Ed leaned forward in anticipation and Zavier held up a hand. "I'm… I need a minute to process this."
A second later Zavier was out of his chair and storming to the door. The door that wasn't there anymore. He spun in a circle and his eyes went wide when he saw that all four walls of the garage looked the same and that none of them had a door.
"What the fuck is happening? What did you do?" He rushed to Ed and grabbed him by the shirt, hauling him out of his chair.
"I just hid the doors for a minute." Ed pleaded.
Zavier lifted him off his feet and pulled him closer.
"Wait!" Ed shouted. "You need to stop and think for a second!"
"That fucking bastard has been manipulating us! Manipulating Cass! You know what he can do, we need to stop him! I'M going to stop him." He threw Ed to the side and started pounding on the walls, listening for the telltale thump of a door behind the illusion. Ed quickly pulled out his brush and weaved some patterns. The room suddenly exploded into dozens of walls, each of them somehow 90 degrees from each other. The effect was mind boggling and disorienting so Zavier turned back to look at Ed.
Ed, who was now gone.
"Where the fuck are you? Let me out of here man, I'm serious."
Ed's voice came from the air all around Zavier. "I will, you just need to calm down first. You're experiencing the backlash of suppressed emotions. It'll fade. What happens if you kill him right now?"
Zavier closed his eyes. If he couldn't trust them he would use his other senses. He felt around one of the walls, feeling a familiar surface. He began inching along it.
"Then he's dead and this nightmare is over."
"His skill doesn't work that way, Zavier. It leaves a resonance in the mind of the people that are under the influence."
Zavier inched further until his foot hit a familiar metal wheel - the base of his rolling tool cabinet. "But at least the head of the snake will be cut off. We can figure it out from there."
"People have tried that before. When he leaves, the effects remain. They don't go away unless he removes them or the person is willing to see through it."
Zavier reached blindly into the drawer that held his screwdrivers, pulling out a handful of them. "You don't know if that'll be the effect once he's dead, though."
"Are you willing to take that chance?"
Zavier whipped around, eyes still closed, and flung the handful of screwdrivers with perfect aim. He'd never thrown these before and his skill treated them like the first time he'd used them as thrown weapons. Zavier had been turning his head like a radar dish, triangulating where the voice was coming from. Although Ed's voice echoed around the garage and seemed to come from everywhere at once, it still had a true source, and Zavier had identified it.
Half a dozen thunks sounded out, immediately followed by a pained cry. Zavier opened his eyes and saw five of the screwdrivers embedded in the wall around Ed, the last buried in his leg. With the illusion gone Zavier stormed towards the door again.
Ed yelled with a pained gasp. "If you kill him you'll lose Cass forever! Forever, Zavier!"
Zavier paused at the door, hands clenching and unclenching. His body quivered with adrenaline that needed to be released. He was ready to kill and if Gabriel had been standing in front of him he would have ripped his throat out with his bare hands.
Instead, he took a step back, then another, then punched a hole through the garage wall and into the house beyond.
Tess's experience was much the same. Zavier had had the foresight to ask her to leave all her weapons inside the house after explaining everything, including his reaction, before they started. Unfortunately, once the veil was lifted the emotions that had been buried surfaced in a storm strong enough to override logical thought.
"Do you want to try to restrain her?" Ed whispered it to Zavier, the two of them huddling in a corner under his illusion.
"Ooohhh noooo, buddy. This is one fire we need to just let die out on its own. You're sure she can't sense us at all, right? All of her senses are really, really good. Like 'we're fucking dead if you got it wrong' good."
"I doubled down," Ed reassured him, then thought better of it and pulled out his brush again. The room twisted again and this time Tess started feeling around with her hands.
"I turned off the lights," he whispered.
"I don't think that will help," Zavier whispered back.
"I can smell you and those stupid cigars you two were smoking."
"Oh shit!" Both of them cried out in unison as Tess flew at them. The illusion dropped as Ed took a kick to the head and Zavier was sent sprawling with a backhand.
"Tess!" Zavier cried from the ground. "You can't go out there!"
"I know that." Her voice was calm but laced with a predatory danger that made the hair on the back of Zavier's neck stand up.
"Then why are you fighting us and trying to get out?" Ed croaked.
"I'm not trying to leave the house, I just don't like being trapped in an illusion by two idiots," she said as she stormed into the house, slamming the door behind her.
Two more weeks passed with Zavier, Tess, and Ed planning the overthrow of Father Gabriel. They'd started by trying to spread small rumors and questions meant to instill doubt, all of which fell on deaf ears.
"They're too low level," Ed had explained. "He won't allow anyone to level up because the stronger they get the more likely they are to see through his machinations."
They'd had luck with Bob, a staunch conspiracy theorist who had maintained such a high level of distrust before The System that he wasn't easily fooled by Gabriel. He could always be found at the outskirts of the gatherings, arms crossed in quiet defiance. He'd refused Ed's spell for the same reasons he wasn't fooled by Gabriel - he didn't trust anyone to do anything to him. He'd agreed to help them with trying to recruit others, only to disappear days later. When they'd asked the neighbors about him they'd been met with blank stares. If anyone knew him before Gabriel arrived, they certainly didn't remember him now.
"Gabriel wasn't strong enough to kill Bob on his own," Ed had noted. He didn't miss the concerned look Tess and Zavier shared.
"Do you think the other neighbors got rid of him?" Tess had asked, the doubt in her voice highlighting the truth they all refused to acknowledge.
"Maybe," Zavier had replied, "but it would have taken enough of them to make him memorable. No, I think we know what happened to him."
Tess hissed under her breath. "Don't say that Z, don't even think it."
"I think we have to, Honey. I don't like it either, but there's only one person out there strong enough to remove someone quietly and without a fuss."
Tess turned her head to the side, rejecting the thought, but Zavier caught the concerned expression in her eyes.
"Okay then, what do we do?" She asked.
Ed mulled the question over before replying. "I honestly don't know. He needs to die, no doubt about that, but we need to make sure his influence is stripped before he does. I think we need to get that damned book and the rosary away from him, then maybe incapacitate him. I can temporarily block his influence if he doesn't have his items - that might be enough to convince people, but it won't hold for long. And there is Cass to contend with."
The worried parents shared another look. "Leave his items and Cass to me," Tess said. "He can't hurt me in any case, and he's more likely to listen to me than to," her eyes looked at Zavier and his head drooped.
Zavier took a deep breath and straightened again. "Okay, that takes care of that, but then what do I do?"
"I don't know if it'll be enough without your access to the system, but I need to make you stronger, Zavier." Ed looked at him with determination. "I'm going to teach you how to use The System like I do. If you can level up enough to unfuck your Intelligence stat, that would help, but even if you can't at least you can learn to break any lingering effects from the spell for when you do get it back."