The Butcher’s Blade
“Fate,” Kate said slowly, “I’m not sure that fighting Tivi is the best use of your training time.”
Dust still hung in the air behind her, drifting gold in the afternoon light.
“Actually, I think it’s the most beneficial thing for me,” Fate said.
“I know she’s a lot stronger than me. But I’m the only one in this class who’s managed to take even a single point off her in the last six months. There are others stronger than me overall, but even they can’t land a hit on her.”
Kate frowned at him.
She turned to Tivi, who was staring at Fate in open disbelief.
“What do you think, Tivi?” Kate asked.
Tivi’s smile was thin. Sinister, almost.
“I’d be happy to oblige,” she said, then left after a nod from Kate.
Fate sheathed his sword and turned to go.
“Are your ribs all right?” Kate asked.
Fate blinked, caught off guard. No teacher had ever bothered to ask him that before.
“You should go straight to the hospital wing,” Kate continued. “They’ll put you back together.”
Fate thanked her and left—but not for the hospital wing.
He’d never once gone there. Not even when his bones had been broken before. He wasn’t about to start now.
Pure stubborn pride, he thought. They never helped me before. Why start now?
Pride, mixed with his own knack for fast recovery.
Instead of the hospital, he headed for the kitchens. He’d spent a while thinking about the fastest way to gather large amounts of life energy, and that search had led him to the school’s butchery.
The smell hit him before he even reached the door—raw meat, old blood, tallow smoke.
“You want to help in the kitchen? A student?” The head butcher looked at Fate in disbelief, cleaver still in hand.
Fate didn’t hesitate. “I think the work would be genuinely useful for my training. Not only would I get used to blood, but I could build the kind of strength you have, and learn to move a blade with precision, for a clean kill. I don’t need payment.”
The butcher shook his head. “I don’t want fancy swordsmanship in my kitchen. We’re not here to finesse the animals—we’re here to put them down. If you want to work here, you use a butcher’s knife.”
“I can’t do that,” Fate said. “It would defeat the point of the exercise. But I promise—no fancy swordsmanship. I want to learn your way of precise cutting, just with my own sword. Even if it takes me longer than it takes you, you’ll still have an extra pair of hands for free. And if my work isn’t good enough, I’ll walk away without complaint.”
The butcher studied him for a long moment.
“Ha. Can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ll give you one day to prove yourself.”
Fate nodded, pleased, and followed him into the kitchen.
Steel hooks hung from the ceiling. A drain in the stone floor, dark and stained.
He was shown how to butcher a chicken, then a hen—how to drain the head into a bucket and hang the carcass on the rope. It took him longer than the butcher, but the cuts were clean.
“Not bad,” the butcher admitted. “Mostly thanks to how sharp your sword is. You need to use your wrist at the last second, though.”
He glanced at the blade again, frowning.
“You’re sure you want to use that sword on chickens?” he asked.
“I’m sure,” Fate said.
He skipped his history and literature classes to spend the day killing chickens. It sounded pathetic, put that way, but by the time he’d worked through his hundredth bird, his body was fully healed and he had energy to spare.
He didn’t stop through the night. By morning, he’d killed more chickens than even the most experienced butcher on staff.
The man watched him work with a strange expression but never asked questions—just gave him room to work as long as he wanted.
The academy processed tens of thousands of chickens a day, enough to feed every student and teacher. He funneled most of the life energy he gathered into strengthening his astral roots and his physical body, but each day he also tried to refine a small portion of it into something new—a ki made of pure life force.
He understood the theory. He just hadn’t found the way to actively forge it yet. But each day, he felt a little closer.
The next day, Fate’s score against Tivi was one to thirty-four, in her favour—his single win coming from a genuinely underhanded trick.
But even so, the rest of the class was starting to look at him differently. Not all of the new attention was good.
After training, Fate skipped the rest of his classes again to return to his new job. This time, the butcher showed him how to break down a pig. It took much longer, but a pig’s life force was far stronger than a chicken’s, and worth every extra minute.
He made sure to keep the passive drain of his matrix set low enough that the people around him wouldn’t notice anything beyond feeling a bit more tired than usual. It didn’t net him much life force yet—his range was only a few metres—but as his astral roots grew, so would his reach, and Fate knew that eventually, this would become his primary source of power.
He remembered a time when men with a range of miles could draw a trickle of life force from millions of living things at once—and that trickle alone had made him the most powerful mage in the world.
But Fate wasn’t foolish enough to think he was still that man.
It would take years to grow his roots back to even a fraction of that scale. Decades, probably. So, to be safe, he made sure to bathe his roots in whatever life force he gathered before spending the rest elsewhere.
On the day of the summoning ritual, classes were suspended, and second-years from all eleven sectors gathered on the tenth floor of the main tower, where a massive magic circle waited.
Fate noticed it was far more complex than the ones he remembered, though he wasn’t surprised—knowledge advanced, changed shape, over the centuries.
Each student had roughly a minute inside the circle to recite their summoning incantation. Some used old standard chants; others improvised. It didn’t matter much either way—you could nudge the direction of a summoning, but you never truly knew what would answer until it stood in front of you.
Some people called it destiny.
Fate knew better.
The summonings went smoothly. Students called forth salamanders, pegasi, water sylphs, dryads, even three drakes—a fire drake famous for its breath, a white drake said to be among the noblest of its kind, and a wind drake, one of the fastest.
The winged beasts were young, months away from bearing a rider’s weight, but their new masters were thrilled regardless. There were fire lions, lightning tigers, even one strange creature that looked like a floating eye wreathed in static.
Finally, it was Fate’s turn.
The moment he stepped into the circle, he said, “The thirteenth door, I open to thee.”
No one heard him—they were still buzzing over the last student’s ent. But the instant the words left his mouth, the flames in all eleven torches ringing the circle shifted from red to black, and the hall went dead silent.
Fate didn’t notice. He was too busy forcing the door wider, searching the Asura channel for the wall that marked its edge.
It took him nearly fifty seconds to find the connection, so he cut the incantation down to the bare minimum.
“You who wield the Black Flame, you who roam in shadow—Seventeenth General of the Asura Army, Pandemonium, I summon thee.”
Eleven black flames shot toward the centre of the circle. A metre from Fate, every light in the hall went out.
It took the teachers nearly two full minutes to get the fire-stones relit—two minutes of total silence and darkness.
When the lights came back on, Fate was no longer standing in the circle. It took the crowd a few seconds to locate him—standing beside his classmates, brushing the mane of a black horse.
The hall was quiet for a moment, then burst into laughter.
One student, who had a crush on Tivi, was the first to “congratulate” him, barely holding back a grin.
“Beautiful horse. Shame all that dramatic chanting got you was a farm animal. Bet he’s great for ploughing fields.”
He couldn’t finish without laughing outright.
Horses were common—no real noble bothered with them, not when there were beasts that outclassed them in every way. Even the cheapest horse cost less than a single gold coin.
There’d been other unremarkable summons that day, but nobody had used a chant as grand as Fate’s for something so ordinary.
Fate ignored the mockery entirely, still stroking the horse’s mane. After a few more comments, he finally sighed and approached Kate.
“I’d like permission to spend the next few days bonding with my familiar.”
Kate looked at Fate, then at the horse, then at the students still laughing behind him.
She sighed. “Permission granted. The next two days are yours to strengthen the bond.”
Fate nodded and walked off, the horse trailing him without any command needed.
Once they were clear of the academy grounds, he gripped its mane and swung up onto its back. In seconds, they were gone—moving in a way that, if anyone had seen it, they wouldn’t have believed.
But no one did. They moved wrapped in shadow.
Fate found himself back in the clearing at the forest’s edge—the same one where he’d trained with Sari.
The moment he dismounted, the horse burst into black flame, and its shape shifted. Standing before him now was a handsome young man in his mid-twenties, dressed in black, with long raven hair and a deep frown.
He stared at Fate for a long moment.
Then he sighed. “Fuck. Would you care to explain how a weak mortal like you managed a direct summoning incantation on me? That should be impossible. Your astral strength is so low I could barely manifest at one percent of my power, and yet you forced a one-sided contract onto my soul. It shouldn’t be possible.”
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