Chapter 182 – Clown Fight

Scrambling to their feet, Joe and Alan lunged for the shattered window. Three stories below, the masked intruder—the clown with the diamond painted on the cheeks—had already landed in a crouch on the cobblestone courtyard, the impact absorbed with an acrobat’s unnatural grace. Without a backward glance, the figure was already sprinting toward the labyrinthine alleyways that bordered the university grounds.

Joe: “Stop! Police!” The shout was more reflex than expectation. He didn’t hesitate. With a detective’s reckless resolve, he vaulted through the jagged remains of the window frame. Alan, his mind still reeling from the explosion and the dead professor, acted on sheer instinct and loyalty, leaping after him.

As he fell, Joe concentrated. Beneath his coat and shirt, thin, flexible plates of specialized alloy—a personal precaution for a man who made powerful enemies—hugged his torso and limbs. He reached out with his Vectromancy to push against the metal on his own body. It was a crude, intensely difficult application of his power, like trying to lift himself by his own bootstraps. The metal groaned against his skin, but the magnetic repulsion against the earth’s own field created a shuddering drag. He hit the ground hard, but in a controlled roll, the impact jarring but not breaking.

Beside him, Alan summoned a gust of wind from beneath his feet, a technique still rough. It wasn’t elegant, but it was effective, slowing his descent enough to land beside Joe with a stumble.

Alan was moving before he’d fully found his balance. Channelling wind into his legs, he shot forward, a blur of motion closing the distance on the fleeing clown. Joe, lacking magical enhancement for speed, pushed into a hard sprint behind him.

The clown glanced over its shoulder, the painted diamond seeming to wink in the evening light. Seeing Alan’s rapid approach, the figure prepared another attack. From within the billowing sleeve, eight more daggers appeared. With a practiced, almost juggler’s motion, the clown tossed them into the air, did a full, spinning pivot, and caught and threw them all in a single, fluid continuation of the spin. The daggers became a fan of deadly silver, arcing toward Alan.

Alan skidded to a halt. He knew better than to trust his wards against this. In a flash of silver light from his storage ring, a well-balanced longsword appeared in his hand—a tool provided by Mitra. He didn’t try to charge through. Instead, he planted his feet, channeled wind aether down the blade, and executed a wide, horizontal slash. A crescent of compressed air roared forth. It was a blunt, powerful shove. The gust caught the daggers mid-flight, knocking them off course. They spiraled away, embedding themselves in the ground and nearby walls.

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!

A chain of fiery eruptions tore craters in the cobblestones and masonry, showering the area with stone fragments and acrid smoke. Without waiting for the debris to settle, Alan charged through the cloud, sword held low.

He closed the final gap in seconds. With a grunt of effort, he brought his blade down in a powerful overhead chop. The clown whirled, crossing two daggers in an ‘X’ to block. The clash rang out, steel shrieking against steel. The clown’s arms buckled under the impact; their boots scraped backward on the stones. Sparks flew from the grinding metals.

A fierce, grim satisfaction surged through Alan. The endless, painful hours of Mitra’s enhancement training were paying off. His strength was winning. He poured more aether into his muscles, feeling the power build for one final, decisive push to break the guard.

Then, a foreign sensation washed over him—a cold, prickling aetheric signature he didn’t recognize, utterly unlike the clown’s explosive magic. He had no time to analyze it, no chance to adjust his defensive wards. An invisible force latched onto the metal plates sewn into the lining of his uniform and yanked.

He was ripped backwards off his feet, flying through the air away from the clown. As he sailed backward, he saw a cluster of new daggers—these ones dripping with a viscous, greenish fluid—rain down precisely on the spot he had just occupied. Where they struck the ground, the cobblestones didn’t explode; they hissed and dissolved into bubbling, acrid sludge.

Alan landed in a heap a dozen feet away, looking up to see Joe with his hand outstretched, his face a mask of intense concentration. He’d used his Vectromancy on Alan’s own hidden armor to save him.

Before Alan could voice his thanks, a shadow fell over them. A second figure, clad in an identical brown robe, dropped from the roof of a nearby building, landing lightly between them and the first intruder. With a synchronized, theatrical flourish, both figures shrugged off their concealing robes, letting them fall to the ground.

They stood revealed in full clown regalia—puffy sleeves with frilled cuffs, oversized polka-dotted buttons running down their chests, and mismatched, striped leggings. Their faces were hidden behind porcelain masks. They were near-perfect duplicates, save for one detail: the mask of the newcomer was marked not with black diamonds, but with red ones.

The courtyard erupted into a chaotic ballet of violence. The two clowns, now unencumbered by robes, moved with a horrifying synchronicity. Another volley of daggers sliced through the air—some glowing with explosive runes, others dripping with virulent acid.

Alan responded with a broad, powerful sweep of wind, creating a gale that knocked a cluster of the knives off course, sending them clattering and detonating harmlessly against the far wall. Joe didn’t bother with dodging. In one fluid motion, he drew his service pistol. But he didn’t aim at the clowns. His eyes, sharp and calculating, tracked the spinning daggers. He fired in a rapid controlled trio of shots. As each bullet left the barrel, he gave it a minute, magnetic nudge with his Vectromancy. The projectiles curved impossibly, each one striking the tip of a different dagger with a sharp, resonant TING, sending the blades spinning wildly off-target to detonate in empty air.

Seeing an opening, Joe shifted his aim to the clown with the black diamond mask and fired. The bullet was a blur. The clown didn’t dodge. Instead, a dagger flicked up from its sleeve in a silver arc. There was a barely perceptible snick, and the bullet split cleanly in half, the two pieces whizzing past the clown’s head. Joe fired again, twice more. Each shot was met with the same impossibly precise parry, the clown’s blade intercepting the high-velocity rounds with a swordsman’s preternatural timing and accuracy.

Joe: “Shit,” Striker muttered, the word heavy with cold realization.

Tracking a bullet was one thing. Slicing it mid-flight with a dagger was a feat of extreme reflex and skill, the hallmark of a combatant who had trained their body and mind to operate on a level beyond human norms.

Joe: “Keep your wits about you, Alan! These aren’t thugs—they’re trained killers, probably assassins!”

Alan gave a tight nod, his grip tightening on his sword.

The two clowns assumed mirrored fighting stances, a pair of daggers appearing in each of their hands. They were about to launch a coordinated assault when a thunderous CRASH echoed from the side of the courtyard. A section of the ancient stone wall exploded outward in a cloud of dust and debris. A third clown—this one with a ‘2’ and a heart painted on its cheek—came tumbling through the new hole, airborne and out of control. It hit the cobblestones with a sickening thud, ragdolled, and slid to a groaning stop right between Joe and Alan and the other two clowns.

The newcomer, ‘2’ Heart, shakily pushed itself up onto its hands and knees, its masked head turning to stare back at the hole it had just made.

Everyone followed its gaze.

From the settling dust, an immense figure emerged. Grom Rockjaw filled the jagged opening, his ashen skin gleaming, a pair of heavy, rune-etched brass knuckles on his massive fists. He cracked his neck, the sound like grinding stones.

Grom: “Impressive,” he rumbled, his voice a bass note of genuine, if grim, appreciation. “You’re still in one piece after a hit like that?”

Alan: “Grom!” he shouted, relief cutting through the adrenaline. “We need help! These… clowns… they’ve killed a professor!”

Grom’s eyes swept the scene in an instant—the two poised assassins, their dazed companion, the two beleaguered officers. His assessment was quick, and understood the situation.

Grom: “Kay. Back me up until the other enforcers get here.”

Without further preamble, he stomped one colossal foot on the ground. The earth directly in front of him shifted; a whole slab of cobblestones and packed earth, the size of a car, popped up into the air as if lifted by a subterranean giant. Grom drew back his fist and punched it.

CLUNK!

The slab broke apart from the force. A shotgun blast of rocky shrapnel, each piece the size of a man’s head, hurtled toward the three clowns.

What followed was a display of acrobatic insanity. Two performed seamless backflips over the incoming barrage. The third, ‘2’ Heart, now fully recovered, used a chunk of flying earth as a stepping stone, propelling itself higher into a pirouette before landing lightly.

‘2’ Heart produced a long, segmented whip from its belt. With a snap, it lashed out at one of the larger remaining chunks of earth Grom had launched. The whip coiled around it, and with a twist of its body, the clown hurled the makeshift boulder directly at Alan.

Alan braced, bringing his sword down in an overhead strike, cleaving the rock in two. But the split second his guard was committed, the clown with the black diamonds, who had been using the debris as cover, lunged from behind the shattered halves, daggers aimed for Alan’s exposed side.

It never connected. The clown had to abruptly twist, bringing its dagger up to parry a bullet Joe had sent curving around the rubble. The shot was deflected with another ting.

The whip-wielding clown saw Joe’s distraction. Its whip snapped out again, wrapping around the barrel of Joe’s pistol and yanking it from his grasp. The follow-up strike aimed for his head. Joe threw himself into a desperate roll, the tip of the whip cracking where his skull had been. As he came up, he flung his hand out, using his Vectromancy to summon the gun back to his grip from across the courtyard.

The clown engaging Alan seized the micro-second Joe was disarmed. A dagger left its hand, aimed for Joe’s chest.

Joe saw it too late to dodge fully. The blade struck home—but embedded itself in the metal chest plate under his coat with a solid thunk. Pain lanced through him, but it wasn’t a killing blow. Then the runes on the dagger’s hilt began to pulse with a sickly green light.

Joe: “Crap!”

Joe didn’t try to pull the dagger out. Instead, he focused his power on the metal plate itself. With a grunt of effort and a ripping of fabric, he magnetically tore the entire plate, dagger and all, away from his body and hurled it into a nearby empty alcove. It had just left his hand when it BOOMED, the explosion vaporizing the stone niche.

Meanwhile, Grom was engaged in a deadly dance. He traded blows with the clown with the red diamond mask. The clown was a whirlwind, its acid-tipped daggers a blur of thrusts and slashes. Grom moved with surprising speed for his size, weaving his torso to avoid the worst of the strikes, his own earth-empowered punches missing by inches as the clown contorted and flipped away. Drops of sizzling acid splattered against Grom’s ashen skin, eating tiny, smoking pits into it. Grom ignored the burns, his expression one of focused fury. He feinted a massive haymaker, then drove a piston-straight jab forward.

‘Red Diamond’ crossed its daggers in a block. The impact was colossal—SPANG!—a shower of sparks erupting from the contact. But the clown didn’t try to stop the force; it flowed with it, allowing the punch to push it back in a controlled, acrobatic flip, dispersing the energy. It landed in a crouch, then immediately sprang back into the fray, daggers leading.

Alan’s world narrowed to the clash of steel. He traded furious blows with the dagger-wielding clown, their weapons a blur of silver and reflected light. Every parry sent a shower of sparks into the air, the clang and shriek of metal on metal a frantic percussion to their deadly dance. He’d block a dagger thrust, counter with a slash, only to have the clown effortlessly deflect and launch its own lightning-fast riposte.

Seeing an opening, Alan disengaged for a split second, gathering wind at his core. With a shout, he released it as a concussive wall of force. The clown was caught mid-lunge and sent hurtling backwards through the air. But true to its terrifying agility, it twisted like a cat, landing in a perfect crouch a dozen yards away, already preparing for another strike.

This was his moment. Heart hammering, Alan reached into his pocket and emerged clutching one of the precious talismans—a lattice of silver lines on grey vellum. He held it aloft toward the recovering clown, focusing his will, feeling the chaotic storm of his own lightning magic churning within him, begging for release.

Alan: “Zing!” he yelled, the command word slicing through the courtyard’s chaos.

He didn’t try to control the lightning. He released it, channeling the raw, destructive power directly into the talisman. The paper dissolved in his hand into a cocoon of blinding white energy. There was a deafening CRACK! of the air itself splitting apart.

A spear of pure, white lightning lanced from the point where the talisman had been. It was terrifyingly fast—faster than thought, faster than any enhanced reflex. It crossed the distance to the clown in a nanosecond, a line of annihilating light drawn from Alan’s hand to the assassin’s chest. It was too fast to dodge, too powerful to parry. This should have been the end.

And then, impossibly, it bent.

The bolt of lightning veered sharply upward at a ninety-degree angle, as if yanked by an invisible magnet. Alan’s gaze snapped up, following the diverted energy.

There, standing calmly on a lower rooftop, was a fourth clown. Its mask was marked with a stylized ‘A’ and a heart. In its hands, a long, slender sword of polished, non-reflective metal. The redirected lightning was sucked into the blade, the energy coursing down the steel like water down a drain until the entire weapon glowed with a captured white light.

Grom, mid-exchange with ‘Red Diamond’, saw the new arrival and the absorbed lightning. His eyes, usually calm, widened in a flash of raw panic.

Grom: “Alan, MOVE!” he roared. He brutally kicked his opponent away, the force sending the clown sprawling, and charged toward his junior, his immense body moving with desperate speed.

Above, the ‘A-Heart’ clown descended with a slow, graceful drift, as if gravity held no sway. It spun once, elegantly, and pointed the glowing sword downward and released the energy it absorbed.

Alan’s own lightning, refined and weaponized, screamed back down toward him. He stood frozen, stunned by the reversal.

A mountain of ashen flesh and resolve slammed into him from the side. Grom planted himself in front of Alan, crossing his massive, brass-knuckled arms over his face and chest. His aether flared, layering his already tough skin with additional defensive enchantments, along with empowering his standard combat ward in front of him.

It wasn’t enough.

The rebounded lightning struck Grom with the sound of the world tearing. His ward shattered like glass, the energy piercing through to strike him directly. There was a deafening BOOM and a flash so bright it bleached the color from the courtyard. The smell of ozone was replaced by the acrid stench of burnt flesh and stone.

When the afterimages cleared, Grom was still standing. But he was a ruin. His arms, held protectively forward, were a crosshatch of blackened, bleeding wounds, the skin cracked and steaming. His chest was scorched, his uniform tattered and smoldering. Smoke rose from his scalp. He shuddered, a low, pained groan escaping his lips, and fell heavily to one knee, his fists digging into the shattered cobblestones to keep from collapsing entirely.

Alan: “GROM!” he cried out, the name a raw wound.

Grom:“Don’t… worry about me…” Rockjaw gasped, every word labored. “Focus… on… enemy!”

The clowns, sensing a shift, disengaged from their individual skirmishes. They flowed back, forming a loose semi-circle around the sword-wielding ‘A-Heart’ clown, who landed softly in their midst.

Joe used the lull to sprint to their position, placing himself in front of the kneeling Goliath, his gun raised, providing what little cover he could.

Joe: “Can you keep fighting?” he asked, his voice tight.

Grom tried to push himself up, his muscles trembling with the effort.

Grom: “Maybe…” he grunted, but the doubt was clear. The pillar of their defense was cracked.

Joe: “Damn it! Where the hell is university security?!” Joe snarled, scanning the empty windows and rooftops.

In the center of the clown quartet, ‘A-Heart’ slowly raised its glowing sword high. The air around it began to warp and shimmer. One by one, ethereal blades of solidified light coalesced from nothing, floating into existence until two dozen spectral swords hovered in a deadly array, all points aimed directly at Joe, Alan, and the wounded Grom.

Grom: “Really?!” he coughed out, a bitter laugh mixing with a wince of pain. “That one can use Blade Storm too?” The sheer, unfair versatility of their foes was becoming absurd.

Then it got worse. The ghostly blades began to pulse with a deep, sinister crimson. Snaking arcs of red lightning—Savagery magic, the art of murder given form—crawled over their surfaces, connecting them in a crackling, hungry web.

Joe: “That’s… Savagery magic infused into it…” he said, his blood running cold.

This wasn’t just a storm of blades; it was a storm of blades designed to cause maximum, torturous damage and bleed its victims dry. He holstered his gun, knowing it was useless. Instead, he raised both hands, pouring every ounce of his aether into forming the strongest shield he could muster, a desperate, shimmering wall of distorted air between them and the impending slaughter.

The air grew thick with ozone and the coppery promise of blood. The clowns stood motionless, a silent audience to their leader’s execution. The floating blades hummed, the red lightning snapping with eager malice.

Just as the air grew taut with the hum of two dozen death-sentences, a roaring inferno barreled into the courtyard from a side alley. It wasn't an explosion, but a living creature—a massive, spectral tiger woven from pure, incandescent flame. It moved with predatory grace and impossible speed, its passage leaving scorch marks on the stones. It ignored Joe’s group entirely, its burning eyes fixed on the cluster of clowns and their summoned blade storm.

As one, the clowns broke formation, leaping backwards and away in four different directions with fluid, acrobatic ease, abandoning their attack.

The flame-tiger plunged directly into the heart of the hovering ethereal swords. The collision was silent for a split second before the tiger detonated in a silent, sun-bright conflagration. The crimson-etched blades dissolved into shimmering motes of light that were instantly consumed by the all-devouring fire, leaving behind only a wave of blistering heat and the smell of ozone burnt clean.

Alan whirled toward the source.

A woman strode into the center of the chaos, her boot heels clicking on the cracked stone. She held a slender, elegant longsword casually at her side. Her hair was a mane of fiery orange, framing a face of sharp, elven beauty—high cheekbones, a pointed chin, and ears that tapered to delicate points. But it was her attire that marked her as something beyond a university mage or enforcer. She wore the practical, reinforced leathers and dark colours of a Witch Hunter, a silver medallion bearing the sigil of a crossed sword and torch gleaming against her chest.

She didn’t even glance at the dissipating fire. With a flick of her wrist, she snapped her sword to her side. From the lingering embers in the air, another flaming tiger coalesced beside her, materializing from smoke and heat. It let out a ferocious, roaring challenge, its form flickering with contained fury.

At that moment, the delayed university response finally arrived. Enforcers in white uniform poured into the courtyard from multiple archways, their stances professional, spells already glowing at their fingertips. They quickly formed a tightening cordon, cutting off the clowns’ avenues of escape. The air thrummed with gathered aether, a palpable wall of magical force.

The clowns regrouped, their backs to each other in a tight circle. Even through their masks, their assessment was clear: the dynamic had shifted. They were outnumbered, and the power level in the courtyard had just spiked dramatically with the arrival of the Witch Hunter and the university’s enforcers.

The leader, ‘A-Heart’, made a subtle, almost graceful gesture with its sword—a small, circular motion in the air. The other three clowns gave nearly imperceptible nods. In unison, their free hands dipped into hidden pouches. When they withdrew them, each held a handful of small, colored orbs between their fingers.

They threw them at their own feet.

POP-POP-POP-POP!

The orbs burst with dense, billowing clouds of smoke in a garish rainbow of hues—vermilion, cerulean, pink, violet. The multi-colored plumes swelled instantaneously, merging into an opaque, colorful fog bank that completely swallowed the four clowns from view.

The elf’s expression didn’t change. A magician’s smoke screen was a child’s trick to a Witch Hunter. She pointed her sword, and her flame-tiger charged into the colorful haze. Simultaneously, a dozen hawks, sculpted from flame, erupted into existence above her head and shot into the smoke like homing missiles.

The surrounding Enforcers, well-drilled, didn’t hesitate.

Enforcer: “Volley! Fire!” they barked.

A storm of magical retaliation tore into the smoke cloud. Bolts of solidified lightning, shards of crystallized ice, lances of pure force, and crackling spheres of dispelling energy ripped through the multicolored mist. The air became a cacophony of destruction—BOOM! CRASH! CRACK! TING! CLUNK!—as spells detonated, fizzled, or shattered against the cobblestones within the obscuring field.

After a sustained barrage that lasted ten seconds, a sharp whistle cut the air. The attacks ceased as one.

An unnatural silence fell, broken only by the hiss of fading magic and the crackle of the elf’s remaining fire-hawks circling overhead. Everyone watched, weapons and spells held ready.

The colorful haze dissipated, revealing the scarred, empty patch of courtyard where the clowns had stood. It was pockmarked with fresh craters, scorched black, and glittering with frost and crystal shards.

But of the four assassins, there was no sign. No bodies, no scraps of polka-dotted cloth, not even a single dropped dagger. They had vanished as completely as if they had been figments of the collective nightmare.