Magus Reborn [Stubbing in Seven Weeks]

400. Dravros

Kai had wondered, for a brief while, whether he was rushing things with Amyra when he told her he would help her reach the third circle, but that hesitation had faded for one simple reason.Amyra was not a normal Mage.

Had it been someone like Rhea, he would have forced patience on her. He would have made her remain in the first two circles for at least two or three years, long enough for her foundations to settle so firmly that the higher stages would not crack them later. But Amyra was different. She was a high human, and from everything Kai had seen so far, her body and soul had been made for magic in a way most people could hardly even understand.

Because of that, pushing her to the third circle would not damage her. It would not ruin her future.

If anything, it would only improve her chances of survival if she ever found herself alone. And beyond that, Kai also wanted to know whether advancing her circles would let her take in and purify dead mana more effectively.

Still, he wasn’t going to begin with that immediately.

For now, he had only told her to keep reading and deepen her understanding of spell structures, promising they would speak more of it later. After that, he turned his attention back to the main reason he had come to the desert at all.

The blood drinkers.

More specifically, finding out what exactly they were doing here.

As soon as he stepped out of the library, Neris, who had been waiting just outside, led him to the room where the captured blood drinkers had been locked up.

When Kai entered, half of them were already awake and straining uselessly against the syphon cuffs on their wrists. The restraints allowed them no access to their mana, and the constant draining from the cuffs had clearly weakened them further. That, combined with the fact that the cuffs themselves were made from magical alloy rather than simple metal, meant the blood drinkers had no easy way of breaking free even if they had all the strength in the world.

The cuffs were made from a mixed alloy, one reinforced with metals strong enough that even Killian would have struggled to break them through sheer force, much less blood drinkers sitting near the bottom of their own hierarchy.

The moment Kai entered with Neris, every drinker that was awake turned to glare at them. A few had even managed to chew through their gags, and one of them bared its teeth before saying, “You’re not going to get anything from us, human. Kill us if you want. Your end is coming soon anyway.”

Kai frowned at the threat.

He didn’t really understand why someone already locked down and half-drained would still bother speaking like that, but then again, he wasn’t dealing with ordinary prisoners. Blood drinkers had never been known for being easy to break.

Still, he had already been thinking of ways to get answers from them.

So instead of responding, he began to build a spell structure.

The drinker who had spoken only glared harder, clearly expecting pain to come his way, but Kai ignored him and turned his hand toward one of the blood drinkers still unconscious on the floor. Then he released the spell.

A wave of molten flame crashed over the sleeping drinker.

The fire burned through it so quickly and so viciously that the creature jolted awake only to start screaming immediately, every part of its body blackening and curling under the heat. Even Neris took an instinctive step back, horror flashing over his face. He had clearly not expected Kai to do something like that.

Truthfully, no one in the room had.

Not even Kai himself. He had only decided on the method a few breaths earlier.

But as he looked around the room now, he could already tell it had worked.

The blood drinkers who were already awake had gone pale.

The one who had spoken first looked the worst of them all. The screams of the one burning on the floor kept tearing through the room, and even a few of the others who had still been unconscious jolted awake to that sound, only to find their companion writhing as it slowly died. For a brief moment, a part of Kai felt something close to discomfort. Not because he had killed it—he had no regrets about that—but because of how it had died. The cruelty of it sat heavily in the room.

Still, he did not step back from it. Sometimes cruelty was the fastest way to make people speak.

And looking at the blood drinkers now, he could tell the lesson had landed. Several of them were no longer hiding their fear. So Kai took a step forward and crouched in front of the one who had threatened him earlier.

The creature’s hands were shaking now, though the moment Kai lowered himself, it still forced its fear into another glare. It gathered spit in its mouth and tried to throw it at him, but Kai simply tilted his head and let it pass by.

“Don’t do that,” he said calmly. “It won’t go well for you.”

The blood drinker bared its teeth. “We’ll see. You’re going to kill all of us anyway. Why not just get it over with?”

Kai glanced at the others in the room, all of them listening now whether they wanted to or not, then nodded.

“Yes, you’re all going to die. I won’t lie to you about that.” That clearly wasn’t the answer the drinker had expected. Its eyes widened slightly, and Kai continued before it could say anything else. “But the real question is how.”

He pointed toward the body on the floor, which by now was little more than a smoking ruin. “Do you want it done in less than a second, without pain?” he asked. “Or do you want to suffer even as you die?”

That question shut the creature up completely.

Around them, several of the other blood drinkers let out low, uneasy sounds, and Kai knew then that he had made the right choice. Cruel or not, fear had finally entered the room.

Blood drinkers were never going to speak just because death was hanging over them. They already knew Kai meant to kill them in the end. They had seen him wipe out the others outside, even the lord-ranked one, and they knew well enough that they themselves were nothing special. So instead of using death itself as the threat, Kai had chosen something else.

The manner of it. That was what he held over them now.

He let his gaze move across the bound drinkers and said, almost thoughtfully, “If you haven’t understood yet, that one wasn’t tortured nearly as much as I could have tortured him.”

The room stayed still. Kai went on in the same calm voice. “If I truly wanted to make you suffer, I wouldn’t even burn you. I would cut your limbs off one by one. I would keep you alive with potions the entire time. Then I would scorch every inch of your body little by little while you tried to scream.” His eyes settled on the one in front of him. “Though you wouldn’t be screaming much. I would cut your tongue out first.”

The blood drinker’s eyes trembled.

It knew he could do it.

That was the important part. Empty threats only worked on fools, but nothing about Kai sounded empty now. And in his experience, the loudest ones were often the first to break once fear truly reached them. Looking into the creature’s face, he could already see that happening.

Even someone like this drinker did not want to die that way. There was too much suffering in it. Too much helplessness.

Kai leaned a little closer. “You have ten seconds. Agree to answer my questions, or I start with you. Then I move on to the others, one by one. Maybe by the end one of them will have enough sense to speak.”

As he said that, he began building another spell structure right in front of the drinker.

Its lips twitched. They opened and closed.

For a second it looked like it couldn’t even decide whether to speak or choke on its own fear. Then Kai fed more mana into the structure, making it burn brighter, and the moment the light sharpened, the blood drinker tried to drag itself backward.

“Please,” it muttered. “Don’t do that to me.”

The words were barely more than a whisper. But they were enough. Kai smiled slightly, knowing he had cracked the drinker.

***

As it turned out, the blood drinkers did not know much.

Kai had expected that, at least in part. These were only the lower-ranked pieces of their hierarchy, the sort sent to obey rather than understand, but even then, he had hoped to get a little more from them than he actually did.

But at least they were obedient. Only once did he need to remind them properly of the position they were in.

One of the drinkers had started to protest while Kai was pressing for details about why they were in the Ashari Desert in the first place, and instead of wasting words on it, Kai simply cut the creature apart where it sat. The effect was immediate.

The one doing the talking after that began speaking far more quickly, tripping over its own words in its hurry to stay alive for a few seconds longer. For a moment, Kai even wondered whether killing another one or two might loosen the rest even more, but in the end he let the thought go. There was no need to turn the room into a slaughterhouse if they were already answering.

What he learned was simple enough on the surface.

The blood drinkers were in the desert because they wanted to know what Kai had been doing there so often.

That much he already knew.

What mattered more were the details hidden beneath it. The drinker never said it outright, but its answers made one thing fairly clear.

Maleficia likely suspected that Kai had access to a high human. That was the only explanation that fit with the questions they were tasked to find the answer to. Apparently, they wanted to know how Kai had managed to purge all of Vanderfall.

From their perspective, what he had done there should have been impossible.

Kai could understand why they were thinking that way. And if he had to guess, then the plague they had unleashed in Lancephil was not only meant to spread dead mana and pressure his kingdom. It was also a test. A way to see whether he could repeat what had happened in Vanderfall. Only this time, they would be watching much more carefully.

But before that, they had chosen to search the desert.

Kai could tell from the way the drinkers answered that Maleficia already suspected he had some hidden place in the Ashari Desert, somewhere he was storing things or building something beyond their sight, and that they wanted to take control of it. But the longer he questioned the blood drinkers, the more he felt that this was only one layer of the truth.

There was something more underneath it.

The problem was that he couldn’t get that deeper part out of the prisoners, and not because they were resisting him anymore. At this point, most of them were talking as much as they could. The issue was that they genuinely did not seem to know.

At best, they only had the sense that there was more to the operation than what had been told to them, because there were simply too many blood drinkers spread across the Ashari Desert for the whole effort to be only about finding traces of Kai’s movements.

So Kai kept pressing.

He asked question after question, circling the same points from different angles until the answers started lining up enough for a clearer shape to emerge. By the end of it, he had a rough understanding of what the blood drinkers were actually trying to accomplish there.

Finding out about the tower, learning more about Amyra, and torturing the tribals for answers had all been secondary.

The real purpose was to draw him out.

That was why there were so many blood drinkers in the desert. If this had only been a matter of pressure or intimidation, then a single lord-ranked blood drinker would have been more than enough to lead it. But according to the prisoners, the operation was being directed by Dravros, an elder blood drinker who might be close to becoming a progenitor, though none of them knew for certain whether he had crossed that threshold yet.

That answer wasn’t surprising, yet it made him silent for a moment.

He had expected to face someone strong eventually, and he had already prepared himself for that much. Still, the uncertainty between an elder and a progenitor mattered.

It meant he would have to be as careful as possible when the time came, because against an enemy like that, even one mistake could become fatal.

And one mistake was often enough to lose a battle between beings of a higher standing, which both he and Dravros were.

Once Kai had learned everything these drinkers could tell him and pieced together his conclusions, he did the one thing he had promised them.

He gave them a quick, easy death—so quick that they never even understood it had happened.

One moment, one of them was still in the middle of speaking. The next, every head in the room had hit the floor, and blood was spreading across the stone.

Kai gave the corpses one last look, then stepped out of the room with Neris behind him. The Enforcer looked a little stunned by everything that had just happened.

He had seen Kai’s power before, but not this side of him. Not the cruelty. Still, after a few breaths, Neris managed to gather himself and asked, “What will you do now, Your Majesty? Do you need Kael and me for anything?”

Kai shook his head. “No. Stay here. Look after Amyra. I’ll leave her some things to practice, and then I’ll go hunt down the blood drinkers.”

Neris frowned slightly. “You’re going alone?”

“Yes. There’s no reason to involve anyone else. That would only lead to unnecessary deaths.” His eyes hardened a little as he said, “After all, I’m going to kill every one of them.”

Even after hearing that, Neris still looked like he wasn’t fully convinced, but he didn’t argue, and Kai was more than fine with that. At this point, he had enough information to wipe out every blood drinker in the desert. And once that was done, he would go after Dravros himself.

The man was almost certainly one of Maleficia’s core members. Just like Regina had been, and Kai would make sure he die even worse than her.

***

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