They sent an inferior Bard out to help deal with Wayne. He knew, because his protection circle around the whole encampment had no trouble deadening his emotions and rendering him immune to Bardic nonsense. This guy couldn’t have been much over level 50, if that.

“What’s your name?” Wayne asked the very handsome lad who was currently rubbing his temples beneath, get this, a white fedora. He was flanked by half a dozen Rangers and another half a dozen Rogues, and that was the real concern. Still, Wayne’s people sat in their own summoning circles, which had been honed over the course of the last day. Sure they were hungry, but hunger could take a backseat to actual personal safety.

The dozen Agency people arrayed around the terrible Bard were a very real danger. Unlike Guardians, they weren’t going to be penalized for going on the attack. The Rogues weren’t getting any experience presently, but they’d vanish and move to shoot darts from concealment, or somehow try to get a backstab in. The Rangers were just terrifying, since they were about to get experience for unleashing volleys of arrows or advance with twin blades. Hand axes, short swords or long daggers, it hardly mattered. Wayne wished to get stabbed or sliced by none of those things.

“Ed… Eddie,” the Bard said, and struck up a superhero pose: chest thrust out, shoulders back, hands on hips.

“Eddie, are you okay?” Wayne asked.

The Wizards in their ritual circles snorted or snickered.

“You’re in violation of Agency edicts,” Eddy said, wincing. “I’m under orders to inform you that you need to surrender to our people. You’ll then present yourself to be taken in and interrogated. If you have aided a certain fugitive—“

“You mean Fletcher?” Celine asked excitedly. Wayne couldn’t help but roll his eyes: the girl seemed halfway to orgasm already just speaking the Healer’s name.

“If you have aided this fugitive, expect the full weight of the Agency to drop on you.”

“Do you remember, Eddie, how we were told these people, this world, and all the towns and cities, lack violence?”

“You will remand yourself to our custody!” One of the Rangers called.

“What a shame you don’t have a capable Healer among your people to help handle that headache,” Wayne said. “If only there was someone who was out in the field, doing the job of healing—”

“This is your last warning!” Eddie shouted, then winced again and swayed on his feet. He grabbed his outlandish fedora before it could fall. A Guardian stepped up behind him and took hold of one shoulder. “Don’t… feel… so good.”

“They’ve done a spell on our Bard!” the Guardian shouted.

Several magic shields sprang to life all at once, and Eddie was pulled back behind the wall of huge Guardians.

“I swear,” Wayne muttered, “Not a brain cell amongst the whole lot of them.”

Half a dozen bows were raised, and half a dozen Rogues simply vanished. They weren’t gone, of course; Wayne’s Divination and Abjuration specialists had been layering so many spells lately that they simply could not be surprised.

Two of the Rogues reappeared at nearby trees, tangled in what looked like silvery webbing, already screaming. Another one fell into a pit and promptly broke an ankle.

“Fire!” The lead Ranger called.

The first volley was only six arrows, but they doubled into twelve, doubled again, and doubled yet again into forty eight in the space of a second. It went from an attack to a barrage.

The whole lot of them splashed into an invisible barrier that brought their momentum to a halt. It was like they’d struck a wall, but the wall was made of liquid caramel.

“Fire at will!” the Ranger called again.

A Sorcerer stepped out from behind the Guardian wall, and that was the moment Wayne knew they were cooked.

At that moment, the final three Rogues appeared above the Wizards, but bounced off a dome of force. One of them landed badly, cracking an elbow hard and crying out. The other two passed their Agility checks and landed nimbly on their feet, already throwing stilettos.

The Sorcerer was dressed like a monk, all in white and light gray, and had shaven her head except for a long Mohawk of white dreadlocks. She had very dark black skin, and was holding… an orb made of wind.

Another volley of arrows came, but this time they glowed with purple energy. The blunt heads crashed into the invisible dome of magic, making it visible. Several cracks appeared, making the barrier hiss and hum.

“We surrender!” Wayne called out.

“It’s too late for that!” The Guardians called back.

“We surrender!” Celine and the other five of them started calling.

There was no running away. None of them were any physical match for a Rogue, Ranger, or Guardian.

There was no teleporting away, not after all the spells they’d prepped and the mana they’d used up. They weren’t a magical match for a Sorcerer.

Likewise, there was no talking their way out of this. They certainly weren’t a social match for the Bard.

The only thing they’d had was their preparedness, and all the spells they’d cast had only taken the Agency’s people about a minute to batter through.

Two dozen of the brute force classes against half a dozen Wizards? No, no way.

“There will be no surrender,” the Sorcerer said, and raised her hands high.

All around, the trees and plants started shaking as the wind picked up.

“We surrender!” They kept shouting, even as Wayne did the last spell he could think of. It wasn’t going to work well enough.

“Run,” he told them. They weren’t going to get away.

Wayne was very good when it came to Wizardry. He’d hit level 50 some two weeks ago and went Journeyman, which was not a level many attained as fast as he had. He boosted this spell with all the buffs he had from his new class, draining basically all of his mana out in one fell swoop. He used the circle at his feet and the components set into that circle to amplify the spell as much as he could. Even as Celine and the other five took off, he strained to blast all his power into this one simple spell.

Darkness fell.

An area of utter blackness settled over the area, but a very specific area. The cut line was directly in front of Wayne and the other Wizards. There was no fade in or out, no line of twilight; on one side of the line, the day continued to be sunny and gorgeous, and on the other, it went into the dark reaches of midnight out in the middle of the thickest Appalachian forest on a moonless night.

A whole lot of confusion greeted this sudden drop in available light, but Wayne couldn’t take advantage of the situation. He had to keep the spell up and running. So while the other five bolted out of the clearing and towards cover, and the wind continued to whip up, he could do little more than continue to push mana into the spell, to keep up the incredible area and potency of the darkness as high as possible.

The cries of alarm were cut off by authoritative voices, and a number of flaming arrows came hurtling out of the darkness. Only one skittered off the still-functional shield, while the others went wide. None of them had any effect on the magical darkness.

After some time, the remaining Rogues reappeared at the fringes of his vision, and called back that the Wizard was alone. The others must have fled into the forest.

“We surrender!” he shouted.

Silence had fallen over the forces, as they pulled back or held their ground in the magical shroud of darkness. Wayne gradually began to hear the swish swish of a person walking through grass. Not two minutes later, the Sorcerer reappeared out of the darkness and across the line.

“You have made a terrible mistake,” she said.

“That statement is so fundamentally wrong it is hard to begin to even correct your ignorance,” he replied.

Her lip twitched, but she made no reply.

“The Agency is lying to you.”

“The Agency funded my mother’s diagnosis and treatment,” she replied.

“Any Healer in this world could cure her permanently. That is what this whole situation is about.”

He would love to believe that logic would win out, that she would see the error of her thinking and that she had an incomplete picture of the information. Information was the answer, and she needed to know she lacked some of that information.

“I can’t chance it,” she said, and slashed apart the dome of energy surrounding the larger ritual circle with blades made of concentrated wind. She then created such a gust that he was thrown off his butt and back several feet. The darkness spell vanished with his broken concentration. When he lifted his head, it was to face dozens and dozens of Agency personnel. All the Rangers, all the Rogues, all the Guardians and Wizards they had on desk duty for months upon months were now being given field duty, and that field duty was going to run right over Wayne to the city of Saxwhacket.

The dark-skinned, mohawk-wearing woman with the dreadlocks crouched down beside him. “I know you Wizards want a tool for every job. It makes sense to want to be able to do everything. But you can’t possibly understand how it feels to have the air under my complete control.”

“When your only tool is a hammer,” he muttered.

“What’s that?”

“Everything starts to look like a nail,” he said.

The girl chuckled. “Are you a nail, Wizard?”

This is Christopher’s time beginning to wind down.

This update is available on novel{f}ire.net