Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 31

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The mana sniffer slowly picked its way up the face of the cliff. Considering just how bulky and thick-limbed it was, I was a bit surprised by how much agility it had on display. I wasn’t convinced that it was going to make it to the top, but if it made it to the halfway point before giving up, I was going to kill it.

Of more concern was the second mana sniffer that had joined it. Apparently, they weren’t as territorial as I would have supposed, considering how scarce food must have been for them in the desert. I’d been almost hopeful that they’d end up attacking each other, but I wasn’t that lucky. Instead, one of them had taken the south side of our little plateau hideout and the other was working its way up the north.

“What are you doing?” Mother asked as she emerged out into the sunlight.

“Keeping an eye on the mana sniffers trying to get up here,” I said. “I’m almost certain they won’t be able to handle the climb once it turns sheer, but I’m going to kill them if it turns out I’m wrong. I didn’t think they’d make it as far as they have, but I want to be ready in case they surprise me again.”

Mother stiffened slightly at the mention of mana sniffers, but she did a remarkable job of maintaining her composure. After a slight stutter in her step, she joined me at the edge and looked down. “What about on the back side?” she asked.

That was a fair question. The spire of stone we were perched on jutted up out of the ground like a lone mountain, with the next peak miles away. Thanks to the way it was set up, we had a cave-like shelter to stay in. It was a sort of miniature ravine in the side of the mountain, only thirty or forty feet deep and with the two walls angled together so that at the back end they left us with a shallow overhang.

Then the stone continued up another hundred feet or so overhead, leaving us with a wide ledge to overlook the landscape, but only on the southeast side. That meant we couldn’t really see if any mana sniffers were coming up anywhere but where our ledge opened up to the sky. Fortunately, it also meant that anything climbing up the back side would go right past us without finding any way to actually reach our camp.

All of that assumed the mana sniffers could manage the vertical climb in the first place, which I wasn’t convinced was true. Of course, it also assumed nothing else besides mana sniffers would show up. I was keenly aware that our perch was vulnerable to flying monsters, but so far, I hadn’t seen any. It was actually such a nice spot that I figured anything in the area that could fly would already have found it and turned it into a roost.

“I think we’re safe, but if these ones managed to get close enough that I needed to intercept them, I’ll sweep the areas we can’t see from here with a scrying spell,” I told Mother. I glanced over the edge again to check on the mana sniffer’s progress and felt a hand on my shoulder holding me steady.

“I’m half afraid you’re going to fall over every time you do that,” Mother said.

“That would be unfortunate. We need all the mana we can get right now.”

Far from showing a velvet sky of stars, my mana crystal now had more like a single constellation. It was only about five or six percent full, and I was keenly aware of exactly how quickly I’d gone through what should have been an immense amount of resources saving Nermet’s life. Admittedly, that had come with the perk of igniting Father’s mana core, which I would have done sooner or later anyway, but the timing was damned inconvenient.

As soon as I finished moving control of Nermet’s subjugation spell to Father and refilled my own core, I’d begin the process of syphoning away about a tenth of my maximum capacity into the mana crystal every hour or so, keeping myself close to full but never quite there. It would take about a month and a half to fill it all the way, but every little bit I could store right now would help me when I went after Noctra in a few days.

“How is Senica taking everything?” I asked as a change of topic.

“She is… very excited,” Mother said.

“So she latched onto the magic part and you didn’t try too hard to explain the deadly risks part?”

“Yes. It’s not something a little girl should have to think about. Your father will be able to do magic soon. That’s a big enough distraction to get her to ignore what’s going on. Although it’s becoming a lot of work to keep her away from you. We haven’t explained all of your baggage to her yet, but she knows you can do magic too and she is very, very eager to talk to you about it.”

“Maybe we’ll hold off on that conversation for a few hours,” I said. “At least until I know that these mana sniffers aren’t going to be a threat.”

“I want them gone before I let her anywhere near this ledge,” Mother told me.

“I’m not wasting mana to drive them off if they can’t actually get up here. It’s too important to maintain what little reserves I have left.”

Mother glanced over the edge, shuddered, and said, “You’d better be right about this, Gravin. One of those could kill us all, and we’ve got two.”

I had my doubts about that. All things considered, the mana sniffers were remarkably docile toward each other, and though I hadn’t gotten a chance to examine them closely, I was willing to bet that they wanted nothing but mana. That meant all the ambient mana I’d released for Father’s ignition had caught their attention, and his core was what was keeping them here. My own mana crystal was the largest source of mana in our group, but I’d double-checked to make sure the shielding on that was holding up in addition to making the effort to hide my own mana.

In short, the mana sniffers were here for Father and nothing else. My guess was that those noses weren’t for show, and that in addition to tracking down sources of mana, they’d act as some sort of mana draining implement. The only question in my mind was what they’d do to Father after they sucked him dry if they got hold of him. An intelligent monster would know that mana regenerated. It would capture him and keep him alive as long as possible to keep feeding.

Mana sniffers didn’t strike me as intelligent from what I’d seen so far. They were more like animals than people. If I had to try to predict what they’d do, my bet was that they’d steal as much mana as they could get before wandering off. If they’d been a bit more aggressive and didn’t have such distinctive noses, I would have worried that they’d get their mana by eating people instead, but I knew enough about the biology of monsters to make some educated guesses about how these ones worked.

That was not to say that I was going to let them have a single scrap of the mana up here. Just because Father would most likely survive being fed upon didn’t change anything. If it meant killing them with a pair of fire blasts, well, it worked for Noctra. Though I was sure I could do better than an uncontrolled burst of flame if I put a bit of effort into it.

Come to think of it, we didn’t get a lot of meat in the village. Most of our protein came in the form of beans. Those pelts would probably make for thick padding, too, even if they were too heavy to use as blankets. Even during the cool months, it was too hot here for much more than light clothing. Most of the children didn’t even have shoes, though who could blame them considering that the interiors of our homes were the same hard-packed earth that made up our streets.

“You’ve gone quiet on me,” Mother said.

“Sorry. I was lost in my own thoughts again. This land is so different than what I experienced in my first life. I often find myself wondering where exactly I am and how many years passed between my death and my reincarnation.”

“Can you not do the math?” Mother asked, surprise in her voice. “I would have thought…”

“No, no. It’s nothing like that. The calendar used here is simply different. Telling you that I died in the summer of A.N. 3142 doesn’t help much when it’s now the 408th year of the Galvashian calendar, does it?”

“I suppose that would make it harder to figure out,” Mother agreed. “What does A.N. mean?”

“Ascension Naturallis,” I said. “We measured it by the founding of the Natular Empire whose first ruler was, well… Naturallis was supposedly his name, though he’d already been dead for centuries by the time I was born and I was never clear whether it was actually his name or just a title he’d claimed for himself. His grandson took the throne about fifty years before I was born.”

“It’s so strange to think that you had this whole life already,” Mother said.

“You did too. Probably thousands of times. You just don’t remember any of them,” I pointed out.

“It doesn’t feel like they really count, though. If I can’t remember any of those memories, I’m really only as old and experienced as I am in this life. For all we know, I could have been a mage in my past life too, but it doesn’t do me any good now.”

“There are spells to help you draw memories from past lives out of your soul if you’re curious,” I said. I’d done considerable research on them when I was constructing my own spells for my reincarnation ritual, though I’d never found a use for those spells specifically beyond idle curiosity. It was basically impossible to track who someone’s reincarnation was, so there were few practical uses with that kind of magic, though occasionally someone did discover through sheer happenstance that they’d been someone famous or talented and began to delve deeper into their own past life, just to see what they could discover.

I peered over the ledge again and sighed. “These things are persistent, if nothing else. I’m going to have to kill both of them after all. Do you think the meat and pelts are worth anything?”

Mother blinked at that and shook her head. “We’ve never used any monster parts in the village, as far as I know.”

That saved me the need to avoid making a mess or of going down there to harvest usable materials. I focused my mana into a conjuration and sent a searing beam of fire down the side of the cliff to strike the mana sniffer in the face. It started to give an agonized screech, but the flame lance forced it to let go and it quickly struck the ground below.

The stink of seared meat and burnt fur would no doubt draw in scavengers to take care of the body. Hopefully it wouldn’t result in any future problems for me, but I needed to keep an eye out either way. I was already going to have to start scrying around the far sides of our mountain spire anyway, so I supposed looking at a wider area wasn’t too much extra work.

“Excuse me,” I said to Mother. “I have to go take care of the other one now too.”

She nodded mutely and peered over the edge at the remains of the first mana sniffer. “You… you go right ahead, son. I think I’ll head back into the shade and see how your father is doing.”

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