28 years after the death of Himmel the Hero, on a dirt road, located in the northern lands
Walking as long as Senken had, he had yet to find the people he was searching for. A full day had passed, and while he had happened across their camp, the idiots who had inadvertently killed his home village's priest had yet to be spotted.
By the measure of their tracks, they were in no rush. They must have felt they had outrun any recompense for their actions after they slept safe through the night. Senken had upped his pace, but he had more to carry, and so he couldn't do it for long before he decided to bide his time and simply follow.
He'd catch up. He wasn't in any rush to bring these fuckers justice.
He had left the great forest behind him for a while now. The plains that crawled across the northern plateau had high grass, the path he walked the only space where the thigh high plants didn't brush against him. Senken turned his gaze forward, seeing that the road was shifting slightly.
He came to a literal crossroads, the dirt path cutting in three different directions. Forward, as well as left and right. Checking the tracks, they were muddled. The two he was tracking stopped here, meandering in odd patterns. Did they stop to have a conversation? An argument? One footprint stood out, as none of the paths had the tracks leading off of it.
The footprint leads towards the grass. Did they think they were being followed? Had they seen a monster? Senken stepped into the grass, wading through it as he pondered the possibilities. He might wander upon a foxhole where they hide out in.
What he stumbled across was not that. The grass had changed. Standing out of the ground, the grass in front of him is a dark gray, instead of the yellowish-green of the grass around it. Following the phenomena, it was a circular space, roughly twenty meters across, with a visible clearing in the middle.
Senken stepped, and the grass crumbled, cracking and breaking away like shale from a cliff. He didn't struggle with it, his pants and cloak only catching the dust and leaving light gray streaks across them as he reached the clearing.
Two statues, one on the ground and the other kneeling. The one on the ground was sitting, using its arms to push its chest up. Its head was tilted back with his face upwards. The second was on one knee, a hand reaching out to grab at the shoulder of the first statue.
Both were mastercrafts, from the clothes that laid naturally, to the clarity of detail across them. Such fragile lines of stone for shoelaces. The indentations for the pores, so tiny and plentiful.
The look of fear across both of them, eyes wide and mouth agape.
Senken frowned, and sent Schrein out in all directions, cutting the stone grass down to the dirt. It crumbled, breaking into irregular pieces that the soft breeze blew into the surrounding brush. The ground itself was not dirt, but more stone. No visible use of tools, and even if there was, why make a statue of two people in fear, and go through the trouble of making all that grass as well?
This was obviously a use of magic. Senken used Schrein again, cutting a larger circle around the stone-blighted space. Looking where he had come from, he could see his own footprints, and the duo of others he had been tracking. Further looking showed only one pair leaving, padding across the dirt.
They were recessed in stone as well, as if the very act of walking changed the ground beneath it.
Senken decided, then, to follow those tracks. If it was a mage that had condemned those two to this fate, he might thank them for saving him the hassle.
Following these tracks were far easier than the previous ones. The pads of stone were like a path, leading Senken through the plateau. Cresting a hill, he saw in the distance a village, homes radiating out from the center, then from those the familiar neat rows of farmland.
Senken noticed someone in the fields, probably taking a break. Taking a step forward, he stopped and looked down. He had been using the stones as a tactile path, making sure his feet had touched them so as to not needlessly cut the grass to see where he was needing to go. That path was now gone, his foot pressed against dirt now.
Senken made his way to the distant village, noticing the odd make of their homes. Styled in the same way as his villages, these were made of a different substance. Stone, from the look of it. The mage must have helped reinforce the homes of their neighbors.
He felt, however, he was wrong to be so optimistic, only proven by what he saw as he fully entered the town, the setting sun to his back.
It wasn't just the buildings. The road, the stalls, their wares, and the people. All made into stone. Some of them didn't even seem to notice, turned away or with faces carved to look relaxed. Some of them were shifted back, as if recoiling from something, their faces in the beginnings and ends of horror.
There was only one statue that was broken, laid prone and cracked across the ground. She looked serious, eyes squinted and her hair being blown back.
Senken frowned at all of this. Whoever had done his chore for him hadn't done so because they knew their crimes, the brigands had merely been additions to the perpetrator's spree of victims. He was quick to look for more prints, and found them leading out of town.
His mental map of his travels made his blood run cold. The tracks before had moved in a straight line through the plateau. If that trend followed, then he had to move.
His village was next.
Senken was already a day out from his village. In order to make it back, hopefully in time to stop whatever mage was doing this, he would have to travel through the night. His feet beat the path the mage made through the brush, the most direct route back home.
He kept as steady pace as he could, lamenting that he hadn't tried to make a spell to help him move faster. He made up for it by cutting down any obstacle in his way, cutting a swath of destruction through the forest, dismantles felling trees that were grown before his village was founded.
Senken moved through the night, not willing to risk rest and have his home taken from him in his sleep. The moon was waning, its form that of a sickle that was held aloft in the sky, ready to fall upon him. Beyond its meager light, his path was only lit by fireflies.
It was only when the sun was rising, the sky washed in a pink softer than his hair, Senken could see through the forest to the beginning of a clearing. The physical line between nature and civilization. Senken felt a second wind wash through his bones, and he drove his feet harder into the ground. Dirt, rocks, and exposed roots ripped from the ground, flying behind him in big clumps.
Senken had to clear the distance from the tree line to the village as fast as possible.
Having combed his mind for any answer, anything he could pull from his previous life to aid him. He could only think of two things.
One would take far more time and effort, so the other would need to be used.
The air was a fluid, with pockets of resistance and temperature sufficed throughout its great miasma. It took a great sorcerer to manipulate this to move themselves in three dimensions.
It was like stepping on seafoam. The distinct feeling of something only barely not air giving way as he threw himself forward and up, leaping from foot to foot to his home.
Above the fields where he had toiled his entire life, Senken danced across the sky.
The seafoam, when he had last used this, was cursed energy. Now, it was mana. Unlike with cursed energy, where he could reinforce his limbs and force the resulting pressure difference to give purchase across the atmosphere, he had to give mana shape beyond himself in order to actively use it.
The spell to sculpt smoke had a handy use in this case. He cast the blanket of mana from his foot, and had it wrap as tightly around the open air as it could. By creating a small node of pressurized air, held in place by a thin binding of mana, Senken could use it as a stepping stone as long as his step was fast enough.
He rose through the air, tiny pops like snapping fingers in his wake as he ascended, those bubbles of compressed air popping loudly.
Each pop helped send Senken further along his planned trajectory, a few extra feet between each step.
He sailed, a minute later, over the roof of one of the village's homes, and caught sight of the central courtyard. The fountain had been rung in wreaths of flowers, tassels stretching from it to the church and wrapping around its steeple as if to affix it to the ground. A celebration of the life of their local priest. At the fountain, there were two young boys, sitting quietly, facing the church.
The fountain, the flowers, and one of the boys were cast in the doldrum colors of stone. The other, however, was not. They were dressed in rags, barely even clothes, their hair a soft powder blue, streaked with dirt and swept out of their face and held so by the amount of oil within it.
Growing from their forehead, two small horns protruded. Senken immediately thought back to his first kill in this life. That little boy was what had turned the brigands and the last village to stone.
A demon. Senken pointed his spear, and a magic circle bloomed in front of the point.
"[Zoltraak]"
A roaring beam of light burst forth, and the little demon leapt, the spell punching a hole into the cobbles of the courtyard, missing its target.
Senken's movement through the air meant he would eventually hit the ground. He braced his legs forward, crafting a duo of footholds in the air to slow him. The demon rounded the fountain, lifting a hand. A bright yellow light fired from his little, outstretched hand, and Senken kicked off his landing strategy.
The ray went right through where his chest had been, hitting the roof of the home he had cleared previously, and he saw it change instantly into that same stone material, the effect growing down the side of the building partly. Then, Senken hit the building he had leapt towards, busting through the wall and rolling through the rubble he had made, landing back on his feet.
Another flash of yellow light from outside was the only warning Senken had as the face of the building he had fallen into began changing to stone. It wasn't just the walls or the floor, but everything inside as well, the furniture and even the dust he had kicked up changing that same dull gray.
Senken's lower hands swiped out, and he unleashed a dismantle to cut the house in half, from top to bottom, directly in front of him. The stone stopped when it reached that gap, the house now split between stone and wood.
The spell could cascade its effects from its point of origin, but only so far. Air was an insulator for the technique, but it lost momentum as it moved through materials. Senken focused on the mana of the child. His head craned as he saw it was in the sky, about forty feet up. Waiting for him.
The demon could sense him as well. Knew he was still alive. Somehow, it was standing on nothing.
Was this flight?
"So demon magic was capable of something like this?"
Senken swiped his upper right hand up, sending a few dismantles through the roof towards the demon. He could see through the ruined roof how the demon changed parts of itself into stone, his dismantles carving scratches into the material instead of cutting it fully, like it would with regular stone.
The demon stared at him with flat eyes, lifting his hands and pressing the balls of his palms together, locking the pinkies, and pressing the pads of the ring finger against each other.
'It looks very much like a handsign one would find in jujutsu.' Senken thought.
At the tips of the ring fingers, a yellow ball no bigger than a fingernail in diameter blossomed, mana made manifest. Senken frowned at the partially stone demon, remembering how the other village had been turned to stone.
The demon was floating without any visible assistance, but Senken could see how its mana fluctuated, billowing like a flame. It was reminiscent of a paper lantern.
"I see."
That was the secret to flight. Mana had to act like heat, the body the lantern.
'This, along with that inexplicable petrification magic…'
To fly with no wings, to have such petrification magic, and to be so versed with it to use it as both defense and offense. Senken could recognize that he would have never thought of these things. Human magic wouldn't craft such ideas. Demon magic, however, did so, and did it handedly.
"Demon magic is quite advanced."
It was messy, Sanken's mana pouring off of him in tendrils that only mages could see, and he fired himself up towards the demon.
The sensation was jovial, as the demon pivoted in the air. No longer was the spell aimed at the village itself, but at him.
It was giving Senken a giddy sensation, his abdominal mouth grinning under his shirt, because it was inconceivable to think magic could be capable of doing something like this. To fly without prosthesis. To inexplicably transmute living and nonliving material into stone.
The demon, seeing Senken flying towards him, dropped. He fell faster than he would have if he had simply stopped flying, heels of his feet smashing into the cobblestones of the village.
[Merdülza]
The spell seemingly fizzled, and yet from the demon's feet, the world lost color. Dirt was changing to stone, radiating out from the demon like a ripple on the surface of a lake.
Senken flipped his body, catching two more pockets of air against the bottoms of his feet, which pointed up to the sky, and he launched himself downward. With the use of his repurposed sculpt smoke spell, he had more maneuverability than if he just used the flight spell.
He flew down fast, ricocheting off more mana bubbles to fly straight, coasting just above the ground as he neared the demon, its eyes widening in surprise at his speed.
Senken swiped a hand forward, the barest tip of his middle finger scraping against the demon's forehead.
[Cleave]
Thin, almost inconceivable lines crisscrossed across the demon boy's face, before Senken's hand pushed through the mass and his head popped into numerous cubed shapes, blood splattering away from Senken as the demon's body fell, and he bled off his momentum by lifting back up into the sky looking down at the demon's headless body.
He watched its body crumple, dropping to its knees and then flopping backwards, turning to smoke as he lifted himself further into the air, above the rooftops, looking for the people of his village. He saw people up the river, swimming against its shallow waves, the amount of bodies making it look to be the majority of the village. Lifting his hand, he saw that the tip of his middle finger was a light gray color.
The demon's magic had struck him.
…
"How annoying…"