Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 69

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I’d picked this particular hill for two reasons. First, I was making an educated guess about what path the hunting party would take on its arrival, assuming they moved in a relatively straight line. Second, it was the only possible defensive point anywhere near the projected route our enemies would take.

As we moved, I explained my plan to Karad. “Essentially, I’m going to hollow out the crown of the hill. Your men will be able to kneel down in there and have total cover. The idea is that if the enemy wants to progress through that way, they’ll have to go through your bow range. If they go around, it’ll take them more time and allow you to chase after them.”

“Which we don’t want to do, since we’ll be in the open too, and they’re going to have a lot more bows than us,” Karad said.

“Right. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of cover out there, so I don’t see a better option. Besides, how many ranged weapons do we have?”

“Just bows? One or two. Most of the Barrier Wardens carry slings too. I’ll spread them around the outskirts of the village so they can use the homes as cover after we get everyone to the manor.”

I nodded. “I’ll take care of the mage. The rest are up to you guys. Try not to shoot me.”

“How are you going to do that?” Karad asked.

That was a good question. The primary hurdle was going to be getting the man in range without being spotted. My initial thought was to hide somewhere and wait for them to pass by, but that relied on correctly guessing their route and their incompetency. Presumably, these men were expert hunters and trackers. Absent any magical camouflage, there was every possibility that they’d notice me hiding well before they reached me.

Banking on a plan that relied entirely on an enemy to make a mistake was a terrible idea. I would need to be more active in creating openings, ideally ones where the hunters were preoccupied with Garrison and Barrier Warden forces, leaving me free to take out the mage without interference. At the same time, I couldn’t burn all my mana creating that scenario, not if I wanted to have any left for the fight itself.

I wasn’t happy about the scenario I’d been faced with. The only other feasible option I could see was to fight in the village itself, but we’d have to spread our people thin to cover all the different approaches, too thin to effectively fight back. At least this way, if the hunters wanted to circle around the hill, they’d have to go wide and they’d leave themselves open to being harassed from the back.

“It’ll depend on how well you guys distract them,” I said. “I’d like to sneak up on him, but I’m not going to manage it with all six of them wary and looking around for trouble.”

Karad peeled off to go round up his men and get them started evacuating the villagers to Noctra’s manor house. At least, I assumed that was where he was sending everybody. It didn’t really matter, so long as they weren’t in the way of the invading group. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the huts closest to the fighting got damaged in some way.

It took four casts of stone shape to hollow out the top of the hill like I wanted. By the time I was done, a pair of Barrier Wardens were climbing the north slope to join me. Soon enough, there were twelve people up there. Contrary to Karad’s expectations, they had four bows and six slings between them.

Karad himself showed up with the last group and quickly set about giving his people their orders. That wasn’t anything complicated, just to keep their heads down and challenge the group approaching the village. They expected, at best case, to get into a long-ranged fight and hoped to keep the enemies at bay with their superior numbers. The most likely result was that they’d force the enemies to go the long way around, and that the village defenders might give chase depending on how that played out. They had additional Garrison and Barrier Wardens members stationed in three groups in the village itself, but I didn’t think anyone was under the illusion that a group of ten amateur villagers was going to overpower five well-equipped mercenaries and a mage.

“Our blessed child here is going to conjure up some magic to help us, though what exactly that magic does will depend on how this confrontation plays out,” Karad said with a gesture towards me. “I can’t give you any orders regarding him now other than to watch out not to hit him when you’re shooting. He’ll be out there somewhere doing his best to neutralize the other mage.”

“Ridiculous,” someone muttered. “He’s barely older than a baby.”

Karad either didn’t hear that or chose to ignore it. My talents might not be well known on an individual basis to the villagers, but they all knew who had fixed the barrier and produced the storage crystals that allowed the village’s mana to be stretched much farther.

Explanations and orders finished, Karad turned to me and asked, “How long do we have?”

“I’m not sure. I need to conserve my mana now, but you’ll see them as they approach. There’s not a lot of cover out here,” I said. “I’ll be low to the ground in that field over there, so try to do all your shooting before they get that far.”

The whole group watched me climb back down the hill and disappear into the two-foot-high stalks of bean sprouts, where I barely even had to hunch down to keep my head from poking up too high. I went in about ten feet, then shifted around until I found a place to lay on my stomach and peer through the stalks to get a good view of the open wasteland.

It wouldn’t be long now, just a few minutes.

***

They arrived in much the same formation we’d seen them use in my scrying mirror, with the hunters in a ring around the mage. I felt his mana long before I saw any of them, and I gave silent thanks that they were mostly taking the path I’d predicted. They were a little bit farther off to the side of the hill than I’d expected, but still well within range of a bow-shot. If anything, this trajectory would be even more likely to force them to enter the fields near my hiding place.

I wanted to groan when Karad challenged the approaching group with shouted words instead of unleashed arrows. They certainly didn’t waste any time on their entirely predictable response; three of the men pulled their bows off their shoulders and sent some arrows his way. With a surprised yelp that was clearly audible from my position, he ducked back down.

The hunters eyed the hill warily. I doubted they were any sort of surprised when the village’s own archers popped into view and let fly a few shafts tipped with hunters’ broadheads. Other than noting that the battle had begun, I did my best to ignore the exchange. My focus was on the enemy mage.

My first impression of him was that he was by far the most competent mage I’d met since my reincarnation. His core was shrouded well enough that I could tell he had mana, but not how much. The mana crystals set into the top of his staff were equally hidden. I could pierce the shroud and get an accurate read on his reserves, but not without him noticing.

There was another mana crystal on a ring on his left hand, though once I took a moment to study it, I realized it was actually a low-grade storage crystal being used to power an enchantment in the ring itself. Without getting closer to the mage, I couldn’t tell what the enchantment was designed to do, but it looked familiar. I also spotted a belt that looked suspiciously similar to the one I’d taken off the mage with the familiar. Unfortunately for me, there were no stone ceilings to collapse on this guy’s head out in the open wastes.

I didn’t have so much mana left over that I wanted to waste it tearing through a shield ward, but I could if I needed to. It would have to be fast enough to put the mage down before he was able to pump more mana into it, which wasn’t necessarily a problem, but it certainly wouldn’t be efficient. It would be far better to circumvent the ward altogether.

That was easier said than done. I was making assumptions about how it worked. My tried-and-true ward testing spells would cost far too much mana to use and, frankly, be massive overkill. I sincerely doubted this mage’s wards extended to his astral body, and if they did, I was dead either way. No mage who’d reached that point in their career was going to be beaten by a fresh stage two with limited access to mana, no matter how much they knew.

If I operated under the assumption that I could win this fight, the shield ward probably defended against direct conjurations and possibly physical attacks. It might also ward off enchantments, but I already knew it didn’t stop divinations and I doubted it would contest transmutations either.

My scouting was interrupted by a stirring in the mage’s mana. He was backing up his hunters and, unsurprisingly, casting some sort of earth-based conjuration. Breaking the village’s cover apart so his hunters could pick them off was an excellent mana-conserving strategy. Magic might be flashier and more impressive when it came to dispensing death, but an arrow through the eye would kill just as quickly.

The spell was actually a good sign. It started at his feet and raced forward through the ground, directly on course to strike the hill. Just the fact that he’d chosen himself as his origin point told me that he probably lacked the skill to manipulate his spell structures in real time to change that. Some spells, like fire blast, had their origin points built in as the target, but the mage was using a spell that would fracture the ground and force the villagers to either flee or be crushed as they fell in, and that started as a thin crack at the mage’s feet.

The spell made it about half way to its target before my own counter spell hit it. Threads of mana unfolded and engulfed the spell, each one doing its best to worm into the rune structure and distort it until it broke. Within moments, the mage’s spell fractured and fell apart, leaving nothing but a long, narrow crack in the ground.

Counter spelling was an interesting technique. It wasn’t a spell so much as a way to directly manipulate mana. I favored a style I thought of as tentacle dueling, wherein I sent my own mana out in a tightly packed ball of individual appendages that collided with the target spell, then tried to overwhelm it as the tendrils unfolded. It was more useful against stationary, long-term effects like wards and traps, but if the enemy mage was going to throw magic that moved that slowly, I’d easily counter it.

The counter spell wasn’t free, of course. But it was flexible in terms of how much mana I could put into it, and I’d definitely used significantly less to break that earth shatter spell than my opponent had poured into forming it. If the spell was close enough to me, I could even recover that mana. In this case, unfortunately, both the earth shatter and my counter spell dissipated into the environment well before I could regain control of it.

I glanced over at the mage, who was standing there with a look of shock on his face. Anger quickly replaced that and he started weaving a new spell. Whatever I might have to say about his magical capabilities, I couldn’t accuse him of being stupid. That new spell was divination, probably designed to find fellow mages, and he cast it fast enough that I couldn’t get a new counter spell in his way before it went off.

The mana washed out in every direction from the mage, invisible filaments searching for anything that met the spell’s criteria. Before I could react, the first one settled on me.

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