Page 23 of Destined to the Reaper

Once again revealing his inexperience and cluelessness, the manticore failed to see the trap rapidly closing around him. In a reckless display of bravado, the foolish cub dove down breathing a steady stream of fire at the risen creatures, burning what flesh remained on their bones, shattering a few of them with a brutal swipe of his wing, and even picking one up in a fly by. As he soared back into the skies he made a show of biting a thick limb from his catch, effortlessly crushing the bones between the three vicious rows of teeth in his unnaturally large mouth in his otherwise handsome human face.

Seizing this moment of distraction, Cornelius siphoned a large chunk of the magic reserves Alva gathered earlier from the creatures she terrorized and combined it with my Soul Magic abilities to attempt once again to sever the manticore’s link to his body. Alva faltered from the sudden loss a split second before the effects of his greed struck me as well.

This time, the same excruciating sharp pain tore me asunder, and I felt myself going faint as a strange tingling similar to a person about to lose consciousness spread through me. The world darkened around me. As I had no eyes of my own, I saw and experienced the environment through all of Cornelius’s senses. That the strain on me had been so violent to temporarily separate that connection terrified me.

“Why the fuck are you so weak?!”Cornelius mentally hissed when the attack miserably failed again.

Feeling dazed, I didn’t know by what sorcery I managed to gather my thoughts enough to blurt out what I hoped he would deem a plausible enough explanation.

“You’re attacking a manticore, not some weak human. He’s near his magic well and wisely keeps flying along strong ley lines. You wasted a lot of my energy by casting my death aura over a ridiculously wide radius,”I explained.“The three of you will tire before he does. You cannot take his soul.”

“But YOU could!”Cornelius countered before rolling out of the way of another volley of poisoned darts.

“His life thread is not severed yet,”I argued.“There is still a chance he will survive this encounter. Therefore, no, I cannot harvest his soul for you—not that I would have.”

“Fine, have it your way. I don’t need him alive. It would have been nice, but all I truly need are his bones for my little project. I’ll be sure to remember how you made things harder once it’s completed,”Cornelius mentally replied in an ominous fashion.“For now, let’s use one of your favorite abilities.”

The malicious way he laughed upon speaking those last words chilled me. While I genuinely could not have helped him kill the manticore before Fate deemed his time had come, shame filled me for once again making the situation worse for someone in the necromancer’s crosshairs. After all this time, I knew better than to allow my stupid mouth to provoke him, considering how thin skinned he was. He always needed to put me back in my place by hurting others in my name and doing so with my powers.

Despite how drained I’d become, I still possessed enough power for Cornelius to use my death aura in a targeted fashion. By channeling it through his own magic and aiming at a specific target instead of using it over a wide radius, it required a lot less fuel to have a potent impact. In this instance, the death strike he used against the manticore acted on him like a savage blow.

The cub faltered, his flight pattern becoming erratic as he drunkenly tried to recover. Alva’s nightmares swooped in, clawing him from all sides. With a series of powerful blows andthrough savagely whipping his tail, the manticore fought the weaker creatures back. Just when it looked like he would prevail, Cornelius hit him again with a second death strike. This time, the cub emitted a pained roar and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

Simultaneously, Meri set off her trap.

With a single vocal command, the prone skeletons she had lined in the half circle around the manticore’s domain burst into action. The sharpened bones she had reshaped on their backs shot into the air with the power of a crossbow bolt. Still destabilized by the debilitating pain of the death strike, he failed to dodge the incoming bone spikes. Despite his valiant efforts, several of them found their mark. He shrieked as a few of them embedded themselves in his sides, legs, and left shoulder. A couple more tore through his bat wings.

Enraged, the manticore did what it should have done from the start and dashed towards Cornelius. In his lack of experience and the arrogance of youth, he made a show of his power, threatening and taunting instead of going for the kill. By dragging out the fight for entertainment, he had given the enemy the upper hand.

Having expected that reaction, Cornelius threw half a dozen blood darts at the charging creature. I couldn’t tell whether they reached their target or not as the manticore breathed a long and steady stream of fire at us. For a split second, I thought he had succeeded in breaking through my host’s blood shield until the flames hit the invisible wall before us. It didn’t stop us from feeling the intense heat.

My spirit soared when the shield began to falter under the sustained fiery assault and as the manticore closed in on us. Between the fire and force of the impact, the shield would collapse, and the beast would be able to tear Cornelius limb from limb. Granted, my regeneration powers would keep him fromdying, but it would not spare him from the intense agony of having his body torn to shreds. As I wouldn’t share in that pain, I prayed for that moment to come.

It didn’t.

I heard the heart-wrenching scream of the young manticore half a beat before I saw multiple volleys of bone spikes tearing through the sky. The wall of fire faded just as a loud thud resonated barely a couple of meters in front of us.

Grievously wounded with at least two dozen spikes protruding from his body at different angles, the cub had crashed onto the ground and was scrambling to get back on his paws. Like vultures, Meri and Alva closed in on the creature, hands waving as binding incantations flowed freely out of their mouths.

A cruel chuckle escaped the necromancer as he smugly strolled towards his fallen opponent. With an impressive determination laced with desperation, the manticore attempted to flee. Even with his severe injuries, he still managed to fly away at an impressive speed while clumsily yanking some of the bone spikes out of his body. However, his escape was short-lived. With a powerful spell combining Flesh and Bone Magic, Cornelius took over control of the manticore’s wings, paralyzing them.

The poor creature went into a freefall, crashing heavily once again. It knocked the wind out of him. His painful groans mixed with his wet and whistling breathing, hinting at pierced lungs.

He never had a chance to get back up.

His attempt at flicking his tail, both to fire his poisoned spines at his tormentors and to attempt to sting them with the vicious needle at the tip, was quickly thwarted. Pulling on the skull pommel of his walking stick, Cornelius revealed the vicious blade hidden within. With one swift swipe, he used it as a sword to chop off the tail.

Working swiftly and efficiently, Meri and Alva shackled the cub to the ground. Where Alva merely used her Blood Magic to weave arcane threads around his limbs, Meri revealed the darker side that lurked deep within the lovesick naive girl she usually portrayed herself to be.

Without blinking, she yanked two of the bone spikes embedded in his side then coldly stabbed them in his front paws. With a swift incantation, she once more used bone manipulation for the bones to reshape themselves into some form of grappling hook that nailed his limbs to the ground. Oblivious to his agonized screams, she repeated the process with his back paws.

Refusing to accept what was now clearly inevitable, the manticore tried to escape again—even at the risk of tearing his limbs off—with a vain attempt at flapping his wings again. Sadly for him, Cornelius was maintaining his paralysis on them. Not wanting to continue to expend that energy, the necromancer subjected those magnificent wings to the same dreadful fate his tail had met.

“You should have served me, you fool,” Cornelius said tauntingly as he circled around the mangled creature to stand by his head. “Now, you’re going to die, slowly and painfully. And I’m going to enjoy hearing your agony during every second of it. You see my pretty little Alva over there?” Cornelius asked, gesturing with his head at his apprentice. “She’s extremely adept at Flesh and Blood Magic. Her specialty is harvesting organs while keeping the host alive so that they retain even more of their magic properties. And you, my little friend, are a treasure trove of magic ripe for the reaping.”

He gestured for Alva to proceed. The eagerness with which she retrieved the necessary paraphernalia from the saddle of her horse was beyond repulsive. She was as cruel as her Master. Meri, her face devoid of emotion, began drawing a few runes on the manticore’s body while muttering some incantations bothto stifle his own magic and to keep him alive well-beyond what nature intended once Alva got to work on him.

Cornelius chuckled with shameless cruelty upon hearing me mentally cursing him. I wanted to spare the cub from the prolonged agony they were about to subject him to. But his life thread still had too long remaining on it for me to intervene. And weakened as I was, the powers I could use would only add to the torture he would endure. If I still had a body, I could have at least ended his pain, if not his life.

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