Quote:It wasn't human. At some point it had been, and physically, it almost looked like one still, assuming you saw it in bad light. But in magesight, what it was was incredibly clear.---
A walking corpse, its only animation came to it from an outside source, its existence sustained to serve as a parasite, feeding on behalf of its master in darkened back alleys like this one. And I could see by the slow spread of black in its latest victim, that it was spreading. It was a horribly elegant means of spreading the apparent necromancer's power. One was killed and infected others, who spread it to others, all the power flowing back through them to the central source, like a twisted pyramid scheme of sorcery. But at the present situation, the news had suggested the killings and disappearances had been fairly isolated, so it must not have had much time to spread yet.
Not for the first time, I wondered if just once, whatever seemed to guide my path home could see fit to deposit me early enough into a problem to nip it in the bud rather than just late enough that the bad guy had some kind of momentum going. Dramatic or not, it was very annoying.
Still, best to destroy this one quickly. I began to roll through my list of potential songs I could resort to in order to keep the necromancer from noticing his thralls being destroyed too early when something jumped into the alleyway with a speed that made me blink. Now, note that, given my previous occupation and some of my teammates, it takes a lot to impress me in terms of speed. This thing was that fast. And about a half a second later, the thrall that I'd been preparing to target was rendered into two quickly disintegrating halves, ripped in half bodily by this thing's bare hands. Which was when I got my first real look at it. Physically, it looked more human than the thralls had, short blonde hair and fairly mundane dress not being something that'd stand out any more than I did in this particular incarnation of Japan, which wasn't exactly the melting pot of foreigners that Megatokyo had been.
Magically, however, was something else entirely. This wasn't a god or demon like I'd seen before, but it was something....something that definitely would make a couple of the ones I'd met take more than a second thought as to just casually tangling with it. As it hunched down, power practically bleeding off of it like the moonlight did off its white clothing, I began to slowly back up. What I'd intended to do was obviously about to be taken care of quite easily without me doing anything, and treading into something that powerful's territory without at least trying to look up polite ways to say "please don't murder me horribly for just being in your way" suggests that one is either brave, stupid, or some measure in between. While I was the former, in all modesty, I liked to think I wasn't the latter, and thus continued to slowly retreat....before freezing as the creature turned, a single crimson eye locking with mine.
But a tingling danger sense told me that what I needed to worry about was behind me. A second thrall lurched out of the shadows, having apparently managed to evade my cursory threat scan earlier by simply being...well, dead. I slid to the side, preparing to respond when this thrall also found itself in two pieces....but this time along a single clean line, the body similarly crumbling to dust. What stood in its wake was a perfectly normal young man, wearing a school uniform that I believe belonged to a nearby establishment. But as he turned, I broke into a cold sweat. While the earlier creature had been a towering pinnacle of power, there was something in this young man's gaze that chilled me to the bone as I saw it in magesight. I flicked out of it to avoid freezing up entirely, as the young man slid a pair of glasses onto his utterly unexceptional looking face.
"You should be more careful, sir. The back alleys are dangerous these days."
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."