Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 44

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It was the moment of truth. I’d snuck down the hallway, made sure my mana core was topped off, checked every single doorway for wards and traps, removed yet another paralysis trap on the handle, and now was standing on my toes with a finger hooked around the handle, ready to turn it. If I was right, Noctra was sleeping not twenty feet away from me. This could all be over in the next five seconds.

I turned the handle. It twisted partway, then stopped well short of unlatching the door. Of course it was locked. After all the efforts I’d gone through to make sure I wasn’t walking into a trap, I hadn’t thought to check the mechanical lock itself. I could tell at a glance that the key I’d swiped from the pantry wasn’t going to fit in this lock, so I was forced to resort to magic to get through.

I didn’t really want to on the off chance that Noctra could feel it. Conjuration was among the hardest disciplines to hide from other mages, right up there with transmutation. Even I could only limit it so much, and against a mage just a few feet away, I’d be relying on blind luck.

As I saw things, I had four options. The first was to burn some mana on a phantasmal step spell, almost seven times as much mana as unlock. But phantasmal step was an invocation, which meant it was extraordinarily easy to hide its use since all the magic was internal. It would practically guarantee me an easy, unnoticed entry into the room at the cost of almost my entire core of mana.

The second was to go look for and find a key, but that would take precious time and there was every possibility it was inside the very room I was trying to get into. I could end up searching the entire manor and coming up with nothing, which would drastically increase my chances of getting caught if I needed to worry about every possible ward.

The third option was to use unlock and hope that Noctra was asleep or otherwise occupied. I couldn’t hear anything through the door, even with sharpened senses active, but if I didn’t catch him unaware, it would take several seconds for the spell to work. I could be walking into a fire blast as soon as I opened the door.

Finally, I could risk scrying the other side of the doorway. It would only take a few seconds, but if I set off a ward with it, I could be alerting Noctra that someone was here even if he wasn’t physically in the room. Of course, the same thing might happen if I walked into the room, but I’d at least get a chance to look for wards if I was careful when I opened the door.

Every strategy had its drawbacks, depending on whether Noctra was awake or asleep. To make the best decision, I needed more information than I had. There was a spell that could scry for wards, but it would drain about two days’ worth of mana generation for thirty seconds of use and it would only detect the existence of wards, not their function. I was confident it would remain undetected, unlike the intermediate ranked scrying spell I’d been using.

Ward scanner would leave me low on mana, but it was the least risky of my possible moves. I’d still have enough mana to throw out four or five spells, but if Noctra wasn’t in there, I would effectively be crippling myself. If Noctra was in bed, it was the best move. If he wasn’t, it was probably the worst.

Well, I had a simple solution for that. I could just use life sense to determine if he was there or not. It wasn’t likely that his wards would be powerful enough to cloak him from an intermediate divination. If he was in bed, I’d burst in and kill him. If he wasn’t, there was no reason to even bother going into the room.

Sometimes I just got so far ahead of myself with over-engineered solutions that I forgot that simple spells could provide just as much utility with a dash of cleverness added to them. I was far too used to having virtually unlimited mana to throw at problems and far too dismissive of easily countered basic spells when my opponent probably didn’t rank as greater than an apprentice himself.

A few seconds later, life sense confirmed for me that the other side of the wall had no human life in it. Given the state of the wards and traps I’d encountered so far, I had very little reason to believe that my spell was being tricked, which meant I’d probably wasted my time and mana coming here. To be thorough, I’d check the other rooms and hope Noctra was working on something somewhere else. It wasn’t as good as catching him asleep, but it was better than him not being here at all.

I only had to go eight steps down the hall before someone came into the edge of life sense’s range. They were in the farthest room away from me on the west side of the hall, upright in a chair, from what I could tell, with their head lolled to the side. Perhaps I’d gotten lucky after all and Noctra had passed out in the middle of working on a project.

I spent the mana to keep life sense active as I approached the door. Whoever was inside showed no signs of moving or reacting, not that I made all that much noise to begin with. I stopped in front of the door, mentally prepared myself to cast a sleep spell just in case whoever it was that was in there was actually awake after all, and reached up to test the handle. It turned easily and I slipped inside the room.

There was a man sleeping in an overstuffed chair in the corner, softly snoring and with drool coming out of the corner of his mouth. He looked like he was in his early forties with black hair going gray at his temples, wrinkles starting to form around his eyes and on his forehead, and deep bags under his eyes.

If I hadn’t already known what Noctra looked like from scrying him, I would never have connected this man to the con artist governor of Alkerist. He looked exhausted and worn out, like he had none of the vitality he’d displayed when he’d met my father. His clothes were wrinkled from sleeping in them and his hands were liberally stained with ink.

He also appeared to be living in this room for some reason. A pile of clothes had been built up in the opposite corner of his chair, the bookshelf behind the desk was stuffed with every sort of personal possession and no books, and even his mud-stained boots were placed neatly against the wall next to the door.

It was hard to reconcile the man before me with the one who’d kidnapped my father and sent him to be a slave in another town. Based on the ceramic mug and the empty jug near his feet, Noctra had drunk himself to oblivion. What could have caused him to descend to such a state? Was everything else just an act?

Most importantly, did it matter?

I’d come here to kill Noctra. If I’d had the mana for it, I might have captured and mentally interrogated him first, but that wasn’t a realistic possibility, and keeping him alive was far too dangerous. It was better to end this now.

I took a few steps back, then conjured a basic force bolt. At the same time, I used a mana manipulation technique known as spell shape to alter the force bolt’s composition to make it harder and sharper. I studied Noctra one last time, committing his current state to memory, then I let the force bolt fly.

Humans were, as a general rule, fragile creatures. There were many, many monsters with skin so tough a spell as simple and weak as a force bolt couldn’t even scratch them. There were monsters that regenerated from injuries so quickly that a hundred force bolts cast by a hundred apprentices wouldn’t be enough to overcome them.

For Noctra, governor of the village known as Alkerist, the force bolt’s sharpened tip entered his eye and passed through into his brain so quickly that he gave a single jerk in place and stilled. He didn’t even slip out of his chair. If not for the ruined eye and the blood running down his face, nobody would even have suspected he was dead.

Just like that, his hold over the village was broken. I should have been elated, or at least grimly satisfied. I’d accomplished my goal. There’d be some fallout to deal with, sure, but my family was safe. I had time to devote to myself so that I could form my lattice and graft it to my mana core. I had time to figure out where I was and what had happened here.

I should have been happy, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was only the beginning. There was something else out there that had its sights on Alkerist, something that wasn’t going to give it up just because the puppet it had installed here had been dispatched. The mysterious cabal based out of Derro had an interest in Noctra. He was connected to them in some way and in their debt.

Someone would come calling, probably soon.

Maybe that was what had gotten Noctra into such a state. He’d been in debt; perhaps selling my father was a desperation move and he’d known that it had failed. If so, I needed to start digging through any and all records in the manor. If I was lucky, I’d find some storage crystals that I could harvest for my own work.

I glanced back at Noctra’s corpse and shook my head. I should have been relieved it was over. Instead I was already preparing to tackle another problem. “One thing at a time,” I said.

First, the body needed to go. It should be incinerated for good measure, just in case anyone in this mysterious foreign cabal was scrying on Noctra directly, though it seemed far more likely that there was some sort of scrying beacon in the manor. Tracking that down was going to be a nightmare.

Actually, going through everything was going to be a nightmare. I hadn’t looked around much, but unless every room was empty and Noctra was doing no research whatsoever, there was a lot of space to fill here in the manor. I couldn’t credit the idea that he was sending all of the mana he stole to the cabal without keeping even a little bit for himself.

There was no point in getting ahead of myself. With Noctra dead, I was now free to properly explore his manor without worrying about alarm wards. The first thing to do was get a proper inventory of what I was working with, then start figuring out what needed priority. Gathering evidence of Noctra’s misconduct was bound to be near the top of the list, else to the villagers I’d just be a murderer instead of a savior. I wouldn’t say that I cared much about their opinions, but it would be difficult to live here if they were constantly trying to arrest me or kill me.

I gave the room one last disgusted glance. The rubbish, the stink of booze, the piles of dirty clothes… It all reminded me far too much of the last time I’d been three years old. At least there wasn’t the stale smell of yamma weed and sex overlaying the whole thing. That would have completed the mental picture.

I’d search somewhere else first.

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