The Storm King

“Rufus!” Narses shouted. “I’m placing you under arrest! Are you going to come quietly?”

Rufus smiled back and gave his response. “Fuck off!”

‘All right,’ Leon thought to himself as he took a few menacing steps forward, ‘I guess he’s choosing the better way to handle this. Good thing, I could use a little exercise…’ As he strode toward the foot of the stairs, he stepped essentially right into the kill box that Rufus had set up beforehand, being surrounded by several dozen relatively high-power security personnel on the bottom floor, and a few dozen more up on the mezzanine. Since the mezzanine encircled the entire room, that meant that Leon was now surrounded on all sides.

However, he didn’t for one moment feel like he was outmatched. There were a couple of seventh-tier mages in the crowd, but of his opponents, it was only Rufus who was eighth-tier. He had Maia and Narses behind him, both eighth-tier. Even though most of Narses’ people were still on the bottom floor waiting for the lift to return and ferry them up to the top floor, Leon was supremely confident that his side held the advantage—and that wasn’t even bringing Xaphan into the picture.

He conjured his blade into his ride hand, dramatically extending it outward and letting his aura spill forth. The mages closest to him—a handful of fifth and sixth-tier mages, all pale from obvious anxiety—began to shudder in fear as his aura settled around them, and he encouraged that reaction by letting his power spill into his sword, causing silver-blue lightning to dance across its blade.

“If you’re not going to come quietly,” Narses shouted back to Rufus as he quickly made to follow Leon, “then we’re just going to come and get you!” Rufus almost responded, but Narses cut him off by immediately addressing the security forces in the room. “You all know who I am! All of you fall under my command, not Rufus’! He is a base liar and a traitor! More than that, he is a collaborator, throwing his lot in with vampires who have caused Heaven’s Eye to silently rot from within! I am cleansing this rot with my comrade, Leon Raime, a Hand of the Director!”

Narses paused a moment, and Leon almost burst out laughing when almost a full third of the mages set aside their drawn weapons and backed off, and even more began to look at Rufus, a range of emotions from worry to suspicion crossing their faces.

Leon decided to nudge them a little further without forcing them to defend themselves. “All those who aid Rufus will be assumed to be collaborators, too! But those who stand down right now will not be punished! You are all members of Heaven’s Eye in good standing; don’t throw all of that away for this man!”

Rufus scowled quite nastily as several more of his security guards stepped aside, thinning the line of those separating him and Leon.

“A million silvers to everyone who doesn’t lose their nerve!” Rufus half-shouted, half-growled. A few of the guards clearly steeled themselves, but most of them seemed to ignore him, and three more guards even stepped aside.

Leon couldn’t help but smile, and when he heard the lift arrive back at their floor, his mad grin widened.

When the lift doors opened, for just a moment, he drank in the sight of abject terror that graced the faces of those guards still between him and Rufus. However, just as he was about to turn his head to watch Narses’ forces bolstered, he saw a look of joy cross Rufus’ face, and then felt a ninth-tier aura flood the room, completely outshining his own.

“Now, what do we have here?” the Director asked as he stepped out into the room, followed closely not only by Penelope and Damien Makedon, but three more eighth-tier mages that Leon recognized as three more of his Hands. “All of you look like you’re about to explode; I’m glad we made it in time…”

Leon stared in disbelief at seeing the Director here, having become so used to him staying in the Hexagon that he never seriously thought the man ever left. Yet, here he was, in the flesh, parting Narses’ guards with ease as he calmly approached Leon.

“Leon,” he warmly said, “you’ve done well, but I decided that this is something that I should handle myself.”

He didn’t speak with a commanding tone, and even implied that Leon had been acting with his assent, but Leon still lightly frowned as he wondered just what the Director was doing.

‘If he actually does something now, then that would be for the best,’ Leon thought. He didn’t want to kill anyone today, though he was always willing to do what needed to be done. He just wanted the vampire menace dealt with, and given the support Rufus had been giving them, that meant that he had to deal with Rufus, too.

“Director!” Rufus cried out as he pushed his way past his own people to hurry down the stairs and meet with the Director in the center of the room. “I’m so glad you’re here! These lawless boors burst in here accusing me of all kinds of crimes! Such vile lies they spread about me! I beg of you to deal with these slanderers!”

Rufus spoke with a rather high-pitched voice that grated on Leon’s ears almost as much as the words he used. He rolled his eyes, then watched with great intent at what the Director was going to do.

When he saw the Director’s aura flare up, the corners of his lips began to rise. The Director moved with prodigious speed: raising a hand, conjuring a short two-foot-long blade of translucent razor wind, and then slashing it across Rufus’ throat. The Chief of Magical Research and Development didn’t even realize what happened as his head was separated from his neck, not a speck of his eighth-tier strength able to save him. Leon guessed that in his certainty that the Director would side with him, he didn’t even raise his defenses.

Rufus’ head hit the ground just as Leon’s lips finished forming his smile. But that smile froze as the Director, his full ninth-tier aura now raging, turned around toward him, Narses, and the rest of his group. Lightning still raged through him and he prepared to defend himself, and he could sense Maia doing the same, but the Director raised his hand and someone loudly shouted in surprise.

Narses came hurtling past Leon, borne aloft by a dense cushion of air created by the Director, and stopped before the man himself.

The Director raised his hand again and slammed it into Narses’ chest, driving all the air from his lungs and causing the entire room to cringe from the sickening crunch of shattering bones.

The air cushion restraining Narses then dissipated and the Chief of Security fell to the ground. He was gravely injured, but yet lived.

“There,” the Director said as his eyes met Leon’s. “I think that should put a stop to all of this.” More obviously to the entire room, he loudly stated, “Rufus worked with vampires to undermine my authority and the good name of Heaven’s Eye! For his crimes, he has been punished!” His gaze then drifted down to Narses lying at his feet. “Narses took it upon himself to try and arrest a man equal to him in station! For this overreach in power, he has been punished! I will handle the rest myself! Everyone, return to your stations!”

The security guards didn’t move immediately, but after a few moments, during which Narses struggled to his feet as he quaffed a potent healing potion, all of the assembled guards began to slowly spread out and return to their posts.

“Leon,” the Director said, “would you care to join me in the Hexagon? I’d like to go over what just happened.”

Leon frowned, feeling quite unsatisfied with how things turned out. He glanced at Rufus’ headless corpse, then back to the Director. “Sure,” he replied. “I have some things I’d like to ask you, too.”

---

“What in the fuck was all that?” Leon demanded as the Director’s office door closed, giving him, the Director, and Penelope all the privacy they could possibly ask for.

He didn’t feel the need to elaborate, and his feeling was vindicated when the Director, as he leaned back against his desk instead of sitting behind it, answered, “I was wondering what was going to happen. I wanted to see how committed you were to this partnership. How committed you were to Heaven’s Eye. How committed you were to seeing this threat dealt with.”

“Really?” Leon asked, skepticism dripping from his tone. “Did you not have evidence enough of all that? You needed more? You needed to sit on the sidelines and watch as a civil war damn near erupted in the guild?”

“Dear me, Leon, is that concern for Heaven’s Eye I hear in your voice?” the Director asked with a teasing tone that Leon found quite aggravating given what had just happened.

“Cut the horse shit. What was that?”

The Director’s easy-going smile faltered for a moment, and then he said, “I’ve been following this investigation much more closely than you give me credit for. I’ve done my part to root out vampires from my guild, but others needed to do theirs, too. If they didn’t, how could you possibly believe me if I were to claim that I’d gotten rid of them all?”

“You did all this for my sake?”

“What even is ‘all this’, Leon? From where I’m sitting, I don’t think I’ve done that much.”

“I suppose not, but that’s a problem unto itself.”

“As a leader, Leon, you must understand that the greatest skill I can possibly possess is the ability to delegate important tasks to competent and trusted people. I gave Narses the authority he needed to pursue the vampires—”

“Hardly,” Leon interjected. “You allowed Rufus to stall him with bureaucracy for weeks before I returned.”

“Yes, I did do that. With Valentina in custody, the situation was in well in-hand, there wasn’t much need to go further.”

“Then why did you say that you gave him the authority he needed when it was clearly insufficient?”

The Director stared at Leon for a long moment, not answering. He seemed to be almost hesitant to answer Leon seriously, but it was Penelope who applied the pressure needed to get him to continue.

“Dad,” she whispered, “if you work with Leon, he’s not going to come for your position.”

Penelope punctuated her statement with a quick confirming look sent Leon’s way.

“Right,” Leon replied. “I’m not much of an administrator. If you work with me, then there’s no reason for me to try and usurp your position. I’d rather not even try—my talents and interests lie in fighting and enchanting. You said yourself that you were choosing my side over the vampires. So level with me: what’s going on?”

The Director sighed. “Fine,” he said with some resignation. “Fine. No use in pretending anymore, I suppose. With Valentina in custody, there wasn’t much need to try and contain the vampires. She was, as far as I was aware, the most powerful vampire within the guild. There might be one or two more eighth-tier vampires out there, but she was the greatest threat they posed to the guild. So, with her in prison after that failed attack on Narses’ villa, I calculated that I could take a few risks.

“You see, Rufus has been one of my oldest and most loyal supporters.”

“That seems to have paid off quite well for him,” Leon sarcastically muttered.

“Indeed. He was too loyal by half, I think. He took too zealously to the extreme measures that I’ve had to embrace. Diving in where I would only slowly lower myself, holding my breath. When it came to the vampires, he didn’t believe me when I told him that I was turning my back on them—I didn’t tell him anything important about you, I swear it. He believed that what I was doing wasn’t in my best interest, that I was having to cut loose a powerful asset for the sake of appeasing you and Narses.

“That belief of his led him to block Narses from proceeding with the investigation as much as he could. Since he was involved with the vampires with me, he had almost as much information on the vampiric presence within the guild as I did, and he protected them as best as he could.”

“Why didn’t you act against him, then? Order him in no uncertain terms to stop what he was doing and get rid of the vampires in his care?”

“I considered doing so. But the thing I was most concerned about in making my decision to support you, Leon, was that I needed to win your trust. If you returned from the north, and I were to simply tell you that I’d already eradicated all of the vampires within Heaven’s Eye, would you have believed me?”

Leon didn’t verbally respond, but he sneered at the idea.

“Exactly,” the Director with a knowing nod. “Letting all of this play out as it did was risky, and I kept myself as informed as I could. But what I wanted most of all was for you to see for yourself rather than taking my word for it that the vampire threat was being dealt with. Narses will be more vigilant from now on, and Rufus is dead. I hope that the execution of my oldest supporter will go some way to convincing you that I’m not on the vampire’s side anymore, but yours.”

“The loss of Rufus can’t be overstated,” Penelope added as the Director finished. “He was the most fanatically loyal supporter my father had, and he was in charge of one of the six main branches of Heaven’s Eye. With him gone, it leaves quite the hole in Heaven’s Eye that now has to be filled with someone whose loyalties we might not be able to entirely trust.”

“My heart bleeds for you,” Leon quipped before turning back to the Director. “Why wait as long as you did?”

“Stepping in would’ve brought an immediate end to things,” the Director stated. “I was ready to move whenever things started getting out of hand—as I did just now. The thing I had to decide on was when I should make my move. Moving too quickly would’ve prevented you from conducting your own side of the investigation. Moving too late would leave Heaven’s Eye more damaged than I would’ve liked. I think, all things considered, this wasn’t the worst outcome ever.”

“I can think of better outcomes,” Leon stated. “Ones where you never involved vampires in your affairs in the first place, ones where you gave me all the authority needed to bring the vampires down in the first place, ones where you showed me those damn arks you apparently have!”

“All in due time,” the Director said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “For now, we’re left with a choice, you and I: who to choose as the next Chief of Magical Research and Development.”

Leon’s eyebrows rose in interest. “You’re letting me in on this decision?”

“If we are to be partners who trust each other, then we have to make certain decisions together, don’t you think?”

“We already have a candidate in mind,” Penelope said with a meaningful look.

Leon’s eyes narrowed while his smile grew as he read into Penelope’s pointed gaze. “You can stop looking; I want that job.”

“You’re the only one we want,” Penelope said.

“You need a better position than one of my Hands,” the Director stated. “One with more authority. I’m glad that it’s a position you want.”

“And I’m glad we don’t need to debate it. But, on a more concerning note, the vampire threat hasn’t been dealt with, yet,” Leon pointed out, though the smile on his face hadn’t gone anywhere. “There are undoubtedly members of their foul cult that escaped you, or were never a part of Heaven’s Eye to begin with…”

“Then hunt them down,” the Director replied. “Work with Narses and the Empires to bring these creatures down. I have no more use for them, so slaughter them at your leisure.”

“How magnanimous of you. Should I expect such treatment if you ever find a more a convenient ally?”

“Do you plan to sacrifice humans to demons, implicitly threaten me, and put all of Heaven’s Eye at risk of Imperial sanctions?”

“Definitely not on the first count; the second… I’ll do my best; and the third, well, you know who I am. I might not be able to control Imperial sanctions.”

“That’s the best we can hope for, isn’t? Well, I think we’ll get along quite well as we prove ourselves trustworthy,” the Director said. “Besides with your new position, you’ll be able to hunt down vampires as you please. You won’t have to answer to me as much as you would as one of my Hands, so do as you feel you must.”

“That doesn’t make much sense. How can a Chief of one of the six main branches of Heaven’s Eye have that much free time?”

“As I said just a few minutes ago: the key to a good leader is mastering the art of delegation. Delegate your duties to those you trust and those who prove competent. You need only resolve conflicts between your various departments and provide your department heads with needed direction.”

Leon smiled as he thought the matter over. He did say in the heat of the moment that he wanted the job, but he didn’t want to lose all of his time to administrative busy work. Still, it presented such a fantastic opportunity that he didn’t for a moment seriously think of going back on his declaration.

“All right,” Leon said. “I’ll begin today.”