A brick ripped from the wall behind Harper and crashed into his head. Sadly, demigods have very solid bodies, so it didn't do much damage.

Harper raised his head and looked back at me. "Die," he said, his gaze intense and... frightened? Was he afraid of me?

A bright spark flew out of his hand and rushed towards me.

I turned the concrete around my tied hands into sand and sat down abruptly. The spark reached the wall and I covered my head with my hands. The little fireball exploded, but not too powerful, because Harper conjured it fastly.

My hands and legs were still tied up, so I cut the ropes. They fell to the floor.

Did I have enough power to defeat Harper right now? No. Could I hurt him so that he wouldn't catch up to us when we will run away? Quite likely.

I decided not to use mantras or gestures, because then I wouldn't stand a chance against Harper. I needed to use the fast hands-free demigod way of conjuring spells that didn't require using formulas. I hoped that my parents wouldn't notice.

Using magic, I ripped nine more bricks from the wall behind. Orbiting around me, they formed somewhat a sphere.

Harper sent another spark at me, this time it was brighter and faster then the previous one. Eight of my bricks quickly formed a double-layer shield in front of me and the nineth hid behind it. The new spark did almost no damage to my small flying wall.

Harper decided to discard the magic. He tried to grab my hair, but the wall shifted and stopped his hand. He growled and formed a fist-sized fireball. 

At the same time I turned the nineth brick into sand, reformed it into a cone with a big recess in it and made the stone solid again. Then I started spinning the cone in the air with an increasing speed.

Harper threw his new big fireball at me, I reformed my brick wall, its damaged parts now shifted to the edge of the shield.

The wall exploded anyway, showering debris in all directions. I covered my face with my hands, but the splinters didn't even scratch me, they just bounced off.

I put a fireball into the recess inside of the spinning cone and then I fired my unexpected missile at a crazy speed. Harper flinched and almost dodged it, but the cone lodged in his hip and almost ripped his leg off. Then the fireball inside the cone burst.

Harper screamed and fell on the floor. Standing on one leg in the middle of a fight is not easy.

"Pathetic. You got my father to feel much more pain, but he didn't cry," I said. 

At the same time Xavier finished the executioner and started casting a spell. I could see surprise and disbelief in his eyes when he looked at me, but he didn't say something. Battlefield is not a good place for conversations. As I understood from his mantras, my father was conjuring a fireball. Maybe, together we will be able to get rid of Harper. I started forming another stone cone using what was left from my exploded stone shield.

Harper conjured a glowing spherical shield made of force around him.

"Zane! Xavier! We shoudn't try to kill him! He is a demigod! We need to run." Faye was shocked by our sudden success.

"I know," we replied in unison.

Harper's wife and son were standing still, not knowing what to do.

I wasn't used to fighting or winning. It turned out to be very pleasant. Though, in my previous life I had fought a lot, so these feelings actually were not something new to me. Ugh! Such confusing contradictions between my selves still occurred in my mind.

Xavier finished his spell and the fireball darted towards... Harper's son?! Why? Harper reacted almost immediately and tried to conjure another force shield in its path, but he was clearly too late.

Harper's wife threw herself on the ground together with her son. She covered him with herself.

I fired my cone missile again. It flied past Harper, crashed into the fireball and made it collapse before reaching the boy and his mother.

At that moment Xavier finished his next spell and a force shield appeared around the fireball and the two people.

He must have done this to concentrate the damage in a small zone instead of blowing the whole room up. Also, this didn't allow the fire to leave this dungeon without fresh air, which would have caused us all to suffocate.

The fireball exploded. The space inside the shield turned into a slaughterhouse for a moment.

"Bruno!" Harper cried.

"Father! Why?" I shouted. The force shield disappered.

Lady Gauss was lying on top of her son without moving. Most of her clothes were torn and burned, her back was bleeding. I couldn't say if her son was alive, I could only see his small hand sticking out from under the mother. It was covered in burns.

"Son," my father looked at me and closed his mouth.

Battlefield is a bad place for discussions, but that moment I really wanted to have one.

The glowing shield around Harper disappeared. His leg was not bleeding anymore, I knew that soon it would start growing back.

Sitting on the ground, he conjured ten spells: a small fireball spark at each of his fingertips.

Using magic, I lifted seven pebbles from the floor. Every spell caused a new burst of pain in my head. It indicated that I had almost no mana left. Xavier rushed towards Faye, casting a force shield in front of her on the run. Five sparks darted towards them, Xavier hid behind the shield he created for Faye.

The other small fireballs levitated, forming an arc around me. Then Harper fired them at me from different directions.

My levitating pebbles shifted, catching the sparks and making them blow up a few meters away from me. Though I missed one of them, so I jumped out if its way. Such a sharp movement felt awkward, but also common. 

Both of my parents were seasoned soldiers, so they made sure that besides training my mind and my magic I was also training my body. 

But something seemes unfamiliar. This body of a five year old boy didn't feel the way my previous body did, so a part of me felt clumsily in it.

The spark blew up somewhere behind me and I quickly got up. Xavier had aleady cut my mother's ropes with some sharp torture instrument he had found on the nearest table.

Breathing was hard, today too many fireballs were conjured in this poorly ventilated dungeon.

"Zane, Run!" Xavier shouted, together with my mother, they rushed towards the entrance of the room. My head hurt, I had almost no mana left, so I wasn't going to continue the fight.

I rounded Harper as fast as I could. I knew that behind my back he was casting a spell, but I could also see my father conjuring another force shield. I believed in Xavier.

I dashed past him and he finished the spell. The three of us ran out of the torture chamber. Then a fast moving sphere of compressed cooled air flew out of the room. I recognized it, it was one of Harper's favourite spells, Freezing Burst. It destroyed Xavier's shield easily.

I didn't have enough mana to protect myself from it properly, so I threw myself on the ground and created a small hemispherical force shield near my legs. My father simply grabbed Faye and dropped to the floor, lying on top of her.

The sphere exploded with frosty air mixed with ice pieces. A volcano of ice erupted in the dungeon. 

Ugh! My skin covered with rime, the ice pierced some parts of my skin. I raised my head and looked around. A big part of the passage was now covered with ice. My parents were alive, though they got frozen to the floor and my father's back was covered with cuts and slashes. I had time to conjure a shield for my parents too, but I had no mana for it, so Xavier suffered much more damage than me.

He growled and broke out of the thin layer of ice. Now I saw that his and Faye's hair were white because of the hoar. Mine were probably silver too.

My mother's long hair were frozen in a bizarre shape.

"You idiots!" I heard from the torture chamber. "You won't be able to hide forever, not from me!" Harper shouted.

Together the three of us got up shaking off the snow and wincing. We walked towards the stairs leading from the dungeon.