Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 25

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

The hardest part of cleaning out the storage room was reaching the draw stones on the top shelves. There was a chair, but even standing on that, it was a struggle to get to the top two rows. I ended up climbing the shelf to sit on the top while I was accessing the uppermost row of draw stones. Sometime while I was working, the two Collectors left the bedroom they’d been standing in. One of them left the building, but the other went and woke the remaining four up.

At that point, I only needed about ten minutes to finish draining the last of the draw stones, and if I was lucky, no one would check the storage room. If they didn’t leave me a clear way to escape, I’d waste a bit of mana on a phantasmal step spell to pass through the wall, but I was hoping they’d go somewhere else.

I didn’t think I had good odds of sneaking back out through the door, especially since someone was going to realize that I’d left it unlocked. My hope was that the Collectors all knew about the trap on the door to the storeroom and would stay out. Even if one of them went running for Noctra’s home, I’d be gone well before they got back.

In that one respect, I got lucky. With hindsight, I should have gone right back out into the hall after I drained the first few stones and cast sleeping spells on the other two Collectors, but I’d let myself become overeager and blinded by all the mana available to me, and in my rush to claim it, I hadn’t properly considered the consequences of leaving the Collectors awake.

Now I would deal with an enemy who was on his guard. Oh, he wouldn’t know it was me that was coming, but that hardly made a difference. Then again, being on his guard didn’t make much of a difference either. My mana crystal was more than half full. I had enough mana to cast fifty or so spells sitting in there. If I needed to, I could even cast a few bigger ones, though I couldn’t imagine a scenario where that was the most efficient use of my limited resources.

I used a basic sensory invocation to sharpen my hearing and confirm that four of the Collectors were still awake and talking to each other. It sounded like they’d all moved to the front room and were sitting around the table out there. Assuming no one had found a way to break my sleeping spell, that left two Collectors snoozing and one unaccounted for. I could do some basic scrying to determine where he was, perhaps try to combine it with a long-range sleep spell to knock him out, but that would increase the cost ten-fold, and the simple truth was that I just wasn’t impressed with the village’s defenses.

Perhaps it was sheer arrogance, but more likely it was the half-full mana crystal in my pocket that fueled my confidence. It would strain my resources, but I could use a series of shadow leap spells to get to Noctra’s base in under a minute and probably still have enough left over to blast him to oblivion. As long as Iskara didn’t interfere, I could have this whole threat ended in the next five minutes.

But while it certainly seemed like I’d need to do something about Noctra at some point, that wasn’t the goal tonight. He was clearly using the village to farm mana, possibly to pay off some sort of debt, by the sounds of it. I wasn’t going to let that just continue to happen, but I wanted to be in a good enough place to deal with the fallout before I made my move.

I glanced around the pitch-black storage room, visible to my eyes only because of my magic. I’d already made my first move, now that I thought about it. The only thing left to do was play it out and see how it went. Given my advantages, I was confident in my odds. Noctra would no doubt have some tricks of his own, and probably many times as much mana available to him as I had, but I’d seen the quality of his spells. There was no way I was going to lose to some apprentice rank mage like him.

Phantasmal step was one of the most advanced spells I’d used since my reincarnation. It took me about three seconds to put the spell together, mostly because I wanted to make sure I’d done it as efficiently as possible, and I walked through the back wall of the room like it wasn’t there. The spell only lasted long enough for me to completely step out onto the street bordering the east side of the Collectors’ headquarters before it unraveled.

It took most of the mana sitting in my core to cast the spell, and I took a moment to draw more mana from my personal crystal. Then I circled around and hustled down the streets as fast as my short little legs could carry me. Just as I was turning the corner, I heard a door open behind me and a voice say, “Is someone out here?”

If I wasn’t mistaken, that would be Ayaka. Fortunately for me, I was already rounding the corner when the door opened and I doubted she’d seen me in the dark. Even with both the purple and red moons in the sky, there were so many shadows that I blended right into them. Whatever Ayaka thought she’d heard or saw, she didn’t take any actions beyond looking out the door and then closing it again.

Mother was waiting for me inside our hut when I got back. She looked up sharply as I slipped past the curtain that served as our front door, then shot a glance to Senica’s sleeping form before she asked in a harsh whisper, “You’ve done it then?”

“I have,” I told her. I held up the crystal to show her and added, “There’s more mana in this thing now than I could make in three weeks of continuous effort.”

“Good. Now use it to save your father.”

“Right. First thing is to find out where he’s being held.”

I gave Mother my hand and focused on scrying on the beacon I’d given Father. A vision of my father lying on his side filled my mind, hands bound behind his back and a gag in his mouth. Other than being bound, it didn’t look like he was hurt. Of far more concern was that he seemed to be in some sort of cart, but it was too dark to see without magic.

I pulled the spell back a bit to see that the cart had a blanket thrown over top of it, and a good one at that. The blankets I was familiar with were threadbare, to put it nicely. This one was in fantastic condition and didn’t look to have been woven from the cotton-like fibers grown here in the village. It wasn’t much of a stretch to assume it had come from Noctra’s manor.

A donkey was hitched up to the cart, and walking next to it was someone from the Garrison who was close to seven feet tall and had a series of scars across his face. Part of one ear was missing, and a chunk had been sliced out of his nose.

“That’s Nermet,” Mother told me. “He, uh, got hurt as a boy.”

“It affected his brain?”

“Yes.”

That made sense. Subjugating someone else’s mind wasn’t an easy process, but targeting the extremely young or the mentally feeble made the process easier. Since small children generally couldn’t contribute much as a subjugated slave, Nermet was a logical choice to start with. Still, the ongoing mana costs associated with the spell must have irked Noctra, just judging by the average monthly harvest he could expect.

I doubted he had more than one or two subjugations running. Even one wasn’t an efficient use of his mana. There was very little need for a muscle-bound slave in this village, not when everyone was obeying Noctra willingly.

I returned to examining the scene. They were obviously moving Father somewhere. Perhaps the manor was too open and Noctra had a secret base hidden away somewhere. If that were the case, it might be better to let them finish transporting Father so I knew where it was. On the other hand, it would be easier to rescue him if I only needed to break the subjugation enchantment holding Nermet’s brain hostage. Perhaps I’d follow them until they were close to their destination and step in at that point. Father was in fine shape; he’d survive another hour under the sleep spell.

Mother gasped so loud that I shot a glance at Senica to see if she’d woken up before turning back to Mother to ask, “What’s wrong?”

“That’s outside the village,” Mother said. “They’ve taken your father down the west road and left the village behind. He’s at least five miles away, maybe more.”

My heart sank. Five miles was a lot to catch up. I briefly considered my options. A spectral steed could do it, but without ambient mana to feed the spell as it ran, it would fall on me to keep it powered. Five miles at minimum, plus however far they got between now and when I caught up, would take perhaps twenty minutes. If I had any mana left by the time I caught up, it wouldn’t be enough to rescue Father with.

Plus the spell itself wasn’t designed for a single traveler. It could make up to three mounts, but the mana cost was the same regardless. Dumb spell. I vaguely remembered thinking that I should find a way to modify it to be cost efficient for a single traveler, but by the time I’d had the knowledge to do so, I’d advanced far beyond ever needing it.

Shadow leap was completely out. I’d run myself dry in under a mile. Flight was a possibility, but it had a lot of the same problems using a spectral steed did in terms of maximum speed, and it had even more expensive mana costs associated with it.

There was a game apprentice mages liked to play back when I was young. It involved using a novice invocation to temporarily reduce their weight while holding onto a wooden framework with a piece of canvas stretched across it, then using elemental manipulation to blast themselves with air to fly up into the sky.

Steering was difficult, and it required holding two channeled spells at the same time, which apprentice mages sometimes struggled with. A few of them got around it by creating temporary enchantments that would handle the weight reduction invocation. But it did have two things going for it.

The spells were fast and cheap, and that was exactly what I needed right now. I glanced around the house to find the piece of cloth with the least amount of holes in it and settled on our front door curtain. “I need to borrow this,” I told Mother as I gestured toward the curtain.

“What? Why?”

“I’m going to use it to fly out after Father.”

“What! No. Are you insane? You can’t go out there, especially not by yourself. The monsters-”

“What monsters?” I asked. “The barrier doesn’t work, probably never did. They’re already miles out and no monsters have come after them. I think that the presence of monsters outside the village has been severely exaggerated. It took me igniting my core to draw in one single monster, and right now, I could kill dozens of them without running out of mana.”

I just needed to get out there, break the enchantment on Father, and get us back to the village. Then I’d do something about Noctra and Iskara. And after that… well, I’d worry about that tomorrow.

I jumped up and started pulling the curtain down, then paused at the sight of three members of the village Garrison walking down the streets. Maybe they were just doing a routine patrol. That could be a normal thing that I never knew about because I was always asleep. Prior to igniting my core, this toddler body had required an enormous amount of sleep to function.

On the other hand…

“What do you think Noctra was planning on doing with the rest of us after he kidnapped Father?” I asked.

Share