Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter Book 2, Chapter 7

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Now that I knew to look for it, it wasn’t hard to spot the leech stones filled with mana all over the city. People kept them in bags or purses regularly, and my biggest issue was in identifying them. They weren’t always full, so a halfshard that was almost empty and a tenner that was almost full often felt very similar. Since I wasn’t trying to rob anybody, I didn’t worry much about the difference.

It was mostly just convenient since it explained some of the weird things I could sense around me. The more I explored Derro, the more I was exposed to the leech stones everyone was using and the better I got at judging how much money someone had on them. It also helped flag who was rich and therefore more likely to be dangerous. I saw one man, well over six feet tall with a thick, dark mustache and deep, sunken eyes carrying around what I was guessing was twenty full shards. His own mana core was more than half full as well.

I’d turned around and walked a different direction when I’d spotted him. Someone with that much mana would be important in some way and I didn’t want to be noticed. Most likely, I’d be dismissed as inconsequential, but on the off chance the man was a mage, it was better to never be seen at all.

My exploration did earn me three tenners that had been dropped and lost on the streets, all of them almost completely empty. At first, I’d ignored them, thinking they were some sort of rodent. It was only when I spent ten minutes studying a crowded street and trying to get a feel for the people that I realized the mana I sensed beneath me wasn’t moving. It took a few seconds to dig out the source with my foot, but once I realized it was an almost-dull tenner buried in the sand, I quickly learned to spot more of them.

It wasn’t enough for me to change my mind about robbing the Repository, not even close. I still wanted to test the city’s defenses and, even if I did reconsider, scrounging the streets for loose change was a waste of my time. To that end, I slowly worked myself closer to the center of the city.

Mock Street, as it turned out, was the road that circled the inner wall. Unlike the largely worthless ring of earthen bricks that marked the outer edge of Derro, this wall was thirty feet tall, made of slabs of brilliant white granite, and fairly tingled with magic. It had real gates, also made of enchanted stone, that were set into the wall at intervals all the way around it. I’d already done a bit of snooping on this street via scrying before I entered the city, but I’d made sure to keep a light touch since I was brushing up against what was obviously a barrier between those who had power and those who did not.

There were actually two Repositories, one on the north side of the wall and one on the south, each directly across from a gate. I walked by the south one once, not lingering but not rushing, and studied the defensive wards on it. I only got about thirty seconds to check it out before the street traffic carried me too far away and I ducked down an alley to circle back around.

The Repository was a big three-story building that stuck out from the ruins around it. It had obviously been manufactured much more recently, possibly around the same time the inner wall had gone up. The top floor had a balcony that faced the wall, probably to facilitate transfer of mana to the interior without having to open the gates or risk people on the streets interfering.

There were two guards at the front door and the building itself had its own miniature wall circling it. Nearby buildings had been demolished and removed, preventing anyone from sneaking up to the Repository from any angle and included half a dozen more guards stationed around it. All of that seemed redundant to me since they’d also made no effort to hide no less than three different alarm wards and one incapacitation ward. Technically, it was a trap, but it was so glaringly obvious that I was hesitant to use a word that implied it might be hiding to describe it.

Basically, it was impossible to sneak into physically or magically, and anyone attempting it would likely find themselves shocked into unconsciousness so fast that by the time the guards reached them, they’d already be passed out. If I wanted in, I needed to defeat the wards and employ a level of stealth high enough to bypass the guards watching out specifically for people trying to do exactly that, and do it for long enough to finesse my way past the wards.

This might be tougher than I thought.

The wards were easy enough to bypass, at least the visible ones were. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some hidden wards underneath them, which meant that I needed to go slowly. I’d need to disable the exterior guards if for no other reason than to have time to work on the wards without being rushed, but even that could prove tricky. Unless I missed my guess, all of them were wearing enchanted rings on their right hands that had a weaker version of a Dead Man’s Seal. If they were injured or knocked out, those were likely to trigger and summon reinforcements.

That left me with the option to either come in from above or below. Both would be mana intensive. I supposed there was the third option of blasting my way in, grabbing everything I could get my hands on, and making a run for it. That would defeat the point though, since I wasn’t there to enrich myself but to test the defenses. I wanted a better look at what kind of wards I could expect to find on the homes in the inner city, and the Repository seemed like a good place to find an example.

I wanted to do another pass, but the two door guards were both sharp-eyed and scanning the crowd as people went by. I could probably do one more lap without arousing suspicion if I waited twenty minutes and headed back in the direction I’d come from. That was common enough, just people going about their business and returning home. I didn’t want to risk anything greater than that.

My plan was completely reasonable, well-thought out and aware of the risks. It should have gone off without a hitch, and it likely would have except for a case of extreme bad luck. I was about a hundred feet down the road past the Repository when someone shoved their way between two people nearby and lunged at me.

A leathery hand came down near my shoulder before sliding loose as my shield ward activated. The farmer from yesterday missed a step from surprise, but quickly recovered and tried to grab me again. “Got you now, you gutter shit!” he howled, causing people around us to flinch back.

I was so surprised to come face to face with the old man again that for a moment, I just stood there and stared at him. My shield ward was keeping him from getting a hold on me, but that was conspicuous and would draw all the wrong sorts of attention. It was just… the odds of this guy running into me again in a city with thousands of people couldn’t be that large. Was someone watching me? Was it a set up?

I saw a pouch hanging from his belt bounce as he lunged again and realized the mana I was feeling inside was from a bunch of leech stones. The farmer had sold his product, whatever hadn’t been stolen from him, and come to the Repository to do something with all the leech stones he’d received in payment. It was just my bad luck that I’d walked by at the same time. If I hadn’t taken my nap, or if I’d gotten up half an hour earlier or later, it wouldn’t have happened.

I backed away while slapping a minor telekinesis spell on the farmer’s foot. It wasn’t strong enough to hold him in place, but it did make him trip when he tried to take a step forward. That gave me the opening I needed to run, and this time, nobody else moved to help the man. I got some curious looks from people walking by, but that was it.

I was two hundred feet down the street when someone popped up in front of me, arms spread wide to prevent me from dodging around them. It was the teenage boy who’d chased one of the child thieves into an alley, Clief. Whatever he thought he was going to do, he was in for a rude surprise when it didn’t work.

He lunged to grab me, then went sprawling in the dirt when my shield ward pushed him back away. I slipped past the teenager and ran off into the crowd, leaving both him and his father, or maybe grandfather, yelling behind me.

That had been an unfortunate encounter, but soon enough, I was safe from them. At least, I thought I was until I noticed a half dozen people with suspiciously full mana cores moving down the street. Moving quickly, I found myself a place to hide and observe by circling behind a house and boosting myself up on the roof.

Six people came into view, easy to spot because the crowd was pressing itself back from getting too close to any of them. They all wore uniforms of yellow and gray and had batons with storage crystals mounted on them in their hands. I didn’t see any Wolf Pack insignias on them, so they probably weren’t associated with the cabal I was here, in part, to investigate. That was only a probability though; it was equally possible they were in the Wolf Pack’s employ but not openly advertising that.

Either way, it told me something important. I hadn’t seen guards anywhere else in the city, at least not ones wearing matching uniforms. There was private muscle in abundance, but this right here was an organization. I doubted it was a coincidence they were patrolling near the wall and the Repository.

If they had people on the outside of the wall, it stood to reason that there’d be people on the inside, too. Worse, those storage crystals held at least twice as much mana as their cores did. The mages were outfitting their security to make them more effective. I was starting to think that there were either far more mages here than I’d originally thought, or my village wasn’t the only one that had been turned into a mana farm.

What could a few dozen amateur spell casters do with the mana from twenty or thirty villages like mine? I had a map of the island we were on, but it had a lot of blank spots in it. There were only four labeled villages, but the Basin itself was two hundred miles wide. There was plenty of room for new villages, and that wasn’t even counting the whole mana economy Derro had going on. These mages were being fed mana by literally thousands of people.

I glanced up at the wall again from my hiding spot. How much mana did it take to raise a wall like that with magic? Given some variances for thickness, it was more than any single mage with a stage one core could generate in a year. There was a lot of power concentrated behind those walls, power locked in storage crystals, wands, staves, and ward stones, power waiting for someone truly capable to grab hold of it and do something magnificent.

In other words, behind those walls was the key to advancing to the next step. I just needed to find a way to get to it.

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