Once upon a Midnight | BOOK I

Six

"...and the son of a bitch lit me on fire," Mikoto yelled as she swung her sword and diced the head off a skeleton.

"What?" I grunted and crashed a skeleton into a group of five other skeletons with a kick. One problem with dealing with an undead army was that they couldn't be killed. "There's no end to these things."
Everyone seemed to share my views on the task before us. Angela's familiars had turned into their true faces, two-headed saber-toothed cats who were wreathed in blue flames. They helped her enough in dealing with the skeletons, but it was obviously getting overwhelming. Even the black Mohammedan, Cassim, who was able to summon golems was also having problems. The only person who wasn't having much problem was Tiakken. All the skeletons that came anywhere near him turned to dust. I wasn't surprised anyway, he was a necromancer, it's only normal for him to have runes against necromantic attacks on his body.

"So, what did you do?" I asked Mikoto. She'd taken the liberty of explaining to me about her experience under Asmodeus's tutelage. She said Asmodeus was a sorcerer who died during the shadow war and for some reason, he resurrected. She said his mind is as twisted as the underworld itself.

Mikoto paused, a small smile spreading on her face. "I absorbed it into my skin. It's a very tough spell, but I managed to do it."

"He doesn't seem that bad then. Why do you hate him so much?" I frowned at the view in front of me and relaxed my stance. "That's not right."

All around us, the skeletons were crumbling into dust. Nicolas, who had taken the responsibility of handling the arrow-shooting skeletons in the mountains with strong waves of wind, floated back down.
Mikoto hissed. "Of course it's not right. It's Asmodeus. He's probably leveling up."

"Probably what?"

Nicolas leaned closer. "If I'm right, and Asmodeus is as crazy as the rumours claim, I'd say he's treating the trial like a game."

"We just passed level one," Mikoto said as she bonded her hair in a bun. "And we're going on to..."

"Level two," I gasped.

"Exactly. But why do you look so tensed?" Mikoto asked.

"Silence." Nicolas held his index finger to his lips.

"Excuse you. I was just–" Mikoto went quiet immediately she saw the same thing every single one of us saw.

A man. The man stood a great distance away from us. He was wearing a tunic and a trouser, and a sad smile was fixed on his face. No, not a man, a spectre. His translucent form vanished and the next moment, he was right in front of me. Ghosts were nasty businesses, but spectres were worse. A spectre only forms when the spirit of a dead sorcerer forces it's way through the veil that divides the realms.
Whenever a sorcerer casts a spell or an incantation, magickal residues are released. And where too much magickal residues are concentrated in a place, the magick can cause weather changes, an epidemic, make laypeople see metaphysical things and even weaken the veil between the worlds, and when that happens, some ghosts and spectres can force their ways across the realms. It's like a kind of 'global warming of sorcerers'. There have been some theories that if enough magickal residue is accumulated in the air, it can perforate the entire fabrics that holds time and space together, incidentally leading to the destruction of the world. The scary thing about the theory is that it's been proven by a few alchemists. So, if the world gets destroyed someday, blame magick.