I Transmigrated Into a Weak Body

Chapter 2

There was no time left. 

Brandon let out a weak, pathetic groan. He shifted his weight, dragging his broken body through the mud. He reached out with a trembling, blood-soaked hand, making sure to look like a desperate, dying man begging for mercy. 

"Look at this," Garek sneered, looking down at Brandon crawling toward his boots. "The scribe isn't dead yet. What do you want, boy? Want to kiss my boots before you die? Want to beg for your sister?"

Brandon coughed, spitting a mixture of mud and blood onto Garek’s boots. "Please..." he rasped, his voice sounding entirely broken. 

"Pathetic," Garek laughed, looking away to watch Brunt bring the brand closer to the crying girl. 

That was the mistake. Garek looked away for exactly one second. 

Brandon did not go for Garek’s leg. He did not go for a punch. His bloody right hand shot upward, faster than a dying man had any right to move. His fingers wrapped around the glowing blue Ward-Stone hanging on Garek’s belt. 

Brandon’s thumb was cut deeply from the earlier beating. Warm, fresh blood coated his skin. Blood is mostly water and iron. It is a fantastic conductor. 

Brandon did not try to steal the stone. He didn't try to pull it off the belt. Instead, he pressed his bloody thumb directly over the most critical part of the carved rune—the junction where the lines looped back to the center. He rubbed his blood hard into the groove, filling the carved line with liquid. 

By filling the gap, Brandon instantly created a bridge. He broke the closed loop. He forced the magical energy out of its stable circle and sent it crashing outward into the open air. 

He didn't chant a prayer. He didn't use a wand. He just used basic fluid dynamics and a basic understanding of short-circuiting. 

The blue light inside the stone flashed from a calm ocean-blue to a violent, blinding, sun-bright white. The stone began to vibrate so violently that it burned Brandon’s hand. 

‘Short circuit achieved,” Brandon thought. “Time to move.”

Using the very last ounce of strength in his legs, Brandon pushed off the ground. He dove across the muddy alley, throwing his body completely over Veronica, knocking her flat into the freezing mud and covering her small frame with his own. 

"What in the hells are you doing?" Brunt shouted, surprised by the sudden movement. 

Garek looked down at his belt. "My stone... it's burning! It's—"

Garek never finished his sentence. 

The overloaded magical circuit reached critical mass. The compressed Aether inside the stone violently interacted with the oxygen in the damp alleyway. 

The result was a massive thermobaric explosion. 

There was no fire, only a terrifying flash of pure, blue-white kinetic energy. The sound was deafening—a deep, chest-crushing blast that shattered every glass window in the three-story slum buildings around them. 

The shockwave swept through the alley like a hurricane of invisible blades. The rain was instantly vaporized into a thick cloud of white steam. 

Brandon squeezed his eyes shut, wrapping his arms tightly around Veronica’s head. He felt the intense heat wash over his back, singeing his cheap wool coat. 

The force of the blast rattled his teeth and pushed him down hard into the mud, but he did not let go of his sister. 

For a few seconds, there was nothing but the ringing in his ears and the sound of falling debris. Pieces of brick and shattered roof tiles rained down around them, splashing into the puddles. 

Slowly, Brandon opened his eyes. He coughed, waving away the thick, smelling smoke of ozone and burned flesh. 

He looked toward where the guards had been standing. 

There was a crater in the stone-paved street. Garek was gone. Completely gone. Where he had been standing, there was only a pair of smoking iron boots and a terrifying smear of red ash painted against the brick wall of the alley. The short-circuit had vaporized him from the waist up. 

Brunt, who had been standing a few feet further away, had taken the edge of the shockwave. He was thrown backward into a pile of wooden crates, his heavy armor dented and cracked. His branding iron lay in the mud, sputtering weakly. 

Brandon pushed himself up onto his knees. His jaw throbbed, his ribs burned, and his hand was blistered from the heat of the stone. But he was alive. And so was Veronica. 

The little girl peeked out from under Brandon’s arm. Her blue eyes were wide with absolute shock as she looked at the smoking crater. She looked up at her brother, trembling. "Brandon... what did you do?" 

Brandon didn't answer. He couldn't explain thermodynamics to a starving child right now. He stood up, his legs shaking but finding their balance. The weak, frightened scribe was gone. In his place stood a man who now realized that the "gods" of this world were nothing more than physics waiting to be exploited. 

Across the alley, Brunt groaned. The surviving guard pushed himself out of the broken crates. His helmet had been blown off, revealing a bloody, terrified face. He looked at the crater where his partner used to be. Then he looked at Brandon. There was no more cruelty in the guard's eyes, only absolute horror. 

To Brunt, Brandon had not just killed a man. He had corrupted the holy breath of the Sun-King without even speaking a word. It was heresy of the highest order. It was demonic. 

"Monster," Brunt whispered, coughing up blood. "You're a monster."

Brandon took a step forward, his eyes cold and empty of mercy. 

Brunt didn't try to fight. He scrambled backward through the mud like a frightened crab. His trembling hand reached into his tunic and pulled out a small, gleaming silver whistle. Before Brandon could close the distance, Brunt pressed the whistle to his bleeding lips and blew with all his remaining breath. 

It did not make a normal whistling sound. Instead, it let out a high-pitched, magical shriek that echoed off the slum walls, cutting through the heavy rain. It was an alarm. 

Brandon stopped in his tracks. He knew what that sound meant from the scribe's memories. It was a signal used only when a guard encountered a rogue magic user. 

For three seconds, the alley was silent, save for the rain. 

Then, from far down the foggy street, an answer came. 

It was a horn. But it did not sound like brass or wood. It sounded like a giant beast roaring from the depths of the earth—a deep, vibrating, bone-rattling boom that made the muddy water in the puddles shake. 

Veronica covered her ears and whimpered, burying her face into Brandon's side. 

Brandon looked down the street into the thick, grey fog. The whistle was bad enough. But the horn... 

The horn meant an Inquisitor was coming. And Inquisitors did not leave survivors.