Despite he could see it with Invigoration, a mana core wasn’t a physical organ. It was inside the human body but at the same time it wasn’t. During the years spent as a healer in the Lutia village, he had cured countless peoples with stomach wounds, but none, no matter how deep, had ever affected a core.
Lith had to rely on his newfound mana sensibility, sending a tendril of pure mana from his core to the woman’s. At first, nothing happened, her core seemed stable, keeping its yellow colour despite the flood of alien energies.
But a few seconds later, Lith could see that the zone where he had attached the tendril was getting weaker and weaker. The yellow was turning to orange, slowly spreading to the whole core.
The woman suddenly started to scream in pain, all her veins and arteries bulging out, as if they were trying to shake off her skin. The red of the blood turned blue as the mana that was invading her body.
When it reached her head, she started to bleed the cyan liquid from her eyes, nose and ears. The shrieks of agony showed no trace of her previous defiance, only desperation.
Her voice when from shrill to hoarse, until it didn’t sound like a human voice anymore. She kept yelling and yelling, until she had no more air in her lungs, but she seemed incapable of drawing breath again.
Lith stopped, leaving her a couple of seconds to recover and feel the temporary relieve from the lack of pain.
Sobbing in terror, the burly woman swore to the gods that if she managed to survive, she would have changed her way of life. No more trading lives for money, she would redeem herself.
"My name is Melia." She said trying to establish a connection, to force him to perceive her as a person. It was a trick that had worked countless times in the past, even if she had never been the one to attempt it, but Rodimas.
She always said that every man dreamed of being the hero of a sobbing woman.
And this time, she was sincere, she wasn’t just trying to backstab him as soon as he lowered his guard.
"I don’t care." He replied with a cold stare. "I mean who are you? Mercenaries? Hunters? Assassins?"
"Mercenaries. We were paid handsomely to come here, kill as many beasts as possible and frame the students for it."
Melia’s words confirmed his theory, but didn’t trigger any vision, nor relieved his fears.
"Who sent you here, and why?"
"I don’t know, I swear! I’m just the muscle of the team, Raghul is the one that deals with our contractors, while Rodimas is the brain of our operations."
"That man." She nodded in his direction.
"It’s everything I know, please, let me go."
Leaving them alive was out of question. They had forced him to use too much of his true power, they were a liability. No matter their promises, as soon as they were out of reach, they would sell him to the highest bidder with a smile on their faces.
"Then I don’t need you anymore." With a wave of his hand, Lith used spirit magic to twist her head 180 degrees, breaking the neck and putting her out of her misery.
"Now, mister Raghul, we can do this easy or painful. Tell me what I want to know, and I will give you a peaceful death. Resist and... well. You have seen what happens." Lith removed Raghul’s gag, allowing him to speak.
- "Wouldn’t have been better to leave her alive? To give them hope?" Solos objected. She really didn’t Like Lith torturing people. Every time he did it, she could sense something inside of him dying.
"What hope? They are professionals, not some girls scout. They know all too well that I will never let them live, because that’s what they would do in my shoes." –
"Listen kid, I’m sorry we tried to kill you." His terror ruined his usually flawless poker face, making him sound fake like a three-dollar bill.
"You don’t have to do this. You are still young, don’t become like us."
Behind his fake empathy, Raghul only meant to buy time, hoping to find a way out of that predicament. But he discovered that his hands were blocked, he couldn’t even feel the magical stone he hid in his boot in case of emergencies.
His only hope was to find a crack in the kid’s morality and exploit it to escape.
"Too late for that." Lith ignored his ramblings, placing his hand over Raghul’s core and forcefully sending mana into it. Raghul had a cyan core, just like Lith, so even if he was incapable of controlling it, the core’s energies were able to repel Lith’s clumsy attacks.
- "So, I can freely invade only weaker cores? It’s a pity I don’t have the time. It would have been interesting to discover what happens to someone once I degrade his core, maybe even below the red level.
Stripping someone of his magic could be a formidable threat, not to mention that it would allow me to keep prisoners without having to fear any trick from their side." –
Taking a mental note to experiment on that in the future, Lith stopped wasting his pure mana, adding darkness magic to it. Raghul’s defences crumbled like a sand castle facing a tsunami, darkness quickly spread to the whole core.
Like for Melia, his veins bulged out, but their colour was black. Melia’s suffering had been nothing compared to Raghul’s, pure entropy was eating at every of his cells.
When Raghul started to bleed black blood from all his orifices, Lith stopped sending energy, but the pain didn’t pause.
- "What the heck?" – Lith was flabbergasted. Trying to understand what was happening, he touched Raghul again, using Invigoration.
He was then able to see that even without his command, the darkness was still ravaging the mana core, that was now full of cracks, on the brink of collapsing on itself.
- "Seems that dark magic is too powerful to directly inject it. I need a softer approach for the woman, or all the information will be lost."
"Lith, the core is black." Solus sounded worried.
"What if you just created an Abomination?" –
Lith refused to believe that accidentally performing such feat could be so easy, but being cautious, he kept monitoring Raghul’s status while ignoring Rodimas’ whimpering and sobbing.
After just a few seconds, the black core crumbled, and Raghul’s body when limp, devoid of life. Lith sighed with relief. Humans seemed to be no match for him, but Abominations where on a league on their own.
He was already sick and tired of that day, he just wanted to understand what was the source of uneasiness he kept feeling, solve the damn vision and then sleep for a whole week.
Lith had just turned toward Rodimas, pondering about what element use on her, when a sudden noise drew his attention.
Raghul’s body was trembling again, writhing like he had a seizure.
By using Invigoration again, Lith could see that black and red blood were pooling where the mana core had been, forming a new one, brimming with dark energies.
The blood core was sucking all the remaining fluids in the body, making Raghul turn pale as a ghost, his eyes glowing with a red light, like a torch was burning behind them.
Lith could see his canines grow into fangs, his hands and feet breaking free from the stone ground as it was just soft mud. He immediately backstepped, conjuring a wind barrier to intercept all the rock projectiles flying towards him.
- "What the heck is a blood core?" Solus almost panicked.
"The bad news is that I think I have just created a vampire. The good news is that at least he doesn’t shine under sunlight like a disco ball." Lith replied. -