Chapter 45: Safeguard Catalyst

Subject: Caim Location: Maliscade - Blightbane Guild

Just as he was about to cast his new spell on Mille, Caim caught suspicious movement in his periphery. Though the Guild hall was filled with rambunctious hand-to-hand combat, it was patterned and orderly fighting.

The Welder knights were monsters, taking on seekers and Guild personnel in groups of ten or more at a time without breaking a sweat. They were the six locus points in the hall around which others clustered or fled.

“What is it you see,” Mille asked, following Caim’s eyes.

“They’re wounded, but not from the knights.”

“I see it. I’ve never seen their faces before. I count eight.”

Caim only saw three, but quickly picked up on another two. They weaved in and out of the crowd in a desperate bid to reach the far wall, where the passage to the restricted section was.

After confirming the Hexaline Knight was once again too absorbed in the chaos he’d created, Caim rushed toward Mille and held out his palm, holding her in place with the other hand.

When Flourish Catalyst was cast on a host, it took the shape of a small seed. Safeguard Catalyst looked like the smooth silvery-blue scale of a mythical beast.

When the object materialized so suddenly, Mille tried to move away. He held her in place. Hoping it worked the same way as Flourish, he pressed the scale to the front of Mille’s uniform and wished for success.

A blue liquid burst forth from the scale and swirled around its host. So as not to get in the way, Caim stepped back. The fluid settled on the ground and formed a trio of phantasmal spikes around Mille.

A slight silver shimmer made a triangular barrier around her body. Their eyes met again after they’d each become momentarily mesmerized.

Unwillingly penned in by these partially translucent blue constructs, Mille shifted her stance just enough to edge the toe of one shoe outside the formation.

It didn’t look constricting. Though it was a defensive spell, it wasn’t supposed to restrict mobility. She shouldn’t feel trapped, but he’d be nervous too. There just wasn’t time for an explanation.

The moment one of Mille’s feet stepped out of the triangle, the silver shimmer vanished, and the spikes receded. Having cast the spell, he could feel what the result of her actions was, and he didn’t like it.

“Don’t move,” he instructed, targeting her and manipulating the behavior of the spell.

Substantially weaker than the Flourish Catalyst variant he’d been using before today, he was, fortunately, able to recalibrate it right from the start. Though, some functionality felt locked away.

“Why? What were those things?”

The three spikes erupted from the ground at the clerk’s feet again, and he held her in place by the shoulders until the barrier returned.

When his hands reached through the barrier, he felt just a touch of resistance. Then the spell “recognized” him and no longer interpreted his actions as hostility. The defiance gave way so quickly he could hardly feel a thing.

“It will protect you as long as you stay inside the... pointy things,” he tried to explain, not knowing what to call them. “It isn’t very strong, but it’s all I have right now.”

Safeguard protected someone and layered more protection on when they weren’t moving. He’d had the option to recalibrate it for mobility or for protection, and he went with the latter. It was better for Mille to stay in one place right now.

Shifting the protection to this extreme was probably the only way it would measure up to the utility of Flourish. The mobility end of the spectrum was much weaker. It would be paper-thin, given that he’d only just received the spell.

Mille nodded.

“Can you find those people in the crowd again?” he asked.

“Right there!”

Mille pointed to someone very close to Caim, and he spun around.

“Please, sir! You have the forgotten magic, yes?” a panicked man clutching his chest shouted in a raspy voice.

He swallowed and nervously glanced around while waiting for Caim’s response. His face was scratched up. Long oily hair partially covered both his eyes with a curtain of grey.

“I don’t know what you’re saying. Who are you?” Caim demanded.

“We don’t want to be their tools! We thought we could be free if we did what we were told, but this is worse than death. Someone gifted like you did something to our bodies. We felt our time slipping away, so we went to so many lifemages... But they never find anything wrong. And after all the testing, I can’t focus anymore.”

Anything wrong? The more Caim looked at this poor guy up close, the more scratches and blemishes he saw. From the agonized expression and the nervous twitching, the pain looked terrible.

“You’re hurt. What do you mean?”

The desperate man shook his head in exasperation, and Caim saw Hexknight Latice rushing toward them.

“That isn’t- That isn’t! We did this to try to stop it! We don’t want to die. Please?! Please!”

Latice reached the two of them and grabbed Caim with surprising strength. Unlike his knights, he wasn’t wearing armor, so it was hard to see him as such a muscular person. Appearances were deceiving. Latice was a bruiser, just his squad.

“Move or die, little seeker.”

He maneuvered Caim around and then shoved him back toward Mille. Then, he grabbed the stranger and raised his voice.

“Cray! Incoming!”

He pushed the stranger to a knight who responded to the address. The knight caught the wounded man and then drove him forward toward the far wall.

Caim got back up while Latice addressed the hall.

“This is Hexaline Knight Latice! Welders, we have an emergency! Strangers have infiltrated the city. Protect the citizens!”

Subject: Caim Location: Maliscade - Blightbane Guild

Still wondering what the Hexknight meant by the announcement, Caim saw the stranger’s eyes fill with grey static. It seemed to be a sort of magical discharge, but more like Alice’s eyes, though he could hardly remember back to his first day in Shroud.

The knight was still shoving the man further back to the wall, but signs of magic spread from the eyes, like electricity, to the surrounding skin, continuing until his fingers curled, and his legs buckled.

What were they watching? What kind of magic did this to a person?

Caim’s eyes didn’t do that when he cast a spell, but he’d witnessed something less dramatic with other mages. Why was that?

The stranger clawed at his throat. Whatever that spell was, it wasn’t a power he could command. His chest heaved, and he fought a losing battle trying to stop it.

The knight shoved one final time and sent the man tumbling back. Then the knight rushed to clear the area of any remaining citizens, roughly pushing them out of the way.

The Welder clapped his gauntlets together. From the chest piece of the bulky metal armor, the orange light seeping out of the armor intensified.

He extended his arms, and a black hook fired from a hidden chamber in both palms with *bang*—the hooks embedded themselves in different points on the far wall on either side of the agonized stranger.

A black mesh, like a net unfurling, draped down to the ground and released a cloud of thick exhaust. It let out a *hiss* as it did. This wasn’t magic, maybe not even magitech. It was mechanical

Mille seemed to realize what was happening, and she pulled Caim closer to shelter him inside Safeguard’s triangle. He picked up on that fact and immediately assigned two fragments of Safeguard, calibrated just as he had done for Mille.

One was assigned to the knight blocking off the area. Another bound itself to a Defender closeby to the stranger, still struggling to protect innocent bystanders.

Caim finished just before a bright white light flashed from the stranger’s body and filled his vision.

Safeguard Catalyst: Beacon A [ Severely Damaged ] Safeguard Catalyst: Beacon B [ Damaged ]

Even when he could finally see again, Caim’s ears were still ringing. It hadn’t fully registered in his mind yet, but there had been an explosion.

He was on the ground, staring up at the arched ceiling of the Guild hall, but he didn’t remember falling there.

“What was…” a voice began, but then he realized it was his own.

“I don’t know,” Mille replied. “There were reports of something like it between Maliscade and The Barrier, but it was vague, and I don’t want to believe they would do something like this.”

Her conduits flared with an unrelenting red light. She wasn’t suppressing herself, or maybe she still was, and she was just too emotional to hide.

She extended a hand down to Caim, and he took it, pushing himself to his feet. His body still felt the force of the shockwave. While it hadn’t hurt, it did knock him off his feet from this far away.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“I should be asking you that. I didn’t feel it, but I saw more than I hoped to see. I take it your spell doesn’t protect others.”

“I guess not. But I’m still confused. What happened?”

“A human bomb,” Latice interjected. “This is the kind of twisted stuff you encounter beyond The Barrier. Call me a terrible person, but you can be pleasant all you like when this isn’t a regular occurrence in your life.”

The last part seemed to be more to himself than to anyone else. Maybe he had a guilty conscience. Maybe he had something else on his mind.

“A human bomb?”

Caim looked over to the stranger but found only a revolting mess strung against the black mesh deployed by the knight. There was no human left in that gore. The magic had thoroughly ripped him apart from the inside out.

He had to look away. It wasn’t the first time Caim had come into contact with a gory display of this magnitude, but it had always been from a distance.

“I say that… but I’ve never seen anything like this before. New magic, new terrors to behold.”

Hexknight Latice inhaled a deep breath and looked like he was only now fully awake.

“Knight Cray, report!” he called out to the stationary husk of charred armor.

The armor was worn by the man who’d protected everyone around from the full damage of the blast. The mesh netting seemed to have repelled the energy, funneling the blast to Cray’s armor.

Safeguard Catalyst: Beacon B [ Restored ]

One of the tethers linked to the netting finally snapped, and Cray’s motionless body turned enough to reveal what the blast had done to his armor.

Surprisingly, the hall infrastructure, though charred, seemed intact. The building was made of strong stuff. But Caim felt a pang in his chest for the knight. The armor wasn’t just scorched with gray chalk-like residue, human or magic he didn’t know, it had also received ripple-patterned dents.

There was the faint sight of Safeguard Catalyst’s small blue spikes jutting up from the ground, completely untouched by the blast itself, yet radiating a significantly weaker presence. It didn’t sustain damage like an ordinary architectural feature, but it could be destroyed.

In the silence that had overtaken the hall, a muffled cough emanated from the armor. The remaining hook locking a tether to the wall dislodged, and the black lines of durable material drooped down. Having been held up by the tethers, Cray’s armor shuddered and toppled to the ground with a heavy *crash*.

The hall was still. Caim swallowed heavily.

Then, miraculously, Cray’s armor groaned and sat upright.

“Alive, my lord, but I feel I shouldn’t be,” the knight answered, struggling to stand.

Then I managed to actually make a difference… Caim realized.

Safeguard Catalyst: Beacon A [ Restored ]

When Cray had first fallen out of its protective triangle, Safeguard had withdrawn, but now it appeared again. It had repaired itself and wordlessly reported that event back to Caim, just as the other one had.

He wondered what would have happened if it had been destroyed completely. Having used the other spells enough, Caim understood the reports much more than before. It was beginning to feel more natural.

Latice looked solemnly over to Mille, and then to Caim, before focusing back on his subordinate.

“Thank the Remnant,” he muttered under his breath. Then, in a louder and more sarcastic voice, he called out. “Of course you’re not dead, Cray. A Welder Knight won’t die unless I order them to. Did I order you to die?”

“No, my lord,” the knight chuckled softly with some effort.

“That’s right. Now, use the gel to secure your armor. We’ll have to do maintenance at the base later, but now we get this job done.”

The Hexknight cared for his subordinates. Caim hated him, but he did respect this one thing. And he was ordering The Welders to protect the citizens, so they could be allies for now.

Knight Cray pulled the cap from a bottle at his waist and dumped the contents onto the cracks in his armor. From a distance, it looked like brown clay. Whatever it was, it clung to the armor while the knight hastily patted it down into nooks and crannies he’d missed. He was treating it like something precious, so Caim figured it might be valuable.

Overall, though, Caim was still confused. He shed contentious relief for the knight’s health and began to mourn the stranger, who obviously didn’t mean to end up like that.

He’d used the word “we” to introduce himself and his troubles. There were more. Caim’s eyes slipped between faces in the shaken crowd. They’d been forced to go from an average day at the Guild, to kneeling submission, to a brawl, and now to… whatever this was.

The word that was probably the most fitting was one he’d never use again. He didn’t want to be anywhere near it.

Just like before, Caim noticed someone who didn’t belong. He didn’t pick them out by face. Caim couldn’t remember a dozen of these faces from one day to the next, let alone everyone. It was the woman’s behavior that was “off”.

She wasn’t wearing similar clothing to the other victim, but her face bore the same battered despair. While she slowly crept between the messy tables of the Guild, one of her hands cupped her abdomen, staring in horror at the mess left behind by the explosion.

Kinship, grief, anger, desperation. She feels that kind of trapped terror that- No! No, that can’t be what this is!

Caim didn’t know what to do. He froze. Then another blast knocked him over.

Flourish Catalyst: Beacon A [ Damaged ]

He cleared his vision and stood back up, transferring Flourish around to protect the injured. He couldn’t see anyone who’d died, but the hall was large.

Whoever these new attackers were, they weren’t knights, and they weren’t affiliated with the Guild. They looked human, but their movements were unnatural.

“From outside,” one of the Welders gasped before collapsing.

Having shielded all the seekers behind him from an explosive blast of unknown origins, he took damage head-on, and his armor was leaking black fluid.

This blast was weaker, however. It hadn’t caused the same level of damage to the surroundings.

The stranger who’d caused the explosion was nowhere to be found.

Flourish Catalyst: Beacon A [ Restored ]

“I grant temporary authority to all lifemages and support personnel,” Latice declared over the ensuing commotion. “However, you are only permitted to protect yourselves. Spells cast on my knights will be seen as an act of hostility against a Hexaline Knight of Shroud.”

It was chaos, with no way to determine who the foes were in the crowded room. Only someone who knew the face of every seeker and employee here had a chance of predicting who would attack next.

The fallen Welder wasn’t moving, but Caim was willing to bet he was still alive. He’d been told that even healing would be punished, but it also seemed his magic couldn’t be traced, and that knight protected his comrades.

He felt conflicted doing so, but Caim withdrew Flourish from one of the Defenders and placed it on the knight. This man might be able to help them survive this.

“Seeker Caim. I saw what you did,” Latice murmured while drawing close.

Caim choked on his breath and looked wide-eyed back at the Hexknight.

“Even though I don’t have enough familiarity with magic myself, I can see you aided my knight. We have a situation here, and I would very much appreciate it if you could assist my other knights while we resolve it.”

Looking into Latice’s eyes, Caim realized he was scowling. As quickly as he could, he let his face fall back into blank neutrality before nodding.

It was too late. The Hexknight had seen the blatant revulsion, and Caim’s throat contracted anxiously.

“Good. Don’t worry. I’m not one of the ones so drunk with pride I would forget that people should hate me for my actions. On any other day, I’d expect you to hide it better, but definitely not today. Oh, and if you fight hard and in good faith, there will be no arrests. On my honor and with my Paragon’s authority.”

Even if there wouldn’t be any arrests, Caim was angry. He was so angry he could scream, but he knew that wouldn’t help anyone. He was about to point out another stranger to Latice when the doors to the hall burst open.

Before he could even look to see who’d entered, Caim felt a third impact from behind that knocked him off his feet much more forcefully than the last two. His head bumped against the brick floor, and he fell unconscious.