The unexpected chase brought a rush of adrenaline with it, and Konrad didn't waste it.
Conjuring a quick-and-dirty spell, he dampened their fall. He had learned his lesson about cutting corners. It wasn't as ambitious as the one that put him into a coma.
But the air cushions he created didn't let the Nival's roof crumple over their heads at least.
The windshields had still shattered. The metal dented, too, but—
Thanks to Dmitry's crazy driving, he already fastened his seatbelt when he jumped in the car. Now he was hanging upside down, but didn't zoom through the front window.
Too bad, the Captain wasn't this lucky.
His grip on the steering wheel stopped him from reaching an orbital trajectory. But once the Niva settled on its roof, he fell on his head and went limp like a rag doll.
With the doors stuck.
Well, not enough to withstand Konrad's magic-reinforced kick.
But when he scrambled into the open to take on the attacking drones—
They were already gone.
Or, it looked like they never existed in the first place.
Once the Niva's engine winced its last, not built to run upside down, everything fell silent.
Not a single soul or machine as far as the eyes could see.
Only the woods and the road, as if the earlier attack never happened.
Except he was standing by its result.
The metal was clicking and ticking as the engine cooled down, a little smoke rising from the hill, too. But he found no burn marks or damage on the lower chassis.
As if it had flipped on its own.
Well, his driver was a maniac. But last time he checked, cars weren't flying by themselves.
"Fuck, Dmitry."
Konrad rushed to yank the driver-side door free, but it was stuck as well. His magic also backfired when the handle gave up way before the rest would budge.
He fell on his ass with the cheap plastic in hand, while the Captain remained motionless.
"Damn it, don't you die on me," Konrad demanded, crawling back around. But once he finally reached him through the passenger side, he froze again. "Wait. What if his spine broke?"
Dmitry was unconscious, but he was still breathing.
For now.
But if he was careless moving him—
"Why didn't I learn that damned healing spell?!"
Could Lily have helped via telepathy?
The short answer was no.
It didn't matter how long Konrad had tried to reach her; the telepathic link remained dead.
"A ballistic missile wasn't enough to block it, but now?" he moaned. Not that it brought him closer to a solution. Whatever threw the Niva into the air was interfering with his magic, too.
Yes. The more he thought about it, the more it had to be magic.
But he'd investigate it later.
"Partial invisibility," he grunted into the forest, the idea hitting him hard.
He thought they drove into a landmine, but if it was a spell recreating its effects—
He could recreate something else as well.
Like an X-ray.
Adjusting his invisibility so it wouldn't scatter light but allow it to pass—
Turned out to be way harder than he had first imagined.
The basic principle was different, and he had to change every rune as well. And with the urgency of the situation and his panic settling in, he cut quite a few corners again.
By the time he figured out the right formula, his nose was bleeding.
But his reward was an X-ray vision any cartoon superhero would have envied.
"Okay, so this is the vertebrae and the skull—"
Except he was no doctor.
The spine looked whole, with no obvious breaks or cracks, but the way it compressed—
"Fuck it, more air cushions," he mumbled, careful to extract the Captain without moving him too much. In the end, he'd lay him out on the grass, making sure he was still breathing.
This alone felt like he had done a twelve-hour surgery on him.
"I shouldn't have let Kaede shake me off and force her to teach me that freaking healing magic."
Should he have tried to wake Dmitry or leave him be?
He couldn't leave him behind. That much at least was obvious.
But they have already driven down the hill, with the village at a spitting distance. He didn't know where to find the fixer guy, but there weren't that many houses around.
No worries about knocking on the wrong door, either.
The place was completely deserted.
Apart from the Niva resting on its roof, it felt like no human had touched anything here in the last decade or so. The buildings had lost most of their paint, too.
Some even had a tree growing through the roof or a window, but they were still standing.
Konrad tried his gentlest to haul Dmitry over his shoulder.
He wasn't taking chances by leaving him behind while he explored.
The X-ray experiments and air cushions had only burned through about two hundred of his mana. His corner-cutting took the most out of him—and he should have stopped doing that.
But if he didn't force his stupidity, he could still keep going.
Also, talking about X-rays—
Why bother knocking on every door if he could see right through them?
Finally, his brain was back in gear.
One eye scanning the village, the other on the sky, expecting more drones to come—
But nothing. Neither up nor around.
The village was empty, even after he checked every house.
He had no issues seeing through them, but found no humans inside.
To double-check, he put the Captain down by the road and went inside the closest building.
Nothing of value, and nothing alive.
Only critters and bugs. But he could still see Dmitry lying on the ground where he had left him.
The concept was sound. These thin wooden walls were no match for his new spell.
But this fixer, Sidorovich? He wasn't anywhere in the village.
Well, why was he so surprised?
It wasn't like he knew the guy. He wasn't naive enough to think everyone was trustworthy, but—
He closed his eyes, rubbing his forehead in frustration.
Only to realize his X-ray vision would see through his eyelids, too.
And the ground.
To quite far, actually, seeing roots and old pipes, and—
One huge concrete block past the last house of the village, fifteen feet deep underground.
Now, that was something he couldn't see through. The rebars and heavy metal doors in the structure blocked his sight. But he could trace it back to ground level, and—
The entrance was always there, hidden in plain sight.
Without knowing where to look, he would have never found it.
"Okay, this spell is amazing," Konrad muttered to Dmitry when he rushed back to pick him up.
Still out cold, but still breathing.
"Let's give your friend a visit," he grunted, finding the stairs right where he'd expect them.
A bomb shelter. Or a full nuclear bunker?
It had heavy doors with airtight seals, but someone had left them all open a crack.
They would still take quite some convincing to open wider, creaking from the rust and time.
But after two turns and a second door, he was finally there.
Pushing with his legs, he entered with his living-breathing haul—
Only so a fat, balding man could yell at him.
"What the hell, Stalker? I'm not dealing with dead bodies anymore."