Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 33

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Whoever the person walking across the dry, dead earth was, they could obviously sense mana from a distance. It was impressive, in a way. Almost no one I’d met since awakening had that kind of skill at even the most basic level. From what I could piece together, Father had been considered something of a prodigy at working with mana as a child, and only the unfortunate accident that I was still missing some details on had prevented him from becoming someone important as he got older.

Instead, he’d become a social pariah, though I hadn’t realized it at first. I did not see him out in the fields at work, and when we stood in line for the nightly tithe at the draw stones, he’d always directed conversations inwards toward the family. I’d mistaken it as him being a doting parent at first, but the truth was that very few people could manage anything more than basic courtesy masking subtle hostility.

My father was not well-liked, not at all. One of these days, I was going to have to get the whole story out of him regardless of how painful it might turn out to be. I suspected it was going to be important to know exactly where my family stood once Noctra was dead and gone. Initially, I’d thought that Father might slot into the role since the village seemed to want to have a mage as its head, but I was beginning to suspect they might not accept him in particular.

As we watched the person draw closer to us, I started to get a sense of some mana about them. It wasn’t in their core, not most of it at least, and it was shrouded in a way that reminded me of a window with a blanket tacked up in front of it. It didn’t fool anybody into thinking there was no light on the outside; it just filtered enough light to keep it from being distracting to someone wanting a bit of darkness.

That was what I felt, a curtain drawn over the mana to mute its presence instead of a shield to hide it completely. I couldn’t be certain if the effect was deliberate or not, but I had my suspicions based on what little magic I’d seen in my new life so far that it was more a lack of skill than a lack of choice. Whoever this person was, they were probably trying to cross the wastelands without attracting the notice of any predators that could sniff out mana, and this curtain was the best they could do to reduce the chances of being noticed.

“How do they know we’re here?” Father asked.

“Same way the mana sniffers do,” I said. “They can feel your mana core.”

“From that far away? I can barely feel anything more than twenty feet.”

I shrugged. “It’s a skill you can get better at, just like anything else. If you’d been allowed to keep your mana growing up, your range would probably be ten times that with minimal effort made on your part. And there are special tools that can have miles-long ranges.”

Those wouldn’t be in the hands of some random person, though. And since I was sure that was what our uninvited guest was using to track Father’s mana core, it narrowed down the possibilities considerably. It was too bad I didn’t have the spare mana to shield Father’s core for him or the time to teach him to do it himself. Shielding my own core didn’t actually cost me any mana; it was just a technique that took some mental effort to maintain, sort of like keeping a muscle clenched. Shielding someone else’s mana was a bit more complicated, unfortunately.

The person below us could be a complete stranger, perhaps from Derro. They could have been traveling by, noticed Father’s mana, and decided to investigate. None of that seemed likely to me, but it was a possibility. Equally possible was the idea that we’d accidentally settled near some old hermit’s abode and made enough noise to get them to come see what was going on. That also seemed unlikely.

The chances that the person under that hat was either Iskara or Noctra were significantly higher. Perhaps one of them had scried on their wagon, only to discover it empty. Perhaps Noctra had felt me usurp control of Nermet and wanted to get a closer look at that. It was even possible that they had some extremely sensitive device that could detect mana over miles hidden away. It would have to be properly calibrated to not go off every time some random farmer invoked a bit of mana to get a quick boost of strength, but if they had something like that, it would most definitely have picked up the magic I’d performed when I robbed the draw stones of their mana.

Then again, three Garrison members had shown up at our home an hour later.

Part of me was tempted to confirm my guess with a quick scry, but I squashed that idea with the knowledge that if I was right, I was going to need every bit of mana I could get my hands on to fight. Taking another caster on in a straight fight, even if she was just an adept with no personal mana of her own, was not how I’d wanted to handle the situation. I wasn’t worried, not precisely, but no one wanted to get drawn into that kind of a confrontation.

If I were still Keiran the ancient archmage, it would have been different. Back then I could generate enough mana to suppress dozens of apprentices’ magic without even trying. They would simply be so outclassed that it would become a physical impossibility for them to even move mana around. Today, here, I couldn’t do that. It would be more like fighting a duel of equals, except we’d both be armed with the mystical equivalent of a thorny switch instead of a mysteel blade.

The person reached the corpses of the mana sniffers I’d killed and halted. The number had grown from two to five over the last day, though they did seem to be getting smaller for some reason. Perhaps they had some sort of social hierarchy keyed to individual size, and the bigger ones got more territory or first feeding rights.

“Retreat back into the crevice,” I said. “We’ll let them burn some mana climbing up here before I face them.”

“If you think I’m letting you deal with whoever that is alone-” Mother said.

“If it comes down to a fight, I don’t need the handicap of having to defend you,” I told her. “I’m sorry, but you have no mana and Father’s barely better off. Neither of you can do much more than basic unstructured invocations. If I have to focus on defending you from fire blasts, I won’t be able to fight.”

“How do you know it’ll be a fight?” Father asked.

“How much do you want to bet that’s Iskara down there?”

“It… could be,” Father said slowly. “Why are you so sure it is?”

“Because I stole all the mana from the village’s draw stones before we came out here to rescue you, and Iskara is the one responsible for them. It could be someone else sensing your mana, but I don’t know who else would have the training or equipment to track it over such long distances.”

“All the more reason we should be the ones to meet her then,” Father said. “We’re the distraction. She focuses on us, thinks we’re the threat, and then you hit her with the sneak attack.”

I started to retort, but then I paused. That plan could actually work, but it did put a lot of risk on my parents. If Iskara didn’t stop to talk, I’d have to deflect her opening attack without knowing who it was targeting. As long as the conjuration was physical and we stood relatively close together, I could probably do that without much issue.

If she used something like a stone shaping transmutation to trap us, getting everyone out of the way would be a lot harder. A mental attack would almost certainly be aimed at one of my parents and would be almost impossible to block without using all of my mana to place mind shields on all three of us beforehand.

“It would be better if you waited as far back as possible with Senica,” I said.

“That’s not going to happen. You’re still our son. We have to protect you,” Father said.

There wasn’t enough time to argue with them about this. Our uninvited guest was climbing up the side of the cliff now, and doing so at a much faster rate than the mana sniffers had. Now that she had to look up and her hat no longer obscured her face, I could confirm that it was definitely Iskara.

“We only have a minute,” I said. “If you’re staying… Get Senica and Nermet as far back as possible. We’ll wait in the open, not in front of the crevice. That way, if she does attack us, there’s no chance of her shot going wide and striking anyone in hiding.”

Mother ushered Senica back with some whispered warnings about hiding while Father gave Nermet instructions to stay out of sight and to keep Senica safe. As much as I couldn’t condone using the subjugation spell to give orders, it was hard to fault Father for that one. Any decent person would have done that anyway, but Nermet physically couldn’t unless someone told him to.

Hopefully he was doing what he would have chosen if he still had the ability to make that choice. Hopefully Father didn’t die in the next few seconds and cause Nermet to go berserk. I’d warned Father that if something happened to him and the connection ran out of mana to fuel it, or if it snapped for whatever reason, there’d be a backlash that would probably break Nermet’s mind the rest of the way.

That was a lot of pressure to have on him, and it was one of the reasons I hadn’t wanted to keep the control nodule patch connected to my own mana. I was going to be doing the most dangerous parts soon, and I didn’t want the possibility of my death to lead to that backlash.

We assembled into formation, Father and Mother standing close together and me hiding behind his leg, clutching it and peering around the side as I pretended to be a normal toddler. It felt ridiculous, but it should suffice to throw Iskara. As long as our nosy neighbor hadn’t run her mouth about seeing us do any magic, we’d be fine. Even if she had, the reasonable assumption was that Mother had cast those spells, not me.

Iskara’s hand appeared over the lip of the cliff. I could feel faint traces of mana hanging off her, some sort of climbing spell that made her hands and feet stick to the stone. That was a basic enchantment, something good for practicing with. It might mean that Iskara didn’t know many spells beyond that range of difficulty. Or it might just mean that she was used to using the cheapest magic to get the job done. Adepts had to learn to keep careful track of their resources, after all.

Now that was something I could sympathize with. The way my life had been going since my reincarnation, I was starting to feel like an adept too.

The adept who functioned as Noctra’s assistant in public and his partner in secret pulled herself fully onto the cliff. She stood up, patted some dust off her outfit, and looked over at us. “Sellis,” she said, nodding first to him before looking at my mother. “Xilaya.”

“What a surprise to see you out here,” Father said.

“Yes, well, when things go wrong, I’m often the one who gets sent to clean up the mess. And this is a big mess. I wouldn’t have thought… Huh. That’s odd.” Iskara paused and studied us intently. “How in the world did you obtain a spiritual blessing, Sellis?

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