Waylon waves his hand, and all the windows on the side of the tower shatters instantly. With a flick of his wrist, thousands of shards come raining down on us. The golden light prevents me from getting totally eviscerated, but the sheer force and volume of the glass causes some shards to break through and cut my skin, causing me to wince.

  The same is happening to Arthur, but his agility makes the damage less severe. Within a pile of rubble, he finds a trash can lid that he picks up and uses as a shield. The golden light envelops the lid, and it blocks all the glass shards effortlessly.

  Heh, that’s a useful power, all right. Wish I could—AUGH

  Sorry, I just got smacked by one of those concrete golems. The golden armor absorbed most of it, but it knocked the wind out of me. Gotta work on narrating in the middle of fights without getting distracted.

  Urgh, anyways, Arthur is cutting down concrete golems like it's nobody’s business. He’s also blocking the shards of glass, and keeping both Waylon and Dobrik on their toes. This kid might be able to beat these guys without my help after all…

  Just as Arthur is about to land a hit on Waylon, Yvette catches him in a wave of sticky tar. Arthur fights to get out, but every time he throws some tar off, more clumps around him and restricts his movement. Dobrik forms a set of massive concrete armor and starts whaling on Arthur, and Waylon does the same with his glass.

  Even though the blows are less powerful than what Zane could dish out, and he’s still doing his best to block them, the blows are clearly starting to wear him down. Crap, I’ve got to do something!

  I dodge the concrete golems and make my way out into the open. I consider taking a shot, but that might not even work, and they’d kill in an instant before turning right back to Arthur. Gotta draw them away somehow...

  I pull out Zane’s spellbook and hold it aloft. “Hey, Wizards!” I yell. All three of them turn around for the moment.

  “I’ve got something here for ya!” I hold out the book emphatically, making sure the messy “ZANES SPELLS” written on the front is visible. “But you’re gonna have to take it from me!”

  Yvette’s eyes light up with manic excitement and she screeches “Zane’s lightning spells! I must have them!” She shoves Waylon and Dobrik aside with her tar and makes a beeline for me. Good, she took the bait. I sprint off towards an abandoned building with Yvette in tow.

  Waylon rubs his head in pain and yells “You bitch! Get back here!” Before he can follow, Arthur bursts out of the now-inert tar and lunges at Waylon. He narrowly dodges, and begins his counterattack with Dobrik.

  How did I know all that? I’m running away from the scene, my back is turned and everything And yet it just sort of came out. Just another thing to worry about after the fight.

  I duck into a ruined building and slip behind a pillar. Yvette slithers in behind me and sloshes her tar everywhere in an attempt to feel me out. “Come out, come out, little man,” she says melodically, “You have something that I wa-ant…”

  Obviously, there’s no way I can beat a real Wizard with just a handgun, so I’ve gotta try something drastic. I flip open Zane’s spellbook to a page with an illustration of a stick figure shooting bolts of lightning from his hands, and examine the incantation next to it:

  GwggI’hoo0o0()h—413hgzzizsn*^WHWHWHWWPkZZZaA

  Still gibberish, and it makes my head swim trying to comprehend it. How is it even meant to be pronounced? I guess I can hear it when I narrate it, but trying to say all those syllables with my real mouth…

  Wait a minute.

  Could that work? It feels like it shouldn’t, but…

  The wet, sticky feel of tar against my leg interrupts my train of thought—my feet are now stuck. Yvette appears around the pillar I’m behind with a maniacal smile. “Found you!” she shrieks, “Now give me the tome!”

  I smirk confidently in response. “Gotta take it from me first.” I concentrate on Arthur, remembering his determination, and the golden light envelops me once more. With its power, I’m able to break free of the tar and roll to some more cover.

  Yvette roars “How insolent!” and throws large globs of tar in my direction. I narrowly dodge each one, and fire a few bullets at her. With much of her tar out of the way, Yvette is unable to block, and the bullets lodge themselves in her neck, shoulder, and chest.

  Yvette reels and chokes as blood gushes out of her open wounds, and for a moment I think I might have actually taken her out. But without missing a beat, small blobs or tar detach themselves from her dress and stuff themselves into the wound, stopping the blood. That can’t be sanitary.

  Either unnoticing or uncaring of this detail, Yvette grins and laughs a wet and guttural laugh. “You…fool,” she croaks, tar oozing out of her mouth as she speaks, “It’ll take…more than that…to kill me!” She emphatically clasps her hands together, and I am swiftly sandwiched in between mounds of tar that are quickly getting tighter. “Last chance…to give me the tome…or you’ll be crushed!”

  The pressure is suffocating, and I can hardly move a muscle. Even the golden aura won’t hold up for much longer, I can tell. Looks like it's now or never.

  The tome is still in my hand, and I’ve kept open the page with the lightning spell. Using what little mobility I have left, I prop open the page and read the spell:

  GwggI’hoo0o0()h—413hgzzizsn*^WHWHWHWWPkZZZaA

  I then say the word written above.

  Yvette is momentarily stunned out of her posturing “The hell? How did you say that with your mouth—” but in the middle of that thought, an arc of lightning appears from my fingertips and hits Yvette in the chest. It’s small potatoes compared to what Zane is capable of, but it does just what I need it to do.

  The lightning sparks a small flame where it hit, and the flammable tar quickly lights up. Yvette panics upon seeing this and tries to douse the flames, but she simply makes them larger with more tar. Within seconds, her whole body is engulfed in flames, and she screams in agony as the tar used to plug her wounds ignites as well, burning her from the inside out.

  Yvette’s grip loosens, and I’m able to break free before the flames engulf me too. My head is throbbing after using that spell, and someone is calling me a

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  CHEATER

  CHEATER

  CHEATER

  Breathe, Lindon. You’re the one writing the story.

  WRONG WRONG WRONG

  It wasn’t wrong, just…another way of solving the problem. I had no choice.

  USURPER

  INTERLOPER

  DIE DIE DIE

  Shut up!

  …

  Okay, it’s better for now. Shit, that was almost worse than the other guy. Head still hurts, though.

  So, it looks like I can actually somewhat affect the real world through the narrative, not just the other way around. Nice to know I’m not just a passive observer in all this. But it’s risky, so I should probably keep it to a minimum for the time being.

  I turn back to Yvette, who’s little more than a smoldering husk by now. The tar had completely fallen away from her now, and she painfully drags her charred body towards me. “Please” she wheezes, shakily raising her hand towards me, “Need…magic…please…anything…”

  I stand over her, not feeling an ounce of sympathy. “It’s over, Wizard,” I say coldly, “This one’s for humanity.” Mechanically, I level my gun at her head and fire.

  She immediately goes limp, and the trembling tar behind her falls still. Yvette, the Wizard of Tar, is dead.

  I take a shaky breath as the enormity of the situation overtakes me. I, Murphy Lindon, an ordinary human, have just taken out a Wizard. It should feel momentous, but the moment rings hollow, somehow.

  I examine Zane’s spellbook, and consider that I may not be an ordinary human anymore. Without this magic, or Arthur’s golden armor for that matter, I would certainly have died just like all the other members of my squad. Am I a Wizard now? Something set apart from normal humanity?

  I still feel normal enough. Wizards are drawn to chaos and destruction, that much is obvious to anyone who’s met one. But would I even be able to tell if I ended up turning into that? Have I already gone mad from magic, with all this narration bullshit going on in my head?

  A loud crashing sound snaps me out of it. Shit, Arthur’s still fighting those other guys, he might need help! Existential crisis will have to wait, I guess.

  I rush outside of the building to the sound of the noise, and it’s a chaotic sight. A forty-foot high golem of concrete is swinging its fist at a golden blur running along the top of a building, taking out large sections of the structure with each swing. At the same time, a whirlwind of glass shards is swirling around them, cutting up everything in sight.

  Shit, this is a way better fight than the one I just had. Should’ve narrated this one instead.

  The concrete golem swings one more time, and brings the building down with it. Arthur leaps onto the outstretched arm and runs up its length, reaching the shoulder before it could react. He stands atop the head, raises his glowing sword aloft, and brings it down hard onto the golem, completely splitting it down the middle.

  In the middle of the glass whirlwind, Waylon is just barely visible—but even I can tell that he’s terrified at this display of power, and the whirlwind starts moving away from the battle. Arthur launches himself off the golem at high speed directly into the whirlwind. Waylon throws as much glass at him as possible, but Arthur stays the course, and slashes cleanly past the shards and through Waylon himself in once clean blow.

  Waylon shrieks in despair before exploding into a shower of golden sparks. Just like Zane before him, huh. Quite a flashy power, though I can't imagine the function.

  I run over to Arthur, who’s come to a rest on the ground below the battlefield. I hold up my arms to protect myself from the rain of falling glass from the whirlwind. Arthur is huffing with exhaustion, and he’s covered in gashes and scrapes from the glass.

  “Arthur!” I yell as I approach, “How’d it go? You look badly scraped up, I think I can clean those wounds with a medkit if I find one around…”

  “That won’t be necessary right now,” Arthur insists, and I can see that even though some of the gashes are deep, they’re hardly bleeding at all. “It was hard-fought, but I am victorious in this battle. What of yours? Have you dealt with the Wizard Yvette?”

  I nod. “Yep…I’ve, uh ‘defeated’ her, I guess,” I say somewhat dodgily. “Trust me, she won’t be a problem anymore.” A kid like Arthur doesn’t need to see what I did to Yvette, gruesome as it was. Come to think of it, maybe that’s the reason for the golden explosion whenever Arthur ‘slays’ a wizard—so he doesn’t have to process the fact that he’s just killed a person.

  Thankfully, Arthur doesn’t ask questions, and simply nods in acknowledgement. “Very good. We should rest now; fighting more in this state will simply lead to exhaustion.” I couldn’t agree more—all the exhaustion of the day is starting to catch up to me.

  The rubble of the concrete golem begins to stir, and Dobrik pops out of it, looking concerned. Arthur and I both ready our weapons in case of a counterattack. Dobrik looks around and sees Waylon and Yvette are nowhere to be found, with the two of us still standing. He walks out of the rubble and puts his hands up, saying “I surrender!”

  I scoff in disbelief. “Yeah right. You’re a Wizard, you’ll just stab us in the back as soon as we let you go! Give us one good reason not to kill—er, take you out right now.”

  “I wasn’t tryin’ to kill you, not really,” Dobrik says. “To be honest, I always thought those other two were total nutjobs. I just wanted to rough you up to the point you’d retreat, then I’d take the other two down myself. Honest! Now that they’re gone, I know I ain’t got a chance against you, so how about I help you out and you let me go?”

  I laugh out loud. “A likely story! I know what you are—a Wizard. You never show mercy to us ordinary folk, so why should I show mercy to you?” I level my gun at him and prepare to fire.

  However, Arthur gestures at me to wait. He approaches Dobrik warily and says “What will you offer us if we let you go?”

  “I can clear a path for you out of the city,” Dobrik replies, and stomps his foot on the ground. The streets behind us, which had been broken up and covered in debris, rises up like a wave and clears everything away; when it settles, there’s a finely-paved street leading straight out of the city. A bridge even constructs itself over the river, and it looks stable despite everything.

  It would be convenient to have a path out of here; our squad had to take a roundabout route to get to the center of the city, and it would be nice to be able to ride out smoothly. But it can’t be that easy, there’s got to be a catch…

  Arthur considers the newly-built road as well. He turns back to Dobrik and says “If we let you go free, do you promise not to harm any more innocent people?”

  I gawk at Arthur. Is he seriously considering this?

  “Sure,” Dobrik replies promptly, “I just wanna build stuff with my concrete, y’know? I don’t care about ruling the world or whatever.”

  Arthur thinks it over some more, narrowing his eyes at Dobrik as if sizing him up. Then, he sticks out his hand and says “Very well. We will spare you, and in exchange you must leave this city and never harm anyone with your magic again. Do you accept?”

  Dobrik shrugs. “Works for me, ” he says, and takes Arthur’s hand. As they shake hands, a golden light envelops their handshake and then dissipates.

  Dobrik raises his eyebrow and looks at his hand skeptically. “Uh, alright,” he says, “I guess I’ll be going then. ‘Preciate it.” He then turned away and walked in the opposite direction, taking the rubble with him as a group of shambling golems.

  I turn to Arthur in disbelief. “Are we really just gonna let him leave?”

  “Indeed,” Arthur replies matter-of-factly, “I made a promise to not hurt him, and I will keep it on my honor.”

  “But he’s a Wizard! How can you know he won’t just go back on his word as soon as he’s out of our sight? I thought you were all about defeating Wizards!”

  “Not all Wizards are evil, Murphy. I only wish to eliminate evil, and I have no desire to destroy more than what I need to. That Wizard, Dobrik, was reasonable, and not cruel like the others. I could tell from the way he talked.”

  I want to argue back, but I can’t help but see his point. Dobrik hadn’t sounded at all like any of the Wizards I’ve come across. For one, he didn’t talk like a Disney movie villain. And he clearly thinks more pragmatically than the average Wizard, not based on pride or petty rage.

  If Wizards were actually capable of being reasonable, maybe even good, then what did that mean about our mission? About the future of humanity as a whole? Am I really fighting for the same thing as the USA any more?

  Between this and the spellbook, I may need to rethink my priorities…