Chapter 236 - Arrogance Is A Weakness

I pushed the door open. Inside, I saw a room that was a weird mix of how a modern lab should look like, mixed with a stereotypical witchcraft shop. White walls, white floor, everything was meticulously clean and organised, but the everything itself was all items that I immediately recognised as magical. A lot of seals and materials for making them, a box of gemstones—they were an excellent base for many amulets, as I learnt—and so on.

With my well or with my eyes, I wouldn't have ever found the calming seal's controlling array in here without knowing how exactly it looked. Good thing I had Eve with me.

"Here it is!" she exclaimed, coming to one of the tables. There stood something that looked like a carved obelisk, but only thirty centimetres tall. "Just let me—"

Before she could touch it, the space on the other side of the table shimmered, and Staghead appeared there out of thin air. Before I or Eve could react, he snatched the controlling array from her with the most shit-eating smile on his face I've ever seen.

"Looking for this? Came to stop my fun from going? Now, how would I stop you from that, silly mortals? Maybe I should break this thing.." Staghead raised the obelisk up as if preparing to smash it on the floor.

"You!" Eve snarled. "I'd like to see you try! You think I didn't prepare countermeasures for something like that? And give me back my Seal of Absolute Knowledge! I bought it, it's mine!"

I could see it on Staghead's body, hidden under his clothes. What I couldn't see or understand was how he appeared in this room out of nowhere. One moment he wasn't here, another moment he was. How the hell did it work?

"Bought from an undead abomination who had no business putting its dirty hands on it in the first place… I find a deal like that worth nothing. I find people who make such deals worth nothing." Staghead's eyes moved from Eve to me, and his upper lip curled. "And you… even more disgusting."

He didn't elaborate. Instead, he lowered the obelisk down and pulled the jade seal from his clothes.

"Is that what you want, Thieves of Essence? Well, how about taking it from me, then?" Staghead smirked mockingly.

Eve certainly looked like she could just lunge at him for a moment, before she forcefully pulled herself together and restrained herself with a glare. Then, she turned to me, with an intensity in her eyes that screamed that there was something between the lines in her words. "Fey have a lot of powers that are secret from even the best researchers, since they are so reclusive as a rule. This one, as you can see, can teleport. We have to catch him unaware if we want to attack him."

"Talking about your plans in front of your enemy doesn't seem the smartest thing to do, especially if you wanted to catch them unawares," Staghead smirked again.

I mulled over what Eve said for a moment. That all was true, both her words and Staghead's, but… maybe that was the thing. Staghead was an arrogant bastard, and Eve was playing on it.

"It's not like you won't hear me if I whisper, fey. With ears like yours, you must hear every bad word spoken about you behind your back, and that must be plenty of them. Did anyone joke about your lovers cheating on you yet?"

So if Eve was distracting him, it was my job to do the magic. The hardest part… I had no luxury of hitting with anything less than the best and the most lethal stuff I can muster. If Staghead escaped with the obelisk, then the bedlam in the house won't be stopped without more bloodshed.

Staghead's eyes narrowed. "No one dares to joke about the second lead of the Wild Hunt. No one but you, obnoxious mortals… and only because you don't know yet what the terrible fate waits you. Even if you escape unharmed today, one day both of you will burn on stakes like you should. Mortals don't deserve to be given powers like yours."

I channelled the Earth, something that came almost easy to me now, after all the training with Ghost, and pulled the aspect of stillness from it. It was the safest option for the surroundings, and it would surely stop Staghead in his tracks. And now, when Eve was roasting him with taunts, he seemed distracted enough to not teleport away before I crash all that stillness on him.

There was enough of it to make a "time-stop" in a ten meter radius, by my estimation. Not a real time-stop, of course, but something that would look just the same until the stillness was taken away.

And just like I and Eve hoped, Staghead noticed it just a little too late. He froze on his spot in a sort of eerie immobility that only unliving and undead could achieve, and the latter usually only when they went to sleep.

Without waiting to be prompted, Eve jumped at Staghead and pulled the array out of his hand. She reached for the jade seal, too, but in that moment he disappeared, and Eve's hand went through thin air.

"Dammit!" She ground her teeth. "This guy… he must've been using Other Roads. Damn him, damn fey!"

"I thought he'd die on the spot. He has a beating heart, too. People usually die when it stops," I said sourly. "Not to say I wanted to kill him, but he's one of the people whose death would save many others from trouble. At least we have the array."

"Right." Eve looked at the obelisk and began to pull and push its aspects in a way I couldn't understand if I tried. "Good news: most of the grid is operational. I can restart the spell now. Question—where is the witch who was controlling it before? I'm afraid that after the forcible break of the spell she has a severe case of a backlash."