Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 70

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There was no way I was going to stop that thread of divination-driven mana from touching me. If I’d had more time and set up some wards around the area, I could have deflected it without the mage becoming aware of that, but that was a tricky proposition. It wasn’t something I was going to accomplish in the half a second I had before the divination swept over me.

What I could do was give it misleading information. The spell was a basic divination that functioned to detect mana in the area. It wasn’t all that reliable in my time, but here, with no background mana to sift through, it would do an excellent job of telling the caster exactly where anybody with a core was. Even hiding my mana with a shroud wouldn’t stop the divination from finding me.

It would also find every bit of mana I sent out to brush up against the many other filaments weaving through the area. I sent out two dozen mana threads of my own, each one deftly weaving around the divination and touching it at various points in the field. To the mage, it would seem as if there were a hundred mages hiding in the field.

The drawback to that kind of spell was that it didn’t give good feedback. It simply told the caster whether there was mana there, not how strong or what kind. To that mage, there were either dozens of people or dozens of mana crystals in the field. I didn’t think for a second that he’d believe either were true, but my hope was that I’d effectively stopped him from narrowing my hiding spot down any further than just somewhere in the field.

My opponent had an obvious solution to that. Mana stirred around him, this time much quicker than his earth shatter spell. The mage held up his staff, all four mana crystals gleaming, and a line of fire shot out into the air over the field, where it broke apart into hundreds of falling sparks that ignited the crops.

Shouts of protest came from the hill, and a hailstorm of stones rained down on the outsiders attacking our village, but the hunters put their bows to good use and quickly forced all the Garrison and Barrier Warden members back behind cover. Their brief salvo provided me with an opening, though, one I wasn’t planning on passing up.

While the hunters had their eyes on the hill, I sent out my own spell. Wind burst was strong enough to knock a child to the ground and even stagger a grown man if he wasn’t prepared for it, and in this environment, it was strong enough to pick up dust and sand to blind people. And that was exactly what it did. With just a lick of elemental manipulation to keep the sand in the air, it lasted more than long enough for me to cast my next spell.

The mage’s shield ward had activated, proving that hostile conjurations were one of the triggers. With the number of mana crystals his staff held, I wasn’t keen to fight a battle of attrition against him, so it was time to try something new. Rather than hurl fire or ice his way, I shaped a spell that I wasn’t entirely sure would slip past his defenses.

Mind spike was a spell grounded entirely in the divination discipline. I was gambling that his shield ward wouldn’t cover it, but if I was right, I might disable him early on in the fight. The spell coalesced in my vision, a single wire of mana connecting it to the mage before a black shard of pain sped away to strike the man at the end of that path.

There was a flare of mana at the final moment, not from the shield ward, but something the mage did himself. He cried out in pain, surprising the hunters that accompanied him, but I couldn’t tell how effective my attack had been while the sand storm was still going around them. I figured I had a few seconds, and I spent that time using elemental manipulation to pull air away from the fires starting to spread through the field. It wouldn’t matter if we won today only to have people starve later. The village was nowhere near the point where it had the margins to afford an entire field going up in flames.

A sharp slash of wind cut through my sandstorm, scattering it to reveal a handful of men with faces and arms abraded by the sand and one mage clutching at his head while angrily glaring in my general direction.

“Enough!” he bellowed. “Come out and face me, you coward.”

I certainly wouldn’t be doing that. This guy was proving to be surprisingly resilient compared to the other mages I’d killed, and while I would have loved nothing more than to crush him with a single spell, those magics were beyond me for the moment. I wouldn’t have been able to use something like Aura Crash even if my mana crystal had been full. It would have been overkill for this fight anyway, and most of its impact would have been wasted since its primary purpose was to prevent them from generating new mana. It would have messed with the mage’s ability to draw mana through those crystals though, limiting him to whatever spells were inscribed on his staff.

While the mage was puffing himself up and striding towards the field, his minions were advancing on our fortified hill. They were working in unison, carefully timing their shots to keep an arrow going by every second or so. At that rate, it seemed like they’d run out soon, but they looked more than willing to engage in melee combat.

I needed to end this fight before the hunters reached the villagers, or at least distract the mage long enough to help them. Otherwise it was practically guaranteed that there would be fatalities in our ranks. It wasn’t that I had a problem with a few people dying off, but they were ostensibly my allies and I had gotten myself deep into a mindset of resource conservation.

“Whoever you are, you can choose to face me willingly, or I will flush you out,” the mage declared as he strode forward to face the field.

Mana flared through his staff again and three more lines of flames burst forth one after another. The whole field was ablaze now, and there was no way I was going to save it without devoting a significant amount of mana to the process. Worse, the mage was steadily burning away my cover. I was almost surprised that he was willing to waste so much of his own mana, but from his perspective, it wasn’t wasted if he forced his opponent out of hiding.

With a heavy sigh, I stood up and pushed my way through the stalks to stand at the edge of the field. The mage’s jaw worked silently for a moment when I appeared, then he composed himself and said with a slight bow and a flourish of his staff, “I am Ebalnat, Magician of Conjuration and Transmutation.”

I blinked in surprise at that. It had been many, many years since any rivals had spoken to me like that. Ebalnat’s actions were those of a duelist at the beginning of a match. After a certain point, mages didn’t fight duels. If they wanted to kill another mage, they did so as efficiently and skillfully as possible. In fact, it hadn’t even been legal in most countries for mages who reached the master rank to duel. There always ended up being too much collateral damage.

My surprise was less that Ebalnat would challenge me to a duel and more that the customs I was so familiar with were present here as well. It forced me to once again ask the question of just where I was. So many things were different from what I expected, but every now and then, something like this cropped up and reminded me that I was still on Manoch after all.

With a sigh, I pulled myself into a proper duelist’s stance and gave my own bow. “I am Keiran, Mage.”

Back in my youth, it was considered somewhat offensive to give so little information. Judging by the look on Ebalnat’s face, that hadn’t changed. He gave me a sneer and said, “Lying about your skills won’t save you. I’ll test them for myself.”

Without another word, he cast his first spell at me. This close, I could almost hear him muttering the incantation, and with a slight application of sharpened senses, his words became clear. “Utrach demios falrit,” he said, finishing the spell that would char my flesh from my bones.

Except it didn’t. My own mana snaked in and ripped it apart as the structure was forming. Ebalnat blinked at me, surprised that his spell had fizzled. I started walking forward. With every step I took, I was able to utilize my counter spell technique faster, and at this distance, he wouldn’t get off any spell that took more than two seconds to cast. For him, I was betting that was most of them. Ebalnat must have realized the same thing, because his next spell was a single word.

“Fring,” he snapped as he flung a hand out and a blade of ice flashed into existence. Ice blade was a novice spell, notable for training because it combined elements of conjuration and enchantment. It was a good practice spell for new apprentices trying to learn how to join disparate disciplines into a single style.

That did not mean it couldn’t kill me if I let it. As simple as it was, it could still slice through my skin. Properly aimed, it could tear my throat open with ease and leave me flat on my back, gasping out my last breaths.

Ebalnat did not properly aim his ice blade. Even if I made no effort to defend myself, it would slice into my arm as it passed by instead of hitting anything vital. I wasn’t sure if he was expecting to spook me with the attack and trying to compensate for the direction he guessed I would dodge or if his aim really was that bad, but a single step to the side was enough to let the spell pass harmlessly by. In less than two seconds, it burned through the artificial mana core keeping it solid and the spell vanished.

Really, I didn’t even need to do that much. This was exactly the kind of spell a shield ward was designed to stop. That was why I hadn’t bothered to throw basic conjurations back at him. I was almost positive his own shield ward would stop conjurations and ranged physical attacks. I’d already proven he wasn’t immune to mind spikes, but he’d shown a surprising amount of resourcefulness in deflecting most if not all of the attack using his own mana.

If that was the case, I wondered how he’d do against a physical attack. I cast a quick transmutation to draw a thin blade of stone from the ground and presented it to him while turning my body to the side.

Ebalnat sneered at me and said, “What could you possibly do with that, pretend mage?”

Despite how small it was, it was still stone and thus quite heavy for my child’s body. That was easy enough to fix. Villagers all over were able to increase their strength and stamina just by flushing mana through their body in unstructured invocations. I was aiming to be a bit more efficient than that.

“This spell is called empower,” I told Ebalnat.

“That’s a stupid name for what is obviously a very mediocre transmutation spell.”

The invocation came to life in my body, sending strength and speed through my limbs. The stone blade felt light as air, and I dashed forward, covering the forty feet between us in a few seconds while Ebalnat flailed in surprise and tried to cast some sort of spell.

He didn’t manage it before I was inside his shield ward.

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