Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 66

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

“I think we can safely presume hostile intent at this point,” Karad said. “Just look at all those weapons.”

“They would need them just to cross the wastelands. They could be for monsters, not to use on us,” Shel argued.

“They’re manhunters,” I said. “My guess is Noctra’s cabal thinks he’s fled, and this hunting party was sent to run him down and remind him of his obligations. But then they got here and found out he’s actually just dead.”

They certainly hadn’t wasted any time in arriving. If anything, they’d have had to have left almost before I killed Noctra to get here so quickly. It made me wonder if it was Iskara’s death that had triggered this expedition. I hadn’t noticed a Dead Man’s Seal on her prior to killing her, but it wasn’t outside the range of possibility. They were easy enough to break and it was possible I’d just missed the flash of mana when it detected that its host had expired, especially since she’d died down on the ground below us.

I could easily picture a candle flaring to life in some room miles and miles from here. A shadowy figure hidden in thick robes would note it, report Iskara’s death, and the cabal would immediately dispatch their hunters after the most likely culprit: Noctra himself trying to slip his leash. Only, their tracker would arrive at the village and quickly learn that Noctra was dead. He’d delay taking action to report back to Derro, receive new orders to investigate the sudden revival of the barrier and new sources of magic showing up.

It was all entirely plausible in my mind. The only question left was what orders they’d been given. Would they attack and try to capture us? Were they waiting for me to ignite more cores so they could harvest those people as resources to be captured and drained? Was it a recruitment pitch? If so, did we actually have the option to say no? ‘Serve willingly or be a slave’ was not that unusual a stand for people with power to take, stupid as it was. That was an excellent way to get assassinated by a subordinate looking to obtain their freedom.

“There are some positives here. We’ve got five people who presumably aren’t mages and should be relatively easy to capture and hold onto if needed. Of the two who definitely are mages, they’re working together but don’t have a means of instantaneous communication. If we go after one of them, we’ll retain the element of surprise to use against the other one.”

If I had to pick a target, it was going to be the mage with the familiar. He was the one gathering information; without him, the others wouldn’t know what was going on. Taking out one mage while effectively blinding the other was about as good an opener as I could manage with my limited resources. Even getting to that cave was going to be expensive, let alone fighting.

With my mana crystal completely full, I could manage a teleport there and back, but that would be it. Every spell I cast in that fight would be time I spent waiting to generate more mana before I returned back to the village. Flying would be cheaper, but it carried the risk of being seen on the approach unless I mixed in invisibility, which would easily push the mana cost up past teleportation, even if I only used it for ten or twenty seconds.

Teleportation was better. In. Attack. Out. If I did it right, I’d only be there for ten minutes. All I needed to do was catch the mage off-guard, overpower him long enough to ask some questions, and then depending on the answers, possibly kill him before I teleported back. It would take something like ten or eleven days to recover all the mana that few minutes cost me on my own, but it was workable if I relied on the village to supplement my reserves.

In my mirror, the mage had finished reading the message his associate had sent him and was speaking to the hunting party. Even without sound, it was easy to tell he was describing people. Lip reading wasn’t something I’d set out to learn, nor was it a skill I’d used in a long, long time. It had been well over a thousand years since I was so unskilled that I couldn’t weave sound into my scrying. And never had I been as mana starved as I was now, not even as a child in my previous life.

Despite my lack of proficiency, I caught enough words to get the general gist of it, and him holding his hand up at certain heights as he described new targets made it easy to confirm. That combined with the fact that I recognized the underlined names in the other mage’s journal told me everything I needed to know.

“They’ve got targets picked out,” I said. “Probably planning an abduction.”

“Me and the other students,” Shel said. “Who else?”

“My family,” I told her. “I didn’t get a long look at the paper, but the obvious connection was anyone doing magic or associated with it in some way. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was another list of important people like the rest of the council. They might also go after the Barrier Wardens individually to prevent any sort of alarms.”

“We’ll be ready for them,” Karad said. “I’ll go speak with Solidaire right now and get messages out to everybody. Those crags are miles away. By the time they get here, we’ll be in place to stop them.”

This left me with a bit of a dilemma. I could go after the familiar-using mage and expend all of my mana in a sneak attack that would leave the enemy blinded and likely unable to get a message back to Derro, though killing the mage might also activate a hidden Dead Man’s Seal. If I did that, I’d need to rely on the Garrison and Barrier Wardens to defend us from that other group, and if their mage was in any way competent, that would result in people dying.

The worst part of this was that I still didn’t know their true goals. I was predicating my entire strategy on assumptions I was making, admittedly ones that were looking more and more likely to be correct by the minute. I needed more time, and it didn’t look like I was going to get it. If it came down to people in the village getting hurt or the people invading it with a capture or kill list, I knew what I’d choose.

“Do either of you know if we’ve got any spare mana in storage?” I asked. “Anything at all that wasn’t fed into the ward stone this evening?”

Curse my thoroughness, I’d already cleaned up every bit of mana I could find. The emitters used for Testing were spotless now, as was every single bit of the manor. I’d gone out of my way to hunt it all down, even to the point of consuming all of Noctra’s stockpiled, if subpar, resources.

“Well, there’s a draw stone here,” Shel said. “I’m not sure how much mana it’s got in it. Nobody’s used it in weeks.”

Even if it was at capacity, that wasn’t going to be nearly enough. I’d need a different strategy if I wanted to address the incoming threat and the mage acting as a scout. And I’d need to come up with it right away, since it looked like we’d gotten lucky enough to get warning of an imminent attack just before it happened. The hunters were gathering up their gear, but only the stuff they’d need for a fight. It looked like they were planning a raid that ended with a retreat from the village once their goals were met.

Its mission complete, the hawk went back on the wing. I took a moment to study the angle and confirm that it was coming back to the village, probably to scout for the approaching hunters. That settled the attack order for me. I needed to take out the mage bonded to that familiar first.

“Could you pull the mana back out of the barrier?” Karad asked. “It’s not going to do us a lot of good against other humans anyway.”

“Theoretically, I could drain it, but that would almost certainly damage the ward stone itself.”

It would do for a last resort tactic, but I had another idea. With a thought, I shifted the scrying mirror back to the mage hiding in the cave up in the mountains north of the village. “There’s enough mana in this mirror for it to hold this view for another ten minutes,” I said. “If something goes wrong and I don’t come back, well, adjust your plans accordingly.”

“Wait, what are you doing?”

“Taking a piece off the board,” I said. “Now stop distracting me. This isn’t as easy as I make it look.”

***

Teleportation was a master tier spell. Even in my prime, there had been few mages capable of casting it. It required mastery of both the conjuration and divination disciplines and, unless the caster had reached at least stage five, it was so mana hungry that it was impossible to cast directly from internal mana reserves. That forced the mage to rely on channeling mana from an external source while trying to weave together a spell at the absolute highest ranking for difficulty.

It took me about five minutes to weave the whole thing together, and by the time I finished, my mana crystal was down to around forty percent. I’d either slightly overestimated how much I had available or I’d underestimated the transference loss. It was a good thing I wasn’t planning on teleporting back when I was finished, or that plan would be completely shot. It would take hours to amass enough mana to pull off a second teleportation now.

The spell took hold and I was hurled through the Astral Realm to land just outside the cave, where I immediately noticed two things. First: I hadn’t eaten in a while and that meat smelled really good. Second, and more importantly: the enemy mage only had a stage one core. It held three times as much mana as mine, but that was a function of his age, not any advancements he’d made.

I’d shrouded my own mana usage as much as possible, but there was still a slight chance that he’d noticed me. If he was anything like Noctra, I didn’t need to be concerned. I was expecting a higher level of skill since presumably these mages were in good standing with their cabal and hadn’t spent a significant portion of their life running a backwater mana farm. That probably translated into more time spent training and more access to the kinds of resources mages consumed to grow stronger.

It wouldn’t make a difference to this mage, in the end. The only thing he could affect was just how much mana it took to take him out and whether I was forced to kill him. Life sense gave me his position and told me he was facing away from me. Weight reduction reduced my already soft footsteps to practically nothing, and shadow cloak let me slip into the darkness hanging around the outside walls of the cave.

The mage had a trio of candles lit on his writing desk where his journal lay open. He was using ink that I detected as faintly magical, probably imbued with standard enchantments to aid in longevity and keep it from fading. I could sense a mana crystal hidden under his clothes over his chest, perhaps strung on a necklace, and he had a wand in an arm sheath on his left forearm, ready to be drawn and have deadly magic channeled through it at a moment’s notice.

None of that mattered, since I wasn’t intending to give him that notice. I ghosted forward through the dark, cloaked in magic specifically designed to make me functionally impossible to see, and prepared to attack.

Share