, Genoa had turned her head. Understanding her slowed speech wasn’t easy, but this wasn’t Wayne’s first rodeo.
“I had it handled,” she said.
Wayne had to drop his accelerated thoughts just long enough to speak. “I handled it first.” He paused, then smiled. “Try to keep up.”
He accelerated his thoughts again.
They continued down the stairs at a sedate pace–from his perspective–occasionally having to destroy zombies or skeletons. None posed much of a threat to his flames or her macroferrokinesis.
Wayne grudgingly admitted that she was good. Most earth mages skipped ferrokinesis entirely. Those that learned it tended to only be able to do so by touch. When she dropped half a door on a zombie like some sort of guillotine from a whole floor above, Wayne only managed to keep his face straight thanks to processing through the shock in an instant.
“Are they going to send anything hard at us? I mean, those half-demon flesh golems would have put up a better fight than this.”
“I don’t think they’re sending anything at us,” Wayne said after an instant of thought. “These zombies and skeletons seem to be lying around. Probably have been for a while.”
“If we get through this place and don’t come across any necromancers or Nel, I’ll knock the building down. And then I’ll knock Ylva’s cell block down.”
“Ylva seemed to think they would be here.”
Genoa turned her head with a glare even as Wayne sent a fireball over her shoulder. Only through his quick thinking did it swerve around her face to hit the zombie coming through a door.
“
“She did it before.”
“What?”
“Last spring, I inadvertently invited her to drinks at a bar.”
“Inadvertently?”
Wayne rolled his neck. “I meant to invite only Foster, but she showed up as well. Some nuns showed up with presumably hostile intentions. Foster fled as fast as he could and I wasn’t too keen on being caught in a demon’s presence.
