Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 34

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Iskara stared at my father, waiting for an answer. I could practically see the gears turning in her head, measuring, cataloguing, and assessing him. She took a step forward, then another.

“That’s far enough,” Father said, snapping her out of her funk.

“Hmm? Oh. Where was I?”

“A big mess,” Mother said dryly.

“Ah, yes. But that was before I realized your husband had been blessed by the spirits. You must tell me how this happened.”

There was a hunger in those words. It was well-hidden, but I recognized it. I’d seen it before. Adepts universally wanted to become mages. There was always a reason they couldn’t, usually some sort of damage to their mana cores but occasionally they suffered from a curse or disease that prevented them from manipulating their own mana. In this place, it seemed to be a lack of knowledge as to how to actually ignite a core that held adepts back.

They all wanted to fix that deficiency, whatever it was. I’d seen it dozens of times. Iskara was no exception. Oh, she had her tricks. There was a small wand hidden in her sleeve, probably fastened in place with some sort of wrist strap, that she could draw in an instant to shape the mana inside its crystal into some sort of attack. I also felt no less than six mana crystals around the wrist opposite of the wand, probably strung together on a bracelet. None of them were very big, but all were fully charged.

Iskara had more than enough mana available to her to kill us all. I couldn’t let a fight drag out between us, not if I wanted to win. When I struck, it needed to be decisive, so fast that she never saw the spell coming. I needed something I could form instantly and that didn’t have any sort of travel time, probably something that would damage her mind.

“I’m not really sure why you’d think I’d tell you anything after what you two did to me,” Father said. “If you wanted my help, casting a sleep spell on me, then dragging me out into the middle of the wastes where I could have been eaten by any monster that happened to be in the area wasn’t a great way to go about asking.”

“That was before you received a blessing. Now you’re a mage, and that means you’re far too valuable,” Iskara said.

“That’s why you sent people to kidnap the rest of my family?” Father asked. “To do… what? To hold them hostage?”

“No, of course not,” Iskara said. “That was unrelated to you becoming a mage.”

I scanned the adept carefully. She was confident, and she had a lot of good reasons to be, but this seemed too much. Did she know something I didn’t, or was I just overthinking things? I was used to opponents with monumental resources to draw on, able and willing to spend more mana on simple traps than my new body could generate in a year.

There couldn’t be any traps. We’d been camping out on this ledge for days now, and if she’d tried to set something after arriving, I would have sensed it. I couldn’t help but be wary of whatever trick she had to use against us. It wouldn’t have to be formidable to stop me, not in the state I was in.

“But you realize that it doesn’t exactly make me want to help you, right?”

“I don’t see why we need to be enemies here,” Iskara said with a shake of her head. “It’s not like you all have never made mistakes. Last week you were a minor curiosity. Now you’re in a position to become a strong asset and get ahead in life. Do you really want to be a farmer until you die? An ostracized farmer that the whole village hates, no less.”

There. When Iskara shook her head, I’d spotted a fine chain hanging around her neck. Now that I had a clue to tell me where to look, I could feel the draw stone amulet hanging under her shirt. That was a nasty trick, right there. A mage would never want to wear something like that; it would weaken them too much, either by stealing away their mana as it was generated or by wearing them out mentally resisting it.

An adept, on the other hand, generated almost no mana to begin with. All the fuel for Iskara’s spells was stored in her bracelet, far enough away from the draw stone amulet that it wouldn’t be affected until she drew it into her mana core. She’d only need to resist the pull for a few seconds while she cast the spell.

And in the meantime, any spell cast against her would see a majority of the mana drained away on contact. It wasn’t perfect immunity by any means, and back when I’d been an archmage in possession of a stage nine mana core, I would have overwhelmed it without even trying. Now, things would be a bit trickier.

“You can’t possibly expect me to trust Noctra after this,” Father said while Mother nodded next to them.

“To hell with Noctra,” Iskara said. “I’ll make you a deal. You tell me how you obtained your blessing, show me how to do it too, and I’ll kill Noctra myself.”

I paused.

That shouldn’t really have been a surprise. I’d already gotten the impression that the two weren’t on the best of terms. If anything, it seemed like Iskara had been sent by whatever cabal he answered to back in Derro to keep an eye on him and ensure regular shipments of mana made its way back to her masters.

“You’d betray him?” Mother asked sharply. “How are we supposed to trust you if you’d stab a man you’ve been working with for fifteen years in the back.”

Iskara started laughing. “Oh no, I don’t work with Noctra. He’s here as a punishment. I’m here to make sure he pays back his debts. Trust me, he hates my guts.”

I silently willed my parents to keep Iskara talking, to fish more information out of her, but they both just stared at her mutely. Whoever Iskara’s employer was, that was who we would need to worry about after I killed Noctra. The more I could learn about them now, the better off we’d be in the future.

I considered a mental interrogation, but it would almost certainly cost me more mana than I had available. Even if I could break the attunement on Iskara’s mana crystals, there was so little in there that it wouldn’t be worth the effort. The wand was the same story. They were hand-crafted for the individual who would wield them, though I was curious to see what kind of design changes had been made to compensate for an environment completely devoid of ambient mana.

The short version was that I did not have the budget to go trawling through Iskara’s brain for secrets and I wasn’t likely to get much from her. Worse, thanks to that draw stone amulet, I was going to have to be creative with how I put her down. I was considering a transmutation to soften the stone under her feet, but doing it at that range fast enough to trap her would be problematic.

Throwing her off the cliff also had its appeal, but I couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t save herself with a simple weight reduction invocation. The amulet’s location so close to her head also made mental attacks problematic.

A wide burst of fire would probably be effective, though the damage would be far more severe on her bottom half. But really, the best solution would be to cut her off from her tools. An adept without any outside sources of mana was just a regular human with a lot of academic knowledge about how magic worked, after all.

“If it’s a punishment for him, why isn’t it a punishment for you?” Mother asked.

Iskara shook her head and smirked at my parents. “Now, now. Let’s see a bit of reciprocal trust before I go giving away the big secrets. Tell me how you gained your blessing.”

“I don’t think so,” Father said.

In an instant, Iskara’s whole demeanor shifted. “I don’t think you understand. You’re going to tell me. You can do it voluntarily, or I can make you. If you don’t want to cooperate, I’ll pin the three of… wait, don’t you have two kids? Where’s the other one?”

Iskara started drawing in mana from her bracelet, and I fought to hold back a grin. There was an angle I hadn’t considered once I’d found out about the amulet. In order to cast a spell, she needed to hold off the draw stone from disrupting her mana. I’d assumed she’d be well practiced at it.

She wasn’t. Not only was she struggling to keep her mana inside her core while she made the spell, she actually closed her eyes to help her concentrate. Iskara was as vulnerable as she’d ever be, at least for the next few seconds. That was plenty of time.

I conjured up a big block of stone and lobbed it up in an arc to crash down on her head.

Iskara went down in a heap. Blood ran down her face from under her hair, and the mana she’d been working on shaping into a spell disappeared into the draw stone in a flash. She groaned and tried to climb back to her feet, but wasn’t able to get past her hands and knees.

Beside me, both of my parents shouted in surprise. I stepped out from around Father’s leg and examined my victim. Her head was lolling to one side and blood ran freely to drip onto the stone below. My conjured stone had dissolved right around the same time it impacted her skull, the mana that formed it disrupted by her draw stone amulet. Most of the spell’s mana flashed into the atmosphere where it was drunk up by the harsh environment.

As I approached, I performed a simple act of minor telekinesis to take her wand from her. It was the easier of the two weapons to remove, and potentially the more dangerous if she managed to palm it and used it to increase her offensive capabilities.

I took the bracelet next. It wasn’t even something with a clasp or latch, just a plain leather band with six small red stones embedded in them. Garnets, perhaps. My magic tugged it off her wrist and it flew through the air into my waiting grasp.

“You see, the problem is that you’d turn on us even if we agreed to ally with you. If there’s one thing people like you are reliable about, it’s looking out for your own best interest at the cost of your supposed allies,” I said. “Goodbye, Perfidy.”

Even in her current state, I didn’t trust her enough to get close so that I could remove that amulet. Instead, I used a considerably more powerful version of minor telekinesis, appropriately known as greater telekinesis, to grab Iskara by her foot and drag her backwards thirty feet into the open air. Her body swung loose as it slipped off the side of the cliff, and I let her fall to her death.

My parents watched, slack-jawed. I turned back to them and shook my head. “I thought I’d made it clear that I was killing both of them. I was hoping you’d get a bit more information before I struck, but it wasn’t worth the risk once she started casting a spell.”

“You just… just like that,” Father said. “You’re a murderer.”

I shrugged. “So was she.”

“You don’t know that,” Mother said.

“What do you think she was planning on doing to us?” I asked. “Why was she asking about your kids? Do you think that was the first time she’d ever used someone’s family as leverage? Should I have let her torture Senica until you told her what she wanted to know so that you’d feel morally justified in killing her?”

“No! It’s just…”

“The only difference between killing Iskara and killing Noctra is that I don’t plan on confronting him first,” I said.

I glanced over the edge of the cliff at Iskara’s body. She was either very dead or double jointed in every limb, including her neck. I was betting on the former, but I cast a quick scry to confirm it. The last thing I needed right now was her activating some contingency spell with her dying breath.

But no, she was very, very dead. “I have work to do,” I said as I walked past my parents into the shade of the crevice.

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