Published at 24th of February 2024 10:34 am

Chapter Book 2, Chapter 11

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There was a big rock in the corner of my hideout, about two and a half times the size of the one I’d used for my first mana crystal. If I were in an adult body with an adult-sized mana core, it would have been no problem to start converting it over. But even though my core had grown bigger over the last year, it still wasn’t enough for the project I had in mind, not by itself.

If I wanted to wait two or three more years, my core would probably double in size again, but even that wouldn’t be enough to turn the giant slab of rock into a mana crystal. If I wanted to do it now, I needed to use a different technique. It wouldn’t be as mana efficient, and the transference loss would be higher than my current mana crystal. It might be better to make two smaller crystals instead.

But no. One of my issues right now was that I was extremely limited by the size of my mana crystal. I could pull off a single teleport spell, if my crystal was almost completely full. Teleporting back was a different story. There were other spells in my repertoire that required so much mana that it wasn’t possible for me to use them right now. Creating multiple mana crystals could help alleviate that issue, but the more of them I made, the weaker my attunement would be to them. Additionally, drawing from multiple sources at once made spells exponentially more difficult to cast.

That wasn’t a problem for the standard basic or intermediate tier magic, but it certainly was for master tier. I pondered the problem while I munched on some sort of vegetable I’d bought at the market. It looked vaguely like a carrot, except it was slightly softer and leaned more toward yellow than orange. The vendor had assured me it was edible without any sort of cooking and sold me three of them for a tenner. I was almost certain I’d been ripped off.

I ate all three of them anyway and silently mourned that I hadn’t found a place to serve an actual hot meal while I worked. Unfortunately, I had far too many demands on my limited mana, and there just wasn’t enough time or resources to work on all of them at once.

Time was what I needed, which meant reinforcing my wards, acquiring a few more tenners, supplying more mana to my phantom space both to repair it and help it grow in size, and crafting a mana crystal big enough to hold the spoils of my planned looting.

Still wishing for another of those strange yellow carrots, I got to work.

***

Despite my pessimistic prediction that Tanner would never gather the mana needed, two days later he found me during one of my food runs. I was three blocks from the market I’d started frequenting when I noticed a child heading my way at a full clip. At first, I didn’t realize who was running at me and started preparing a spell to defend myself, but I remembered just in time to avoid blasting him.

“There you are! I’ve been looking for you for a day and a half now,” Tanner said as he came to a stop next to me.

“You’ve found me,” I said. “I take it you managed to acquire a full shard.”

“Nearly got myself killed stealing it, but I’ve got it,” he told me. “You’d better not try to cheat me.”

“If you don’t trust me to hold up my end of the bargain, I recommend taking that shard and getting yourself a nice meal and some new clothes.”

Indecision warred on his face. Tanner wanted those things, not that I could blame him, and he was obviously afraid of wasting the money on me. “Look, how about a different deal instead? You know how to get under that wall. I’ll pay you to take me. You’ll have even more money than you already do.”

“No,” Tanner said after a moment. “I’ll run out of money eventually. I need to learn things that most people don’t know. If I learned to cast spells, I could work for the Hierophant.”

“The who?” I asked.

“The person in charge of the city,” Tanner said, waving one hand in the general direction of the wall. “All of the mages answer to him. They get to live in the inner city. It’s supposed to be a paradise in there.”

“Wouldn’t you know? You’re the one claiming to know how to get to the other side of the wall.”

“I know how to get there. That’s not the same as going there. I’m not setting one foot in the inner city. You’re on your own once I show you where the smuggler’s passage is.”

I laughed. “A paradise with smugglers? I think you might have the wrong impression of what the ruling elite are living like.”

“Guess I’ll find out once I’m living on the inside,” Tanner said. He looked me straight in the eye and added, “Assuming you’re not lying about anything.”

“I’m lying about tons of things,” I told him, “but not about being able to do magic. I have to stress again: if you go through with this, it will paint a target on your back.”

“How? Is there a way to tell that someone knows a spell?”

“It’s not that. It’s what you need to do to your mana core in order to gain enough mana to do anything. It’s called ignition, and you won’t be able to hide your mana at first. Any decent mage is going to be able to feel you through walls, even if you’re just sleeping. If you start actually casting spells, that’s going to draw attention even faster.”

“It’s a big city,” Tanner said.

I just sighed and shook my head. Maybe I could set up a warded practice room for him. If I taught him how to keep the wards topped off, he might go years without being discovered. Of course, that was going significantly out of my way, far more than our deal required. Even igniting his core wasn’t strictly part of the agreement, but I’d determined it was necessary in order to actually teach him any magic. I wasn’t going to sit around for months waiting for him to generate mana so he could practice. I wasn’t even sure it was possible, considering the prevalence of mana-stealing leech stones in the city. Everyone was walking around with near-empty cores.

Something must have shown on my face, because he said, “Look, it’s not your responsibility to look after me. Just teach me how to do some magic, I’ll show you the smuggler’s tunnel, and we’ll go our separate ways.”

That was true enough. I needed to keep my sympathy for these kids’ situation under control. It was awful that they were living on the streets, forced to steal to survive, living on the edge of starvation. Really, it was. I’d been there myself. It also was not my problem. I’d come to Derro to handle much bigger issues than the local orphans’ lifestyles.

“You’re right,” I said. “Alright, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go buy some food, then I’m going to spend the next few hours working with you. This is going to be an intense crash course, but if you’re as smart as you think you are, you’ll get through it just fine.”

“Uh… you go ahead. I’ll just wait for you here,” Tanner said.

“There some reason you can’t go into the square?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

He shot me a dirty look and muttered, “It’d be suicide to go back in there now. I’m already too close. Just go get your food and come back down this street. Keep walking until I join you.”

Well, the only reasonable way Tanner was going to get his hands on a full shard was to steal it. It just made sense that he’d try his luck in a place where a lot of money was floating around. I was guessing things either hadn’t gone well and the guards knew to watch for him, or he’d robbed one of the regular merchants who were there every day. Either way, I couldn’t argue with the idea of keeping some distance. There were plenty of other markets around the city Tanner could try his luck at if he got desperate enough.

But as for me, I hadn’t stolen anything from anyone there and had in fact become something of a regular paying customer to one of the food vendors. So I was going back for my normal lunch. “I’ll see you in ten or twenty minutes,” I said as I turned back to the market.

I felt Tanner moving away by tracking his mana or, more accurately, the shard in his possession. We’d need to drain that soon in case any wandering mages happened to note its presence and decide to go investigate why such a large sum of mana was in the possession of a bunch of street kids who couldn’t defend it.

He’d keep for half an hour, I hoped. I glanced back behind me and saw the street was empty. Tanner had ducked into an abandoned ruin on the east side of the street. Resolutely, I shook my head and took another step toward the market. He’d already had it for over a day and nothing bad had happened to him.

I made it halfway to the market when I felt a surge of mana behind me. Someone had cast some spell from far enough away that it was out of my range. All I’d felt was the spell resolving, not its construction, which meant the target was still close to me even if the caster wasn’t. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough information for me to determine what spell exactly had been cast.

That wasn’t something I could ignore. For the first time since I’d arrived in Derro, I felt another mage at work. I needed to find out who they were and what they were doing. The fastest way to do that would be to scry. As long as there were no warding fields present, it would remain undetected. And since I’d just walked through that area a few minutes ago, it was unlikely that anyone had had time to set something like that up.

I ducked into the first empty building I could find. Someone was living there, judging by the clothes piled on top of a flat stone in a rudimentary attempt at creating some padding. A waterskin, empty, sat next to them. Whoever it was, they weren’t home right now, but I wanted to be out of the place before they came back. It would be less of a hassle that way.

I cast my scrying spell south and looked through it. It didn’t take long to find the disturbance, not with the mage making no effort to hide himself and wearing one of those distinctive guard uniforms I’d seen the other day. He was walking down the center of the street, heading in the direction of a dust plume rising into the air. I sent the scry anchor past him to get a closer look.

Tanner had his back to a wall around the corner, chest heaving and eyes wide. Nearby, a chunk of stone had been torn out of the building, perhaps from some sort of force spell. There was nowhere for Tanner to run, not without revealing himself. If the mage who’d attacked him was any good, that shard Tanner was holding would make it impossible to sneak away regardless.

The odds of a random guard just happening to come across Tanner were too low to dismiss the encounter as a coincidence. More likely, whoever Tanner had stolen from had sent someone after him. The reaction seemed a bit extreme for a single shard, but then again, I didn’t know that Tanner hadn’t stolen anything else. Either way, if I wanted my smuggler’s passage beyond the wall, I needed to save the kid.

With a scowl, I stomped back out of the house and started running down the street. Mana sped my steps, but just a tiny strand of it, enough that the mage wouldn’t notice until it was too late. Tanner just needed to survive another thirty seconds. He could do that easily enough, as long as he didn’t move. The mage was taking his time getting there.

So of course Tanner picked that moment to rabbit. I felt mana spinning up again, some sort of wide-spread force spell, practically guaranteed to hit a relatively slow-moving target. There was no way I was getting there in time to save him, not at my current speed.

Mentally cursing the boy, I thickened the flow of mana to my speed boosting invocation.

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