Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 72

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Other than examining the prisoners to confirm that their mana cores were dormant and empty, I spent the night recovering and going over the various pieces of enchanted or inscribed gear the party had been carrying. The axes and bows the hunters had were nothing special. Karad would be happy to add them to the village’s armory, but I had no interest in them.

Ebalnat’s outfit took me longer to go through. Only one of the rings was magic—the mana drain spell he’d tried to hit me with right as I was transmuting his heart into a lump of rock—but I did find another signet ring with a one-eyed wolf’s head on it. Idly, I wondered what the story was with the missing eye. It was probably related to the cabal’s history in some way.

The mana drain ring itself was a mixed bag. For some reason, Ebalnat had fashioned it with a mana crystal attuned to him, not a storage crystal like I’d first thought. It powered the enchantment that allowed anyone wearing the ring to activate its mana draining properties. The stolen mana would be siphoned directly into the mana crystal, so there was no real reason to attune it to Ebalnat other than paranoia about it being stolen. Even with him gone, the ring would continue to function until it ran out of mana, which it would unless someone started using it since no one would be able to recharge an attuned mana crystal.

The amethyst pendant was Ebalnat’s primary mana crystal, surprisingly empty and subpar to my own. It reminded me of every other mana crystal I’d seen on a member of the Wolf pack. They obviously had some sort of shared method of growing their crystals, and it did not yield great results. It was serviceable, but this thing was eight times bigger than my own mana crystal and its reservoir was half the size. I tossed it to the side to be stored away with the mana crystal bracelet I’d taken off Iskara. Cracking the attunements on them would be good practice for my hypothetical future apprentice someday.

I gave the belt he’d been wearing a cursory examination, but I could tell it was the same as the one that other mage with the familiar had used. Apparently, they were standard issue for Wolf Pack mages. Too bad Noctra hadn’t owned one; it would have saved his life. Iskara’s status as an adept must not have warranted one either.

There were only two other objects of interest. Ebalnat’s staff was the most complicated piece by far, and I set that aside to examine the copper band the leader of the hunters had been wearing around his left bicep. It was an interesting piece, actually four different inscriptions all on one loop of metal. Each was an invocation, which in my mind was a bit of an odd choice since those were internal spells and the whole point was that they saved in efficiency by being generated inside the mana core itself.

I supposed for a person who couldn’t be bothered to learn those basic level invocations, it made sense. There were invocations for sharpened senses, basic body empowerment, muffled sound, and masked scent. They’d be of limited use to a hunter with a dormant core, but I supposed it was possible the man had also been an adept and regularly bought stored mana from mages or was supplied by the cabal he’d apparently worked for.

Much like the mana crystals, it was something for my future apprentices to play with. It wasn’t badly designed or anything, but its purpose was redundant. Nobody did inscriptions for basic tier invocations. They were supposed to be for difficult spells that the average person lacked the skill to perform, or for something like a ward that needed to run constantly, even when the mage wasn’t going to be around.

Finally, the staff. I couldn’t see myself using it, but I had high hopes that this particular piece of gear would be worth breaking the attunements on the mana crystals. Ebalnat had declared himself to be a magician of conjuration and transmutation, meaning he was able to cast intermediate tier spells in those two disciplines and presumably basic spells in all the others. If he’d mastered one more discipline to the intermediate tier, he would have been able to call himself a full mage.

If it turned out that the inscriptions were any good, this staff might become integral to the village’s defenses soon. It would probably become the property of the first apprentice I took on who was interested in fighting off monsters or, in some cases, men. If no one came along with that mindset, I’d replace the mana crystals with storage crystals and they could pull it out of their armory when the need arose.

The staff itself looked like four branches that had been softened to allow them to be braided together, then returned to their former strength. More likely, they’d been deliberately coaxed to grow that way. There were eight spells inscribed on its length, two on each branch. Of the four mana crystals, those were equally divided among the inscriptions instead of being chained together. That was a poor design in my opinion, since it meant the user could have three completely full mana crystals but be locked out of using two of the inscriptions if the fourth crystal that was linked to them was empty.

That problem was mitigated somewhat by the use of mana crystals, since Ebalnat had been able to draw mana from one crystal and put it in the other, albeit at a transference loss. But the more I studied the staff, the less impressed I was. Everything I’d taken from the mages of this area was the work of apprentices or possibly inept magicians. I was aware that my own standards were exacting, even for an archmage, but I’d taught enough apprentices to have a good idea of what they were capable of producing on their own, and these trinkets did not measure up.

The staff had fire blast, flame lance, rain of fire, force bolt, and earth shatter for conjurations in it. The three transmutations were stone wall, earth to water, and earth spear. It wasn’t an impressive or diverse collection, but it did cover most of the major points needed to survive wandering in the wastes. All Ebalnat had needed to carry with him was food. With his staff, he could dispatch enemies from a distance and create shelter and water.

Other than the float enchantment worked into the top of the staff that was almost out of mana, there wasn’t anything else to it. Ebalnat hadn’t even included any sort of focusing enchantments to increase his range or accuracy. I tossed the staff onto the pile with the other pieces and let out a frustrated groan. “Why is it that everything these people have is junk?” I asked out loud, though there was no one else there to hear me.

At least it made them easy to fight. If they’d been well-equipped, that whole battle would have been a lot more difficult. The after-battle report was a bleak thing though. I finished jotting down the information in this bastardized written excuse for a language that everyone thought was Enotian, left the papers with the loot in a secured room in the manor, and dragged myself back home to my own bed.

***

As much as I would have liked to go straight to bed, I forced myself to spend the next two hours scrying all over the wastelands looking for threats. I had no doubt that I missed hundreds of hiding places despite seeing a few dozen monsters or beasts in my scouting. I didn’t find any other people, though, and that was the whole point of my search. Only after I’d done my best to confirm there were no stragglers out there within twenty miles did I finally collapse onto my bed to let my poor, abused mana core start to recover.

It was a restless night, one where I kept waking up every few hours. I took advantage of that to keep refilling my mana crystal over and over, with the results being that when I got up for good the next morning, I felt awful, but had added enough spare mana to cast a good four spells or eight or nine cheap ones. It was far from enough to make me feel any sort of safe, but it was a start.

Classes were canceled that morning, for obvious reasons. Though none of my students had taken part in the fighting, I was too busy to instruct them. When I got up for good, I felt their mana outside anyway, but it looked like they were doing some exercises we’d already reviewed. As long as they weren’t expecting me to referee, that was fine by me.

Today, my house arrest guard was Ganor, the man I’d mentally dominated to get him to deliver the message and key-turned-scry-beacon to Charok. I stopped next to him when I walked outside, then looked up and said, “Karad leave any messages for me?”

“Uh, no?”

“Anything about our new prisoners?”

“Nope,” Ganor said.

Much as I didn’t want to do it, I supposed my first stop would be the Garrison jailhouse, all one cell of it. I had questions that I needed answers to, even if it wasn’t likely that the two men there had them. I would much rather go back to bed, but it was too important to find out if there were more people coming.

“Alright, let’s go,” I said.

“Go?” Ganor echoed. “You can’t go anywhere. You’re supposed to remain here.”

I supposed there had been a reason Ganor hadn’t been my escort before today, and that all the injuries had limited who they had to spare today. This was the first time any of them had tried to enforce my house arrest on me.

“I need to go to the Garrison,” I told Ganor. “Come on, walk with me.”

“You’re staying right here,” Ganor said. “Technically, you shouldn’t be allowed outside.”

There were probably better ways to handle it. Shel wasn’t even thirty feet away, and all I needed to do to get her involved was raise my voice. Even if she didn’t have direct authority over Garrison members, she could likely have found a way to resolve things peacefully.

But I was tired and in a bad mood. I’d literally fought and risked my life for the village not twelve hours earlier. I was done with this game of pretend to make them feel better. My already foul mood was plummeting at the thought of dealing with this idiot, and all the sudden, what little patience I had left was gone.

Of all the ways I could have resolved this issue, casting sleep on Ganor stretched the limits of my restraint. I wanted to do something much more painful, but I settled for a small smile at the satisfying thump his unconscious body made as it hit the ground. The movement caught the attention of my students, who stopped their training to look over at me.

“Everything alright there?” Talik called over to me.

“Just fine,” I told him. “I’ve got to go over to the Garrison building and take care of some business. I’ll be back soon.”

“Before you go, we were wondering if you were claiming that staff,” Ayaka said.

I kept myself from snorting. I wouldn’t be caught dead with that piece of junk. “Nope. All yours. Is that what you’re playing for today?”

“Winner gets first dibs on any loot you’re not keeping,” Shel said. “I think we can all agree that we want the staff.”

“Heh. Well, best of luck to the four of you then. I’ll be back in an hour or two. Let me know who ends up winning it.”

With a single look back at Ganor, face down and snoring into the dirt, I walked through the Arbor toward the village square.

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