Darkness and Hellfire

Chapter 11 A Disgraced Noble

Isaac sat on his rock focusing on his mana. He needed to be gentle otherwise he got the feeling he could do real damage to his insides. He moved his mana to his left hand and pulled out his death mana. He felt the flames dripping off his hand. He ever so slowly started working his death mana up his arm.

As soon as it reached his wrist he felt pain. The mana pathways were burning from his death mana. He pulled his mana back and took a deep breath. It was then he realized his jaw was clamped and he hadn’t been breathing. The pain was not pleasant. It wasn’t unbearable in small quantities either.

He relaxed all of his mana. Deciding that was enough suffering for now. He opened his eyes and looked around making sure there weren’t any monsters looking for a snack. Well, he looked over to Claus’ sleeping form, a meal and two side dishes.

Isaac brought his attention inward again and focused on feeling his recently wounded mana pathways. The death mana was still lingering and his pathways had started to heal through it. He could tell that this process is what would allow him to use his death mana over his entire body.

At the rate it was healing it would probably take the better part of the day to heal the minuscule damage he had done. At that rate he felt like he would die of old age before he was done destroying and rebuilding all of his mana pathways. He sighed.

‘Well better get a start on it now otherwise it’ll never get done.’ He thought. Over the course of the next hour he burned every single mana pathway bordering an area where death mana wouldn’t hurt him. He would periodically open his eyes and breathe.

During that time he would look around for any hidden threats and make sure his new party members were still asleep. Once he was done he hurt. His wrists and a ring around his core ached. He tried to run normal black mana through them and found that he could but not very well.

While they healed the mana would have to skip over them and jump to the next non damaged part. Everytime it jumped it lost some of its power. Only now did he realize that this might not have been a good idea while he was out in the wild with his only companions being unconscious.

He refocused on keeping watch, now more vigilant at the thought of his weakened state. Messing more with his magic would have to wait for a little while.

A while later, Isaac was pretty bad at keeping accurate time, Aria yawned and sat up. Stretching, she looked around. It was dark. There were only embers left of a torch. She squinted to see Isaac sitting on a rock looking back at her.

“The rest of us still need a little light to see.” She said and glanced back towards the torch.

“Oh yeah. Sorry.” He said and got up to grab a fresh torch. He winced when he put pressure on his hand to stand. Aria, despite the darkness, noticed. She could still see in total darkness, just not very well.

“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” She asked and got up. Claus sat up and looked around. Isaac stopped, fresh torch in hand, and looked at her.

“Just sore…” Was Isaac’s response. Then he thought for a second. “Unless you can heal mana pathways?” He asked.

“How in the nine hells did you injure your mana pathways?!” She exclaimed as she ran over to him, nearly tripping on a stone on her way over, and touched his shoulder. He felt a light pulse of mana go through him then back to her.

“How?” She was now more curious than worried. “Its self inflicted internal damage. It's healing fine but slowly. I could heal it but I don’t think it’d be a good idea.” She looked into his eyes. “You said dark mana right? I only saw shadows and assumed you were mistaken in the breadth of your power.”

She let go of him and paced with her hand on her chin. “I don’t think I’ll be able to understand what's going on without some more tests but it looks like an aspect of your power is dangerous to your current mana pathways. If I heal them they will go back to how they were before but if you let them heal naturally they will come back stronger like a muscle.”

Isaac had stopped to listen for a moment but then had continued on his quest for light. He lit the new torch from the embers of the old one and started rolling up his temporary bed roll. Claus was packing everything else already.

“Alright so what I’ve been doing is okay then? I’m not killing myself or anything?” Isaac asked and continued packing up.

“You should be alright. Stronger maybe even. It’s hard to tell.” She said and then finally realized what was going on around her. She too started packing. “My goddess has a message for you Isaac.” Aria said in a serious tone, all excitement gone.

“You’ll have to explain how that works sometime.” Isaac replied. “What’d she say?”

“She told me that we need to come up with a cover story for you. She said that your past should be hidden. She also said that you should tell everyone that you are a shadow sorcerer because that is the closest thing to the truth.” Aria went on.

“Alright, that was the plan. Well except the shadow sorcerer thing, but that’s because I didn’t know that was a thing.” Isaac stated. He packed the now spare backpack with practiced ease. He didn’t even realize it until he had buckled the last buckle.

Aria noticed but didn’t say anything. She seemed to realize that there were going to be a lot of things that Isaac could do that none of them realized until it happened. “Well, let’s get going. We have a long walk ahead of us and I have some more questions.”

The trio set off with Claus carrying the bundle that was their petrified scout. Isaac was in the lead. His steps silent with shadows wrapped around his boots. Aria was in the middle so she could pepper him with questions about his mana and everything he knew about how it worked. Claus was in the back carrying his fragile bundle.

Aria and Isaac talked quietly about his new backstory. He was now a disgraced noble from a far away country. If anybody asked where he ‘didn’t want to talk about it’ and that was to be his answer if anybody asked why. He was a shadow sorcerer for all intents and purposes. His noble status would help explain why he didn’t know some of the more common things.

They stopped on several occasions to rest Isaac’s feet and Claus’ arms. Whenever they did Aria would watch as Isaac played with his shadow mana. He realized that if he covered almost all of himself he would become completely silent and scentless. If he covered everything and created a complete circuit he would disappear entirely.

Isaac also learned that his shadow mana was way easier to control than his dark mana while it was still pure. His enlarged mana pool was balanced out by his internal injuries so unfortunately he wasn’t able to enjoy his larger mana pool.

Eventually, Isaac thought it felt like days, they came across something interesting and stopped.

Before them there was rubble strewn across fifty feet of tunnel. The tunnel looked like it had collapsed and was recently excavated by an angry basilisk. Isaac now knew the name of the monster they had fought.

“Be careful and sneak ahead to see what did this. The tunnel was open last time we were through here. All of this is recent.” Aria whispered to Isaac.

“Alright. Run to my rescue if you hear screaming.” Isaac joked and headed out.

A minute or two of travel later Isaac heard some deep guttural voices talking quietly. He cloaked entirely and peaked around the corner. What he saw was three massive, fat, humanoid looking creatures. Each one was around fifteen feet tall and looked like they weighed a ton. Most of their flesh was exposed except for a loincloth covering the important parts and nothing else.

They smelled like they hadn’t bathed in years and they were resting. They looked tired. They were talking. It was hard for Isaac to understand. He made out a few words however. Something about running and a monster.

Isaac returned to Aria and explained what he had seen. “What are they? Do we wait or what?” Isaac asked.

“If they are running from something that means it’s worse than a few ogres. We should go through them and then keep going and hope that whatever is hunting them is far enough behind that we can get out of here before it gets too hungry.” Aria explained. Claus nodded.

“Alright, I’ll take care of them. Anything I need to know?” Isaac asserted.