The Storm King

He’d left Elise at the party without any warning. They’d spoken about this and Tiberias’ early departure had taken him by surprise, but as Leon left the Aeneas estate, he couldn’t help but feel terrible about it. He’d even left his friends, and though he felt bad about that, too, his regret was marginal at best compared to how he left Elise.

Still, he had a job to do, and apologies could come later.

Fortunately, the party was large enough that people were still arriving, and others were leaving just as Leon was, so it was hardly a thing of note that he was leaving at the same time as Tiberias. Should any investigations take place, then he was just one of several people leaving around the same time.

Leon kept an eye on Tiberias as much as he could. In his lessons with the Thunderbird, it had been revealed to him that once his magic body had been completed, the range of his magic senses had been extended to the limits of his soul realm. The more his soul realm grew the farther he could see with his magic senses as a result. Over the course of laying the groundwork for his Mind Palace, his soul realm had grown to about a mile in radius from his throne, so that was the limit of his magic senses.

Of course, a circle with a two-mile diameter meant that enough fell into his senses that he simply couldn’t make sense of it all, even with the mental enhancements that came with adapting his brain to magic to reach the fourth-tier. Leon still needed time and a great deal of magic to assist his brain in processing such a vast amount of information.

Tracking Tiberias, however, didn’t require such an unfocused use of Leon’s magic senses. Rather, Leon could keep projecting his magic senses in a significantly more directed way. Instead of a circle with a two-mile diameter, Leon only released his magic senses in Tiberias’ direction and only far enough to keep the nobleman in his sight.

There were a few hiccups since in the noble district more than half of the villas were inhabited by people with enough financial or magical resources to ward their homes against magic senses, but Tiberias never left Leon’s sight for long. Even when the nobleman got into his wheel-less carriage Leon was able to track him with relative ease—it seemed even the Decimius family couldn’t ward their carriages against magic senses, or at least, Tiberias’ carriage wasn’t deemed at a sufficient enough risk to warrant the expense. They were in the capital, after all, there was little to no chance that there would’ve been anyone with a deep enough grudge against their family to break the peace in the city.

However, they had attempted to murder just one such person. Leon had little care or respect for the Bull King’s authority, even if he largely agreed with the need for law and order. As a result, it was with no hesitation that he ran as fast as his powerful lightning magic could propel him while still keeping Tiberias in range of his magic senses. Fortunately, Leon’s invisibility ring had long been fixed and Tiberias didn’t seem to be in any great hurry, so Leon was able to both remain unnoticed and rapidly outpace the carriage.

Leon only let his invisibility lapse once he reached the place where he and Naiad were planning on ambushing Tiberias. However, Leon didn’t see the river nymph waiting for him as he approached. He wasn’t concerned, though, Naiad had offered to help him so he had no doubt that she would be there. She was simply an eighth-tier equivalent being, and he assumed she had some method of hiding from his senses that he didn’t know about.

Upon arrival, Leon immediately double-checked Tiberias’ position, and after ensuring that his ring would have the five minutes it would need to cool down and be ready for when he next needed it, Leon let his invisibility drop.

Instantly, a small muddy puddle, otherwise innocuous and beneath just about anyone’s notice, began to ripple and rise from the ground. In seconds, Leon found himself staring at Naiad who had emerged from the puddle. He almost expected her to be angry that she had to wait in such an undignified way, but she seemed fine. He guessed that since she lived in an underground lake, she wasn’t too concerned about such trivialities as a muddy puddle. She didn’t even seem dirty, so he figured he was overthinking things and put it out of his mind. If she wasn’t upset, he wasn’t going to be upset on her behalf.

“You ready?” Leon asked once it became clear that Naiad was more interested in staring at him than she was in any greetings.

[I am,] Naiad replied.

“No one saw you come here?” Leon asked just to be sure.

[I can move with impunity through these lands unnoticed,] Naiad stated matter-of-factly.

“Good to hear,” Leon responded. He might’ve asked a few more questions, but Tiberias’ carriage was approaching, and he wasn’t of a mind to start any long conversations until after they’d assassinated the nobleman.

It seemed Naiad didn’t share that mindset, though, for as soon as Leon replied to her, she asked, [I can see him coming, but what if he doesn’t come this way? That map had several different routes to take for him to go home from that estate you two were just at, some that are still open to him.]

Leon nodded, sharing her slight apprehension at how easily Tiberias could disrupt their plans by simply taking a longer way home. The noble district had been built on a hilly plain surrounding the lake in the center of the capital, and roads wound all over and between the district’s estates. Tiberias was spoiled for choice as to the routes he could take, assuming he was even going home in the first place.

Still, Leon hardly considered it a problem.

“If he takes another way, then we’ll simply wait until night falls and hit his estate, as we planned to do from the start,” Leon said like it was the easiest thing in the world. Given that the only response he got from Naiad was a head nod and a light smile, it seemed she agreed with his attitude. She was strong enough that she doubted any defensive wards on the Decimius estate would be able to keep her and Leon out if they absolutely had to get into the place.

It didn’t seem like it would come to that, though, since Tiberias’ carriage continued to make its way toward them.

[Out of curiosity, do you know how many people are with the boy?] Naiad asked.

“Not for certain, but given that it’s only a single carriage, it can’t be too many…” Leon said. However, his gaze dropped for a moment to the ring on his finger that he’d taken from the corpses of the assassins Tiberias had sent after him in the wake of their departure from the Knight Academy two years ago. “That being said, there could be a few invisible guards keeping an eye on their Young Lord, so while we can only see a single carriage, there could easily be more guards than we can see…”

[I understand,] Naiad said. [As it is, I can sense four people, including that boy you want dead.]

“I sense the same,” Leon said. As the son and heir of a powerful Duke, he’d expected Tiberias to have a bigger entourage, but the young nobleman had only what seemed like two guards and the carriage driver with him. Even in as secure a place as the capital, having an entourage or a retinue of knights was a symbol of prestige, but Tiberias lacked one that others of his social rank might consider appropriate.

Leon’s suspicion grew, and he felt like his answer to Naiad’s question about the number of people on Tiberias’ side was more accurate than he might like. Invisible guards hardly contributed to prestige since, well, no one could see them, but they still fulfilled a crucial function in keeping their charge alive.

“Let’s assume that there’re invisible guards, just to be safe,” Leon said, and Naiad nodded her agreement. Her instincts were quite similar to Leon’s own, both being products of the wild. Neither were going to assume anything that might leave themselves at a disadvantage, even with the titanic power difference between Naiad and Tiberias’ fourth and fifth-tier guard.

[I’ll follow you,] she said. [If anything tries to harm you, I will kill them, so act as you please.]

“It’s appreciated,” Leon said, a vicious smile spreading on his lips as he watched the carriage approach. After pulling his sword and the generic nondescript armor that Elise had picked up for him to conceal his identity out of his soul realm, he quickly channeled magic power into his ring, bending light around him and rendering him invisible. Taking her cue from Leon, Naiad melted down into water, becoming nothing more than a puddle on the ground.

Just a few minutes later, the carriage reached the location Leon chose for the ambush. It seemed that Tiberias was returning home by the fastest route he could take, which only made Leon smile even wider. In such a secluded place, with trees blocking the view of the road from the distant estates, Tiberias and his people were sitting ducks.

Leon didn’t launch his ambush quite yet, though. This part of the road was long and winding, and Tiberias’ carriage had only just entered into this ‘corridor’. Instead, Leon used his magic senses to ensure that they were alone—they were, there were no people on the road besides him, Naiad, and Tiberias’ crew—and to examine what kind of defenses the carriage had. He’d given it a cursory examination as Tiberias was leaving the Aeneas estate, but he had been in a bit of a hurry to reach the ambush point and so hadn’t taken a closer look. Now that he had a few minutes to spare as Tiberias’ carriage approached, Leon decided to take that closer look.

The carriage was heavily warded against physical attacks. In other words, it would take serious force to damage it. However, it wasn’t nearly so warded against magical attacks, with the only serious element that the carriage’s makers seemed to focus on being fire.

The wards were well put together, worthy of being on the vehicle of the son of a powerful Duke, but Leon couldn’t help but shake his head at the lack of thoroughness. His own skills in enchanting had come a long way in these three years, and he already felt like he could do a better job of it than whoever designed this carriage’s defenses.

Of course, he wasn’t privy to their material and educational restrictions, what with the Thunderbird and Xaphan in his soul realm and his girlfriend being the daughter of the Heaven’s Eye Tower Lord, but he couldn’t help but feel confident and a bit cocky about his skills.

As the carriage approached, Leon found that it wasn’t warded to keep sound in the carriage from leaking out, which was just one more oversight that he rolled his eyes at. The carriage was about to enter the range of his magic, but he decided to take a moment to listen.

“Young Lord,” began the fifth-tier guard in the carriage, “it wouldn’t be wise to antagonize Heaven’s Eye right now. His Grace has only recently gotten the House’s financial situation stabilized, but it wouldn’t be difficult for Heaven’s Eye to cause additional harm if they so desired.”

“Fucking cowards, fucking pieces of shit,” Tiberias cursed, his mask of noble serenity dropped completely now that he wasn’t in public. “Who do they think they are?! Blacklisting us?! And not once telling us why!”

“It is a dishonorable act, indeed, to not even tell us why they did what they did,” the guard said, his tone more exasperated than sycophantic or conciliatory. Leon figured his role in House Decimius was probably more than he assumed, given how casually he was speaking with Tiberias. “However, it doesn’t change the fact that this plan of yours involving Lady Elise will not end well. Heaven’s Eye will retaliate if you try and kidnap the daughter of the Tower Lord from her home and murder her lover!”

Leon’s vision went red. He didn’t hear Tiberias’ entitled and indignant response, his mind cleared of everything except killing the nobleman. Magic power flooded from Leon’s soul realm, rushed down his right arm, and formed a brilliant spear of golden lightning. This broke Leon’s invisibility, but Leon didn’t care. As soon as the spear had formed itself, he hurled it with as much force as he could manage, aiming for the driver of the carriage.

The lightning bolt rocketed across the few hundred feet between Leon and the carriage, exploding upon the chest of the startled driver. The poor man didn’t even have time to scream before lightning ripped his body to shreds.

The guard beside him didn’t come off any better. The carriage was wreathed in lightning from that single bolt, hurling him out of his seat and searing his flesh. Thunder resounded in his ears so powerfully that his eardrums tore, leaving him deaf and bleeding from his ears. He was effectively incapacitated, but that wasn’t enough for Leon. Another bolt of lightning hit the fourth-tier guard a moment later, shredding what little armor he had left and leaving him little more than a charred corpse on the ground.

The carriage itself was almost shaken apart. Both the front and back axles snapped, the wooden frame warped and burned in the lightning’s heat, and the two inside were thrown around and smashed into the carriage walls hard enough for a few of Tiberias’ bones to break, despite the cushy padding within. Additionally, the harness tying the two horses to the carriage was obliterated, and the terrified beasts immediately took off away from Leon as fast as their legs could carry them.

With that, Leon’s mind began to clear. He looked around at the damage he’d done, but he barely cared. His left shoulder ached as mana rushed through his body, but as Leon rested his left hand upon the handle of his sword, he felt the smallest of shocks that instantly relieved the pain.

Leon smiled. He didn’t know the Adamant weapon could do that, but he couldn’t stick around to properly appreciate this happy development; the thunder summoned with his lightning had likely alerted the entire noble district to what was happening, so he had to move quickly. Even after the attack on his home shocking the entire noble district, the Legion wouldn’t reach this location for at least ten or fifteen minutes, and Leon wanted to be long gone by the time they did. Legion response times wouldn’t change much after a single incident, no matter how shocking it was; the nobles in the district were loath to accept the Legions messing around in what they thought of as their domain.

He strode confidently forward, moving fast enough to not be taking his time, but slowly enough to ensure that he wasn’t rushing into a trap. His magic senses remained locked on the two inhabitants of the carriage, but he also widened the area to keep an eye on his surroundings just in case there were a few invisible surprises.

No one revealed themselves, so Leon gradually picked up the pace. He knew that the fifth-tier mage within the carriage had seen him and was already trying to get Tiberias out of the carriage, and he wasn’t going to let that happen.

Leon reached the carriage in seconds. With a swift kick, he snapped the door off its hinges. His earlier lightning bolt had shredded much of the wards securing the carriage, so the wards against physical attacks were largely useless now.

Before Leon could enter the carriage, a gout of fire erupted from the carriage, enveloping him in its entirety.

And Leon couldn’t have cared less. He was a skilled fire mage himself, and even if he was of the same magical tier as the guard inside the carriage, he doubted this one blast would’ve harmed him.

Leon tanked the blast, coming out none the worse for wear once it died down. He took a moment to savor the fear he could see in the eyes of the fifth-tier guard before answering the man with a fire attack of his own. However, Leon’s own attack was far more contained; it wasn’t an undirected blast of fire, it was more like a beam of fire that blasted a hole in the man’s chest, annihilating his internal organs as well as punching a hole through the carriage and leaving a small crater in the paved road beneath it.

He then turned his attention to Tiberias. The nobleman seemed like he wanted to say something, but Leon gave him no opportunity. He raised his hand and let loose with a blast of lightning. He didn’t bother forming a lightning spear from it, he simply let golden lightning flow from his fingers and into the other man.

Forming lightning into his spears increased the potency of the magic, essentially compressing the magic into a smaller, more contained form. The more the lightning was condensed, the more powerful it became, and it was an exponential growth rather than linear. As far as Leon knew, only his family possessed the skill in lightning magic to consistently create such bolts. All others who used lightning magic—at least, in his limited experience in the Bull Kingdom—could only reliably do what he was doing now, namely releasing their lightning in uncontrolled blasts. A few talented individuals figured out how to do similar things, creating less compressed, less powerful lightning bolts, but none had been able to replicate the feats of House Raime, even with what had been left behind by the Thunderbird Clan.

Lightning coursed through Tiberias, slowly tearing him apart. It wasn’t a controlled bolt of lightning, but it was still magic power from a sixth-tier mage, and Tiberias was only of the third-tier. The nobleman tried to scream for help, but his body seized up as he opened his mouth. He couldn’t move a muscle as lightning ravaged his body. He felt his circulatory system burst, his organs fry in his torso, and his muscles lock.

Lightning destroyed everything it came across, but Leon made sure it was relatively slow. Tiberias’ eyes popped in his skull, his tongue was fried, his teeth shattered. His heart was saved for last, and Leon took great pleasure in its destruction.

The final burst of lightning liquefied Tiberias’ brain. If Leon left right after destroying the nobleman’s heart, Tiberias still would’ve died in seconds, but Leon wasn’t going to leave the job unfinished. Lightning coursed through Tiberias’ brain, finally killing the young man who, if Leon were to be honest, probably couldn’t even feel it at that point.

In the end, Tiberias wasn’t able to say a single word. He died miserably in his carriage without even knowing his killer’s name.

There was an instinct to incinerate Tiberias’ corpse, but at this point, there would be little point. The assault was flashy enough that it had likely caught the attention of many powerful mages. Besides, there was a small part of Leon that wanted people to see what he had done, like it was some kind of message.

A message of what, Leon didn’t know, but it felt good to leave Tiberias’ fried body there, still identifiable despite the plentiful lightning burns.

Leon turned away from the carriage, his job complete. He had been so into killing Tiberias that seeing the corpses of two more guards on the ground around the carriage was the first moment that he realized that he and Naiad had been correct to be cautious. Both had been killed with an ice spike through the throat, but when Leon looked around, he couldn’t see Naiad.

The ice spikes were her handiwork, of that he had no doubt, but the river nymph was nowhere to be seen.