He gave another shrug before tipping straight backwards and falling through the floor, apple and all.
Juliana did not move until the last ripples in the floor ceased. With a long sigh, she moved into the circle and started erasing. Everything had to go. Almost everything–the shackles on the outside could stay so long as Juliana took care not to smudge or otherwise bump any part of it.
Disturbing the shackles would be incredibly easy. Too easy. Juliana erased it as well. New shackles would not be a problem to redraw.
Talking with Ylva had turned into something of a wakeup call. If he had offered, Juliana would have jumped to accept Agiel’s contract. A knot had grown in Juliana’s stomach all through their discussion.
It didn’t, however, deter her in the slightest.
Eva could wipe out entire hordes of skeletons in seconds. Eva had Arachne–powerful in her own right–hanging off of every word she spoke. Eva walked around without eyes like it didn’t even matter.
Comparing herself to Eva so much couldn’t be healthy. Not comparing herself to Eva was near impossible. They were roommates after all. Every time she disappeared to the prison or took off her gloves was a reminder of all the abnormalities surrounding the girl.
That wasn’t to say that Juliana wanted more stares and glares. She had enough as it was–most of which occurred in Professor Kines’ extracurricular combat class. And most of those happened every time she dueled an older student.
She wasn’t stupid; Juliana knew she was considered something special to her peers.
In a few years time, that wouldn’t matter. The students would catch up to her level while Juliana floundered about. Not for the first time did Juliana wish she had accepted her mother’s advice to skip a few grades.
Halfheartedly wished.
She didn’t skip grades for almost exactly the reason she received glares in Professor Kines’ class. A younger student in a higher age bracket would just be ostracized at best, relentlessly bullied at worst.
At least now she had her roommates and Jordan’s crew as friends. Juliana was blatantly more powerful than any of them, yet she managed to avoid alienation.
With the floor scrubbed clean enough to eat off of, Juliana wiped the sweat from her brow and leaned back against the wall. She took a long drink from a cool water bottle and let herself rest.
Not for too long. She had work to do.
Flipping open the tome she had borrowed from Eva, Juliana found the page for Agiel and crossed out the word ‘benign.’ She took out her pen and wrote ‘will answer questions truthfully, but will destroy mind if contracted with’ in its place.
That finished, she flipped through the pages. There were a handful of others labeled as benign. Just because they were labeled benign didn’t mean Juliana would accept that label blindly. She liked to think she learned from her mistakes.
Gently rubbing the black ring on her finger with her thumb, Juliana browsed the few entries she had marked out earlier. One, Arioch, looked interesting, but Juliana didn’t have anyone she needed ‘vengeance visited upon’ at the moment. The fertility demon, Ishtar, definitely held no use for Juliana anytime in the near future.
She thumbed through until she found one that looked useful. Her hand froze before she could turn the next page. With a slight licking of her lips, Juliana stopped and read through the page.
“This might do,” she said as a smile worked its way onto her lips.
Juliana set down the open book and pulled out her chalk. She started the arduous task of copying down the circle. Carefully, of course. Summoning something wrong and having it escape would never be forgiven.
If she even survived such an event.
Chapter 016
The last few scribbles made their way from one paper to the next. Eva wasn’t using her good ink. This was just a test.
Besides, the less of the good ink Eva used, the more funds she had. While the privacy rune packs were profitable to be sure, it was still money from kids. Kids without a lot of money for the most part.
Drastically overestimating the budget for her supplies to her new employer was like taking candy from a baby. A really rich baby that had no identifiable source of income.
Funny how getting paid made her care much less about the money’s origins.
A mystery to solve later.
Eva took a drink of her… whatever it was. Some sort of bitter fruit drink. She’d told the man at the counter to recommend her a drink. Being unable to read had made menus very inconvenient.
It wasn’t a menu she was familiar with either. Eva had chosen this particular restaurant for her test due to the possibility of violence. The Liddellest Cafe wouldn’t do.
The place had also been chosen for the lack of patrons. Apart from Eva and the man behind the counter, there was a single other person.
A nun.
Any time Eva tried to leave Brakket’s campus on foot, she acquired a nun escort from out of nowhere. They never interacted with Eva. Instead, they chose to hang back and watch. None of them were ever very good about concealing their presence, though it helped that Eva could easily detect them by the little orb in the chest. Likely one of the eyes that Nel was covered with.
Eva had considered asking for or outright taking two of the eyes. The fact that all the nuns had them in their chests and Nel’s eyes squirmed around her body with minds of their own had turned Eva off to the idea.
The eyes were likely some sort of conduit for the nuns’ powers. That was an extra complication that Eva did not need at the moment. She had enough complications to go around.
Not to mention that Devon would be angry at further anomalies to account for in his experiment.
The nun that followed Eva into the shop today didn’t even bother trying to hide. She brazenly walked just a few steps behind Eva until they reached the restaurant. Without even an acknowledgement of her obvious spying, the nun sat at one of the other tables and ordered her own little brunch.
Exactly as planned. Eva needed her for an experiment of her own.
After ensuring the canceling runes on Eva’s hand and Arachne’s back were active, Eva readied the sheet of paper in front of her. The blood-tainted ink on the paper identified the runes as test thirteen. It was also the one she felt the best about.
Eva channeled her magic into the runes and waited.
She didn’t have to wait long. The magic of the wrath runes took hold almost immediately.
The man behind the counter tensed up. His heart rate increased as he glared at the nun.
The nun did not react in any way, Eva noted with no small amount of satisfaction. Not to the runic magic nor to the man’s glare. She was much too focused on her meal.
Keeping the nuns from feeling the effects was one of the main problems she’d had in her early testing. Eventually she settled on the wrath rune exclusively affecting humans while targeting nonhumans. She had to strictly define human and nonhuman with runes because while the nuns were human, they had that extra organ. Regular humans didn’t have weird eye things embedded in their chests. Strictly defining nonhuman was required as well.
Hurting kittens because of wayward runic experiments would be unforgivable.
The canceling runes kept Eva and Arachne from both sides of the rage effect.
Eva started to mark test thirteen as a success in her notes.
A sudden roar from the man behind the counter froze the pen in her hand.
He climbed on top of the counter and launched himself at the nun.
Eva activated the disintegration runes. Test thirteen crumbled to dust that Eva scattered with a brush of her hand.
That did nothing to stop the man. He reared back a hand and punched the confused nun in the face.
Several vessels in her nose broke as it bent inwards.
The man tried to follow-up with a second punch, but his fist encountered resistance.