Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 67

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

I knew the force bolt was a mistake the instant I let it fly. It wasn’t that the enemy mage had spotted me or that his reflexes were so great that he was going to twist out of the way. No, it was the light welling up from under his shirt. The shield ward snapped into existence and shattered my force bolt an instant before it would have taken the mage in the back of the head.

Without getting a look at the inscriptions, I couldn’t know for sure what the shield ward was designed to defend against, but I judged from the light patterns coming through the shirt that it looked like the runes had been etched across the surface of an extra-wide leather belt. I was betting they were about fourteen times bigger than mine, so if I assumed both sides of the belt were being used—a terrible idea since the runes would get worn down on the inside length, but which would make the shield ward twice as strong while it lasted—there wouldn’t be enough surface area for the inscription to have more than two or three possible triggers.

The most likely probability was that it deflected only magic, and that it would have at most enough mana for five or six spells. I doubted I’d overpower the shield ward before the mage got a chance to fight back, and while my own shield ward was fully charged and sophisticated enough that there probably wasn’t anything he could throw at me to actually break through it, there were far more efficient ways to take him out.

The mage was already spinning toward me as I cast my next spell. He had just enough time for his face to screw up incredulously and start to say, “What the-”

I cast gravity twist onto the ceiling above the mage. Chunks of rock immediately broke apart under their own weight and crashed down on him, propelled entirely by nothing but their own magically bloated weight. Even if his shield ward dispelled the extra weight, they were still heavy and numerous. The mage was half buried under them before he had a chance to react.

Environmental effects were a big weakness in shield wards. It was easy to find ways around their triggers that still relied on magic when a ward could shield its bearer from direct attacks. Far too many mages had met their ends thinking they were invincible because they had a piece of jewelry that would prevent a fire blast from igniting in their faces or an arrow from perforating their lungs. That was one of the main reason my own shield ward spent so much space defining different trigger conditions, so that it was likely to activate in almost all scenarios.

Of course, there was only so much it could do. If I’d been in that mage’s position, my shield ward would have deflected the first ten or twelve stones, mostly dependent on weight, and then failed. It would have given me a second to react and not much else, but that was the whole point, after all.

I wasn’t happy with the situation, mostly because I suspected I’d killed the mage. It didn’t help that using gravity twist had cost me more than three times as much mana as a simple force bolt, but I hadn’t had a lot of time to weigh my options between discovering his shield ward and giving him time to attack me. I should have predicted something like this and prepared accordingly, but I’d underestimated him.

It was funny, in a macabre sort of way. I’d devoted so much effort to considering scenarios and how to effectively combat them, then missed a simple, basic, obvious one. Worse, it was one I myself had prepared as a defense, and hadn’t thought that someone else might as well. I could say that it wasn’t reasonable to expect such a defense, that thus far, every spell caster I’d met had been about as skilled as a second-year apprentice and only half as well equipped.

Reality didn’t care about excuses. The simple fact was that I’d slipped up and accidentally killed a mage I was trying to capture alive. If I’d had time to think, I would have prepared something that could have overwhelmed the shield ward and allowed me to hit the mage with a mana drain. I could have restrained him and asked a few questions.

But no, I’d gone into the fight jittery, acted reflexively when I’d encountered an unexpected obstacle, and failed to accomplish half of my objectives. The mage was dead and I fully planned on looting his body, but I didn’t get the chance to ask him a single question. I hadn’t even stolen his mana; that had all dissipated with his expiration.

Greater telekinesis shifted the rocks that had bludgeoned the mage to death aside, revealing a bloody mess. His face was unrecognizable, and his skull had been split open. Unfortunately for me, the wand had been snapped by an unlucky strike directly to its length. I wasn’t terribly upset by the loss, if for no other reason than it was worthless to me and there were no other mages to pass it on to in the village. I’d craft something better for my would-be apprentices later. The mage’s mana crystal had also been damaged by the collapsing stone to the point where it wasn’t worth salvaging, so I left it on the body.

The man’s belt was still intact. I used telekinesis to pull it off of him for later examination, then gave the body a once-over to see if I’d missed anything. Two pieces caught my eye. One was a wristband made of leather, one that I probably wouldn’t have given a second thought to except I remembered the mage’s familiar landing on the same arm the wristband was on. Tugging it off revealed a string of runes carved on the inside that, at first glance, looked to be a simple spell that sheathed the forearm in protective force magic.

That and the belt would both be useful, since anyone able to manipulate their mana well enough could channel some into the items to generate the spell effect. I had half a dozen people back at the village who could manage that, including my sister. Someone would find a use for either of these items.

The last thing I noticed on the body was a signet ring on one hand. It wasn’t enchanted in any way, and since precious metals lacked value to a master transmuter, I wasn’t inclined to steal it to sell, but when I noticed the insignia, I had to get a closer look. It was a stylized wolf’s head with one eye closed and a line drawn through it.

I’d already known it was likely these mages were part of the same cabal Noctra had ties with. This served as a simple reinforcement of that, but it was nice to have a bit more proof that I hadn’t murdered a nosy but ultimately harmless recluse. I hadn’t been inclined to believe that even before I’d found the ring, not with the hawk serving to send messages to that group of hunters, but every little bit of proof that I was correct in my thinking helped.

It was far too easy to kill because it was convenient, and I knew firsthand that the more I saw murder as the first resort to my problems, the worse they’d get in the long run. I wasn’t about to slide back into that dark pit again, but it did highlight one simple fact: it was a lot harder to find alternate solutions when I was so weak. Power normally gave me a breadth of options I was now lacking.

I turned the ring over a few times to look at it from all angles before slipping it into my pocket. Mostly, I was trying to remember if Iskara had one like it on her finger. If so, I hadn’t noticed it before her body was tossed over the cliff to the scavengers. Noctra definitely hadn’t had such a ring, but from everything I’d learned, he was in bad standing with the cabal. I wasn’t even entirely sure if he’d been part of it originally, or just a rogue mage who owed them a lot of mana for some reason, though I suspected the former.

With the mage’s body as thoroughly looted as it was going to get, I took a few minutes to rifle through everything else. I didn’t want to waste mana coming back out here later, and I knew I had at least half an hour before the other mage with his hunting party reached the village. Other than the journal detailing the results of his spying on the village, there was nothing really worth the effort of taking. I certainly didn’t need a rug or a dead man’s bed roll.

I’d regained some mana, but not enough to teleport back home. That was all part of the plan. Now that I didn’t need to worry about a mage who specialized in spying seeing me, I simply walked back outside the cave, made sure I had everything secured, and cast a flight spell. True flight was much different than the trick I’d done combining elemental manipulation with weight reduction to drift along on a sustained gust of air. That had let me move two or three times faster than walking, and it was fine for how much mana it used when circumstances allowed it.

An actual flight spell hurled me through the air so fast that one of the components of it was an actual shield of force shaped something like in a curved dome in front of my body to prevent damage from the wind as it streamed by. Flight made without it was uncomfortable at best, and could result in actual injuries.

I burst into the air, mana draining out of me far, far faster than I could replace it and quickly devouring the reserves in my mana crystal. I clutched my prizes close to my body as I flew face first to reduce the size of the shield I needed. The wastes stretched out below me, looking like nothing so much as a sandbox someone had scattered a handful of rocks in. As I approached the village, the trees of the arbor were a brown smear in the distance.

It was only in the last mile or so that I began my descent directly into the arbor. As I dropped low, I noticed a hawk in the sky, circling the village. Bereft of its connection to its master, it would soon revert back to a normal bird. There existed the possibility that another mage could form a bond with it to try to salvage any new information it had acquired, but such bonds were permanent and breaking them was damaging to the mage and the familiar both.

I could have killed it easily then, but it was nothing more than a relatively harmless hawk now. Other than being a scourge on the local rodent population, it couldn’t affect the fate of the village, and I suspected it was only here at this point because this was where its last job had taken it before I’d killed its master. Other than using sharpened senses to confirm it didn’t have a return message from the blond-haired mage tied to its leg, I left it alone.

One thing about flight spells that took a bit of getting used to was the descent. Going up wasn’t a problem, and maintaining altitude was easy as long as the caster wasn’t afraid of falling and wasn’t stupid enough to run out of mana, but coming back down was a different story. There were two ways to do it: the easy way and the fast way. Given how badly I needed to manage my mana these days, I chose the fast way.

It felt like my stomach was doing backflips for about ten seconds as I plummeted in what was close to a free fall, only for the flight magic to catch hold and slow me down in short order. That was somehow an even more nauseating sensation, but it resulted in both of my feet on the ground in the clearing outside my home.

I took a moment to breathe and reflect that it hadn’t been as bad as the last few times I’d been flying, no doubt a perk of my new, young body. Then I ran back to my house to get my scrying mirror retargeted. I’d taken care of one problem, but another, arguably much bigger, threat still loomed.

Share