Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 46

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This whole time, I’d been thinking of the barrier as something of a myth. The village obviously functioned fine without a barrier and had been for years. Based on Father’s story, I’d made some assumptions about local history that it seemed were incorrect.

It didn’t take more than a glance to confirm that this ward stone was designed to project a huge barrier, though exactly what kind would require a few minutes to read the runes inscribed on its surface. That was largely irrelevant right now anyway, since it met some sort of unfortunate fate and cracked. It was nothing but a conversation piece now, though I assumed someone had been trying to fix it.

If my understanding of the timeline was correct, it probably hadn’t been Noctra’s predecessor who’d been working on it. He’d died during the incident that had killed Father’s friend, and it looked like the magical backlash from the ward stone might have been what had done it.

That left Noctra himself, though he’d obviously failed after spending a great deal of effort. Just judging by the few diagrams he’d left open in various books, it was obvious that he didn’t understand the first thing about how ward stones operated. It looked like he’d been trying to apply the principles of a static ward field to the stone when he should have been looking into transmutation to patch up the damage and inscription to fix the runes that had been destroyed.

The confusion was understandable, given the name, but ward stones had much more in common with enchantments than they did with traditional wards. There was, admittedly, some overlap, but whoever had been working on this one had gone in completely the wrong direction trying to fix it. I couldn’t read any of the labels on the diagram, but it appeared to me like they were trying to create some sort of patch made of pure mana that would hold the shape of the destroyed runes.

That would never work, of course. It was a temporary solution at best, and completely missed the point of the ward stone being a physical object to anchor the spells to. The ward stone itself was the work of a master scribe with a solid foundation in transmutation, far too complex for someone who barely qualified as an apprentice to repair.

I’d have to examine the runes more carefully—I could still read those, at least—to confirm what exactly the ward stone was meant to accomplish, but I couldn’t see any good reason that I wouldn’t be able to fix this thing. For now, I was going to leave it alone as more evidence of Noctra’s lies. Between this and Iskara’s workshop, I had plenty of proof of what they’d been up to. The problem was that it might not be so apparent to someone who didn’t understand magic.

Hopefully, someone in the village could read that ledger. That book was probably my best option for proving that the mage who’d been protecting their town was actually scamming them and stealing their mana. On the off-chance that its contents proved completely indecipherable, it was probably a good idea to keep looking.

Of the few remaining rooms, only one of them proved to have anything interesting in it. Other warded rooms were being used as storage, and I might repurpose some of those raw materials in the near future if it proved to have any quality, but for the moment I only wanted to take a general inventory with an eye for things the villagers could understand.

The exception to that was a room with a map pinned up on the wall. It clearly showed the town and the surrounding wastes, no labels needed. It also marked twenty or so spots in a rough circle around the village, though focused heavily on the west and north-east portions where the land flattened out. If I didn’t miss my guess, one of those marked spots was near the trail we’d returned on.

Noctra knew about the dust jackals. I thought back to their mana cores, so unusual to find in nature. Animals almost never had a stage two core. They might have a pseudo stage three, as that was far easier to accomplish if ultimately weaker when done out of order, but it took a degree of intelligence to create and graft a lattice to a mana core. Dust jackals did not have that intelligence, not unless the pack I’d killed was exceptionally stupid. Assuming they were indicative of the species as a whole, someone had been experimenting on them.

I briefly went through the diagrams in the notes before nodding to myself. Most of them looked like ideas for constructing a lattice, meaning Noctra was at least aware of the concept, even if he hadn’t managed to refine it enough to do it to himself. I would have noticed if he’d possessed a stage two core when I finally encountered him, and from what I could tell, he’d only had a decidedly mediocre stage one.

Good for him for practicing, I supposed, though I could think of a few organizations from my past who would have balked at him using animal test subjects. Given the nature of making changes to a mana core, I couldn’t personally blame him for wanting to make sure he had it right before he grafted a lattice into his own core. Making suboptimal choices due to a lack of knowledge was how I’d ended up in the position I had in my previous life. Doing things right this time was one of my major goals.

Of course, I knew how to repair the lattice I was going to build, including how to swap out a few modular pieces to increase overall efficiency later on once my core grew to full size. I’d be weaker for the next decade or so than if I used a permanently fixed lattice, but I wasn’t willing to sacrifice long-term power in exchange for a small advantage now.

When I finished looking around, I took a moment to gather my thoughts. I had sufficient evidence that any mage could understand that Noctra had been bilking the village for years, but there were no mages besides myself. Father might technically be an apprentice, but he was too new to know what he was looking at, and his standing with the village wasn’t good anyway. I had a lot of written material, but I didn’t expect anyone to understand a word of it since it wasn’t in the language we were all speaking.

The cracked ward stone was a damning piece of evidence, assuming no one tried to blame me for it. But again, it was something a mage would easily understand and anyone else might not. I could only hope that the villagers would recognize what it was and that it had been like that before I’d gotten here. It seemed to me that seeing a few big cracks in what was obviously magical writing would be enough proof to say that it didn’t work, but some people didn’t think like that. To them, a shovel still worked even though the handle was splintered and the blade was chipped. Worn-down magic should still work too, just maybe not as well.

If only it was so easy.

I had some proof that Noctra had been using mana to do experiments, though not any proof that it was anyone’s mana but his own. That might not fly on its own, but if I could translate the notes, I could prove his experiments had been used to modify local wildlife to make them dangerous and, if I wanted to lie about the technical definitions, turn them into monsters. He hadn’t done that, but claiming that their governor was making monsters would have a lot more impact than saying he was doing magical experiments on animals to refine his technique.

I had Nermet, but he’d already been slow before Noctra had gotten ahold of him. Fixing him was a goal, but it probably wouldn’t have an effect on whether anyone believed me over the next few days. Unfortunately, I lacked the equipment to keep records of what I scried. That would have made things much easier if I could just cast out an illusion of the conversation between Father and Noctra.

Those were easy enough to tamper with and there was always someone crying foul whenever a mage tried to submit an illusion as evidence, but it might work in my favor here. These people didn’t have a clue what was and wasn’t possible with magic, and if they were going to doubt the factual evidence I had, I wasn’t above presenting them with some fabricated evidence that I couldn’t prove was actually true.

The biggest problem with this whole situation was that I did not have the kind of mana reserves I’d need to protect myself from the entire village if things turned against me. Extracting myself was achievable. Getting the rest of my family to safety with me was a far more dubious prospect. I could take the mana from those storage crystals now, I supposed. It wasn’t like anyone except for my father would be able to feel the mana in them.

Even if I did all that and went scrounging for every bit of mana I could pull out besides, like from cleaning out those emitters they used as Testing devices, it wasn’t going to be enough to fight off the entire village without killing people. It was far, far easier to kill than it was to restrain, especially in large numbers. Three or four arc lightnings could kill a third of the village and was well within my means. For the same amount of mana, I’d get six or seven paralyzing grasps, and those would last only minutes.

Taking the mana held in the storage crystals wouldn’t make a big difference, and on the off-chance that someone could read the ledger, I wanted it to match up properly. If things went sideways, I’d find an alternate solution. For now, I probably had enough proof to at least merit a closer look at things.

I needed to talk to Father about all this. With Noctra gone, the village was without his dubious protection. Yes, they’d be able to keep their own mana again, and that should make life significantly easier for them if they wanted to keep on the way they’d been going, but there should be someone around to drop a fire blast on a roaming monster should the need arise. I didn’t want that person to be me, nor did I expect the village to want me for the role. I was three. I still had to stand on my toes to reach door handles on occasion.

The sun would be up soon anyway. It was time to go retrieve my family and walk Father through what I’d uncovered. Senica should probably be kept away from the room with the body in it. Really, it wouldn’t be smart to let her near any room with anything expensive and valuable in it. I’d gone out of my way to deliberately keep everything as close to how I’d found it as possible, and I didn’t need anyone messing that up. I could trust Father to look, but not touch. I did not trust Senica to follow that rule.

I locked the side door leading into the kitchen behind me, not that I expected anyone to come rummaging through before dawn. But I’d found the keys to the place while I was poking around and there was no reason not to take precautions, so I did it anyway, then set off at a jog hastened by a simple invocation to find my family.

Assuming they hadn’t been caught, they would be waiting south of town. When I hadn’t found them after about ten minutes of looking around, I grew worried that something had gone wrong. Perhaps another Barrier Warden had run across them and captured them without my magic there to assist. Perhaps they’d run afoul of some creature lurking out in the dark.

Perhaps Father had just given in to Mother’s badgering and they’d returned home. I doubted it, but it was possible. There was an easy enough way to find out, though I did feel I was being a bit too free with my mana even as I cast a scry spell.

It snapped into place immediately and I saw my whole family in the village’s one and only holding cell in the Garrison barracks. Damn. That was going to be a pain.

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