Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 68

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Karad and Shel were both waiting for me, the former looking upset and the latter looking ill. “What was that?” Karad demanded as soon as I walked through the door, one of his fingers jabbed in the general direction of the scrying mirror. “I thought you said you weren’t going to kill him.”

“I wasn’t planning on it. I didn’t expect him to have a shield ward and I didn’t have a lot of time to come up with an alternate solution before he started throwing spells back at me. Yes, I could have used a different spell that would probably have subdued him without killing him. If I’d been able to think of one in the second I had, I’d have used it. I wasn’t, and I’m not going to apologize for valuing my own life over an enemy, one that is spying on us and reporting that information back to an armed, hostile force that’s probably even now heading towards us unprovoked.”

“There was so much blood,” Shel said with a shudder. She glanced at me once and then closed her eyes. “And you just started taking things off a dead body.”

Her squeamishness was a bit of a surprise, but some people were just like that. Additionally, the village was itself relatively peaceful. There were occasional fights that ended with punches being thrown and farmers spending a night in the only jail cell in the entire village to cool off or getting publicly caned in the square, but even those were rare. The village just didn’t have enough people to have a lot of what I considered to be crime. It was too easy to get caught doing something here.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that Noctra’s death was the only murder in living memory and that most villagers were squeamish about death. Not even the farmers were immune, especially since so many of them were field workers growing crops. The village’s supply of livestock was rather pathetic, with most of what they kept being chickens. There wasn’t a lot of slaughtering going on here, and besides, killing a chicken and killing a man were not the same things at all.

“Believe it or not, most places aren’t as nice and friendly as we are here,” I said. “The spoils of war are a very real thing, and I’m not just talking about pretty jewelry and metal cookware. I haven’t flipped through this whole book yet, but I think it’s safe to assume this is going to be a slave raid. This team is here to capture whoever they can, with valuable targets having already been located in advance, kill whoever’s left, and loot whatever’s valuable.”

“With six people?” Karad scoffed.

“At least one of those people is a mage,” I said. “Don’t think for a second that I couldn’t kill every single person in this village in less than ten minutes if I wanted to. If that mage is in any way worthy of that staff he has floating next to him, he’ll be able to do the same. I’m going to be spending most of my remaining mana trying to stop him from burning down homes and fields.”

In truth, I was slightly regretting killing the other mage first. I didn’t want either reporting back to the cabal and he seemed far more likely to get away, plus he was the easier target, but it had taken a huge toll on my mana reserves. I would need a week of doing nothing else but rebuilding them to recover to full capacity, which was a mental calculation I was heartily sick of doing.

My old stage nine core generated mana close to fifty times faster than my current stage two core did, or roughly three thousand times faster than my core when it had still been dormant. I had very rarely had to worry about conserving mana then and had plenty of tricks to speed up my recovery by using ambient mana if it became necessary. Compared to back then, I was constantly frustrated at how slow and weak my new body was.

But my back and my knees didn’t hurt anymore, so that was something.

“Have you started making preparations to defend the village?” I asked.

“I sent one of my people to go round up the Garrison for him,” Shel said. “We were waiting for you to get back so we can check on the other group before Karad leaves to give orders.”

That wasn’t the worst plan I’d ever heard, assuming whatever runner they’d sent did their job. It did have one big hole though. “What about the Barrier Wardens?”

“Solidaire’s got the patrol schedule. I’ll need to get with him to even figure out where everyone is,” Karad said. “Just hoping there’s enough time.”

At least he was aware of the flaw in his plan. I activated the scrying mirror and studied it for a second, then said, “It appears we’re in luck. They’ve stopped for some reason.”

All six men were grouped closely together. The five hunters were in a loose circle facing outwards with the mage in the center. I could see a bit of tension in their stances, but none of them looked overly worried. They were ready for trouble and confident that they’d handle it when it came.

“What are they doing?” Shel asked as she looked over my shoulder.

“Probably encountered a monster,” Karad said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll take care of our problem for us.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I said. “Not with that mage there.”

One of the men pointed at something and the mage turned to face that direction. I could see his mouth moving as if he was shouting his incantation as he made some vague gestures with his staff in the direction the hunter had indicated. A few seconds later, a pillar of stone thicker than a man at its base and tapered to a delicate point at the end erupted out of the dirt. Hanging from it, bloody and thrashing, was a monster that looked somewhat like a turtle, if they were vaguely bipedal and nine feet tall.

The stone pillar had punctured its underside and come out at an angle through one of the leg holes in its shell. At the mage’s command, three of the hunters started filling it with arrows while the rest continued to scan the environment.

That scene repeated itself two more times before the group allowed themselves to relax. The hunters went about recovering what arrows they could while the mage took a moment to collect himself. I couldn’t feel his mana expenditure through the scrying mirror, but I knew how much it would cost me to cast a stone spear spell like that. It was about twice the maximum amount my mana core could even hold right now. A normal adult without a stage three core would be able to cast that precisely once before they needed to recover mana in some way.

“Spirits protect us,” Karad said. “How are we supposed to fight against someone who can do that?”

“You’re not. That’s my job,” I told him. “Your job is to protect the targets the hunting party will be looking for.”

I didn’t mention that I’d be doing their job as well, at least for my own family. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the Garrison to try its hardest. I just didn’t think they’d win. I needed to find and stop the enemy mage before doing anything else, but I also needed to keep an eye on my family so I could defend them. In fact, it might just be better to round up all the priority targets and put them somewhere safe.

Where would that safe place be though? It couldn’t be somewhere obvious from their spying. That eliminated the arbor as an option. Noctra’s former home was too big to effectively defend and was another obvious place to check. We could evacuate the entire village there though. If we concentrated every member of the Garrison and Barrier Wardens in one place, it might work.

It was too bad the barrier itself couldn’t be altered to help us right now. Once it powered down in a few hours, I could make alterations to the ward stone, but not while it was active. One of the biggest drawbacks to inscriptions was that they ran until they were out of mana. Enchantments could be deactivated at will, but an inscription, once fed mana, would do whatever it was designed to do for as long as it could. Trying to change that while it was running could have disastrous results.

“What do you think about pulling the entire village back to the manor?” I asked.

“If you can take care of the mage, it’s a good idea. We can lock and barricade the doors,” Karad said. “But if you can’t… well, it puts everyone together in a nice convenient box to be killed.”

“If I can’t stop the mage, it’s not going to matter much,” I mused out loud. “It boils down to where we want to stand our ground. We got a lucky break catching onto this whole scheme just before it came down on us, but it doesn’t leave us with a lot of time to set up defenses or lay traps. Our choice is whether to fight them in the village, or rush out to meet them in the wastelands.”

“If we don’t have cover, those hunters are going to pick us apart with their bows when we approach,” Karad said.

The best option wasn’t realistic. If I’d had the mana, I’d have gone out myself and ambushed them out in the wastes. I just didn’t have enough left to get more than a mile outside of the village before I ran into them, not if I wanted to still be able to fight after. Plus, leaving the village potentially meant dealing with monsters. The odds were slim, but as we’d just seen, there were a few of them still roaming around.

“We’ve got a few bows, right? A couple of the Barrier Wardens are hunters?”

Karad and Shel exchanged uncertain looks, and he replied, “Maybe one or two? Not enough to match them either way.”

This village sure wasn’t going out of its way to make it easy to save them. Every plan I thought of failed immediately because there wasn’t enough time, manpower, or mana. Sad as it was to say, the most likely role the villagers could play in the upcoming battle was that of a distraction. If that was all they were good for, we might as well lean into it.

I fed a bit more of my precious mana into the mirror and pulled it away from the hunting party just as they got moving again to scan the path between them and the village. For the most part, it was open wastes with a few rocky hills here and there. Usually the ground was baked and cracked earth, but sometimes it was sand. There were always ways around the sandy patches, and I didn’t think having a bit more footwork to do would make a lot of difference in slowing them down anyway.

I scried all the way to the edge of the fields without finding what I was looking for. Well, if it didn’t exist, I’d just have to make it. There was a small hill near the south edge of the fields that I could modify to suit my purposes.

“Alright, this is where we’ll make our stand,” I said.

“That’s wide open! They’ll pick us off easily,” Karad objected. “And even if they don’t, there’s nothing stopping them from going around and ignoring us.”

“I’ll make you some cover, and keeping their attention is why we have bows of our own. I need you to get at least a dozen men, as many bows as you can, and meet me at this hill. We’ve got at best half an hour before they get here,” I said. When Karad didn’t move, I dismissed the image in the mirror and said, “Well? Go!”

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