Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 58

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“We’re going to end today’s lesson a bit early,” I said as I noticed Karad approaching us through the trees. “Vhan, keep practicing gauging individual mana levels. Tomorrow I’m going to have you cold-reading other people’s mana and helping Talik do the same.”

The other three wandered off as soon as I dismissed them, but Shel stuck around. “Today is the day?” she asked, having noticed Karad.

“It is. It’s going to take about an hour and it’ll probably be very boring to an outside observer.”

“I’d like to stay as well. I know my ability to sense mana isn’t developed enough to follow what you do, but it can’t hurt to observe.”

“As long as you can refrain from distracting me,” I said. Truthfully, short of attacking me, I doubted there was anything she could do to disrupt my work, but it would be less annoying to not have them in the background chattering or pestering me with questions. Plus, it would be a good test to see if anyone was going to make a move against me when they thought I was vulnerable. I expected Karad would move to intercept them since it was his nephew I was working on, but either way, it’d be a nice little experiment to see if anyone was going to make a move.

The most likely result was that Karad and Shel watched me closely, with neither doing anything. I was still too valuable a resource right now. Once the first few apprentices went through their ignition rituals, they’d reevaluate, but there was a reason I’d been putting that off. It wasn’t because I wanted their skills honed so that their cores would be as strong as possible. It was because I was collecting mana for my own upgrade and things were moving along quite quickly.

It turned out about a quarter of the town was capable of putting mana in a storage crystal without any instruction at all, and that fact alone had increased the amount of extra mana available immensely, even if it had resulted in me spending three extra days making a dozen more storage crystals. The Collectors, other than Ayaka, didn’t have a way to tell if anyone was holding anything back, but even if people were, the sheer increase in efficiency made it so we were bringing in more mana than ever before.

I’d taken my cut, of course. The barrier was actually working for about eight hours a day, an utter waste of resources if ever there was one, and I’d heard that the Barrier Wardens had confirmed they could feel a tangible difference when they were near it. Individual people had made the trip across the fields at night when it was turned on to experience the difference for themselves, and there was no longer any doubt that Noctra had lied to everyone.

What this meant for me personally was that as the storage crystals helped cut off a huge chunk of transference loss from the draw stone system, I got a larger and larger portion of the mana the village tithed. At the rate I was going, my next big project was going to be building my mana lattice. I’d have a stage two core inside a month.

For the moment, it was well worth the hassle of pouring mana into the ward stone, creating new panes of glass for the greenhouses, including the new one that was under construction, casting occasional healing spells, and remaining under ‘house arrest,’ if it could even be called that. I rarely wanted to go anywhere, and when I did, I just went while one of Karad’s people followed me around.

I imagined that as time went on and more villagers ignited their mana cores, our fields would begin to flourish and they’d turn towards improving their general living conditions. Amenities such as chilled or heated water would be in their grasp. There was a lot of empty room inside the radius of the barrier near the manor, and I suspected new constructions of larger houses built out of better material would start popping up within a year or so. People would move into them and the space their former homes occupied would likely be cannibalized as everything spread out.

That was all assuming that we survived the confrontation when the Wolf Pack finally sent someone out to check on Noctra and Iskara. If we were lucky, it’d be just one mage. A more likely scenario was a mage plus a group of warriors supporting him. The worst case was the entire cabal showing up, but I suspected they were too firmly entrenched in Derro for everyone to leave all at once.

While I considered the future of the village, I called Nermet out and got to work. As I’d told Shel, there wasn’t much to see for anyone who hadn’t refined their ability to sense mana. From her perspective, I was clearly doing something, but the details were all fuzzy. Karad just saw me sitting there staring at Nermet’s head.

In reality, I was double checking every support structure I’d built into the subjugation spell as I’d slowly removed the hooks it had dug in Nermet’s brain. All of the ancillary connections had been broken, one by one, until there was nothing but the main control loop left. Normally, tampering with this would cause the spell to tear into Nermet’s mind and destroy him. Now, I had all its flailing tendrils safely detached and tucked away.

It was time to cut the main loop, restrain it, and pull the spell completely free. There were a lot of spells, countless varieties that did almost the exact same thing, but sometimes, some tasks just had to be done freehand by a master who was skilled enough in raw mana manipulation to pull it off. This was one of those times.

My mana was a scalpel wielded by my will, held steady by centuries of practice and discipline. Other, lesser, mages might have been able to replicate what I was doing, removing the spell without killing its host, but I doubted there was anyone who could do it without causing additional damage to Nermet.

It took me the better part of an hour to make those final incisions in the spell’s structure without flaying Nermet’s brain. The entire time, he sat there unmoving while Karad and Shel hovered in the background. Finally, the last thread tethering the magic and Nermet together let go. The spell was now completely entangled in what was essentially a fake mind, happy and whole and doing what Noctra had designed it to do.

Shel saw it, even if she didn’t know what it was. Her eyes followed it as it rose into the air and away from its victim. Then I released my own mana, let it flash into ambience, and the subjugation spell went wild. No longer anchored to anything, it lashed out in every direction in one last futile gesture before it dissolved.

Nermet blinked twice and fell forward. His arm shot out to brace himself against the ground before anyone else could reach him. With a low groan, he looked around, his eyes bright for the first time since I met him.

“Uncle Karad?” he asked, focusing on the Garrison captain. “What happened?”

“Nermet?” Karad’s voice was hesitant. “You’re alright?”

“I’m good,” Nermet said.

This was the first time I’d heard him speak. There was a slur to his words, like he had trouble forming them properly and wasn’t sure quite when to cut the sound, but he was easy to understand. I had no trouble believing he’d suffered a head injury as a child, but it could have been a lot worse.

Karad helped his nephew to his feet and embraced the man in a hug. “You’re back,” he said. “You’re you again.”

“I’m me,” Nermet agreed.

“Yeah, you are,” Karad said, laughing. “I missed you.”

Nermet just looked at him, silent and patient.

“Come on,” Karad told him. “Say thank you to this boy here. He’s the one who saved you and brought you back to us.”

“Thank you,” Nermet said, but it had the feel of a child following instructions without really understanding why.

“You’re welcome,” I told him. “Have a good day.”

“I can’t believe it really worked. I owe you one, kid,” Karad said before leading Nermet away.

Shel and I watched them go. It was one of the rare times I’d seen her lose her pleasantly bored expression. It was hard to place what exactly was going through her head, but if I had to guess, I’d say she was just starting to realize exactly how much of a gulf there was between the two of us. I’d just done something she couldn’t even see, let alone replicate.

Shel knew that I wasn’t really a child. I was an adult in a child’s body, but it seemed like she’d expected to catch up easily enough. Maybe she’d thought she’d replace me within a year once she’d learned everything I could teach her. If so, this might have served as a demonstration that she had a long way to go.

“Something on your mind?” I asked.

“No, just… it’s good to see Karad happy, and it’s kind of weird to have Nermet talking again. It’s been years since he really said anything. I’m kind of surprised he remembers how.”

“Hmm, yes, well… my father is the one who fed that spell mana for the last month to keep Nermet alive while I worked on him.”

“I believe you mentioned that,” Shel said. “What will he do now that he has his full mana generation available to him? Should I expect to see him in class tomorrow?”

“I doubt it. Father has expressed almost no interest in learning how to cast spells. He’s still spending his mana on unstructured invocations to do field labor.”

And he was filling up a storage crystal I’d given him on the side for me. It wasn’t much, but every little bit helped. I’d need to visit home again to empty that, and also discuss whether they’d made a decision about igniting Mother’s core as well. At the moment, I was hesitant to do it since the last two ignitions I’d performed had drawn mana sniffers in, though maybe that would be a good thing. It might help keep this new council a bit more tractable if they got to watch me fry a few monsters with a fire blast.

It would be something that I coordinated with the Barrier Wardens before I did it, if for no other reason than to foist off watching for incoming trouble to them. Now that I thought about it, I should probably mention that before this group I was teaching reached that point. Maybe I’d attend one of these council meetings they were having.

“When’s your next meeting with the others?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Because I need to talk to Solidaire and Karad about you, so we might as well do it when you’re all in the same room. We can uninvite Melmir if that makes it easier.”

Shel burst into laughter. “No, no, he has to be there too, at least until we can dissolve the Collectors as an organization. If we ever can, I mean. People seem to like the new storage crystals though. I’m hoping we can replace all the draw stones with those.”

“That is one of my goals,” I said. “And train someone else to transfer the mana over to the ward stones so I don’t have to do it every night.”

By then, I’d be stage two and generating more mana than half the village combined anyway. I’d rather have the time back in my day to work on other projects than the extra mana in my budget, and if the village wanted me to do something, they could just hand me a fully charged storage crystal or two. Now I just needed to keep them on board with my plans so we could get that far.

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