Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 40

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My first impression of a dust jackal was that it looked like a dog with stork legs that were far too long for its body. It had dark brown earthy-colored fur on its back, and lighter dusty brown, almost yellow patterns on its legs and face. Everything about it was squished, like it had been pressed flat. Its muzzle was long and narrow and its ears were long and pointy, so close together that they practically touched at the base.

All in all, it was a rather ugly creature. Judging by how similar it looked to the other five coming in right behind it, I suspected it was a typical example of the species. I’d certainly seen worse in my time, but I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to take one home and keep it as a pet.

More surprising, however, was the amount of mana I sensed coming off the group. It rolled off the animals in waves, catching hold of the dust they kicked up in their run and spreading it out into a blinding screen that flowed in front of them toward us.

“Run,” Father demanded as he rushed to place himself between the jackals and us. “Nermet, carry the kids. I’ll stall them.”

I had to admire his bravery even as I rolled my eyes. Father had no weapon and was barely competent at a single utility invocation. There was very little hope that he could do anything to save himself, and he knew that. He was just trying to buy us time to run while he distracted them by sacrificing himself.

“Oh, move out of the way,” I said, pushing at his leg as I stepped past him. “Honestly, it’s getting a bit tiresome having to remind you of this constantly.”

The dust was a form of elemental manipulation, almost evenly split between earth and air. Other than the magical manipulation to keep it billowing in the air, I didn’t detect anything special about it. My guess was that it would blind us the same way a good old fashioned dust storm would: through the physics of having small dirt particles hitting our eyes.

If the jackals could see through it, that would likely be through enhanced senses or some sort of elemental feedback from the dust, or possibly both. That whole plan relied on the dust cloud reaching us and the jackals swooping in while we were blinded, though. It was simple enough to stop just by killing them before they got that close.

I was about to do just that when a thick, muscular arm scooped me off my feet and started pulling me away from the fight. I blinked and glanced up to see Nermet running with Senica held in his other arm. Her eyes were wide with fear as she clutched at the man, though I couldn’t say whether it was from the abrupt abduction or from the predators closing in on our position. Nermet himself, well, he didn’t look determined or scared or confused. Really, he didn’t have much of any expression on his face, just like always.

“Call him off please. He’s interfering,” I yelled back at my parents.

But Father wasn’t listening. Mother noticed what was happening, and she tried to grab Nermet and get him to release me, but he shrugged her off and kept running. If I wanted free, I was going to need to use a bit of magic. I hated to do it because Nermet hadn’t really done anything wrong, but if I let him carry me away, it would probably be the death of both my parents.

No spell that caused pain would make a difference. I’d need to escalate to the level of maiming Nermet to get out of his grasp that way. Fortunately, there was a more elegant solution. The human body had plenty of interesting reactions when touched with lightning. Most living things did, I’d found. For this situation, I needed a simple shocking touch spell. I sent it down his arm, causing his muscles to spasm and allowing me to slip from his temporarily weakened grasp.

That would ache for hours, but it needed to be done. I tumbled to the ground, stunned for a second by a blow from Nermet’s moving leg as I fell. Before he could swerve around and scoop me back up, I recovered, climbed to my feet, and rushed back towards my parents.

The leading edge of the dust cloud obscured Father’s form, which meant that my original plan of a single arc lightning spell to wipe out the whole pack was off the table. The spell didn’t discriminate between friend and foe, and I couldn’t risk it hitting Father now that the jackals were so close. I’d need to resort to targeted and more costly spells to resolve the situation.

First, I needed a way to find the dust jackals through their concealing cloud. The most direct method would be to use elemental manipulation to contest their control of the dust, but it would be me against a whole pack. I could likely do it, but the mana costs to fight back so many others at the same time would be prohibitively expensive.

A much cheaper, if more complicated solution would be to rely on the divination discipline of magic to learn what I needed to know. Life sense was a spell that gave the caster the ability to feel the location of any living things within a certain range. The jackals would stand out to me no matter how they chose to hide with that. It was a bit expensive to keep running, but I should only need it for a handful of seconds.

I cast the spell while I fled from Nermet. By the time it was done, I was inside the dust cloud myself, with Father about ten feet to my right. The jackals had spread out into a semi-circle in front of us, the closest one no more than fifteen feet away and moving to trap us while its counterpart did the same from the other side. If we stood there and let them, they’d cut us off from all sides and fall on us all at once.

I needed a spell strong enough to kill a jackal in one hit but precise enough not to worry about injuring my own family. I needed it to be quick enough to cast that I could kill all six jackals in seconds or versatile enough to kill multiple targets without sacrificing precision. In addition to all of that, I needed it to be cheap.

That last condition limited my options severely, but I had a spell in mind that I thought fit the situation. My only concern was that the jackals had what appeared to be two elemental affinities. Against a sapient caster, I would have hesitated to use an elemental conjuration that they’d shown proficiency in lest they counter the spell.

Against animals and dumb monsters, it was less of a concern. I pulled mana through my mana crystal and let it stream out from my core into the shape of the spell I wanted, a relatively cheap conjuration known as stone needle. If it had been a permanent transmutation, it would have been costly. But as a conjuration, I was able to cast one each second for about a quarter of my total reserves, with my mana crystal making up the difference.

Every second, a four-foot-long needle of sharp, black stone jutted up from the ground and punched through a jackal’s jaw into its brain. It remained in existence for precisely three seconds before breaking back apart into mana and vanishing. By the time the jackals realized something had gone wrong with their plan, three of them were dead. None of them thought to flee before I killed the last one.

Without their power holding the dust in the air, it was a simple act of air manipulation to sweep the cloud away and reveal the results of my handiwork. An arc lightning spell would have been about a third less mana, but this was acceptable.

Before I could examine the corpses more closely, Nermet grabbed me again with his injured arm. “No,” Father said, snagging his shoulder as he turned to run again. “It’s fine, you can put them down now. Just wait here with us.”

Nermet gave no response but to set Senica and me back on the ground. I suppressed a sigh that was one part annoyance and one part sympathy and walked forward to look at the corpses I’d made. Mother reached out a hand to stop me as I passed by, but she paused before actually touching me and turned to Senica instead.

“What are you doing?” Father asked as I approached the first body. He followed me over and eyed the single bloody entry wound visible below the jackal’s jaw.

“There’s something off about these creatures,” I said. “Their magic was more powerful than I expected.”

“Didn’t seem to slow you down much,” Father told me. “All I saw was the dust blinding me and then a few seconds later, it blew away and they were already dead.”

“Mmm,” I agreed. “The dust was the give-away. For what should be six creatures of animal intelligence working with almost no mana, it was far too well coordinated an effort with far too much mana put into it. I expected something half the size of what they created, and that it would be patchy or thin.”

Mana cores could be tricky things to harvest. They weren’t physical organs, and anyone thinking to cut open a freshly killed monster and scoop it out was in for a disappointment. It wasn’t really even possible to harvest the core itself, barring some extremely unlikely scenarios and a lot of specialized equipment. What I could do was harvest the leftover mana and get a feel for the core’s structure in the process.

This wasn’t normally a worthwhile procedure. The mana would leak out on its own and join the rest of the ambient mana in the world without me having to do anything at all. For obvious reasons, that didn’t work here. If I wanted to take the mana directly and refine it with my own, time was of the essence.

I extended my senses into the body and found the jackal’s mana core. It was surprisingly robust for an animal that size, and more importantly, it wasn’t a perfect, flawless sphere like I’d been expecting. Instead, I could detect faint ridges and folds along its surface, almost like…

“This core is partially latticed,” I muttered to myself. “Impossible.”

Had someone been experimenting on the animals? There was no way a wild dirt-wielding dog had managed to ignite its core and then begin the process of transforming it with a stage two lattice. Someone or something had to have been helping it along.

I quickly harvested the mana from it, more than I’d used to kill it, so this encounter wasn’t a total loss, and moved on to the next. I found the same thing there, though this one hadn’t been quite as far along in the latticing process.

When I was done, I stood up and regarded Father with a frown. “Something is wrong with these jackals. I can’t believe they would have developed mana cores like this naturally. It’s far more likely someone was experimenting on them.”

“Who would do that?” Father asked.

“Who knows? My first guess would be Noctra, but only because he’s the only one I can think of with the means. I can’t imagine why he would do this, and what his experiments would be doing way out here, miles away from the village.”

The silver lining to the encounter was that the dust jackals had so much mana, I’d actually come out ahead by a good amount. But still, the mystery of it worried me. I couldn’t think of any good reason to experiment on the local wildlife, especially not in a region so starved for mana to begin with. Maybe that had been the point though, to alter animals to produce more mana so they could be regularly drained of it. Maybe them being all the way out in the wastes was an accident.

I didn’t know, but I suspected I would need to find out sooner or later. I couldn’t ignore the signs of another mage in the area if it turned out Noctra had nothing to do with it.

For now, there was nothing to do but keep walking toward home.

***

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