《Keiran》


 Chapter 1

    When I first opened my eyes, it was to stare down in confusion at the thin, grubby, dirt-smudged fingers of a child far too old to be a newborn. My hands, somehow, impossibly. They should have been the soft, pudgy digits of a freshly born infant, not even an hour old, but instead, I had months and months, maybe even years of memories of my new life.


    Something had gone terribly wrong.


    The invocations I¡¯d laid into my soul should have sparked my previous life¡¯s memories with only the barest brush of mana to trigger them. If not for my new body¡¯s memories, my first thought would have been someone had detected my passage through the reincarnation cycle and trapped me in a mana void for years. Just looking around was enough to dispel that line of thinking. The truth was both simpler and stranger, it seemed.


    There wasn¡¯t a speck of ambient mana in the air around me, not a drop in the dry, dusty earth. I was sitting in a garden, a place that should have been bursting with life, but each row of plants was sadder than the one that preceded it. They barely clung to life, sad, wilted, shriveled things starved for the mana they needed to flourish.


    It appeared I¡¯d been reborn in a desert, one that had been devastated by some cataclysm that had scarred the land. It had taken my new body years to generate enough internal mana to trigger the soul invocations that would awaken my previous life¡¯s memories. There¡¯d been no mistakes, just ill fortune that had seen me reborn on a swath of dead land.


    ¡°Gravin.¡±


    This was probably a blessing in disguise. If there was so little ambient mana in the environment that it had taken years to trigger the soul magic, I wouldn¡¯t have been able to do much during those initial years anyway. At least this way, I¡¯d been spared the tedium of having to live through them. The memories alone were bad enough, fragmented and disjointed as they were.


    ¡°Graaavviiin,¡± a voice cooed.


    I was going to need to adjust my time frame. Internal mana was going to be my only source of power as long as I was stuck in this mana desert, and I was physically too weak to survive on my own. It would be months before I built up enough mana to ignite my core. Damn. What rotten luck to be reincarnated in a place like this.


    ¡°He looks so serious,¡± a different voice said. ¡°Look at that scowl on his face.¡±


    ¡°Come here, Gravvy,¡± the first voice said, and suddenly a shadow appeared over me. I looked up just in time to see a plain-faced woman wearing rough home-spun leaning down to grab hold of me. My mother, if the memories of my new brain were to be believed.


    ¡°Did you have fun?¡± she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she whisked me away towards what could generously be described as a hut and said, ¡°Come on, let¡¯s get you cleaned up and we¡¯ll have dinner.¡±


    My mother said her goodbyes to the other woman, a neighbor by the looks of it, and carried me towards a nearby hut, one of dozens lined up next to a dirt street, our home if my new body¡¯s memories were to be believed. They were more or less identical, all mud-fired bricks of some sort with a woven thatch roof. I took that time to consider my mana core. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure something had gone wrong. Even in this desert, I should have generated enough internal mana to awaken far sooner than I had. I couldn¡¯t recall the exact averages for mana generation rates in babies, but I should have produced enough well before reaching two years of age.


    I didn¡¯t realize we were inside the hut until I was plopped down on a table and the woman carrying me started tugging at my clothes. ¡°Arms up,¡± she said in a little sing-song voice. My body reacted without my conscious decision, and she pulled my shirt off.


    I needed to figure out this mana situation immediately. Otherwise it was going to be a long few years.


    * * *


    My memory wasn¡¯t perfect, but I hadn¡¯t been an archmage for nothing. I¡¯d done the math, repeatedly, and the results just didn¡¯t make sense. I would have said my mana core was crippled in some way, but I could sense it perfectly. It was as flawless as any other two-year-old¡¯s. Even if my math was somehow way off, I could sense it generating mana. It should have only taken about twenty hours before my core had enough mana to awaken my memories, not over two years.


    Something was interfering with my mana generation. That was the only explanation that made sense, but I couldn¡¯t for the life of me fathom why. Even if someone found the records of my experiments, it was impossible to trace the flow of my soul through the afterlife to my new body. It would take a grand magus invoker to examine my soul here and now to note anything unusual, and judging by the conditions I¡¯d apparently been living in, I doubted there was one within a thousand miles, let alone one bored enough to spot check random babies for soul modifications.


    I could only speculate for now. Until I learned more, the best I could do was start working on building up enough mana to ignite my core. Given how pitiful my mana generation was at the moment, that was going to take a month just for the mana to form, and I¡¯d need more than my core was capable of holding. I¡¯d have to invest some time and mana into building a storage crystal to feed my mana into.


    Another frustrating delay. I could scarcely picture a way in which I could have started my new life in a worse position. This process should have taken me a few hours at most, not weeks and weeks.


    Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.


    My new family appeared one by one. First, my older sister showed back up just as Mother was finishing dinner, followed swiftly by my father. I had memories of both but, perhaps unsurprisingly, a baby¡¯s memories didn¡¯t provide clear pictures. I wasn¡¯t even sure how old my sister was, though she certainly didn¡¯t have more than a few years on me. Gravin felt a baby¡¯s love for the parents who nurtured him, and perhaps curiosity at his older sister more than anything else. I supposed a bit of acting was in order.


    Fortunately for me, Gravin was a quiet child with a tendency to stare at whatever caught his interest. If anything, he seemed a bit timid. That should be easy enough to copy for the time being. Once I¡¯d ignited my mana core, things would have to change, of course. That was several months away, and without an abundant source of ambient mana, my progress was going to be agonizingly slow.


    Dinner was a simple affair of humble food prepared with more love than skill, and, unfortunately, no seasonings at all to help the taste. I focused my efforts on fine motor control, which was surprisingly difficult to accomplish and somewhat exhausting. Who would have guessed that eating a meal without making a mess all over myself would turn into such a grueling test? It wasn¡¯t even that it was hard to accomplish so much as it was that my stamina was non-existent.


    The whole while, my new sister nattered on about what she¡¯d learned that day, which I did my best to tune out. Basic numbers and letters weren¡¯t exciting when I had been the one learning them thousands of years ago and they weren¡¯t exciting today. More and more, I despaired of how tedious my life was going to be for the next few months. It wasn¡¯t until after dinner was done that something interesting happened.


    ¡°Good job, Gravin!¡± my mother said. ¡°You barely need to be cleaned up at all. How about we go to the square early today and you can watch everyone while we wait for the Collectors? We¡¯ll be right near the front of the line this time.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯d be a relief,¡± Father added. ¡°We can all go to bed early tonight.¡±


    My sister¡¯s round little face scrunched up at that, but she didn¡¯t say anything. At first, I thought it was the early bedtime that she had a problem with, but somewhere in Gravin¡¯s fuzzy memories were visions of a group of people all lined up in front of tables, moving forward every few seconds. It was hard to pick details out of it, in part because of Gravin¡¯s habit of fixating on things. I had one memory with a clear picture of a man¡¯s mud-stained boot in front of me, but no clues as to why we were in line to begin with.


    I supposed I¡¯d find out soon enough.


    * * *


    The village was one of those little huddled specks on the landscape, a collection of fifty or so huts surrounded by fields that barely grew enough for the people to survive. Everything was dry, dusty, and hot. I didn¡¯t get to see much of it during our short walk to the square at the center, but what I did see was not reassuring. These people were one crop-ruining storm away from being wiped out.


    More importantly from my perspective, there was no ambient mana at all. I would have said it was impossible if I wasn¡¯t seeing it myself. Everything had mana in it, even the world itself. Living things were the best source of mana, but even in a desert like this, there should have been at least a little. Instead, the whole village was bone dry. Not even the people had any mana coming off them.


    They had mana, of course. Each and every one had a dormant mana core, but not a single one of them was full. Maybe it was just that they were all coming back in from a hard day¡¯s labor. I could see it being common around here to spend mana on physical invocations to aid in farming. The techniques would be as basic and bare bones as possible, just a simple conversion of mana to energy, but it would explain why not a single person was producing ambient mana from a full core.


    While I studied the villagers, they started organizing themselves into four lines that stretched across the square. Families chatted with each other as they waited, though I wasn¡¯t able to tell what exactly it was we were all gathered for. Whatever was going on, it was common enough that nobody felt the need to discuss the details.


    The north side of the square had a wide, squat building, more than five times bigger than any of the huts various families had emerged from. It also had a single wooden door, which was the first one I¡¯d seen so far. The huts had all used rough cloth to drape the entryways.


    The door opened and eight people walked out in groups of two with tables carried between each of them. Those were lined up in front of the building, and four more people emerged. They were carrying large black rocks, probably about forty pounds or so, close to their chests. Without talking, they all stepped up to a different table and placed the rock down. We were close enough to the front of the line that I could easily make out the details.


    Draw stone. Of course. I should have guessed.


    The lines started moving, people placing a hand on the stone for a few seconds, receiving confirmation from the attendant and having their names ticked off a list on a nearby sheet of paper, and moving out of the way for the next. Each person¡¯s mana core was emptied into one of the draw stones, and within a minute, it was my family¡¯s turn.


    Father went first, then turned to my sister. ¡°Come on, your turn,¡± he said.


    ¡°I don¡¯t like it. It makes me feel tired.¡±


    ¡°I know sweetie, but everyone has to contribute so the barrier doesn¡¯t come down. The monsters will get in if we don¡¯t donate our mana.¡±


    My father took her hand and gently pressed it against the draw stone. What little mana she had drained out of her over the next few seconds, and she swayed on her feet. He scooped her up and carried her out of the way so my mother could take her turn. From what I could tell, he wasn¡¯t handling the mana drain much better than my sister.


    My mother let the draw stone take her mana, then knelt down and boosted me up so I could reach it sitting on the table. ¡°Just put your hand here, like we practiced,¡± she said.


    All around me, the other lines were moving forward. Behind us, more villagers were waiting their turns. No one was objecting, at least beyond some fussing from the smaller children. Everyone thought this was perfectly normal. Had I been reborn inside some sort of cult? And what barrier were they talking about? I would have noticed something like that.


    Her hand over mine, my mother guided my hand to press down on the draw stone so that it could steal what little mana I¡¯d managed to generate.


    To hell with that.


    * * *


    Note: If you are reading this on a website that is not Royal Road or on my Patreon, you are reading a pirated version and that website does not have the permission of the author to host the story. Please instead read the story on Royal Road, here</a>, as it is completely free to read on Royal Road. This story has not been published on Amazon and if you find it there, please reach out to me via DMs on Royal Road or through discord as EmergencyComplaints.

 Chapter 2

    Draw stones were easy to use, so easy in fact that they would passively steal mana right out of the cores of anyone nearby, albeit much more slowly than if someone touched one. It was no wonder it had taken so long for me to awaken if this was a nightly village ritual.


    Fortunately for me, anyone with the least bit of knowledge could block the pull of a draw stone. It was a simple matter to keep my mana right where it was. The only question was whether the attendant would realize, but considering there wasn¡¯t a single ignited mana core in this entire village, I was betting the answer was going to be no.


    I pulled my hand back after a few seconds of pretending to let the draw stone do its business, and the attendant just ticked off a box next to my name. Mother picked me up and said, ¡°There we go. Good job, Gravin! Maybe you should give Senica lessons on how to be brave.¡±


    My sister stuck her tongue out at me from our father¡¯s arms, and together we walked back to our one-room hut. At least I knew her name now. I was sure Mother and Father would suffice for our parents, and no one would look at me too hard if I forgot the names of anyone else I was supposed to know. No one was even really commenting on the fact that I hadn¡¯t said a word yet since I¡¯d awakened. Gravin had always been a quiet child.


    Now that I had a better idea of the situation I¡¯d found myself in, I could start forming a plan to get myself out of here. The first step was going to be creating a mana storage crystal. My own core couldn¡¯t hold all the mana I needed to ignite it, and there was no ambient mana to draw in. I¡¯d have to hoard it. That shouldn¡¯t be too terribly difficult. I just needed a physical object, some mana, and a great deal of patience. The biggest hurdle was going to be how weak my body was. Even without letting myself be mana drained, I was feeling drowsy.


    Toddlers slept a lot, and while I could use my own mana to energize myself, I needed it for other projects. A nap wouldn¡¯t go amiss right now. Luckily enough, the sun was going down and it looked like everyone else was getting ready to sleep too. That led me to take my first good look around the inside of the hut, and I realized almost immediately that there were only two pallets. One was a small, Senica-sized rectangle with a pair of dolls laying on it, and the other was big enough for two adults.


    Oh no. Was I still sleeping with my parents? This whole reincarnation was starting to feel like some sort of cosmic joke someone was playing on me. It was bad enough that I was sleeping on an unscented oblong bag of straw, but to have to share the pallet with two other people¡­


    Getting my own place to sleep was right up near the top of my priorities list.


    My new family went through their night time rituals before Senica crawled onto her own pallet and I was placed between my parents on the larger one. My mother handed me some sort of straw-stuffed doll shaped like what I assumed was a local animal. I didn¡¯t recognize it, but that could have been because the quality was lacking or because it was just an animal I¡¯d never seen before. Neither would have surprised me. Wherever I¡¯d reincarnated at, it wasn¡¯t a place I was familiar with.


    Apparently, it was just expected that I¡¯d want to hang onto ¡°Farnsley,¡± as my mother called the toy. It wasn¡¯t ideal for my purposes, but I only needed a storage crystal for a month or two. I could easily empty my mana into the toy every morning once I¡¯d modified it, and no one would think twice about me constantly holding it. It was almost galling thinking about the transference loss, but then again, it wasn¡¯t like I had anything better around to work with.


    I¡¯d get started on forming the storage crystal inside the toy where it couldn¡¯t be seen tonight, and over the next few weeks, I¡¯d slowly fill it. No one would suspect a thing. Perfect.


    * * *


    My eyes cracked open to see sunlight pouring in through the window. Both my parents were already up and preparing for the day, though my sister was still laying on her pallet. I groaned and sat up, then looked around for the toy. It had somehow made its way down past my feet while I slept.


    I had not managed to finish forming the storage crystal last night, not even close. I hadn¡¯t even managed to use all the mana in my core before I¡¯d fallen asleep. I crawled across the bed, scooped the toy back up, and got back to work.


    ¡°Oh, you¡¯re up early,¡± my mother said. Before I had time to think, she¡¯d crossed the room and picked me up. ¡°Come on, leave Farnsley here. Let¡¯s get your morning business taken care of.¡±


    With no say in the matter, I was whooshed out of the hut to the nearest communal outhouse. How humiliating.


    * * *


    It was far more difficult than I¡¯d expected to work on the storage crystal. I wasn¡¯t allowed to take the toy anywhere, and when I tried, I was told that I was getting too old for that now. Between that and my weak body¡¯s inability to stay awake at night, it was hard to get time to even work on the crystal. That was frustrating, but if I was being honest, it wasn¡¯t like I was generating mana fast enough that a ton of additional time would make a difference.


    This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    It took me a week to finish forming the storage crystal inside the toy. It felt like a rock the size of a grown woman¡¯s thumb, and the only way to tell it was there was to squeeze the toy tightly. Its maximum storage capacity was pathetic, and if circumstances hadn¡¯t been so dire, I¡¯d be embarrassed to associate myself with its creation.


    The storage crystal was horribly inefficient and I was forced to once again revise my estimations about how long it would take to fill it. At least half the mana I poured into it leaked out before it stabilized, and if the tests I¡¯d done were in any way accurate, I was going to lose half of it again when I tried to pull it back out.


    Two months, at least. That was the best-case scenario. So far, nothing had interfered, at least not in any meaningful way. Mother was intent on monopolizing most of my waking hours, and when she wasn¡¯t, Father occasionally took over my evening. The only person who didn¡¯t seem particularly interested in me was Senica. At least, that¡¯s what I thought.


    * * *


    ¡°How come you don¡¯t talk anymore?¡± Senica asked me one afternoon.


    I slowly turned my head to look at her and blinked once. It suited my purposes to say nothing, and no one had made any demands otherwise.


    ¡°Mom¡¯s worried about how quiet you got. I heard her talking to Malra about it while we were gardening the other day,¡± my sister continued. She jabbed a finger in my direction. ¡°So how come you stopped?¡±


    I shrugged my little shoulders and told her, ¡°Nothing to say.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯d better start talking again soon. Malra said we should take you to the gover- the govenirer, no, the¡­ to Lord Noctra¡¯s house to see if you¡¯re possessed.¡±


    That was ridiculous. What kind of spirit would waste its time possessing a toddler? What would even be the point? Now, if they were worried about body snatchers or changelings, that would make sense. But a possession? That was just dumb.


    Just the same, I didn¡¯t need anyone taking a closer look at me before I had the ability to defend myself. Even if they couldn¡¯t see the soul invocations I¡¯d woven into myself, that might not stop some third-rate charlatan from pronouncing some suitably mystical sounding garbage to some frightened villagers that ended up with me in even more dire straits than I was now.


    ¡°Not possessed,¡± I said.


    ¡°Well, of course you¡¯re not, dear,¡± my mother said, sweeping me up into her arms. Curse my toddler senses, I hadn¡¯t even realized she¡¯d been listening. ¡°Senica is just being mean. Ignore her.¡±


    I spent the next half an hour reciting the names of various fruits and vegetables from the garden back to my mother as she told them to me, much to her delight. It looked like I hadn¡¯t done as good a job at acting like a normal toddler as I¡¯d thought.


    Two more months¡­


    * * *


    Everything would have gone so much faster if I¡¯d had the ability to cast even the most basic of spells. Mana draining my parents in their sleep, for example, would have increased the amount of mana I could put in my storage crystal. It was too bad I couldn¡¯t do it.


    Days turned into weeks, and ever so slowly, the storage crystal kept filling. Every evening, I went to the town square with my family and pretended to give up my mana to the draw stone, an event they called the tithe. Every night, I poured it into my storage crystal instead. Soon enough, it technically had enough mana in it to ignite my own core, but with so much being wasted upon drawing it out, it wasn¡¯t really close to enough. I needed to fill the crystal to the brim to ensure success.


    The whole thing would have been easier if Mother was just a little bit less interested in me. Her constant demands on my time were bad enough, but the amount of energy I wasted appeasing her attempts to play with and educate me were the true problem. It was impossible to keep up with her demands without tapping into my mana. Gravin, and no doubt every other baby here, had probably been doing it unconsciously. It was a common enough form of invocation, which itself was by far the easiest kind of magic to cast without realizing it.


    If I tried to get out of it, I got admonishments. If I persisted, it turned to concern about my health, which led to greater scrutiny. The last thing I needed was someone like that neighbor Malra snooping around or, worse, going to someone else who might actually be competent. Anyone with a lick of training would notice that storage crystal. I was running a calculated risk not shielding the mana, but it would take ten times as long to fill if I did.


    Why couldn¡¯t I have gotten an absentee mother, like in my previous life? That woman had been so disconnected from me that I couldn¡¯t even remember her name anymore. Thinking about her only brought to mind the smell of burning yamma weed that she¡¯d smoked from a long-stemmed pipe every day and the sound of flesh slapping on flesh, which was how she¡¯d paid for it.


    My new mother was nothing like that. It was ungrateful of me to resent her for being such a loving parent, but she was standing in the way of my progress. I played along and did my best to keep my mana expenditure to a minimum while silently fuming about even more delays. Weeks turned into months, and my goal of filling the storage crystal in just two months seemed laughable. Before I knew it, my third birthday had come and gone.


    That led to even more expectations, and my mana generation hadn¡¯t grown enough to keep up with them. It was now four months of this routine, and every day was an exercise in willpower as I resisted the temptation to tap into the storage crystal, drain it dry, and hope that I could squeeze enough mana out of it to ignite my core.


    The day was coming, and soon too. Even with all the stumbling blocks, I was over three quarters of the way to filling the crystal. Just another two months should do it. This time, I was sure.


    * * *


    ¡°Gravin,¡± my mother said. ¡°I have a surprise for you, sweetie.¡±


    I opened my eyes and looked at her. I¡¯d been sitting in the garden while she worked, doing my best to meditate and increase the amount of mana I was generating. With my core in the state it was, there wasn¡¯t really much I could do, and I would have normally considered it a waste of effort. In these circumstances, though, anything I could do to shave off a day or two was worth the work.


    ¡°This is Cherok,¡± my mother said, gesturing to a man standing next to her. ¡°He¡¯s going to be your school teacher for the next few months while you learn how to use your mana. Isn¡¯t that exciting?¡±

 Chapter 3

    The man standing at the edge of the garden had a round, soft face and thick, pudgy fingers. He wore the same rough home-spun as everyone else in the village, but in his case the fabric strained over a potbelly. In my former life, I would have pegged him as some sort of low-ranking noble, high enough up the ladder to not have to do manual labor, but not so high that he had the time and inclination to maintain a state of physical fitness. He would be someone for whom appearances weren¡¯t important.


    Here, where almost everyone worked the fields, and did so without much magic to help, finding someone with an appreciable amount of fat on them was something of a rarity. Everyone else I¡¯d met so far straddled the line between lean and malnourished. So then, this Cherok fellow must be important to the village¡¯s society, someone in a privileged position. He represented yet another complication I didn¡¯t need.


    He advanced through the rows of stunted tomato plants and squatted down in front of me. ¡°Hello, Gravin. It¡¯s nice to meet you.¡±


    I had no idea how Gravin would have reacted, but as my sister had pointed out, I¡¯d developed a reputation for not saying much among my family. There was no reason to change that strategy now.


    ¡°Hello,¡± I said. Then I waited.


    Cherok smiled patiently, but after a few seconds of me not saying anything else, he looked back to my mother, who just shrugged in response. ¡°Do you know what mana is?¡± he asked.


    It was a struggle not to roll my eyes, made easier by the fact that I had a very real fear that this man was going to be hindering my progress greatly. Depending on his capabilities, there were really only two ways to play this. Either I could pretend to be a prodigy and get through the unnecessary lessons as quickly as possible, thus wasting the minimum amount of my precious mana appeasing him, or I could pretend to be hopelessly thick, wasting no mana and deliberating failing all his lessons.


    The problem there was that I didn¡¯t know if I just needed to prove I could manipulate my mana or if the classes lasted the same length of time regardless. More than that, I didn¡¯t know how much he¡¯d be able to detect. There were too many unknown variables to make this decision with any degree of confidence, and of course nobody had bothered to talk to the toddler about what he wanted to do. Why would they?


    The only thing Gravin would know about mana was that the draw stones took it. That was a nice, safe topic. ¡°It¡¯s what we give to the big rock every day,¡± I said.


    Cherok chuckled at that. Perhaps I¡¯d just spent too many months as a small child, but I¡¯d noticed that a lot of adults were very patronizing towards children. It was to be expected to an extent, but there were degrees of difference. My mother, for example, wanted to celebrate every little thing. That was a perfectly valid tactic for encouraging children to grow and explore, but it did get a bit wearing to me personally.


    This particular adult was not like that. He clearly looked down on me, probably on all children, and considered me lesser. I disliked him immediately. If I¡¯d been on the fence before, that laugh of his sealed the deal.


    ¡°That¡¯s true, but that¡¯s not what mana is. That¡¯s just something you do with it,¡± he said condescendingly. I glanced over his shoulder at my mother, but she just stood there smiling at me. Obviously, I wasn¡¯t getting any help there.


    Cherok was waiting for me to say something again, no doubt intending to lead me through the conversation by the nose while he displayed his intellectual superiority to a literal toddler. I stared back at him and remained silent.


    The moment stretched between us, him waiting for me to ask the question he was baiting me into voicing, me more than willing to sit there all day ignoring him. I didn¡¯t need to ask him what mana was. I¡¯d known that for over two thousand years, and my original teacher had been an actual mage, not a dull like this guy. All he was doing was interrupting my meditation, which was just a way for me to pass the time and generate just slightly more mana than I would otherwise.


    ¡°Mana,¡± Cherok said, giving up on waiting me out, ¡°is the magic inside us. It makes us strong, and we collectively use it as a community to empower the great barrier that keeps Alkerist safe from monsters.¡±


    Almost nobody ever said the name of the village. I¡¯d been here for months before I¡¯d heard it the first time. For a group of people utterly isolated from the outside world, the real surprise had been that they¡¯d named their village at all. I suspected someone who¡¯d died a long, long time ago had come up with the name, and whatever meaning it had once had was long forgotten.


    Then there was this guy.


    ¡°Okay,¡± I said.


    Cherok frowned and glanced back at my mother again. She didn¡¯t say anything, and I felt a surge of malicious little glee at the whole situation. He looked back to me and said, ¡°My job is to teach children how to sense their mana and, more importantly, how to manipulate their spirit to make more of it. Some of my students are so advanced that they can even use their mana to make themselves stronger or faster. Doesn¡¯t that sound exciting?¡±


    The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    It really, really didn¡¯t. Also he didn¡¯t seem to know what he was talking about. Presumably, he meant he taught people how to manipulate their mana cores, but I couldn¡¯t be completely sure.


    ¡°Okay,¡± I said again.


    Cherok rose back to his full height and walked back over to my mother to talk to her in a hushed voice. I went back to ¡°playing¡± in the dirt, as my mother had termed my meditation sessions. A bit of mana sharpened my senses so I could pick up their conversation easily. It might have been wasteful, but it seemed prudent to keep on top of whatever they were planning for me.


    ¡°Maybe he¡¯s just a bit too young,¡± Cherok said, ¡°but he doesn¡¯t understand what I¡¯m saying, and he¡¯s not interested in learning.¡±


    ¡°It sounds like you¡¯re saying my son is stupid,¡± my mother said, a warning tone in her voice.


    ¡°No, no, of course not. Everyone develops at their own pace, and just because his sister started early doesn¡¯t mean he will too. There¡¯s nothing wrong with that. It¡¯s just how it is.¡±


    ¡°So you don¡¯t want Gravin to attend your next class?¡±


    ¡°He can, if you really want him there. But I won¡¯t be able to give him special instruction time to help him catch up. It might be best for everyone if we try again in a few months.¡±


    Yes, good. That sounded reasonable. It would give me enough time to ignite my mana core. Then whatever demands Cherok made of me would be easily compensated for. As long as the lessons weren¡¯t too intensive, I could probably spend most of the time strengthening my core so I could push past stage one quickly.


    Considering the utter lack of ambient mana in the village, increasing my own mana generation was really the only way to progress. Once I was strong enough to leave, I¡¯d get out of this desert and I could return to my original plans. I didn¡¯t like being vulnerable like this, though there were still a few failsafes left in my soul if the worst should come to pass.


    ¡°Senica wasn¡¯t that interested to begin with either,¡± my mother said. ¡°But you¡¯ll recall she ended up doing very well.¡±


    ¡°She did,¡± Cherok admitted. ¡°But as I said, every child is different. Your daughter was interested in playing and was extremely active. She thought the classes would be boring and a distraction from her games. Once she got a taste of what I had to teach her, her whole attitude changed. Gravin, on the other hand, well¡­¡±


    ¡°Well what?¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s just kind of¡­ sitting there. And from what I understand, that isn¡¯t unusual behavior for him. He doesn¡¯t do much of anything, isn¡¯t curious, doesn¡¯t play, doesn¡¯t talk. I¡¯ve been teaching the children of Alkerist for twenty years now, and I¡¯ve never seen one as disinterested in the world around him as your son. Xilaya, he¡¯s not ready, and he might never be ready. There¡¯s something wrong with him.¡±


    ¡°There is nothing wrong with my boy,¡± my mother hissed.


    Cherok held his hands up and took a step back. ¡°As you say. You¡¯d know him best. Regardless, from my conversation with him, I¡¯d recommend waiting a few more months to see if he develops some interest. I can show you a few things to work on with him here at home that might spark something if you¡¯d like.¡±


    I hadn¡¯t realized I stood out so much. Here I thought I¡¯d just been well-behaved and easy to care for, and instead I¡¯d gotten a reputation as an idiot. I¡¯d be offended if there was even a single person in this whole village whose opinion mattered to me. As it was, I¡¯d take being looked down on if it meant I was left alone for the next few months.


    ¡°Our next Testing is in a month,¡± my mother said, her voice quiet and almost desperate. ¡°Gravin needs to be able to show that he¡¯s contributing to the barrier.¡±


    ¡°Well I¡¯m sorry, but even if the boy was a genius, it¡¯d be all but impossible to teach him mana techniques in just a few weeks,¡± Cherok said. ¡°Not even I can take a child to that height so quickly, no matter how talented they might be. And your son, I¡¯m sorry to say, isn¡¯t.¡±


    If only he knew how wrong he was. But no, it wasn¡¯t worth it to draw the attention to myself, not when I was still this weak. I had nothing to prove to a bunch of farmers living in the back corner of nowhere and clinging to superstitions about a fictional magical barrier that was keeping them safe from a vague, unspecified threat that never seemed to emerge to prove them wrong.


    ¡°What are we supposed to do then?¡± my mother demanded. ¡°Sellis is already working himself to death. We can¡¯t afford for him to be taxed twice a day.¡±


    ¡°There is nothing you can do,¡± Cherok said stiffly. ¡°My suggestion would be to keep your legs closed in the immediate future so you don¡¯t end up with a third child you can¡¯t afford.¡±


    It was a good thing I was studiously avoiding looking in their direction, otherwise one of them might have seen my smirk when I felt the mana in my mother¡¯s core surge in an unstructured invocation that bolstered her physical prowess. A second later, there came the smack of palm against cheek and Cherok let out a surprised, pain-filled squeal.


    It seemed I wasn¡¯t the only one who didn¡¯t like the village teacher.


    ¡°Well then,¡± his mother said, her voice cold, ¡°thank you for the deep insight into my family. Truly, your wisdom is without peer.¡±


    I risked a look over and saw Cherok still staggered back a step, one hand clutching at his face. He straightened up, shot me a nasty glare, and said, ¡°My recommendation is that you wait for your son to get older before he begins his schooling. He is nowhere near ready at this time. Good day, Xilaya.¡±


    And with that, he turned on his heel and stormed off down the street. My mother watched him go, her fists clenched at her side and her nose flaring with each breath. Only after he¡¯d turned the corner did she force herself to relax.


    ¡°And good riddance,¡± she muttered. When she turned to face me, she¡¯d resumed her normal, smiling expression. ¡°Well then, wasn¡¯t that exciting?¡±


    ¡°Mean man,¡± I said.


    ¡°People are complicated,¡± she told me. ¡°Do you understand?¡±


    ¡°Mean. Pretends not to be.¡±


    My mother paused, gave me a speculative look, and nodded. ¡°Yes, I suppose that¡¯s a good way to put it. There¡¯s nothing to be done about it, though. Why don¡¯t we see about getting this row weeded, and then we can start working on dinner?¡±


    It looked like I¡¯d managed to dodge school for now. With any luck, by the time that particular issue reared its ugly head again, it would be too late to matter.

 Chapter 4

    ¡°Cherok came by to talk to Gravin today,¡± I heard Mother say when Father came home.


    There was a silent beat, then, ¡°How¡¯d that go?¡±


    ¡°He implied there was something wrong with Gravin¡¯s brain and told me that if we can¡¯t afford the mana tax, that I should close my legs more often.¡±


    My father¡¯s expression darkened. ¡°Did he now?¡± he said quietly. I would not want to be Cherok when Father caught up with him.


    ¡°What¡¯s that mean?¡± Senica asked. I smothered a laugh and turned away from the rest of the family so they couldn¡¯t see my face.


    ¡°Oh, it¡¯s, er, it¡¯s just a grown-up thing you won¡¯t need to worry about for a long time,¡± Mother said.


    ¡°But what¡¯s it mean?¡± Senica pressed.


    ¡°I¡¯ll tell you when you¡¯re older.¡±


    My sister let out a huff and flopped onto her pallet. ¡°Fine!¡±


    ¡°What do we do now?" Father asked. ¡°There¡¯s only a few weeks left.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know. Even if we pushed the issue and got Gravin into training, this class is just starting too late for it to make a difference, and it¡¯s not right to put that kind of pressure on Gravin. He¡¯s only three.¡±


    ¡°I know, but that¡¯s the rule. Everyone contributes mana. No exceptions. We¡¯re a family of four, and Gravin is old enough to walk and talk. They¡¯re going to start assessing us higher. If we can¡¯t produce enough with a daily tithe, we¡¯ll both be wearing draw stone pendants for the next six months.¡±


    I wondered how many draw stones this village could possibly have. It wasn¡¯t like it was rare or anything, but considering these people were out in the middle of nowhere with no obvious way to acquire it, it was strange that they¡¯d have draw stones in abundance.


    On a more personal level, if I was understanding this conversation correctly, we were looking at having draw stones literally hanging off our necks. Maybe it would just be my parents, but I still didn¡¯t want the stuff in our home. The constant need to resist a draw stone¡¯s pull would wear on me, and especially since I still had to sleep in the same bed as my parents, it would be practically touching me all night. It was just a matter of time until it started stealing away my precious mana while I slept. Worse, my storage crystal would have no such protections.


    ¡°Hey,¡± Senica said to me. ¡°What¡¯s wrong with your brain?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know,¡± I said.


    ¡°Nothing is wrong with his brain,¡± my mother said. ¡°Cherok was just being an as- a jerk. He was saying mean things because he doesn¡¯t get along with your father and wanted to take it out on us.¡±


    ¡°Cherok¡¯s not the problem right now,¡± Father said. ¡°He can be a jerk all he wants. It¡¯s the Collector showing up in a few weeks that we need to think about.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s a Collector?¡± I asked.


    ¡°They¡¯re the ones who administer the draw stones, sweetie. The man at our table is a Collector, and so is the person who will come do our Testing next month.¡±


    Of course they were. That made perfect sense. The whole village government was obsessed with harvesting mana from its populace, though I¡¯d yet to see any evidence of what it was all being used for. If I could get my hands on one of those draw stones, my mana problems would be over instantly. Come to think of it, maybe it was a good thing if both my parents ended up wearing one. I could drain the mana out of it, pump it into my storage crystal, and finish igniting my mana core.


    It would be better if I was left alone to do it myself. There was less chance of drawing scrutiny that way. I wasn¡¯t sure if I could do it in a month though. I could make an attempt right now, if I wanted, but depending on how bad the loss converting the mana from the storage crystal was, I might fall short. If I didn¡¯t have enough, all of my work over the last eight months would be wasted.


    ¡°Maybe we¡¯re worrying over nothing,¡± Father said. ¡°They might show up, do the Testing, and determine we generate enough mana for a family of four. It¡¯ll be Gravin¡¯s first time. He could score really high.¡±


    ¡°Maybe,¡± Mother agreed, but I could hear the doubt in her voice. ¡°He does spend a lot of time just sitting there. He¡¯s probably not using too much passively.¡±


    She wasn¡¯t wrong. That was a deliberate choice on my part. I didn¡¯t move around much because I didn¡¯t have enough energy to last all day, and time spent napping was time not spent speeding up my mana generation. If I could just get a few weeks undisturbed, and maybe some better food, I could get this interminable weaning stage over with. I was tired of being a dull.


    If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    My parents spent the rest of the evening going in circles about things that were outside of their control and stressing themselves out over it. They only stopped once they realized Senica had picked up on it and was getting a wild look in her eyes. That led to Mother taking a break to soothe her while Father took me outside to sit in the garden together.


    ¡°You know, son, I don¡¯t think that teacher knew what he was talking about. Plenty of wise men knew to keep their mouths shut when there was nothing important to say,¡± he told me.


    I wisely stayed quiet in response, which caused my father to laugh after a moment.


    ¡°Yeah, just like that. You know more than you let on, don¡¯t you? Well, either way, don¡¯t worry about this whole Testing thing. It¡¯s not that big a deal. It¡¯ll just make for a rough few months, nothing your old man can¡¯t survive.¡±


    ¡°Will we fail?¡± I asked.


    Father shrugged. ¡°Who knows? It would certainly help if you had some mana to tithe, but you¡¯re too young for them to expect very much. A few years ago, we wouldn¡¯t even be worrying about this, but right around the time you were born, Lord Noctra let us know the barrier was becoming unstable again, that we weren¡¯t tithing enough mana to keep it active all the time. That¡¯s when the Barrier Wardens became a thing, to keep a look out for monsters so we can activate the barrier whenever one gets close.


    ¡°Supposedly we¡¯re building the reserves back up, and soon we¡¯ll be able to run it full time instead of just at night when no one can see if there are any monsters out in the dark. Sure has made for a rough few years though.¡±


    Interesting. That might explain why I hadn¡¯t seen much of this supposed barrier since my awakening. If they only ran it at night to conserve power, well, it was a rare day indeed that I managed to keep my eyes open once the stars started coming out. I¡¯d yet to spot all six of our moons despite months of looking. It might be worth it to spend a bit of mana just to stay up late and see if I could get a look at this barrier.


    ¡°Have you ever seen a monster?¡± I asked.


    Father took a moment to answer. ¡°The Wardens keep us safe when the sun¡¯s up, and if they spot something they can¡¯t handle, Lord Noctra comes out and fries it to a crisp. Then the barrier keeps everything away at night, like I said. All I have to do is grow food during the day and take care of you at night.¡±


    A simple life. I wouldn¡¯t say I was jealous, not considering the cost, but I could see the appeal. I did notice that Father hadn¡¯t answered the question though. There was more to that story, but I wasn¡¯t getting it out of him, not tonight at least.


    * * *


    That night, I clutched the toy holding my storage crystal tight to my chest and carefully examined it. At maximum capacity, it could hold twenty times as much mana as my own core. I lost about half of the mana I put in, and I¡¯d lose half of it again pulling it out. It was currently three quarters full after six months of work. Like I said, it wasn¡¯t a very good storage crystal, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances.


    It took me six days for my mana core to fill to full naturally, or five if I was given enough uninterrupted time to stimulate my core so it would generate mana faster. I needed eight times my maximum mana to make my core ignite, so in theory, the storage crystal didn¡¯t need to be completely full. There was a bit of leeway there in that I could fill my own mana core to the brim prior to starting the ritual, and of course skill counted for a great deal in these sorts of things. If I did it properly, I could get away with as little as seven times my maximum mana in the crystal.


    The rest was a buffer, just in case something went wrong. I¡¯d rather spend eight months and ensure I did it perfectly the first time than spend seven and risk wasting it all by failing. The draw stones were a complication, especially if my parents were going to be wearing them at all times. If I did the ignition right before the Testing in a month, I would theoretically still have more mana than I needed, but only a bit under eight mana cores worth instead of ten. The margins were tight, but I could do it.


    If I ignited my core prior to the Testing, I could probably cheat in some way to make it seem like my family produced enough mana to satisfy whatever the requirement was. My ignited core would generate mana twenty times faster than it did in its dormant state. I¡¯d have enough to spare, and it¡¯d be worth the investment to keep draw stones out of our home. I supposed it might also relieve some of my parents¡¯ stress as well.


    That settled it then. I¡¯d give the storage crystal a few more weeks, then look for a good opportunity to ignite my core. It¡¯d probably be one of the days when Senica was home from school during the day and Mother was visiting with that nosy neighbor who¡¯d thought I was possessed. Senica was supposed to keep an eye on me, but really, who trusted a six-year-old to babysit? Then again, nothing bad had happened, so maybe Mother was right to think Senica could do it.


    * * *


    As we got closer to the Testing, my parents got more and more agitated. From what I gathered, they were convinced they were going to fail, despite both of them doing their best to limit the amount of mana they used during the day. Seeing as to how they weren¡¯t really trained at all, at least not that I could tell, almost all of Father¡¯s mana usage went towards instinctive invocations to give himself more strength or stamina. Mother pushed most of her mana into our garden to try to help the scraggly plants grow.


    There were three days left, and it was Senica¡¯s last day off from school before the Testing. If I wanted to do this, it had to be today. We went through the morning routine, breakfast, garden work, play time, and then I was put down for a nap on the pallet I¡¯d been sharing with my parents. Senica played with her two dolls at the table, and Mother went outside to chat with the neighbor, that way she wouldn¡¯t keep me up.


    Thanks to my own invocation, I was wide awake. I clutched the stuffed animal toy tightly, the better to pinch the storage crystal between two fingers, and with a glance at Senica to make sure she was still ignoring me, I accessed the crystal.


    Immediately, I felt the mana inside. It was mostly full, not quite enough topped off. That was fine. I could do this without a safety net. It would mean months, possibly years considering what kind of setbacks I might see, of work to try again if I failed. But I hadn¡¯t gotten to be an ancient archmage without taking a few risks.


    I was so sick of being a toddler. It was time to take some control over my life.

 Chapter 5

    Igniting a core was so easy that people did it accidentally in areas with high ambient mana. The only ingredient required is an overabundance of mana, more than a mana core can hold. The smaller and weaker a mana core is, the easier it was to ignite. If not for the fact that there was no ambient mana at all here, I would have done it years ago.


    That wasn¡¯t the circumstance I¡¯d found myself in, however, so I was forced to use a workaround. My method needed actual skill at controlling mana, since I had to use what I¡¯d saved up in my junky storage crystal to create an artificial cloud of ambient mana. Depending on how quickly I managed to cycle the mana through my core, it would react and reach a critical threshold. The entire core would start producing mana instead of just the one spot where it touched on the Astral Realm.


    What I was about to do was in essence what being a mage was all about. Any idiot could channel some mana from their core into a basic invocation to help them hoe the dirt a little harder. Controlling mana that wasn¡¯t already connected to them is a whole different skill set. Controlling seven or eight times the total amount of mana my core could even hold was not something the average mage had the ability to do.


    But I needed my artificial ambient mana to stay near me where I could use it, so that was precisely what I was going to do. Left to its own devices, it would diffuse and spread until there was nothing left, drunk up by the parched earth of this desert. If there¡¯d been someone I could trust to release the mana from the storage crystal at a steady rate, this would have been simplicity in itself to perform, but I was on my own. It all had to come out at once before I started the process.


    I broke the seal on the storage crystal, and mana flooded out of it. Immediately, I started pulling it into my core, packing it in denser, spinning it around. The first coreful was easy; mana in its natural state sat loosely. The second coreful was when things started to get strained and I had to work to cycle the mana around. When people did this accidentally, it was normally by overexerting themselves casting various spells. That method required far more mana than I had available, and my version was significantly more uncomfortable.


    I¡¯d managed to pack in four times as much mana as normal and had it spinning inside my core like a raging vortex when I noticed I was losing more than I¡¯d accounted for. At the same time, Senica had stopped playing and was looking around the hut, far too alert. She¡¯d noticed something. It wasn¡¯t hard to guess that some of the ambient mana had been close enough to her that she¡¯d instinctively absorbed it into her own core.


    That was great for her. That kind of natural talent was prized, and if she¡¯d been born somewhere else, she probably would have been on the fast-track to full mage status. It was both of our misfortunes to have been born here in this village. Probably one or both of our parents had a similar talent, as such things did tend to get passed down from generation to generation. If I¡¯d been forced to guess, I¡¯d say our mother was the more likely candidate, just given the state of our family garden compared to the neighbor¡¯s.


    Regardless, it was a problem for me. I needed that mana, and my margins were already thin. If Senica took too much of it, the ignition would fail. I eyed up what was still left in the air, determined that I could still make things work, and stretched myself to take in the ambient mana closest to Senica first. I needed it far more than she did, especially considering anything she took would just end up in a draw stone in a few hours.


    I kept pulling in more and more mana, adding it to the collection, keeping it from exploding outward through sheer force of will and the speed of the cycling drawing it tighter. It was like that ride that was popular at a mage carnival, where people would climb into a giant bowl and the operator would use his magic to make it spin so fast that they were pulled to the walls. But in my case, I was doing it with pure mana, and the more I layered in, the harder it was to keep it moving at speed.


    I added another core¡¯s worth on top of what was already there. That made for seven times as much as normal. One more should do it, but the ambient mana was thin now. Senica had stolen too much of my buffer, and now she was out of her chair and approaching me. ¡°Gravvy?¡± she said. ¡°Are you sleeping?¡±


    I didn¡¯t answer, both because I didn¡¯t want her hanging around me soaking up more of my mana and because I didn¡¯t have the spare mental capacity to hold a conversation while I spun around more than twice as much mana in my three-year-old core than the average full-grown adult could comfortably hold. Mana kept draining out of the air into Senica, despite my best efforts to snatch it back to myself.


    Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    Was there enough left now, or had my sister doomed me to another eight months of slowly building up the reserves in my storage crystal so I could try again? I honestly couldn¡¯t tell. An ignition wasn¡¯t an exact science, nor was it baking where I just followed a recipe with clearly labeled portions. The only thing I could do was keep drawing in as much of the remaining mana as I could.


    ¡°Gravin?¡± Senica said, climbing onto the pallet next to me. I felt her lean over me, but I kept my eyes squeezed shut and did my best to keep my breathing even. I was asleep, damn it, go away.


    ¡°Do you feel it?¡± she whispered. ¡°All the mana. You feel it too, right?¡±


    The last of the ambient mana disappeared, the lion¡¯s share going to me as I actively drew it in, but enough of it funneled into my sister¡¯s core through her mere presence and her instinctive desire to claim it that the outcome was far from certain.


    I spun my core as fast as I could, and held it for as long as possible. Still, no ignition. I could feel the mana start to escape back out now, too much for me to keep and not held long enough to catch a spark. I needed more, and the only source was Senica. I could take it from her. Right now, my core was so overflowing with mana that was about to go to waste, it would be a simple matter to cast a mana drain spell and take back what she¡¯d stolen. Her own core was full enough that it would still be a net gain.


    She¡¯d know, of course. Maybe she wouldn¡¯t understand exactly how it had happened, but she¡¯d know I¡¯d drained her mana. Everyone in the village was intimately familiar with the experience of having mana drained from them. There was no way she wouldn¡¯t recognize that I was doing it.


    Without that mana, I was going to fail. That was a simple fact, so there really wasn¡¯t a choice. I gathered up the tattered strands of mana that had fallen out of the spin before they could get away, wove them into the spell, then rolled over and grabbed Senica¡¯s hand.


    She jerked back, startled, but I didn¡¯t let go. My spell touched her core and, just like the draw stone she handled every day, began pulling it out. I took it, all of it, and added it to the maelstrom spinning in my core. And finally, finally, there was enough.


    My core shifted and the mana began to absorb into it. No longer did the core simply hold and contain the mana, now the mana flowed into the walls. Where before my core had been spongy and soft, an air bladder filled with the building blocks of magic, now it was a ceramic orb, hard and unyielding as mana infused it. The more the mana soaked in, the faster everything that was left spun.


    Senica cried out and pulled away from me, but I¡¯d gotten what I needed and I ignored her. The ignition was almost complete, but I could still botch it if I didn¡¯t keep the rest of the mana spinning until it was gone. It would only take a few more seconds, three¡­ Two¡­ One¡­


    I let out a groan and collapsed down onto the pallet. It was done. My core was empty, but I could already feel it generating new mana. It would most likely be completely full in the next eight hours instead of six days. Finally, I had the spare mana to use magic again. Everything was about to get easier.


    ¡°What did you do to me!¡± Senica screeched.


    Almost everything.


    There was no playing dumb here. She already knew. I sat up and looked her in the eyes, then said softly, ¡°I borrowed your mana.¡±


    ¡°Give it back!¡± she demanded instantly.


    That was it. There was no question as to why I¡¯d needed it or how I¡¯d taken it. She just knew that it was her mana and I¡¯d taken it without permission, like stealing one of her toys. Never mind the fact that at least half the mana I¡¯d taken from her had been mine to begin with.


    Little kids were simple that way. In a few hours, I¡¯d have more than enough mana to give back everything I¡¯d taken from her, but I didn¡¯t think Senica was going to be that patient. Besides, giving mana to someone else directly required some knowledge and skill from them. Sure, I could forcefully push mana into her core, but that could damage her, perhaps permanently.


    Then again, Senica had shown a surprising and annoying amount of talent at scooping up ambient mana. I could just expel some of mine into the air around her and let her absorb it into her core on her own. Whatever she managed to get would be what she got. It wasn¡¯t like she had any way to keep track.


    That did bring me back to the first problem though. I didn¡¯t have any mana left, and it would be an hour or two until I had enough. It was time to see how patient a little girl could be. ¡°I can¡¯t,¡± I told her. ¡°I used it.¡±


    ¡°You can¡¯t do that! You¡¯re supposed to save it for the tithe.¡±


    ¡°I know, but I didn¡¯t. It¡¯s gone.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m telling Mom,¡± she said.


    Little tattletale.


    ¡°I¡¯ll give you my mana once I make more, but I don¡¯t have any right now.¡±


    That seemed to appease her. She settled back onto the pallet and jabbed a finger at me. ¡°You¡¯d better. Don¡¯t forget.¡±


    ¡°I promise,¡± I said.


    I was a little bit surprised that she¡¯d accepted the whole mana drain so easily, with almost no questions about what had happened or why. I would have been way more suspicious when I was a kid, but I suppose I¡¯d had a different childhood than Senica did. It might have been nice to grow up as sheltered as she had.


    ¡°Did you feel the mana too?¡± she asked suddenly.


    ¡°No,¡± I lied. ¡°I was sleeping until you woke me up.¡±


    ¡°No you weren¡¯t. You had your eyes all scrunched up and you were groaning.¡±


    Was I? I hadn¡¯t realized.


    ¡°You did something with it,¡± Senica said. ¡°Tell me.¡±


    ¡°No I didn¡¯t,¡± I insisted.


    ¡°Tell me or I¡¯ll tell Mom and Dad you were doing something and that you took my mana without asking first.¡±


    Unbelievable. I was being blackmailed by my kid sister. I took back every single nice thought I¡¯d ever had about her.

 Books 1-4 Now Available on Amazon

    Hello!


    I hope you''ve enjoyed the sample of this story. If you''d like to keep reading it, you can find it on Kindle Unlimited and Audible at the following links.


    Kindle Series: https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0D1JQSJXZ</a>


    Audible Listings:The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    Book 1: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Faded-Land-Audiobook/B0CZ4XV97P</a>


    Book 2: https://www.audible.com/pd/Wolves-of-the-Wastes-Audiobook/B0D6NMXZDT</a>


    Book 3: https://www.audible.com/pd/Ashes-of-the-Empire-Audiobook/B0DK2CK9H2</a>


    Book 4: Available by the end of January,2025


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 58.3266%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%">


    Book 5 releases on April 2nd on Amazon.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>

 Writathon Story Announcement

    Hello!


    This was a spur of the moment idea. I haven''t done a writathon entry since April of last year, and I''ve been feeling burnt out trying to wrap up Keiran (I''m a little over halfway through the last book), so I decided to take a break to write something else. This will not affect Keiran''s release schedule in any way on either Royal Road or Patreon, but if you''re looking for something new to read, consider checking out my writathon project. I''m anticipating it will be about 100-120k words and should be wrapped up by New Years. I don''t really have a backlog since I just started writing this last week, but I''m working to get more chapters done as quickly as possible for Patreon readers (currently at RR: 12, Patreon: 14, available on all tiers).


    Monsters lurk in the night, but what if something else hunted them?Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.


    An incident in his childhood left Velik an outcast with a racial subtype that thrives at night and unique class called [The Black Fang], which focuses on just one thing: killing monsters. He¡¯s good at finding them, and he¡¯s good at slaying them. For ten years, he¡¯s been gaining levels and sharpening his skills on the thousands of monsters infesting the wild lands of the frontier. For ten years, he¡¯s kept a lonely stretch of towns safe.


    Despite his efforts, this year has seen an explosion in the monster population, so much that he¡¯s no longer capable of protecting everyone by himself. This draws the interest of another monster hunter, one that¡¯s professionally licensed, but he seems more interested in investigating Velik than anything else. At least with him there, Velik is free to finally explore the mysteries of the deep wood, where he believes the source of all monsters resides.


    Every answer he finds leads to new questions, and not even Velik himself knows the truth of what happened on that fateful day. One thing¡¯s for sure: not even the monsters are safe in the dark.


    https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/97850/duskbound-a-monster-hunter-litrpg</a>

 Book 5 Blurb/Catch up summary

    Blurb:


    It¡¯s been six months since Keiran left his greatest enemy stranded on one of Manoch¡¯s moons, six months of feverish work preparing for the lich¡¯s seemingly inevitable return. Keiran is gathering allies and resources, and working to strengthen himself as much as possible.


    But when he hits a bottleneck just one step short of finally regaining his full power, never mind solving it before Ammun returns, he¡¯s not sure he¡¯ll be able to solve it, ever. Distractions abound as payments come due for past aid, an order of archmages takes an unhealthy interest in his activities, and friendships begin to fracture under the weight of both Keiran¡¯s responsibilities and his secrets.


    Can he survive the crushing weight of a lich clad in a moon¡¯s full power bearing down on him, or will he be washed away in the flood?


    ----


    Summary of book 4:


    After two years of effort, Keiran¡¯s plan to create a petrified forest of living stone comes to fruition. It¡¯s now producing incalculable amounts of mana and he¡¯s ready to bind the valley as his genius loci to finish his mana core¡¯s ascension to stage six. The ritual goes off smoothly, and he heads to the town he helped his family establish, New Alkerist, to celebrate.


    After enjoying an evening with his parents, his sister, and his new little brother, Nailu, Keiran is about to leave when a force of armed warriors teleports onto the town platform. Far from being hostile, they¡¯re refugees from a coastal town near the tower that fled by ship. Ammun¡¯s mages are attacking everybody, driving people out of towns or killing them and stealing food and supplies. Keiran takes a day to help get the refugees integrated on a peninsula hidden behind the mountains that they¡¯ve settled on, then starts actively poking around Ralvost.


    What he finds is that Ammun is reclaiming the land controlled by the old empire with military force, and that, more importantly, there are secret facilities beyond even that border that are getting shipments of mysterious components. Keiran lays a series of divinations throughout the countryside in the hopes of finding one of these shipments and tracing it to its delivery site.


    When he returns home, it¡¯s to find a message from Keeper, former records keeper of the Wolf Pack cabal, wanting to talk to him. She¡¯s discovered some passages in old books indicating that the city of Derro has a large quantity of mysteel buried deep underground, originally used as part of its infrastructure. Keiran needs this to patch up the broken shell around the world core, and pays Keeper for the info before descending underground to salvage it.


    What he finds instead are thousands of giant sand worms, all intent on consuming any source of mana they can reach. After fighting his way through, Keiran eventually discovers the cache of mysteel in the form of an enormous pillar. It has layers and layers of metal wrapped around it, each one carved with tens of thousands of runes. They were designed to empower the city with all sorts of functions, not in the least of which was protecting it.


    He also finds a dormant golem, one made of a strange material he doesn¡¯t recognize. Keiran relocates the pillar¡ªalong with all of its smaller companion pieces¡ªand the golem back to his demesne to research them further. After modifying the pillars to work in conjunction with his own wards, Keiran then examines the golem and determines it has an incredibly complex personality matrix, so detailed that it acts like a living person.


    He wakes the golem up by feeding it mana, and it introduces itself as Querit. He is a research golem that was active a thousand years ago when the world broke, who then shut down after being starved of mana. Keiran quickly puts the golem to work in exchange for the mana he needs to survive, and his new assistant proves most capable.


    Keiran¡¯s spying on Ammun¡¯s lands bears fruit. He discovers not only the facility that deliveries are being made to, but that there are eight of them total. Each one is building some sort of complicated machine, one that has something to do with spatial magic and which is incredibly delicate. Working with Querit, he constructs mobile bomb golems that can be remotely piloted. They sneak one into each facility and destroy the machines, hoping to set back Ammun¡¯s plans.


    In the process, Querit comes under attack, but he manages to hold the group of mages that found him off long enough for Keiran to intervene. Their mission accomplished, the pair retreat back to Keiran¡¯s demesne to plan their next move.


    Keiran wants to advance his core again, but to do that, he needs to find a mana resonance point. With mana having disappeared from the world, he doesn¡¯t believe any natural points remain. Querit agrees with that assessment, but suggests that he can help Keiran build an artificial one instead. The catch is that they need to go digging under Derro to find an archive owned by Querit¡¯s creator in order to find the knowledge needed.This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it


    While they¡¯re down there, Keiran has a realization about the sand worms. They¡¯re much bigger than Querit remembers them being, and they have to have a source of mana to feed on. Keiran theorizes that a piece of the shattered moon¡¯s core struck Derro, leaving the massive crater he¡¯s already explored, and that a thousand years ago, the sand worms dragged the actual core farther underground, where they¡¯ve been feeding off it ever since.


    That much mana would be incredibly valuable in creating an artificial resonance point, and Keiran devises a plan to feed scrying beacons to the sand worms to track their movements in the hope that they¡¯ll lead him to the core. Querit recovers the books he wants while Keiran works on creating the beacons needed.


    Soon after, a group of Ammun¡¯s mage hunters attack the valley. Their attempt fails utterly, and they are quickly killed or captured. He interrogates one of the mages and discovers that Ammun is attempting to build some sort of tether system that will link him to the tower, allowing him to roam anywhere inside the circle of the eight facilities without worrying about running out of mana.


    Keiran traces the mage hunters entry to the island back to one of the brakvaw portals and goes there to shut it down, much to the consternation of Grandfather and the elder council. Unwilling to leave an open portal for his enemies to use, Keiran closes it anyway. Then he begins making plans to fortify New Alkerist, plans which include removing the island-wide teleportation platform network to prevent the enemy from using it.


    While Keiran fortifies the island, Querit is hard at work researching both the designs of Ammun¡¯s machines they gained from interrogating prisoners and adapting lossless casting to give himself an infinite source of mana. Ideally, he wants to expand his research to perpetual enchantments and inscriptions as well, but that requires more work.


    With everything else taken care of for the moment, Keiran follows up on his search for a buried moon core. He goes digging deep under Derro, miles down, where the sand worms are so big they could swallow him whole. Instead of finding the moon core, he finds a colony of ants gifted in mind magic who¡¯ve formed a gestalt entity. Keiran quickly strikes a deal with the gestalt that involves relocating its colony to the brakvaw eyrie, where it will keep an eye on the portals using its divinations in exchange for unlimited food and the location of the moon core.


    After handling that transaction, Keiran finishes his delve. He finds the broken chunk of moon core nestled in the coils of a massive, multi-mile long sand worm. After killing the monster, he extracts the core from its clutches and takes it to the valley, where he harnesses its mana-producing capabilities to increase his demesne¡¯s rate of production even further. Soon, he and Querit are ready to forge their artificial mana resonance point.


    Just as they complete it, Ammun¡¯s forces launch their second attack. Ammun himself makes a brief appearance via a portal and breaks Keiran¡¯s wards, allowing mages to swarm the valley. Keiran and Querit fight them off, killing all of them but leaving Keiran too exhausted to retaliate. He speculates that Ammun must have found a way to spy on them in order to time the attack so well.


    Querit realizes that during his own fight months ago, one of the mages tagged him with a sympathetic scrying rune and piggybacks on the magic to turn it into a two-way viewing. Keiran gains access to the diviners¡¯ hall in Ammun¡¯s tower, where he kills close to a hundred of the mages and frees several dozen more. They tell him about the secret project in the heart of a hollowed-out mountain.


    Before Keiran can follow up on that, Ammun sends his next distraction to New Alkerist. A massive skeletal dragon arrives via portal, shepherded by none other than Averin, the master mage who worked to revive Ammun back in the tower. Keiran fights the dragon off, killing Averin in the process, then returns to the valley.


    They determine that they still have some time before Ammun finishes harnessing a moon to use as a weapon like the rebel cabal did a thousand years ago. Keiran uses that window to finally advance his core to stage seven and gains the ability to use heavy mana in his spells. Fully empowered now, he takes the fight to Ammun¡¯s hidden mountain, where he destroys the undead dragon completely before entering the sanctum inside the summit.


    There he finds the place empty but for a massive ritual chamber that he determines is an ultra-long-range teleportation spell that can take a group of people all the way to the surface of the moon. Using the ritual construct as a base, he pars it down to operate on a single person: him.


    Once he arrives, Keiran quickly realizes that Ammun can¡¯t make the magic work on his own. He couldn¡¯t figure out how to do what Keiran did, and if Keiran takes the group of mages Ammun has left in the moon base back down to the planet, Ammun will have no way home. After sending them away, he tracks Ammun down in a cave network under the moon¡¯s surface.


    After catching up to the lich, Keiran realizes Ammun¡¯s true goal. It¡¯s not to turn the moon into a weapon. It¡¯s to embed his phylacerty in the moon core to create a permanent connection to it as a source of mana. Ammun will be able to go anywhere on the planet with no fear of getting too far from his phylactery and starving himself of mana. He¡¯ll have an unlimited amount of mana to cast spells at the same time. Even if he¡¯s defeated, he¡¯ll simply grow a new body far out of anyone¡¯s reach.


    Ammun and his golem, Ergl, attack and overpower Keiran. Unfamiliar with the strange gravity and needing things like air to survive, Keiran loses the fight and activates his emergency recall, which he¡¯s retooled to take him back to the moon base. Ergl, who is grappling Keiran at the time the spell goes off, ends up coming along for the ride. Without its master to help, the golem is unable to defeat Keiran and detonates its core as a mana bomb to in an attempt to kill Keiran.


    Keiran survives, but is now injured, exhausted, and out of mana. He concedes Ammun¡¯s victory, but, knowing that the lich can¡¯t return to Manoch on his own, destroys the moon base and teleports back down to the planet¡¯s surface. As soon as Keiran recovers, he gets to work adapting the ultra-long-range portion of the ritual into scrying mirrors to keep an eye on what Ammun¡¯s doing up there, just in case, and begins planning the final steps to regaining his lost power in preparation for their inevitable final confrontation.

 Book 5, Chapter 1

    Golemancy was considered by many mages to be the absolute peak of the inscription discipline. To carve the language of magic into a physical object in such a detailed and intricate way that running mana through it created something akin to a living being was a difficult and rewarding task. And, of course, there were infinite variations. Golems could be as simple as having no function beyond opening a door when it sensed someone approaching or so complex that they were practically indistinguishable from a human being.


    The sheer breadth of knowledge needed was a huge hurdle to be overcome. Divinations were mandatory just to allow the golem to interact with environmental stimulus. Invocations and conjurations were needed if the golem was to exceed its base material in any way. All in all, a great deal of skill, time, material and effort went into even the simplest of creations.


    Breaking a golem, however, was quite easy.


    A bolt of pure force, a conjuration of kinetic energy, cut through the air and slammed into the closest golem¡¯s head. It rocked back on its heels precariously before shifting enough of its ponderous weight forward to settle solidly onto its feet and continue its advance. The few seconds it wasted on that were enough to allow me to distance myself from the encroaching line of enemies.


    Ammun¡¯s golems were quite durable, even for ones built specifically with defense in mind. It helped that the tower itself was feeding them all the mana they needed to run at maximum power for an unlimited amount of time. That was a clever bit of synergy there. But it didn¡¯t make them unbeatable; it just meant I needed to adjust my strategy.


    Initially, I¡¯d been attempting precision attacks. Since I had no idea how many golems were defending the lower levels of Ammun¡¯s tower, I didn¡¯t want to burn through my mana going all-out on this batch, only to be forced into a retreat later on. That was still an option, but it was quickly becoming apparent that it would take a prohibitive amount of time to break through with anything approaching finesse.


    ¡°The hard way it is,¡± I told a swiftly approaching golem.


    When attacking a being made of stone that wasn¡¯t actually alive, my options were limited. Fire was worthless. Ice wasn¡¯t much better. Lightning would do practically nothing, and they had no minds for me to dominate in mental combat. That was why I¡¯d opted for force magic initially, but their stone bodies were repairing themselves too quickly.


    I could rupture their cores, but not only would that not destroy them immediately, it would take far too much mana to do hundreds of times. Instead, I grabbed hold of them with a grand telekinesis spell and slammed them around until pieces started falling off. It was expensive, but I was able to siphon some of the excess mana they bled out as they broke down, and the fact that I was grabbing a dozen or more golems at a time to smack into each other helped mitigate the cost.


    My progress wasn¡¯t as fast as I wanted it to be¡ªI had another appointment when I was done here that I didn¡¯t want to be late for¡ªbut it was steady. More and more golems poured out of hidden rooms, relentless in their efforts to reach me and empowered with nigh-infinite mana. I just kept breaking through them as I advanced up the massive intake shaft.


    This was getting annoying. I¡¯d destroyed or disabled hundreds of golems already, not to mention shredding a few thousand mana wraiths on my way down to the tower¡¯s base, and no matter how many I took out, there were always more ready to take their place. When had Ammun found the time to make all of these?


    Maybe they were leftovers from before he¡¯d cracked the world core and destroyed global civilization. They could have laid dormant for all those centuries and only been activated as a defense when Ammun himself returned from his hibernation. That was the only way I could see them existing in such numbers, since they certainly hadn¡¯t been here the last time I¡¯d come through.


    Eventually I won against the masses, but it was a slog. I reached the point in the mana intake shaft where it started splitting dozens of directions and took a moment to consider my approach. What I wanted to leave behind probably wouldn¡¯t be recognized as something the golems should attack, but even if it was, it would only have to survive for a few weeks.


    Just to be safe, I burned the mana to conjure up a platform made of pure force, then spun an enchantment around it to keep it existing indefinitely. If there was anywhere that could afford such an extravagant and wasteful demonstration, it was here. There was enough mana down here¡ªheavy mana, at that¡ªto power the platform for years.


    I stood in the middle and lifted it to float in the air a full twenty feet above the floor. That should keep everything outside the reach of any future golems that might come wandering by. Then, one by one, I started pulling out the pieces I¡¯d fabricated back home and assembling them into one big machine.


    When I was done, I fed it the initial spark of mana to bring it to life, then stood back and watched to make sure everything was working right. It sucked mana in from the environment around it, not bothering the platform it was sitting on, but drawing massive quantities of loose mana out of the air. After a minute of that, it had a sufficient volume to start refining it into the one thing it was capable of making: mysteel.If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    I had no time to watch it after I was sure it was cycling correctly. After all, it would take a full day to make a chip the size of my pinky nail. I simply ensured that there were no problems with the process since I already knew it would work from previous testing. The only variables were whether I¡¯d constructed it properly, which I knew I had, and if the heavier mana down here would cause a problem. Since I¡¯d accounted for that in the initial construction, I was confident everything would work fine.


    What I wasn¡¯t sure about was the golems. Those hadn¡¯t been here last time I¡¯d come into the tower through the mana intake vents and I really didn¡¯t have time to pick apart one of their cores to map out their defense protocols. That was the kind of project that would take days, unless it was something stupidly simple like ¡®attack anything that moves,¡¯ and even then, there¡¯d be additional layers of runic scripts to coordinate with the other golems and determine how best to kill the intruder.


    Golems were complicated.


    With my work done, I retreated back down the intake to the outside of the tower and flew around its base to the next entrance. I was miles and miles deep in an enormous chasm, so far down that no sunlight could reach me where the air was so thick with mana that it would kill any normal person exposed to it.


    The new intake had its own set of golems, proving that I hadn¡¯t just gotten unlucky with my initial pick. I fought my way through them as well, eventually reached the spot I wanted where it split and placing a second mysteel generator. Then I backed out and repeated the process for a third time, but that was all I could get done before I ran out of time.


    I wanted to leave a teleportation platform down here, but I needed to spend some extra effort shielding it from detection. There were still thousands of mages a hundred miles up, many of whom were skilled enough to notice such a platform, and that wasn¡¯t even counting whatever automated defenses Ammun had activated. The best I could hope for was to leave a platform deep inside the intake valve and hope the golems would ignore it.


    I wasn¡¯t that worried about it being destroyed. A platform was a convenience, not a necessity. Losing it wouldn¡¯t stop me from regaining access to my mysteel generators. It would just take a bit longer. I suspected the golems were probably operating on a ¡®destroy anything that¡¯s not supposed to be here¡¯ set of commands, which could very well include the platform. I supposed I¡¯d find out when I came back to check on things later.


    With my work as done as I could get it in the limited amount of time I had left, I used the platform to teleport to my first relay point a thousand miles southeast of the tower. A second jump brought me close to my destination, and a third saw me there.


    Two massive black-feathered birds, each one with beaks longer than I was tall, loomed over the platform. They looked down at me in unison, and I felt mana surge through one up into its throat to form sounds its mouth had no hope of ever accurately replicating on its own.


    ¡°You¡¯re late,¡± the brakvaw said. ¡°Everyone is waiting for you up at the peak.¡±


    ¡°I know,¡± I groused without bothering to explain. Some random brakvaw stuck on platform guarding duty wasn¡¯t going to care about my excuses. I lifted myself into the air with a flight spell and zoomed up the slope, dodging a flock of juvenile birds when they suddenly poured out of a crevice in the side of the mountain. Every single one of them was almost as big as me.


    They didn¡¯t even notice me, so intent were they on each other and their game. A larger, adult brakvaw streaked after them, his voice harsh and screechy as he scolded them. I caught a single glimpse of them looking back and up to see me flying away, then I was around the curve of the mountain and approaching the peak.


    In normal times, it was a huge depression, a sort of bowl left over when the tip of the mountain had been broken off and sent up past the clouds. In the center was a single, enormous roost, home to the brakvaw leader known simply as Grandfather. He¡¯d been stuck there for years now, and even that had been an improvement from his original position on the floating island up beyond the clouds.


    Today, we were fixing that once and for all. Thanks almost entirely to my assistant¡¯s hard work over the last four months, we were finally ready to attempt merging lossless casting into a standing enchantment to make it entirely self-sufficient. If it worked, the magic Grandfather had been continually channeling for centuries to hold the floating island aloft would power itself autonomously, finally freeing the brakvaw patriarch to leave his roost.


    Querit was standing there waiting for me, as were a few thousand eyeless, crystalline ants. Those were a small fraction of the gestalt entity that lived inside the mountain, a sapient colony of mind magic specialists, all joined together in a singular consciousness. On the ground, circling the whole bowl in row after row of runes joined in a complex array of connecting lines, was the inscribed portion of the ritual. If everything went as planned, it wouldn¡¯t be necessary.


    Grandfather had wanted a backup system in place, however, so Querit had labored for weeks to shape the whole ritual, then spent another week going over everything. He was a golem, however, and didn¡¯t suffer from human foibles like fatigue or loss of focus. He¡¯d simply worked, hours upon hours stacking up without so much as a break, until the runes were carved.


    ¡°Finally,¡± he said when I landed next to him. ¡°How was the mission?¡±


    ¡°I only got three of them done. Ammun filled the lower levels with thousands of war golems. I¡¯m a little bit concerned about the machines being attacked, but I took steps to mitigate the chances of that happening.¡±


    ¡°Maybe we can come up with something to trick their sensory inputs,¡± Querit said. ¡°Did you bring back a few core samples?¡±


    ¡°I didn¡¯t have time to sift through the rubble to find one that was intact. I¡¯ll try to preserve one when I go back to install the rest of the harvesters.¡±


    Querit nodded, then turned his attention to the center of the caldera when Grandfather appeared on top of his roost. ¡°Time to get this going,¡± he said.


    Together, we started casting the spell that would free the old brakvaw from his self-imposed prison.

 Book 5, Chapter 2

    We¡¯d tested plenty of smaller enchantments, measured their efficiency and their output, and confirmed our theories. Everything worked as expected ¨C they had higher initial mana costs, but then they recycled all but the tiniest fraction of their expended mana, increasing their lifespan by near a hundred-fold what the old method granted.


    Small enchantments were fine, but there was the possibility that our predictions would fail on something this massive, so Grandfather was approaching the procedure with a noticeable amount of trepidation despite our safeguards. I didn¡¯t expect any issues with scaling things up, but his concerns were understandable.


    ¡°You¡¯re sure you¡¯ve accounted for everything?¡± he asked again.


    ¡°Yes. And if something does go wrong, either of us can manually take over the spell. Stop worrying so much and stop pestering me,¡± I said. ¡°Look, Querit¡¯s in position. It¡¯s time to start. Get out of the center so you don¡¯t disrupt anything.¡±


    ¡°How quickly can you get this online?¡± Grandfather asked. ¡°As soon as I move out of position¡ª¡±


    ¡°I know,¡± I interrupted. ¡°Just move. We¡¯re ready to go.¡±


    Maybe I could have been nicer about it. An objective part of my mind noted that I was still angry about failing to plant all the mysteel generators thanks to the unexpected resistance of thousands and thousands of golems, but that wasn¡¯t Grandfather¡¯s fault and taking it out on him wasn¡¯t fair.


    Before I could say anything, the old grayfeather broke the spell that was holding the island aloft above the clouds and sped out of the ritual circle with two flaps of his huge wings. His bulk landed behind me, shaking the ground slightly as he settled into place. I ignored that and started the enchantment.


    A huge surge of mana chased the retreating trail of Grandfather¡¯s magic up into the sky, steadily gaining on it until it overtook it completely. The first step had gone off without a hitch, and the island would maintain its altitude uninterrupted. If anything, it might rise up a few hundred feet before settling back to its current position.


    Mana raced through the ritual, both mine and Querit¡¯s, as it provided the initial spark to get things going. We had about three minutes before the temporary surge abated and the enchantments were forced to hold the island up. If things weren¡¯t ready by then, someone would have to step in and the whole ritual would be ruined.


    But, for a change, everything went smoothly. Querit did his part of the ritual and I handled mine. The enchantments flowed into place smoothly, each one locking around its fellows to create a unified whole that powered a massive feat of long-distance levitation. It was backed by the inscription array, but that was a failsafe, not a necessity. That had enough mana in it to keep things in the air for an entire day if the enchantments somehow failed, more than long enough for someone to step in.


    They wouldn¡¯t, I knew, not unless some flaw started a cascading reaction that burnt out the mana powering the enchantments before anyone could correct it. And I doubted such a flaw existed, but I understood why Grandfather would be concerned. This was an island he¡¯d spent centuries holding up, and now he was trusting it to the workings of a man who wasn¡¯t even brakvaw.


    ¡°And we¡¯re done,¡± I announced. ¡°I imagine you¡¯ll want to hang around here and reassure yourself that nothing¡¯s going to go wrong. Feel free to do so. You can move through the center now that the ritual is complete. As long as the runes aren¡¯t physically damaged, the safeguard system will stay intact, though it will need regular infusions of mana if you plan to keep it operational.¡±


    ¡°The mana batteries we buried under the stone are holding steady as well,¡± Querit reported as he walked up to us. ¡°At the rate they¡¯re draining power, I would say they¡¯ll need to be recharged once a month, just to be safe. They should last three months without maintenance before the backup has to take over.¡±


    ¡°We will keep an eye on them,¡± the gestalt added, their feminine voice seemingly coming from nowhere. ¡°It is no trouble for us.¡±


    ¡°I appreciate that,¡± Grandfather said. He peered down at the cluster of crystalline ants that had observed the ritual. ¡°Do you think it will all hold?¡±


    ¡°If Keiran says it will, then we believe him,¡± they said. ¡°He has not misled us, so far.¡±


    It was good to see the brakvaw and the gestalt getting along. I¡¯d sort of dumped the ant colony in the eyrie with no warning and Grandfather had been justifiably upset about that. Creating this enchantment to free him from his duties as a living channel for the massive levitation spell holding their graveyard up in the sky had been a sort of apology for that.


    Plus, it was the perfect test to confirm massive enchantments handled the lossless modifications before I risked any of my own demesne¡¯s enchantments trying it. No sense in making sweeping changes to my own setup without checking to see if they worked first.This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    ¡°Speaking of things that work, I also have your new scrying¡­ orbs,¡± I said. They weren¡¯t really orbs, but they might as well have been at a casual glance.


    ¡°Excellent. We will show you where to place them.¡±


    ¡°You guys alright up here?¡± I asked. ¡°Fine if I go take care of other things?¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re good,¡± Querit assured me. ¡°Everything is working correctly.¡±


    ¡°Perfect. In that case, I¡¯ll be on my way.¡±


    I followed the stream of ants as they scurried down the side of the mountain. The permanent portals I¡¯d built for the brakvaw were stationed on a vertical cliff face that had been magically smoothed out, and the gestalt¡¯s lair was right below that. It had expanded its caverns considerably and the stone now looked more like smooth volcanic glass than the rough granite that existed here when the gestalt had first moved in.


    My own access point was a bit grosser than the ones the gestalt used. They simply crawled through the thousands of cracks in the stone, filing in one after another, but I had to use the feeding hole, a fissure opened in the ground that brakvaw dropped whole carcasses in as part of the deal between them and the gestalt. It watched over the portals for threats, monitoring all of them at once, in exchange for what was barely a snack for the average brakvaw once a day.


    The hole was not regularly cleaned. Bits of fur and meat were stuck to the walls. To say it was an unpleasant passage would be an understatement.


    But I could fly and my shield ward protected me from actually coming into contact with any of the remains, so I didn¡¯t complain about it. Instead, I floated through the air to the main chamber, where a massive stone tree grew out of the ground. Somehow, it was even bigger than the last time I¡¯d seen it, despite the fact that stone generally couldn¡¯t grow.


    I pulled the three orbs out of my phantom space and held them in the air with telekinesis until I felt the gestalt¡¯s own magic pluck them out of my grip. Each one was a thousand-sided polyhedron, its facets so small as to make it appear to be a sphere. To anyone other than a gestalt entity, it would be an utterly pointless device.


    For a collective consciousness composed of millions of ants, each orb would let them look at a thousand different places at once. Getting the spellwork small enough while keeping it functional had been quite the task, but I¡¯d been working on them diligently for months now. Much like the enchantments I¡¯d designed to take Grandfather¡¯s place, there was no way to be sure the scrying orbs would work without actually testing them, and I couldn¡¯t do that with my singular mind.


    But a colony of magical ants that specialized in divinations could. The orbs held themselves off the ground, only an inch or two, and the ants climbed up and swarmed them so thick that I could no longer see the mirrored surfaces. Only the fact that mana swept through them told me that the gestalt had activated the orbs, and even that wasn¡¯t enough to confirm if everything was working properly.


    ¡°Well?¡± I asked after a minute.


    ¡®The design is functional,¡¯ the gestalt projected into my mind. Without Querit¡ªa being that had no mind to connect to¡ªhere, there was no need for them to use physical words. ¡®With these, we shall see farther than ever before. Soon, there will be nowhere that escapes our sight. Wherever invaders think to hide, we shall find them.¡¯


    ¡°Good. That¡¯s exactly what I need you to do.¡±


    Ammun himself was trapped up on one of Manoch¡¯s moons right now, but that wasn¡¯t stopping the people running his army from continuing his campaign against me. Of course, they were a lot less threatening without their lich overlord, but there were still thousands of them. Keeping them off my island was high on my priority list, especially with them knowing where my family lived.


    ¡°Any movement up on Yulitar?¡± I asked.


    ¡®This being that you claim is up there continues to block all attempts to scry on it,¡¯ the gestalt sent. ¡®We know of its movements only in the places we cannot look, and while the ultra-long-range scrying mirror you gave us works, a single mirror is not enough to keep track of the entirety of the moon¡¯s surface. Nor would we have the mana to scry so much land so far away.¡¯


    I frowned. ¡°I¡¯m still working on it. We probably won¡¯t ever be able to pierce Ammun¡¯s scrying wards, but I think I can streamline the cost with these new lossless enchantments.¡±


    Surprisingly, the gestalt had proven completely incapable of mastering lossless casting. Something about the way their mana functioned as a collective consciousness ran counter to the technique in a way that we hadn¡¯t quite been able to figure out. Whenever they¡¯d tried to use it, any ant involved in the spell had been disconnected from the gestalt. That had caused several splinter consciousnesses to form that the main entity had needed to excise.


    It hadn¡¯t taken them long to deem even practicing lossless casting too dangerous to continue, despite the potential gains. As inconvenient as that was, I couldn¡¯t blame them. If I¡¯d been forced to cut out part of my body every time I cast a spell, I would have stopped, too.


    ¡°No signs of anything new being built up there?¡± I asked.


    ¡®Nothing in any area we¡¯ve been able to see.¡¯


    That wasn¡¯t a ¡®no,¡¯ unfortunately. It was entirely possible that Ammun had set up underground where we wouldn¡¯t be able to physically see him on top of using a standard set of archmage-level scrying wards. For that matter, it was possible that he¡¯d figured out how to modify the ritual he¡¯d used to get up there and was already back down on the planet, though I didn¡¯t think that was likely. If Ammun had returned home, I¡¯d never have gotten away with placing my mysteel generators in his tower.


    ¡°I¡¯ll keep working on something else to make that easier. Thank you for doing your best with the tools I¡¯ve created so far.¡±


    The gestalt brushed off the gratitude. ¡®It is little enough trouble. We are well supplied with mana and food and a single mirror takes an insignificant portion of our mind to direct.¡¯


    ¡°Still, I feel better knowing you¡¯re keeping an eye on things.¡±


    I left then, stopping only to check on the peak once more before moving on to my next errand. Everything was still operating smoothly up there, much to Grandfather¡¯s delight. It would probably be a few more weeks before he felt comfortable enough to truly leave the caldera unattended, but I knew he was looking forward to seeing the rest of the world in person for the first time in centuries.


    My work on Eyrie Peak was done for the day, so I returned to the teleportation platform and headed off to my next destination.

 Book 5, Chapter 3

    The wastes were a bit unusual for a desert climate due to one simple fact: there was plenty of water. Hundreds of streams came down from the mountains, and near their banks, short grasses or scraggly bushes did often grow. But without mana from the world core, nothing was vibrant. Nothing was healthy. Plants lived or died on their own mana production, which was generally insufficient even with a ready source of water.


    It was the soil that did it, or rather, the lack of soil. The island had never been good, arable farmland, but the cataclysmic disaster that was Ammun¡¯s breaking of the world had driven it to its current state. I doubted so much as one part in a hundred of the island was capable of supporting human life.


    ¡°And you plan to change that,¡± I said to Hyago, who stood proudly in front of a grove of close to a thousand large, healthy trees.


    ¡°Oh, not in my lifetime,¡± the druid said. ¡°But I can get it started. I have gotten it started.¡±


    I glanced at his work. Admittedly, it had only been a year or so and it was impressive how far he¡¯d come, but a century of work just like this wouldn¡¯t be enough to cover even a fraction of the island. I doubted the trees he left behind as he continued to expand would remain healthy without his care, either.


    ¡°This doesn¡¯t seem sustainable to me,¡± I said. ¡°How much can you really do when every tree you grow operates at a mana deficit?¡±


    ¡°By myself, I¡¯d be limited,¡± he admitted. ¡°But I¡¯ve got eight assistants now.¡±


    ¡°You know that won¡¯t be enough. It wouldn¡¯t even be close to enough.¡±


    His voice turned sly and he said, ¡°We might not be able to cover more than an acre or two, but with you helping us¡­¡±


    I laughed. ¡°Hyago, I came to you because I don¡¯t have enough time in the day to do everything that needs doing. I do not have the time to help you.¡±


    ¡°No, but you have ember blooms. I¡¯ll do your herb gardens for you in exchange for some cuttings.¡±


    While that was true, the cuttings hadn¡¯t done nearly as well as the original I¡¯d taken them from. Without that one anchor tree, my whole system would have collapsed years ago. Fortunately, I didn¡¯t strictly need the ember bloom anymore, not now that the petrified forest was complete. It produced more than enough mana to power the wards and enchantments in my valley, and as soon as I got around to redoing those with the same techniques we¡¯d used on Eyrie Peak, even the living stone trees would be unnecessary.


    I couldn¡¯t produce the mana Hyago needed out of nothing, but I could ease the amount of mana the trees used to the point where they started generating excess. Teaching Hyago how to make the enchantments would take far too long, but if I could get Querit out here to set them up, that would certainly help continue the expansion efforts.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think an ember bloom cutting would help,¡± I said. ¡°And the tree still hasn¡¯t dropped any kind of seeds that I can find. However, I have an alternative proposition.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m listening.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ve got some enchantments running to keep your trees healthy, to protect the soil against erosion, climate adjustments, so on. That¡¯s got to be hard on your budget. How much more could you do if you didn¡¯t need to keep the mana batteries topped off?¡±


    ¡°A lot,¡± the druid admitted. ¡°That¡¯s an unexpectedly generous proposal, though. Can you really afford to spend that much mana just to avoid a bit of gardening?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve learned some new tricks since you left my employ,¡± I said with a grin. ¡°Remember what those giant birds taught me?¡±


    ¡°The mana recycling thing? But you said it was only useful for certain kinds of spells¡­¡± Hyago trailed off. Then he laughed and said, ¡°You sly bastard. You figured out how to adapt it.¡±


    ¡°I can¡¯t take all the credit. I had some help from my new assistant.¡±


    ¡°Ah, right. I met him ¨C seemed like a nice enough fellow.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s a golem,¡± I said.


    Hyago¡¯s eyebrows climbed up to his hairline. ¡°That was a golem?¡±


    ¡°The most advanced one I¡¯ve ever seen in my life. I found him deactivated in some old ruins and fed him some mana to get him moving again.¡±


    ¡°Incredible,¡± Hyago said with a laugh and a shake of his head. ¡°And the two of you cracked your infinite mana trick for enchantments. You¡¯re willing to redo ours?¡±A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    ¡°It¡¯s not infinite,¡± I said. ¡°More like¡­ ninety-five percent reduction in cost. If the enchantment could have run for a day without being refreshed, it¡¯ll last about three weeks instead. Maybe a bit longer, depending on the enchantment.¡±


    ¡°That would still help us expand quite a bit. Would we need to do anything?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d expect you to grow some plants for me,¡± I said dryly.


    ¡°Besides that. Would we need to do anything special to maintain them?¡±


    ¡°No, they act just like normal enchantments. Feed the mana batteries regularly and they¡¯ll last forever.¡±


    Hyago nodded along and regarded his little oasis in the desert. ¡°Okay, you¡¯ve got a deal. Let¡¯s talk about what you need grown and how much.¡±


    * * *


    By the time I left, I¡¯d invested far more effort than I¡¯d planned. Monsters were a bit of a problem for the druids, specifically some sort of ringed serpent that apparently loved trees. How or why those existed in a desert was a bit of a mystery, but I suspected they were used to climbing cracks in rock walls and had simply adapted to Hyago¡¯s forest.


    I raised walls to keep out the less nimble monsters and crafted some strong vermin repellent wards under the theory that without any mice or the like to prey on, the monstrous snakes would quickly abandon their new homes under threat of starvation. I also opened a portal to a far greener land, one which Hyago eagerly sent his underlings through to collect copious amounts of good soil and a few new tree species.


    Finally, I opened portals to a few specific locations I¡¯d marked during my travels to allow Hyago to gain access to several breeds of tree I wanted to see flourish on the island. It wasn¡¯t so much that I thought he had a chance of succeeding at his goals in the next century, but if he was going to try, there were a few fruits I¡¯d like to see readily available.


    First was a peculiar type of apple tree. Its bark was a rich, distinctive gold color, quite beautiful in its own right. But the tree¡¯s true value was the fruits that it produced. Each harvest took years to come in, or at least that¡¯s how long it had been back in my original life. With the limited mana available now, we¡¯d probably be measuring its fruiting cycles in decades.


    But those apples could be eaten raw and would grant increased health and longevity. Properly prepared, the effect could prolong a life by a good century. They were so famous that there were all sorts of myths and stories told about them. Having spent a few hundred years eating them myself, I could confidentially say that they worked well at first, though with diminishing returns until they finally did nothing at all.


    Less impressive, but far more practical, I led the druids to some vines that grew grapes bursting with mana. It was no substitute for a good mana crystal, and they would draw monsters to them once they ripened, but they had plenty of alchemical uses.


    Finally, they obtained three shield willows, perfect for travelers seeking shelter. The thick, flexible branches could easily protect against bad weather and hide whoever was camping inside. Even better, a mage who knew the trick of it could convince the tree to fend off predators when needed.


    I got a bit more than I was originally looking for as payment for the extra work. Alchemy relied heavily on various plants grown in mana-rich environments, but it could also make use of monster parts. Those were significantly more difficult to get hold of, for obvious reasons. While the druids weren¡¯t hunters, they were already fending off all sorts of monsters. Adding the mana-bearing grape vines to their orchards was going to make that problem worse.


    It wasn¡¯t much of a stretch to get them to save certain parts for my use. All I needed to do was get a look at a few of the more common monsters while they were still alive so that I could point out what to harvest off them, which was easy enough to do with a few simple divinations pointing me in the right directions.


    ¡°I think that¡¯s everything,¡± I said as I glanced at the setting sun. ¡°And I am officially out of time now anyway.¡±


    ¡°Got somewhere to be?¡± Hyago asked.


    ¡°Family thing. I¡¯m probably already late.¡±


    ¡°Say no more. You¡¯ll send your golem assistant over to do the enchantments tomorrow?¡±


    ¡°Maybe not tomorrow, but sometime in the next few days. We¡¯ve got a lot going on right now.¡±


    Hyago shrugged. ¡°Take your time. Can¡¯t start growing your stuff without the seeds anyway.¡±


    ¡°Right. I¡¯ll get those to you.¡±


    It was technically possible to store seeds in my phantom space, but organic matter was always tricky even if it wasn¡¯t really alive yet. Some of the seeds would inevitably end up damaged and fail to sprout if I went that route, and I wasn¡¯t in that much of a hurry. I¡¯d get Hyago the starter samples soon enough.


    ¡°Good luck with all of this,¡± I said, waving a hand at his miniature forest. ¡°I¡¯m hoping to get the world core itself fixed in the next decade or so. It¡¯ll take a while, but if I can pull it off, mana will start flooding the land again. That¡¯ll make everything a lot easier.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°Huh?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Why the obsession with the world core?¡± he asked. ¡°I know things aren¡¯t the same as how they were in your last life, but you¡¯re plenty powerful. I know how much mana your demesne makes. And I know how little you care about helping strangers when there¡¯s nothing in it for you. So¡­ Why?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not for them. I just¡­ It¡¯s for magic itself. I know I¡¯m not good with people. I¡¯m impatient and rude and have no empathy for them. I run roughshod over everyone I meet, and I get away with it because no one can actually stop me. But magic¡­¡±


    I trailed off and gathered my thoughts while Hyago waited patiently. ¡°Magic saved me,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯d have died in the gutter without it. It¡¯s everything to me. I want mana to come back so I can rebuild what this world lost. You¡¯ve lived your whole life with things like this. You can¡¯t even imagine what it was like before Ammun. If you¡¯d experienced it, you¡¯d understand why it¡¯s worth the effort.¡±


    The druid glanced around at his grove. ¡°I think I get that, a little bit. Living in your valley for a few years really showed me how much better our lives would be if this whole island wasn¡¯t an endless desert.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s true enough,¡± I said. ¡°But I don¡¯t think you¡¯re going to be able to scale this up to accomplish your goals. Still, it¡¯ll be a nice few miles of green amidst an endless yellow and brown. That¡¯s worth something.¡±


    ¡°Says the man who turned his whole forest to stone,¡± Hyago snorted.


    ¡°It wasn¡¯t because I thought it looked better this way.¡± I looked past Hyago to the setting sun again and sighed. ¡°Good luck with all of this, though. Honestly, I hope you prove me wrong. Now, where would you like me to leave this teleportation platform? I need to drop it and get going.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 4

    There was a backpack sitting just inside my bedroom door, presumably packed by my sister. It was the first thing I saw when I teleported to my parents¡¯ home. I chuckled softly; Senica had probably been obnoxiously impatient all evening while she waited for me to finish up everything else on my agenda. Truthfully, the most efficient way to organize my tasks would be to delay this outing until I finished setting all the mysteel generators in the mana intakes of Ammun¡¯s tower, but in the end, a few extra days without them in place wouldn¡¯t make a real difference.


    New Alkerist¡¯s population had swollen to almost double its original size after Ammun sent a few thousand zombies through portals all over the island to attack random villages in an attempt to distract me. I hadn¡¯t taken the bait, with the end result being that a dozen different settlements were destroyed, their populations scattered into the wastes to live or die depending on how well they could fend off the local monsters.


    Querit had done an admirable job rescuing many of the survivors, and the island¡¯s only city had absorbed most of the displaced villagers easily. For those that weren¡¯t interested in city life and had no family elsewhere to take them in, New Alkerist had become their new home. The council had been trying to get me to help them build more housing for months now, or rather to get me to do the standard set of housing enchantments in them. I¡¯d been too busy and had ignored their requests.


    It was for exactly that reason that I¡¯d teleported directly to my family¡¯s house and would be leaving the same way. No one on the council¡ªexcluding my father¡ªwould ever know that I¡¯d been here. And he wasn¡¯t going to tell on me.


    Annoyingly, it seemed only one of the two people coming with me on this trip was actually here. Senica was sitting at the table, watching Nailu run around chattering and my parents worked together in the kitchen preparing food. Senica¡¯s boyfriend was nowhere to be found. I stood in the doorway, as of yet unnoticed, and sent scrying spells out to sweep the town.


    ¡°You¡¯re late,¡± Nailu announced in a high-pitched voice as he jabbed a finger at me. That caught everyone else¡¯s attention, causing them to stop what they were doing and look up.


    ¡°I know,¡± I said. ¡°It was a very busy day.¡±


    ¡°Told you he¡¯d show up just in time to eat the food,¡± Father said out of the corner of his mouth to Mother. I rolled my eyes and pretended not to hear while I kneeled down and readied myself for my little brother¡¯s charge across the room.


    Just before he could hit me, I swept us both up into the air to spin around in circles while he giggled. I stayed in place, but the arc of his rotation got bigger and bigger until he was flying around the entire room with each pass. Slowly, I settled back onto the floor. Nailu, however, kept kicking his legs and flailing his arms in an attempt to speed up.


    ¡°Hey, not in the house,¡± Mother scolded us after one of his feet clipped a clay jar set on a shelf halfway up the wall. I caught and steadied the jar with telekinesis before it could do more than wobble, but that was the end of the game for my little brother.


    ¡°So, what was the problem?¡± Senica asked as I claimed the chair opposite of her.


    ¡°Ammun left an unexpectedly high amount of security behind,¡± I grumbled. ¡°Thousands and thousands of golems. I only got three of the generators placed and I stayed for almost double my allotted time. The stuff at Eyrie Peak went smoothly, but getting Hyago on board also took far longer than I expected.¡±


    ¡°He agreed, though. That¡¯s something.¡±


    ¡°He did,¡± I said. ¡°But I need to send Querit out there to do probably a whole day¡¯s worth of work now. That crazy druid is trying to reforest the entire island.¡±


    ¡°Reforest?¡± Father asked. ¡°Was it ever forested in the first place?¡±


    ¡°Not to my knowledge, but I guess the basin used to be mostly prairies prior to Ammun¡¯s mistake.¡±


    ¡°Can he actually do it?¡± Mother asked. When I shook my head, she added, ¡°Not even with your help?¡±


    ¡°Not before you¡¯re dead and dust,¡± I told her. ¡°Not the way he¡¯s currently going, at least. Even with a hundred druids to help, they won¡¯t have the time and the mana to cover more than the smallest fraction of the island. The only way this works is if I get the world core fixed, and even then, it¡¯ll probably be another fifty years before ambient mana levels rise to the point where trees could support themselves naturally in this environment.¡±


    My scrying spells finally found Juby, out on the far edges of the south fields. He was staring off into the desert, perched on a rather large rock that marked the boundary of the town. Just judging by how the farmers completely ignored him, I was guessing he¡¯d been there a while.


    It wasn¡¯t hard to put the pieces together. There was only one backpack. Juby was sitting off by himself, sulking¡ªor maybe it was angry brooding¡ªat the edge of town. Senica hadn¡¯t mentioned his name once, even though he was supposed to be going on this trip with us.Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    ¡°So, what was the fight about?¡± I asked my sister.


    She let out an exasperated sigh and said, ¡°It doesn¡¯t matter. I don¡¯t want to talk about it. He¡¯s not coming, if you haven¡¯t already figured that out.¡±


    ¡°I assumed as much. I just wanted to know if this is going to be something that distracts you from doing your job?¡±


    ¡°No, I¡¯m fine. He¡¯s the one being a¡ª¡± she cut herself off glared out the window.


    ¡°Right. Well, if you¡¯re sure¡­¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m fine,¡± she said again. ¡°Let¡¯s just eat and then we can go.¡±


    ¡°Speaking of eating, dinner¡¯s ready,¡± Mother said. Four metal pots floated off the stove to the table and spaced themselves out in the center on a thin slab of thin stone placed there for the purpose of holding them.


    It was a far cry from the cauldron they¡¯d boiled every meal in when I¡¯d first awakened in my new body, but my family had taken to using an enchanted stove with gusto and learned quite a few ways to prepare dishes besides ¡®raw¡¯ or ¡®boiled,¡¯ not that I had anything against stew in all of its infinite variations.


    ¡°Gravin,¡± Nailu said, demanding my attention. ¡°Up.¡±


    ¡°No magic during din¡ª¡±


    But it was too late for Mother¡¯s admonishment. Nailu was already floating through the air in a graceful hop to land on his chair. He even did a flip halfway through, much to Mother¡¯s consternation and everyone else¡¯s amusement.


    ¡°Tada!¡± he announced, holding his arms up and looking about expectantly.


    ¡°Did you¡­?¡± Senica looked at me.


    ¡°Nope, that was all him.¡±


    * * *


    We appeared on a rocky overlook above a few-mile long stretch of old forest sometime later. I was pleased to see that the instant we arrived, Senica spun up a divination spell to sweep the area for threats. It took her six seconds to fully cast it, but the fact that she was using it at all was a massive improvement over her capabilities even a few years ago.


    ¡°Well?¡± I asked.


    ¡°I don¡¯t see anything that could be a threat to us,¡± she said. ¡°Not that I expected to.¡±


    ¡°You never know.¡±


    ¡°I might not, but you do. I don¡¯t believe for a second that you teleported us here without scrying the area first.¡±


    ¡°Oh, I did. But what I consider a threat and what you consider a threat aren¡¯t necessarily the same thing.¡±


    Senica rolled her eyes and stepped off the edge of the overlook. Flight magic took hold of her body and sped her off over the trees to the north. Our destination was only a mile or two away, easily close enough for her to fly at her top speed without getting tired. If she thought that was going to be enough to beat me, though, she was sadly mistaken.


    Ten seconds later, I caught up to her and slowed down to match her speed. ¡®How long can you keep this up now?¡¯ I asked telepathically.


    ¡®Depends how I cast it,¡¯ she replied.


    That was honestly a fair answer. We¡¯d spent some time working on lossless casting, but the truth was that in exchange for reclaiming spent mana, spells were significantly more difficult to cast. For something channeled like flight, that added a considerable burden to the process. Unfortunately, as a stage two mage, mana was in short supply and Senica needed to save as much as she could.


    ¡®Lossless style,¡¯ I sent.


    ¡®At full speed? Fifteen minutes? Maybe twenty. At half speed, I¡¯m good for an hour or so.¡¯


    I mentally translated that to half the spell¡¯s actual maximum speed, which wasn¡¯t bad for a mage who was only technically past the apprentice stage by the strictest definition of what a full mage actually was. Senica met the actual requirements to be a mage¡ªproficiency in intermediate spells in at least three different disciplines¡ªbut it was generally expected that apprentices would also have a grasp on the basic spells in all the other disciplines as well.


    Her education had been¡­ spotty. It wasn¡¯t her fault. Mana was a precious resource now and we¡¯d had to focus on giving her the tools she needed. Even with my recent advancements up to stage seven over the last few years, my own mana was tied up so heavily in fighting Ammun that I hadn¡¯t had much to spare for her.


    This outing was a step toward changing that. I¡¯d done the best I could teaching my sister magic under the circumstances, but the fact of it was that my best wasn¡¯t very good. I couldn¡¯t really afford the time or resources she needed, despite her clear talent. Unfortunately, there wasn¡¯t anybody else around who was really qualified, so Senica had done her best with a part-time tutor and no help with training.


    ¡®Where are we landing?¡¯ Senica asked thirty seconds later when the ruins of an old city started poking through the trees.


    I¡¯d already picked out a spot, a large, three-story building that was missing most of the roof and was near the center of the city. We landed on the moss-covered stone and peered around at the streets below. Old cobblestones had been busted up practically everywhere either by tree roots or by the city¡¯s new occupants, several of which were going about their business under the canopy of green leaves.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t mention how bad they¡¯d smell,¡± Senica said.


    I shrugged. ¡°You¡¯ll get used to it.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d rather not.¡±


    ¡°Think of it as a good training opportunity to practice filtering harmful fumes out of the air.¡±


    ¡°Wait, are you not smelling this, too?¡± she demanded.


    ¡°I am not,¡± I confirmed.


    ¡°That is completely unfair.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯d better figure it out quick. They smell worse up close, and the stink is basically weaponized once you start cutting them up.¡±


    ¡°I regret agreeing to this,¡± she muttered.


    ¡°Too late for regrets. Some of them noticed us.¡±


    Down below, a group of six trolls were looking up at the roof and pointing. Each of them was over eight feet tall and probably weighed six hundred pounds at minimum. Their skin was mottled green and brown, surprisingly good at blending in with the forest growing up through the ruined city.


    And they were strong, as one of them demonstrated by hauling up a loose hunk of stone and throwing it fifty feet into the air. It flew unerringly at me, only to be deflected at the last moment by my shield ward. ¡°Good arm on that one,¡± I said.


    ¡°Are you going to help?¡± Senica asked.


    ¡°What? Why would I do that. This is why you¡¯re here. You¡¯ve got practically unlimited mana to use and you specialize in fire conjurations. I have every confidence that you¡¯ll defeat these monsters.¡±


    Four more stones, each the size of my head, sailed up from the ground to pelt us. Senica shot me a dirty look and produced her wand. ¡°Yeah, if they don¡¯t split my skull open first,¡± she said.


    Then she got to work setting the trolls on fire.

 Book 5, Chapter 5

    I floated along behind my sister as she flew through the air, moving like a particularly acrobatic dancer to avoid the barrage of rocks the trolls were hurling at us. More and more of the monsters were showing up, and there was plenty of loose stonework to serve as ammunition. Senica spun around, her limbs contorting to get them out of the way and her magic shifting her from side to side.


    I caught my own fair share of attacks as well, but for me, they weren¡¯t such a serious threat. I simply kept an eye on my shield ward and made sure its mana reserves were topped off while I focused on ensuring that Senica was far better protected than she thought she was. The whole point of a training mission was to get real-world experience, after all. If she knew that I had invisible strands of telekinesis threaded around her, ready to stop any attack that she couldn¡¯t dodge, she wouldn¡¯t be trying so hard to keep herself safe.


    Of course, just dodging wasn¡¯t going to win this fight, so while Senica darted through the air, she was also flicking her wand out and dropping lines of fire on the trolls. Back in my day, trolls had a well-known weakness to being burnt, but apparently these ones had gone without any sort of predators in their environment for so long that they¡¯d forgotten it was possible to be hurt.


    Senica taught them better.


    At first, the trolls ignored her retaliatory spells. That was their primary method of defense ¨C to just accept any number of hits in exchange for one of their own. They were monstrously strong, probably used to ending a fight with anything they could reach in a single blow. It wasn¡¯t until more than a dozen of their numbers were on the ground, bellowing so loud that they shook the leaves off the trees, that the rest finally realized something was wrong.


    Predictably, their response was to simply keep doing what they¡¯d been trying all along. If it were just Senica up here, it probably would have worked, too. More and more trolls kept showing up; more and more rocks filled the air. Even with some of them targeting me, it was getting to be too much for Senica.


    ¡°Time to retreat,¡± she announced.


    We flew up together, her dodging around rocks and me just deflecting them away, until we were five hundred feet up and well out of the range of the trolls. Dozens of them stared up at us, their prominent, floppy noses sniffing repeatedly and squished, beady little eyes squinting to pick us out from so far away.


    ¡°Thoughts?¡± I asked.


    ¡°There are a lot of them,¡± she said. ¡°More than I thought I¡¯d be facing at one time. They take longer to kill than I was expecting. I think it¡¯s safe to say I underestimated how difficult a fight this would be.¡±


    ¡°What else?¡±


    ¡°I need something better than just dodging for defense. I think it might be easier to just stay away from them and modify my conjurations to increase their range. I won¡¯t get all of them that way, but we don¡¯t need to kill all of them, do we?¡±


    ¡°That depends entirely on whether you can harvest troll blood without killing everything in the area first,¡± I said.


    ¡°You know I can¡¯t.¡±


    Troll blood worked well as an alchemical reagent, but it did require a lot of work refining it into something suitable for use. Like many monsters, trolls could use mana instinctively to mimic various magics. In the case of trolls, they could recover from almost any kind of damage given enough mana. Fire was the hardest to bounce back from, but if they had the time, they¡¯d regenerate charred flesh, too.


    That magic was present mostly in their blood, which of course circulated everywhere and repaired the body using the same mechanics as a regeneration spell. It was entirely possible to create a synthetic liquid for use in alchemy that did the same thing, but it was also altogether cheaper and faster to harvest troll blood and purify it. Since Senica couldn¡¯t rely on my mana reserves for her own purposes, we were going to be working on the harvesting and purification process tonight.


    ¡°Alright,¡± I said, looking down at the assembled trolls and counting upwards of a hundred. ¡°This is partially my fault for being so late. Dusk is the prime hunting time for trolls, so there are more active now than usual. That having been said, sometimes you¡¯ll have to deal with suboptimal circumstances. If I wasn¡¯t here, how would you adapt to the extra challenges?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d wait for the sun to come back up,¡± Senica said dryly. ¡°I¡¯m not in any hurry, certainly not enough of one to justify taking more risks than necessary.¡±


    I laughed. ¡°Excellent answer. That¡¯s exactly what you should do. But what if there was a pressing need for this reagent? Someone is injured and you need to make a healing potion.¡±


    ¡°Well, it¡¯s not like I need dozens of trolls for this. I¡¯d scry for an isolated troll off on the outskirts of the city, bait it to a location I¡¯d already secured, kill it there, and bleed it dry.¡±Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    ¡°Good, good. That¡¯s smart. Rational. It¡¯s the path forward with the least resistance and the least risk. However¡­¡±


    Senica groaned. ¡°Why do you have to keep changing the rules?¡±


    ¡°Why should you only take one lesson from this mission when you could explore multiple scenarios?¡± I countered.


    She just groaned again. ¡°Fine, what restrictions are you adding this time?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re trying to retake the city so it can be filled with human settlers. Every troll needs to be killed in order to make this dream a reality.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s dumb. Why would I try to take an entire city by myself?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re the only one who can. Everyone else in your group is too busy trying to find food and keep your base camp safe.¡±


    ¡°We would just go live somewhere else. There¡¯s nothing worth fighting over here.¡±


    ¡°Sure there is,¡± I said. ¡°According to Keeper, there¡¯s a fortune in mysteel under the city.¡±


    ¡°Mysteel is worthless to anyone but you,¡± she pointed out.


    ¡°And I¡¯m paying you a fortune to retrieve it for me, but in order to accomplish that, you need to clear out the troll tribes in the city.¡±


    Senica paused to consider that. ¡°Is there actually a bunch of mysteel under the city?¡±


    ¡°Yes. That¡¯s why I¡¯m here,¡± I said. ¡°You¡¯re here to get some hands-on problem-solving experience. At minimum, you need to secure a portion of the ruins so that I can dig uninterrupted.¡±


    ¡°Again, I wouldn¡¯t come here myself.¡±


    ¡°Your trusty companions have met a variety of bad ends along the way. You¡¯re all that¡¯s left and the job is depending entirely on you.¡±


    ¡°In that case, it doesn¡¯t matter if I can harvest any troll blood. I¡¯m burning the whole city down. There are plenty of trees I can light up. The trolls will either burn to death or they¡¯ll flee. Either way, you can dig in peace.¡±


    I considered the city below us. It was overgrown, most of the buildings swallowed up by nature. In fact, it was surprisingly green compared to everywhere else I¡¯d been in the new world. That made me wonder what else I¡¯d find buried under its streets. When Keeper had come to me with information about a city called Geldrisa, everything she¡¯d found had led us to believe the setup would be similar to Derro. I was starting to suspect that wouldn¡¯t be the case.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think you fully appreciate how hard it is to get a wildfire started, or how hard it is to stop one,¡± I said. ¡°But that¡¯s alright. This is an impossible job, and I know that you know that. Let¡¯s narrow down the scope. Your new mission is to clear everything in that block of the city.¡±


    I pointed to a square that had at one time held a public fountain, but these days was filled with thin trees that hung over the edges of a green, scum-covered pond. Trails worn through the brush told me that trolls¡ªand possibly other monsters¡ªwere using it as a watering hole, but that wasn¡¯t why I¡¯d picked it.


    The north side of the square had what looked like some sort of temple, miraculously intact even after a thousand years of neglect. Vines ran up its walls, thick leafy things that pulsed with mana. Even as I watched, two new vines crept out through a crack and stretched out to catch hold of nearby tree branches.


    ¡°Uh, what was that?¡± Senica asked.


    ¡°Different type of monster,¡± I said. ¡°Probably why that building is still in one piece. The trolls must know better than to get near.¡±


    ¡°And you want me to fight that?¡±


    ¡°No. I want you to secure the square. I¡¯ll handle whatever¡¯s inside the temple.¡±


    ¡°You make it sound so easy,¡± she said. ¡°How many trolls do you think will come running when the fighting starts.¡±


    ¡°I guess that depends on how many of them you¡¯ve made afraid of fire. My advice would be to keep a clear escape route and not to overestimate yourself.¡±


    ¡°Oh, sure. I¡¯ll just abandon you.¡±


    I rolled my eyes. ¡°I appreciate the show of loyalty, but when we go back down, I¡¯ll be working and you¡¯ll be training. I don¡¯t actually need you to protect me from a bunch of forest trolls. Now, I¡¯ll be clearing out the interior of the temple. You¡¯ll be killing or driving off anything else that comes into that square. Hold it for as long as you can, then retreat. Don¡¯t follow me into the temple.¡±


    ¡°I can do that,¡± she said, but she didn¡¯t sound too sure of herself. That was good. This job was too big for her to handle and I wanted her to get some experience feeling the limits of her abilities while I was around to bail her out if she overestimated herself.


    ¡°Here we go, then.¡±


    We descended through the canopy using force spells to make a hole and landed on the north side of the pond. The ruined stone face of the fountain statue sticking halfway out of the center of the water stared at us, what little that was left of its expression somehow mournful. I spared a moment to wonder if Keeper knew this particular statue¡¯s history and what, if any, relation it had to the temple it faced.


    Then the first troll appeared between the trees a hundred feet away. It paused, its nostrils flaring as it sniffed the air, then advanced into the open. ¡°Can it really smell us from that far away?¡± Senica asked.


    ¡°Probably. Their eyesight isn¡¯t that great, but their noses help them make up for it. They¡¯re pursuit predators, and this is how they run down their prey. Fortunately, trolls are dumb as a rock, barely even sentient. Just don¡¯t let their numbers overwhelm you.¡±


    ¡°Got it,¡± she said, flicking her wand to where a second troll had appeared and igniting the air around it into flames.


    While she torched the incoming trolls, I floated through the air, my feet a foot or so off the ground to avoid touching any of the vines coming out of the temple¡¯s main door. I noticed that several of them stirred as I approached, somehow sensing my passage anyway. Something must have confused them, because they didn¡¯t lash out at me, not that they would have been able to grab me anyway, and I drifted by unhindered.


    I¡¯d chosen the temple as my base of operations for two reasons. First, it was highly defensible, being one of the few buildings left in Galdrisa that was mostly intact. Second, it had several sublevels below it that would save me a few hundred feet of digging.


    The drawback was that I needed to kill this plant monster living down in the basement, but, well, there were always going to be monsters no matter where I started. I might as well enjoy the perks of using this temple. Besides, maybe the plant monster would be alchemically interesting.


    As I entered the foyer, vines writhed across the walls and rose up behind me, weaving themselves together into a living net that blocked my retreat. I glanced back over my shoulder, snorted, and flew deeper inside the temple.

 Book 5, Chapter 6

    There wasn¡¯t a single inch of bare stone to be found. Instead, layer upon layer of vines coated everything, even the ceiling. I wasn¡¯t sure how exactly they clung to the stone, but my guess was some sort of magic rather than the physical methods non-mobile vines used.


    They were surprisingly still, considering the plant monster had made its move to seal off the exit. I¡¯d expected an attack already. When that didn¡¯t happen, I flew over to the interior door and sent a burst of force blades scything through the vines clogging the entrance. They were so thick that I wouldn¡¯t even have known there was a door there at all if not for the scrying I¡¯d already done.


    The monster, predictably, didn¡¯t appreciate me cutting apart its vines. The entire temple quivered as its body flexed and ripped itself free. By the time the room was done coming to life, I¡¯d already flown past it and blocked the door with a force wall. The mana drain was negligible enough that I decided to just leave the spell active purely to inconvenience my opponent. If it wanted those particular vines to be part of this battle, it would need to withdraw them through the various cracks and side passages they¡¯d filled.


    The monster had filled the interior of the temple over years and years, and there were plenty of vines ahead of me. As soon as I floated out of the foyer, I was set upon by a hundred or so, all lashing out as one in an attempt to batter and restrain me. Individually, their attacks were too weak to matter, and that meant there was no danger of them piercing my shield ward.


    Monsters like this didn¡¯t really care about individual attacks failing, not when they had thousands of limbs to bring to bear. Additionally, plants didn¡¯t feel pain like animals did, which meant that while the monster definitely knew I¡¯d damaged it, I¡¯d done nothing to actually slow it down.


    My only concern here was that I could conceivably be pinned down, though the vines couldn¡¯t actually grab hold of me. Even if that remote possibility came to pass, I saw no reason I couldn¡¯t simply brute force my way free, so I advanced without concern. Blades of force rotated around me, chopping apart anything that got within their range and allowing me access the inner rooms of the temple.


    I didn¡¯t bother heading for the main worshipping hall. There was nothing interesting there, and the heart of this monster was underground. I followed the hallways, stopping occasionally to hack through walls of vegetation, until I reached the staircase leading down into the cellar.


    While I worked my way forward, I kept an eye on Senica outside. She was doing well, mostly because the trolls had quickly rediscovered their fear of open flames. The trees provided excellent cover as she flitted through their upper branches and ducked behind the trunks. Even better, the trolls themselves were wary about getting too close to the temple, which greatly reduced the amount of open space they could occupy in the square.


    More than one of them had been snagged by the surprisingly strong vines and dragged into the temple. Unlike me, they hadn¡¯t made it past the first room and now their regeneration was working against them as the vines repeatedly tore off chunks of flesh and wormed their way inside the trolls¡¯ bodies. Eight of them were being slowly pulled deeper and deeper into the temple, all still alive while the vines repeatedly tore them apart.


    It was a gruesome reminder of the fate that awaited me if my magic were to fail for some reason. I could take some solace in the fact that I¡¯d be dead in under a minute, at least. Those trolls would last for as long as they still had mana in them. The irony that this plant monster was essentially doing the same thing to them that we¡¯d come to do¡ªdrain them of their blood¡ªwas not lost on me.


    Light spells guided me forward, not that I really needed them with all the divinations I had going right now. I flew at a sedate pace, a little slower than an unempowered run. If I¡¯d had any concerns about running out of mana, now was when I would have turned back. The stairwell was a writhing mass of vines, these ones covered in metallic thorns instead of leaves. As they reared up and snapped at me, I could see the gouges in the stone walls beneath them.


    That made them considerably more dangerous than the outer defenses, enough so that I felt it would be impractical to let my shield ward handle them. I cast a spell to drain the heat from the area that flash froze every vine ahead of me. That wouldn¡¯t kill the plant monster as a whole, but it did make it exceedingly easy to bust up this particular section with a simple force wave.


    The first basement level had two sets of stairs leading back up to the ground floor and one more leading even deeper. It wasn¡¯t clear what exactly the purpose of that layout was, but I¡¯d already figured out the entire layout before I entered the temple, so I wasn¡¯t worried about finding my way. I simply floated through the darkness, only my light orb bobbing ahead to illuminate my path.


    Up above, Senica had gotten herself into a bit of a sticky situation. She¡¯d overcommitted to the east side of the square, and had done an admirable job of keeping those trolls at bay. As a result of that effort, more trolls on the west side had gotten to the point where they could start climbing trees to get at her. That, combined with the third group on the south side who were bombarding her position with rocks, was making it hard for her to fight back.You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    I could see a few ways to turn things around, but I wasn¡¯t sure Senica had the skill needed to cast so many spells in that tight a timeframe. The point where she needed to break away from the fight and flee was fast approaching, and if she didn¡¯t realize it in time, I¡¯d have to go rescue her.


    I figured she¡¯d last another few minutes one way or another, so I hurried down a third set of stairs and found myself in the plant¡¯s core room. It was a massive grayish-purple sac that hung suspended from its own vines. Thick, razor-edged, ropy lengths of vegetation were tangled all throughout the room, wrapped around the stone pillars supporting the temple overhead. The whole room writhed like a pit of snakes crawling across each other, and the second the core came into sight, I was under attack.


    Ice flowed out across the room, radiating from me and lancing toward the core a hundred feet away. It caught the vines in the air and buried them as more and more layers built over the plants. Unlike what I¡¯d used upstairs, this wasn¡¯t an instant effect. It took several seconds for the ice to coat the room, which was far too large for my previous spell to cover.


    It probably wouldn¡¯t kill any part of the plant monster, either, but I didn¡¯t need it to. Now that I had access to the core, it would be a simple matter to finish it off. I formed a force lance and launched it across the basement to strike the sac, only for the magic to rebound and shatter.


    ¡°Huh. That¡¯s¡­ surprising.¡±


    Fire exploded around it, but did little more than leave greasy soot across the sac¡¯s surface and thaw out half an inch of ice over the nearby vines. I approached cautiously and studied the sac, both with my eyes and with a series of divinations.


    The first thing I realized was that I¡¯d been mistaken about the sac. It wasn¡¯t any sort of vegetation or fruit like its appearance had led me to believe. It was hardened, like an ironbark tree. Strangely, it didn¡¯t seem to be any sort of innate magical invocation, either.


    I prodded it a few times while I analyzed its composition, then pulled back in surprise. Unless I was very much mistaken, this plant was actually an incredibly valuable find. Not destroying it was going to make digging here harder, though. It might be worth finding some other starting location just to preserve this specimen.


    I summoned my scrying mirror and fed a trickle of mana into it. ¡°Querit,¡± I called out, but, annoyingly, he didn¡¯t answer. ¡°Come on. What are you so busy with?¡±


    That wasn¡¯t exactly fair, considering how much work I¡¯d dumped on him to do for Hyago. My golem assistant did have the advantage of never needing to sleep or rest, which gave him the ability to get through an incredible amount of work very quickly, but it had only been a few hours since I¡¯d filled his plate. He was probably just doing what I¡¯d asked.


    ¡°Keiran?¡± a voice came out of my mirror a few seconds later. I glanced down at it and blinked.


    ¡°Hyago,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯ll assume Querit¡¯s busy redoing enchantments.¡±


    ¡°He is, but if it¡¯s urgent, I could go get him.¡±


    Now that I thought about it, Hyago was someone who¡¯d be interested in this, too. ¡°Take a look,¡± I said, angling the mirror to catch the core sac¡¯s reflection. ¡°Some kind of plant monster that took over tens of thousands of square feet with prehensile vines. This is what¡¯s at the center, about fifty feet underground.¡±


    ¡°A plant monster,¡± the druid said, his tone not quite unfriendly but clearly unimpressed.


    ¡°Yes. That¡¯s not the interesting part. The vines are all held down with a layer of ice right now, but they¡¯ve got razor-edged thorns growing out of them. And this thing,¡± I said, pausing to rap a knuckle against the sac. ¡°This is entirely metal. Living, growing, biological metal.¡±


    ¡°Not really metal,¡± Hyago argued. ¡°Just a plant structure that mimics the properties of metal when it¡¯s charged with mana.¡±


    ¡°No,¡± I said with a laugh. ¡°That¡¯s what¡¯s so interesting. It¡¯s not using any mana to maintain its structure. I think it¡¯s actually growing this way. It might be doing some sort of transmutation to use troll blood to fuel the change, but once it¡¯s complete, it stays that way.¡±


    ¡°Really?¡± Hyago was eyeing the plant hungrily now.


    ¡°I¡¯m thinking about cutting the vines and relocating the sac for further study,¡± I said. ¡°Would you be interested in being part of that?¡±


    ¡°I¡­¡± He paused and shook his head with a sigh. ¡°I have too much work to do already. There just aren¡¯t enough hours in the day. Let me go grab your golem for you¡ª¡±


    ¡°Damn it,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯ll be right back. I have to go save an overconfident teenager from her own bad decisions.¡±


    ¡°Wait, what?¡±


    But I was already gone. Phantasmal step would have been the perfect spell to get out of the temple quickly, except that it couldn¡¯t pass through living objects and everything was coated in vegetation. Instead, I used an expensive combat teleport with a limited range to pull myself five hundred feet straight up.


    I appeared in the sky just in time to watch a troll leap out of a tree and catch my fleeing sister by her foot. She plummeted with the monster, unable to hold both their weights and not strong enough to break its grip. With a sigh, I caught them in a grand telekinesis spell, broke the troll¡¯s fingers in an act of precision, and flung it away. Then I pulled Senica up into the air next to me and looked her over.


    ¡°I¡¯m going to bruise where it grabbed me, but I¡¯m fine,¡± she said.


    ¡°I¡¯m still disappointed. I thought you knew when to disengage.¡±


    ¡°I was trying to! I wasn¡¯t expecting the damn tree to come to life and grab me.¡±


    I frowned at that and mentally reviewed what I¡¯d seen with my scrying spells. It was subtle, but she was telling the truth. There was a moment, just when she¡¯d decided to cut and run¡ªprobably about thirty seconds later than she should have, but still with enough room to escape¡ªwhere a branch shifted in front of her.


    It could have been the wind, if I looked at that branch in isolation. But it wasn¡¯t. Nothing else had moved ¨C just that one branch.


    ¡°Huh,¡± I said. ¡°This place is full of interesting flora.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 7

    The mystery of the mobile tree would have to wait. I¡¯d left my scrying mirror down by the plant core in my rush to bail Senica out of trouble. Taking her back underground with a teleportation spell wasn¡¯t really feasible, not because it was impossible, but because the quick combat versions didn¡¯t generally allow for passengers. There wasn¡¯t much point in casting a full teleportation spell just to move a few hundred feet when we weren¡¯t in that big a rush, so we flew back instead.


    ¡°This place is creepy,¡± Senica said. She peered around at the mass of vines wherever they¡¯d survived my initial passage. New vegetation had crawled in to cover some of the bare patches of stone, but they hadn¡¯t finished the job yet. Perhaps reaching the monster¡¯s core had caused it to divert its resources away, or perhaps it simply wasn¡¯t fast enough to grow new appendages in such a short amount of time.


    Either way, the second trip underground went much faster. I deflected the plant¡¯s feeble attacks when it mustered the strength to make the attempt and spared a brief moment to wonder if there were actually two plant cores whose bodies were tangled together, but if that had been the case, my scrying spells would have located the second one.


    I frowned and traced the vines that were still moving back into the darkness. Could a second core be buried somewhere outside the temple¡¯s stone walls? I could picture its core hidden away, the vines penetrating cracks in the walls and infesting the interior. There were thousands of them covering the temple; it was certainly possible that there was more than one core. What was less likely was that my divinations had failed to detect them.


    Once I removed the core I knew about, that would settle the question. The vines attached to it would wither and die, and if anything was still moving about, I¡¯d know there was a second core. Before that, I needed to determine how best to go about preserving the sac of biological metal for future experimentation.


    ¡°What¡­ is that?¡± Senica asked, her face twisted into a mask of disgust.


    Admittedly, the sac looked something like an enormous raisin with a tree trunk¡¯s worth of intertwined vines coming out of the top, but it wasn¡¯t that ugly. ¡°It¡¯s the part of this monster I want to preserve,¡± I said. ¡°Somehow, it¡¯s growing metal like living tissue.¡±


    ¡°It looks like a bruised ball sac. And why it is¡­ uh¡­ pulsing?¡±


    Choosing to deliberately ignore part of that description for the time being, I asked ¡°Pulsing?¡±


    ¡°The temperature.¡±


    ¡°Hmm¡­ I haven¡¯t looked at it that way yet.¡± I cast a quick heat sensing divination and confirmed Senica was correct. The temperature was fluctuating over the course of a minute or so, peaking at a point so hot that the sac should have been glowing red before dipping back down to a more reasonable level, only to pulse out another wave of heat again. Each time, heat rushed down the vines before they cooled again.


    ¡°Ah, I see. It wasn¡¯t doing that before. I think it¡¯s generating heat to counteract the ice blanket I laid on the vines here. Look there, you can see where it¡¯s almost completely melted its way free.¡±


    ¡°Should we do something about that?¡±


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you take care of it?¡± I suggested. ¡°Ice is just the opposite of fire. You should be able to thicken up that layer easily.¡±


    We both knew it wasn¡¯t that easy. Conjuring up an ice prison involved condensing water out of the air while simultaneously pulling heat away to freeze everything, which wasn¡¯t that complicated, but was mana intensive. Since Senica was working off the mana I¡¯d donated to her, she didn¡¯t have any room to complain about the expense.


    Scowling, she set about renewing the ice layer keeping us safe from being mauled by razor-thorned vines while I circled back around to my mirror. Both Hyago and Querit were visible in it now, talking in hushed tones and scribbling down notes while they waited for me to come back.


    ¡°Keiran,¡± the golem said when he spotted me. ¡°You find the most interesting things.¡±


    ¡°This one was entirely on accident. But I think this might be the key to something big. I just need to figure out how to extract the core without killing it.¡±


    ¡°How important could it be?¡± Hyago asked. ¡°It¡¯s novel to see metal growing, sure, but I know you can transmute any quantity you need easily enough.¡±


    ¡°For steel or gold, yes. But what I need is a massive amount of mysteel.¡±


    Querit¡¯s eyes lit up with understanding, but Hyago just looked confused. ¡°What¡¯s mysteel, and why do you need it? And what does it have to do with this monster?¡±


    ¡°Mysteel is nigh-indestructible,¡± Querit explained. ¡°It doesn¡¯t form naturally and takes prohibitive quantities of mana to transmute.¡±If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    ¡°It¡¯s also what surrounds the world core,¡± I added. ¡°Patching up the hole Ammun tore in it when he blew up a moon is going to be difficult. If I could get this thing to start growing bio-mysteel, then replicate that a few hundred times, that would go a long way toward harvesting the amount I¡¯m going to need.¡±


    ¡°So, the same strategy you used making the petrified forest?¡± Hyago asked.


    ¡°Same theory, at least. I¡¯m sure it¡¯ll be a vastly different process, if it even works at all.¡±


    ¡°Are you bringing that thing back to my grove?¡±


    I shook my head. ¡°Too dangerous. I¡¯m sure it¡¯ll put every effort into regrowing its vines once I amputate them. It¡¯ll go back to my demesne where I can ensure it can¡¯t hurt anybody.¡±


    ¡°Let¡¯s get a look at the top of the core,¡± Querit said. ¡°I think I know what to do, but I need to check something first.¡±


    I obliged him and tilted the angle of the mirror to give him the view he wanted. Tendrils of a divination reached out through the mirror and burrowed into the sac while I watched, and a minute later my assistant and Hyago were discussing the results.


    ¡°You were right,¡± Querit said. ¡°If you just sever the vines, you¡¯ll kill the core. To be fair, the amount of metal I¡¯m sensing there would make cutting through a difficult task for a normal person. Did you harvest any troll¡¯s blood yet?¡±


    ¡°No, There were¡­¡± I shot Senica a look. ¡°Complications.¡±


    ¡°Alright, well, for my idea to work, you¡¯re going to need a gallon or two. The more purified it is, the less you¡¯ll need.¡±


    ¡°This thing¡¯s been feeding off trolls directly. It probably doesn¡¯t need to be purified at all,¡± I said.


    ¡°That¡¯s how it¡¯s been growing,¡± Hyago said, ¡°but you¡¯re going to need the regenerative properties.¡±


    I nodded. ¡°You want me to cut the connection, relocate the core, then basically force feed it a massive dose of a regeneration potion.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d probably put up some sort of force wall between the sac and the severed vines on the ceiling when you do it, just to make sure it can¡¯t reconnect, then hit it with the potion immediately. I¡¯m not sure how long this thing will survive with that kind of damage. Despite what it looks like, it¡¯s more monster than plant. I¡¯d bet it bleeds like an animal when the core gets injured.¡±


    That was more or less what I¡¯d been planning on doing, though I probably wouldn¡¯t have bothered to refine the troll¡¯s blood. I doubted it was truly necessary, but it wouldn¡¯t hurt. Besides, I could make Senica do the work there. That¡¯s what apprentices were for.


    ¡°Alright, I think we¡¯ve got a plan moving forward. Querit, I¡¯ll be moving this by portal back to the valley. How much longer do you need before you¡¯re done at the grove?¡±


    ¡°Two or three hours,¡± the golem said.


    ¡°Can you head back after to help me get this monster relocated? I¡¯m going to have Senica do the alchemy, so figure it¡¯ll be about five hours before we¡¯re ready.¡±


    ¡°Sure. I¡¯ll set up a specimen lab for containment. Maybe convert the one on the east side of the valley over.¡±


    ¡°Perfect,¡± I said. ¡°I think we have a plan. Thanks for the help.¡±


    * * *


    ¡°This is so gross,¡± Senica complained. ¡°Why is everything in this place disgusting?¡±


    ¡°The fresher the ingredients, the better,¡± I said.


    ¡°It¡¯s still alive! We¡¯re basically torturing it.¡±


    I glanced over at the troll, which was suspended above a wide stone funnel by manacles that stretched its arms and legs out to hold it tight. A spike of steel had been driven into the artery in its thigh, and blood gushed out to splash down into the funnel. Despite the fact that the troll had been up there for twenty minutes, it still thrashed and roared in rage.


    ¡°Trolls don¡¯t really feel pain like you or me, if that helps you feel better about the whole thing,¡± I said.


    Senica shot a look at the four corpses visible through an open archway. Their regeneration lasted only until they ran out of mana, and at that point, the blood was no longer valuable. The bodies had been tossed to the vines, which were slowly constricting around various limbs, trying to squeeze mana-rich blood out.


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t, no,¡± she said. ¡°How much more of this do I have to make?¡±


    ¡°How much liquid mana is left in that barrel?¡±


    ¡°Half.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d say you¡¯re halfway there, then,¡± I told her.


    I was doing my own work on the table next to her while simultaneously keeping the vines from intruding into the room. Really, Senica had the easiest part of the whole process. All she had to do was run the blood through a series of filters and mix the resultant base liquid in a two-to-one ratio with liquid mana, then add in the catalyzing agent I¡¯d already prepared.


    I was the one doing the other six steps of the process while keeping us safe and remotely hunting down the next troll. There was one drinking from the scum-covered pond just outside the temple I was about to grab with telekinesis if it didn¡¯t wander away in the next few minutes, which it didn¡¯t appear to be in any hurry to do.


    If they weren¡¯t so dumb, the troll probably would have smelled all the blood in the air and realized something was wrong, but I¡¯d never met a troll that could do anything but batter its problems into submission and then stuff them in its mouth. Not much had changed in the last thousand years in that regard.


    ¡°If you want to take a break, the ice is starting to thin again,¡± I said.


    ¡°Ugh. No, you do it. I don¡¯t want to go back down there alone.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s perfectly safe. Most of the vines are inert now.¡±


    ¡°Tell that to the trolls over there,¡± she said, gesturing to the corpses being slowly pulped.


    ¡°I¡¯m pretty sure those belong to a second core somewhere else.¡±


    ¡°Is that supposed to make me feel better? Why would I care which particular monster is strangling me?"


    That was a fair point. ¡°Fine, I¡¯ll go refreeze it,¡± I said. ¡°As soon as we replace this troll. Pull the shiv, please.¡±


    ¡°So gross,¡± she grumbled as she telekinetically plucked the hunk of metal out. The wound sealed itself closed, but it took several seconds instead of doing it instantly. This particular troll probably could have lasted another few minutes, but I didn¡¯t need blood that didn¡¯t carry its full regenerative capabilities, not when there were a thousand replacement trolls nearby.


    My magic tossed it to the vines with the rest and pinned it down until they had it good and tangled. Then I snatched up the surprised and confused troll outside the temple and dragged it to our impromptu lab. The manacles fitted themselves around its wrists and ankles, then pulled themselves apart to stretch it to its full height while it bellowed in fury.


    With a sigh, Senica drove the shiv in to our newest victim. If the troll felt it at all, it didn¡¯t show it. It just kept roaring at us while it futilely tried to rip itself free of its bindings. Blood ran down its leg into the funnel, and Senica set the filters back into place.

 Book 5, Chapter 8

    Removing the core was a delicate process, but with a bit of patience and plenty of mana, I managed to extract it without killing the thing. When I finished severing the connection, every single vine in the room went limp all at once, and my scrying revealed that the rest of the temple stilled as well. ¡°I guess that kills off my theory about there being more than one core,¡± I said.


    In a way, that made things easier. I just needed to clean out the dead vegetation and reinforce the temple walls to prevent anything new from getting in. Then this place would serve as a fine base for exploring the area and excavating the city¡¯s underground. If nothing else, we were going to need a steady supply of troll blood to keep the core alive until it stabilized itself. Even then, I¡¯d probably still have to throw trolls into its pen regularly, though hopefully not as often without its massive network of vines to maintain.


    ¡°Here, hold on to this while I open the portal,¡± I told Senica. Her own telekinesis spell grabbed the sac and held it steady, but it was an obvious strain for her to handle the weight.


    ¡°How long does a portal take to make?¡± she gasped out.


    ¡°Not too long. I¡¯m sure you¡¯ll be fine.¡±


    ¡°Just. Hurry.¡±


    I might have taken a little bit longer than was strictly necessary to open the portal, just in the name of Senica¡¯s training. Sometimes, it was best to push an apprentice to stretch their limits beyond what they thought they could accomplish, even if Senica technically wasn¡¯t an apprentice anymore. But soon enough, the doorway through reality opened to reveal Querit waiting for us.


    ¡°Oh. It looks a bit bigger in person,¡± he said. ¡°This lab might be too cramped once it starts regrowing the vines.¡±


    I guided the core through, with Querit catching it on the other side. He spun it around and floated it upright to a harness he¡¯d rigged up. It settled into place, its hardened biometal exterior more than up to the task of protecting it. I followed the sac through with several flasks of rejuvenating troll¡¯s blood potions to get the core back into good shape.


    ¡°You¡¯ll take care of the initial testing?¡± I asked.


    Querit laughed and said, ¡°It¡¯s a good thing I don¡¯t need to sleep, huh? As much work as you¡¯re piling on me lately, I¡¯d never keep up otherwise.¡±


    ¡°Sorry,¡± I said.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it. I know you work yourself just as hard.¡±


    There was some truth to that. With the hours I kept, I wouldn¡¯t be able to function without a significant investiture into ongoing invocations to keep me upright. When I did eventually crash, I was basically dead to the world for days at a time now.


    ¡°I¡¯ll sleep like a regular person once I get that tower torn down and the world core repaired,¡± I said.


    ¡°How many decades will that take?¡±


    I didn¡¯t answer. The truth was that even without interference from Ammun, this wasn¡¯t a short-term project. That having been said, I probably wouldn¡¯t have felt half the pressure to move quickly if I didn¡¯t know Ammun was still out there. Trapping him on one of Manoch¡¯s moons was a temporary solution, and I had no real way of knowing when he¡¯d get back to the planet.


    ¡°Anyway,¡± Querit said after a moment of awkward silence, ¡°I¡¯ll get this thing ready for your experiments when you get back. I should have a fresh stock of alchemy supplies from Hyago by then, too. He¡¯s got a whole circle of druids growing things out there at ten times normal speed.¡±


    ¡°Too bad the most valuable ones can¡¯t be grown like that.¡± Then again, if they could, they wouldn¡¯t be as valuable. Still, I¡¯d prefer that the reagents I needed be cheap and plentiful if at all possible. ¡°As far as the troll¡¯s blood goes, I¡¯ll have my sister work on processing as much as possible over the next few days for you.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m sure that wasn¡¯t what she was expecting to be doing when she signed on for this trip,¡± the golem said dryly.


    ¡°Absolutely not, but what¡¯s the point of having apprentices if you can¡¯t unload the scut work on them?¡±


    ¡°Speaking as the golem created specifically to do scut work, I can¡¯t say I appreciate the sentiment.¡±


    ¡°Oh, come on. You were made for much more than that.¡±


    Though I couldn¡¯t really agree with his creator¡¯s priorities, Querit had what was without a doubt the most complicated personality matrix I¡¯d ever seen in a golem core. His behavior was so natural that it was easy to forget he wasn¡¯t a human, at least until he shifted the shape of his body or sat down on a piece of furniture that wasn¡¯t designed to hold four hundred pounds of golem.This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    ¡°Yes,¡± he said, an unhappy frown on his lips. His creator, and everyone else he¡¯d known in his old life, were long dead, victims of a meteor strike on his home city caused by Ammun destroying one of the moons. Querit had been surprisingly resilient about being woken up to that fact after I¡¯d discovered his inert body deep under Derro and fed it enough mana to bring him back to life.


    ¡°Uh, Gravin,¡± Senica called through the portal. ¡°I think the trolls noticed that the vines all died. There¡¯s a bunch approaching the temple.¡±


    ¡°Looks like it¡¯s time for me to go,¡± I said. ¡°Thanks for the help.¡±


    I stepped back through the portal and let it close while I reestablished my scrying network in the old city. If anything, Senica had been understating the problem. It was more like a horde than a bunch. Apparently, killing off the vines was a big deal to these trolls. That, or the smell of all that meat up near the entrance was pulling them in. Trolls hunted more by scent than anything, and they had no problems with cannibalism.


    Either way, we had far more trolls coming in than we actually needed, so it was best to take care of the problem now before it spiraled out of control. ¡°Come along,¡± I said. ¡°Let¡¯s see how your fire spells are progressing.¡±


    We flew back up to the ground floor of the temple, mostly to avoid the nuisance of tripping over thousands of thick, ropy vines. Even dead, they were still tangled across the entire floor, and their thorns were still sharp. I made a mental note to scavenge those bits of biometal out after burning the rest of the vegetation later. There was no telling what they¡¯d be useful for.


    The trolls were ripping their way through the curtains of plant matter when we found them. There were five of them, all fighting each other as much as the vines in their struggle to be the first one through. Senica stepped in front of me, brandished the emberbloom wand I¡¯d made for her, and sent a jet of fire streaming across the room.


    Bellowed screams of rage filled the temple as flames washed across the trolls. The two at the back came out of the spell in the best shape, but even the ones in the front were already visibly regenerating. As one, the group turned to charge at us, only to slam into a quickly formed force wall. The lead troll was flattened by two of its fellows before their combined weight overloaded the spell and sent them all sprawling to the floor.


    Senica sent out another line of fire, this time tightened down to a finger-thick bar that sliced across their faces and burned into their brains by melting through bone. Working quickly, she cut the beam left, then right, each movement sweeping it across the enemy group to strike a different troll.


    ¡°That won¡¯t put them down for long,¡± I warned.


    ¡°I know. Isn¡¯t it kind of weird that they don¡¯t actually need their brains?¡±


    I shrugged. ¡°It¡¯s not like they use much of them to begin with.¡±


    She snorted out an indelicate laugh. ¡°Even animals die if their brains are destroyed.¡±


    ¡°Nothing else regenerates quite like a troll. If you were to attack their mana cores directly, they¡¯d die a lot quicker. Failing that, fire¡¯s a reliable way to force them to burn their mana quickly enough to actually kill one.¡±


    Even that short conversation gave the first troll enough time to regenerate enough brain matter to get back to its feet. It rushed forward, fists raised to turn us into paste, only to be blasted backward by a front-facing wave of force. The spell carried it all the way across the room to slam into the rest of the trolls, knocking all of them back down and setting them up to receive a fire burst that engulfed the whole group.


    ¡°Trolls are annoying,¡± Senica said. ¡°Nothing should get back up that many times.¡±


    ¡°You should see some of the hardier varieties of undead. There are a few that don¡¯t stop even if the body is completely destroyed. They just keep coming in spiritual form.¡±


    While Senica was keeping this group pinned down with a non-stop barrage of fire spells in an attempt to burn through their mana and halt their regeneration, a few dozen more trolls grew bold enough to enter the temple. I cast my own fire magic, a master-tier spell called inferno, and scorched them down to the bone from eight rooms and a thousand feet away.


    The boom of my spell going off caused Senica to flinch¡ªor maybe it was seeing the sudden fire storm immolate twenty trolls at once in her ongoing scry¡ªand shoot me an angry look. ¡°Warn me next time,¡± she said.


    ¡°Adjusting to unexpected magic on the battlefield is an integral skill for any combat mage.¡±


    Senica just huffed in displeasure and kept throwing spell after spell at the group of five trolls she¡¯d pinned down. Meanwhile, the other few dozen I¡¯d attacked had been reduced to nothing more than charred skeletons, their natural regeneration completely overwhelmed by the intense heat of my magic.


    That did nothing to deter hundreds of other trolls attracted by the sound and smells of the fight. In retrospect, disabling the core and killing off the temple¡¯s defenses before I¡¯d started the digging and established an underground base camp might have been a mistake.


    Well, it was easy enough to fix, at least. I cast a few rapid mana puncture spells to riddle the trolls¡¯ cores with holes and let Senica finish them off. ¡°What¡¯d you do that for?¡± she asked.


    ¡°I need to go seal off the front of the temple. Rather, we need to. How have you been doing on stone shaping transmutations?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s¡­ not my best discipline, but I¡¯m passable. I helped make the new school back home.¡±


    I kept my expression carefully neutral at that proclamation. That school was an architectural disaster, functional only by dint of brute force. Walls a foot thicker on the bottom than the top were the main reason it hadn¡¯t fallen down already, and every time I visited New Alkerist, I was taken by a strong desire to tear the building down and remake it properly.


    ¡°I suppose that means now is as good a time as any for a lesson in remedial structural engineering,¡± I told her. ¡°Now, an important distinction to make here is that there¡¯s a difference in a home built to be functional and safe for its occupants and defensive fortifications designed to hold against a half-ton troll that doesn¡¯t even understand the concept of stopping.


    ¡°To start with the obvious, the wall needs to be far thicker than normal. It also needs to be fully integrated with the rest of the structure, else a particularly stubborn opponent might knock the thing down as one whole piece simply because the building your modification is anchored to isn¡¯t as strong as the rest of the wall. This brings up two more subjects: material and support structures¡­¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 9

    With the temple fully secured against troll incursions, I set Senica to work disposing of the vegetation. We ignored the stuff out near the edges that lacked metallic thorns in favor of the rooms near the core. A constant, moderate heat was enough to incinerate the vines, though I did end up having to create a chimney in the room we picked to hold the bonfire. Bits of thorns remained behind, mixed in with the ashes, the sorting of which was another perfect task for my sister to take on.


    She didn¡¯t see it that way, of course. I wasn¡¯t sure what exactly Senica thought she¡¯d be doing on this trip, but we weren¡¯t on vacation. The only reason I¡¯d agreed to bringing her along was to get some work out of her in exchange for her getting to experience a new environment, new monsters, and new spells.


    While she worked on that, I cleared out the very lowest room in the temple and got to work digging. Using transmutation to excavate wasn¡¯t like using a shovel. I made progress by compressing dirt into stone and using it to line the walls of the tunnel a few feet at a time. It was a slow process made even worse by the fact that scrying didn¡¯t really work in solid ground. The best I could do was use a spell called earth sense or one of its variations to try to get a feel for the ground composition in a small radius around me.


    Querit had developed a stronger version of it that I was using today, but it was by no means failproof. I got a bit more range and it did a better job of separating out what I was sensing, but it didn¡¯t let me scan for miles in every direction. It was entirely possible for me to miss any underground facilities, especially since I was going off Keeper¡¯s speculations based on old books she¡¯d read and my own knowledge of city planning.


    The temple was ideally placed to line up with the city¡¯s buried infrastructure, which probably wasn¡¯t a coincidence. It had been an important building back when people still lived here. Even so, it was well over a thousand feet wide and I doubted any maintenance rooms I might find buried down here would be even a fraction of that size. I also didn¡¯t know for sure how far I¡¯d have to dig and what, if anything, I could expect to find living underground.


    Last time it had been sand worms ranging from man-sized to miles-long. But Galdrisa wasn¡¯t located in a desert, so that was unlikely to be a problem here. We also weren¡¯t in a mountainous area, so their cousin species, the rock worm, also probably wasn¡¯t an issue. Was there some sort of¡­ dirt worm? Root worm? It wouldn¡¯t surprise me to find something like that.


    After going down about five hundred feet, I took the time to expand the tunnel into a small cave complete with lighting and air recycling enchantments. The walls were reinforced with a steel net, just in case some sort of burrowing monster did find the place and tried to get in. Anything small enough to dig through the net probably wouldn¡¯t be much of a threat given that the lack of ambient mana had culled off pretty much anything that had the magical capabilities to compensate for a tiny body.


    There were exceptions, of course, but it was a decent safety measure for a temporary camp that only took ten minutes to slap together. That combined with some basic security wards and my own ability to sense mana would be enough to keep us safe.


    ¡®How are things coming along up there?¡¯ I telepathically sent to Senica.


    ¡®Hot. Smokey. Stinky. Why do these things smell so bad when you torch them?¡¯ she complained back.


    ¡®Probably something in the sap. Have you recovered much biometal?¡¯


    ¡®I haven¡¯t even started sifting it out of the ash yet. Are you in a hurry to get your hands on a sample?¡¯


    ¡®No,¡¯ I told her. ¡®Just checking in and letting you know I¡¯ve hollowed out a spot underground for us to use as a base camp. When you¡¯re done, bring the thorns with you, please.¡¯


    ¡®It¡¯s going to be a few hours, at least. If this magnetic spell thing doesn¡¯t work, it¡¯ll be even longer,¡¯ she sent. After a pause, she added, ¡®But wouldn¡¯t that just mean they¡¯re not metal and we don¡¯t need to collect them?¡¯


    ¡®No. Not all metals are magnetic, and I have no ideas what kind of properties a biologically growing metal might have. I¡¯m not even sure if it can go into my phantom space, though it probably can since it¡¯s ¡®dead¡¯ now that it¡¯s been cut off from the core.¡¯


    ¡®Right. I¡¯ll be down when I¡¯m done. The barriers are holding, by the way. And you were right about them not giving up. The pounding has been non-stop. I¡¯m kind of starting to worry that one of them will get smart enough to break through the stone wall instead.¡¯


    ¡®Keep an eye on it and retreat if necessary,¡¯ I suggested. ¡®The hole I bored is too small for a troll to fit through and I can seal it up easily enough.¡¯If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    With that said, I went back to digging and Senica went back to setting things on fire. For a girl who professed a deep and abiding love for burning monsters, I would have thought she¡¯d enjoy cleaning all the vines out of the temple. There really was no pleasing some people.


    * * *


    Eight hours later, we were lounging on a pair of plush chairs I¡¯d pulled out of my phantom space and snacking on cold leftovers from dinner. Senica had reeked of smoke when she¡¯d finished clearing out the sublevels of the temple, but a few cleaning spells went a long way toward taking care of that problem.


    I, on the other hand, just smelled like dirt. Considering that everything else here smelled the exact same, it was hard to notice. I was sure that once we left, I¡¯d be working some magic of my own followed immediately by a shower. Hopefully that would be happening in the next day or two, but it would mostly come down to luck. I might find a chunk of mysteel within minutes of resuming my digging, or it might take weeks.


    Either way, I was only going to be here for three days before returning Senica home and going back to Ammun¡¯s tower to install the rest of those mysteel generators. I also needed to check on the three I¡¯d already placed to ensure that they were operating properly and free of damage.


    It seemed that giving Senica downtime was doing her no favors. Based on the scowl on her face as she picked at her food, I suspected she¡¯d started thinking about whatever it was that had upset her back home.


    ¡°So,¡± I said, dragging the word out a bit. ¡°You want to talk about it?¡±


    Startled, she looked up at me. ¡°Talk about what?¡±


    ¡°About whatever¡¯s got you looking like you¡¯re going to light someone¡¯s hair on fire.¡±


    I had my assumptions, but I¡¯d learned the hard way that it was better to let her just tell me what was on her mind. That way, she had the choice of whether or not to share and I didn¡¯t end up being the one she was mad at for bringing up the topic. Senica was not a person who appreciated being figured out.


    ¡°It¡¯s Juby,¡± she said. ¡°Obviously. Thanks for not asking earlier, by the way.¡±


    ¡°I assumed. He was supposed to go with us, but since nobody was worried, I figured he wasn¡¯t in any danger or hurt.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s going to get hurt if he doesn¡¯t knock it off,¡± she muttered darkly.


    ¡°Knock what off?¡±


    Senica let out a growl of frustration. ¡°He¡¯s just¡­ He¡¯s so damn pushy lately. It¡¯s like he doesn¡¯t care what I want at all. It¡¯s always him nagging me that I should be focusing on learning enchantments or inscriptions to maintain the town¡¯s magic. I need to give up fire magic and conjurations in general. No more traveling. No more monster hunting. Just stay at home and learn to keep the house in good shape for him.¡±


    I frowned. That was not exactly an uncommon attitude, but I hadn¡¯t expected it from Juby. Prior to my reincarnation, there¡¯d been a clear division of labor in the villages. Men went out to work in the fields. Women stayed home and tended the garden attached to the family hut. Children were sent to communal schools for a few years until they were old enough to take on their gender-assigned roles.


    With the knowledge of mana core ignition becoming widespread again, those roles were starting to fall apart. It was simple for a mage to maintain an invocation that boosted their strength all day, which went a long way toward balancing the difference in muscle size between the average men and women. Beyond that, as the communities became more and more magically developed, less people were needed in the fields to begin with. Everyone was discovering new professions now.


    So hearing that Juby subscribed to more traditionalist views on gender roles in relationships was a bit of a surprise. He¡¯d grown up as an orphan and knew as well as anyone that everyone had to do their best regardless of whether or not they squatted down to pee. I wondered if this was a new attitude he¡¯d picked up from one of the locals, though I doubted it. Most of the people who¡¯d chosen to relocate to my valley and then to New Alkerist held progressive views, so I wasn¡¯t sure who would have given him these ideas.


    ¡°Maybe he¡¯s jealous,¡± I mused aloud. ¡°Does he feel threatened by your prowess?¡±


    ¡°Not as much as he is by yours,¡± she said wryly.


    I waved the joke away. Everyone who was threatened by power was afraid of me. That was nothing new, and I¡¯d known Juby for the better part of a decade now. ¡°It¡¯s different when you¡¯re romantically involved with the other person.¡±


    ¡°How would you know?¡± she asked. ¡°I seem to recall your one marriage ended in murder. Wait¡­ It wasn¡¯t because¡­?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± I said. ¡°Nothing like that. That was more because of greed, lies, and betrayal. She thought she was cleverer than she actually was, that I wouldn¡¯t notice her snooping for secrets and selling them to my enemies.¡±


    I cut myself off before I could go any further down that line of thought. It had been a spectacularly violent end to what had started as one of the best times of my previous life, but now it was just an old wound that had scarred over. There was no point in picking at it anymore. I¡¯d done enough of that at the time.


    ¡°But we¡¯re not talking about me. We¡¯re discussing Juby,¡± I finished.


    ¡°There¡¯s not much more to say,¡± she said. ¡°He¡¯s been really pushy lately and what he wants me to do isn¡¯t what I want to do. I¡¯m starting to think it¡¯s time to break it off with him. I¡¯m going to be a master mage, then an archmage. I¡¯m not giving up on that. Whatever his hangups are over that, they¡¯re his problems. Either he gets over them or I¡¯ll get over him.¡±


    I nodded approvingly. ¡°Magic never lets you down,¡± I said. ¡°Much better than people.¡±


    ¡°Present company excluded?¡±


    ¡°Did you finish collecting all the biometal?¡±


    ¡°Most of it,¡± she said.


    ¡°Then sure. Present company excluded.¡±


    ¡°Whatever. You¡¯re a jerk.¡± She rolled her eyes when she said it, but I could hear fondness in her voice.


    ¡°That¡¯s what brothers are for.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t need you anymore. I¡¯ve got Nailu now, and I¡¯m going to teach him to be the sweetest little boy. None of this snark I get from you.¡±


    I considered our little brother¡¯s behaviors. He was fully mobile and more or less talking now. Some of his comments, though¡­


    ¡°Good luck with that,¡± I said.


    Senica just sighed.

 Book 5, Chapter 10

    It ended up taking me three weeks to find what I was looking for, including a two-day side trip back to Ammun¡¯s tower to place the rest of the mysteel generators. Those would take years to produce what I pulled out of Galdrisa, which was itself barely a quarter of what I¡¯d found beneath Derro.


    It was going to be a long few years of repeating this process if I couldn¡¯t find a better way to acquire mysteel. If not for the looming threat of Ammun hanging over the world, I would have been content to devote that time to fixing the core. It was certainly worth the effort.


    Senica had returned home after the first few days. Harvesting troll blood had lost its thrill almost immediately, especially once she¡¯d learned that she was expected to process it as well. After we¡¯d run out of all the other ingredients, I¡¯d sent her back to New Alkerist. She¡¯d been more than happy to leave.


    ¡°That is a lot of mysteel,¡± Querit said when I returned to the valley and unloaded my new stockpile into the vault.


    ¡°And yet, not nearly enough,¡± I replied with a sigh. ¡°We¡¯ll see how much I can pull out of the tower before it collapses, but I foresee a lot more digging ahead of us.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll keep working on refining the divination spells,¡± the golem said.


    ¡°That¡­ would be appreciated. The whole process would go a lot smoother if I knew where to dig in the first place.¡±


    ¡°This biometal lead might make your archeology adventures unnecessary, too.¡±


    I wasn¡¯t going to put a lot of hope in that. We didn¡¯t even know how fast the monster could grow biometal as it stood, let alone if we could get it to grow mysteel the same way. It was an angle worth exploring, but not so likely to pan out that I was willing to devote all of my time and resources toward nurturing it.


    ¡°Let¡¯s hope so. Keeper doesn¡¯t have another lead for me, yet. She¡¯s looking at three more old cities, but last I knew, she hasn¡¯t narrowed down where to start digging at. If she can¡¯t get me the information I need, this project and Ammun¡¯s tower will likely be our biggest sources of mysteel.¡±


    We stared at the vault in silence for a minute. It was so much mysteel, piled up in five-foot cubes I¡¯d shaped it into, dozens of them, in fact. Even back in my old life, it would have been a king¡¯s ransom. These days, it was literally priceless. Mysteel didn¡¯t exist naturally and I doubted anyone besides me and possibly Ammun was capable of producing it.


    ¡°So much, and yet so far from being enough,¡± I murmured again. ¡°Just sourcing everything needed will be the work of years. Actually placing the patch will be another level of difficulty altogether.¡±


    ¡°One step at a time,¡± Querit said. ¡°Speaking of next steps, let¡¯s get started, shall we?¡±


    I gave the contents of my vault one last look before I closed things up. ¡°Alright. Show me where we¡¯re at.¡±


    * * *


    Without an endless supply of trolls to feed on, the plant monster didn¡¯t seem to be able to grow the way it had back in the temple. There were only seven vines coming out of its core now, each one as thick around as my wrist. None of them had anything remotely resembling thorns, and it seemed like the only metallic part of it was the shell around its core.


    ¡°Without a constant supply of troll¡¯s blood elixirs, I haven¡¯t been able to get it to produce any new biometal,¡± Querit confirmed after I¡¯d looked through the notes. ¡°Even setting up a regeneration enchantment that encompasses the whole room didn¡¯t replicate the effect.¡±


    ¡°Not surprising,¡± I said. ¡°The elixirs don¡¯t really work the same way. This chart shows that the monster is responding better to the elixirs than to unfiltered troll¡¯s blood, though. So we don¡¯t necessarily need trolls. I wonder if I could convince Hyago to maintain another field for me to make it artificially.¡±


    I used to have a set of greenhouses in New Alkerist, but Senica and Juby had been in charge of maintaining them. The quality had been so inconsistent that half of what they¡¯d produced had been unusable, and I¡¯d given up on it a few months ago when I¡¯d found Hyago again. Getting the time to actually talk to him had been a different story what with everything else I¡¯d been working on, but that was set now. Soon, my alchemy table would receive a significant portion of my attention.


    Querit and I worked through the next several nights experimenting with the plant monster core. What we learned only served to confirm my initial theory: the monster could only grow biometal if it was fed on a diet of troll blood or the alchemical equivalent of it. Even then, attempting to control what kind of metal the monster produced was currently beyond us.The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    ¡°Ah. I think I understand,¡± Querit said while we were studying the fifth set of samples. ¡°The metal is based on iron. Here, look.¡±


    The research station we were using had a mirror mounted on it to display divination results, and at Querit¡¯s gesture, an enhanced view of one of the thorns appeared. ¡°That¡¯s not iron,¡± I said as I peered at the thorn in far greater detail than an unenhanced human eye could perceive.


    ¡°No, but it¡¯s close.¡±


    ¡°Your theory then is that the iron in the troll blood is influencing the structure of the metal it grows?¡±


    ¡°Exactly so. If that¡¯s true and we already know that the core will grow new thorns when subjected to your elixir instead of pure troll¡¯s blood, then it would stand to reason we could introduce mysteel into the mix through alchemy. If the core replaces its pattern with a mysteel one, then the thorns should start growing the new metal.¡±


    ¡°Makes sense,¡± I said, scratching at my chin as I considered the problem. ¡°Dissolving mysteel into liquid isn¡¯t easy, though. The formula I¡¯m using now isn¡¯t going to cut it, not even at the levels we¡¯re talking about.¡±


    A tiny fingernail¡¯s worth of metal dissolved into a full-sized barrel was the appropriate ratio, but mysteel was practically indestructible. It didn¡¯t just dissolve on its own, which meant I¡¯d need to invest a lot of mana into getting it to do what I wanted. That, in turn, meant altering the formula to account not only for the different material but for the dramatically increased amount of mana. Those alterations would force even more changes, all the way down until at the end, the formula was completely different than the one I¡¯d started with.


    ¡°This is going to take some thinking,¡± I said. ¡°For now, I guess let¡¯s just focus on keeping this sample alive. I¡¯m going to see about restocking my alchemy lab so I can run a few experiments.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t think Hyago¡¯s got anything ready for you quite this soon,¡± Querit said.


    I nodded. ¡°Likely not. I do still have my greenhouses in New Alkerist. I¡¯m going to see if there¡¯s anything left in there I can salvage, and then¡­ I do know another place that grows herbs. Maybe I¡¯ll go visit there and see what I can convince them to part with.¡±


    * * *


    It was kind of funny how, once New Alkerist had been built, the original Alkerist couldn¡¯t just remain ¡®Alkerist¡¯ in anyone¡¯s mind. It was now commonly known, and with some measure of affection by most, as Old Alkerist. This moniker did not please those who lived in that village, which was just fine by me.


    I hadn¡¯t made many friends in Old Alkerist. I couldn¡¯t even fairly say that I had any left there now ¨C just acquaintances and enemies. Though, if I was being honest, calling anyone there an enemy was a stretch. None of them were a threat. They just didn¡¯t like me for flouting village law. That had led to an exile, which only really stuck because I¡¯d already been planning on leaving.


    The one thing Old Alkerist had that I was interested in today was a group called the Arborists. They were primarily responsible for the trees north of the village, including the fruit trees that supplemented everyone¡¯s diets. More importantly, they had a number of greenhouses that, once upon a time, had been capable of growing the specific plants I needed.


    It had been years since I¡¯d set foot in Old Alkerist, but the leader of the Arborists was a one-time student of mine. I¡¯d introduced her to alchemical gardening, and my hope was that she¡¯d kept up on the process. I had no idea what I could expect to find, but I was willing to bet I could convince her to part with at least some of it.


    Old Alkerist looked almost exactly like I remembered it. The mud-brick huts with thatched roofs were still lined up in their neat little grid. The Collectors office sat in the middle of town, though I had no idea what they used it for anymore. There was no evidence of modernization anywhere, not even the standard teleportation platform that so many other villages had adopted.


    I suspected the council¡¯s personal feelings toward me had motivated their decision to reject any of the standard upgrades everyone else was enjoying. Even most of the mana cores I could sense around me were still dormant despite the village having the knowledge of how to complete the process for years. But, with my scrying spells all but instantly mapping out the town, I quickly realized that it was far emptier than it should be.


    That begged the question: had they lost half their population in an attack when Ammun had unleashed hordes of zombies all over the island, or had half the village simply packed up their bags and left because they disagreed with the council¡¯s decisions? As a distant third possibility, I considered that perhaps a bunch of families were simply off somewhere else together, soon to return.


    That one didn¡¯t seem likely to me, but I expanded the range of my divinations just in case there was some campsite set up a few miles out of town. It didn¡¯t really matter one way or another, but I had to admit to a bit of curiosity about what had happened here.


    With no platform in the village, there was no need to appear in plain sight. My destination was a spot a mile in the air. I promptly turned myself invisible the moment I arrived, having no real desire to speak to anyone involved with the council or any of my extended family while I was here. They hadn¡¯t been kind to Mother when we¡¯d left, or for many years before that, from the way I understood things. As far as I was concerned, they were no family of mine.


    Instead, I turned my focus north and flew over to the arbor, where a small circle of huts was surrounded by no less than eight greenhouses, with several more tucked away between the trees. It seemed the Arborists had been hard at work expanding their operations in the last few years.


    The person I was looking for was a woman perhaps forty or fifty years of age. She¡¯d had a stage one mana core when I¡¯d left, but that had been a number of years ago. It was possible she¡¯d advanced to stage two, though it was also equally possibly the knowledge of how to do that had never made it here. In that case, she¡¯d probably be stuck at stage one still.


    Either way, she wasn¡¯t anywhere in the arbor, as far as I could tell. Maybe she¡¯d abandoned the village after all. She¡¯d stayed behind when we left, citing her duty to the arbor as the council member in charge of it, but a lot could change in half a decade.


    If I couldn¡¯t find her, I¡¯d just have to start asking questions. I located the nearest Arborists, landed behind a nearby tree, canceled my invisibility spell, and walked out into view. ¡°Hi,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯m looking for Shel.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 11

    The villager¡ªhe looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn¡¯t put a name to his face¡ªblinked at me slowly. ¡°Shel?¡± he repeated. ¡°She left years ago.¡±


    ¡°Left?¡± I asked. ¡°Left where?¡±


    The man just shrugged, but then a suspicious look came over his face. ¡°Who¡¯re you, anyway?¡±


    ¡°Who would know?¡± I asked, ignoring his question.


    ¡°You one of those, what¡¯cha call ¡®ems, the magicals?¡±


    It seemed things had changed more than I¡¯d expected. It had been a while since I¡¯d used this particular interrogation tactic, but I doubted my victim would realize what was happening. I formed a connection with his mind and started reading his surface thoughts.


    There was suspicion there, of course. I was a stranger in a village that didn¡¯t see much of the outside world. I was asking for a woman who was no longer around, thus confirming I knew something about Old Alkerist, but not enough to keep up with recent events.


    ¡°What¡¯s a ¡®magical¡¯ supposed to be?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Maybe you ought to ask around in town,¡± he said, ¡°They might be able to tell you more.¡±


    But his thoughts painted a different story. He was planning on siccing the local militia on me, such as they were. Their numbers were reduced to the point where instead of having dedicated village guards and hunters, they had a bunch of farmers who were trusted to access the local armory in times of need.


    I also picked up that he meant mage when he called me a magical. It seemed the knowledge I¡¯d introduced to Old Alkerist had caused a schism in the population. ¡°So a bunch of people decided they were going to practice magic despite the council trying to stamp down on it,¡± I said, more to myself than to the man.


    His face screwed up in confusion. ¡°Who are you?¡± he demanded, reaching out a hand to grab my shoulder.


    My shield ward caused him to stagger to the side when it shoved him away. He blinked down at his hand for a moment like it had personally betrayed him, then his brain caught up to his eyes. ¡°You are a magical!¡± he snapped. ¡°Get out of here. We don¡¯t want your kind. Go back to your fucking caves!¡±


    ¡°Caves? What caves?¡±


    ¡°Screw you. Get lost before I call someone over to give you a beating.¡±


    So much for subtlety. I gripped the man with greater telekinesis and lifted him off the ground. ¡°I¡¯ve done nothing to deserve this attitude,¡± I said coldly, ¡°but if you¡¯re going to treat me this way, I might as well play the part. Now, you¡¯re going to explain to me exactly what the hell happened to half this village.¡±


    The spell enveloped him, preventing any part of his body from moving. I left enough slack in it to keep his chest rising and falling so he didn¡¯t suffocate, but it wouldn¡¯t be hard to correct that if needed. It would be even easier to just wrap a band of force around his throat and prevent him from getting any air in the first place.


    ¡°The caves,¡± the man stammered out. ¡°West of town! Most of the magicals fled town a few years ago. Abandoned their families, too.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°Wanted to practice their evilness. Wouldn¡¯t listen to the voice of the ancestors.¡±


    I needed more context on that. Had Old Alkerist been infested by a cult? I knew there was a general belief that the spirits of their ancestors guided them, but this whole voice thing was new to me. Actually, now that I thought about it, I didn¡¯t care that much. The person I was here to see didn¡¯t live in town anymore. Worse, those who remained were undeniably hostile toward mages.


    There wasn¡¯t much reason to stick around at this point. I wasn¡¯t going to change any minds with my presence, and if I truly wanted to address this problem, my efforts would be better spent tracking down those who¡¯d been driven out of town and ensuring they¡¯d found a way to live without being poised on the brink of starvation or fallen victims to monster predation.


    More importantly, it wasn¡¯t likely that I¡¯d get what I came here for, and I didn¡¯t need someone else to grow things for me. I had that covered. I needed supplies today. It was probably worth the effort to scry the area and attempt to find this group, just in case. If they were really living out of some caves, I could probably offer some tempting services and knowledge in exchange for any magically infused herbs they did have.


    I released the man with a shove, sending him backward three steps in a futile attempt to regain his balance before he fell on his backside. ¡°I think I¡¯ve seen enough of this place. It¡¯s just as backward as it¡¯s always been.¡±


    There was no need to wait for an answer. I didn¡¯t care what this man had to say about me or anything else, really. I¡¯d already plucked the information I wanted from his mind; all that remained was to confirm it, and I could do that just as easily in the air where no one could distract me.This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    While my scrying sensors swept across the foot of the mountains west of town, I debated on what to tell my family. They¡¯d been born here. Mother still had family living in town. Senica had left friends behind that she probably held some fondness for. Whether those people had stayed¡ªand in the case of Mother¡¯s family, I¡¯d checked to confirm that they had¡ªor left, there were bound to be individuals my parents would want to know about.


    Alternatively, I could simply not tell them. It would save me a headache, but I felt like that was the wrong answer. It was easier for me, but this was something I knew they¡¯d want to know about. This was going to be one of those annoying morality things.


    Maybe I could just leave them a note detailing what I¡¯d discovered. That way they could process without me there to hold any hands. That was probably a good compromise. I¡¯d pay for it later, but it was better than dealing with breaking the news to them in person.


    While I pondered the best way to navigate this situation, my divinations worked overtime scouring the mountains trying to figure out where the rebellious villagers had disappeared to. I would have thought this would be easy, considering how few caves there were that could actually hold a few dozen people. That was proving to be an incorrect assumption.


    Most likely, I was operating on bad information. Sure, that guy believed what he¡¯d said about a bunch of people squatting in caves, and maybe that had even been true for a little while, but why would they remain there for years? At best, I was going to find a starting point to a longer journey that probably led to them founding their own little magic village out in the mountains.


    Half an hour of searching didn¡¯t suddenly reveal the location, which meant that I¡¯d officially reached the threshold for how much effort I was willing to invest into looking for them. I had better things to do, and this was the kind of project that would be perfect to hand off to someone who cared a whole lot more than me. I¡¯d just have to deal with the fallout of breaking the bad news.


    ¡®Hey, are you busy?¡¯ I telepathically asked.


    I could feel a wave of surprise roll back through the connection, then my sister angrily formed a reply. ¡®Don¡¯t do that! I didn¡¯t even know you were here.¡¯


    ¡®I¡¯m not. I¡¯m in the sky above Old Alkerist.¡¯


    ¡®What? But then how are you connecting? That¡¯s way outside this spell¡¯s range.¡¯


    ¡®Linked it off the scrying mirror in my bedroom,¡¯ I explained.


    ¡®Oooooh. I¡­ didn¡¯t know it could do that.¡¯


    ¡®I¡¯ll show you how to do it some other time. It¡¯s the same basic concept those emergency messaging stones I made for you last year run off of.¡¯


    ¡®Right. That makes sense.¡¯ There was a pause, then, ¡®So, did you need something or¡­?¡¯


    ¡®Well, I stopped by the old village and found out that everyone who ignited their core was driven out of town. I haven¡¯t been able to figure out where they went though. I need someone to do some long-distance scrying to track them down.¡¯


    ¡®Oh, that. That¡¯s easy. I know where they are.¡¯


    If my will wasn¡¯t as unbending as steel, I¡¯d have fallen out of the sky in shock. ¡®You what?¡¯


    ¡®I know where they built their new village. They reached out to Dad years ago to purchase enough food to make it through their first season until the crops started growing in.¡¯


    ¡®Wait, so you all knew about this? And nobody bothered to tell me?¡¯


    ¡®It¡¯s been mentioned in your presence more than once, Gravin. You¡¯re just so self-absorbed that you don¡¯t care. I¡¯m surprised you¡¯re interested now. Actually, hmm, what did you want from them?¡¯


    ¡®Alchemy ingredients,¡¯ I admitted. ¡®And I¡¯m not self-absorbed. I have a lot of other problems I¡¯m dealing with!¡¯


    ¡®That, and you don¡¯t care about them beyond your own needs.¡¯


    ¡®That¡¯s not fair.¡¯


    There was another pause. Finally, she sent back, ¡®Do you want to know where they are or not?¡¯


    ¡®Yes,¡¯ I sent, somewhat grumpily.


    One of the nice things about mind-to-mind communication was that words weren¡¯t necessary. It was easy to have a conversation that mimicked talking, but we could also do things like share images or even memories if the mages involved were skilled enough. Senica¡¯s map was a bit rough and unfocused, but I managed to line it up with the landmarks I could see.


    That explained the failure of my divinations to find them. They were technically ten miles or so west of Old Alkerist, where the foothills started to turn into mountains. But they were also fifty miles south, buried deep in a hidden valley that was completely inaccessible without flight or the blood of a mountain goat running through an expert climber¡¯s veins.


    It was a pretty enough valley, I supposed. There weren¡¯t nearly as many trees, and the valley floor was far flatter than mine. Two streams cut it into roughly equal thirds, and the village had been built in the center with fields flanking it on either side. Just going by the count of homes, I expected to find at most fifty people there, which lined up with my guesses based on how many of Old Alkerist¡¯s citizens my own actions had reduced the village¡¯s population by.


    Unlike Old Alkerist, this new mage village definitely had contact with the rest of the island. Even through my scrying spell, I could see traces of my designs in their buildings. It was obvious that a lot of transmutation magic had been utilized in their construction. The wards were too far away to study, but I knew they were there and I was willing to bet I¡¯d see a lot of familiar rune structures if I bothered to look.


    Perhaps most importantly, there were greenhouses and herb gardens in the village. This whole trip hadn¡¯t been a total waste after all. If Shel was there, and I suspected she was, it would be easy enough to trade some lessons or resources for what I wanted.


    That was assuming they had the ingredients I needed. I had no proof of that yet, so I made an effort to keep my expectations reasonable. This was simply an exploratory mission. I wasn¡¯t out much beyond an hour of my time if things fell through


    ¡®Thanks,¡¯ I sent to my sister. ¡®This saves me a lot of time.¡¯


    ¡®You¡¯re welcome. You can pay me back by showing me the linking spell like you said you would.¡¯


    ¡®I will, next time I come home.¡¯


    We ended the connection there and I took a moment to consider whether I wanted to fly or teleport. It was a nice day, and, ultimately, flight cost me no mana. Master-tier spells, unfortunately, were still too difficult to combine with lossless casting, though I was getting better every month. With that in mind, I started cruising across the sky toward the hidden village. I wondered what exactly I¡¯d find when I got there.

 Book 5, Chapter 12

    I had an audience waiting for me when I landed, a full twenty familiar faces from the beginning of my new life in Old Alkerist. Shel was there, along with six other Arborists. A few random villagers I hadn¡¯t had much interaction with also stood below, watching me. There were four children, none of them older than ten or eleven, but I didn¡¯t know them. I¡¯d been exiled before my mandatory enrollment in the village school, not that I¡¯d had any plans of going.


    It was possible Senica might know a few of them from school, but given the age gap and how young she¡¯d been after we¡¯d left, I doubted it. Thankfully, the school teacher, a man named Cherok who harbored a great deal of hatred for my father, was still back in Old Alkerist. Satisfying as it might have been to verbally abuse him today, it would make my task here all the more difficult.


    Surprisingly, Karad was there. That head of the Garrison and de facto governor of Old Alkerist was not someone I expected to defect when the village had split apart over the usage of magic. If anything, I would have thought that, given his surprising stance on it, those who hated magic would have been the ones to leave.


    ¡°Stranger,¡± Karad said, stepping forward. ¡°Welcome to Vestrus.¡±


    ¡°Stranger?¡± I repeated with a laugh. ¡°I suppose none of you remembers me? I was born in Alkerist, too.¡±


    Brows furrowed, Karad exchanged a confused look with Shel. When nobody stepped forward with any information, he turned back to face me. ¡°I¡¯m sorry, but I don¡¯t recognize you.¡±


    That was fair enough, really. I¡¯d sped up my aging with alchemy and looked to be in my early twenties, an age I planned to maintain for a few thousand years. Not having back pain, joint pain, constantly upset stomachs, and a sagging face appealed to me. But my reincarnation¡¯s actual age was ten or so ¨C I¡¯d lost track over the years. Maybe I was twelve? It wasn¡¯t really that important to me.


    ¡°Keiran,¡± Shel said suddenly.


    ¡°What? No,¡± Karad said. ¡°Keiran would be¡­¡±


    He held a hand to his chest, then gestured to me. At around six and a half feet tall, no one else even came close to my height. That was also due to my abuse of alchemy on my body. A bit of height was a small advantage when determining core size, but I¡¯d been tall in my previous life too and there¡¯d been no reason not to make myself the same size when the option was available.


    ¡°The aging ointment must have worked,¡± she said.


    ¡°Is she right?¡± Karad asked, turning back to me.


    ¡°She is,¡± I confirmed.


    ¡°Well¡­ Welcome to Vestrus, Keiran. This village wouldn¡¯t exist if not for you.¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Uh, about that. What happened? Last I remember, the council was a united front on wanting to get rid of me, not get rid of magic completely.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s a delicate subject,¡± Karad said.


    ¡°No, it¡¯s not.¡± Shel shoved her way past the man. ¡°Melmir was being a jackass about the whole thing. He was pissed that the Collectors got disbanded once everyone knew how to donate mana to the ward stone directly. So, he lobbied for some rule changes prohibiting people from using magic on the basis that we should all be donating all our mana to the defense of the village, never mind the fact that we were making so much mana now that it only took twenty people to keep everyone safe.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s more complicated than that,¡± Karad objected. ¡°There were other factors to consider, like when Tsurai accidentally destroyed both her home and her neighbor¡¯s trying to figure out that fire blast spell. Melmir had some good points. That¡¯s why Solidaire agreed with him.¡±


    ¡°But you two didn¡¯t,¡± I said. ¡°I get why Shel would be against banning magic, but I¡¯m a little bit surprised you backed her up.¡±


    ¡°Magic isn¡¯t evil,¡± Karad said. ¡°Yes, Noctra did some bad things to the village. For that matter, you did a few yourself. But you also saved us all, twice. And you saved Nermet¡¯s life. I haven¡¯t forgotten that.¡±


    That had really been more Father than me. Yes, I¡¯d untangled the mind control spell Old Alkerist¡¯s former governor had laid on Nermet, but Father was the one whose mana had kept the man alive until I could free him. I would have simply put him out of his misery to prevent Noctra from using the enslaved man against us.


    I glanced around at the gathered villagers. ¡°You all felt strongly enough about the new rules demanding you stop using your mana for yourselves that you banded together and left? Why? With this many people against it, surely you could have just rejected the ruling.¡±


    ¡°We tried that,¡± one of the gathered villagers said sourly. ¡°Didn¡¯t work out.¡±If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.


    ¡°Things got violent,¡± Karad added. ¡°It was tearing Alkerist apart. The jail cells were full even after we added a few more. The way it was going, we were going to starve just because there weren¡¯t enough people to grow food.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s all history now,¡± Shel said. ¡°We left. We founded this village. And now we¡¯re doing just fine. No offense, but you¡¯ve never shown any interest in Vestrus before. Why are you here now?¡±


    ¡°I always liked that about you,¡± I said. ¡°Direct. To the point. None of this waffling and politics I¡¯m always dealing with. Put simply, I am in need of some emergency alchemy supplies, and I¡¯m here to offer you a trade for access to your gardens and greenhouses.¡±


    They didn¡¯t outright reject the idea, but I could tell they weren¡¯t happy about it. They probably had good reason for growing the things they did and lacked the manpower and the supplies to grow extra. If I took some of their stock, there was the potential that it would hurt them down the road.


    I¡¯d just have to offer enough to make it worth their while, then. Relatively speaking, I was rich. I had what was an effectively unlimited mana budget, as far as they were concerned. I had all the knowledge to make practically any sort of tool or enchantment they might desire. It was very rare for me to enter into a negotiation where I didn¡¯t have something the other party wanted.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we find a place to talk things over?¡± I offered. ¡°I¡¯m sure these people have lives they need to get back to anyway.¡±


    ¡°Hmm,¡± was all Karad said before gesturing toward a nearby building.


    I followed him in with Shel and two other Arborists¡ªor whatever they were calling themselves now¡ªbehind us. At first glance, it looked like we¡¯d stepped into some sort of communal kitchen. There were a few tables set up at the front half of the hut, which was all one large room, and the back side had several firepits. Two of them had cauldrons suspended over them, and another was some sort of grill with a flat sheet of metal suspended over the flames.


    Upgrading their cooking equipment was probably a good place to start the negotiations. Then again, it was hard to demonstrate the immediate benefits when their current system no doubt felt fine to them. And honestly, if their town was struggling to survive, maybe a magical stove wasn¡¯t the luxury good they needed.


    The building itself was sadly reminiscent of the mud-brick huts they¡¯d been using back in Old Alkerist. Apparently, their advances in magic hadn¡¯t extended deeply enough into the discipline of transmutation to allow for stone-shaped homes. There was nothing wrong with their current construction methods, but they weren¡¯t terribly sturdy, certainly not anything I¡¯d want to waste time reinforcing with enchantments.


    That being said, renovating the entire town was a little much for access to their herb gardens. I could offer to raise a single building and do some enchantments on it. Then they could study and copy it at their leisure. That was probably a good deal.


    ¡°Let¡¯s start with the hesitation I¡¯m sensing from your side of the table,¡± I said. ¡°You¡¯re obviously growing those plants for a reason. I assume it¡¯s important. Medicine for the village? Some sort of catalyst to increase crop yields?¡±


    ¡°Crop yields? Is that even possible?¡± Shel asked.


    ¡°Sure. It works on the same concept as fertilizer, just¡­ uh¡­ without the associated smell.¡±


    Karad gave me a wry smile. ¡°Now that¡¯s something I¡¯d be interested in.¡±


    ¡°But no, it¡¯s not either of those. It¡¯s just that we¡¯re sort of under contract to produce them for somebody else already,¡± Shel said. ¡°It¡¯s not that we¡¯re not willing to trade them away.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s that they¡¯re already sold,¡± I finished. ¡°I see.¡±


    ¡°How urgently do you need the reagents?¡± the former leader of the Arborists asked. ¡°We could sell you the next crop. Or even clear some new patches and start growing something now.¡±


    I shook my head. ¡°I¡¯m afraid my need is quite a bit more urgent than that. I¡¯ve already made arrangements for future supplies. I need reagents to get me through this week and I don¡¯t have the time to go hunting for wild plants.¡±


    ¡°Then I¡¯m afraid there¡¯s not much we can do to help right now,¡± Karad said. ¡°This particular crop is already spoken for.¡±


    Well, that certainly limited my options. It didn¡¯t necessarily eliminate all of them, however. ¡°If you don¡¯t mind me asking, what exactly are the terms of the contract?¡±


    ¡°Two dozen ointments that block scents for hunters, ten healing potions, and a flask of¡­ ahem, let¡¯s just call it renewed manhood.¡±


    I frowned at that, not because I cared that some old man wanted an alchemical pick-me-up for the bedroom, but because their fields held far more reagents than were needed for such a small order. ¡°That¡¯s everything?¡± I asked.


    ¡°It is, so you can see¡ª¡±


    ¡°I can make all of that with less than a quarter of your yield.¡±


    Shel paused for a moment. ¡°A quarter?¡±


    ¡°Less than that,¡± I repeated.


    ¡°That¡¯s¡­ I know our techniques aren¡¯t as good as yours, but are we really that far behind?¡±


    ¡°I have no idea what techniques you¡¯re using. I¡¯m just saying that you¡¯ve grown far more than you need for what you¡¯ve listed.¡±


    ¡°Are you offering to make everything for us? Because if not, it doesn¡¯t really matter.¡±


    ¡°Yes, that¡¯s what I¡¯m offering,¡± I said. ¡°A few hours of alchemy. I¡¯ll take everything you planned on using, and you get your contract filled. This way, you¡¯re not out any of the ingredients you grew and you don¡¯t have to actually do any of the work making it.¡±


    ¡°Give us a few moments to confer, please.¡±


    Shel¡¯s group retreated to another table and talked in hushed whispers while I did my best to ignore what they were saying. That took an active effort on my part since the far table was still only ten feet away, but it was a short conversation. The only possible downside was that I might screw something up, but Shel laughed away that suggestion when one of her subordinates mentioned it.


    Even an active effort not to eavesdrop was doomed to fail in such confined quarters.


    After a minute, Shel and Karad returned to the table I was seated at. ¡°We¡¯ll need to clear up some details,¡± Karad said. ¡°The contract is due in a week. Can you get everything done by yourself by then?¡±


    ¡°I can have it all done this evening,¡± I assured him.


    ¡°And you can guarantee the quality?¡±


    ¡°Please. Don¡¯t be insulting.¡±


    ¡°Our people will harvest everything for you. You¡¯ll return everything needed to fulfill the contract and the rest of the supplies are yours to keep.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s what I¡¯m proposing, yes,¡± I said.


    ¡°I think we have a deal,¡± Karad said, holding out a hand.


    ¡°Not just yet!¡± Shel said. ¡°I have one more condition.¡±


    Oh, no.


    ¡°I want to watch. And ask questions.¡±


    I hadn¡¯t missed that part of Shel¡¯s apprenticeship, not at all.

 Book 5, Chapter 13

    I¡¯d offered to make extra potions. I¡¯d offered the town storage crystals packed full of mana. I¡¯d offered them a teleportation platform ¨C though to be fair, I¡¯d given a few dozen of those away already, so that last one wasn¡¯t much of an offer.


    Shel had declined all of that. She knew what she wanted, and she knew I wanted access to their reagents bad enough that she could push for it. I spared a moment to remember the old days, when I just took what I wanted, stepping over literal bodies if I had to. I was a very different person now, and had been for centuries, but at the moment, it had a certain appeal.


    But no, this was a petty annoyance that didn¡¯t actually cost me anything other than an extremely limited amount of extra mana teleporting her along with me. Somewhat ungraciously, I accepted the deal. It stung all the more because I could see an amused twinkle in Karad¡¯s eyes.


    ¡°Fantastic!¡± Shel said. ¡°I¡¯ll have my people start gathering everything up immediately.¡±


    She rushed out the door, followed by the other Arborists, leaving me alone with Karad. The former leader of Alkerist regarded me silently for a second, then said, ¡°So how many years did you give up to make yourself look like an adult?¡±


    I shrugged. ¡°A decade or so, I suppose. It hardly matters much when I have a lifespan measured in millennia.¡±


    ¡°You haven¡¯t changed much, have you?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a little late in life to still be figuring out who I am,¡± I said dryly. ¡°I¡¯m at the point where I¡¯m rounding my total age to the nearest century and occasionally losing track.¡±


    Karad shook his head, bemused. ¡°Ancestors guide me. I can¡¯t even imagine what kind of thinking a life like that leads to. It¡¯s a wonder you¡¯re as well-adjusted as you are.¡±


    ¡°Some people wouldn¡¯t agree with your assessment of me. I can think of more than a few who think of me as a right bastard.¡±


    ¡°Oh, you are,¡± Karad agreed. ¡°It hasn¡¯t been so many years that I¡¯ve forgotten what dealing with you was like. As soon as you told us what you wanted, I knew you¡¯d get it. The only real question was how much we could convince you to pay for it.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not that bad,¡± I protested. ¡°I always paid a fair amount for anything I needed.¡±


    ¡°Negotiating with you is like trying to talk the weather into behaving. Maybe the village gets what it needs, but it¡¯s more of a coincidence than because of anything we did. That¡¯s one of the big reasons you rubbed so many people the wrong way. That and the fact that no one likes being bullied by someone who¡¯s less than three feet tall, regardless of how old they actually are.¡±


    ¡°Yes, I recall that being a point of contention.¡±


    Apparently, Karad was planning on babysitting me while we waited. That was probably just for his own peace of mind rather than out of any foolish belief that he could stop me if I decided to do something he didn¡¯t like. If he was here, he could at least try to talk me out of it instead of having to clean up after I was done.


    ¡°For all you rubbed us the wrong way, though, you¡¯ve honestly done a lot to help this whole island. Heh, ¡®island.¡¯ We didn¡¯t even know we were on an island ten years ago. We barely knew the names of the next village over and the city Noctra came from. And forget about magic. I kind of suspect, looking back on it now, that Noctra knew almost nothing, too. There are probably six or seven people in this village now who are better mages than he was.¡±


    ¡°That wouldn¡¯t surprise me, to be honest. You¡¯re right that Noctra was not a very good mage. I don¡¯t know if he was even technically a true mage. His core was ignited, but his skills were lacking. His assistant knew more magic than he did; she just lacked the ability to generate her own mana at any appreciable rate.¡±


    ¡°Ah. Her¡­¡± Karad trailed off with a dark scowl. I supposed his position as the guy who enforced the rules had probably put him in close contact with Iskara, the governor¡¯s aide and the woman truly in charge of everything. No doubt he had plenty of bad memories that he¡¯d recovered after I¡¯d killed both Noctra and Iskara. Without them there to maintain all the mind magic they¡¯d been laying on people, a whole lot of negative feelings had cropped up about the pair.


    ¡°Enough of bad times,¡± I said. ¡°How has this new village been doing since you founded it?¡±


    ¡°A bit of a rough start, but having everybody here able to produce mana with an ignited core has smoothed things out considerably. Other than a few kids who haven¡¯t reached that point yet, we¡¯re all able to spend mana freely to grow crops and defend Vestrus from the rare monsters that find us all the way out here.¡±This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    ¡°No teleportation platform, though. You¡¯re completely disconnected from everywhere else.¡±


    Karad shrugged. ¡°For now. Someday, I¡¯m sure we¡¯ll reach out to your new town to buy one.¡±


    I laughed. ¡°Nobody buys one. I give them away.¡±


    ¡°You do?¡±


    ¡°You have to power it yourself, but yes. It doesn¡¯t take very long to make a platform. The mana banks are the expensive portion. The rest is just a chunk of stone. Do you want one?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re really just giving something like that away? There has to be a catch.¡±


    ¡°There isn¡¯t, but you don¡¯t have to accept it. I don¡¯t really care one way or another. I doubt I¡¯ll ever be back after today.¡±


    While Karad turned that offer over and tried to spot the non-existent trap in it, I watched Shel organize about twenty people into harvesting herbs from various gardens scattered throughout the village. She personally hit no less than three greenhouses, where I was pleased to see her gardening skills had grown considerably since back when we¡¯d been working in the greenhouses of Old Alkerist. The various plants that required mana to thrive were all healthy and green. Even some of the tricky ones that could die if they were oversaturated were in perfect condition.


    It was going to be a few hours before everything was packaged up, which unfortunately left me with some time to kill. I looked back at Karad and asked, ¡°You make a decision yet?¡±


    * * *


    Shel and I stood on Vestrus¡¯s new teleportation platform while I filled it with enough mana for a single trip. All the herbs were packed up in baskets or crates and safely stowed away in my phantom space, meaning we¡¯d be leaving in about twenty seconds.


    ¡°¡ªtell her I¡¯ll deal with it tomorrow when I get back,¡± Shel was telling one of the Arborists.


    ¡°But Shel, you know she¡¯s going to want an answer now. It¡¯ll only take a few minutes. Can¡¯t you take care of that before you leave?¡±


    Shel shot a glance at me, but I shook my head. Turning back to the Arborist, she said, ¡°Guess n¡ª¡±


    Then the world vanished and we reappeared in my biggest alchemy lab inside my demesne. ¡°¡ªot,¡± Shel finished. She blinked and looked around. ¡°Oh, damn. This is a lot of equipment. Is this how you¡¯re going to make everything so fast?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s part of it,¡± I said. ¡°Having six tables and being good enough to keep all of them running smoothly at the same time will speed things up, but the real trick is the refined recipes. Alchemy requires a lot of expensive trial and error to truly distill a potion down to the fewest steps and least amount of materials, but fortunately for us, I¡¯ve long since done that work.¡±


    ¡°Or stolen someone else¡¯s work,¡± she added.


    ¡°Yes, or that. Now, let¡¯s get started processing this stuff. You can help with that while you bombard me with questions.¡±


    I set her up with a mortar and pestle to pulp a stack of leaves into the powdered base we¡¯d need for the ointments while I used some very precise force spells and delicate telekinesis to dice up everything else. While we worked, I explained what spells I was using, how to cast them, and what sorts of drills worked best for practicing this kind of magic without wasting expensive materials.


    Shel¡¯s questions, just as annoyingly thorough as I recalled them being, did not stop there. She got ahead of the process and started questioning me on the tools filling the work stations, with a special focus on the heat emitters. Those had been finely tuned by various enchantments to hold exact temperatures, something that was vitally important in alchemy.


    ¡°I want one,¡± she said. ¡°No, actually, I want five of them. How much would you charge to make them?¡±


    ¡°I won¡¯t make them for you, but if you really need them that badly, there¡¯s a guy named Tetrin who makes his living off commissions like that. I¡¯ll help you get in contact with him and you can negotiate the rate.¡±


    ¡°Will they be as good as yours?¡±


    I pointed to one of the heaters on the back table. ¡°He made that one. His work is good enough that I have no problem using it.¡±


    She considered that for a moment before putting down the mortar and walking over to examine the heater. ¡°I can¡¯t see a difference between this and the one I was looking at before.¡±


    ¡°How about that?¡± I deadpanned.


    ¡°I know, I know. But can you blame me for wanting to experience it for myself? Why take someone¡¯s word for it when you don¡¯t have to?¡±


    It went on like that for another hour or so while we finished prepping everything. Then I started loading up the tables, which prompted a whole new round of questions every time my method deviated from the one she knew.


    ¡°Why are you putting the base in first? Isn¡¯t there too much air in the flask if you do it this way?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s not enough calbera root for a full dose.¡±


    ¡°Why doesn¡¯t your recipe use gold thistle? And what are you substituting for it?¡±


    Some questions I answered. Some I ignored. Shel seemed to have a sixth sense for when she was growing too annoying and would occasionally get quiet for a few minutes. It never lasted though, and it was with a great amount of relief that I finished up the last part of the order a few hours later and placed it in the box.


    ¡°Here you go. One contract fulfilled, and the leftover reagents are now mine,¡± I said.


    She peered into the box and silently counted it all up, even though she¡¯d done that several times already while I was preparing the very last part. While she was busy doing that, I teleported us both across my demesne to the platform I used for traveling to the outside world, causing her to start and almost drop the box.


    ¡°I¡¯d appreciate if you didn¡¯t destroy all of that,¡± I told her. ¡°I¡¯m not in the mood to make it again.¡±


    ¡°No, that would be bad,¡± she agreed. ¡°The sudden jump was just surprising, is all. I suppose this is goodbye for now, then?¡±


    ¡°For now,¡± I said, having absolutely no intention of ever seeing this most annoying of temporary students ever again if I could help it.


    I sent her back to the new platform in her home village, then let out a long groan. ¡°What a day,¡± I muttered.


    Querit appeared next to me just then. ¡°Who was that?¡± he asked.


    ¡°It¡¯s a long story. Trust me, that one¡¯s too much of a nuisance to want to get to know. What¡¯s important is that I got what we needed to start running the experiments on dissolving mysteel.¡±


    ¡°So soon? And here I thought we might actually get a few weeks off.¡±


    ¡°No such luck,¡± I said. ¡°To the lab.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 14

    ¡°Keiran, it¡¯s time to stop.¡±


    I ignored Querit and started preparing the reagents for the next experiment.


    ¡°Keiran! Please.¡±


    Force magic chopped the herb into thin slices, then did a second pass to dice them into cubes.


    ¡°Keiran¡­¡± Querit reached out to grab my shoulder.


    I shrugged him off and turned an angry glare on the golem. ¡°I don¡¯t have time to stop right now.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s been a month. I haven¡¯t seen you sleep. You cannot tell me that the quality of your work hasn¡¯t suffered.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not going to argue with you about this. You know how important it is,¡± I said.


    ¡°I agree. It¡¯s important. I will stay here and keep things running while you sleep, but please, please, go find your bed.¡±


    I¡¯d burned through the reagents I¡¯d gotten from Shel¡¯s new village faster than I¡¯d wanted, but Hyago had come through for me and now had no less than five of his druids working in shifts to keep up with me. Each batch was a bit smaller than the last, but it was enough to keep pushing forward. We¡¯d find the answer sooner or later, but only if we kept looking.


    ¡°Why are you so obsessed with this experiment?¡± Querit asked, not for the first time. ¡°We have other sources of mysteel. It might take us a few extra years, but you weren¡¯t in such a rush before.¡±


    ¡°You damn well know why,¡± I said, jerking myself free of Querit¡¯s hand.


    Six weeks ago, the gestalt had contacted me to let me know that something had appeared on Yulitar. It wasn¡¯t much, just a single, solitary tower peeking out of the ground, but there was only one person capable of making it. And if Ammun had built it, that meant there was a reason. Maybe that reason was just that he was getting a spot of revenge by making us panic, but I couldn¡¯t assume there wasn¡¯t any greater purpose.


    And if that was the case, then we needed to get things resolved down here before he showed back up. My mysteel generators were running full tilt inside the tower¡¯s foundations, starving it of mana and producing the all-important metal at the same time. It wasn¡¯t as fast as taking a metaphorical sledgehammer to it and breaking it to pieces, but it did have the upside of probably not killing everyone living inside it. They¡¯d have plenty of time to realize the mana was gone, that it wasn¡¯t coming back, and that there was no reason to stay.


    I hoped.


    ¡°This isn¡¯t the way to do it. You¡¯re not thinking right. What happens if that lich shows up tomorrow and you¡¯re in this state?¡±


    ¡°This is all I can do to prepare,¡± I said.


    ¡°Well¡­¡±


    ¡°Well, what?¡±


    ¡°Have you looked at the valley¡¯s mana levels in the last few days?¡± Querit asked.


    I frowned. ¡°No¡­ Why would¡­¡± My eyes popped wide open as I realized what he was saying. ¡°We hit our threshold?¡±


    ¡°As far as I can tell, yes.¡±


    ¡°Even with all the mana we¡¯ve been burning?¡±


    ¡°See for yourself,¡± Querit said. ¡°And then go get some sleep. You¡¯re going to need to be in good shape.¡±


    When I¡¯d advanced my core to stage seven, I¡¯d planned on quickly taking the next step to stage eight. That plan hadn¡¯t worked out for a very simple reason. I didn¡¯t have enough mana. Stage seven involved creating an astral body double that existed inside the Astral Realm, essentially multiplying my capabilities and allowing me to easily handle heavy mana.


    Stage eight was the forging of the mage¡¯s shadow, which was essentially the creation of two more astral bodies, except one of them existed in this world. The shadow was connected to me, but could operate independently and couldn¡¯t be truly destroyed. And the amount of mana needed to create it depended entirely on how powerful the stage seven mage was.


    I was significantly more powerful than I¡¯d been the last time I¡¯d reached stage seven, and not just because I¡¯d taken advantage of the opportunity to build my mana core perfectly. Something about my reincarnation had caused my core to exceed even my most optimistic expectations as far back as stage two, and that advantage had only been growing each time I advanced.


    In short, I¡¯d underestimated the amount of mana I¡¯d needed significantly, so much so that it had taken over six months for my demesne, itself practically a mana dynamo with a fragment of moon core buried beneath a petrified forest of living stone, to make what I needed. In all fairness, I spent my mana quite readily these days and probably could have shaved a month or two off the buildup if I¡¯d tried.


    Advancing to stage eight would be a significant advantage if it came to another fight with Ammun. I would have done it months ago if I could have. If everything was ready now, then Querit was right. I needed to take a break from my attempts to integrate mysteel into the plant monster¡¯s biometal processing and prepare myself to weave my new shadow.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    ¡°Fine. You win,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯m going to get something to eat, then hibernate for a few days. When I come out of it, I¡¯ll be busy for a week or so.¡±


    ¡°Thank you,¡± Querit said, clearly exasperated. ¡°Go, I¡¯ll finish this up.¡±


    ¡°Okay, but first, let me just¡ª¡±


    ¡°Keiran!¡±


    ¡°Alright! Alright. I¡¯m going.¡±


    * * *


    As much as it pained me to admit it, once I got my mind off working, the past month hit me like a herd of stampeding horses. Human bodies weren¡¯t meant to withstand what I¡¯d been putting mine through, and I¡¯d stretched it beyond my limits with a dozen invocations running every second of every day. I¡¯d accomplished a lot in that time, but unfortunately, not the one thing I¡¯d been trying to do.


    Now that I¡¯d stopped, the only thing I wanted was to sleep ¨C the bed was optional. Food wasn¡¯t, however. Once I went down, I wasn¡¯t getting back up until my stomach made me. If I didn¡¯t eat first, that¡¯d be in less than a day, and I needed way more time than that. So I shoveled raw vegetables into my mouth, rounded them out with a few pieces of fruit, detoured to the bathroom, then teleported myself the twenty feet to my bed.


    I didn¡¯t even remember releasing the invocations keeping me conscious.


    * * *


    Coming out of a hibernation was a strange feeling. On the one hand, I felt amazing after even just a few days of sleep. On the other, I was in desperate need of a trip to the bathroom and something to drink. A shower wouldn¡¯t go amiss either.


    While I was doing that, I used my connection to the valley¡¯s genius loci, the very aspect of my mana core that formed my demesne, to get caught up on what I¡¯d missed. For the most part, things were unchanged. The trees were still stone. The artificial mana resonance point we¡¯d forged still hung in the air over a shelf of bare rock on the south side. The wards were functioning, and the collection of mysteel pillars that formed the backbone of my defense network were intact and ready to be used.


    In the labs, Querit was hard at work overseeing the experiments we¡¯d designed, and our test subject was as alive and well as it had ever been. The golem noticed my divination sweep over him and paused in his work to look up at the source of the spell. ¡°Six days,¡± he said.


    My eyebrows shot up. That was a hell of a hibernation cycle, even for an archmage. No doubt, my mana had worked to keep me from dying of dehydration, however inefficiently it might have done the job. It certainly explained a few things about my trip to the bathroom after waking up, not in the least among them the ripeness of my smell.


    Now that my head was fully clear, I could admit that Querit had been right. I¡¯d been flailing at a problem to no effect. I cringed just thinking about how bad some of my ideas had been toward the end. It was incredibly obvious how those experiments would turn out, and I should have seen that without the need to waste resources.


    I got the feeling Querit was going to be insufferable about this, probably holding it over my head every time I went without sleep for any extended period of time. He was always just a little bit smug about his golem body being able to function indefinitely. The joke was on him, though. I was ready to move up to stage eight.


    Stage nine was going to be more of a problem, but I¡¯d done it before. I could do it again. I just didn¡¯t know how yet. Things were different this time around, but I¡¯d adapt. It was really more of a question of how long it would take me.


    And then I could resume the search for the mythical stage ten: true immortality. I had thousands of years left to figure it out, too. And if I failed again, well, there was always the reincarnation method. Admittedly, with the planet being down a moon and the world core itself broken, I was going to have to revise my methods, but I could figure that out if I devoted some time to it after I got everything else fixed on this busted up planet.


    Once I was presentable and nourished again, I teleported to the resonance point. It wasn¡¯t strictly necessary to do this here, but I figured it would be easier if the local mana flows were more tightly leashed. There¡¯d be less interference that way.


    Perhaps sensing my intentions, or just knowing me well enough to know I¡¯d be impatient to get on with it as soon as possible, Querit was already there. ¡°Before you get started, I¡¯ve got a few things to update you on,¡± he said.


    ¡°Anything dire?¡±


    ¡°No. Hyago dropped off another shipment. He was concerned at the rate we¡¯re going through the ingredients, but I assured him we¡¯d be slowing down for a few weeks at least as something else had come up that required your attention. As I understand it, this will give his team a chance to do¡­ something¡­ I¡¯m afraid I didn¡¯t quite follow all the technical terms, but I understood it as rejuvenating the soil between crop cycles.¡±


    I nodded along. ¡°What else?¡±


    ¡°Grandfather showed up to talk to you three days ago. It seems everything is going smoothly at Eyrie Peak, but he wants you there to do one final check with him before he starts some long trip he¡¯s planning. I didn¡¯t get the details, but there¡¯s no rush to get that done right now.


    ¡°Finally, your father has been trying to reach you via your scrying mirror all week. When he was unable to, he contacted me instead. I assured him that you¡¯re alright, just in the middle of something.¡±


    ¡°What did he need?¡± I asked, my mind already conjuring all sorts of trouble that could beset the town.


    ¡°Shel showed up in New Alkerist. I¡¯ve been told that she was quite insistent that she speak with you, but of course, no one could produce you. Your father said it wasn¡¯t an emergency.¡±


    ¡°All of that in just a few days, huh? How¡¯s the progress coming on our experiments?¡±


    ¡°Slowly. I¡¯ve ruled out a few more catalysts and redesigned the acclimation process four times. All I¡¯ve managed to do was cross out a few more potential combinations.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve got a few new ideas to try,¡± I said. ¡°Just kind of came to me when I woke up.¡±


    ¡°Imagine that.¡±


    ¡°Yes¡­ Imagine that.¡± I gave him a flat look. ¡°Okay, let¡¯s talk about the base liquid. We¡¯ve tried using acids to help dissolve the mysteel, but that was never going to work. On other metals, sure, but mysteel just won¡¯t melt. It¡¯s hard enough to reshape it, let alone dissolve it. We need to powder it, instead.¡±


    ¡°How would you go about powdering mysteel?¡± Querit asked, clearly bewildered.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got a few ideas for you to try out while I¡¯m busy. To start, a mysteel grinder combined with a transmutation spell to soften metal. I¡¯ve already figured out how to recalibrate the spell from brass to mysteel. I think it will work better than any other type of metal transmutation.¡±


    I finished giving Querit my ideas for the next round of experiments, then he left to prepare them. I took a breath, then opened myself to my demesne again. I would need all of the mana it could give me over the next few days.


    Exhaling, I closed my eyes and plucked at the first thread of mana.

 Book 5, Chapter 15

    No mage, not even me, had the mental capacity to weave a mage¡¯s shadow on their own. It was just too complex a task to be done without assistance. That was why the sixth stage was the forming of a genius loci and binding it to my mana core. It helped focus my magic, allowed me to pull off feats of mental gymnastics that I never could have anywhere else in the world. Without my demesne, the artificial resonance point hanging in the air overhead wouldn¡¯t exist.


    Even that wasn¡¯t enough in and of itself to accomplish what I was trying to do here. That was why I pulled a device of my own invention out of my phantom space. I¡¯d made the prototype about seven hundred years before my last death. At the time, there was nothing like it in the world and I was advancing through uncharted territories. I doubted I was the first archmage to reach stage eight, but all those who¡¯d gone before had taken their secrets to the grave.


    That had forced me to come up with my own solution: the mana loom. It looked nothing like an actual loom, of course. There was no need for it to mimic the shape when its purpose was to organize mana, not threads. My original version had been a sprawling, clunky thing almost the same size as the hut I¡¯d been born in as Gravin. Since then, I¡¯d made numerous improvements and helped no less than four other archmages follow in my footsteps.


    Suffice to say that the new design was considerably more elegant.


    From the outside, it looked like a simple jewelry box, one that easily fit between my hands. It was made of gold and silver and glinting gemstones, far too ornamental and tawdry looking to be practical. There was a reason for that, however. Certain metals influenced mana drawn through them, and in the case of gold, it made the mana more rigid. It would help the threads I wove keep their shape for just a little bit longer as long as I concentrated.


    Silver, on the other hand, made mana more malleable, which I needed for the parts where I sculpted mana into shape around that inflexible base. Similarly, the various gems studding the box both inside and out were designed to hold mana and alter it in different ways. To be more specific, they worked with heavy mana, which no mage below stage seven could reliably shape into magic without immediately exhausting themselves.


    I placed the box on the ground in front of me and activated it with a mental command, causing it to unfold itself repeatedly until it formed a ritual platform for me to stand on that was far bigger than the outer dimensions allowed for. In between the sapphires, diamonds, garnets, and more were rune structures, deep channels carved into the wood that were waiting to be filled with liquid mana.


    I sat in the center, inside a circle with lines of runes radiating out from it in a sunburst pattern. Compared to my original mana loom, this one was barely more than a carpet placed under a kitchen table, but it was undoubtedly the most powerful loom I¡¯d ever created. It would have to be, seeing as to how it was personally designed to take advantage of my mana reserves, willpower, and knowledge.


    Back when I was just Keiran, my first try at becoming a stage eight archmage had taken me two weeks and failed in the end. It was only on my fourth attempt that I¡¯d succeeded after a month of effort. But now I knew every mistake I¡¯d made on the road to success, and I was older and stronger. I was getting this done in the next week.


    I pulled the first thread of mana through the loom and started weaving my shadow. In the Astral Realm, my opposite mirrored me.


    * * *


    No spider had ever woven a web to match what I sat in the middle of. It connected to my body at a million different points. A single twitch would ruin it. Even taking a breath would be too much. I¡¯d been feeding myself air using a combination of conjuration to force the air to move and invocation to cycle it through my lungs without actually inhaling.


    Slowly, delicately, I mentally grabbed hold of two strands of mana being held in place by my loom and twined them together.


    * * *


    I was trapped in a cocoon of mana so dense that I was oblivious to the world around me. Or maybe ¡®trapped¡¯ wasn¡¯t the right word. It was so delicate that I could easily rip my way free if I had to. But the waste¡­ It would set me back months if I gave up at this point. No, the only way out was forward.


    My astral body shifted on its own for the first time, not in mirror of my actions, but in response to my thoughts. Good. It was beginning to break free.


    * * *


    No longer was the mana a cocoon. Now it was a fine suit, tailored for me and so flexible that it was practically a second skin. I could move again, but not off the ritual platform. My weave was done, and my astral body had mimicked that using pure mana suffusing the Astral Realm. Now it was time for the penultimate step: removing myself from the second skin of mana without ruining it. Emergence was as much a mental act as a magical one. Like wards that only I was allowed to pass through, I needed to part the heavy mana around me, to take that step without disturbing what I left behind.


    There would be no second chance if I made a mistake here. This was the step that I¡¯d bungled in two of my four attempts in my previous life, and even when I¡¯d managed to do it successfully, it had been a near thing.The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    The loom was fully engaged, holding everything in place. I just had to detach it from my physical body now without breaking it apart. Carefully, I snipped the first thread wrapped around me, then smoothed out the loose end. With it sealed and the weave still stable, I cut another one.


    Repeat.


    Repeat.


    Repeat.


    * * *


    I stood face to face with myself, or rather a copy of my astral body, but fully in the real world. There was just one step left. I needed to take that connection between my mana core and my astral body and flip it inside out, to pull the astral body into this world so it could inhabit this body made of mana that I¡¯d built for it.


    Saying it and doing it were two different things. There were no words to describe the sensation of reaching into my own mana core to grab hold of a mirror of myself, but that was what I did. Our hands met in the middle and clasped, and then the mirror broke. I pulled, and instead of exerting equal pressure pulling me back, my astral body moved independent of me.


    It slipped through and was flung into the vessel I¡¯d prepared for it, the me that was made of pure mana. Now it was out of my hands. My astral body could draw on my power, but it would have to acclimate on its own. The only thing I could do was wait to see if it would survive, or if I¡¯d just broken myself back down to stage six.


    I wasn¡¯t worried. After all, that was my astral body. In a very real way, it was me. And I had plenty of faith in my own abilities.


    * * *


    I stood on the ground, my mana loom now closed up and back in its compact travel form. Behind me, my shadow flickered back and forth of its own volition. It leaped across the grass, merging with the shadow of a fallen pillar that had been part of the creation process back when Querit and I had forged the artificial mana resonance point.


    My shadow was perfectly invisible, swallowed up in the larger shadow it was hiding in. Despite that, I knew exactly where it was. In many ways, a mage¡¯s shadow was a living creature. It thought like me, almost perfectly in sync, but it wasn¡¯t me. And the longer it existed independently of me, the more we would diverge. Mages who never took the time to merge with their shadows again often found themselves with a companion possessed of its own opinions and desires.


    Most archmages agreed that letting a shadow run wild was a bad idea, if for no other reason than because we were technically sharing mana cores. We had a pair between us, and each could draw from either or both. Both cores also regenerated at the same rate, meaning I¡¯d effectively doubled how much mana I could hold and how quickly I regained it.


    My shadow pulled on our mana core, and a needle of stone rose ten feet into the air. With a thought, it shattered the temporary construction back into mana. Good. As it should, the shadow possessed all the skills I did. Lossless casting was no problem for it, and together we might even manage to cast master-tier spells without giving up any mana.


    We experimented for a few more minutes before I was satisfied with the results. It looked like true lossless master-tier spells were still out of reach, but we were up to something like seventy percent efficiency. This was as close to my true power as I was likely to get in a dead world with a stage eight core.


    I slipped through my demesne to appear in the bio testing lab. Querit wasn¡¯t there at the moment, but he was good about keeping records. Our monster specimen was still alive, but it didn¡¯t look like we¡¯d made any progress. Maybe I could fix that.


    The problem had always been getting mysteel dissolved to the point where the monster could assimilate it and start producing it for its biometal. We kept failing at that; even our most refined mixes weren¡¯t producing any metal at all.


    Mysteel¡¯s defining quality was that it was nigh-indestructible to both physical and magical forces. It was in fact so difficult to do anything with it that a thin shell of it was enough to contain the mana core of the entire planet. It had taken a force powerful enough to destroy a moon in orbit to fracture that shell.


    I couldn¡¯t generate that kind of magic, but then, the mysteel piece I was working with was much smaller. I could¡ªand had¡ªreduced it to a fine powder. That wasn¡¯t really the issue. The issue was getting it to combine properly with the elixir instead of remaining inert. In order for that to happen, I needed to fully suffuse the mysteel with mana.


    That was something I could probably do. And even if not, the attempt would be an excellent test of the maximum amount of mana my shadow and I could handle. I selected a vial of powdered mysteel and considered which alchemical bases were ready. Some of them were incompatible with the method I was planning, but I had a few that could handle the stress of that much mana being moved through them.


    My shadow and I both started cycling mana through the mysteel dust, more and more of it each second. Rather than let it flow back into me, I forced it to be more compact, denser, heavier. Then I added another layer, and another, and another, so many that it was a fight just to keep it all from venting out. If that happened, the glass vial would shatter, pelting me with the world¡¯s most expensive metallic sand.


    The only thing stopping it was our combined efforts. And slowly, ever so slowly, the mysteel was infused with so much raw mana that it couldn¡¯t hold. Carefully, I poured it into the already-prepared alchemical mixture and swirled it around. Its resistance overcome through sheer force, the mysteel couldn¡¯t resist reacting.


    The liquid turned from a rich blue to a murky silt-gray. Working swiftly, I started heating the elixir while stirring it with a slender glass rod, the end of which was flattened into a paddle. At the same time, my shadow starting casting the spell needed to engage the catalyst.


    Thirty seconds later, there was a burst of mana, so strong that it triggered my shield ward, and the elixir was a solid, sparkling gray. Subtle currents swirled through the bottle, barely visible even to my mana sense.


    Querit rushed into the lab, then froze when he saw me. ¡°You¡¯re done,¡± he said. With a glance at the elixir I¡¯d crafted, he added, ¡°I¡¯m assuming your core advancement went well.¡±


    ¡°Very well. I was able to apply a new level of pressure to the mysteel thanks to my shadow¡¯s help. It¡¯s not a clever solution, but I think it might work.¡±


    He studied the elixir intently, then straightened and said, ¡°You might just be right. The mysteel is actually alchemically bonded to the regeneration elixir this time. It¡¯s not going to separate no matter how long it sits.¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s only one thing left to do,¡± I said with a grin. We both turned to look at the plant monster safely contained in its pen. ¡°Try it out.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 16

    After making a few more samples for Querit to play with, I left him to his work. There were a few other things I had to catch up on, namely checking on what Ammun was doing up on the moon and helping Grandfather confirm everything was fine so he could do whatever it was he was planning. After that¡­ helping Father get rid of Shel should have been a priority, but I was very much alright with ignoring that particular problem.


    Before I left for Eyrie Peak, I spent a bit of time doing my own long-range scrying. I¡¯d modified my scrying chamber months ago so that I wouldn¡¯t have to go through the trouble of spending half an hour setting up the ritual every time I wanted to use it. Now it included an actual basin of liquid mana big enough for me to completely submerge myself in, the interior of which was covered in the necessary runes.


    I scoured the surface of the moon Ammun was trapped on, hindered mostly by the fact that his own magic was hiding whatever it was he was building. Unraveling it from this distance was sure to be difficult, which made me wonder exactly how the gestalt had done it ¨C probably by brute force. That was the primary advantage of having millions upon millions of bodies to throw at a problem.


    It wouldn¡¯t surprise me in the slightest to find out the gestalt was looking at the entirety of the moon through thousands of different scrying mirrors at the same time and noting which places they couldn¡¯t see so they could refine their spells to search there. It was impossible for a normal person to do, even someone like me, but for a gestalt entity, the only limiting factor would be the mana. It was too bad their ability to utilize lossless casting was practically nonexistent.


    Giving up the attempt at scrying Ammun¡¯s activities as a bad job, I slipped through my demesne to appear on my teleportation platform. One quick spell later, I was standing on an identical platform on Eyrie Peak and on my way up to speak to Grandfather.


    Surprisingly, the old grayfeather was nowhere to be found. Either he¡¯d decided to proceed with his vacation without me, or he was just somewhere nearby on the mountain. I could see him slowly starting to venture out as he got more comfortable with the new enchantments holding the brakvaw¡¯s graveyard up above the clouds.


    Rather than go looking for him, I decided to just seek out the gestalt instead. They were, as always, in their underground cavern, and also crawling across the portal network, and on the other side of it. Odds were they were quite a few other places I wasn¡¯t aware of, as well.


    ¡®Keiran,¡¯ their odd voice spoke in my head. ¡®You¡¯ve received our message about your enemy?¡¯


    ¡°I did,¡± I said. ¡°I would have been here earlier, but I was delayed with another project.¡±


    ¡®We see that your core has changed again. This is the second time since we have known you.¡¯


    That was a bit surprising to find out that the gestalt was able to feel enough of my mana core to notice the changes. I kept it shielded from casual observation at all times, and I would have expected to know if someone was snooping around, trying to get a good look.


    Assuming my shielding technique was as good as I thought it was, that meant the gestalt was able to tell the difference based on the visible mana that supported the various spells I¡¯d cast in their presence. So, they probably didn¡¯t know what stage my core was at, just that I¡¯d advanced it twice. Still, it was impressive that they could feel the difference in my mana well enough to note the change.


    ¡°Yes. Just earlier today I finished my advancement. You told my assistant that you¡¯d detected a building on Yulitar¡¯s surface, but I wasn¡¯t able to find it with my own scrying.¡±


    ¡®Correct,¡¯ the gestalt sent. ¡®We will show you.¡¯


    I flew over the carpet of ants below me so as not to step on any part of the gestalt and approached the three mirror balls I¡¯d made. All of them were already working, each individual facet showing a stretch of empty moonscape. As I¡¯d suspected, with thousands of images to work from and their unique ability to piece together disparate sensory perceptions, the gestalt had sniffed out Ammun¡¯s secrets through pure brute force.


    Next to the scrying orbs was an illusion of the moon with a particular spot highlighted in red. It showed a small, square tower perhaps four floors high. ¡®We were not able to see inside of this structure,¡¯ the gestalt told me. ¡®Not without some way to transfer some of our bodies to this location, and that would present its own series of challenges.¡¯


    Maintaining the connection to the rest of the gestalt would be damn near impossible over that kind of distance. They would almost have to split off a second, smaller gestalt to find what they wanted, then merge them back together after, something that a gestalt preferred to avoid doing. There was no guarantee the new gestalt would consent to rejoin their host once they¡¯d been separated.Stolen story; please report.


    I might have to go back up there and investigate this myself. I¡¯d been hoping to avoid another fight with Ammun after I¡¯d lost so badly in our last encounter. Unused to fighting under the effects of the moon¡¯s gravity and with no air, I¡¯d failed to properly defend myself, nearly died, and ended up fleeing.


    Now, Ammun had been up there for months and was fully acclimated to the environment. Worse, he¡¯d no doubt already finished tying his phylactery to the moon¡¯s core. He¡¯d be at full strength if we fought again.


    No, going back up to Yulitar was out of the question. I needed to spend however much time I had left preparing for Ammun¡¯s return. If I was lucky, his tower would be starved of mana before he got back, leaving him with no demesne to return to. He¡¯d still be formidable, but not unbeatable. Of course, just destroying his body would just send him back up to the moon, where he¡¯d teleport back again once he was recovered.


    I had plans to deal with that. Ammun wouldn¡¯t find it so easy to flee the next time I beat him.


    ¡®Do you have any requests for what you¡¯d like us to search for now?¡¯ the gestalt asked.


    ¡°Presumably, if Ammun¡¯s anti-divination wards on this tower fall, that means he¡¯s left. That could be used as a warning to let us know that he¡¯s returned,¡± I said. ¡°Then again, it¡¯s just as likely that he¡¯s built them to run on ambient mana up there. It¡¯s not a reliable indicator. Damn. There¡¯s got to be something we can do with this information.¡±


    If I did go up there, could I do it without being discovered? And if so, could I infiltrate Ammun¡¯s wards? For that matter, was this tower even real? It could be a simple decoy he stone shaped then warded to keep our attention on it. There was no way to tell, not right now.


    ¡°Keep trying to get a look inside,¡± I said. ¡°Hopefully this tower is the real deal. I¡¯ll keep making preparations to deal with Ammun when he makes it back here.¡±


    What those preparations were going to be, I didn¡¯t yet know. There was no way I was going to be able to create an emergency recall charm that would take me back down to the planet. If I went up there, it¡¯d be a one-way trip until I managed to carve out a ritual circle to bring me back. I¡¯d need to make sure I destroyed it as soon as I left, too. If it fell into Ammun¡¯s hands, he could use it to follow me back down here. The more I considered the idea of making a second trip to Yulitar, the more I found reasons not to do it.


    I glanced at the illusory moonscape again and scowled. I¡¯d hoped to get another year or two before he figured out how to get home. The fact that it was a multi-floor tower was encouraging. It meant he was still thinking in terms of a group ritual, probably trying to figure out how to do every part of it at once by himself. Or it meant that he wanted me to think that and his real ritual chamber was underground where we¡¯d never be able to scry it. That was the smart thing to do.


    ¡®We shall continue to monitor the surface of this moon,¡¯ the gestalt said. ¡®It is no great trouble to our mind, but you shall need to supply the needed mana for us.¡¯


    I nodded absently and poured mana into the three mirror balls. The enchantments were incredibly efficient, but a thousand different scrying mirrors were still a steady drain on their reserves, especially viewing something so far away. Topping all three of them off took all the mana I had in my core.


    As long as I didn¡¯t need to cast any master-tier spells in the next hour, that was fine. And if I did, my mana crystal was over half full, easily able to support a dozen or so spells. I was in no way defenseless.


    ¡°Done,¡± I said. ¡°Do you know where Grandfather went? I¡¯m supposed to find him, too.¡±


    ¡®The patriarch departed, flying straight up past the clouds an hour ago.¡¯


    Crap. Of course he did. ¡°Did anyone else go with him?¡± I asked. If not, I could probably sneak up there and see what he needed.


    ¡®Four of the elder brakvaw,¡¯ the gestalt told me


    Out of luck, again. I wasn¡¯t on good terms with the elder council to begin with, and intruding on some brakvaw ceremony that took place on their floating graveyard island was just asking for trouble. I¡¯d have to come back some other time, and it probably wouldn¡¯t be anytime soon. My hibernation and ascent to stage eight had put me behind schedule.


    ¡°Did you scry out that other thing I asked for?¡± I asked.


    Information flooded my mind, almost too much to process. It was damn near a mental attack, but I¡¯d been expecting something like this and I was prepared for it, even going so far as to suppress the mental defenses on my shield ward for a few seconds.


    ¡°Thank you for the information,¡± I said as I flew back out of the gestalt¡¯s lair. They sent a feeling of acknowledgement after me.


    I¡¯d leave Grandfather a message and see about scheduling some time with the old bird later. I just needed to find a brakvaw to pass the message along to. Luckily, there was always at least one guard at the teleportation platform. One of them could serve as my messenger.


    I flew back down and picked the larger of the two to let Grandfather know I¡¯d come by. I got something that I took to be an acknowledgement without words, mostly because brakvaw couldn¡¯t speak anything remotely resembling a human language naturally, and not all of them knew enough magic to mimic words. Some of them also didn¡¯t understand Elotian, for that matter.


    Usually the platform guards were in the group that could communicate with outsiders, though I didn¡¯t know how many people actually showed up here besides me. In this case¡­ I wasn¡¯t sure with this guy. Maybe he just didn¡¯t like me. Either way, I suspected someone would tell Grandfather I¡¯d been around and he¡¯d come find me. If nothing else, the gestalt could let him know.


    Or not. And that was fine, too. I had other stops to make and plenty to keep me busy. There was a whole map in my head now, just waiting for me to address it. It would probably be best to wait for my mana core to refill before I started on that, though, so I headed home to speak to my family next.

 Book 5, Chapter 17

    As was typical, Father was out of the house when I got there. More unusually, Mother and Nailu were also gone. Then again, with the town grown significantly from what Old Alkerist had boasted at its peak, and with the advent of magical knowledge making everyone¡¯s lives easier, people found themselves with a lot more free time. Mother used hers to socialize with a far wider circle of friends, especially those who also had young children.


    As for Senica, she could be anywhere. Much to our parents¡¯ dismay, she was no longer limiting herself to staying in New Alkerist. Our successful troll hunt had given her enough confidence to push back against their desire to shelter her, not that she¡¯d had much trouble fighting them on that in the first place. Besides, she was closing in on sixteen now, which was the point where she was considered an adult in this culture.


    I could think of a few others I¡¯d found over the years that had much younger ages of majority. It was probably for the best that we hadn¡¯t been born in any of those places, however. Societies that acknowledged ten-year-olds as adults usually only did so in order to prey upon them in various unsavory ways.


    I¡¯d hoped to catch up with my whole family, but I wasn¡¯t surprised that I¡¯d missed everyone by popping up unannounced in the middle of the day. On the other hand, the only person I actually needed to talk to was Father, so I searched him out. Unsurprisingly, he was out in the fields. That was where he spent most of his time when not being swamped with his duties on the town¡¯s council.


    Good. It was far easier to get a chance to talk to him when he was working the fields than it was when he was busy talking to everyone else. I flew across town, skimming the rooftops both to shorten my journey and to avoid anyone on the streets who might try to flag me down. That didn¡¯t mean people didn¡¯t see me, just that I was gone over the next building before they could say anything.


    Father waved up at me as I approached, then turned and said something to the two men standing nearby. One of them nodded, and he handed off the shovel he¡¯d been holding before stepping away to meet me.


    ¡°Gravin,¡± he said. ¡°Finally feeling better?¡±


    ¡°Yes and no. Lot of work to catch up on,¡± I told him. ¡°I¡¯m refilling my mana core before I tackle the next problem and thought I¡¯d use the time to see what you need.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s the next problem?¡± Father asked curiously.


    ¡°Boring experimentation and lab work,¡± I lied. It wasn¡¯t that my parents would try to stop me from going into dangerous situations, but they worried, sometimes over nothing. My next job would only become dangerous if Ammun happened to teleport on top of me while I was doing it. Admittedly, the likelihood of that actually happening seemed to be on the rise.


    However, it would seem dangerous if I explained it to Father, plus a lot of people were probably going to die today, so it was easier to just¡­ not tell him. Part of me thought I should feel bad about that, but that part was only whining because it was my parents I was keeping things from. Besides, I was technically a teenager now, probably. Hiding things from my parents was practically a rite of passage.


    ¡°I heard you were delivering a message from Shel?¡± I prompted in a bid to change the subject before Father could ask any follow up questions.


    A flicker of annoyance crossed his face, but he¡¯d spent enough time arbitrating disputes on the council to smother it immediately. ¡°Yes¡­ Shel. Thanks so much for bringing her back into my life,¡± he said.


    ¡°She can¡¯t possibly be that annoying when she lives hundreds of miles away.¡±


    ¡°For the two days she was here, yes, she could. Very insistent on seeing you again. She only gave up and went home after I got back from the valley and told her that not even I could get to you at the time.¡±


    ¡°Okay, but what did she want?¡± I asked. I assumed it was for me to help with something, but that didn¡¯t really narrow it down.


    ¡°To know what you wanted them to start growing next, I think.¡±


    ¡°Uh¡­ nothing? That was a one-time deal. I¡¯ve got my supplier sorted out and we¡¯ve invested a lot into his operation. Shel and the village got a harvest at a premium price because I needed it right then, but I¡¯m all set now.¡±


    Father snorted. ¡°Of course. All this time pestering me, and the answer is just, ¡®No thanks.¡¯ You think she¡¯ll accept that next time she comes around?¡±


    ¡°Does she have much choice? What would you do with anyone else if someone refused to accept an answer?¡±


    ¡°Warn them to get over it before they spent the night in the jail.¡±This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    ¡°So do that,¡± I suggested.


    We had sound wards on the cells. She couldn¡¯t annoy whoever was on duty too much that way. It seemed like a simple solution to me.


    ¡°Might be better to hear it from you, just so there¡¯s no ambiguity and you can address any other problems she has,¡± Father said.


    I squinted at him suspiciously. ¡°That sounds a lot like trying to foist a problem off on me.¡±


    ¡°It was your problem in the first place!¡± he protested. ¡°If anyone foisted anything, you did it to me!¡±


    There was a fair amount of truth in that statement, much as I hated to admit it. ¡°Fine, fine. I¡¯m up and about now. Next time she shows up, just let me know. I¡¯ll come back and deal with her.¡±


    Damn it, that was exactly what I didn¡¯t want to do. Why did I like having a family again?


    * * *


    I spent a few more minutes catching up with my father, then flew myself back to the town¡¯s teleportation platform. I hadn¡¯t nearly filled my mana core to full, but time was more valuable to me right now. I drew on my personal mana crystal to power a series of teleportation spells that ended with me in the old empire of Ralvost, now a mostly deserted land thanks to Ammun¡¯s predations.


    He¡¯d gotten a legion of zombies in exchange for killing almost everyone who¡¯d lived here, one that Querit had been remarkably thorough in killing when they¡¯d been sent through portals to besiege the various villages and towns located on my home island. He¡¯d also taken out a few dozen necromancers as well.


    That did not mean things were pacified over in this corner of the world ¨C far from it, in fact. Ammun had left an army of mages behind when he¡¯d teleported himself and a few dozen diviners up to Yulitar. I¡¯d sent those diviners back, stranding him up there with no one to help him work the ritual to get back, and most of them had had the good sense to run for the hills upon returning to Manoch.


    The rest of his army was a mixed bag. Some had deserted. A lot of them had gone running back to the tower, though I expected the ones who¡¯d disappeared into the wilderness had only done so because they were afraid of Ammun returning, easily finding them, and punishing them.


    I wasn¡¯t terribly worried about the deserters. The tower was getting weaker by the day, the mana needed to support the gargantuan building being siphoned away by my mysteel generators. Once the wards and enchantments holding it together started to fail, it would be crushed under its own weight.


    No, the problem was the rest of the army. There were still a few thousand hostile mages loyal to Ammun¡¯s cause that I¡¯d been ignoring for the last few months simply because there were so many other, more important problems demanding my attention. Collecting enough mysteel to repair the shell around the world core was one of my top priorities, right up there with destroying Ammun¡¯s demesne and figuring out how to return my mana core to stage nine.


    But now that I had to worry about my former apprentice showing back up, it was time to do something about them. The gestalt had helped me out by using my network of scrying beacons to do a lot of the busywork, even if their method of transferring that information left something to be desired. If I¡¯d had more time, I would have insisted it be delivered the normal way, but there was too much and I didn¡¯t have a few days to go through it all.


    Instead, I got a brain full of troop locations, defensive systems, supply lines, and identified officers. The gestalt had even found a lot of the deserters who¡¯d opted to flee instead of returning to the tower, and marked a hundred or so spots with anti-scrying wards that probably held the more competent mages, including Ammun¡¯s diviners.


    While I¡¯d been taking care of other business, I¡¯d been reviewing everything the gestalt had sent me. There were too many sites to just start raining destruction down on them randomly. I needed a strategy. At the very least, I needed to identify the most important places to destroy and plan the most efficient route to hit them all.


    That had been on my mind for the last half an hour or so, and I¡¯d slowly settled into a definitive plan of action. The most important aspect was preventing my victims from alerting other parts of the army. I¡¯d cut off the more isolated camps first, the ones that wouldn¡¯t be missed for days or even weeks. Then I¡¯d go after the high priority targets. They¡¯d be missed in a matter of hours, maybe less.


    After I hit the first one, it¡¯d be a race to take advantage of the information for as long as it remained accurate. At some point, the army would start to collapse back on its main base and there¡¯d be too many of them for me to do more than strafing runs. I didn¡¯t have the time to whittle them down, so the goal was to break them before they figured out what was happening.


    I considered bringing Querit in on this, but if I was being honest, I didn¡¯t need him and the work he was doing was probably more important. Or maybe I just didn¡¯t want him to have to kill thousands of people. I was already a monster; there was no need to turn anyone else into one.


    I flew above the clouds, trusting in my divinations to lead me to the first site I was going to attack. It was a small encampment fortified with transmuted earthworks and staffed by about fifty mages. Its only purpose, as far as I could tell, was to keep an eye on the northeast border of Ammun¡¯s empire. Considering they¡¯d killed or driven off all their neighbors, I wasn¡¯t sure why the fort hadn¡¯t been abandoned already.


    The first order of business was to place a divination lock on the fort, just in case anyone inside was decent enough to scry out for help. After that, a few carefully placed ward buster spells blew the defenses wide open, leaving the ward stone vulnerable to a mana surge that cracked it in half.


    That was when the soldiers started making noise. Some of it was panicked, but most of it was impressively disciplined. Discipline only got a soldier so far, however. Without the skill to back it up, they had no chance of spotting me before I was ready to reveal myself.


    Mindful of my reserves, I opted to send ropes of lightning down into the fort, killing its defenders one by one as it chained between bodies. It wasn¡¯t the fastest way to wipe everyone out, but it got the job done. Once I¡¯d ensured there was no one left alive, I flew to the next outlying encampment.


    It was a butcher¡¯s work, killing those soldiers loyal enough that they were still serving their absent emperor, but I was determined that by the time Ammun got back, he wouldn¡¯t have an army left.

 Book 5, Chapter 18

    I didn¡¯t even keep track of how many places I destroyed, let alone how many people I killed. All I knew was that it was a lot, and that I¡¯d almost certainly ended the lives of a significant number of people who didn¡¯t deserve it. That did not stop me from moving on to the next base, encampment, or fortification to repeat the process.


    Ammun was going to return eventually. I needed to cut away any and all support I could, even if the cost was an ocean of blood. These people had threatened me and mine too many times already.


    While I went about my gruesome work, part of me wondered why I was bothered at all. The old Keiran had broken armies multiple times, and he¡¯d never paused to consider the fates of those unfortunate soldiers. Why was I? It couldn¡¯t just be the Gravin part of me. I¡¯d long ago determined that Gravin¡¯s defining contribution to my new personality was affection for my immediate family, and that was it. It was a small circle, and even my new little brother was only loosely connected to it.


    Maybe it was how closely I¡¯d been working with others for the last decade making me go soft and sentimental. I¡¯d spent more hours around other people since being reincarnated than I had in the past two centuries of my old life, and as it turned out, they weren¡¯t really all that bad. Sure, they could be annoying and selfish and greedy, but I wasn¡¯t any better. And usually, the things they wanted were so trivial that it took almost no effort on my part to fulfill those desires.


    But I wasn¡¯t a charity, and thus was under no obligation to actually help anyone just because they wanted something. Besides, my time was too valuable to be spent on random engineering projects or putting up newer, better homes for people who honestly didn¡¯t like me that much and hadn¡¯t treated me that well anyway.


    Shel was on my mind more than I cared to admit. She was hardly the first person to show up and want something, and I supposed I understood her thinking since I¡¯d initially made contact with the village, but it was a lot harder to give her the brush off than I¡¯d expected. Shel was one of my first apprentices since I woke back up in Gravin¡¯s body, even if she was incredibly annoying. I hadn¡¯t technically abandoned her, but only by virtue of the fact that I¡¯d been banished from the village.


    Damn it. Did I owe her some help like I would any other apprentice? If so, what form did that help take? It definitely wasn¡¯t helping out her whole village, but it might be teaching her the spells needed so that she could do it herself.


    My musings were interrupted by a squad of artillery mages who¡¯d somehow shielded themselves from detection long enough to get a ritual spell up and running. A pillar of stone thirty feet tall and ten feet wide came flying up through the air with enough momentum to kill me on impact. Something that big and heavy had no right to move that fast, especially not moving straight up, but there it was all the same.


    It was too big to swat aside with telekinesis, even with master-tier grand telekinesis. Instead, I layered force walls in front of it, stressing the rock structure and bleeding off its speed as it blasted through each one. By the time it reached my altitude, I was already a hundred feet away and it was shedding small chunks of stone to rain down on the mages below.


    I quickly located the artillery squad hiding beneath an anti-divination ward with some attention redirection qualities woven into it. My earlier distraction had made it easy for the magic to keep me focused on killing everyone else, but now that I was focused on them, I ripped through the ward easily. Javelins of force rained down, dozens falling to spear through the artillery mages.


    Personal shield wards popped and shattered as they were bombarded with more damage than they could stop. Mages were shunted in every direction, often slamming into each other, and three seconds later, they were dead. What had been a potentially lethal threat was now a tangle of bodies leaking blood from punctured torsos and severed limbs.


    It did serve to drag my attention firmly back to the task at hand, though. Mages died or fled by the dozens until all two hundred or so that had been stationed here were disposed of. None of them had possessed the ability to teleport, or if they had, they hadn¡¯t found the time to actually cast the spell. Six had ¡®escaped¡¯ by flying away, only to be shot down by mana beams from the defensive embankments I¡¯d built and seeded around the camp in a large circle. The rest had died where they stood.


    I collected my equipment back into my phantom space through the simple expedient of triggering an enchantment on them that caused them to all fly toward me, then headed off for the next spot.


    * * *This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    A few other times, artillery squads managed to protect or hide themselves long enough to take a shot at me. Usually, it was a combination of hiding and sacrificing other mages as a distraction, since it was rather difficult to go hunting mages down while fending off a few dozen of their fellows hurling fire, ice, lightning, force, mind probes, and hexes at me all at once.


    The usual cycle for these things was to thin as much as half their numbers in my opening attack, whittle down another quarter or so over the next few minutes, then mop up the survivors once they broke and fled. That time I spent whittling was the only dangerous part, and a bunch of mages at stages one or two just weren¡¯t that threatening. Even the occasional stage three officers were more of a nuisance than anything else.


    That¡¯s how it went for the first eight hours or so. After that, all the isolated camps were gone and I had to start taking risks. I¡¯d already worked out my strategy, which was to change my priority targets to any communications centers first, then to prevent escape second. Taking out mages specializing in offense was the third most important part of the job, and I focused on it just heavily enough to ensure I didn¡¯t need to retreat.


    Even now, it was still a chore to be handled, the butchering of larger groups of mage soldiers that took slightly longer to murder than my original targets. I was still killing more people faster when I accounted for my travel time, especially since my mana had completely recovered and I¡¯d started opening up my assaults with devastating master-tier spells, just one or two for each base I destroyed.


    That worked for another hour or so, but then someone managed to get a message out and the whole plan unraveled. Once the soldiers were forewarned and had time to prepare, it got a lot tougher to devastate their forces with surprise attacks. That in turn reduced my effectiveness, drastically increased my mana costs, and left me facing considerably more danger.


    I hadn¡¯t gotten them all. I¡¯d killed maybe a third, and probably the worst third at that. Important and competent soldiers didn¡¯t get sent to isolated outposts that guarded nothing. But still, single-handedly destroying a third of an army several thousand strong in a single day was nothing to turn my nose up at.


    They weren¡¯t just going to take it lying down, however. Not only did I fail to take the next spot by surprise, but they actually ambushed me first. I was still setting up for my attack when my shield ward flared with mana, blocking some sort of overpowered mind crush spell. At the same time, a giant ball of force appeared around me and started trying to constrict on me, to crush me into paste.


    A few more attacks targeting my mind came my way, probably as a distraction, while I reached into the mana matrix of the force spell and broke it apart. By the time I freed myself, thirty mages were flying up to attack me, various spells already forming around them.


    A wave of dispelling magic rolled out from me, wide enough to catch all of them even if it was a bit wasteful. Conjurations designed to burn, tear, or bludgeon me to death fizzled out, and no small number of mages found their weight suddenly unsupported when they failed to protect their ongoing flight spells, too.


    More mages were coming out of everywhere to attack me, including no less than six artillery squads. It was somewhat flattering to know they were taking me seriously, but it was also making my job considerably harder. In fact, with so many enemy mages arrayed against me, all of them organized and with a plan to kill me in mind, this was looking like the point in my campaign of genocide where I needed to retreat.


    That was my plan until someone two miles north of the camp fired off a massive beam of heat and fire at me. It struck me squarely, breaking through my shield ward and turning my skin an angry red as it blistered. I was only in the edge of the beam for half a second before gravity pulled me clear, but that was enough to do some real damage. I¡¯d need to magically heal myself if I didn¡¯t want a face full of burn scars for the rest of my life.


    A simple intermediate-tier invocation killed my sensation of pain, allowing me to ignore the burnt skin for now. The deadly fire beam swept the sky, catching a few of the enemy mages in its path as it chased me around, but I¡¯d seen this spell a few times already and I knew how to handle it.


    It belonged to a mage who¡¯d gone by the moniker of Seven back when he¡¯d been in the Breakers. I¡¯d watched him use it to assassinate his own grandmother when I¡¯d first met him, and he¡¯d tried to kill me with it more than once. I hadn¡¯t exactly expected to run into him here and now, but that didn¡¯t mean I wasn¡¯t ready to deal with him.


    First, I had to rebuild my shield ward. It couldn¡¯t stand up to the fire beam, but he wasn¡¯t the only mage trying to kill me right now. A few dozen other conjurations were heading my way, all of them weak enough that my shield ward could defend me from them, but only if I could pump enough mana into it to get it back up fast enough.


    Two force bolts slammed into my back, rattling me and stealing my breath. My instinct was to spin in place and return fire, but I didn¡¯t have the time, not if I wanted to avoid becoming a charred corpse. Instead, I let myself keep falling for the second it took to get my shield ward back up, then jerked myself sideways with a short-range instant teleport.


    Blood seeped down my back and I definitely had a broken rib or two. I wrapped a band of force around my chest to hold everything mostly in place, but I needed to be careful for the rest of this fight or else I¡¯d end up with a punctured lung on top of everything else.


    Fortunately, flight didn¡¯t require me to actually move any part of my body, so the injury didn¡¯t slow me down. It did make dodging a bit riskier since sudden changes in direction were a problem, but I only had one goal left before I retreated from this battle.


    I flew toward the source of that fiery death beam that had scorched me. For as many times as I¡¯d seen Seven, this was the day I made sure he died.

 Book 5, Chapter 19

    The closer I got to the source of the beam, the harder it was to dodge it. That might have been a problem if I wasn¡¯t already so familiar with the spell, but I¡¯d been on the receiving end enough times to have a good idea of both the spell¡¯s and the person controlling its limitations. Seven aimed the spell visually and seemed unable or unwilling to use divinations to assist with that. I had a theory that he just wasn¡¯t a good enough mage to channel a master-tier spell and cast anything else at the same time, but either way, it meant he had a lot of blind spots.


    One of those was that he couldn¡¯t see what was directly next to the beam since it blocked his own view, though he compensated by shifting it in a slight circular pattern to fry anyone who tried to hide there. Even without that, the amount of heat rolling off the beam was enough to cook anyone who got that close.


    It was a powerful spell on its own, made all the more dangerous by the fact that Seven had a full squadron of mages supporting him. They worked the divinations that fed him information and protected him from retaliatory magic. They were also the ones who tried to pin me down with telekinesis or mental attacks, to slow me enough to let Seven catch me. Really, they were the ones I was fighting right now. Without his support mages, it would be trivial to dance around Seven¡¯s death beam until he ran out of mana.


    So, I didn¡¯t target Seven directly with my counterattack. He was too well defended, anyway. Instead, I latched onto one of the dozen or so defenders on the platform working both to cover him and to maintain the wards, and I drove a massive mind spike into the man¡¯s brain. He cried out in pain and collapsed on the spot, leaving a small hole in the platform¡¯s coverage. Automated wards partially compensated for it, but it was obvious the system had been designed to have humans holding its hands. It wasn¡¯t robust enough to read what was attacking it and respond accordingly.


    Without that guidance, there were vulnerabilities to exploit. Normally, something as complex as wardbreaking wouldn¡¯t be done during live combat. However, in this case, messing the wards up would most likely result in an explosion that killed everyone on the platform. Since that was pretty much the goal, and because I wasn¡¯t going to be anywhere nearby when it happened, I sent a surge of mana into the hole left by the mage I¡¯d already dropped.


    It wasn¡¯t subtle. There were certainly better ways to unravel that defense, but I didn¡¯t have time for that, nor did I particularly care about breaking anything. My mana was a hammer, and I swung it with the intent to break something.


    As it happened, the wards looked to have been made by some mages who didn¡¯t really know what they were doing. It had been slapped together with nothing to anchor it to and no mana reserves outside what the mages could feed into it. When I hit it, I didn¡¯t just break something. I broke a lot of things.


    Miniature explosions filled the platform, outright killing at least four people and injuring a handful more. A few of them had personal shield wards strong enough to survive the catastrophic feedback the fallen ward let out, which unfortunately included Seven. I¡¯d give him his due; his concentration never wavered.


    His aim, on the other hand, got a lot worse all a sudden. I accelerated and got another hundred feet of distance from the beam even as I closed the distance on its source, and Seven couldn¡¯t keep up with my abrupt change in speed and direction. His magic sliced through the air, but by the time it reached where I¡¯d gone, I¡¯d already disappeared again.


    I was still too far out to use any sort of conjurations without having to worry about them being dispelled, but that was a risk I was willing to take. The mages left alive were still reeling from the failure of their wards. While it was a safe bet that just because they could dispel any spells I threw at them didn¡¯t mean they actually would.


    Force bolts spiraled through the air, striking unerringly and throwing bodies off the platform. I closed in, spinning a large loop to keep ahead of Seven, whose shield ward was still intact despite everything. The difference between Seven¡¯s gear and the average army mage¡¯s was night and day.


    ¡°Damn it!¡± Seven bellowed, finally releasing the beam of fiery destruction and spinning to face me as I approached. Mana welled up in him and burst out into four smaller beams that curved around to meet with me as their focal point.


    Unlike the big one he¡¯d been trying to cook me with, these ones were pure mana, designed to punch through shield wards, and not even close to up to the task. Maybe if I¡¯d been using the kind of shield wards that appeared to be standard issue in Ammun¡¯s army, I¡¯d have been in trouble. Instead, I brushed the spell off like it wasn¡¯t even there. I probably could have done it even without my shadow enhancing my magic.


    There were six feet and two shield wards separating us. A look of absolute rage twisted Seven¡¯s features as he glared at me, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure why. We were enemies, sure, but we¡¯d barely ever had any personal interactions.Stolen story; please report.


    Oh. Right. I¡¯d killed a few thousand soldiers. He probably had some friends in that group. That would do it.


    ¡°Just die already, you monster,¡± he screamed at me as he conjured up some sort of steel ball. It shot across the platform, grew spines and dug into my shield ward, trying to break it down. I shattered it with a pane of force and sent three blades at Seven. The feedback let me know that, despite everything, his defenses were still holding strong.


    This was not going to be quick, not unless I stumbled across some flaw in his shield ward, and unfortunately for me, I still had the rest of the army stationed here to deal with. I¡¯d gotten ahead of them momentarily, but now that I¡¯d stalled out, they¡¯d quickly catch up. I needed to end this fight before circumstances forced a draw.


    There was always the easy way. I could just dump tons of mana on Seven¡¯s head until the shield ward just couldn¡¯t take it anymore. If I was fast enough, I might even get away with not chaining master-tier spells so that I could recover all the mana I used. As much as it pained me to once again use the hammer, I didn¡¯t know what the right tool for this job was and I didn¡¯t have time to experiment.


    I dumped lightning on Seven¡¯s head. I flash froze the air around him. I bombarded him with force bolts, lances, and crushing waves. I cycled through various powerful conjurations, enough to break a small army, and when that still wasn¡¯t enough, I started attacking him with divinations and hexes as well. I didn¡¯t need any one thing to stick. I just needed to find the last straw that would prove too much weight.


    Seven wasn¡¯t stupid. He understood exactly what was happening. I was turning our fight into a contest of who had more mana available, and the fact that I might run myself dry killing him, only to be killed in turn by his allies, probably wasn¡¯t any sort of comfort to him. The way he won this was to stall, to turtle up and reinforce his shield ward long enough for his allies to arrive.


    I didn¡¯t think he realized that, not fully. Conventional wisdom was that attacking forced an opponent to split their attention so that they couldn¡¯t hit back quite as hard. And, for the most part, I agreed with that. However, lossless casting allowed me to win any sort of contest over who had the most mana by default, which meant I didn¡¯t need to budget or be clever.


    When Seven tried to distract me with his own spells, I let my shield ward take the hit and kept my focus on hammering him down. He quickly gave up on trading spells with me and shifted focus to blocking as many conjurations as possible while pumping mana into the shield ward. It was a losing proposition for him, but if he was lucky, he¡¯d last just long enough for someone to save him.


    At least, that was what I assumed he was thinking right up until he decided to be a bit more proactive about the whole thing and threw himself off the platform. Lightning chased him down, striking him no less than six times and sending skittering lines of electricity across his shield ward. Then his flight magic caught hold of his weight and whisked him toward his allies.


    I ripped up chunks of stone to pelt him with, the smallest the size of my head and the bigger ones more than three feet across. It wouldn¡¯t stop him, nor did dealing with repeated kinetic impacts make it harder to fly since his shield ward apparently wasn¡¯t sophisticated enough to push him aside to lessen the mana load. Instead, he just took and stopped each attack, probably spending triple the mana and making this easily the most viable way to break through.


    The thirty seconds or so I¡¯d estimated I had left to finish him was shrinking rapidly, down to five or six before he made contact with the rest of the army, so it was time to do something a bit more drastic. While Seven was fleeing, I started setting up a master-tier spell. There was no chance anyone would interfere from this distance, but even so, I put it together as quickly as possible. It still took a good fifteen seconds, allowing Seven to rejoin the ranks of his supporters. He spun in the air to flash me a condescending smirk, but the expression slipped off his face when he realized what I was casting.


    Rather than explain to the rest of the mages, he turned and fled at maximum speed. No mana was spared on defense, not when he knew how pointless it would be. He managed to get a quarter mile or so away before I finished the spell I¡¯d been building while he flew.


    Then a beam of fiery destruction split the sky, instantly vaporizing anyone caught in its wake. I swung it across the approaching army, killing a hundred people in a second but not catching Seven. Unlike the erstwhile heir to now-defunct House Adelyn, I was more than capable of casting other spells while I channeled Seven¡¯s signature fire beam. I didn¡¯t need my eyes to tell me exactly where he was, and it was easy to tweak the spell¡¯s parameters to extend the beam¡¯s range.


    Now it was his turn to dart and weave through the air, desperately trying to keep ahead of me. I even let him think he could for a few seconds while I set up the next part of my trap. Perhaps he thought to just flee beyond the spell since I wasn¡¯t chasing after him. Or perhaps he was too panicked to think of anything beyond staying alive for another moment.


    Either way, he wasn¡¯t prepared for my modification, when the fire beam split from one twenty-foot-wide bar of destruction into ten two-foot-wide tendrils. They lashed out like living things, corralling Seven between them and quickly caging him in on all sides. Then, without pausing, they collapsed back together, catching him in their deadly embrace. His shield ward vanished like smoke on the wind, and Seven was reduced to a cloud of ash lightly drifting toward the ground.


    I turned the beam on the rest of the army. There was no point in wasting it when I already had the spell up and running. It cost more mana than I strictly needed to spend, but it got the job done. Survivors fled in all directions, more than I could possibly hunt down. I let them flee. My work busting armies was just about done for the day, anyway. If any of them dared to regroup, I¡¯d do a second pass and show them the error of their ways.


    For now, I was ready to head back home.

 Book 5, Chapter 20

    ¡°Querit,¡± I said, ¡°Did we have visitors while I was away?¡±


    I stood in the middle of the valley on my teleportation platform and frowned as I felt out the foreign node of mana embedded in my wards. My assistant was in the lab, peering over my shoulder through the scrying mirror I¡¯d pulled out of my phantom space.


    ¡°None that the wards detected,¡± he said. ¡°I suppose I could have missed somebody coming in who was already keyed in. But I¡¯m having trouble coming up with anyone who fit the criteria and could do something like this.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s because there isn¡¯t anyone like that,¡± I muttered. My immediate family could pass through unhindered. Querit himself could. And that was the end of that list. ¡°Someone could have stood outside the wards and done this, though.¡±


    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t the divination components have detected them?¡±


    ¡°Unless they were really good, yes.¡±


    The golem considered that for a second, then said, ¡°Do you think one of Ammun¡¯s mages came here to spy on us?¡±


    ¡°No. This isn¡¯t anything like that. This is¡­ as far as I can tell, something I never expected to see again. It doesn¡¯t look quite right, but it¡¯s close enough that I feel comfortable calling this an archmage¡¯s knock.¡±


    ¡°I have no idea what that is,¡± Querit told me.


    ¡°It¡¯s exactly what it sounds like ¨C a way for archmages to announce their presence to each other without triggering a bunch of killing wards by trying to breach each other¡¯s demesnes.¡±


    I just had no idea who¡¯d put it there. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only archmage on the planet until Ammun figured out a way to return, and I was starting to doubt his credentials anyway. Of course, there were still a lot of unexplored continents left. It was possible whole magical civilizations existed there, and we just hadn¡¯t discovered them. Our recently adapted long-range scrying spells could let me see anywhere on the planet now, but I hadn¡¯t really had the time to do it yet.


    That sounded like yet another job to pass off to the gestalt, and one I probably should have asked them to do as soon as I¡¯d completed those scrying polyhedrons. But no, I¡¯d had legitimate concerns about keeping an eye on what Ammun was doing. He was an active threat, and I had limited resources and manpower. This¡­ whatever this was, was something new.


    ¡°Do you know any other archmages?¡± Querit asked. ¡°I was under the impression that magical culture had completely died out.¡±


    ¡°Me too. I guess maybe we were wrong about that. I wonder where they¡¯re from, and what they want.¡±


    I scried backward through time while I casually picked at the knot of mana. A middle-aged-looking man left the knock for me from about three miles away, outside the range of my wards¡¯ detection capabilities, but not outside my own scrying abilities. I doubted that was a coincidence.


    I studied him while he wove together the spell and embedded it in my demesne. He was tall, an inch or two over six feet, with a thick head of hair gone to gray the beginnings of crow¡¯s feet at the corners of his eyes. A close-cut beard lined his jaw, brown with more streaks of gray in it. I wasn¡¯t willing to take that at face value, not when it was so easy to appear significantly younger than he actually was. He looked middle-aged because he chose to, not because he was actually in his forties or fifties.


    Of more interest were his clothes. He was dressed in brown robes, simple and unadorned. Generally speaking, people with the level of power this man was displaying could afford to buy whatever clothes they wanted, so if he was wearing that, it was because he wanted to. It was a statement of some kind.


    The robe vaguely reminded me of some monastic orders that had existed back in my old life, ones who mixed magic and spirituality together in a way I¡¯d never quite found myself understanding the purpose of. It worked for them, though, and if their descendants were still around, maybe they¡¯d done something right, after all.


    Or it could just be a coincidence. Those kinds of people hardly had some sort of exclusive right to wearing plain brown robes even back in my last life. There was no telling how much things had drifted over a few thousand years.


    I finished unraveling the knock while I studied the mage who¡¯d left it. The pattern was a little different than I remembered, but once again, I was willing to blame that on millennia of culture drift. The important part was that the core of the knot contained a message, just like I¡¯d expected it to.


    ¡®Greetings, Keiran of the Night Vale. The Global Order of the Arcane would like to extend an invitation to meet with us regarding the recent events occurring in the Selivar Region, known locally as the kingdom of Ralvost. It has come to our attention that the lich lord known as Ammun Nescent has returned. You have been called upon to submit any and all information on this situation so that we can form an appropriate response. Please see the attached instructions for contacting us with a reply.If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    ¡®Respectfully, Bakir Odrinac, Archmage of the Fifth Order¡¯


    It was a sort of mental image of the man I¡¯d scried out speaking to me, along with the mana signature of a scrying beacon and general location of it to find him. The message itself faded away after I¡¯d listened to it once, apparently not sophisticated enough to be repeatable.


    ¡°Well, I have some questions,¡± I said. ¡°Have you heard of any of this stuff?¡±


    I gave Querit the pertinent names, none of which he recognized. ¡°If such an organization existed back in my time, it was not general knowledge. I would hazard a guess that it¡¯s possible they formed post-cataclysm as a direct response to Ammun destroying a moon and shattering the world core.¡±


    That was a fair guess. Something like that was certainly a good reason for the archmages of the time to put aside their differences and focus on mitigating the damage. But that just raised the question of what exactly had attracted their attention to this part of Manoch now. Ammun had been awake for years already.


    ¡°Is there any way we can find out more about these people before I agree to meet with them?¡± I asked. ¡°Any books your creator left behind that might talk about them?¡±


    I wasn¡¯t eager to step into a cabal of archmages, all of whom had an unknown amount of strength. I was close to my former strength in terms of raw power and skill, but decidedly lacking in all the tools and workshops I¡¯d built up over a thousand years. My ability to prepare for a battle was a mere shadow of what it used to be, so much so that I wasn¡¯t confident I could learn anything at all about these new archmages.


    Perhaps a meeting with this Bakir Odrinac was the best move. I could invite him into my demesne, where I¡¯d be at the height of my power, and assess him before I agreed to talk to anyone else. If it seemed too risky, I¡¯d just send him on his way. I¡¯d tell him what his cabal wanted to know if there was some advantage to it, otherwise it¡¯d just be one more potential problem to deal with.


    I had plenty of things I needed to keep secret in my demesne, however. I would need to take steps to mitigate Bakir¡¯s ability to snoop if I didn¡¯t want him discovering my mana resonance point or moon core fragment. The labs were all individually warded, so the contents of those were safe. The petrified forest itself was impossible to hide. Anyone with eyes could simply look into the valley from miles away and see the trees.


    A private room, warded against scrying and that my unexpected guest could be teleported directly into would be best. He might already know about Querit, but if not, this was a good way to hide the golem¡¯s presence. It would also block him from detecting other mana sources inside my demesne. I just needed to set it up first.


    * * *


    The chamber was buried in the side of the mountain that made up the north slope of the valley. It was freshly formed, shaped entirely of magic and stocked with a few comfortable chairs and tables I¡¯d picked up and put into storage for the next time I needed them. I spent the most effort on the wards, designed to completely isolate it from any and all outside influences. A scrying mirror provided the only access to the rest of the world, and without enchantments constantly recycling the air, anyone trapped in here would soon pass out and die.


    One half of the room was filled with furniture and other comforts. The other half was a ritual summoning circle designed to bring my guest directly to me, assuming he was cooperative. I¡¯d given strong consideration to lacing the room with traps just in case negotiations broke down, but I¡¯d decided against it.


    It was possible these people could become important allies. I did still have a world core to save, after all, and any help I could get would make things easier. A cabal of archmages would be highly motivated to assist with that goal, so I was hopeful that this meeting would end with us on good terms. Summoning their representative into a deathtrap probably wasn¡¯t the best way to facilitate that goal.


    Once I¡¯d finished the prep work and relayed instructions to Querit on keeping himself out of sight just in case things went poorly, I reached out through the mirror and found the scrying beacon Bakir¡¯s message had directed me to. I found it immediately, and as soon as I did, the archmage himself noted the connection.


    ¡®Ah. Archmage Keiran, I presume?¡¯ he mentally projected.


    ¡®The same,¡¯ I sent back. ¡®I received your message that you wished to speak.¡¯


    I hadn¡¯t been expecting to have a telepathic conversation, but that was also fine. The meeting room could sit here collecting dust until I needed it for something else, and this was probably safer for both of us, anyway.


    ¡®Very much so,¡¯ Balkir sent. ¡®It seems you¡¯ve been quite busy since your reincarnation. We didn¡¯t even realize you¡¯d returned until Ammun started up again, to be truthful. I¡¯m afraid we all rather thought that project of yours was something of a fool¡¯s errand, but, well, here you are. I guess you showed us! Ha!¡¯


    ¡®I hadn¡¯t realized my works were so well known,¡¯ I thought sourly. ¡®I suppose everything came out after my death when my vaults and workshops were raided.¡¯


    ¡®More or less, yes. Not all of it, but I¡¯m told there were plenty of people interested in knowing what your final fate was after two hundred years with no word from you.¡¯


    It wasn¡¯t a new concept for me. I¡¯d discovered the remains of the Night Vale where Ammun¡¯s tower now stood¡ªa fact I still hadn¡¯t forgiven him for¡ªand knew that the home had been pillaged. I even had an old mysteel vault door I¡¯d salvaged and had been using for scraps to run my biometal experiments sitting in my phantom space. It still rankled every time I thought of the delicate instruments being destroyed and my life¡¯s work being carted off.


    ¡®There were some unexpected complications to my reincarnation,¡¯ I said. ¡®And the world appears to have fallen apart while I was gone.¡¯


    ¡®True. I suppose you¡¯ve invested some considerable effort into catching up on everything that happened between your death and rebirth?¡¯


    ¡®As much as I could,¡¯ I sent. ¡®I¡¯ve obviously missed a few things, as I¡¯ve never heard of the Global Order of the Arcane.¡¯


    ¡®Ah!¡¯ Balkir sounded excited now. ¡®A proper introduction is in order then. Might I trouble you for an invitation into your demesne?¡¯


    Apparently, we were going to be doing this face-to-face after all. ¡®I have a summoning circle set up to bring you in,¡¯ I told my fellow archmage.


    ¡®Perfect. Give me just a moment and I¡¯ll be ready.¡¯

 Book 5, Chapter 21

    Bakir¡¯s eyes glittered with amusement as he surveyed the meeting room I¡¯d constructed, but he kept any comments about my security to himself. I guided him to his seat and claimed the one opposite of him, then settled back and let him start the conversation.


    ¡°I confess to some curiosity,¡± he said. ¡°Not to pry into the intimate details of your life, but you may be the only person to ever navigate the cycle of reincarnation and come out with your memories intact. Having experienced the process, would you say this is the true key to immortality?¡±


    I snorted out a laugh. ¡°No. Not at all. Maybe it could be with some more refinement, but¡­ no, just the fact that it took thousands of years for me to come back means something went wrong. Without being able to fix that, it¡¯s a flawed process at best.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ll continue to research it?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Someday, when I have the time. I¡¯ve got a lot of other problems competing for my attention right now.¡±


    ¡°Yes, that.¡± Bakir frowned. ¡°The lich lord is not someone we were expecting to show back up. Then again, I suppose the same is true for you. You¡¯re specters from the past, all but forgotten by civilization.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m perfectly fine with that,¡± I told him dryly.


    ¡°You¡¯ve certainly gone out of your way to draw attention to yourself, though.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m just trying to fix this broken world. If Ammun hadn¡¯t interfered, I¡¯d be halfway there already.¡±


    That wasn¡¯t strictly true, but I¡¯d certainly be farther along if I wasn¡¯t constantly getting sidetracked dealing with him. In his defense, fixing the world involved breaking his demesne. Prior to his little jaunt to a moon, that would have been a death sentence for him. Without an abundant source of mana to power his artificial body, he would be nothing but a tortured soul trapped in a rock. Eventually, even that magic would fade and break.


    Bakir leaned forward. ¡°It¡¯s true, then? The world really used to have so much mana that it just filled the air?¡±


    ¡°Not everywhere, and with varying degrees of density, but yes.¡± I frowned at the other archmage. How did he not know this? Now that I looked at him, really looked, I found myself a little bit suspicious.


    If this was an established group, and he was an archmage of the Fifth Order, whatever that meant, why were his robes plain, unenchanted material? Why couldn¡¯t I sense his connection to a phantom space? Where was his staff or wand? Where was the magic?


    ¡°Tell me about this Global Order of the Arcane,¡± I said. ¡°I don¡¯t believe any such organization existed back in my time.¡±


    ¡°That is correct,¡± he told me. ¡°We were founded about three hundred years before the world broke, though none of our founding members remain among the living. At least, not unless any of them managed to follow the path you set forth and simply chose not to reveal themselves.¡±


    Ah, all the old-timers had died off. I was willing to bet they¡¯d lost a lot of knowledge thanks to Ammun¡¯s bungling. That called into question exactly whether their members were even archmages at all. There was no telling what that title had come to mean over the last millennium. I certainly hadn¡¯t met anyone recently worthy of being called an archmage besides my former apprentice.


    ¡°Is there anyone left who predates the moon falling out of the sky?¡± I asked.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure none of the leaders of the Order would appreciate me revealing such information about them,¡± Bakir replied smoothly. ¡°Suffice it to say that we truly are a global organization and that no one has a stronger magical culture than us.¡±


    ¡°If that¡¯s the case, why haven¡¯t you fixed everything?¡±


    ¡°Some things can¡¯t be fixed,¡± he said with a frown. ¡°Why, are you saying that you can?¡±


    ¡°Of course I can. Either your leaders aren¡¯t nearly as strong as they want to pretend to be, or they¡¯ve deliberately left the world in the state it is.¡±


    Bakir sunk back into his chair and studied me. With a helpless sigh, he shook his head. ¡°I can¡¯t tell if you¡¯re delusional or if you truly can reverse even something as catastrophic as a destroyed moon raining down on the world and breaking mana.¡±


    ¡°Technically, that¡¯s not what caused the breakage,¡± I said. ¡°It¡¯s more like the outcome.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s¡­¡± Bakir trailed off. After a moment¡¯s consideration, he said, ¡°Could you describe to me exactly what you believe the cause of the mana density shift a thousand years ago was?¡±


    ¡°Your global archmage fraternity doesn¡¯t know?¡± I asked. ¡°What the hell have you all been doing all these years?¡±


    ¡°Please? Just¡­ please.¡±


    This hadn¡¯t been a long conversation, but already Bakir had transitioned from a smooth, confident member of the aristocracy into someone who looked slightly harangued, like a man who¡¯d been called on to defend his beliefs, only to find himself losing ground with every verbal exchange.This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Maybe this group wasn¡¯t going to be a threat, but it was also starting to look like they wouldn¡¯t be much help, either. Then again, that wasn¡¯t really fair. Querit wasn¡¯t an archmage either, but his contributions to my work were immeasurable. A whole cabal of mages that were at least at the master level could be useful, once I disabused them of any notion that they were real archmages.


    It would probably be better to hold off on that until I actually met them, though. Bakir wasn¡¯t necessarily the gold standard to represent his entire organization. There was no point in making plans based on a bunch of unfounded assumptions. For now, it would be better to assume that the Global Order of the Arcane was full of potentially hostile archmages who could make my life far more difficult than it already was.


    ¡°Keeping in mind that I wasn¡¯t there to witness the actual event, this is what I¡¯ve pieced together from historical research and my own personal examination of Ammun¡¯s tower. Roughly a thousand years ago¡­¡±


    I outlined what I¡¯d learned, about the faction that had figured out super-long-distance teleportation and taken over an entire moon, about Ammun¡¯s demesne project, an enormous tower that sunk its roots all the way to the world core. I described how the tower had pierced the mysteel shell surrounding the core, and that when Ammun had used it to send a blast of pure mana through the empty space between Manoch and the orange moon known as Amodir, he¡¯d killed off almost all of the living stone that made up the world core.


    ¡°And with the mysteel shell ruptured, it¡¯s never been able to heal itself,¡± I finished. ¡°We need to patch the shell and inject a massive quantity of mana into the world core to act as a catalyst so that things can start moving again.¡±


    ¡°And Amodir¡¯s destruction, followed by the subsequent devastation of fully half the planet as it rained down from the sky, had nothing to do with Manoch¡¯s mana density vanishing? That¡¯s what you believe?¡± Bakir asked.


    ¡°That¡¯s what happened. If Ammun had missed and fired that blast off into the endless void, it wouldn¡¯t have changed the planet¡¯s fate. That he didn¡¯t miss just meant he managed to destroy the people who could very well have been our one chance to reverse the damage before it cascaded out of control.¡±


    I gave Bakir some time while he processed that. It was hard to say whether he actually believed me, but either way, I¡¯d certainly fed him an alternate theory than whatever it was he¡¯d been told before. I supposed I could see how the generations of mages born after the moon fell from the sky could attribute that level of destruction to a global catastrophe that had fundamentally altered the very fabric of magic, but they were grossly underestimating the planet¡¯s durability.


    No, it had taken a deliberate act of worming his way all the way down to the core itself, one foot of stone at a time cut through over decades, for Ammun to put himself in that position. I didn¡¯t think what he¡¯d done was actually common knowledge at the time, though at least some people had figured it out and recorded it in historical records.


    The real question was whether it was merely Bakir who was ignorant of the truth, or if it was his whole cabal. Even that was largely irrelevant next to the much bigger issue of how powerful they were and what they wanted. Now that I thought about it, I¡¯d spent far too much of this meeting humoring Bakir and not nearly enough obtaining information.


    ¡°What else can you tell me about the Global Order of the Arcane?¡± I asked.


    Bakir shook himself out of his thoughts and appeared to collect himself. ¡°The Order? Yes. As the name implies, we¡¯re situated all over Manoch. Our primary tenet is the accumulation and preservation of magical knowledge. I¡¯m sure you¡¯ve seen for yourself just how much has been lost. Some places are worse than others, of course. This whole continent was shattered, and I¡¯m afraid the Order never had much success in gaining a foothold within the Sanctum of Light.¡±


    ¡°And since they were the only place that had any real magical tradition here, you basically gave up on this part of the planet to focus your efforts elsewhere,¡± I finished for him.


    ¡°Precisely so,¡± he said. ¡°Archmages don¡¯t grow on trees, and we need to focus our efforts where they can bring about the most benefits. It wasn¡¯t until you and Ammun stirred things up around here that we noticed anything amiss. To be frank with you, we¡¯re still not entirely sure what happened.¡±


    He paused, apparently lost in thought, and let out a rich laugh. ¡°The look on their faces when your name came up though¡­ That¡¯s a memory I¡¯ll cherish. I wonder if you realize how much you¡¯ve strode right out of legend.¡±


    ¡°I am aware,¡± I said. ¡°Thousands of years have passed. The world basically ended. And there are still people eking out a living on its surface who remember my name. Some of them probably curse it. It wouldn¡¯t be entirely unreasonable to blame me for the state of affairs once you consider that Ammun was only able to do what he did by pilfering my libraries and modifying my research.¡±


    ¡°That hardly seems fair to me,¡± Bakir said. ¡°I wouldn¡¯t concern myself overly much with those who hold that opinion, especially when it seems you¡¯re hard at work trying to remedy the issue. But I¡¯ve gotten distracted. You wanted to know more about the Order itself.


    ¡°As I said, we lack the manpower to be everywhere at once, but we do invest a great deal of effort into preserving the art of magic in any way we can. Our vaults are full of books on the subject. We take apprentices and teach them. We¡¯re a well-known and respected organization based on the other side of Manoch, over in Jeshaem.¡±


    Manoch had four continents. What we were on currently was the shattered remains of Olaphun. Jeshaem was the farthest away, and also the largest of the four. It made sense that they were in the best shape, considering Amodir had crashed down on this side of the world. They¡¯d only had to deal with the loss of mana and cleaning up the dust and dirt kicked up into the air from the moon fall. The people here had also faced a devastating death toll and the destruction of their cities, their farms, and their roads. The continent itself had ruptured.


    ¡°And what does your cabal want with me, other than to hear stories about what I¡¯ve been up to here?¡± I asked softly.


    ¡°Don¡¯t misunderstand,¡± Bakir said. ¡°I wasn¡¯t sent here to demand your services or that you join the Order. I¡¯m sure it would make a few people very happy to have an archmage of your caliber working with us, but we just need to know what¡¯s going on with Ammun. He¡¯s a global threat and we take his movements very seriously.¡±


    ¡°So seriously that he¡¯s been active for going on three years now and you¡¯re just now showing up?¡±


    ¡°Yes, well¡­ as I said¡­¡±


    ¡°Understaffed, right.¡± I waved away his excuse. ¡°Very well. Let me catch you up on how I trapped the old lich on a moon.¡±


    He blinked. ¡°I¡¯m sorry, you did what?¡±


    I grinned and began my story.

 Book 5, Chapter 22

    The more time I spent talking to Bakir, the more I became certain that he was only at stage five or six. That didn¡¯t automatically disqualify him from the title of archmage, as it was more of an indicator of skill and knowledge than of raw power, but it did make me question the strength of his organization as a whole.


    It made sense, once I thought about it. One of the problems I¡¯d had to overcome to climb beyond stage six was that with mana no longer being freely available in the environment, there probably wasn¡¯t a single natural resonance point on the planet. Even back in my previous life, they¡¯d been extremely rare natural phenomena.


    I¡¯d had to forge an artificial one, something I¡¯d only been able to accomplish so quickly because of Querit¡¯s expertise and assistance. There was no telling how many years of experiments it would have taken to work out the process on my own. It was possible the Global Order of the Arcane knew how to make a resonance point, or that they¡¯d somehow shielded one from unraveling a thousand years ago and had kept it intact all this time.


    It was also possible that no one in their ranks had advanced past stage six, which meant they were completely locked out of the upper echelon of master-tier spells, the ones that couldn¡¯t be cast using regular mana. If that was the case, it also meant the Order was absolutely not a threat to me, and even better, that I had something they desperately needed, even if they didn¡¯t know it.


    How best to go about using that to my advantage? What did I need that they could provide? More mysteel was welcome, of course. I had nowhere near enough of it. Raw mana couldn¡¯t hurt, but at best that would just save me time. It wouldn¡¯t solve my issues with advancing to stage nine on its own, no matter how much of it there was. That involved reforging my physical body into something like a solid mage¡¯s shadow, something that could exist inside the Astral Realm and even allow my consciousness to remain intact if my body were somehow destroyed.


    It was in fact the basis for my reincarnation magic, which had worked from a technical viewpoint, but hadn¡¯t really achieved everything I¡¯d been going for. Specifically, losing a few thousand years between my death and rebirth had been an unexpected twist that had completely ruined my original plans. I couldn¡¯t even begin to express how different the world would be right now if I¡¯d been able to regain access to the Night Vale and my full power within a decade of dying.


    By the time I was finished sharing what information I felt like giving to my fellow archmage, he¡¯d long since given up trying to interrupt me with clarifying questions and had sunk into a sort of stupefied horror. It was only after I went silent that he finally roused himself in his seat and said, ¡°Well, that is¡­ certainly a lot to take in. I suppose I shouldn¡¯t be surprised at Ammun¡¯s casual cruelty. All of our records indicated that he was a very selfish man. Given his personal power, it¡¯s a terrifying combination.¡±


    ¡°All powerful mages are selfish,¡± I said. ¡°It¡¯s how we get so powerful to begin with.¡±


    ¡°Not all of us!¡± Bakir protested.


    ¡°That just means you¡¯re not powerful enough yet,¡± I said with a dark chuckle. ¡°Trust me, at some point you¡¯ll have to decide between power or principles. If you haven¡¯t had to face that decision, well, you got lucky and someone else carried you along on their own path. You don¡¯t get the luxury of morals when you¡¯re fighting to survive.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s an incredibly bleak outlook.¡±


    ¡°Yes,¡± I agreed. ¡°It is.¡±


    Silence stretched out between us for what I was sure Bakir found to be an uncomfortably long moment while I studied his reaction. He quickly broke it by standing and saying, ¡°I think I have obtained everything I need to know, but might I be able to call upon you again if the Order has any further questions?¡±


    ¡°You are welcome to leave another knock in my wards,¡± I said. ¡°I can¡¯t promise when I¡¯ll be able to respond. I have quite a bit of work to get done and not a lot of time to do it in.¡±


    ¡°Erm, yes. Quite so. Regardless, you have my thanks for your hospitality and for allowing me to impose upon your schedule today.¡±


    The Bakir of right now was considerably different than the one who¡¯d greeted me. Gone was any semblance of warmth and congeniality. Instead, he looked harrowed and exhausted, no doubt a reaction to finding out that it was entirely possible the whole world would be threatened by a reawakened lich, now truly immortal with a nigh-infinite source of mana and an unassailable home for his phylactery.


    Seeing how poorly he was taking the news was yet further proof that he might be an archmage on paper, but he wasn¡¯t one in reality. I opened the way for him to leave and wondered who would come calling upon me from his organization next, and if they¡¯d be receptive to making a deal or two.


    * * *


    ¡°I went through everything we recovered from the archives,¡± Querit told me. ¡°I¡¯m confident the Global Order of the Arcane did not exist prior to the breaking of the world. If it did, they were either so small as to be unnoticed by anything but local powers, or so incredibly well-hidden that only the greatest of powers knew of their existence.¡±The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°And you don¡¯t think it was the last one,¡± I said. That more or less lined up with what Bakir himself had told me of their history.


    ¡°I do not,¡± the golem said. He was reshelving a pile of books almost as tall as I was, rapidly slipping them back into their assigned spaces using some logical scheme I wasn¡¯t privy to.


    ¡°Which means that it¡¯s entirely likely that none or very few of them were alive prior to the world core dying. So none of them have access to a mana resonance point.¡±


    ¡°Ah, I see,¡± Querit said, pausing in his work. ¡°You¡¯re speculating that at best, their strongest are only stage six.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s only a theory. It¡¯s possible they made their own resonance point just like we did. The knowledge obviously existed back then.¡±


    ¡°It did, but it wasn¡¯t common. My creator was a researcher with a powerful backer. The things we worked on weren¡¯t by any means something a regular mage or even an archmage would have access to.¡±


    ¡°Which just means it¡¯s even more likely than I thought that the very best of them is still no higher than stage six, and that they most likely won¡¯t be leaving their genius loci behind to travel to another continent. Bakir¡¯s going to have a long, expensive journey home, and whoever comes next will have an equally long journey back. I¡¯d say we¡¯ve got a week or two before we can expect a visitor.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re sure they¡¯ll send someone else? Why not just negotiate through Bakir if that was what they wanted?¡±


    ¡°Bakir¡¯s a field investigator. His job is to gather information and report it back for other people to make decisions. Either they¡¯ll think what¡¯s going on here is important enough to send someone with real power, or they won¡¯t. Considering what¡¯s at stake if we fail to stop Ammun, I can¡¯t imagine they¡¯ll be content to ignore it.¡±


    ¡°And in the meantime, we¡¯ll continue with our own preparations?¡± Querit asked. At my nod, he continued, ¡°Would you like to do anything in particular to get ready for the arrival of what could possibly be a few dozen archmages?¡±


    ¡°If they¡¯re all as weak as their representative, I¡¯m not concerned. If more than one or two are as strong as Ammun or me, there¡¯s nothing we can do that would stop them from getting in.¡±


    That didn¡¯t mean I didn¡¯t have plans for it. If anything, Ammun¡¯s appearance in the sky over my demesne just long enough to drop one spell on me last year had proven I was a fool to assume he couldn¡¯t get to me. The amount of mana it had cost him was prohibitive and he¡¯d barely stayed for a few seconds before disappearing again, but that move had taken me by surprise and allowed a few dozen of his minions inside my defenses.


    Of course, it wouldn¡¯t have happened that way if he hadn¡¯t picked the moment I was at my absolute weakest to strike, but that excuse felt a little thin when I considered how much potential damage those invaders could have done. I¡¯d made it a priority to shore up those potential weaknesses in the future, which meant I¡¯d already proofed the valley against hostile archmages as well as I possibly could with my current limitations.


    ¡°How did the new biometal experiments work out?¡± I asked, changing the subject.


    ¡°I think we¡¯re heading in the right direction now, but I¡¯m worried about how replicable it will be,¡± Querit said. ¡°No one but you can process the mysteel for the elixirs.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s fine. I don¡¯t need a technique that can be used by any random mage. I just need a quick way to grow mysteel in large quantities. Once we reach the threshold, I don¡¯t care if the recipe never gets used again.¡±


    ¡°In that case, give me about five hundred gallons more of that elixir, and I¡¯m confident that we can grow that much weight back in biometal. I want to test it for possible adverse reactions over the next few months, but assuming the sample survives, you¡¯ll need to head back out and capture a few more of them to ramp things up.¡±


    Maybe that was a job I could pawn off on the supposed archmages I was sure were going to be showing up. It should be within their abilities to complete without getting themselves killed, even if none of them were any stronger than Bakir. I¡¯d keep that on hand as a bargaining chip to use when I revealed that I had control of a resonance point.


    Querit finished up his work and turned to face me fully. ¡°I have a question,¡± he said.


    ¡°What¡¯s that?¡±


    ¡°Do you think our priorities are right? We¡¯re devoting an awful lot of effort to the long-term problem of fixing the world. Maybe we should be preparing for Ammun¡¯s inevitable return instead.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re doing both.¡±


    ¡°We are, but it¡¯s clear where the majority of our time is going.¡±


    ¡°I get what you¡¯re saying, but you have to understand that I did a lot of my preparations for fighting Ammun back before we ever met. I was hoping to use them on him when I chased him up to Yulitar, but the environment there was so difficult to function in that I didn¡¯t get the chance.¡±


    ¡°That was before we learned about his plans to tie himself to a moon core,¡± Querit said. ¡°Surely things are different now.¡±


    ¡°More difficult, maybe, but my plan hasn¡¯t really changed that much. And I¡¯ve gotten stronger, too.¡±


    Our first real fight had occurred when I was at stage five. I¡¯d beaten him, but only because he¡¯d been freshly awakened and near starved for mana. The second battle had gone to him. I¡¯d barely survived the golem he¡¯d brought with him, one that wasn¡¯t even specialized for combat, thanks to the difficulty of fighting in an environment with low gravity and no breathable atmosphere.


    Now, my core had reached stage eight and our next encounter would take place on Manoch. Ammun would have unlimited mana to fight with, but that didn¡¯t guarantee victory. It simply became one more obstacle for me to overcome.


    ¡°Maybe you should be focusing your efforts on reaching stage nine,¡± Querit said.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know if there¡¯s enough time for that, but I¡¯m going to try,¡± I said, only partially a lie. ¡°If this organization has the resources I hope they do, gaining access to them will be part of the price I extract from them. That will hopefully be enough to push me to where I need to be.¡±


    ¡°And if they don¡¯t?¡±


    I shook my head. ¡°Then we¡¯ll figure something else out.¡±


    Querit was a bit of a worrier, but in this case, he wasn¡¯t wrong to be concerned. I knew how I planned to defeat Ammun. I just wasn¡¯t sure if I could pull it off. Even if I did manage to ascend to stage nine and reclaim all my former strength, that still might not be enough.


    Or maybe I was overthinking things, and I could easily crush him as I was right now. Time would tell.

 Book 5, Chapter 23

    While Querit oversaw the experiments I¡¯d outlined, I returned to the jungles around Galdrisa just to do a bit of quick scrying and mark down the locations of any other vine-encrusted plant monsters nearby. I wasn¡¯t interested in harvesting them right now, but I did want to make sure there were more left just in case my assistant accidentally killed the one I¡¯d already collected. There were none quite that big, but it did turn out that they weren¡¯t terribly uncommon for the area.


    I sent my shadow out to harvest troll blood while I scried the area, not because we were running low, but just to be efficient. We¡¯d need more eventually, one way or another, and without Senica here slowing down the process by learning, I was able to collect a few thousand gallons worth and process it over the span of an hour or two.


    Satisfied with my reconnaissance, I switched focus to the next problem. I still had multiple people demanding my time and attention, but they were all trying to get me to address their issues, and I had enough of my own to deal with already. Whatever Shel wanted was so far away from being important that I didn¡¯t care if I never spoke to her again. Grandfather, however, was a different matter. Eyrie Peak was an important resource, both as a home for my portal network and because the gestalt was living there, and they served as my many eyes across the continent and beyond.


    Now that I thought about it, I still needed to check in and see how my rampage across Ralvost had gone. I was hopeful that I¡¯d killed at least two-thirds of Ammun¡¯s standing forces, but I expected the actual number to be somewhat lower. Not only had I failed to target all of the major encampments, but my run against the last one where I¡¯d been sidetracked by Seven had been the farthest thing from thorough.


    On the bright side, that was one less of Ammun¡¯s elites I needed to worry about, and that one had been causing a lot of problems over the last few years. It was too bad he¡¯d ended up in the lich¡¯s pocket. With a bit of tutelage, he could have been a fine archmage. Though, his priorities left much to be desired. Still, he¡¯d been young, and that could have been fixed.


    Once I was finished securing my harvest, I placed a teleportation platform in a small room in the temple of Galdrisa, sealed it up with stone shaping, and used it to cross as much distance as I could in a single jump. I had to cast the spell manually a second time to reach Eyrie Peak, but that only took a few minutes.


    ¡°Is Grandfather here?¡± I asked one of the platform guards.


    Mana shaped itself in the brakvaw¡¯s throat as it cast the spell that allowed it to speak Enotian. ¡°Not here,¡± it said, with what I had to assume was supposed to be a scowl. It was always hard to tell. Beaks did not lend themselves well to expressing emotion. ¡°Gone for many days now.¡±


    ¡°Still?¡± I muttered. ¡°What is that old bird up to?¡±


    I wasn¡¯t really asking, but the guard answered me nonetheless. ¡°Pilgrimage to Third Peak.¡±


    ¡°Third what now?¡±


    It was such a generic name that I could think of dozens of different mountains that might qualify, but none of them were holy sites as far as I knew. Then again, it wasn¡¯t like I knew all that much about brakvaw cultural history, and the world was a big place.


    ¡°Homeland,¡± the brakvaw said.


    ¡°Ah. I didn¡¯t realize¡­¡± I trailed off and shook my head. It wasn¡¯t important and I had enough other problems to deal with. The only relevant part was when Grandfather would be back, and whether or not he actually needed my help. ¡°Do you know how long he¡¯ll be gone for?¡±


    ¡°No. Takes however long it takes.¡±


    This conversation served to remind me that brakvaw as a species weren¡¯t overly concerned with punctuality. Grandfather was a notable exception, but I suspected that was more a consequence of him having dealt with humans in the past, while most of the younger generations had never seen people as anything but prey. In fact, now that I thought about it, I wasn¡¯t sure how old the second-oldest brakvaw was, but I was betting it was several hundred years less than Grandfather himself.


    ¡°Alright, well, if he does come back, please let him know I¡¯m still waiting to see what he needs. In the meantime, I need to speak with your other guest.¡±


    Yep, that was definitely a scowl. I hadn¡¯t known beaks could do that. The brakvaw, somewhat ungraciously, waved a wing to send me on my way. I flew off, watching with a divination to make sure it didn¡¯t try anything behind my back.


    The brakvaw were never going to do more than tolerate me, it seemed.


    * * *


    ¡®You ask much,¡¯ the gestalt spoke in my mind. ¡®What will you offer us in return?¡¯


    ¡°You were already going to be watching there anyway,¡± I objected. ¡°All I¡¯m asking is that you keep an eye out for some specific individuals.¡±Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    ¡®And how would we know these creatures? We have never seen them. You have never seen them. Humans do not walk around with signs on their necks announcing their status as archmages.¡¯


    ¡°I showed you what the one who sought me out looks like. If any other humans show up in his company, it¡¯s a safe bet that they¡¯re people of interest to me.¡±


    ¡®We agree with this logic, but nevertheless, there remains the matter of payment.¡¯


    ¡°Well, what do you want?¡±


    ¡®We want our own portal, one just for our use.¡¯


    That wasn¡¯t a difficult request, providing it exited somewhere I could reach, but there was a snag. ¡°You¡¯d have to power it yourself,¡± I said. ¡°The brakvaw aren¡¯t going to pour mana into a portal that doesn¡¯t benefit them.¡±


    ¡®Acceptable,¡¯ the gestalt sent.


    An image of a craggy mountainside came to me. I¡¯d never seen this particular one before, but I recognized it as belonging to the mountains that ringed the island we lived on. The gestalt confirmed that guess a moment later when it added a set of reference landmarks to help me lock in the position. It wasn¡¯t enough to teleport to on its own, but I was confident I could find it.


    ¡®The portal should go here. Additionally, we shall require more of your thousand-faceted scrying devices. The ones you¡¯ve given us are already at capacity watching the other locations you wish observed.¡¯


    That was a bit more time-consuming than I wanted this deal to be, but it was also kind of a fair request. Observing the entirety of our largest moon and a country several thousand miles away at the same time was no easy task. ¡°I can supply you with one more,¡± I offered.


    ¡®Four.¡¯


    ¡°That¡¯s way more than you should need for a job like this.¡±


    ¡®They are payment for our services.¡¯


    ¡°Two now, and one more after this crisis with Ammun is resolved.¡±


    The gestalt hesitated over that, which was telling when they had so many individual minds working together that they literally thought several times faster than us mere mortals. Eventually, they reached some sort of majority agreement in their collective consciousness and said, ¡®Agreed.¡¯


    I immediately pulled two of the spheres out of my phantom space and floated them over to the gestalt. ¡®You have anticipated our demands,¡¯ they remarked.


    ¡°That, or I figured you¡¯d need them sooner or later to fulfill my own requests,¡± I said. ¡°But I¡¯ve only got these two prepared for now, so the last one will have to wait.¡±


    ¡®We should have asked for more,¡¯ the gestalt lamented. ¡®But the bargain has been struck. We shall watch for these archmages you believe are coming and ensure that they do not collaborate with your enemy.¡¯


    ¡°Our enemy,¡± I corrected. ¡°If Ammun shows up and takes the army back over, it¡¯ll mean more assaults on the island. They won¡¯t spare you if you get in their way.¡±


    ¡®We do not fear these weak mages.¡¯


    ¡°Speaking of weak mages, have you finished counting up what¡¯s left?¡±


    ¡®Yes. You destroyed roughly one fifth of the gathered humans, and another fifth have deserted their ranks.¡¯


    That news soured my mood. Either I¡¯d vastly overestimated how much damage I¡¯d done, or I¡¯d underestimated their numbers. It was probably the former since I¡¯d been using the gestalt¡¯s head count. I wouldn¡¯t get another chance to surprise them like that again, not any time soon. I could continue to try to thin out the numbers, but it¡¯d be an uphill struggle now.


    ¡®The survivors have regrouped together and are retreating in the direction of the tower,¡¯ the gestalt added. ¡®We estimate it will take no longer than a week for them to arrive.¡¯


    ¡°Great,¡± I said. ¡°Just what I needed ¨C a time limit.¡±


    That meant I either needed to give up, infiltrate the tower and waste months on a campaign of assassinations and sabotage, or knock the entire tower down in the next few days. None of those options appealed to me. Was there a fourth option? Could I gather together enough allies to assist me that we could kill thousands of hostile mages out in the field while they marched toward safety?


    That seemed unlikely to work. Querit was undoubtedly the most powerful person on my team, after myself, of course. He was roughly equivalent in strength to a stage five or six mage, but his repertoire of spells was decidedly pointed toward research. Even with a proper combat frame, I doubted he¡¯d make a significant impact against an enemy that size, and he¡¯d run the very real risk of being destroyed.


    No, he was far more useful to me doing exactly what he was doing. Maybe I could put together some simple traps that dealt a lot of damage over a wide spread area and seed the road with them before the mages got there. Manufacturing them in such a tight timeframe would be difficult at the very least. Damn it. This was exactly the kind of thing having a few dozen archmages to call on would be helpful for.


    I might just have to take the loss on this one. I¡¯d taken my shot, done some damage, and escaped unscathed. If it wasn¡¯t as much as I wanted, well, that was the way it went. I¡¯d known there was a strong possibility the survivors would turtle. I¡¯d just been hoping there wouldn¡¯t be so many of them, and that there¡¯d be a significantly higher percentage of deserters.


    Still, there was no reason to make it too easy for the survivors to return to the tower. Even if I couldn¡¯t kill all of them, I could still slow them down and inflict some more casualties. My mind churned with ideas as to how best to accomplish that, most of which were wildly impractical for a variety of reasons.


    With enough mana to throw at the problem and a little more time, I could probably devastate the retreating force, but there was no point in making a plan using resources I didn¡¯t have. I¡¯d settle for using what I knew had a good chance to work.


    ¡°Thank you for your help,¡± I told the gestalt. ¡°Could you send me everything you¡¯ve got on the army¡¯s current positions?¡±


    ¡®Of course. That is part of our bargain.¡¯


    With that information safely stowed in my head, I started calculating how quickly the various squadrons and contingents were moving, which ones were small enough to be attacked directly and which ones I¡¯d have to scatter traps in their path and hope for the best.


    I bade the gestalt farewell and returned to my demesne. I had a lot of work to do and not too much time to get it done. As soon as I got back, I pulled myself directly through the genius loci that inhabited the valley and arrived at my crucible. ¡°Querit,¡± I said into my portable scrying mirror. ¡°Could you join me? I have a time-sensitive project of high priority.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 24

    The problem with setting traps was that they¡¯d be less and less effective each time the army stumbled into one of them. They were already on their guard for another fly-by from me, which greatly increased the likelihood that someone¡¯s divinations would notice anything I left in their way.


    With that in mind, my plan was to get one good trap in front of each unit of mage soldiers before they all converged back into one full-sized army, then supplement that with a personal appearance. Coordinating that would have been a monumental effort on my own, but the gestalt was more than capable of keeping track of each discrete platoon and apprising me of how close they were to another.


    Querit and I worked feverishly through the night¡ªwell, I did; he worked at a steady and sustained pace as golems were wont to do¡ªto build all the enchantments needed to power the traps, which were themselves placed onto flat discs. I then burned through the early hours of pre-dawn placing them in the paths of the larger groups I wanted to thin down. By the time Ammun¡¯s legions got moving, I¡¯d already placed forty of my enchanted discs in their way.


    I hid myself in the sky, camouflaged by magic and distance, and watched what I could with multiple divinations pointed in various directions. Not being a mind made up of millions of individual entities, that amounted to only a small fraction of my total targets, so I prioritized the groups that I planned on personally hitting after the traps softened them up.


    If everything went well, I¡¯d have staggered the attacks well enough to let me attend to at least six of the larger groups before any of them started meeting up. If I was really lucky, my work would slow all of them down enough to give me an extra day to work with. After that, the numbers would be too much in their favor for even an archmage. Attacking a small platoon of fifty mages was one thing; taking on three thousand all by myself was an entirely different prospect.


    The largest of the enemy groups hit my line of traps, all of which triggered at once. Shield wards absorbed some of the magic let loose, but there was too much for that to be enough to save everyone. Fire, lightning, and force ripped through their ranks and the ground split open, dropping hundreds more to their deaths. I watched as a handful managed to save themselves and escape the yawning chasms, but most were, if not outright killed in the fall, at least injured badly enough that they were out of the fight.


    If I¡¯d timed everything right, I had about thirty minutes to do as much damage as I could before I needed to move onto the second-largest unit. I dropped out of the sky, already preparing my opening salvo of spells while the mages below screamed and their officers tried to restore order to the chaos I¡¯d caused.


    And I wasn¡¯t about to let them succeed. I picked my first target and adjusted the angle of my descent.


    * * *


    The gestalt was the only one who knew for sure exactly how effective my second run at Ammun¡¯s army had been, but I had a suspicion that I¡¯d achieved far less despite spending significantly more mana this time. I¡¯d held them off as long as I could, but once they¡¯d realized they were under attack again, communication had increased between units and most of my traps had been discovered before they could go off.


    Now, fully two-thirds of the mages had managed to link up into one endless line of humanity, flowing toward the tower as fast as it could. There was no stopping them, so my new goal became ensuring that their home offered no real protection. To that end, I returned to the mana vents deep below the planet¡¯s surface and made my way back inside the tower.


    It seemed my mysteel generators were doing good work. The amount of mana flowing upwards was noticeably thinner, though not so much that I couldn¡¯t have placed another twenty generators to drain the excess. Even with the world core shattered like it was, it still put out a ridiculous amount of mana here. Ammun¡¯s tower even cleverly managed to cycle it into heavy mana by repeatedly pulling it up and sending it streaming back down the outside of the tower. Any mage below stage five wouldn¡¯t survive even approaching the place.


    I¡¯d already mapped this out once, but when Ammun had woken back up, he¡¯d taken steps to reinforce his demesne against me. It was only after his exile to a moon that I¡¯d managed to breach the vents again, and I was still working my way through the new defenses to reach the tower¡¯s master control room again. That was a project that had been on the backburner since I¡¯d decided to use the tower¡¯s mana draw to help me produce the needed mysteel.


    With the armies retreating back to the tower, it was time to turn their home against them. To that end, I spent the next two days worming my way deeper and deeper in until I finally found my goal. Various wards blocked my passage, backed by many, many golems, elemental constructs, alarms, and a surprising amount of solid walls.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    Those were new, but by necessity, they had to be permeable to mana, which meant they were nothing more than a stall against a mage of my caliber. If mana could flow through it, so could I. Even more surprising, Ammun had decided to put pockets of superheated air between some of them, no doubt hoping to kill me when I broke through.


    My divinations warned me well in advance and I took appropriate steps, often using the tower¡¯s own mana to fuel my countermeasures. It was one more stall, which would have made perfect sense if Ammun had been around. It would have given him time to assess what was attacking him, allowed the intruders to weaken themselves fighting through defenses, and given the lich innumerable opportunities to ambush them at the perfect moment.


    Without Ammun here, though, that whole plan fell apart. It just became a tedious thirty hours of work that eventually ended with me thoroughly annoyed when I walked into the master control room. That led me to another eight hours of finagling with the controls to regain access since Ammun had devoted considerable amount of time to updating all of his systems against me.


    That made sense. He¡¯d used my old designs back when I¡¯d been dead, and, in a bid for efficiency, hadn¡¯t bothered to update them. Why would he when the only exploitable vulnerability was that they were tied to a man who¡¯d died centuries earlier? It was perfectly reasonable that he hadn¡¯t expected me to come back, but here I was. I¡¯d had my way with the tower prior to him waking up, and I had no doubt that the lion¡¯s share of his efforts had gone toward making sure I couldn¡¯t repeat that feat now.


    It was wasted time on his part. Ammun had either been unwilling or unable to change the underlying architecture of the spells that controlled the tower, and his hack job of manually altering each and every single component part wasn¡¯t hard to undo. It just took a while because I had to fix every single change he made, but once that was done, I was back in.


    ¡°Now,¡± I murmured. ¡°What should we change?¡±


    I could start starving out the tower now. That would collapse the whole thing in a matter of months as the wards reinforcing the physical structure died and it literally broke under its own weight. If nothing else, it would force the remnants of Ammun¡¯s army back into the open. It would also hinder my collection of mysteel, but that might just be worth the price.


    Really, it was a question of when exactly Ammun would return. I wanted this tower broken down before he got back. That was my first priority. So with that in mind, the best thing to do would be to reverse the mana flow coming in from the vents, purge as much mana as possible, and begin manually draining the wards laced into the tower itself. It would be a slow process, and honestly, my contributions would be miniscule compared to how much of the tower would just plain starve without the massive intakes at the base working.


    It would slow down the world¡¯s recovery by as much as a decade, but the gestalt had found evidence that Ammun was building up on Yulitar. He could return tomorrow, or in a year. Or never. It was a gamble, and as much as I wanted to use the tower¡¯s mana to help restore Manoch¡¯s world core, it just wasn¡¯t worth the risk of letting Ammun reclaim his demesne.


    So I started the process of pulling it all apart. It would still take a few months, and if I was lucky, I¡¯d have that time. I¡¯d get a decent chunk of mysteel out of my generators before it all fell apart, and most annoyingly, I¡¯d eventually have to excavate the ruins just to get access to the mysteel wrapped around the world core so I could fix it.


    But with the land so completely altered, Ammun¡¯s genius loci would wither and die. More importantly, without the tower to serve as a conduit and recycler, the mana would start to spread out across Ralvost. It wouldn¡¯t be an overnight change, but in the coming years, this would be the most magically charged country on the planet.


    And it would still be a faded shadow of what Manoch used to be like. Too much of the world core was cold, dead stone for there to be any other outcome. I could fix that, though. I knew how. It was just a matter of finding the mana and time to do it.


    I sighed as I began dismantling the tower¡¯s wards. This wasn¡¯t the plan. I was supposed to have more time, and a large part of me wondered if I was being too timid, too risk averse. I probably had six months or more before I even had to worry about Ammun returning. That was enough time to make a massive amount of mysteel completely passively.


    Committing to this course of action meant imposing years of extra work on myself, possibly pushing back repairing the world core by far longer than a mere decade if I couldn¡¯t get everything together fast enough. It could mean consigning another generation or two of mages to living on a dead planet.


    No, I¡¯d find another way. My original timeline hadn¡¯t included biometal processing. That could pick up some of the slack I¡¯d lose from the mysteel I wasn¡¯t getting out of the tower¡¯s mana intakes. This was the right course of action, to hedge my bets against Ammun and deprive him of his place of power. There was no telling how strong he¡¯d be when he returned. That was what I needed to prepare for.


    With my course set and the work done, there was nothing left to do but wait. The tower would fall on its own, probably in the next two months, and I could speed that up by a day or two at most if I devoted myself to the task. That was time better spent elsewhere, but I did leave myself a teleportation platform to come back if I needed to. It wasn¡¯t connected to anything, being just a beacon to guide me here in the future.


    It probably wasn¡¯t even necessary. The wards that blocked those kinds of spells were going to starve inside a week anyway. Then anyone capable of casting master-tier spells would be able to move around the tower freely. Those mana wraiths would probably start coming up through the floors, too. That was going to be a disaster for the first floor, and maybe a few more above that. Hopefully those weren¡¯t occupied anymore.


    I didn¡¯t like genocide as a general rule, but really, anyone who was still living here at this point was either loyal to Ammun or simply too afraid to leave. One way or another, this was the push that was going to change everything about their lives.

 Book 5, Chapter 25

    It took a little over two weeks for the divination blocking wards shrouding the Sanctum of Light to begin failing. During that time, the remainder of Ammun¡¯s army, just over half of what they¡¯d had a month ago, moved back into the tower one group at a time. I¡¯d given serious consideration to destroying the remaining teleportation platforms to prevent them from actually returning, but that would have doomed every single person still in the tower to death when it started collapsing.


    Enough of them weren¡¯t going to make it already, and through no fault of their own. If a few thousand managed to evacuate once it became obvious that the tower was no longer stable, I wouldn¡¯t complain about it. If not, then I wouldn¡¯t have dealt with Ammun¡¯s forces either way.


    The gestalt helped immensely with keeping track of things, so much so that it eventually became easier to establish a communication line tied directly to them so that they could update me in real time as events unfolded. Nothing had required my direct intervention, but as the tower started groaning and creaking, its inhabitants became more and more nervous. Soon, they¡¯d likely be pushed back out into the plains and forests surrounding the area, and then I¡¯d make my move.


    Querit and I continued to refine our mysteel and troll¡¯s blood elixir. The plant was beginning to show traces of something other than organic iron in the thorns it grew, but whatever it was, it wasn¡¯t mysteel. Something about the process still wasn¡¯t working the way I wanted it to, something about how it filtered the metal and changed it.


    We were dissecting a second sample I¡¯d fetched, trying to isolate the exact mechanism the monster used to grow metal in hopes of doing a bit of targeted alchemical alterations to our next batch for the research specimen when Querit looked up at me and said, ¡°How¡¯s the progress to stage nine coming along?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not,¡± I said. ¡°Too much to do, not enough time to do it. Not enough mana, either.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t understand why you¡¯re not prioritizing this. I must be missing something, because this seems like the single greatest thing you could be doing to prepare for a confrontation with Ammun. This stuff with the mysteel hunting, sure, it¡¯s important, but it¡¯s not time sensitive. We could still do this after you beat Ammun.¡±


    I let out a frustrated sigh. We¡¯d had this discussion a few times already. No matter what explanation I gave, Querit kept poking at me. Every few weeks, he brought it up again. ¡°I know you feel that way, but I don¡¯t agree.¡±


    ¡°Okay, but why not? Where am I wrong in my reasoning?¡±


    ¡°Just drop it,¡± I said.


    Then he surprised me. ¡°No. You keep giving evasions. I¡¯d like to think we¡¯re friends, and I know you well enough to tell that you¡¯re hiding something from me. Tell me. Help me understand the piece I¡¯m missing.¡±


    I released the phantasmal scalpel I was holding and let it flicker into motes of light. It helped me dig out metallic thorns by cutting through the fibrous plant matter without damaging the metal itself, which I wouldn¡¯t have thought was a big deal when I¡¯d first started working on this, but I¡¯d quickly learned that the thorns had a sort of interconnected root system of hair-thin metallic threads.


    I was still hesitant to call Querit a friend. For one thing, he wasn¡¯t actually a person. As complex as his core was, it was still possible to change who he was on a fundamental level by altering the rune sequences that governed his mind. Then again, humans were just as mutable, probably more so. They could be coerced into betrayal easily enough.


    It was more a problem on my end. I was just too paranoid to fully trust anyone, even my own family. For all that Querit had helped and supported my work, with as vulnerable as I was to sudden treachery, I still hadn¡¯t dropped my guard around him. He knew that, and I¡¯d thought he¡¯d accepted that I wasn¡¯t that kind of person, that some things would never change.


    That wasn¡¯t really fair, though. He didn¡¯t really understand what he was asking me. I¡¯d be literally putting my life in his hands. A single mistake could kill me, and if he decided to do it on purpose, there was no way he could fail. There had to be a better way to take that last step into stage nine, but I hadn¡¯t found it, not yet.


    If I explained it, Querit would rightfully think I didn¡¯t trust him. In all fairness, I trusted him quite a bit these days, more so than I ever would have thought possible, but to allow someone I¡¯d known for such a brief period of time the opportunity to end my life¡­


    No.


    I didn¡¯t trust him that much.


    Did I trust him enough to explain why? Would it solve any problem besides getting him to stop badgering me if I told him the truth? Or would it just cause a rift to grow between us at a time when I could ill-afford it?The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    ¡°Keiran?¡± Querit prodded.


    ¡°No,¡± I decided. It wasn¡¯t worth the risk. ¡°Moving to stage nine isn¡¯t an option right now. I don¡¯t have what I need, and likely won¡¯t for more years than it¡¯ll take to resolve all of this business with Ammun.¡±


    Senica was my backup plan if I couldn¡¯t find a way around my current problem. That was a big ¡®if,¡¯ however. I¡¯d given this extensive thought prior to my reincarnation and had several theories on how to achieve a perfect stage nine without outside assistance. Unfortunately, they all required resources I was years away from regaining access to. The mana costs alone were staggering, not to mention dozens of generations of iterative improvement on the tools I¡¯d need to manufacture just to get to the point where I could test my theories. And all that was just to explore theories. I still didn¡¯t know.


    ¡°But what is it you need? I can help. We¡¯ll find new sources of mana. We can build¡ª¡±


    ¡°Enough,¡± I barked. ¡°Let. It. Go.¡±


    Querit regarded me steadily for a long moment, then he sat down the glassware he¡¯d been holding while he mixed reagents into the solution and turned toward the door. Without a word, he walked out of the lab, leaving me alone with my thoughts.


    ¡°Damn it,¡± I muttered, unsure whether I was angry at him or myself.


    * * *


    I didn¡¯t see Querit the next day. I knew precisely the moment he left the valley, about an hour after moonrise on a flight spell that took him west. I could have tracked his progress with a few simple divinations, but I didn¡¯t.


    We both needed some time to ourselves.


    Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I didn¡¯t get it. In the early morning, just before sunrise, the droning voice of the gestalt entered my mind. ¡®We have spotted the archmage Bakir Odrinac and two more humans,¡¯ they informed me without preamble. ¡®They are in the basin of the island, some hundred or so miles west of the human town known as New Alkerist.¡¯


    That sent a jolt through me. I¡¯d never informed the gestalt of my association with the town, but I couldn¡¯t assume they didn¡¯t know. Short of using massive amounts of memory-altering mind magic, there was no way to hide the fact that my family lived there. Even if the gestalt didn¡¯t realize the significance of Bakir¡¯s location, that didn¡¯t make it a coincidence.


    What was he after, though? Was it an attempt to strike out at my family? Or just a way to probe me for a weakness? Did he want to see if he¡¯d get a reaction from me?


    There existed the possibility that it truly was just a coincidence, but a hundred miles was practically nothing for an archmage to cover. Even the slowest flight spell could get him there in an hour if he pushed it. If his two companions were also members of the same cabal, they would no doubt have access to even better spells.


    ¡®Thank you for letting me know. Please keep an eye on them and inform me if they make a move toward any human-occupied villages or towns,¡¯ I sent back.


    ¡®As you wish.¡¯


    I pulled myself through my genius loci to my teleportation platform and empowered it immediately. A moment later, I was inside my room in my parents¡¯ house, where I could hear my father in the kitchen preparing for a new day.


    I walked into the common area to find him standing at the sink, a knife in hand and a pile of vegetables being chopped up. His hands blurred as he worked, a faint trace of mana infused in his body to speed him up. I smiled softly to myself at the waste. Ten years ago, he never would have considered using mana for something as mundane as food prep.


    ¡°You¡¯re up early,¡± Father said. ¡°Got a big date tod¡ªOh! Gravin. Sorry, I thought you were your sister.¡±


    ¡°Hello,¡± I said. ¡°Don¡¯t mind me. I can¡¯t stay.¡±


    Something in my voice must have alerted him, because the tension was instant and palpable. ¡°Something wrong?¡± he asked in a tight, strained voice.


    ¡°Probably not, but I¡¯m going to check the town¡¯s countermeasures to make sure we have time to react if it comes down to it.¡±


    ¡°Ammun¡¯s mage hunters are back?¡±


    ¡°No, no. It¡¯s completely unrelated to them. An archmage¡ªwell, he called himself one, at least¡ªshowed up a few weeks ago at the valley. We had a chat and he went on his way. Supposedly, he¡¯s from another continent on the other side of the world and is just here to investigate what Ammun¡¯s been up to.


    ¡°A few minutes ago, he appeared on the island with two unknown people. They¡¯re about a hundred miles west of us at the moment, and I¡¯d be remiss in dismissing the location as a coincidence when I have prominent ties to New Alkerist.¡±


    ¡°Do you think they¡¯re going to attack?¡± Father asked.


    I shook my head and said, ¡°No, probably not. They¡¯re probably setting up to do some scrying and see what they can learn. Most likely, they¡¯re hoping to find out anything and everything they can about me before they approach me with whatever it is they want. Just in case they¡¯re planning something stupid like taking hostages, though, I¡¯m going to be here for the next few hours.¡±


    ¡°And after that?¡±


    ¡°If they haven¡¯t done anything, I¡¯ll probably go to them.¡±


    My calm confidence must have been enough to calm Father down, because he let out a grumpy sigh and went back to work preparing breakfast. ¡°Do you need me to do anything?¡± he asked over the sound of the knife smacking into the cutting board repeatedly.


    ¡°No. I¡¯ve got access to everything I need to check.¡±


    He snorted. ¡°You¡¯re not supposed to.¡±


    ¡°Hard to stop me. I¡¯m the one who installed it all.¡±


    ¡°You do have a way with village councils, son. You know that?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve been told my social skills could use some practice.¡±


    ¡°Ah, well, we love you anyway.¡±


    ¡°I¡ª¡± I paused. Then I sighed and said, ¡°I love you all, too. Actually, do you mind if I get a bit of advice from you?¡±


    ¡°Of course,¡± Father said. He set the knife down and turned to face me. ¡°Not sure how I can help, but I¡¯ll do my best.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s complicated. No, that¡¯s not true. It¡¯s simple. I can¡¯t bring myself to trust people. How do you do it? How do you live knowing that they could betray you?¡±


    Father looked startled for just a moment, then he started laughing. ¡°Ancestors forbid, Gravin. I thought this was going to be something big. How is it that you handle world-shaking problems on a regular basis, but struggle so hard with people? No, no, I¡¯m sorry. I understand. Truly. Here, come help me get this food finished and we can discuss the finer points of not having so much personal power that you have absolute control over everything around you. I¡¯m sure it¡¯ll be an enlightening conversation.¡±

 Not a chapter, amazon launch announcement

    Book 4 of Keiran is live on Amazon today. The audible version is still a few weeks out. We''re hoping by the end of next week, it''ll be up, but definitely by the end of the month. I think book 4 has my favorite cover out of the series, so if you haven''t seen it yet, you should click the link just to check it out.


    Links:


    KU: https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0DHH26G3X</a>


    Audible: TBD (should be out before end of January)


    Blurb:


    The man who broke the world has risen from the pages of history¡­ and Keiran is the only one who can stop him.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    With the awakening of the lich lord Ammun Nescect, Keiran must contend with his greatest challenge yet. His former apprentice, an archmage in his own right, stands between Keiran and his goals of tearing down the tower rooted in the world core itself.


    While Ammun remains trapped, unable to leave the world¡¯s one and only source of mana, Keiran prepares for the battle. But he isn¡¯t the only one who¡¯s been preparing, and if Ammun¡¯s machinations come to fruition, nowhere will be safe from the lich¡¯s reach.


    Keiran must act quickly, for he knows that if Ammun frees himself from his prison, the outcome of their next meeting has inevitable, and fatal, implications for him.


    Can he regain enough of his lost power to face an immortal lich in open battle?


    Details:


    Pages: 532


    Run Time: TBD


    Publisher: Timeless Wind


    Artist: Poyjeee


    Narrators: John Joseph Rogers, Rylee Kuberra

 Book 5, Chapter 26

    I left the house feeling¡­ I wasn¡¯t even sure how to describe it. Disappointment? Resignation? Annoyance?


    That wasn¡¯t fair. Father had tried his best, but his advice had mostly boiled down to people learning to trust each other because they didn¡¯t have a choice. Circumstances beyond their control forced them to take those risks, and the ones it had worked out for had survived. It might have been true, but it was also useless. I didn¡¯t need to trust anyone else. My magic made sure of it.


    Except, that wasn¡¯t quite true, was it? I did need someone else if I wanted to ascend to stage nine. Sure, I had theories about other options, ways I might be able to manage the transition without outside assistance. But that was all they were: theories. And I couldn¡¯t even test them.


    So, those were my options. Trust someone else¡ªQuerit was the only real option¡ªor let myself get stuck at stage eight for the foreseeable future. It could be decades before Senica gained the strength needed to assist me, and there were no guarantees that it would ever happen. She could take her life in a completely different direction long before she reached that point, or be killed doing something inane and reckless, as she was prone to doing.


    Something in my demeanor must have given away that I was in no mood for small talk. Not a single one of the villagers I crossed paths with over the next hour did more than nod in my general direction before hurrying on their way. I checked the mana reserves in the batteries feeding the town¡¯s defensive enchantments, confirmed there was no damage to any of the devices that would deploy themselves in the event that the wards were breached, and made sure the shelter¡¯s independently-powered magic was in good condition.


    It wasn¡¯t that I expected any of this to be needed, but far too many people had access to the equipment to fully rule out an act of sabotage. I¡¯d initially wanted it sealed away, protected from the townsfolk until it was needed, but the council hadn¡¯t liked that idea. It was one of those things that I probably should have just overruled them on, but it was their town, after all.


    Everything was in perfect working order, and the worst I could say was that the mana reserves had been slowly draining from upkeep costs. No one had bothered to refresh the enchantments, which was something I¡¯d pass on to Father that people needed to do. That was half the reason they¡¯d been given access, in the end. But there was enough mana left not to cause any immediate problems. If a trio of archmages attacked the village, all the magic I¡¯d placed here to defend it would be nothing more than a stall to give me time to react personally. For that purpose, everything was fully functional.


    While I worked, the gestalt kept me updated on the three foreigners¡¯ movements. Despite the early hour, they were all wide awake and active. It was probably much later in the day wherever they¡¯d started their journey. It was one of those peculiar quirks of teleportation to all of a sudden go from it being noon to watching the sun rise in just a few moments when traveling via a chain of platforms.


    It seemed like they were hard at work building themselves some sort of underground bunker out in the wastes. They¡¯d chosen a ridge of modest height, twenty or so feet, and were burrowing into it like a colony of moles. Already, they were a hundred feet underground and were busy hollowing out a series of interconnected chambers.


    Whatever they were doing, it looked like they were going through the effort of creating a permanent base of operations. I wasn¡¯t thrilled about that, mostly because I didn¡¯t need such dangerous neighbors so close to my family¡¯s home. Admittedly, there wasn¡¯t a lot of difference between one hundred miles and a thousand miles to a group of archmages, and it was entirely possible that they¡¯d chosen this place to establish their camp simply because it was central to the populated part of the island. But still, I didn¡¯t like it.


    Worse, now that the basic shape was taking form, one of the trio had stopped transmuting and turned to warding. He produced a pre-built warding stone from somewhere and started attuning it to the cavern complex. In less than ten minutes, the wards snapped into place, blocking me from easily scrying their activity.


    ¡®Can you get around this?¡¯ I asked.


    ¡®Easily, with your assistance. Bring some of us to the cave and get us inside the wards, and they shall prove no obstacle.¡¯


    Depending on what kind of wards the trio had put up, that might prove to be impossible. On the other hand, if they allowed me in, I could probably sneak a few passengers past their defenses with me. I supposed it was time to go meet the new neighbors.


    * * *


    I stood at the mouth of the cave and waited patiently for one of the archmages to come greet me. There was no doubt they knew I was there; I¡¯d approached openly with a flight spell from the northeast, feigning my direction to be from my valley instead of the nearby village. Whether they¡¯d been watching long enough for the deception to matter was a mystery, but it was worth it to me to go through the motions just in case.Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.


    Bakir appeared in the tunnel, only just barely visible in the shadows even with a sensory invocation. I suspected that had something to do with the ward schema they were using, but I wouldn¡¯t know for sure until I got a better look.


    ¡°Archmage Keiran,¡± he said politely as he stopped at the edge of the ward¡¯s boundary, just shy of leaving its protection. ¡°This is an unexpected surprise.¡±


    ¡°It seemed fair,¡± I said dryly, ¡°after you unexpectedly started building a hidden base of operations on my island.¡±


    ¡°I was not aware that you had claimed the entirety of this region as your own,¡± Bakir replied calmly, unperturbed by my unspoken accusation. ¡°We surely would have spoken with you first. As it happens, we¡¯d hoped to finish setting up before inviting you for a visit.¡±


    I translated that as a desire to impress me with their power and reach by showcasing how they could afford to lavish resources on a literal hole in the ground. Was that because they wanted to make a good impression, or because they were making a silent threat not to cross them?


    It certainly wouldn¡¯t be the first time I¡¯d seen someone try to use expensive magic toys to intimidate me. I still wasn¡¯t sure where Bakir¡¯s cabal stood, but until proven otherwise, the only reasonable thing to do was assume hostile intent and keep my guard up. I already knew Bakir wasn¡¯t strong enough to pose a real threat, and even if his two companions were able to match my own abilities, I¡¯d still be able to stall them long enough to flee.


    ¡°Might I step inside so that we can discuss this further?¡± I asked, keeping my voice polite so as not to betray a hint that I was considering how best I might go about murdering all three of them if they proved to be a threat.


    ¡°Of course,¡± he said after a beat of hesitation, giving me the impression that he knew exactly what was on my mind. He certainly wasn¡¯t lacking for bravery, though. The wards curled back at his command and he stepped aside, gesturing for me to enter the tunnel.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid we¡¯re not quite set up for visitors just yet,¡± he continued while leading me deeper. ¡°But I¡¯m sure you can understand the need for temporary accommodations for unexpected guests.¡±


    ¡°Certainly,¡± I agreed. I¡¯d hid my own demesne from him when he¡¯d come to see me, and not giving them the time to do the same was just one of the many reasons I¡¯d shown up so soon after they¡¯d arrived.


    The two archmages must have been working frantically to put something together while Bakir met me. Based on the quickly-hidden dirty look one of them flashed him, I surmised that he¡¯d been tasked with stalling me for a bit longer than he¡¯d managed. Regardless, they¡¯d put together something relatively impressive.


    An elegantly formed stone table sat in the center of the room, four wooden chairs surrounding it. Each of them had an embroidered cushion on the seat, something that couldn¡¯t have been made with a transmutation spell. A small stove had also been set up in the corner, upon which a kettle of water was just starting to boil. That might have been fabricated in the last few hours, but I had my suspicions that they¡¯d brought it with them.


    Both of the archmages waiting for us had phantom spaces attached to their mana cores, though I couldn¡¯t tell exactly how big they were. Given the number of tables, benches, equipment, and personal effects the trio had already managed to stuff into their little hide-away, I was going to assume at least one of them was fairly robust.


    I couldn¡¯t see any of that from where I stood, however. The first chamber of their base was obviously designed as some sort of receiving room, complete with a teleportation platform in the corner. Unlike my own design, theirs was two plates aligned with each other, one on the ceiling and the other on the floor. It was a serviceable formation that allowed for significantly more space to carve runes onto it, but it required a lot more work to install, especially outdoors.


    ¡°Archmage Keiran, please allow me to introduce to you Archmages Adilar and Nevlac,¡± Bakir said, gesturing to each archmage in turn.


    Nevlac appeared to be a middle-aged man with a beard just starting to go gray at the edges. He had a full head of hair and faint wrinkles starting to form at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth. Adilar, on the other hand, looked positively ancient, easily in his eighties or nineties. He was stoop-shouldered and had a cane gripped in both hands in front of him.


    I would have said neither were happy to see me, but that was just an assumption. Other than that one quick scowl Nevlac had thrown Bakir¡¯s way when we were walking into the room, both of them wore bland, pleasant expressions.


    ¡°Archmage,¡± Adilar rasped out, his voice low and rough. ¡°Forgive us. We were not expecting to entertain you so quickly.¡±


    ¡°No? When were you expecting to do so?¡± I asked.


    The old man paused and tilted his head in thought. ¡°Tomorrow, most likely.¡±


    Both archmages had their cores fully shielded, but I had other ways to gauge their strength. It might just take a few minutes. That would be easy enough to buy. ¡°I apologize for ruining your schedule,¡± I said. ¡°Believe me when I say I won¡¯t hold it against you that you haven¡¯t finished unpacking just yet. Let¡¯s sit down, shall we?¡±


    ¡°Yes, of course. What point would there be to having such comfortable chairs if we didn¡¯t use them?¡± Nevlac replied.


    Bakir guided me to my seat, then claimed the one to my left. Nevlac took my right, and Adilar sat across from me. Once all four of us were seated, I pressed my foot against the stone and released the hundred ants clinging to the side of my leg out into the cave. They scurried off in every direction, unnoticed by the three archmages.


    ¡°I suppose we should get the unpleasant part of the way first,¡± I said. ¡°You can understand why I¡¯m hesitant to trust you when I¡¯ve caught you constructing fortifications so close to my own demesne without making any effort to announce your presence first.¡±


    ¡°Of course, but let me offer you my assurances that we meant no harm,¡± Adilar said.


    ¡°What assurances are those?¡±


    His genial expression faltered for a second. ¡°Pardon?¡±


    ¡°You wanted to offer me assurances. Go ahead. What are they?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s just an expression,¡± the old archmage said, his smile returning. It looked a lot more forced now.


    ¡°Try anyway,¡± I said.


    The three of them exchanged glances, their expressions unreadable, and flickers of telepathic communication flitted between them.


    What were they hiding here? Or what had they hoped to hide before I came calling? I was sure I¡¯d know by the end of this meeting, one way or another. The gestalt would see to that.

 Book 5, Chapter 27

    ¡°Perhaps we¡¯ve started on the wrong foot,¡± Adilar said. ¡°Our intentions were not to spy on you. If we¡¯d wanted to do that, we¡¯d hardly have sent Archmage Bakir to knock on your front door and announce our presence.¡±


    There was some logic to that. While there was every chance I¡¯d have found them anyway, and I¡¯d probably have come at them with a lot more open hostility if they hadn¡¯t taken the time to meet with me first, it was still a much smarter move to not alert me to their existence if they were here to spy on me.


    ¡°What are your intentions then?¡± I asked. ¡°I¡¯m sure you didn¡¯t build this place out in the middle of nowhere, hidden underground and warded against divinations, because you¡¯re here to soak up some sun in a dusty, old, monster-ridden wasteland.¡±


    ¡°No, this place was designed with a different purpose,¡± Adilar explained.


    ¡°Yes, I can see the research equipment. You¡¯ve set up labs to experiment in.¡±


    ¡°Precisely so,¡± the old-seeming archmage said. ¡°One part of our mission is to¡­ I suppose the best way to say it is that we¡¯re to test you, to confirm that you really are who you say you are.¡±


    ¡°What if I¡¯m not interested in being tested?¡±


    Adilar¡¯s polite expression flickered for an instant, something I probably wouldn¡¯t have noticed if I hadn¡¯t been staring right at him. He wasn¡¯t used to being defied, and he didn¡¯t like it. If he was part of a society of archmages, then he was high up in their ranks, maybe even near the top. I doubted he was in charge, or he wouldn¡¯t be out here in the first place, but he was definitely a man used to being obeyed.


    ¡°Please understand that our purpose isn¡¯t to offend you. We are simply doing our best to ensure that the world never suffers again as it did when Ammun last walked the lands.¡±


    ¡°That doesn¡¯t explain why you¡¯re here. If you¡¯re so worried about Ammun, you¡¯ve got a couple thousand miles to go to reach his demesne.¡±


    ¡°Oh, we are. As we speak, another six of our members are building something similar in the Selivar Region. The Global Order is devoting quite a lot of resources to ensuring this conflict doesn¡¯t escalate to the heights it reached the last time Ammun got into a fight with someone.¡±


    Once again, that was fair. It made sense. It was logical. It completely justified their presence here. And I didn¡¯t doubt that it was all true. I just didn¡¯t believe it was the whole truth.


    ¡°None of that explains why you were trying to hide from me,¡± I said flatly. ¡°I¡¯d like a reason for that.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re not trying to hide from you. We simply haven¡¯t reached the point where we were ready to reach out as your new neighbors. We¡¯ve barely been here a few hours!¡±


    ¡°No. I don¡¯t believe you¡¯re so incompetent that you really thought it was a smart move to build a fortified bunker a few hundred miles away from my demesne without informing me that you were going to do it first. Who in their right mind would think that was acceptable?¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t own this entire corner of Olpahun,¡± Nevlac snapped. ¡°We¡¯re not under any obligation to¡ª¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s enough,¡± Adilar interrupted. The younger of the pair subsided with a huff, ceding the conversation back to his boss. ¡°Archmage Keiran, please tell me what proof you need us to provide to convince you that the construction of this research lab was not planned in any way to be a precursor to hostilities toward you.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know,¡± I said. ¡°Can you go back in time a few hours and tell me you¡¯re planning on setting up a base here before I catch you doing it behind my back?¡±


    Adilar was unable to keep his face smooth. ¡°You know we can¡¯t. This behavior is unfitting of the archmage you supposedly are. You act like a petulant child when we have arrived here solely to extend a hand in friendship to you.¡±


    ¡°Is that what you¡¯re doing? Because most friends don¡¯t sneak up behind me,¡± I said. ¡°How would you feel if I traveled over to Jeshaem and built myself a secret bunker near your headquarters?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯d never manage it,¡± Nevlac sneered.


    ¡°Neither did you,¡± I said dryly.


    ¡°I¡ª¡±


    ¡°Archmage Nevlac, I believe I told you that you had said enough already,¡± Adilar said. Turning back to me, he added, ¡°I see now that we¡¯ve erred in how we¡¯ve gone about our business. It was not our intent to deceive you, but I can hardly blame you for interpreting our actions in a less than charitable light, especially considering your involvement in an ongoing dispute with another archmage. Please, accept my apology on behalf of the Global Order of the Arcane, and rest assured, moving forward we shall make every effort to keep you apprised of our goals while we remain in this area.¡±


    That was smooth. There was the apology made with the assumption that my only objection was to the manner that they¡¯d arrived, not to them being here, coupled with a resolution to be a better neighbor moving forward.


    I could make more of an issue of it. I could demand that they leave. I could fight them over it. I¡¯d probably even win, from what I could see. But if they were being honest about all of this¡ªnot that I believed that for a second¡ªall I¡¯d accomplish was alienating a potential ally. That wasn¡¯t really necessary, and besides, I¡¯d already accomplished my goal here.If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.


    I¡¯d kept them focused directly on me, and upset them enough that they¡¯d shown no signs of realizing I¡¯d released a few hundred infiltrators into their brand-new base of operations. Those ants had already made their way into the cracks in the stone and established a full connection with the gestalt entity. No matter what wards this trio put up now, it would do them no good. My spies were literally in the walls.


    I took a breath and pretended to wipe annoyance off my face. ¡°Fine,¡± I said shortly. ¡°Let¡¯s start over. Welcome to the island. I look forward to a productive, open, honest relationship between your cabal and myself. Why don¡¯t we talk about your objectives while you¡¯re here, and what I can do to help you achieve them.¡±


    I sensed a few more threads of telepathic communication flicker between them, mostly from Adilar to the other two. ¡°It¡¯s nothing too special,¡± the old man said. ¡°The island has remarkably low mana density, the lowest we¡¯ve ever seen. We have a few experiments we do every time we come across a new area to test how specific enchantments will respond, but those are boring. We¡¯re actually far more interested in trading knowledge with you and forging a partnership to stop Ammun from recreating his world-shattering weapon from the days of old.¡±


    ¡°Oh? Is there anything in particular you¡¯re looking for?¡±


    ¡°Nothing specific. I¡¯m sure you¡¯re aware of just how much was lost to history. We have no idea how much, really. I¡¯d like to think that we¡¯ve done a good job recovering and preserving the vast majority of those spells, rituals, techniques, and so on, but it¡¯s hard to say when we don¡¯t know what we don¡¯t know.¡±


    ¡°And you¡¯d like me to help fill in the blanks,¡± I surmised.


    ¡°Precisely, yes. And in return, we hope that our expertise and manpower can help you. Or rather, that we can help each other prevent another disaster from befalling Manoch.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m sure I can think of a few tasks I could use some extra help with,¡± I said. In truth, I already had a small list of projects I wanted to hand off to them, but all of that required some amount of trust that I just didn¡¯t have after the way they¡¯d tried to sneak in, probably with the intent of spying on me to learn all they could before they made contact. I could understand why they¡¯d done it, but that didn¡¯t change the fact that those were the actions of an enemy.


    At best, we could be political allies, which were practically the same thing. It was just a matter of timing and convenience that separated them. The Global Order definitely wasn¡¯t the answer to my current predicament with my mana core. I trusted Querit far, far more than I trusted any of the three in this room, and I didn¡¯t see that changing anytime soon.


    We made small talk for another half an hour or so while Adilar danced around revealing anything he didn¡¯t want me to know without making it seem like he was doing any such thing. The other two mostly kept their mouths shut or made neutral statements that amounted to nothing substantial. I briefly considered poking at Nevlac, whose temper would almost certainly get him in trouble saying something he shouldn¡¯t, but it wasn¡¯t necessary.


    The gestalt would get their secrets from them.


    ¡°As enlightening as this has been, I do have my own work to get back to. Send someone to let me know when you¡¯ve finished setting up and are ready to properly receive visitors, please,¡± I said as I stood from my seat at the table.


    ¡°Of course. It was a pleasure meeting you, Archmage Keiran,¡± Adilar said. ¡°And again, I apologize for our social faux pas in failing to inform you of our presence immediately.¡±


    * * *


    ¡°That guy is a giant asshole,¡± Nevlac said after I¡¯d gone.


    ¡°He is certainly¡­ arrogant,¡± Adilar agreed. ¡°He wasn¡¯t wrong, though. I would not have advertised our presence to him so soon, not until we¡¯d had a chance to get a read on him first.¡±


    ¡°Do you think he can be useful to the Order, Master?¡± Bakir asked.


    ¡°Perhaps. He¡¯s certainly competent. I¡¯m not sure how else to explain how he grew so powerful in this dry, barren desert but to accept his reincarnation story. He may truly be the legend of myth, in which case, we are playing an extremely dangerous game.¡±


    I stood in my scrying chamber, the connection I¡¯d forged between my own mirror and the gestalt¡¯s feeding me a view of the Order¡¯s new compound via the thousand or so ants still there. I doubted I would have been able to interpret what those ants could sense into anything intelligible on my own, but the gestalt took care of that for me.


    ¡°He didn¡¯t seem that strong to me,¡± Nevlac argued.


    ¡°Then you are a fool,¡± Adilar said sharply. ¡°He is beyond any of us already. We must discover how he broke the barrier and ascended past stage six.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re sure he truly has? I¡¯ve met with him twice now and have sensed no such thing,¡± Bakir said.


    The old archmage nodded. ¡°When he teleported away, did you not feel his mana?¡±


    ¡°It was¡­ dense,¡± Bakir said. ¡°What does that mean?¡±


    This guy called himself an archmage? I was right all along. This whole group was a bunch of posers. They¡¯d be teaching assistants for graduate classes at any academy in the old world. Well, maybe not Adilar and any on his level, but Bakir and Nevlac definitely weren¡¯t what I¡¯d recognize as true archmages.


    ¡°It goes by many names. You would perhaps recognize it as true arcana. It is a form of supercharged mana, necessary for forging the greatest of spells, magic so strong that mana itself crumbles under the weight of its casting. To wield it so casually, though¡­¡±


    The old man trailed off and stared at the wall while his hand grasped the cane he leaned on so tightly that his knuckles turned white. Slowly, he shook his head. ¡°Whether he is truly Keiran of the Night Vale returned after millennia of absence, or merely some imposter claiming the name, we would be utter fools to challenge him openly.


    ¡°I tell you this, though. We must know where he found a resonance point. If we do nothing else with our time here, obtaining that information is worth any cost.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a shame his guard will be up now,¡± Bakir said thoughtfully. ¡°All our plans to divine his locations and actions are too dangerous to implement now.¡±


    ¡°Agreed,¡± Avilar said. ¡°We¡¯ll have to negotiate in good faith for the location.¡±


    Nevlac scoffed. ¡°I still don¡¯t see why we can¡¯t just take it by force. There are three of us here, and if that somehow isn¡¯t enough, we can always call in reinforcements.¡±


    ¡°Perhaps,¡± Avilar agreed. ¡°Perhaps. For now, diplomacy.¡±


    Great. That was just what I needed. Like I didn¡¯t have enough problems occupying my attention already. Now I had some sort of group of wannabe-archmage thugs looking for a handout and threatening a beating if I didn¡¯t comply.


    ¡®Keep a close eye on them and let me know what they¡¯re doing?¡¯ I asked the gestalt. ¡®I¡¯ve got some other stuff to take care of right now.¡¯


    ¡®We will do as you ask,¡¯ the entity replied. ¡®For as long as you can afford to pay the price.¡¯


    There was no need to remind me of that, either.

 Book 5, Chapter 28

    I¡¯d been putting off a particular task for a few weeks now, one that I could justify delaying because I had other things to do that were arguably more important. However, now that three new archmages were here, I couldn¡¯t delay it any longer.


    It was time to go talk to Keeper again.


    I teleported directly into her warehouse library in open defiance of her wards, something that I knew bothered her to no end. Every time I arrived, I noticed that the warding schema was more robust, better developed and with greater and greater amounts of mana powering it. Every time, I phased through it like it wasn¡¯t there, anyway.


    It was a bit of a game, her trying new and different ways to stop me. Maybe one day I¡¯d tell her that what she was doing was never going to work against my teleportation spells. Her method of locking out a spatial shift was entirely dependent on creating a sort of metaphysical moat that prevented intruders from crossing a shell that encompassed the whole building.


    My teleportation spells didn¡¯t send me across space. The relative distance between the starting and stopping point had no bearing on how difficult the spell was to cast or how much mana it took outside of the absolute maximum reach. Instead, it forged a sort of path into the Astral Realm, one that sucked the caster in and then spit them back out again somewhere else an instant later.


    Until Keeper figured out that she needed to flood the entire area with anti-teleportation wards, not just a shell wrapped around the outside, she was doomed to fail. But it was amusing watching her struggle, and she never once asked for so much as a hint to how I was getting in. And so, the game continued.


    ¡°Keiran,¡± she grumbled at me when I appeared next to the chaise she was resting on. A glow lamp on a nearby table cast light over her, and a pile of books sat on the floor near her hands. Another one was open, balanced on her leg so that she could read it. ¡°You do always manage to interrupt me when I get to the good part.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a gift,¡± I told her. ¡°I honestly don¡¯t even try. It just happens.¡±


    Keeper looked to be in her late fifties, but only because I¡¯d been trading her life-extending magic for the last few years. When I¡¯d first met her, she looked twenty or thirty years older and was approaching the end of her life. Now, if nothing was done, I guessed she had a good half a century left in her. She¡¯d learned enough magic from me that it was far more likely she¡¯d live three times longer than that on her own, but her willingness to sort through the staggering amount of information available in the archive made her valuable, and she was quite happy to trade that value for more of my expertise.


    ¡°You¡¯ve finished Galdrisa?¡± she asked. ¡°Was there mysteel in there like I thought?¡±


    ¡°There was,¡± I confirmed.


    ¡°Perfect. The reference was a bit archaic, but I was sure that¡¯s what the tome was referring to. In that case, I probably have another location or two for you to loot.¡±


    ¡°Later,¡± I said. ¡°A new problem has come up. Tell me, have you ever heard of the Global Order of the Arcane?¡±


    Keeper blanched, the color draining from her face. She froze in place, but for a slight tremor in her hands. ¡°Why do you want to know about them?¡± she asked.


    ¡°They¡¯re here. And they¡¯re annoying me.¡±


    Her mouth worked silently for a few seconds before she sputtered out, ¡°They¡¯re what?¡±


    ¡°Annoying. Trying to sneak around and spy on me. Lying to my face when confronted.¡±


    ¡°They¡¯re¡­ they¡¯re archmages! Dozens of them. They¡¯re all the best mages in the world.¡±


    ¡°Oh, good. You do know about them. Tell me everything.¡±


    Whatever fear Keeper might have had of them, it didn¡¯t extend to me. Perhaps I¡¯d been too familiar with her over the years. Or, more likely, she just knew that she was too useful to get rid of, and that I wasn¡¯t the type of person to casually execute someone because they¡¯d committed some minor trespass. Those kinds of tyrants never lasted long, usually only to the first time they ran into someone stronger than them who felt the same way.


    ¡°Off the top of my head, they have a reputation for seeking out and cultivating great magical talents, though they¡¯re not particularly active in this corner of the world. Their leadership is a council of five archmages, all of whom they rank as ¡®First Order.¡¯ There are six total orders in their hierarchy, but I¡¯m not sure what you¡¯d need to do to advance through the ranks. Even gaining entry to the Order requires far greater magical expertise than anyone I¡¯ve ever met possesses, excluding you.¡±The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    ¡°What about their goals and their methodologies?¡±


    ¡°I think that¡¯s highly individual. They work on their own projects and support each other when needed. I¡¯m sure the lower ranking members act directly on behalf of their superiors, but it¡¯s not publicly available information. Most of what I¡¯ve read about them is speculation from those who¡¯ve come in contact with agents of the Order, though I do have one first-hand account of a member of the Sixth Order. It was a personal journal that was lost when he was killed eight hundred years ago and ended up in a box of books I acquired.¡±


    That was almost certainly useless. I had a strong suspicion none of the current members had been alive to witness Ammun¡¯s folly, which meant it was extremely unlikely anything that deceased archmage had recorded would mention the trio I was dealing with. Maybe it could give me a general feel for how the Order operated, assuming they hadn¡¯t changed drastically in close to a thousand years, which was basically an impossibility.


    Individuals might stay set in their ways, especially old pseudo-immortals. Organizations did not. New people meant new goals and new ideas how to get there. I¡¯d been hoping Keeper would have something more modern on the Order, especially since she seemed to afraid of them now. That was a bit suspicious, actually.


    ¡°What do you know about their activities today?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Why would I know anything about what¡¯s going on today?¡± she retorted. ¡°I¡¯m a historian, not a gossip.¡±


    I squinted at her. ¡°You know something. One of them was here, in Derro. Did they meet with you personally?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± she denied. ¡°They just have a reputation for getting what they want, regardless of the consequences to anyone else ¨C not unlike a certain someone I know.¡±


    Scrying for a specific person could be difficult, but it wasn¡¯t impossible. Scrying for that person back through time was a whole new layer of complication. Doing if it that person had warded themselves specifically against temporal divination wasn¡¯t really worth the effort to even try. However, I was confident I could make some assumptions.


    So, instead of searching for Bakir, who I already knew had been active on the island prior to introducing himself to me, and hoping to find his comings and goings around Derro, I limited myself to here, in Keeper¡¯s home, and to a time span of about a month prior to Bakir showing up at the valley.


    It didn¡¯t take long to find a stretch of about three hours that was blocked from my magic. Someone with the time, mana, and desire to cast a temporal divination blocking spell had visited Keeper. It could have been someone from the royal family. They did specialize in time magic, though with more of a focus on divination rather than warding. Or it could have been a nosy archmage, looking for information about me and coming to the one person in Derro I still had any sort of regular contact with. If I were in his shoes, investigating an unknown mage with enough power to be a threat, I¡¯d do the exact same.


    ¡°What did you tell him?¡± I asked. ¡°I¡¯m going to assume it was Bakir who showed up here wanting to know about me.¡±


    ¡°What was I supposed to do, Keiran? He could have killed me.¡±


    ¡°I could kill you,¡± I said mildly.


    ¡°You¡¯re a lot more reasonable than he is.¡±


    He¡¯d seemed so mild-mannered to me, too. Though, perhaps I was making a mistake in assuming it was Bakir. If Nevlac had been her surprise guest, I could see him threatening her. ¡°What did he look like?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Tall. Handsome. Brown hair with just enough gray to look distinguished.¡±


    That was definitely Bakir. I supposed he was one of those people who was only polite to those who rivaled his social station. He must have been a devil to his servants. Or perhaps he was just playing the role in his pursuit of information. I¡¯d certainly done that enough times in recent years to get what I wanted, though I generally found it more of a hassle than it was worth.


    ¡°He wanted to know what spells you knew, how many you could cast without stopping, how well you shielded your core, stuff like that,¡± Keeper said. ¡°He seemed to be sizing you up.¡±


    ¡°You could have warned me,¡± I said. ¡°Why didn¡¯t you?¡±


    ¡°He¡¯d know. He¡¯s going to know about this!¡±


    ¡°No, he won¡¯t. I¡¯ve blocked out this meeting from temporal scrying and destroyed the four surveillance spells he left here. The most he¡¯ll know is that someone was here. He¡¯ll probably assume it was me.¡±


    Keeper shook her head. ¡°It won¡¯t matter. He¡¯ll know he missed something and then he¡¯ll be back with more questions.¡±


    ¡°Yes, yes he will.¡± I grinned. ¡°And when he does come, you¡¯re going to let me know. I¡¯d like to have a few words with them.¡±


    Specifically, I wanted to catch one of them alone and away from their wards. I should have killed Bakir when he first showed up, but I¡¯d been wary of upsetting an unknown cabal of archmages. Now that I knew they were all a bunch of pretenders to a title they didn¡¯t understand, I was done handling them gently. It was time to get some answers.


    ¡°Here, take this. It¡¯s a transmission stone. Keep it on you, and when the Order¡¯s representative shows up, you message me immediately. I¡¯ll come handle him.¡± I pulled a duplicate of one of the stones I¡¯d made for New Alkerist from my phantom space and handed it over to Keeper. ¡°Unless he¡¯s in your mind reading your thoughts at the time you use it, it¡¯s undetectable. You don¡¯t even need to touch it, just keep it on you. Anywhere within three feet of your body is fine.¡±


    Keeper accepted the stone somewhat hesitantly. ¡°I thought you¡¯d be¡­ more upset.¡±


    ¡°Oh, I am livid,¡± I said. ¡°Not at you. I don¡¯t expect you to stand up to an archmage, even a fake one like the people from the Order. But I am tired of getting sidetracked from my work putting out new fires every other week. It¡¯s become very obvious to me that the Order is not here to help. They¡¯re looking to advance their own agenda and trying to find a way to use me to do so. I¡¯m going to smack their noses once and they¡¯d better learn their lesson.¡±


    ¡°And if they don¡¯t?¡±


    I considered Nevlac¡¯s open hostility, and Adilar¡¯s almost slimy false politeness. Bakir had behaved pleasantly enough to my face, but he was still a nuisance who¡¯d been threatening allies I relied on to further my interests. So far, the Global Order of the Arcane had shown themselves to be nothing more than a hinderance to my plans, one with no interest in anything but themselves.


    ¡°You¡¯ve read your history books. I¡¯m sure I¡¯ve made a few appearances in them. Back in my day, I was not known for my benevolent nature. I don¡¯t imagine the historians got that part wrong, did they?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± Keeper said softly. ¡°No, they did not.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 29

    Grandfather returned to Eyrie Peak that evening. It was no surprise, really. Querit was still off wherever he¡¯d gone to sulk. A cabal of mages many times stronger than the Wolf Pack had turned up on the island and had an unhealthy amount of interest in me and my allies. I still hadn¡¯t figured out how to make bio-mysteel, nor did I have any ideas on how to complete my advancement back to stage nine without outside assistance that lacked the skills to do what was needed even if I got over my trust issues.


    So, of course that was when the old grayfeather popped back up and wanted to talk to me. Fortunately, with the stabilization of the spell holding up their graveyard, he was finally free to travel around. That meant I got to host Grandfather for the first time ever instead, which was sure to be an interesting experience.


    For one thing, he was too large to actually fit on a teleportation platform, so he was either going to be flying the whole way or he¡¯d be altering his size. I knew brakvaw could shrink themselves down to a degree, but I¡¯d never once seen Grandfather do it. Usually he crafted a projection and inhabited that when he wanted to be somewhere other than his eyrie.


    I was expecting a slightly smaller version of Grandfather to appear on the platform, but instead, two humans teleported in. I recognized one of them, it being the shape Grandfather used when he projected a human shape to me. The other was a stranger in appearance, but something about his mana was familiar to me.


    ¡°Keiran,¡± Grandfather said, somewhat more fondly than I would have expected. ¡°So nice to see you again.¡±


    ¡°You¡­ too,¡± I said slowly, a frown on my lips. What was this weird behavior?


    I took a mental step back to look at the whole situation. Suddenly, everything made a bit too much sense. Mentally, I projected, ¡®The Order found you?¡¯


    ¡®Indeed,¡¯ Grandfather¡¯s voice echoed in my mind, far more grave than the warm tone he¡¯d used to greet me. ¡®Are we safe from their scrying eyes here?¡¯


    ¡®We should be, but hold up the act for a few more minutes until we get inside.¡¯


    ¡°Come, join me,¡± I said, affecting not to recognize the unexpected guest who¡¯d come with him. That man looked to be in his late teens, with dark brown skin and thick, wavy hair that was draped over wide, expressive eyes. His lips were parted in an amazed expression as he feigned looking around the valley.


    I quickly led my two guests to my home, or at least to the decoy house I kept on the surface of my valley near the teleportation platform. I didn¡¯t actually live in it, but it was fine for meeting guests I allowed to actually view the valley. Fortunately, Bakir hadn¡¯t rated even that much, so he¡¯d missed out on an opportunity to actually see any of my demesne from the inside.


    Once inside the house, I activated the wards woven into the walls and said, ¡°We¡¯re safe to talk now. The Order has been thorough if they¡¯ve reached all the way to Eyrie Peak. I¡¯m going to assume they wanted information about me.¡±


    ¡°Essentially,¡± Grandfather said. ¡°They were more interested in the portal network at first, but they quickly connected it to you.¡±


    ¡°Did they find out about the gestalt?¡± I asked sharply. While the entity as a whole would be in no danger from losing a few hundred ants, I didn¡¯t want those mages even thinking they needed to be on guard against being spied upon by little bugs in the walls.


    ¡°If so, they didn¡¯t mention it,¡± Grandfather said. ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°Because the gestalt does all my scrying for me, and the Order is shaping up to be a hostile faction. It¡¯s better for us if they don¡¯t learn who our spymaster is.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re a faction now?¡± the other man said. ¡°Wouldn¡¯t that imply a level of trust between us?¡±


    It was easy to forget that Querit was technically a shape shifter. His entire outer body structure was a morphic alloy of metal that could be rearranged by running mana through it. He usually stuck to his default appearance, sometimes shrinking in size if he needed to fit inside a particular frame for some reason. The combat ones were sometimes big enough to hold an adult, but a lot of the research ones required him to be much smaller to use.


    It was rare to see him with a new face, however. I suspected this wasn¡¯t a coincidence. ¡°Hiding from the Order?¡± I asked.


    He shrugged. ¡°Maybe I just wanted a bit of distance from who I was last week.¡±


    ¡°Querit.¡±


    He glared back at me while Grandfather watched us with a bemused expression on his face. I was momentarily distracted wondering just how he¡¯d gotten so adept at mimicking human facial expressions and whether it was an unconscious reaction or if he was mocking us in some way. Regardless, it was a question for later.You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    ¡°If you don¡¯t want me to pry into your life, do me the courtesy of doing the same,¡± the golem said.


    ¡°Then why are you here?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Because your new friends are poking around everywhere looking for any and every scrap of information about you. As much of an ass as you are most days, I still thought you deserved to know, but I can see now that I wasted my time adopting this form and coming here to warn you.¡±


    ¡°Ah, well, whatever it is this is,¡± Grandfather cut in, ¡°I¡¯m sure you can continue it later. Let¡¯s shift this discussion back to the relevant topic. Who are these mages, and what do they want?¡±


    I quickly outlined everything I¡¯d learned about them and their activities. Neither of my companions were surprised to learn that the Order was primarily out for itself, or about what my preliminary moves had been to counter them.


    ¡°The two biggest problems are that we don¡¯t know their numbers or how strong their leaders are,¡± I said. ¡°And with them being based out of another continent, it makes it easy to move against the ones that are here without having to worry about them calling in emergency reinforcements, but difficult to predict who¡¯s going to show up next once they stop reporting back in.¡±


    ¡°Is it really that easy, though?¡± Grandfather asked. ¡°Your portals don¡¯t seem to suffer the same distance limitations your teleportation spells do. What if they set up one of those?¡±


    ¡°Ah, it¡¯s complicated,¡± I said. ¡°The portals still have some distance limitations via scaling cost with distance, enough that crossing an ocean with just one isn¡¯t really feasible. Most likely, they¡¯ve established a chain of islands to hop across. They can still move quickly, but it will cost them an incredible amount of mana.¡±


    ¡°That hasn¡¯t much slowed you down,¡± Querit pointed out.


    ¡°I¡¯ve seen the teleportation platform they installed in their new base. Trust me, it¡¯s not efficient at all. If that¡¯s what they¡¯re using, it¡¯s a considerable expense to move someone back and forth.¡±


    ¡°But not impossible.¡±


    ¡°No,¡± I agreed. ¡°I¡¯m sure they won¡¯t give up if the agents they have here already go missing, but we shouldn¡¯t expect a flood of stage five and six mages to come out of nowhere.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re talking like they¡¯re enemies, but is that really true?¡± Grandfather asked. ¡°They¡¯ve been a bit pushy and asked a lot of questions, but really, that¡¯s not that unusual behavior for anyone who¡¯s considering approaching an unknown to form an alliance. It¡¯s just smart to know as much as possible before trying to make a pact with a stranger.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s why I¡¯m not eliminating them outright,¡± I said. ¡°I don¡¯t like how they¡¯ve behaved, but I understand it. My concern is that they might threaten my allies.¡±


    Of course, I really meant ¡®family¡¯ when I said that. While I would be upset of the Order were to attack Eyrie Peak or Hyago¡¯s fledgling forest, if they attacked my parents or siblings, I¡¯d kill them all instantly, then I¡¯d trace their teleportation platforms back piece by piece until I found their base on Jeshaem and razed it to the ground.


    ¡°So, for now, you are keeping an eye on them and waiting for them to approach you with whatever offer they come up with?¡± Querit asked. ¡°I thought you were going to be the one to offer them a deal when they made contact again.¡±


    ¡°I reconsidered once I learned they were talking to everyone but me. It¡¯s obvious they¡¯re not here to deal in good faith. If they remain harmless, then I¡¯ll treat them that way. If they attempt to force my hand, they¡¯ll suffer the consequences. I¡¯m convinced at this point that they pose no threat to me, personally, so I¡¯m taking steps to mitigate their ability to do damage to anyone else I care about.¡±


    Our conversation eventually turned from ethical considerations¡ªof which I had none¡ªto the matter of what to do if the Order attacked Eyrie Peak, and finally to what Grandfather had wanted prior to the Order showing up.


    ¡°Your platform guard mentioned some place called Third Peak,¡± I said.


    ¡°Ah, yes. That¡­ is not a place you¡¯ll likely ever see. It¡¯s something of a brakvaw holy place, our homeland,¡± the old grayfeather explained. ¡°But it does concern that, yes. I realize how unreasonable it is to ask for your help, but¡­¡±


    ¡°You want some sort of large-scale magic there, something permanent, and aren¡¯t sure how to go about setting it up,¡± I surmised. ¡°And since your elder council doesn¡¯t want me setting foot there, you¡¯re hoping I can coach you through the process without ever actually doing any of the work myself.¡±


    Grandfather at least had the grace to look embarrassed about the situation. ¡°The council and I are in agreement on that,¡± he said. ¡°I consider you a friend, Keiran, but this is a place that is for brakvaw alone. It is the cradle of our civilization, lost centuries back when the waypoints broke. Only I knew the way home without them, but I could never leave my eyrie before, and the world has changed too much for others to follow the directions I tried to give.¡±


    I didn¡¯t miss Querit¡¯s scowl at Grandfather¡¯s use of the term ¡®friend.¡¯ Unlike others I¡¯d been dealing with lately, the golem wasn¡¯t good at hiding his emotions. Then again, he wasn¡¯t exactly trying. I knew he was upset with me. Even if I¡¯d been blind, I still would have known. Querit wasn¡¯t the type to hide what he was thinking.


    I¡¯d deal with that later. A bit of time for him to cool off would do us both good. When he was ready, we could talk about it. And if he never reached that point, well, it would be a loss to see him go. He was a capable research assistant.


    And that was all. I frowned to myself. That was all, right? I¡¯d had plenty of acquaintances come and go, some I would even call friends. One more relationship falling to the inexorable march of time was no great loss.


    I shook those thoughts out of my head and focused on Grandfather again. ¡°Let me guess. You want something to fly in the air. Is it another graveyard?¡±


    ¡°No, no. I¡¯m afraid you¡¯re thinking too small. We want to raise all of Third Peak at minimum. If possible, the entire thing.¡±


    ¡°The¡­ what thing?¡± I asked slowly. I had to be misunderstanding him, here.


    ¡°All four peaks, and the valleys between them,¡± Grandfather said. ¡°The entire brakvaw homeland, back into the sky.¡±


    ¡°Wait, you want an entire flying mountain?¡± I gaped at him. ¡°Wait. What do you mean ¡®back into the sky?¡¯¡±


    ¡°Oh, yes. Back when I was fresh out of the egg, our home soared through the clouds.¡±


    ¡°You want to not only raise an entire mountain off the ground, you want to be able to move it around?¡±


    Apparently Querit hadn¡¯t known the extent of Grandfather¡¯s ambitions, either. He was staring at him in mute astonishment, a look I was sure was mirrored on my own face for just a moment.


    ¡°That¡¯s completely crazy,¡± I told him.

 Book 5, Chapter 30

    ¡°That¡¯s totally awesome,¡± Senica said.


    ¡°No, it¡¯s not.¡±


    We were sitting around the table while I updated my family on what I¡¯d learned about this potential threat and what they should keep a look out for. I no longer had any doubt in my mind that the location they¡¯d chosen for their hidden base was a coincidence, not after learning exactly how deeply into my life Bakir had probed. The fact that he hadn¡¯t spoken to my family yet just meant he was smart enough not to test me.


    The conversation had naturally shifted from there into the revelation of what Grandfather wanted my assistance with, something that was theoretically possible but outrageously wasteful. Even if I¡¯d been onboard with the idea, not being allowed onsite essentially made it a non-starter.


    Senica was dazzled by the possibility, however. ¡°It absolutely is. Can you imagine it? Our whole town could fly through the air. We could just¡­ go somewhere, fields and houses and everything. You could have your own mobile flying fortress? How do you not want that?¡±


    ¡°The amount of mana you¡¯d need is mind-boggling, for one thing. Even as efficient as I am, that would still be the work of decades.¡±


    ¡°But you have lossless casting, so once it¡¯s done, it¡¯s done,¡± she said.


    ¡°No, of course not. There would still be maintenance costs. They¡¯d be a bare fraction of what it would be otherwise, but your hypothetical flying town still wouldn¡¯t just float up there forever on its own.¡±


    ¡°Not now, maybe, but isn¡¯t someone supposed to fix the world and make it rain mana again?¡±


    I rolled my eyes. ¡°It¡¯s not rain, it¡¯s¡ªyou know what, never mind. Yes, you could theoretically enchant a few square miles of land and uplift it into the sky if you had enough mana, and yes, if you regularly cycled it through mana-dense environments, it could probably absorb what it needed quickly enough to keep from crashing, but that still ignores all sorts of logistics problems like getting people to and from it, not to mention how vulnerable the whole thing would be to tampering.¡±


    ¡°But it¡¯s possible,¡± she said, jabbing a finger at me. ¡°So I¡¯m right. It¡¯s totally awesome.¡±


    ¡°Ah-sum!¡± Nailu gurgled from Senica¡¯s lap. He even threw his little hands up in excitement with her.


    ¡°Fine. Sure. It¡¯s a fun and entirely impractical idea,¡± I said while doing my best not to glare at my parents, both of whom were trying and failing to smother their laughter in the background. ¡°It¡¯s irrelevant, either way. The brakvaw don¡¯t want me to physically go there, so even if I had all the time and mana in the world, I couldn¡¯t help them.¡±


    ¡°Then why did Grandfather want to talk to you?¡± Father asked.


    ¡°Mostly to consult on adapting their current techniques to such a large land mass, and to confirm that their understanding of how to make it move was correct.¡±


    ¡°And¡­ was it?¡± Mother chimed in.


    I shrugged. ¡°Who knows for sure? In theory, it works, but things have a way of breaking down when you get into numbers that size, not to mention we didn¡¯t even get into how they¡¯re going to separate an entire mountain from the range. How do you pull a tooth from the planet? The whole project sounds like a waste of time to me.¡±


    Then again, Ammun¡¯s tower was built among a similar scale. It practically was a mountain, one whose roots literally went down to the core of the world and whose peak was lost beyond the clouds. It had sustained itself somehow, doubtless through a great deal of mana reserves to see it through the breaking of the world and then by monopolizing every last scrap of mana the crippled core could produce for centuries after.


    If Grandfather wanted to waste the next century of his life pursuing this project, I wished him all the best with it. Maybe he¡¯d even surprise me and succeed, though even if he managed to get a mountain up in the air, it¡¯d be terribly vulnerable to the magic being ripped out of it, sending everything crashing back down and likely killing anyone still on at the time of impact.


    I supposed it¡¯d be safer for brakvaw, since they could fly independently, but I still couldn¡¯t fathom the purpose. It was a vanity project, unless there was something I was missing. There might be a real reason Grandfather didn¡¯t want me near Third Peak, not just some cultural and religious thing.


    I dismissed that thought with a mental sigh. I didn¡¯t have time to investigate this. Hell, I didn¡¯t even know where Third Peak was, let alone what single thing inside an entire mountain might be of enough interest to me personally that my ally didn¡¯t want me to find out about it. It might not exist at all, and I had real problems to deal with now, anyway.Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.


    ¡°I need to get back to work,¡± I said as I pushed my chair from the table and stood up. ¡°Remember, if anyone shows up asking questions about me, you immediately tell me, then threaten them with my name. If that doesn¡¯t get them to leave you alone, I will show up and make them regret ever being born.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s¡­ a little extreme, don¡¯t you think?¡± Father asked.


    ¡°Not if it keeps you alive,¡± I said shortly. ¡°This is a compromise between leaving you vulnerable to my enemies and spiriting you away to my demesne where you¡¯ll be safe.¡±


    If it had been anyone else, I wouldn¡¯t have given them the choice. They could stay where I could protect them until the threat was neutralized. Caring about people made it so much harder to do the logical thing when they were opposed to the actions that would keep them safe.


    ¡°And we appreciate you resisting your impulse to kidnap us, but I still think you¡¯re being overly paranoid.¡±


    I leveled a glare at my father and said, ¡°Just, please keep the damn transmission stone on you. Do not hesitate. I want to hear your voice in my head if anyone starts asking about me, even if it¡¯s someone you know. It could be a hostile archmage in disguise, using illusions or manipulating your mind with enchantments. I would rather get a thousand false flags a day than let one of them sink their claws into you.¡±


    ¡°Alright, alright.¡± Father raised his hands in surrender. ¡°I promise, I always have it in my pocket anyway. We won¡¯t forget, and we¡¯ll be careful.¡±


    ¡°Good. Thank you. Now, I need to get going. There are a few other people I have to check up on.¡±


    ¡°Uh, Gravin, before you go,¡± Senica said, ¡°I kind of need your help with something.¡±


    ¡°This really isn¡¯t a good time,¡± I said.


    ¡°I know! I do, really, but, I think this is also important and it might be kind of time sensitive.¡±


    It was obvious Mother and Father had no idea what she was talking about from the looks on their faces. So, it was either extremely embarrassing, or it was something she knew better than to do and that she¡¯d be facing punishment for. But if she was speaking up now, that meant it had turned dangerous.


    I narrowed me eyes and looked her over. ¡°What did you do?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Just a bit of alchemy. It was harmless, I swear. At least, it was supposed to be.¡±


    ¡°Oh, no,¡± Mother said.


    ¡°Look, it¡¯s probably not a big deal to fix. I just don¡¯t know how. All I need you to do is walk me through the steps and I¡¯ll take care of it from there?¡±


    ¡°What did you do?¡± I asked again.


    ¡°I, uh, maybe sort of used one of your recipes.¡±


    ¡°On yourself?¡± I demanded, my voice sharper than I¡¯d intended.


    ¡°Well, yes.¡±


    ¡°Senica, stop hedging and spit it out.¡±


    She cleared her throat and shot a glance over her shoulder at our parents. Apparently, not liking what she saw, she said in a small voice, ¡°I made my own ointment of aging.¡±


    I should have seen that coming. She¡¯d tried to steal mine a few times back when I was still accelerating my age to adulthood so that I could advance my full-sized core and not stunt my magical growth. The difference was that I was an accomplished alchemist. I knew how to make the ointment. I knew the side effects. I knew how to mitigate them.


    I wasn¡¯t even sure Senica had made the ointment properly, so it was impossible to say what it had done to her. Even if she had, she was fourteen years old, and the hormonal teenage years were the absolute worst ones to try to skim through at high speed. It might actually be worse for her if she¡¯d gotten it right than if she¡¯d made a defective product.


    ¡°How long have you been using it?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Three months or so.¡±


    ¡°Senica, why?¡± Mother demanded.


    ¡°Because she wants to lock her core in at its maximum size so she can advance to stage three,¡± I answered for her. ¡°The same reason I did it, except that I knew what to do when it started messing with my body through puberty.¡±


    ¡°Uh¡­ Yeah, things are, um, they¡¯re a bit out of sorts. We can fix that, right?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know,¡± I told my sister. ¡°It depends on what exactly you made and what effects it had on you. Do you have any left?¡±


    ¡°In my room.¡±


    ¡°Good. Go get it, then you¡¯re coming back to the lab with me to figure out if it¡¯s actually ointment of aging and deal with the side effects.¡±


    She handed off our little brother to Mother and raced out of the room. ¡°Ancestors save that foolish little girl,¡± Mother muttered. ¡°Sometimes I wonder if our lives really are better with all this magic in them.¡±


    ¡°I think we all know the answer to that,¡± Father replied. ¡°The problems are different, and sometimes they¡¯re much bigger than anything we¡¯d ever have dealt with before, but look at our home. Nailu is never going to know what a lean off-season feels like. He¡¯s never going to have to ration food. If he decides to fight monsters, it¡¯ll probably be from a hundred feet in the air while he sets them on fire with his mind.¡±


    ¡°I know,¡± Mother said with a sad little sigh. ¡°I do, really. And our lives are so much better in so many ways, but still, I was never worried about being taken by an angry archmage, or about a giant dead dragon attacking us, or chasing my husband through the desert after he¡¯d been put in an enchanted slumber and tossed in the back of a wagon.¡±


    I knew Mother wasn¡¯t saying any of that to hurt me, but the truth of it was that, in one form or another, all of that was my fault. If I¡¯d just stayed plain, ordinary Gravin, the Wolf Pack would still control Derro and all the tiny villages of the island, Ammun would still be sleeping, locked away under his tower, and this new group of mages would never have come here.


    ¡°Well, I think it was worth it,¡± I said.


    ¡°Oh! Gravin, I didn¡¯t mean¡ª¡±


    ¡°I know. I¡¯m sorry my troubles keep finding you.¡±


    Before that conversation could go any further, Senica came back out of her room with a small clay pot. ¡°Here it is,¡± she said, oblivious to what she¡¯d missed.


    I took the pot from her and looked inside. ¡°Why is this orange?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Well, I had to make a few substitutions, but I¡¯m sure I factored everything right.¡±


    Of course that was what she¡¯d done. Senica wasn¡¯t terrible at alchemy, but she was no master. Apparently, she¡¯d learned just enough to get her in trouble when I wasn¡¯t looking. I put the lid back on the pot and tossed it into my storage space, then pointed toward my room and the teleportation platform stashed in there.


    ¡°Okay, well, we¡¯ll figure that out, too. Come on, let¡¯s get going. The sooner I know exactly what¡¯s in this, the better.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 31

    Surprisingly, the ointment of aging was properly made. I hadn¡¯t given Senica enough credit for her work, but she¡¯d done it all perfectly. Even substituting a few reagents for things she could actually get her hands on had been done flawlessly.


    ¡°The good news is that your only mistake was using it now,¡± I said. ¡°You¡¯ve thrown your body¡¯s chemistry out of order, but that¡¯s easy enough to fix if you know how. Though, it¡¯ll be a bit harder since I¡¯ll have to do it for you. You¡¯re going to need me to adjust things every few days for the next few weeks until the ointment¡¯s effect is completely out of you.¡±


    ¡°What if we didn¡¯t stop the treatments?¡± Senica asked.


    ¡°Then you¡¯d need me to keep manually adjusting your body until you¡¯re an adult.¡±


    ¡°Let¡¯s do that.¡±


    ¡°No, for a few reasons. First of all, Mother and Father will never agree to this. Second, I¡¯m too busy. Third, enjoy the last few years of your childhood before you have no choice but to deal with being an adult.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m basically already an adult,¡± she argued. ¡°What¡¯s the difference between now and then? A few inches of height and maybe my boobs get bigger? Why do I need our parents¡¯ permission, anyway? And if you¡¯re so busy, just tell me how to do it myself.¡±


    There was some truth to that. Though Senica was not legally an adult as far as what passed for laws around here were concerned, she was a mage proficient enough in all disciplines of magic to have graduated from just about any magic academy I could think of off the top of my head. She wouldn¡¯t be top of her class or anything, but that was a lack of resources, not ability.


    ¡°I¡¯ll make you a deal,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯ll give you the spells that regulate your body when adjusting your age to keep it from becoming unbalanced. If you can learn them yourself and successfully manage the side effects of the ointment, I¡¯ll back up your argument when you try to convince our parents that you should be allowed to do this.¡±


    Left unsaid was that even if they denied Senica¡¯s demand, she already knew how to make the ointment and would know the magic required to use it safely. She could just go ahead and age herself up anyway. My thinking was very simple here. She was going to do it whether anyone else wanted her to or not. If that was the case, at least she¡¯d be able to use the ointment without making herself sick.


    It wasn¡¯t like there were a lot of good options. There was no way I could harvest every reagent near New Alkerist to prevent Senica from making more of the ointment. Imprisoning her was a laughably bad idea. Using mind magic to rip the knowledge of how to perform the alchemy out of her head was possible, but came with a list of dangerous side effects even when performed by a master. And besides, I wouldn¡¯t do that kind of long-term memory editing to someone I hated and wanted to see dead, let alone to my own sister.


    Which just left finding a way to motivate her to learn how to do it right. It wouldn¡¯t be the end of the world for her to skip three or four years, though I was sure our parents would be vehemently against the idea. Their reaction to my own accelerated aging was all the proof I needed there. But I suspected that, unless something went terribly wrong, Senica had a good thousand years or so of life in her.


    I was less concerned about her wasting a few years and more about her recklessly wielding the power a stage three or four core granted her. Fortunately, at that point, it was mostly an enhancement to how much mana she could hold and how quickly she could replace it. It wasn¡¯t until stage five that things started to get a little weird, so it was more a matter of how much faster she¡¯d be able to get herself into trouble for the time being.


    It didn¡¯t take Senica long to reach a decision. ¡°Deal,¡± she said. ¡°What do I need to know?¡±


    ¡°This is a type of healing magic, which is a cross between conjuration and transmutation. In this case, we¡¯ll be replacing the conjuration elements with invocations since you¡¯ll be performing this on yourself. You will, of course, need some diagnostic spells so that you know what you¡¯re doing,¡± I began, ignoring her groan.


    ¡°Why is it always divinations with you?¡± she grumbled.


    ¡°Because knowledge is the foundation of everything else,¡± I said. ¡°Why do you always complain so much? We both know you¡¯re going to work hard and master these spells.¡±


    ¡°I like to complain. It¡¯s a hobby.¡±


    ¡°You need better hobbies. Now, let¡¯s start with identifying the issue¡­¡±


    * * *


    The fact of the matter was that I did not have the time I needed to manually teach Senica all of the spells she¡¯d need for this, but I had prepared a library of books for her future learning a few years back. I gave her a basic overview of the process, produced the volumes that had what she needed to learn, then set her loose to practice using the immense amount of mana available inside my demesne.Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.


    I¡¯d check in on her when I had some free time, but other than briefly contacting Father to let him know that Senica would be here for a few days to learn everything she needed to know to fix the problems she¡¯d accidentally created in her body, I had to turn my attention back to other projects. Ammun¡¯s tower still hadn¡¯t collapsed yet, and if it didn¡¯t start showing signs soon, I¡¯d need to investigate that. Before that, I needed to deal with this annoying cabal of pretend archmages.


    With that in mind, I reached out to the gestalt to get caught up on what these new troublemakers had been spending their time on. I was hopeful that they¡¯d be minor nuisances and not real threats, but I¡¯d gotten the impression that they were used to getting what they wanted with no regards to the collateral damage they inflicted in the process. It was an attitude I was intimately familiar with myself, after all.


    ¡®Have you discovered anything about their plans?¡¯ I telepathically projected to the gestalt.


    ¡®Nothing you did not already expect,¡¯ came the oddly echoing answer. ¡®They are primarily interested in testing you to confirm your capabilities and extracting as much knowledge as possible from you. They have spoken very little on the topic of what exactly they plan to bring to the bargaining table.¡¯


    ¡®Figures. All three of them are currently in their new base?¡¯


    ¡®They are.¡¯


    ¡®And you haven¡¯t noticed anyone else working with them, no fourth archmage in an independent location?¡¯


    ¡®Not on the island, no,¡¯ the gestalt sent. ¡®But we believe we may have discovered the team of six in the Ralvost area you¡¯ve asked us to keep an eye on.¡¯


    That wasn¡¯t really a surprise. Bakir had told me in our first meeting that they were investigating Ammun¡¯s reemergence. That had been the primary reason I¡¯d cooperated with him, hoping that I could point some more pressure in the old lich¡¯s direction when he finally popped back up.


    ¡®Any idea what they¡¯re working on over there?¡¯ I asked.


    ¡®They seem to have made contact with several of the leaders of the army you chased back into the tower. We were not able to breach the scrying wards they placed around the meeting to verify the contents of their discussions, but all parties left peacefully. Two of the archmages accompanied the army back to the tower itself.¡¯


    That wasn¡¯t necessarily a problem, but it wasn¡¯t a good sign. If the Global Order of the Arcane was more interested in advancing its power than it was in preventing Ammun from causing more problems, I could easily find myself facing a united front of both organizations. It might be better to start killing them now while they were still easy pickings.


    On the other hand, politics were a thing that existed. If an organization had fifty members, there would be at least two factions, probably more. It was entirely possible that the archmages here were unaware of what their colleagues were doing over by Ammun¡¯s tower, which was something else I needed to look into now. My immediate guess was that they¡¯d been contracted to stabilize the tower before it collapsed, which I doubted they¡¯d be able to manage.


    ¡®Have the ones by the tower had any contact with the local group?¡¯ I asked.


    ¡®Nothing that we have noted.¡¯


    ¡®And it¡¯s not likely that they can communicate through pure telepathy from that sort of distance, not even with an amplifier.¡¯


    ¡®It is not impossible,¡¯ the gestalt argued. ¡®But we are extremely sensitive to mental magic. It is unlikely such communication would have escaped our notice if it existed.¡¯


    ¡®Alright. Please continue to watch both groups and let me know if anything develops. I don¡¯t want to be surprised by their next move, especially as it might threaten my allies.¡¯


    ¡®Do not concern yourself. You will know when the situation changes the instant we do,¡¯ the gestalt assured me. We cut the connection, leaving me to ponder what to do about the trio staying on the island.


    There weren¡¯t enough puzzle pieces in front of me to put together a solution to this particular problem yet. I needed to know what their goals were and if they could be reasoned with, or if they were going to sell their services to the remnants of Ammun¡¯s legion. I didn¡¯t blame them for exploring their options, but that didn¡¯t mean I¡¯d just let them throw in with my enemies.


    I also needed to find out more about their cabal¡¯s political structure. Were the archmages in Ralvost working independently from the rest of them, or were the ones here the odd ones out? It was also possible that they were unified in purpose and trying to play both sides. If I could figure that out, it would be a lot easier to decide on the correct course of action.


    But how to do that?


    It was like I¡¯d told Senica. Knowledge was the foundation, and magic was my tool of choice. If I didn¡¯t have enough knowledge to make a decision, I knew how to get more. I was already surveilling Bakir¡¯s group through the gestalt, and they were doing their best to keep an eye on the Ralvost team as well. That left one other known group to look into: the rest of the Global Order off-continent.


    That would normally be a prohibitive amount of distance, but as luck would have it, I¡¯d come into possession of the ultra-long-range teleportation and scrying magic an ancient cabal had used to reach a moon a thousand years ago. It wouldn¡¯t be a trivial matter to modify it to scry the other side of the world, but it was within my capabilities.


    Narrowing my target to a single continent wasn¡¯t nearly precise enough, but I knew someone who could point me in the right direction. The only question was how to get the information out of him. Perhaps it was time to visit the uninvited spies living on my island again.


    It might be better to speak to them individually, though. Nevlac was too hostile to be amicable to sharing the information I needed, and Adilar was too clever. Bakir was their weak link, but that was relative. He was still an accomplished mage, even if I didn¡¯t think the title of archmage should really apply to any of them.


    That having been said, I was reasonably certain I could separate him from the other two. It would require a bit of preparation, and I would need to ensure Senica was far away from my demesne just in case anything went wrong, but the beginnings of a plan were taking shape in my mind.

 Book 5, Chapter 32

    It required some patience to get the opening I was searching for. The Order¡¯s new base of operations on the island was too well warded for me to casually enact my plan at my leisure, but I knew they weren¡¯t going to sit in there forever. Sooner or later, they¡¯d have to leave the safety of their underground nest, and then we¡¯d see how good their portable defenses were.


    My bet was on ¡®not very.¡¯


    In the meantime, I got everything set up and turned to testing Senica¡¯s progress on the spells she needed to learn. She was making good progress, already having mastered the first three diagnostic spells and expanding her basic repertoire of healing magic greatly. I had full confidence in her ability to manage the side effects of the ointment herself, though I would have preferred she not use quite so much mana practicing them. Her lossless casting still needed a lot of work.


    Querit, unsurprisingly, did not show back up. Considering he was the one who¡¯d been trying to push me into doing something I didn¡¯t want to do, I wasn¡¯t sure why he was so mad. I supposed he¡¯d either get over it, or I¡¯d be out a friend. Maybe I¡¯d feel bad about that later, but right now, I was too busy to play those kinds of games. I could use his help, but I wasn¡¯t going to hunt him down and force a resolution to this conflict.


    As long as he didn¡¯t join a hostile faction, I was content to leave him be. And I trusted him not to actively work against me, even if we weren¡¯t really on speaking terms at the moment. That golem was hard to keep tabs on with his ability to take on any form he wanted without resorting to illusion magic, but the gestalt was truly a miracle worker in the divination department. They were keeping a track of a great number of things for me, so many that I suspected I¡¯d be faced with another price increase to continue retaining their services soon.


    Well, that was only fair. It would be so much harder to keep track of everything I had the gestalt watching on my own, and it was almost certain that I¡¯d be missing things that simple wards couldn¡¯t discern were worthy of my attention. That marvelous entity deserved far more than I¡¯d offered them already, if only I had time to make whatever they decided they wanted next.


    There was one problem, as I discovered when I reached out to the gestalt for an update on the trio of Order mages we were spying on a few days later. ¡®The vessels we left there are beginning to die,¡¯ the gestalt told me. ¡®There is no food to sustain them.¡¯


    ¡®Nothing at all? The archmages are still human. They must be eating something.¡¯


    ¡®They¡¯re storing their rations in phantom spaces,¡¯ the gestalt explained.


    ¡®Which means you haven¡¯t been able to raid the larder like we¡¯d planned. Damn, that¡¯s an unfortunate complication.¡¯


    I didn¡¯t waste time commiserating on the loss of lives. We both knew a few hundred ants meant nothing to the colony. They were there to serve a purpose, and if they all perished in pursuit of that goal, that was an acceptable loss. Unfortunately, that purpose hadn¡¯t been fulfilled. I¡¯d learned a bit about the trio themselves, enough to reinforce my initial impressions of them, but it was vanishingly rare to find someone who conveniently explained everything an eavesdropper wanted to know in expositional dialogue.


    That meant that I¡¯d gained a lot of new puzzle pieces, but not only did I not know how they fit together, I wasn¡¯t even sure how many different puzzles they¡¯d come from. None of them had mentioned their counterparts in Ralvost, and none of them had casually rattled off the location of the Order¡¯s home base. I had crossed four or five cities I¡¯d never heard of off the list based on the context of some of their conversations, but that didn¡¯t help much to narrow things down.


    ¡®We will lose our window into their operations within the next two days, and things will become increasingly muddled as more of the vessels succumb,¡¯ the gestalt explained. ¡®If there are any final tasks to be completed, it would be best to start them immediately.¡¯


    ¡®I just need to know when Bakir leaves the safety of their base,¡¯ I replied. ¡®We can still watch for him to physically leave with some area scrying, but they¡¯ve got that teleportation platform set up in there. He could just vanish somewhere else and we¡¯d never know he left.¡¯


    ¡®Unless you can find some way to get us access to food, or arrange to send in another group of vessels, we¡¯ve reached the end of our ability to help here.¡¯


    I probably could just barge in with more ants hidden in my clothes just like last time, but walking into a potential enemy¡¯s base after they¡¯d been given a few weeks to fortify it was not a brilliant strategical maneuver. It was too bad the Order hadn¡¯t come to me in a more reasonable manner. I¡¯d been hoping to offload some of my work onto them in exchange for filling in a lot of blanks in their magical knowledge.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.


    I didn¡¯t consider myself to be a passionate teacher, but I¡¯d done it often enough over the centuries and magic of the old world had become one of my primary currencies. I had no doubt that I had plenty to offer a group of people who were all stuck at stage six or lower. It was just too hard to trust them at this point after all the snooping around and secrets, especially with another group actively talking to Ammun¡¯s generals.


    ¡®Bakir is leaving,¡¯ the gestalt said abruptly.


    I blinked. ¡®What? Right now?¡¯


    ¡®Yes.¡¯


    ¡®Huh. That¡¯s¡­ surprisingly good timing.¡¯


    ¡®We knew he was going to leave eventually,¡¯ the gestalt pointed out.


    ¡®Yeah, but still, it¡¯s a lucky break for us. I don¡¯t get those too often.¡¯


    ¡®He appears to be using the teleportation platform. We are observing the spell and tracing his destination.¡¯


    I pulled myself through my genius loci to cross my demesne in an instant and appeared in front of Senica. ¡°Hi,¡± I said. ¡°Sorry, but I¡¯ve had something come up. I need you to head back to New Alkerist for a few hours.¡±


    ¡°What?¡± was all she managed to get out before I collected the spellbooks and whisked us both to the teleportation platform.


    ¡°You¡¯re making good progress, but don¡¯t start trying to fix anything without me there to oversee it the first time. I should have this business taken care of by tonight,¡± I explained as I activated the platform. ¡°See you soon.¡±


    ¡°Gravin, wait. What¡¯s goi¡ª¡±


    Then the platform activated and spirited her away to our parents¡¯ house. I was going to get an earful about that later, I was sure, but I couldn¡¯t afford to pass up this opportunity just to appease Senica. Hopefully, she¡¯d listen to my warning and not do anything irreversible today.


    One more quick trip through my demesne brought me to the space I¡¯d prepared for this abduction. I appeared in the control room adjacent to my trap and sent to the gestalt, ¡®I¡¯m ready for Bakir.¡¯


    Immediately, they sent back a flood of information. I saw the archmage standing on what appeared to be the top of some stubby little mountain only a few hundred feet tall, barely more than a large hill. It was ringed by trees for a mile in every direction. Those gave way to a sandy beach and then to a blue ocean that stretched past the horizon.


    It looked like Bakir was heading back home for some reason, which wasn¡¯t ideal to my plans. He probably wasn¡¯t out of my range just yet, but if he got another teleport off, he would be. I had to move fast if I wanted to catch him.


    Fortunately, I¡¯d long since prepared my plan. The only part I was missing was an unguarded target, and I could already tell just from the gestalt¡¯s senses that Bakir¡¯s personal wards were not up to the task of stopping me. With a grim smile, I mentally activated my summoning ritual.


    In my mind, I saw Bakir start in surprise and mana flood out of him as he attempted to block the tendrils of magic seeking to pluck him from his perch and drag him through reality to the box I¡¯d prepared for him. Though I did not view him as a real archmage, he was more than capable of defending himself.


    I would have given him a passing grade if he were a student fending off a normal mage¡¯s summoning magic. Against even a master mage, he likely would have been successful. His techniques were refined and controlled, obviously something he¡¯d spent many hours practicing. He recognized the danger immediately and didn¡¯t hesitate to fight back.


    Against me, he never stood a chance.


    Three seconds after the summoning ritual started, Bakir was standing in the middle of a large, empty room made of stone and buried in the mountain that made up my demesne¡¯s northern slope. There were no exits and no light, not that those would hold Bakir in place on their own. For that, I¡¯d carved additional runes into the outside of the box I¡¯d placed my victim in. Those triggered as soon as he appeared, and a hailstorm of mana puncture spells filled the room.


    As expected, Bakir¡¯s personal wards stopped each and every one of them from getting through. I¡¯d been hoping the sheer volume would overwhelm his defenses, but I¡¯d probably already used up my entire allotment of luck for the year just getting him into the room.


    Waves of disorientation blasted Bakir in succession, never letting up the pressure on his wards. At the same time, a mana draining field attacked the man¡¯s defenses. If it worked, his defenses would be bled dry and him immediately thereafter.


    My assault came at Bakir in waves, already set in place long before he was summoned. He resisted the first wave, and the second, and third. Somewhere around the ninth of my thirty-five prepared attacks, his wards buckled completely and I started draining his mana core.


    ¡°I surrender,¡± Bakir called out. ¡°Your trap was well-executed and I am overwhelmed.¡±


    He didn¡¯t sound worried, which I didn¡¯t like. Frowning, I observed him through the divinations built into the walls of the cage as his mana drained away to nothing. That didn¡¯t make him harmless, of course. There was no way he didn¡¯t have at least one mana crystal hidden somewhere on him, and if he¡¯d shielded it properly, I wouldn¡¯t be able to tell unless I physically found it.


    Bakir couldn¡¯t reach into a phantom space without any mana of his own, so I didn¡¯t need to worry about him pulling any surprises out of there on the off-chance he had access to one I¡¯d missed. That didn¡¯t eliminate anything he was already carrying on his person, but my divinations would find that now that the wards weren¡¯t blocking them.


    Surprisingly, he pulled a hunk of crystal out of his pocket and held it up between two fingers. It was an inch long, deep red with swirls of black through it, and cut with sharp facets into a cube. ¡°I believe you¡¯d like me to relinquish this to your custody, Archmage Keiran?¡±


    ¡°No points for clever deductions,¡± I said.


    ¡°This was truly unnecessary if you merely wished to speak,¡± Bakir announced to the empty room. ¡°But then, I don¡¯t suppose you wish to speak. If you did, you would have spoken instead of doing all this.¡±


    ¡°Your cabal hasn¡¯t given me much reason to trust you, but no, I¡¯m not planning to kill you if you don¡¯t give me a reason to. I simple need some answers to a few questions.¡±


    I telekinetically plucked the mana crystal from Bakir¡¯s grasp and pulled it away from him. He watched it disappear with a frown, then sighed. ¡°Very well. What can I tell you that will help clear up this misunderstanding?¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 33

    Surrendering his mana crystal voluntarily actually made me even more suspicious of Bakir, so I took the time to make sure I had him properly secured. There was no real way to keep him long-term, not without a massive expenditure of my own mana to maintain a draining field on him at all times. Even if I were willing to invest that much into Bakir¡¯s capture, I¡¯d still need to keep an eye on him. Draining fields could be resisted, and it wouldn¡¯t take much mana for someone at Bakir¡¯s level of skill to attack the delicate magical structures keeping him prisoner.


    No, the second I took my eyes off him, he¡¯d start working on breaking free. Maybe I could hold him if I wanted to check on his progress and refresh everything every half an hour or so for the rest of my life, but since that was obviously infeasible, that meant this meeting was either going to end with me setting him free or me killing him.


    Bakir had to know that, and yet he was remarkably calm. Either he had a trick in reserve that he thought I wouldn¡¯t find, or he was confident in the aegis of the Global Order¡¯s reputation to keep him safe. If it was the latter, he was making a mistake. So far, his cabal had done nothing to endear me to them and, while a few extra helping hands would make my life easier, I didn¡¯t have any real need of their services.


    I suspected they were operating under an inflated impression of their own importance, given that they¡¯d reached what was likely the pinnacle of magic by today¡¯s standards. That struck me as remarkably foolish, considering I¡¯d found ample evidence of magic on the scale I was used to. History hadn¡¯t been erased, not completely, and that meant they had to know what the archmages of the last era had been capable of.


    Perhaps they simply thought that the tales were exaggerated, or that I¡¯d require an entire cabal of my own to pull off the magic described in those stories. If so, they were in for a rude awakening once I found the rest of them.


    I completed my investigation of Bakir¡¯s current capabilities and determined that, in addition to the mana crystal he¡¯d willingly surrendered, he had a pair of metal bracers hidden under his sleeves inscribed with runes that would shroud him in a mana barrier. They only worked at his direct command, and needed to be supplied with mana, so they did nothing for him in his current situation.


    There was a small metal rod embedded in his leg under his skin, about the length of my pinky and half as thick. That was probably the source of Bakir¡¯s confidence. It was an implanted emergency escape device, just waiting on him to trigger it to flee. My divinations swept over the enchantment, analyzing its structure and confirming that it wouldn¡¯t be able to bypass my anti-teleportation wards. I was tempted to break it just to be certain, but on the off chance I could salvage some sort of working relationship with his cabal, I decided to leave it in place.


    I added my own tracking enchantment to it, of course. If he somehow did manage to flee, I might as well follow him back to wherever it took him. There was every possibility that he¡¯d run straight toward where I wanted to go. I might even let him escape on purpose if it proved to be too difficult to get answers out of him.


    There were a few other pieces on him, but nothing that was going to help him out right now. Everything either needed mana injected into the inscriptions, of which he currently had none, or were enchantments entirely unrelated to combat. Finally satisfied that Bakir was as safely contained as it was possible to make him, I asked my first question.


    ¡°The Global Order of the Arcane is full of mages at stages five and six, correct?¡±


    ¡°For the most part,¡± he said smoothly. ¡°Some of our initiates and a few legacy members are still at stage four. We¡¯ve got a prodigy student who¡¯s only at stage three, but he¡¯s barely into his thirties, so exceptions were made to nurture such a promising talent.¡±


    ¡°How impressive,¡± I said dryly. Admittedly, it¡¯d taken me far longer to reach stage three in my last life, but I hadn¡¯t had the tutors or resources of a powerful lineage backing me.


    If I hadn¡¯t been watching Bakir so closely, I might have missed that single instant where the corners of his mouth started to curl into a frown before he mastered his expression. ¡°If I might inquire, why the curiosity? Are you interested in joining the Order?¡±


    ¡°No, I¡¯m determining how useful your cabal might be to me.¡±


    Left unsaid was, ¡®Or how much of a threat they are.¡¯ I had no doubt Bakir caught the subtext, though.


    ¡°There are better ways to get our attention. I already came to talk to you once. You know where we¡¯ve set up locally. Why summon me into this prison and drain my mana? I¡¯ll be expecting that back, by the way.¡±


    ¡°Your cabal is based in Jeshaem, you said. Where at?¡± I asked, ignoring Bakir¡¯s question.


    ¡°We have offices in several large cities, including¡ª¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t care about your public-facing buildings. Where do the senior members actually live? Where do they do their experiments? Where do they keep their vaults? If I want to see whoever¡¯s in charge, where do I go?¡±Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.


    ¡°You can¡¯t,¡± Bakir said. ¡°You see the Elder Council if and when they decide they want to see you, not the other way around.¡±


    Why did every group need an Elder Council? That hadn¡¯t been a thing been in my day. The mages who ruled did it with absolute power. They had subordinates, not colleagues. Maybe it was a matter of relative strength, of needing to share what little mana was still available in order to accomplish their goals.


    I certainly had no plans on elevating a handful of mages up to be my equal so that I could share my authority with them, and yet I kept finding everywhere I went that the power structure included a few individuals at the same level. Usually there was one person who was the clear leader, but they weren¡¯t typically so much stronger that they had unquestioned power over the rest.


    Grandfather had an Elder Council. They¡¯d triggered a minor civil war just a few years back. The Wolf Pack had used a similar structure, led by Monarch, but with Keeper, Velvet, Freak, and Weaver controlling different aspects of their cabal. The Sanctum of Light had four ruling Houses that were balanced against each other ¨C at least it had until Ammun had woken back up and assumed unilateral control.


    In my experience, cabals worked cooperatively, but maintained their own territories that might touch borders, but never overlapped. That power structure had apparently morphed into this cohabitative mess I kept finding everywhere.


    ¡°And where would your Elder Council want me to go when they decide to talk to me?¡± I asked.


    Bakir remained silent for a moment. ¡°I don¡¯t know,¡± he finally admitted. ¡°I have¡­ not had the honor of speaking to them.¡±


    The funny thing was that I believed him. He sounded genuinely embarrassed, or possibly just frustrated, that he hadn¡¯t managed to climb the ladder high enough to be granted an audience. Pathetic.


    ¡°Archmage Keiran,¡± he said suddenly. ¡°I mean no offense when I say this, but reconsider whatever this ill-conceived notion you¡¯re pursuing is. I do not doubt your great skill, but seeking a confrontation with the Order is an unwise move. Not even you can defeat more than a hundred mages of equal power.¡±


    ¡°Equal power?¡± I asked with a laugh. ¡°Do you really believe that?¡±


    ¡°You cannot bluff me in this regard,¡± Bakir said. ¡°I fully believe you¡¯ve reached the apex of what¡¯s possible in this new world, but surely you realize that even with your great knowledge backing your power, a single stage six archmage cannot hope to win against such a great number arrayed against him?¡±


    That gave me pause. ¡°Why would you think¡­¡± I trailed off. Was he fishing for information about the resonance point by implying that I was stuck at stage six? I¡¯d overheard them speculating about its existence. They had to have at least an idea that I controlled it, didn¡¯t they?


    The Order needed access to my mana resonance point to advance their own cores to stage seven. With all the spying they¡¯d done, especially while I¡¯d been away, I¡¯d assumed they¡¯d managed to pierce enough of my wards to find it, that the whole reason they were bothering me was to gain access to it.


    ¡°I suppose I gave you too much credit,¡± I murmured. ¡°There I go, overestimating the magical knowledge of this new world again. You all really are just children, even the greatest of you.¡±


    ¡°Archmage Keiran?¡±


    Either this was some sort of bluff to try to get me to brag and confirm the existence of the mana resonance point, or I was vastly overestimating their resources and abilities. There was no real point in speculating, though, not when I had someone with the answers I needed at my mercy.


    ¡°Archmage Bakir,¡± I began. ¡°What is your cabal hoping to get from me?¡±


    ¡°What do you mean? We¡¯d hoped to form some sort of alliance, possibly induct you as a member of the Order if you were amicable, but that did not appear to be likely based on our previous meeting.¡±


    ¡°An alliance to what purpose?¡± I asked.


    ¡°To stop the lich lord Ammun, of course.¡±


    ¡°Oh, of course. That¡¯s why fellow members of your cabal are over in Ralvost right now making deals with the leaders of Ammun¡¯s army.¡±


    There it was again, that micro expression that he struggled to control. Bakir hadn¡¯t known about what the other members of his cabal were up to. I wondered if Adilar or Nevlac were aware, or if the Order had a few factions that hid their actions from each other.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure where you got your information from, but I can assure you that nobody wants to see Ammun in power. The world barely survived it last time,¡± Bakir said. ¡°Whatever you¡¯ve been told, if it¡¯s truly a group of archmages from the Order, they were not there to forge any sort of bargain with Ammun.¡±


    ¡°Interesting. It looks like I know more about what your cabal is up to than you do,¡± I said. ¡°That¡¯s not a good look for you.¡±


    ¡°You are mistaken,¡± my prisoner insisted.


    ¡°Am I? So there is nobody in your entire cabal who would work against someone else¡¯s interests? No divisions between members of your Elder Council? No split loyalties?¡±


    ¡°No, of course not¡­¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t sound confident.¡±


    Bakir¡¯s voice firmed. ¡°The Global Order of the Arcane is a united front. Our goal is to contain the threat Ammun represents to the entire world. My colleagues and I are here on this island for no purpose but to learn about you and to forge an alliance with the purpose of stopping the lich lord.¡±


    The sad thing was that I believed Bakir believed all of that. Whatever closed-door deals his superiors were making with each other, whatever betrayals they had planned, Bakir was low enough down the ranks that even at stage five, he was just following orders and repeating the party line.


    That kind of loyalty was commendable, at least, but his naivete wasn¡¯t good for his long-term health. Sooner or later, he¡¯d become someone¡¯s sacrificial pawn. Hell, that was basically the position he was in right now. I¡¯d been planning to kill him if I needed to.


    ¡°Can you stop him?¡± Bakir asked, interrupting my musing.


    ¡°Ammun?¡± I clarified.


    ¡°Yes. Can you defeat him if it comes down to it?¡±


    That was a complicated question. I had no idea how much stronger Ammun would be next time we fought. ¡°Maybe,¡± I said. ¡°I hope so.¡±


    ¡°Then we have the same goals.¡±


    I found myself believing his sincerity. ¡°Even if it means turning away from the Order?¡±


    ¡°They¡¯re not corrupt like you seem to believe.¡±


    ¡°What if they are?¡±


    ¡°If that were the case¡­ I know what¡¯s truly important,¡± he said.


    ¡°I¡¯d be happy to be proven wrong, but so far, the evidence doesn¡¯t point that way. So let¡¯s find out. I want to have a talk with the people in charge. How do I get to them?¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 34

    Despite Bakir¡¯s repeated proclamations that Adilar was who I needed to talk to¡ªthat the whole reason the senior archmage had come to my home was specifically to negotiate with me¡ªhe still guided me along the teleportation chains across the ocean.


    The Order had spent a considerable amount of time and effort surveying that route. They¡¯d settled on six islands anywhere from three to five hundred miles apart, determined mostly by mana density. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was an abundant amount of thriving plant life that produced excess mana. For a mage who couldn¡¯t afford to chain six teleportation spells in a row, which was most of them, the islands allowed them to skim mana from the trees to replenish themselves for the next jump.


    For us, it was merely a stretch of beautiful and varied scenery on our way to the eastern continent of Jeshaem. Unlike Olpahun, the landmass was still in one piece. It wasn¡¯t much of a surprise, considering no one had fired a mana beam from the heavens into it, nor had anyone drilled down to the core of the world and ruptured it while simultaneously destroying a moon and raining massive chunks of stone down on the continent.


    I really had gotten unlucky being reborn in the absolute deadest part of the entire planet. But I¡¯d made it work in the end, and it wouldn¡¯t have changed much in the long term either way. Besides, if I¡¯d been born elsewhere, my family would all still be unwitting mana slaves to the Wolf Pack. If nothing else, some good for the world had come out of my new life.


    The Order¡¯s teleportation platforms were even more outdated on the islands than the one I¡¯d spotted inside their base. In fact, they were the next best thing to worthless, taking so long to activate and being so inefficient that the only reason to use them at all was that they were pointed at the next stop along the chain.


    ¡°I¡¯m guessing your cabal doesn¡¯t travel across the ocean often enough to make a permanent portal worth the cost to maintain?¡± I asked as I set up to do the fourth teleport. I hadn¡¯t imagined quite this many platforms forming the chain, but apparently their teleportation spells didn¡¯t have the range I was used to. It might actually be cheaper to use a single portal, if they could do it.


    ¡°I suppose not,¡± Bakir said.


    ¡°You suppose? You don¡¯t sound sure.¡±


    ¡°Permanent portals are¡­ cost prohibitive.¡±


    ¡°Not if you make them properly,¡± I muttered to myself. Maybe that was something else that had been lost. Ammun was the only other mage I¡¯d seen use a portal.


    When we reached the last jump, I caught a whiff of mana coming from my unwilling travel companion, some sort of divination. Apparently, he¡¯d gained just enough to cast some sort of communication spell, probably up ahead to warn of our coming. ¡°Do you need to stall me for a few minutes while they get ready for us?¡± I asked casually.


    He jerked in place, an almost comical look of panic crossing his features. ¡°What? No, no. I didn¡¯t¡­ How did you¡­¡±


    I gave Bakir a few moments to pull himself together, but, as amusing as it was to watch him flail wildly, it wasn¡¯t productive, and I was already wasting enough of my time dealing with the Order. ¡°Relax. I don¡¯t care if they¡¯re aware that we¡¯re coming. In fact, it¡¯s better that way. Maybe we can get this taken care of quickly.¡±


    ¡°You are perhaps a bit too overconfident, Archmage Keiran.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s only overconfidence if I¡¯m wrong, and that doesn¡¯t happen too often.¡±


    An image of Ammun¡¯s golem beating the hell out of me while I struggled to find air to breathe up on Yulitar flashed through my mind. There had been a few occasions where I had been overconfident, but I¡¯d done a lot of prep work while I waited for him to find a way back down to the planet. Our next fight would be very different, no matter how much mana he¡¯d claimed.


    ¡°Perhaps,¡± he allowed. ¡°Still, to go against so many of equal strength alone seems foolish to me. No matter how many esoteric techniques you know that have been lost over the centuries, I cannot imagine an ending that doesn¡¯t go poorly for you.¡±


    ¡°Then you lack imagination,¡± I said bluntly. ¡°Ready?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve done my duty as well as I can in these circumstances,¡± he said.


    I finished the final teleportation and let the magic carry us away.


    * * *


    Whatever ambush Bakir might have been hoping to see¡ªand it couldn¡¯t have been much of one given how little notice he¡¯d given whoever was at the end of the last stop on the chain of platforms¡ªit failed to materialize when we reached Jeshaem. That was probably my fault, since I¡¯d altered the destination of the final teleport to be three miles north of where the last platform was located.


    ¡°Wha¡ª¡± he said, clearly confused.


    ¡°Sorry about that. It seemed easier to just avoid customs, and it¡¯s not like we¡¯re going to be here very long anyway.¡± Though I had sent some scrying spells out toward the platform¡¯s actual destination to see if I could spot a few more Order mages. So far, no one had managed to show up.Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.


    ¡°But you can¡¯t¡­ You didn¡¯t change the rune structure¡­ How?¡±


    ¡°Oh, I didn¡¯t use the platform for the last jump.¡±


    ¡°Then how did you cast the spell so quickly? It should take twenty minutes to do it manually, not to mention needing to scry out an unfamiliar destination first.¡±


    I laughed and clapped the pretend-archmage on the shoulder. ¡°You¡¯ve still got a lot to learn. Don¡¯t worry, you¡¯ll get there someday.¡±


    Bakir gave a weak laugh, but I could see the wheels turning in his head. Good. That was what I wanted. His cabal had underestimated me by a significant margin and I needed my involuntary emissary paving the way to his leadership for me. Hopefully, this would impress upon them how monumentally they¡¯d screwed up trying to spy on me while hashing out deals with my enemies.


    ¡°Now, where do we go from here?¡± I asked.


    ¡°I suppose the best place to start would be Ibasha,¡± he said slowly. ¡°Archmage Tredor frequently works out of the research center there. He¡¯s on the Elder Council. If anyone can get you directly in front of them, it¡¯s him.¡±


    ¡°Fantastic. Which way is that and how far do we need to teleport?¡±


    Bakir¡¯s mana regeneration was somewhat obscured by his core shielding, but I was sure he didn¡¯t have any sort of lossless casting technique, and unless his regeneration dwarfed mine, he¡¯d probably spent almost everything he¡¯d regained sending out that little warning. He¡¯d be helpless for the next ten or twenty minutes.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid I¡¯m not familiar enough with the local geography to just point directly toward the city from here. I would normally use a teleportation platform, and it was not inside my sphere of responsibilities to coordinate trade caravans between cities for the Order¡¯s use.¡±


    ¡°Well, I am afraid that I was dead for the whole planetary rearrangement thing, not to mention how many new kingdoms rose and fell during those thousands of years. So I¡¯m going to need you to step up and point me in the right direction here.¡±


    I lifted us both into the sky and gestured around. ¡°I¡¯m not expecting you to just pick out a city you¡¯ve never had to physically travel to, but let¡¯s get moving. We can narrow it down as we get closer.¡±


    ¡°It would be far easier to simply return to the city and use the teleportation platform,¡± Bakir argued.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure it would, and that nobody there is waiting for us to show up so they can rescue you from my clutches.¡± They still weren¡¯t. Their response time was horrible, but I didn¡¯t need Bakir making contact with them just yet.


    The other archmage gave me a tight-lipped frown. I returned the look with a bland stare.


    ¡°Has anyone ever told you that you are unnecessarily confrontational?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Not in those exact words.¡±


    ¡°Then it¡¯s good for you to hear it now,¡± Bakir told me. ¡°I apologize that we¡¯ve given you the impression that the Global Order of the Arcane is your enemy. That was not our intent. I have done my best to be reasonable while you have this¡­ Whatever it is you¡¯re doing right now. But I cannot and will not entertain these ridiculous demands further. Now, I you will return my mana crystal and release me. If you still wish to meet with those in control of the Order, we can return to the teleportation platform and I will do my best to guide you from there.¡±


    ¡°You demand, do you? And what are you going to do when I refuse, Bakir? Do you have enough mana to save yourself if I let you fall right now? Let¡¯s not forgot what position you¡¯re currently in. You showed up, uninvited, and started interrogating friends and allies of mine, looking to dig up anything you can. Members of your cabal are currently consorting with my enemies.


    ¡°So yes, the impression you¡¯ve given me is that I would be an idiot to trust you. Frankly, the only reason I¡¯m here is to eliminate a threat. Now, I think that you personally are just doing what you¡¯ve been ordered to do without any real understanding of the motivations and goals of your superiors. But make no mistake, I will crush you if you get in my way. Now, make yourself useful before I decide that I have no more use for you.


    ¡°Which. Way. To. Ibasha.¡±


    Bakir regarded me, his face pale and his hands trembling. I couldn¡¯t tell if it was fear or rage coursing through him. ¡°You are a fool, Keiran.¡±


    Then he activated that recall pin stored inside his leg. The teleportation effect took hold of him, pulling him away from me too fast for respond. It sent him fifty miles straight east, presumably landing him at ground level when he came out of the spell.


    ¡°The hard way it is,¡± I muttered as I triggered the divination I¡¯d added to the enchantment to point me in the right direction. Cooperation might have saved Bakir¡¯s life, but I didn¡¯t see him surviving this whole fiasco at this rate.


    It would take me perhaps ten minutes to fly to his new location, time enough for him to regain some mana and call for help. Perfect. Whoever showed up would lead me to the next link in the chain, and if that failed, it wasn¡¯t like my ability to track Bakir would suddenly vanish.


    I cloaked myself in invisibility and hurtled through the sky, my magic a wedge that split the air around me to increase my speed. I had to channel an aura of silence just to keep my passage from cracking like thunder, else there¡¯d be no point in keeping myself invisible, but it was hardly an issue.


    While I flew, I considered my repertoire of tracking and divining spells. I¡¯d already tagged Bakir with the needed beacon, and it would propagate to the next person to get near him. If they were as unskilled as Bakir himself, I wasn¡¯t worried about the magic being detected. But I did want to arrive in time to physically witness the arrival of whoever showed up.


    Instead, I arrived at a patch of bare rock with blood splattered all over it. The metal pin was sitting in the sun, still glistening red and wet from being dug out of Bakir¡¯s leg. Apparently, I hadn¡¯t given him enough credit for noticing my attempts at subtly weaving another enchantment into it. I really hadn¡¯t thought he¡¯d caught my meddling, but it wouldn¡¯t save him.


    Altering his emergency escape trinket had been the most blatant portion of the tracking spells I¡¯d saddled him with. And even if I hadn¡¯t, Bakir had basically no mana and had wasted valuable time carving up his leg. He wasn¡¯t limping too far from here, not without help.


    I swept the area with a simple scrying spell, one designed to home in on the beacon I¡¯d left on him. He was two miles south of me, sitting in a cave with his back to the wall while another man fiddled with a screen of brush designed to hide the entrance.


    ¡°That ought to keep us from being spotted by anyone flying overhead,¡± the man said.


    ¡°Don¡¯t be so sure,¡± Bakir told him through gritted teeth. ¡°He somehow found the evacuation enchantment and modified it to let him track where it took me. I imagine he¡¯ll find it in the next hour or so. We should go deeper before he starts getting close.¡±


    ¡°Can you keep walking?¡±


    ¡°Another minute to finish this healing spell. Those storage crystals had terrible transference rates.¡±


    That was interesting. I spun off another scrying spell and sent it deeper into the cave to see if I could find their destination while I hovered, invisible, in the sky above the entrance. One way or another, they were going to lead me to where I wanted to go.

 Book 5, Chapter 35

    Bakir and his friend retreated from the surface to the back wall of the cave, then proceeded to transmute the stone until they¡¯d burrowed through five feet of it to reach a second chamber. That was a mildly clever bit of protection, enough to turn away a casual attempt at scrying by virtue of nothing but a decently thick layer of solid rock. It wouldn¡¯t stop a divination from piercing through it, but it would hide the fact that there was anything there to scry for in the first place. It was considerably less effective when I was watching them dig their way through, of course.


    While they worked on that, I scried out the rest of the cavern. It wasn¡¯t much, just three small rooms joined together by a narrow hallway that had been cut from the stone. One room had been recently unsealed and looked to have a cache of emergency supplies, based on what was missing and the lack of dust in the air. A second room was still closed off and simply held a set of beds.


    The third room was the interesting one. It had a junky old teleportation platform, obviously aged even by the Global Order of the Arcane¡¯s standards, and a divination pillar much like the ones Ammun had been using back in his tower. It appeared to be made of glass, though reflective instead of transparent, and lacking the hundred gallons of liquid mana it would take to fill the interior.


    Everything was old and obviously hadn¡¯t been used in a long time, which made sense when I considered that there were probably thousands of caches just like this all over the continent. Most of them were never touched, as was often the case with emergency preparations. I¡¯d certainly invested heavily in contingency planning that, best case scenario, would never be needed.


    At this point, I was running out of time to make a decision. Either I recaptured Bakir, or I let him escape and followed along behind him. If I had the time to study that teleportation platform and determine how extensive the network was, it would be an easy decision. But for all I knew, all emergency platforms went to the same place, and finding this one got me no closer to my goal.


    So I hung back and waited. The two archmages eventually got through the wall and patched it back up, then spent another few minutes dinkering around with the supply cache. When they were done, they pulled all the air out of the room and sealed it back up, then finally went to the teleportation platform.


    ¡°Just need to do a bit of scrying to make sure that guy isn¡¯t anywhere near here,¡± the unknown archmage said. ¡°Wouldn¡¯t want him sensing the mana usage.¡±


    ¡°We should be safe,¡± Bakir said with a thoughtful frown. ¡°I removed the escape rod that he laced his tracking magic into, but yes, probably best to take a few minutes and do things properly.¡±


    I rolled my eyes and watched the mage put together what was barely an intermediate-tier divination. It was broad and could cover miles in every direction quickly, but it was so weak that I didn¡¯t even have to try to avoid it. My shield ward blocked it all on its own.


    ¡°Looks like we¡¯re clear,¡± the mage said. ¡°Let¡¯s get the platform prepped before that changes.¡±


    Neither noticed me watching them as they worked, but there honestly wasn¡¯t much to see. They sped the process up by collaborating, but the activation ritual was archaic, slow, and needlessly complex. It used as much mana as my own version of teleportation, but took four times longer to cast even with two people, and looked like it had a range cap of about four hundred miles due to some shoddy rune work in the platform instead of the thousand I personally enjoyed.


    I frowned as I noticed a potential problem in the rune structure. Unless I was very much mistaken, several hairline cracks had formed in the stone. The spell might still work, but if it failed, that would likely be the cause. It would come down to Bakir and his friend¡¯s ability to hold the magic together when the construct shaping it warped. It was possible they already knew about it, but if that were the case, I would have expected them to repair the platform before they tried to use it.


    A soft sigh escaped my lips as the spell failed exactly where I¡¯d expected it to. The two men not only hadn¡¯t known about the damage, but they¡¯d been unable to hold the magic together when they hit the unexpected snag. I supposed I¡¯d see how fast they could figure it out, but my bet was that this was going to take a while.


    I¡¯d wanted this to be a sort of day trip, there and back before anyone could miss me. That was seeming less and less likely, to the point where I suspected I¡¯d have to come back to Jeshaem multiple times to finish this up. Thankfully, at stage eight, I could literally be in two places at once. So while I was stuck sitting in the sky, watching two supposed-archmages fumble around trying to fix a cracked rune structure, my shadow went to do something productive.


    I chose a spot about twenty miles away, far enough that I wasn¡¯t concerned about anyone feeling the mana usage. Then my shadow transmuted a hole an inch wide straight down about five hundred feet until it was well into the bedrock. Once it had a good spot, it hollowed out a twenty-foot square room, then got started laying the groundwork for the super-long-range teleportation ritual.You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    I¡¯d originally used this to make it up to Yulitar when I was chasing after Ammun, but I¡¯d put a bit of time into iterating on the ritual. First and foremost had been reducing it down from something that required several dozen people to just one, which hadn¡¯t been that difficult for me. The participants were mostly there to handle the massive amount of mana the magic required; removing them had lowered the cost to the point where I could afford it myself.


    After that, I¡¯d spent a bit of time refining the ritual to take up less space, mostly by cutting off various pieces that I didn¡¯t need. The distance to a moon was significantly farther than going anywhere on Manoch, and apparently, the old cabal that had designed the teleportation had discovered that moving off-planet had its own set of complications to be dealt with.


    It was far easier and cheaper to jump a single person three or four thousand miles than it was to teleport to a moon orbiting around the planet. For all that, the ritual needed a lot more work before I¡¯d be able to simply cast it spontaneously like I could with a normal teleportation spell. In its current incarnation, the elaborate ritual room was a necessity, and it could only target one specific spot. If I wanted to teleport somewhere else, I¡¯d need to alter the ritual circle or build a new room.


    Having an intercontinental teleportation platform would probably be worth a day of effort, but I was only carving out the ritual chamber now because I had nothing else to do with my time. It was either find something constructive, or watch Bakir and his friend try to figure out the problem with their device¡¯s rune structure.


    Sadly, with my shadow doing all the work, I had plenty of time to do both.


    By the time they finally located and fixed the problem, my ritual chamber was set up deep underground. It boasted hardened steel walls, self-sustaining light, air filtration and temperature controlling enchantments, and a mana bank that would keep everything online for about a century, or, more realistically, enough mana for one long-range teleport.


    Meanwhile, Bakir had spiraled more and more, often muttering to himself and stopping to cast additional scrying spells a few times an hour. His partner grew annoyed with him quickly enough, to the point where I thought I might have wasted my time waiting for them to finish when the whole project got shoved aside so that they could have a lengthy and loud argument.


    Eventually, though, my patience was rewarded. They got the platform working, charged it up, and teleported away. I swooped in immediately, an empowered phantasmal step getting me through the wall they¡¯d put up and allowing me access to their secret bunker. I¡¯d already explored everything else with my own divinations, but I hadn¡¯t dared to examine the enchantments on the platform, not with two archmages actively working on it.


    My visual examination of the runes was already complete, so I dove right into deciphering the mana locks that prevented casual access to the platform. That took a few minutes to break, at which point the entire network unfolded before me. There were hundreds of these platforms all linked together throughout the continent, usually no more than a few hundred miles away from the next one. That included no less than three of them near my current location, so close that it would have been faster for Bakir to fly to a new location and use that platform rather than to fix this one.


    He must have feared I¡¯d spot him if he left the bunker, which was a reasonable concern when accounting for the fact that he was unaware I¡¯d been watching him the whole time. It had made for a tedious afternoon for me, but I¡¯d got what I wanted in the end.


    With their network broken into, I now had locations all over the continent I could teleport to whenever I wanted. The difficult part now was figuring out where exactly I needed to go. I could chase Bakir¡ªI knew which location they¡¯d chosen¡ªand ask him some pointed questions, but I had my suspicions that he¡¯d be reporting to his superiors and probably be taken to where I wanted to go.


    There was every chance he¡¯d be debriefed remotely, of course, but I still considered him a better source of information if he didn¡¯t know I was watching him. If tracing his movements didn¡¯t work out, I could always catch up with him later. I doubted any of his colleagues were going to notice the scrying beacon I¡¯d placed on him, not unless they were familiar with my spells.


    For the time being, I was ready to start exploring. I could use the beacons built into the teleportation platforms as guidance points and appear nearby, much like I¡¯d done with my last jump in the chain to Jeshaem itself, so I started with the spot Bakir had fled to. A few minutes later, I appeared a mile up in the air, still invisible and as undetectable as I could make myself to divinations.


    The platform was somewhere in an immense city below me, hidden away in one of the hundreds of thousands of buildings. I could feel the beacon in my mind, probably underground in a cellar or basement. Bakir was also down there, a quarter mile west of the teleportation platform and stationary. He was behind far more sophisticated wards now, ones that were sensitive enough to prevent me from spying on him directly.


    That was fine. There was plenty of city that wasn¡¯t warded at all, and my immediate goal was to gain some familiarity with this continent¡¯s geography. It wasn¡¯t hard to find a few libraries or archives, though it did take me a minute to decipher the local language. It was similar to Enotian, but had diverged in a few meaningful ways. There were a number of terms I was unfamiliar with, but I picked most of them up from context and applied that new understanding to street signs and business advertisements.


    The real treasure trove was some sort of shop that had large maps under warded and magically-reinforced glass. It looked like the shop sold copies of the map for what appeared to be a significant amount of money, but I didn¡¯t need my own copy. Simply reviewing the maps would be enough for my purposes. I was looking for a specific city anyway.


    Unfortunately, before I could find Ibasha, Bakir returned to the teleportation platform and disappeared again. With a twinge of annoyance, I finished looking over the map I¡¯d been examining remotely and began teleporting myself after the archmage. Hopefully, he was heading to somewhere important, else I was wasting my time following him.

 Book 5, Chapter 36

    Bakir dragged me through two more teleportation jumps over the next few hours before he finally left the safety of the Order¡¯s warded fortresses. I¡¯d used the time to explore the new cities he¡¯d been taken to, mostly in an attempt to establish some baseline of the continent¡¯s geography. If all I could figure out was where I was, I¡¯d still count it as a win.


    Once Bakir left the city itself, it was time to move on. Sadly, it was an obvious trap. Whoever was in charge stuck him in a wagon, had another archmage pretend to be the teamster driving it, and apparently thought I wasn¡¯t going to notice the divinations watching its progress, or trace them back to the four mages following along a mile or so back.


    I was, frankly, a little bit insulted.


    What I needed was the location of the Order¡¯s so-called Elder Council. I was tired of screwing around over here, and I was out of time and patience. Searching an entire continent wasn¡¯t feasible by myself, but I could probably temporarily relocate the gestalt here and have a map of every warded building within a thousand miles by the end of the day. If I couldn¡¯t get a straight answer out of this group of idiots, that was my backup plan.


    As for how best to trigger the trap without getting my hand caught in it, I opted for a simple counter-ambush. I ignored Bakir and his driver and tracked down the four archmages waiting for me to make a move. They were competent, I¡¯d give them that. Just in the half an hour I shadowed them, I confirmed that each of them had a flexible repertoire of spells spanning multiple disciplines. At the very least, they were master mages.


    As to whether they were true archmages, I still had my doubts. It was certainly possible, but it wasn¡¯t like they were going to casually start casting multiple master-tier spells so I could confirm their abilities, and nothing I¡¯d seen from anyone in the Order I¡¯d spied on so far suggested that any of them had that level of skill. It looked like, for them, ¡®archmage¡¯ meant proficient in all disciplines, but not able to cast master-tier spells from them.


    Normally, my biggest issue with attacking four highly competent mages who were expecting trouble would be breaking through overlapping defenses while dodging a constant stream of attacks. Fortunately for me, this group was trying to be sneaky. Their defense was that they didn¡¯t think I¡¯d notice their presence.


    It would have been impossible to remain unnoticed with a bunch of magical barriers swirling around them, so they weren¡¯t using them. At best, they had personal shield wards like any other mage, and even those were muted to reduce their mana signature to the low levels their obscurement could actually cover.


    Hitting them wasn¡¯t a problem. Doing it hard enough to overwhelm them without killing them was. I had to judge exactly how much pressure I needed to exert to break their defenses without also breaking them in the process, and each of them required a different level of finesse.


    Doing that with a single spell was impossible, even for me. However, doing it with six different spells at the same time was well within my capabilities. The first two spells dropped out of the sky where I was invisibly perched above them, striking the group simultaneously and releasing a vortex of kinetic pressure that pulled the four together, stressing their shield wards and hindering their movements when they tried to escape.


    The second spell was a detonation of fire designed to soften up their defenses. That by itself was enough to overwhelm one shield ward, specifically the one belonging to the man in the middle who¡¯d gotten slammed by all three of his colleagues when my first spell forced them together, but he wasn¡¯t seriously injured and I simply compensated with my follow up attack to reduce the power I sent through the force bolt that smacked into him.


    The other three got far harsher spells aimed at them, mostly in the form of crushing blows or piercing lances. Somewhere between the third and fourth wave of spells beating them down, one managed to counter with a beam of mana flung from an outstretched hand. I casually batted it aside, then knocked him out with a concussive orb of force that smacked into his face and crushed his nose.


    Soon after, all four of them were subdued and pinned in the air with greater telekinesis. The scuffle had taken less than twenty seconds, but I had no doubt that the two remaining archmages down in the wagon had noticed it.


    The driver might get away, but I could always chase Bakir down. For the moment, I ignored them to focus on securing my new prisoners. Without the extensive setup I¡¯d built to pin Bakir down back home, I was going to have to be a lot rougher with these mages, especially since they outnumbered me. The first thing I needed to do was drain their mana reserves, something that was very difficult to do to a conscious mage.


    Well, it wasn¡¯t hard to fix the ¡®conscious¡¯ part with an application of blunt force trauma followed by a stabilizing round of healing to make sure none of them were dead or brain damaged. After that, I siphoned all the mana they had out of them and used it to replace what I¡¯d wasted on that chain of teleports that had taken me across the ocean.If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    Then I stripped away every last enchanted or inscribed trinket they had, including busting open the phantom spaces two of them had tied directly to their mana core and looting those. I followed it up with a few hexes to encourage lethargy and a sense of hopelessness. Those wouldn¡¯t last long, but only someone with an exceptionally strong will would be able to fight their way free before I came back to check on them in the next few minutes.


    My final act of security was to bury all four of them up to their necks in the ground. I built a small dome of rock around them to keep any local wildlife from stopping by for a snack, then flew off to where my shadow had been keeping an eye on the wagon. Bakir and his friend had abandoned it, but only far enough to try to hide while they waited for me to show up.


    It hadn¡¯t worked for their friends. I couldn¡¯t fathom why they thought the exact same spells would help them, but for some reason, they were trying it anyway. I quickly dismantled their defenses and both of them received the same treatment as the ambush team.


    Then I gathered my group of would-be attackers up, flew off in a random direction away from civilization, and debated how best to get the information I wanted out of them. With a sigh, I glanced down at the clump of bodies telekinetically bundled together.


    ¡°Why couldn¡¯t you guys have just been reasonable? If you hadn¡¯t tried to screw with me, we could have had a fruitful partnership,¡± I said, though none of them were awake to hear me.


    * * *


    The process of extracting information from all of them individually was tedious and tiresome, but by the time the sun came back up, I had a solid idea of the Order¡¯s main bases, who was in charge of what, and where to find the Elder Council.


    I had also confirmed that this little group had orders to ambush and capture me, then drag me back to the nearby city, a place named Feldirin. The abduction served a simple purpose: to do essentially what I¡¯d done to Bakir. The Order wanted my knowledge, and my willingness to participate wasn¡¯t a factor in how they planned to get it.


    Their ambassador team was really more of a spy group, with Bakir being the only member who actually had any experience in the fine art of diplomacy. Adilar had the clearest idea of his boss¡¯s objectives and wants. Nevlac was the muscle, and Bakir was their scout. He was the one who¡¯d visited most of my allies and snooped around. He was the one who pointed the way for the others.


    He was the one who¡¯d suggested their bunker be built near my family.


    In the end, none of this was that surprising. The Order probably did believe itself to be a bastion against the chaos Ammun¡¯s return represented, but they weren¡¯t interested in helping me stop him. They only wanted my knowledge and resources to leverage more power for themselves. Even the lower-ranking members of their cabal knew the truth of things.


    ¡°You were a surprisingly good actor,¡± I told Bakir after I was done interrogating everyone. ¡°I really, honestly believed you had good intentions, that you were willing to work with me and were just a bit too na?ve to realize that the people in the true positions of power inside your cabal were using you.¡±


    He glared at me, but remained silent. There was no point in lying now, not after I¡¯d gotten into his head and pried out the truth of things. It was a dirty, distasteful task, but seeing exactly how far the Order¡¯s influence extended across an entire continent had convinced me that I needed to take them seriously.


    I had five different locations to hit in rapid succession if I wanted to round up the entire Elder Council before they figured out what was happening. To do that, I couldn¡¯t afford distractions. If I let the ambush squad live, they¡¯d send messages and warn people that I was coming. Getting a surprise attack off probably wasn¡¯t in the cards anyway, since this group was supposed to report back hours ago regardless of whether I¡¯d taken the bait, but there was no reason to announce my plans.


    ¡°Such a waste, though. Your cabal could have been quite useful to me if you¡¯d been willing to cooperate. I wonder what the other group said to Ammun¡¯s generals. Do you suppose it¡¯s any different over there, or just more lies and angling to get what you want?¡±


    ¡°Spare me,¡± Bakir said. ¡°Just get it over with.¡±


    ¡°As you wish.¡±


    A blade of force severed his head from his neck, sending it spinning through the air and soaking the grass with blood. Bakir¡¯s body remained upright, still locked in the grip of my magic, and I tossed it onto a pile with the other corpses.


    ¡°I¡¯m not trying to take some moral high ground,¡± I told the mound of dead bodies. ¡°I¡¯m every bit as big a monster as your leaders. This was simply a case of your group picking a fight with the wrong target. Believe me, Ammun would have done worse. Well, it¡¯s too late for you to worry about that now.¡±


    Then I burned the bodies to ash and scoured the area down to the dirt. In seconds, there was nothing but a large, barren patch of black earth in the middle of the field, with no evidence that anyone had died here beyond a wisp of smoke curling away into the night sky. I sighed again and shook my head.


    Letting this group of idiots run around causing problems for me was just asking for them to pop up at precisely the wrong moment, probably when Ammun made his return. To that end, I had a few more stops to make before the sun came up, then I¡¯d see if I could salvage something useful out of this whole fiasco.


    The first city I needed to reach was Ibasha. Surprisingly, Bakir hadn¡¯t been lying about that. I suspected he¡¯d been thinking the archmage there might have stood up to me if he failed in his own escape attempt. Either way, the rest of my victims had confirmed Tredor of the Elder Council¡¯s labs were based in that city, and now that I knew where it was, it was simple to find the teleportation beacon tied to the platform there.


    And with that, my long night of work began in earnest.

 Book 5, Chapter 37

    The Global Order of the Arcane was, if nothing else, thorough. I¡¯d already broken down the exterior wards of Tredor¡¯s research lab and destroyed the ward stone. I¡¯d been expecting the remaining wards to collapse at that point, but instead, the interior defenses were holding strong. For such a comparatively small building, having multiple ward stones was a ridiculous amount of over-engineering.


    A roar shook a nearby door so hard it nearly rattled off its hinges. Sparks of mana flashed through my senses as something huge and angry tried to break down the wall. ¡°Huh, well, maybe it¡¯s an appropriate amount of warding after all,¡± I told the dazed mage struggling to get back to his feet in front of me.


    ¡°Who¡­ are you?¡± he slurred, his eyes not quite focusing properly as he peered in my direction.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about that right now,¡± I said. ¡°What¡¯s behind that door?¡±


    Another deafening roar washed over us. Wards popped and sizzled as they failed to contain what I assumed was a rather large and angry specimen. I was willing to take the blame for that, considering that my own rampage through the facility had probably been the direct cause of the monster getting free of its confinement and into an area that wasn¡¯t designed to stop it.


    The mage might have been too concussed to hold an intelligent conversation, but he wasn¡¯t so out of it that he didn¡¯t recognize an enemy. A flame lance flashed through the air, cast directly from his outstretched hand to splash harmlessly against my shield ward. If he¡¯d been in his right mind, the mage probably would have realized the smartest thing to do was turn around and run away. Instead, he followed his first spell with a net made of lightning.


    It settled on my shield ward and started pulsing, discharging the magic repeatedly in an attempt to drain the mana powering my defenses. It was an interesting take, somewhat similar to a monster I¡¯d once encountered that spat clinging acid at me, but even if I hadn¡¯t been able to dispel the attack, it had no chance of ever doing enough damage to weaken my shield ward.


    This was getting me nowhere. I wasn¡¯t here to beat down every random mage that stumbled into my path or kill monsters that had slipped out of their pens. I had one goal and one goal only: find and capture the archmage of the Elder Council known as Tredor.


    I crushed the man in an orb of force and left his crumpled body on the floor so that I could get back to what I¡¯d been doing before he¡¯d attacked me. Despite my best efforts, a significant portion of the lab¡¯s wards were still functioning. That was severely hindering my ability to scry the area, a problem I was eager to resolve.


    I ignored the roaring and slamming coming from the adjoining room while I worked, even going so far as to move down the hallway to get some distance. That didn¡¯t do much to stop the noise, but I suspected that when I ripped out the next section of wards, whatever it was behind that door was going to burst free and I didn¡¯t want to be in its way when it did.


    Two minutes later, I finished tracing the ward lines back to a hidden ward stone. It was far enough away that I was going to have to break stuff to get there, but that wasn¡¯t really my problem. Being quiet about this had never been in the battle plan. I only cared about being quick, and I was already annoyed that I¡¯d been here for ten minutes without finding Tredor.


    The wards went down and the roaring monster burst free, taking not just the door, but a whole section of the wall with it. It was about ten feet tall, had six huge, shaggy legs, and no head. Instead, its face was in its torso, though that was mostly mouth. If there were any eyes, they were hidden under its fur. It didn¡¯t seem to need them, though.


    The monster homed in on me immediately and let loose another floor-shaking bellow as it started its charge. I flicked a series of three phantasmal needles into its face, striking what passed for a brain, and disorienting it so much that it crashed into a wall. Blades of force sliced through its limbs, dismembering the monster in the span of a few seconds and leaving a bloody mess behind and beneath it.


    With that problem taken care of, I turned my attention back to locating my target. Now that the wards were fully down¡ªI hoped¡ªit would be much easier to find him.


    * * *


    ¡°Look, will you just stop running?¡± I yelled at Tredor¡¯s fleeing back.


    His response was a vial of some glowing green liquid telekinetically flung at me just before he turned a corner. The instant he was out of sight, the vial crushed itself and noxious gas whirled out to fill the hallway. Everything inside the cloud started melting, but that wasn¡¯t the true danger. The cloud was actually pulling on my mana, trying to drain me like some sort of overpowered draw stone in order to fuel its propagation.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    That was interesting, and under other circumstances, I¡¯d be keen to get a sample and do some experiments. Right now, however, I was too busy to be messing around with it. I cast a simple spell to send a gust of wind out in front of me that split the cloud in two. Reclaiming the mana spent proved difficult, but I managed to snag a portion of it before the green gas ate the rest.


    Even the metal in the floor was half-melted after only a few seconds of exposure, so I flew over the ground instead of trying to walk it. Idly, I wondered if this concoction might be useful in dissolving mysteel without me having to brute force things, but I suspected it would have no effect at all. Mysteel was just too resilient for something like this to break it down.


    If I could find a sample, though, I¡¯d take it home with me to experiment with. Maybe I¡¯d get lucky and Tredor would have another vial or two I could claim once I caught up with him. I¡¯d have to keep an eye out and make sure to catch the next one he tried to throw at me before he could shatter the glass.


    Tredor was nowhere in sight when I rounded the corner, but he hadn¡¯t been able to stop me from scrying on him while he ran. I knew exactly which door he¡¯d gone through. The man was running for the teleportation platform, as far as I could tell. The only reason I hadn¡¯t caught him yet was that there¡¯d been a third ward stone deep in the inner core of the research lab, and the wards were hindering me just enough for Tredor to keep ahead.


    Unfortunately, now that I¡¯d found the man, detouring to rip apart a third set of wards would cost me too much time. I was left with no choice but to fight my way through them over and over again as Tredor wove a path through as many blocked-off doors as possible. The worst part was that I couldn¡¯t even jump ahead to cut him off, despite knowing his destination, because his own divinations would tell him what I¡¯d done and he¡¯d change course.


    I blasted my way through the door, shattering the line of wards with overwhelming force. Tredor was two rooms ahead of me, but I was quick to catch up. This time, we were in some sort of specimen holding area. It was a long hallway with six huge tanks set into the floors, three on either side. Reinforced steel grates capped each tank, thick enough that no amount of muscle was getting through them. The monsters held inside were going berserk without whatever magic that kept them calm functioning.


    Two more mages were flanking Tredor, who flashed me a grin and threw his hands up. Tendrils of magic streamed out of him to the grates, probably in an effort to unlock them. My own magic slashed through them, cutting the spells before they could cause problems. At the same time, I deflected a pair of conjurations from Tredor¡¯s assistants.


    ¡°Keep him busy,¡± the archmage snapped at them while he prepared another spell.


    A barrage of magic flew down the hall, half of it not even really aimed at me. I blocked what I needed to and ignored the rest as I advanced. At the halfway point, Tredor finished what he was working on, only for it to immediately shatter when I countered it.


    ¡°Really, I can¡¯t fathom why you thought such a complicated spell was the right choice for a battle,¡± I said while he gaped at me. ¡°Now, I feel like I¡¯ve killed more than enough of your people. Come with me, and we can leave the rest of them out of it.¡±


    ¡°You¡­ Why are you doing this?¡± he demanded in an attempt to stall for time while he stealthily started casting his next spell.


    He should have gone for something smaller, something that he could have put together inside his mana core where I wouldn¡¯t be able to see it. It probably wouldn¡¯t have worked, but he might have at least completed it before I broke it down.


    ¡°Because your cabal was causing me problems, and I decided to lodge a complaint with the leadership,¡± I told him. ¡°As I understand it, that¡¯s the Elder Council, on which you sit.¡±


    Stymied again and with his assistants¡¯ less-than-impressive attempts to slow me down utterly failing, Tredor snapped open his coat and produced two more of those glowing green vials. Perfect. It looked like I was getting my wish, there.


    I snatched them out of the air, dispelling his telekinesis before he could break them and stowed them away. For the moment, I placed them in a pocket instead of my phantom space. Tredor had been storing them physically for a reason, and until I had a chance to better examine exactly what the liquid was, I¡¯d follow his example.


    ¡°Damn you!¡± the archmage snapped. Abruptly, he turned to run again, but I¡¯d had enough of this game and there was no way I was letting him start up another round.


    I teleported forward fifty feet and landed directly in front of him, then unleashed a force wave that threw both him and his two assistants to the floor. ¡°That¡¯s enough of that,¡± I said.


    It wasn¡¯t a quick process to batter down an archmage¡¯s defenses, but I¡¯d been working him over for the last few minutes while I chased him around, and he hadn¡¯t had a chance to recover. I cast a master-tier spell I didn¡¯t get much chance to use, not because it wasn¡¯t useful, but because it was so damn expensive. It was almost always overkill and even now, I had to dip into my mana crystal to gather enough mana to pull it off.


    Aura Crash wasn¡¯t a spell I¡¯d normally use in combat anyway, not with it taking several seconds to put together. It was vulnerable to enemy tampering. Against someone like Ammun, it would be a massive waste of mana that he could easily counter. But Tredor wasn¡¯t that good of a mage, and if I was being honest with myself, I mostly wanted to do it because he¡¯d annoyed the hell out of me making me chase him.


    The spell slammed down on him, crippling his ability to control his mana. His core immediately spasmed, losing its shielding and revealing itself fully to me. His attempts to draw mana from it ended in failure, leaving him once again gaping at me.


    ¡°It¡¯s only temporary,¡± I said. ¡°Unfortunately. Now, let¡¯s go. I¡¯ve got four more of you to collect and I¡¯m already sick of being on this continent.¡±


    My magic seized the councilman and hauled him upright. His two assistants hadn¡¯t even managed to regain their feet when I blew a hole off the roof and flew straight up with my hostage. I took a moment to orient myself, then flew off toward my next destination, only a few hundred miles away.

 Book 5, Chapter 38

    The Elder Council sat on their chairs, more thrones, really, and glared at me with various levels of mixed animosity and fear. Rounding them all up had been a chore, especially once I had to start dragging them around while keeping them subdued. While I was grabbing the fourth one, the first three had tried to pull off some sort of ritualized spell that probably wouldn¡¯t have done much to me anyway, but which I didn¡¯t need to deal with at that exact moment. Number four was an expert transmuter, and blocking those kinds of spells in combat was difficult enough without the distractions.


    In the end, I¡¯d managed to snag the whole collection. At least, I was hoping I¡¯d gotten the five correct people. It was entirely possible I¡¯d snagged some decoy frontman who pretended to be a member of the Elder Council in public, but there wasn¡¯t a lot I could do about that today. If there was a hidden council, I might never find out as long as they dropped their activities back on Olpahun. That was still a win in my book. I wasn¡¯t here for vengeance, just to eliminate a problem.


    ¡°Alright,¡± I began from my position in the middle of the room. Supplicants were supposed to stand here so that the Council could study them while they petitioned for whatever it was they wanted. Without the enforced rear lighting casting them in shadows, they didn¡¯t look mysterious or dangerous. They just looked stupid.


    The head of the Elder Council was named Domon. As far as I could tell, he was more of an administrator than an archmage at this stage in his life, though I¡¯d seen firsthand that he could still fight if he needed to when I¡¯d abducted him. He sat in the center of their group, an unconvincing sneer on his lips as he stared down at me.


    ¡°You all know who I am, I¡¯m sure,¡± I said. ¡°You can probably guess why I¡¯m here, but just because I don¡¯t want there to be any misunderstandings, let me make it clear. You sent agents to my home and are actively working against me. I¡¯m not happy about that, so we¡¯re going to resolve the situation right now.¡±


    ¡°Who do you think you are?¡± one of the councilmen demanded from my left. I mentally identified him as Kalig. By all appearances, he was the Global Order¡¯s spymaster, but the fact that those low-level thugs I¡¯d interrogated knew who their spymaster was told me that he was either terrible at his job, or he was just a cover for the real one. Kalig was the reason I had my suspicions that I hadn¡¯t gotten the people who were really in charge.


    Well, I¡¯d still be sending a message today, even if I didn¡¯t kill the actual leaders of this cabal. Hopefully, they¡¯d take the hint and stay out of my business. If I had to come back to the other side of the world to deal with them again, I was going to be killing a whole lot of the best mages Manoch had to offer, and I really wanted to avoid doing that.


    ¡°Keiran of the Night Vale,¡± I told him. ¡°But you already knew that.¡±


    ¡°We know some kid is claiming that name. There¡¯s been no proof you¡¯re the actual reincarnation of Keiran.¡±


    ¡°I would think the fact that the five of you are sitting here, very much against your wishes and without enough mana to light a candle between you, would serve as sufficient proof of my capabilities.¡±


    Kalig bristled and started to choke out what he undoubtedly thought was a clever retort, but Domon cut him off before he could get going. ¡°Enough bickering,¡± the leader said. ¡°Whether or not you truly are Keiran is irrelevant. You¡¯re obviously powerful, but unlike us, you¡¯re alone. There are a hundred archmages in the Global Order. Not even you can challenge our combined might.¡±


    ¡°Yes, yes, you¡¯re very impressive in numbers. I¡¯m sure. But it¡¯s just the six of us here right now, so that doesn¡¯t help you all that much.¡±


    ¡°Stupid kid,¡± Tredor said. ¡°Whatever concessions you force out of us now will be temporary. The reparations you¡¯ll be making for your rash actions today will burden you for the rest of your life.¡±


    ¡°I doubt it.¡±


    Unlike with Bakir, I¡¯d made sure to rip out their emergency escape devices as I¡¯d captured them. The last thing I needed was to have to go haring off after a runaway. I¡¯d stripped them of every possible countermeasure, every magical contingency, every little trinket tucked away in real or phantom space, and corrupted the ward schema guarding this room. Unless an entire battalion of mages marched in here to rescue them, they were completely at my mercy.


    And if that did happen, I¡¯d kill all five of them before I let them get away.


    ¡°What do you even want us to do?¡± Domon asked after shooting a look at Tredor, who scowled back but lapsed into silence.


    ¡°Recall all of your agents back to Jeshaem. I don¡¯t care what you do on this continent, but you¡¯ll stay off mine.¡±


    I¡¯d half-expected this to result in an immediate round of blustering and posturing, especially given their outbursts so far, but it seemed that now that we were getting into the meat of things, the others were going to let Domon do the talking. It made sense, in a way. They wanted to present a united front to their petitioners. I¡¯d probably thrown them off by abducting all of them and draining their mana.A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    Now that they were back in familiar territory, previous behaviors were reasserting themselves. Domon didn¡¯t even glance at his fellow councilmen before saying, ¡°Easy enough to accomplish, but we¡¯d need a good reason to do so. What can you offer in return?¡±


    ¡°I could leave without killing you,¡± I said dryly.


    ¡°That¡¯s a poor basis for a negotiation.¡±


    ¡°Who said we¡¯re negotiating? You sent people out to harass my allies to dig up information about me, and you¡¯ve got a team actively working with my enemies now. I¡¯m not negotiating with you. I¡¯m dictating terms.¡±


    While it might not be strictly true that the Order archmages over in Ralvost had already hashed out a deal with the remnants of Ammun¡¯s military, I didn¡¯t want them speaking with those people in any capacity. The best result that could possibly come from that was that the cabal would come down on the army and wipe it out, and I didn¡¯t need their help with that.


    ¡°We¡¯d like a moment to discuss our options in private,¡± Domon said.


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°How can you expect us to work with you when you act like this?¡± one of the other councilmen snapped.


    ¡°I don¡¯t expect you to work with me. I expect you to do what I say because I¡¯m bigger, stronger, and meaner than you, and you operate in a world where might makes right. You don¡¯t get to choose what rules apply when it¡¯s convenient to you.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s hardly a charitable assessment of the situation,¡± Domon told me. ¡°Despite how you¡¯ve accosted us, I do still believe there are benefits to be found between us. Why not work with us instead of further antagonizing the Order with every action?¡±


    Ugh. Politicians.


    ¡°Listen, I¡¯ve got other problems to get back to solving. I¡¯m running out of time and patience, so let¡¯s just keep this simple. I¡¯ve told you what I want you to do. Are you going to do it or not? Feel free to vote on it if it¡¯ll make you feel better.¡±


    ¡°There is no need for¡ª¡±


    ¡°Nope. We¡¯re done talking about this. Yes or no,¡± I said.


    ¡°If you could just¡ª¡±


    I interrupted Domon again. ¡°Talk to your friends, not to me. You¡¯ve got a minute to come up with an answer.¡±


    I only gave them that long because that was how long it would take me to finish setting up the spell I¡¯d been slowly building over the last hour. With each passing second, it spread farther and farther, and it was now surging across the surface of Olpahun toward Ralvost.


    ¡°Alright, yes. Yes, we¡¯ll recall our field teams,¡± Domon said. ¡°It will take some time to relay updated orders to them, but you have my word that we¡¯ll get them back home as quickly as possible.¡±


    ¡°No need to worry about that. I¡¯ve already taken care of that part,¡± I said. I gestured behind me and a large, silvery illusion faded into existence. It appeared to be a mirrored wall, ten feet tall and thirty wide. Hundreds of little pictures were displayed on it, each one a different teleportation platform in the Order¡¯s network.


    ¡°This uses your platform network to open communication scrying windows in all your many, many bases. I¡¯ve even linked it to my own network back home to relay the message all the way to Ralvost. Here, you can speak into it using this.¡± I pulled a glass sphere the size of my head out of my phantom space and floated it across the intervening space to land on the table in front of Domon. ¡°Now. Go ahead. Recall your minions.¡±


    I didn¡¯t let my self-satisfied smile through to my face. Domon had only agreed because he thought it would give him a few days or so to work on the problem without me standing right in front of him. What I¡¯d put together here was an extraordinarily wasteful use of mana, but then, I¡¯d gained quite a bit by draining five archmages, one of whom had been at stage six and inside his demesne when I¡¯d caught up to him.


    That actually pushed me over my maximum capacity, so I¡¯d started building the spell right then and there. Half the prep work was done before I even finished that abduction, just in the interest of being thrifty with the mana. I¡¯d had to add a nice chunk of my own mana to the mix to keep the spell going, but I¡¯d recovered all of that off Domon when I¡¯d picked him up.


    The control orb I¡¯d fabricated glowed in the archmage¡¯s hands as he relayed his telepathic instructions. He knew that they were being broadcast to every single platform, many of which were attracting small crowds of two to five people. They couldn¡¯t all be archmages, but I supposed an organization this size needed some support staff, and maybe the rest were the students of the next generation.


    For those targets he was specifically trying to reach, the scrying portal just served as a conduit for Domon¡¯s telepathy to pass through. Fortunately for all of us, the team wasn¡¯t currently inside Ammun¡¯s tower, else I¡¯d have needed to take some drastic steps to get the message to them.


    ¡®Abandon your current objectives immediately and return home,¡¯ Domon¡¯s voice whispered into their minds.


    Though I couldn¡¯t see them, I could feel their confusion through the telepathic link. ¡®Sir? How are you doing this?¡¯ one of them asked.


    ¡®Unimportant at the moment. All will be explained later. Do you understand your instructions?¡¯


    ¡®¡­yes¡­ but¡­ If we leave now, we¡¯ll be weakening valuable connections we¡¯ve spent the last week cultivating. It will make our work much more difficult when we come back.¡¯


    I knew it. We hadn¡¯t been able to get eyes on the actual meetings, but it wasn¡¯t hard to guess. I knew exactly what the Order was about. They were trying to play both sides to their own advantage. Though Domon¡¯s face revealed nothing, he must have been wincing inside at the damning words.


    ¡®Irrelevant. All of you need to return at once.¡¯


    ¡®I understand. We¡¯ll be back within the next six hours.¡¯


    Considering the weak range of their teleportation spells and the fact that they were likely going to have to free-cast each and every one of them, six hours probably was excellent time by the Order¡¯s standards. It would have taken me perhaps ten minutes to get off the continent and another twenty to cross the ocean to my current location.


    And they called themselves archmages. This little group had a lot to learn if they wanted that title for real.


    ¡°There. Are you satisfied now, Keiran of the Night Vale?¡± Domon asked as he placed the glass sphere back down on the table.


    ¡°Not quite,¡± I said.

 Book 5, Chapter 39

    This was the riskiest part of my plan. If I called it good here, chances were I¡¯d be dealing with the Order again very soon. They¡¯d probably try to be a lot sneakier the next time, and given that I was going to be entirely focused on a skeleton-shaped problem in the near future, there was every chance that they could take revenge at an opportune moment.


    The only way to guarantee my safety was to wipe out the entire Global Order of the Arcane, which was possible, but not really practical. That would be a campaign of weeks at minimum, and more likely months. I didn¡¯t know how much time I had left, or even if I could eradicate the entire cabal before Ammun returned. That plan also carried a high risk of driving everyone who survived the initial slaughter directly to Ralvost to align themselves with my enemies.


    My final option was to cut the head off the snake. They were gathered right here in this room with me, all of them defenseless. It would be easy. It was also the least predictable option in terms of fallout. I didn¡¯t know if these five even were the true leaders of the Order. Killing them might just piss off whoever was actually in charge. Or it might inspire the rank-and-file to some sort of revenge quest, which could arguably be easier to handle, depending on the timing and who filled the leadership vacuum.


    I¡¯d spent some time considering what I wanted out of the Order in the future. Right now, they weren¡¯t trustworthy. I couldn¡¯t use them for much of anything, if only because I¡¯d have to watch them so closely for treachery that any job I handed off to them would end up consuming more of my time and energy than if I simply did it myself.


    I might be able to use them in the future, however. Once I had ample free time, I could reform the cabal into archmages actually worthy of the title, or at least some of them. No doubt there¡¯d be some dead wood to cut out of the program. But honestly, how much time would that save me? Forty or fifty years was more than long enough to establish my own school and raise a class of students to the same level of competency.


    That was the trade-off. I was sacrificing some short-term efficiency by alienating the Order today in order to keep them out of my hair while I dealt with Ammun. Unfortunately for them, this cabal was just enough of a threat that they could tip the scales away from me at a pivotal moment, so there really wasn¡¯t much of a choice.


    ¡°What more could you ask for?¡± Domon asked. ¡°Shall we open our coffers for you to raid? Do you want to burn down our libraries and destroy our laboratories to cripple future generations of mages?¡±


    ¡°No, nothing like that. Believe it or not, I applaud the general idea of your organization. Preserving magical knowledge and passing it on is a laudable goal. And if you¡¯d come to me openly and honestly, instead of slithering through the grass like a serpent intending to sink its fangs into my leg, I probably would have helped you.¡±


    I looked around the room, holding each councilman¡¯s gaze in turn. ¡°But you didn¡¯t do that, did you? You¡¯re bandits looking to ransack a town. Your only mistake was picking a target beyond your capabilities.¡±


    ¡°How were we to know?¡± Kalig objected.


    ¡°Isn¡¯t it your job to know? My understanding of your hierarchy is that you, specifically, are in charge of gathering information. But it doesn¡¯t matter. What you could or should have done in the past is irrelevant.¡±


    Decision made, I wrapped bands of force around their skulls and squeezed. All five of them died simultaneously in an explosion of bone and brain matter while hundreds of onlookers watched through the many scrying portals that were still open. Fortunately, the team in Ralvost was not among the observers. They wouldn¡¯t know that their leadership had been killed until someone else told them.


    ¡°Let me make one thing clear,¡± I said to the mirrored wall behind me. The glass sphere still sat in front of Domon¡¯s corpse, which was now slumped over and about to topple out of its chair. I didn¡¯t need the connection to speak to the assembled observers. The sphere was merely a tool for those without the mana and skill to manipulate the ritual manually.


    ¡°I do not tolerate interference in my business, not from them, not from you, and not from whoever might be hidden behind your Elder Council¡¯s fa?ade of authority. Keep your mages on Jeshaem and we won¡¯t have any further problems. If I find one of you on Olpahun again, I¡¯ll kill you. And believe me, I¡¯ve got eyes everywhere. I will be watching.¡±


    Unlike Domon¡¯s discussion with the field agents at Ralvost, this was a one-way conversation. I was trusting those archmages who were watching to spread the word to anyone who was absent, though I¡¯d noticed a steady uptick in faces on the other sides of the portals the longer they stayed open. Without an exact count of the Order¡¯s numbers, including support staff, I couldn¡¯t be sure what portion of them had witnessed the execution of their Elder Council.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    ¡°I know the secret you wanted ¨C how to break the stage six ceiling. The mana resonance point. Yes, I have access to one. I made it. And yes, I can teach you how to do it, too. I could be persuaded to share this knowledge, but not right now. As you are well aware, I have a lich problem I need to be dealing with. Once that¡¯s taken care of, we can discuss business between the Order and myself. Until then, I do not want to so much as find a loose hair I don¡¯t recognize anywhere within a thousand miles of my home.


    ¡°This is a simple request: stay away. If you can manage that, we¡¯ll get along in the future.¡±


    And with that said, I finished the teleportation spell I¡¯d been building up while I spoke and disappeared, leaving behind a rapidly collapsing continental scrying network.


    * * *


    Paying the gestalt to continue working for me was rapidly climbing up my priorities list as I kept expanding the scope of their spying. I was starting to feel like I was going a bit wild spying on two continents and a moon, but, well, my enemies were many and varied. That bit of bait I¡¯d tossed out in an attempt to ensure the Order¡¯s good behavior might work, but it might not.


    Between the scrying polyhedrons the gestalt already had and the ones I owed them, they¡¯d apparently decided they had enough of that and had turned to requesting a series of psychic relay points embedded for miles and miles in every direction. The colony had been growing steadily with access to nigh unlimited food, and now they wanted to expand without worrying about splinter minds forming as they got too far from the main hub.


    Normally, that was done via the ¡®roots¡¯ of their home tree, but a discontinuous connection wasn¡¯t feasible using that method. For the distances the gestalt wanted to cover, manual growth didn¡¯t really work, anyway, so they¡¯d turned to me to solve this problem as the next payment. It was hard to turn down the request, considering that they were effectively my entire spy network.


    ¡®How soon do you need it done?¡¯ I asked. ¡®I¡¯ve never made something exactly like this before and I¡¯ll need to do a bit of tinkering to get what I have in mind adapted for use by a hive mind entity.¡¯


    ¡®We would prefer sooner rather than later, but given your current constraints, we understand that other projects take priority. Still, three months seems an adequate amount of time.¡¯


    I mentally chewed that over. I could probably do it, but without Querit around to help, it would be difficult to keep everything else running. I¡¯d really been taking advantage of him over the last year or so, and I was feeling the hurt now that he was gone. An intelligent golem assistant was an invaluable resource, but they did come with the drawback of needing to be treated like a person instead of a tool.


    It was too bad he was still upset with me. Other than asking the gestalt to let me know if he got himself into some sort of trouble, I¡¯d given Querit his space. He¡¯d come back when he was ready. Or he wouldn¡¯t, and he¡¯d find some new life out there, far away from me. Either was acceptable, as long as he didn¡¯t decide to throw in with Ammun.


    I gave that low odds of happening. Ammun was directly responsible for the destruction of Querit¡¯s home and the deaths of practically everybody he¡¯d ever known prior to me finding his lifeless body and infusing him with mana. If nothing else, I was reasonably certain that Querit would try to kill Ammun if he ever crossed paths with the lich.


    ¡®I¡¯ll have a prototype to you by then, but it¡¯ll take longer to produce the number needed to cover so many miles,¡¯ I sent.


    ¡®This is an acceptable compromise.¡¯


    ¡®Then we¡¯re agreed. You¡¯ll watch through the network I laced into their teleportation platforms and make sure none of them cross the ocean.¡¯


    ¡®Very well.¡¯


    I changed the subject. ¡®Any updates on Ammun¡¯s project up on Yulitar?¡¯


    ¡®We cannot pierce the scrying ward, but he does not seem to consider any sort of physical obfuscation to be necessary. The tower is now fully constructed, and we¡¯ve noted a shift in the mana flows across the moon¡¯s surface.¡¯


    Images flooded my mind, showing me a four-story tower roughly the same size as the silo he¡¯d used in Ralvost to first cast the ritual that had allowed him to teleport however many thousands of miles it was to a moon in one single jump. It was a square-sided building now, sharp-edged and carved from the face of a small mountain. There were no windows or exterior features, making it nothing more than a blank pillar of stone forty feet high.


    Other images showed strands of mana twisting across Yulitar¡¯s surface, flowing seemingly at random as they radiated out of the stone and off into empty space. Around the tower, however, was something like a whirlpool, with all the mana swirling around it for miles as it was slowly dragged into the center.


    That was a lot more mana than Ammun should have needed for the ultra-long-range teleportation spell. Either he¡¯d cobbled together something extremely inefficient, or he was planning on doing a whole hell of a lot more than just returning home. I knew he wanted a permanent connection between himself and Yulitar¡¯s core, and that he had his phylactery up there with him. Perhaps the tower was going to serve as the focal point for that connection.


    The real problem was that, without being able to see inside, I had no way to know if it was nothing but an empty shell, or if Ammun had carved runes into every single inch of the interior and was even now completing the spell to teleport back. And with so much distance between us, there was no way I was going to get through scrying wards to find out.


    Or was I? I watched the mana sweep across Yulitar, more even than Ammun¡¯s tower back in Ralvost pulled from the world core. Ammun wasn¡¯t that creative. Odds were good that he had the same mana intake system up there as he¡¯d used back home. And that meant I had a weak point to attack. I just needed to fool whatever wards he had to filter the mana into thinking my own scrying spell was an unstructured bit of mana floating in with all the rest.


    And that was entirely possible to do. The real trick was going to be getting it all the way up into that whirlpool so it could be sucked inside. ¡®I think I have an idea, but I¡¯ll need your help,¡¯ I told the gestalt. ¡®I¡¯ll be there in a few minutes.¡¯

 Book 5, Chapter 40

    Reaching stage seven involved a mage anchoring themselves in the Astral Realm, with future stages building on that connection. It was a difficult milestone to achieve, but well within my capabilities. The hardest part had been finding¡ªor building, in my case¡ªa mana resonance point that would hold the mana flows in the physical realm in sync with those of the Astral Realm while I worked.


    Anchoring a spell partially in the Astral Realm was another matter entirely. It actually had the opposite problem a mage did. Instead of trying to force the mana flows to contort to my physical body, I had to find a way to make sure the spell didn¡¯t slip fully into the Astral Realm and unravel. That was easy as long as I was actively holding onto it, but quite a bit more difficult to manage if I wanted to be able to release the magic to actually do something.


    Difficult wasn¡¯t the same as impossible, and I had plenty of experience using this method to infiltrate warded areas. It hadn¡¯t been a viable option with Ammun¡¯s tower after he woke up for a few reasons¡ªnamely his wards were more thorough, there were a ton of mana wraiths eating the mana I¡¯d have to deal with, and heavy mana in general made the whole process more difficult¡ªbut this new structure was significantly more vulnerable.


    I put together a couple enchantments based on my own educated guesses about Ammun¡¯s design philosophy, a few catch-all attempts just to see if they¡¯d work, and three different designs specifically targeted toward surviving the teleportation across a massive distance. Theoretically, that shouldn¡¯t stop any of them, but I could only confirm their efficacy with standard teleportation spells.


    Building them near the resonance point was easy, and holding them to shape while teleporting directly to the gestalt¡¯s lair barely taxed my strength more than a normal teleport. The colony assembled immediately at my arrival, and the gestalt¡¯s voice spoke into my mind. ¡®You are ready to begin your experiment?¡¯


    ¡°I am,¡± I said. ¡°The major hurdle is the distance, of course. But you¡¯ve already got the scrying connection going, and my enchantments are pure mana constructs. They¡¯re designed to anchor themselves in the Astral Realm, so, in theory, they should be able to travel along the scrying path to Yulitar, where they¡¯ll be swept up in the mana vortex and pulled inside Ammun¡¯s new tower. I need your cooperation to launch the enchantments.¡±


    ¡®Very well. Walk us through what exactly we need to do.¡¯


    Working together, the gestalt and I sent one after another of my scrying infiltrators skyward. As I¡¯d expected, there were some problems with adapting the spells to use a different form of teleportation. Fully two-third of the enchantments collapsed on the spot, and of the three that I managed to adapt, two of them became fully subsumed in the mana stream. They probably still existed in the Astral Realm, but that didn¡¯t do me much good.


    Finally, after a bit of tinkering to account for all the new problems we¡¯d come up against, I held what I hoped would be the final attempt loosely in my mind. If this one failed, I¡¯d need a round-trip back to my demesne to take advantage of my resonance point again, but I didn¡¯t think it¡¯d come to that.


    ¡°Here we go,¡± I said. At the gestalt¡¯s mental confirmation, I sent the enchantment racing along the scrying lines, tethered to the spell the gestalt was maintaining to help my magic find its way. It slipped into the Astral Realm, but a moment later, it was back in the physical world.


    ¡°No losses in the rune structure,¡± I said. ¡°Perfect. The enchantment is on Yulitar.¡±


    ¡®The tower is pulling it in,¡¯ the gestalt sent.


    We watched in silence as the spell I¡¯d put into Ammun¡¯s orbit circled around his tower. If I was too far off the mark on what kind of filter wards Ammun was using, we were about to find out. Best case, my magic would break apart into unstructured mana. Worst case, the lich would recognize the invasion attempt and probably make some alterations to his wards in an effort to strengthen them.


    On the other hand, if the spell did manage to slip through, it would let us scry the inside of the tower and maybe, for the first time in the last six months, give us a realistic timeline for when we could expect Ammun to return to Manoch. That would be an immense help in deciding what to prioritize.


    ¡°Almost there,¡± I muttered. ¡°Come on¡­¡±


    The spell slipped into the tower without so much as a blip. It swept through the intake until it reached the interior, where I manually pulled it out of the mana stream before it could be captured in what appeared to be an enormous crystal pillar. Fully a hundred feet tall and twenty feet wide, it rose through the interior of the tower and deep down below the moon¡¯s surface. As it pulled in more and more mana, the crystal crushed it down, converting it into heavy mana.


    ¡®That is a significant amount of mana. Perhaps we did not understand the true scope of this teleportation spell,¡¯ the gestalt observed.


    I shook my head. ¡°It¡¯s for something else. I think this might be the focal point for the soul tether that will connect Ammun¡¯s physical shell to his phylactery.¡±Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    The crystal spire was less interesting than the walls of the tower itself. There were millions of visible runes carved into its surface, and I could see panels of moonstone stacked up waiting to be installed on top of the runes already completed. It was probably possible to count how many layers Ammun had constructed, but it wouldn¡¯t be easy with my limited ability to snoop.


    Still, it was a good sign. I¡¯d gotten the teleport ritual down to a single room, not even a tenth of the size of the interior of the tower, with no extra layers of walls for more runes. Whatever Ammun was doing was a hundred times more complex. It would take far more time and mana to utilize this setup. What I needed to figure out was exactly how much more time he needed.


    Ammun himself floated in the air near the top of the tower. He was wearing the same dark robes I¡¯d seen him in last time, now considerably dustier. With one finger, he carved runes into a blank stone panel on the wall in front of him. The speed at which he worked was impressive, especially considering the cloud of dust he¡¯d created by manually breaking down the stone instead of reshaping it to form the runes.


    I did a quick count of the uncarved panels still waiting to be installed, then compared it to how fast Ammun was working. A lich was undead; it needed no rest. It didn¡¯t get fatigued. At no point would its hands tremble and threaten to ruin its work. Undead were practically biological machines. Because of that, I figured it was a safe guess to assume that his current speed was as fast as he could go, which meant he needed about six weeks to finish carving runes into his supply of panels.


    That was only true if he was carving one side, however, and there was no real reason to do that.  Double-sided panels would cut the number he needed in half in addition to providing smoother, more efficient mana flows. That was how I¡¯d do it, and since Ammun seemed to have modeled himself completely after me, I suspected that was his process as well. If that was the case, six weeks became twelve.


    His current stack of raw material was enough to complete another layer on all four floors of the tower with enough left over to do a third or so of an additional round. Did he have a stock of extras, or was he going to have to take a break to make more panels? Considering how easy they were to manufacture, I could easily see the logic going either way. Why worry about making too many when each one only took a minute to craft? Why worry about making sure he had enough when if he ran out, he could just step out of his tower and get more immediately?


    The only way I was going to get a clear picture was to get a look at the runes themselves and try to piece together exactly what Ammun was building. If nothing else, I wanted to know if the teleportation portion of the tower was completed. I was assuming he wouldn¡¯t come back without the soul tether issue also sorted, but after that, I could also see him adding some sort of weapons system like his old rival cabal had used when they¡¯d taken over Amodir a thousand years ago.


    If he was making that, I¡¯d have no choice but to return to Yulitar and attack Ammun. I couldn¡¯t afford to let him build a planet-cracking mana beam cannon floating over all our heads, but I didn¡¯t know how I was going to win that fight. Hopefully, it wasn¡¯t a priority to Ammun right now. He¡¯d be much easier to handle on Manoch, especially once his demesne finished crumbling under its own weight.


    I¡¯d just started prying into the rune structure, barely even skimming over it to get a rough idea of what things were supposed to do, when Ammun suddenly froze in place. ¡°Shit,¡± I swore. ¡°Looks like he noticed something.¡±


    Slowly, the lich turned and looked down at the partially phased out scrying beacon we were spying on him through. ¡°Interesting,¡± he said. ¡°Who might you belong to? Oh, like I don¡¯t already know. Master Keiran, how nice of you to check up on me.¡±


    ¡®Shall we terminate the connection?¡¯ the gestalt asked.


    ¡°No, take in as much of the rune structure as you can get and project it as illusions down here,¡± I said. With any luck, having a few million minds would allow the gestalt to perfectly recall what the runes looked like. Being able to fully study the magic at my leisure would go a long way toward giving me an accurate timeline for Ammun¡¯s return.


    ¡°It was an impressive trick, leaving me stranded up here by using my ritual fodder to get back home yourself,¡± Ammun said. ¡°Though I do wonder how you managed to coerce the other half of my diviner squad into assisting you. The numbers just don¡¯t add up, you see. One way or another, there should have been some bodies up here.¡±


    ¡°Keep talking,¡± I muttered. ¡°Give us just another minute to look around.¡±


    ¡°Ah, well, I suppose I¡¯ll find out soon enough, when I come to question you in person. It won¡¯t be long now. My work nears completion, but let¡¯s leave it a surprise as to when exactly I¡¯ll come to call on you.¡±


    Ammun reached out with one hand, his skeletal fingers clutched into something that remotely resembled a fist, and a pulse of mana rolled out of him. My scrying spell was snuffed out, snapping the connection and sending mana lashing back at us.


    I grounded out the reprisal without issue, then turned my attention to the gestalt. ¡°Tell me you managed to copy his work.¡±


    ¡®We did, though not all of it.¡¯


    ¡°Damn. That¡¯s going to complicate things. How much did you get a good look at?¡±


    ¡®Everything on the innermost layer and the layer behind that, and a partial look at the third layer,¡¯ the gestalt explained. ¡®We believe there were two more layers based on the thickness of the panels and overall surface area of the interior of the tower when compared to the exterior.¡¯


    I blinked in surprise. ¡°Really? You got all that from just that minute or so of examination?¡±


    ¡®Yes.¡¯


    ¡°Well¡­ That¡¯s a lot. Can you share it with me so I can start reverse-engineering his progress?¡±


    A now-familiar barrage of images entered my brain, too many for me to sort out all at once. I could already feel the beginnings of a headache coming on, but I¡¯d just have to suffer through. This was too important to take it slowly.


    ¡°Thanks,¡± I said. ¡°Alright, making some assumptions about the outer layers housing the ward schema, let¡¯s see if we can find the beginning of the thread with what we¡¯ve got to look at.¡±


    And so the gestalt and I worked together to unravel Ammun¡¯s magic, one panel at a time. I didn¡¯t sleep for the next three days, but when we were finished, I had an answer. Unfortunately, it wasn¡¯t one I was happy with.


    ¡°Ten weeks,¡± I said. How much could I get done in just ten weeks?

 Book 5, Chapter 41

    My already overburdened schedule was suddenly stuffed to the brim. There¡¯d be no sleeping in my future, nor was there time to oversee any non-essential experiments. The only thing I¡¯d be doing that wasn¡¯t furthering my goal of meeting Ammun in open battle and prevailing was helping Senica.


    ¡°But why did I spend days working on this if you were just going to do it yourself?¡± Senica asked, her voice waspish when I showed up to treat her.


    ¡°We just got confirmation. Ten weeks is all I¡¯ve got before Ammun gets back. You need to immediately stop using the ointment. In a few months, hopefully you can resume treatment and I can finish teaching you what you need to know. For now, this is the quickest solution. Now, hold still.¡±


    With a sigh, Senica stopped fidgeting and I cast the spells needed to fix the chemical imbalance in her body. It only took about ten minutes, during which I caught my family up on the most recent disasters I was handling.


    ¡°The Order should stay away,¡± I explained, ¡°and if they don¡¯t, I¡¯ve got the one passage I know about across the ocean under surveillance. You should still keep the transmission stones on you, just in case they have other ways to get here.¡±


    ¡°I can¡¯t even imagine,¡± Mother said. ¡°How much water could there possibly be?¡±


    ¡°In an ocean? I doubt anyone has ever calculated the number.¡± I tried to mentally figure out the dimensions, but quickly gave it up as a bad job. For one thing, my mental map was a few millennia out of date, and for another, I had almost no knowledge of how deep it went, other than ¡®very.¡¯ ¡°It¡¯s not something you can swim across. Even flying¡­ I could do it, but I wouldn¡¯t want to. It¡¯s several thousand miles of open water with no guarantee of finding an island to land on if I need to stop for some reason.¡±


    On the bright side, I was reasonably certain all the sea monsters had died off. Things tended to get a lot bigger in huge bodies of water than they did on land, and with increased size generally came a need for mana just to survive. There were exceptions, of course, but animals that didn¡¯t rely on mana in some way weren¡¯t usually threats to big ships.


    ¡°It¡¯s possible they¡¯ve got alternate teleportation chains set up that I don¡¯t know about, but I don¡¯t have time to scry out the whole ocean looking for them, especially not now. I¡¯ve got to finish knocking down a tower and gather some allies for the fight. Then I¡¯ve got to equip them to handle the threat. The portal network needs to be expanded and the wards strengthened. I need to figure out a portable ritual circle for fixed-destination long-range teleportation, and¡ª¡±


    ¡°What about getting back to stage nine?¡± Senica interrupted.


    I cut off my list with a twinge of annoyance. ¡°I can¡¯t.¡±


    ¡°Why not?¡±


    A sharp retort came to my lips, but I swallowed it down with a grimace. ¡°It¡¯s just not feasible. I don¡¯t have what I need.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s that? Maybe we can help?¡± Father asked.


    I bit back a laugh. The special rooms and equipment I¡¯d fabricated prior to my death as part of my experiments in bridging the gap between stage eight and nine without outside assistance were all gone, lost, stolen, or destroyed centuries ago. Even if I still had them, they were experimental. There was no way to know for sure that they¡¯d work without testing them.


    ¡°It would take me years to get everything ready,¡± I said. ¡°And I still might fail.¡±


    ¡°How could you fail?¡± Senica asked, bewildered. ¡°Weren¡¯t you already stage nine before?¡±


    ¡°I¡­ was, yes. But it¡¯s not that simple. The way I did it the first time isn¡¯t something I can replicate.¡±


    It had taken three of us working together and it had ended in a betrayal that had cost two lives. I¡¯d survived through sheer luck and massive amounts of paranoia. Years of preparations had gone into that ritual, mostly to protect myself from exactly what had ended up happening¡ªone of my cabal mates trying to kill me mid-ascendance¡ªand even then, it had been a near thing. My mind had been cut free to drift in the Astral Realm, to drown in an ocean of mana that I lacked the ability to manipulate.


    ¡°Gravin?¡± Mother said.


    ¡°Huh?¡±


    ¡°Are you alright?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m fine, just remembering¡­ I had a cabal when I was stage eight last time. There were three of us, Nivir, Daelin, and myself. We figured out how to reach stage nine, but it required all of us collaborating. Daelin tried to kill me in the middle of the ritual. He failed, and Nivir burned out his ability to do magic to bring me back from beyond the brink. He died half an hour later when his age caught up with him.¡±


    As much as I owed Nivir my life, I was under no illusions that he¡¯d done it for any altruistic reasons. He¡¯d been injured in the fight and was already nearing the end of his life anyway. He¡¯d saved me in return for my promise to aid his descendants in their own magical journeys, which I¡¯d done without complaint.You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    I¡¯d helped half a dozen archmages reach stage nine over the centuries, but they were all dead now. With no one left to return the favor, my only option was to find a way to advance without help. Or I could trust someone not to kill me when I was in a state of complete and total vulnerability. All they¡¯d have to do is let me go and I¡¯d drift away to my death. The fact that my automatons, traps, and wards would kill my betrayer would be no consolation.


    ¡°Why do all of your stories end with someone betraying someone else?¡± Senica asked.


    ¡°Because you don¡¯t get to my level of power by being a good person,¡± I told her.


    ¡°You¡¯re a good person,¡± Mother said.


    ¡°No, I¡¯m not.¡±


    ¡°You are,¡± she insisted.


    ¡°He murdered like thirteen people this week,¡± Senica said.


    ¡°They attacked him! He was defending himself.¡±


    ¡°I love my brother, but he could have gotten what he wanted and still let them live. He chose to kill them.¡±


    She was probably right. I wasn¡¯t in the habit of showing mercy to people who came after me, though, so I hadn¡¯t bothered to try. Admittedly, an argument could have been made that I¡¯d overreacted to the Order snooping into my business, but when I was fighting a war against an entire enemy nation led by a powerful lich, I couldn¡¯t afford half-measures.


    ¡°You¡¯re all set for now,¡± I said. ¡°Don¡¯t use any more of the ointment. I¡¯ll come back in a week to repeat the process. In a few months, we can talk about how to do this yourself if you want to resume treatments.¡±


    ¡°Senica won¡¯t be doing that,¡± Mother said.


    I snorted. ¡°Good luck stopping her. Might as well settle for doing it safely.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s not¡ª¡±


    I cut her off with an upraised hand. ¡°I don¡¯t have the time to waste on this argument right now. You guys figure out what you want to do and let me know when I come back in a week.¡±


    I strode back into my room, activated the teleportation platform, and jumped halfway across the continent.


    * * *


    Ammun¡¯s tower was in distressingly good condition. Either I¡¯d grossly underestimated how much mana it was drawing in, his golems had destroyed some of my mysteel generators, or those Order archmages had managed to do an extraordinary job fixing things back up. I was betting on the second, but the first would actually be better news. It would mean the world core was in better shape than I¡¯d originally thought.


    I teleported down to the intake vents and shredded a trio of behemoth mana wraiths circling around that locked in on me the moment I appeared. Razor-edged blades of phantasmal force tore them apart in seconds, dissipating them into pure mana and sucking them into the intake. I studied the flow for a few seconds, trying to determine if it was stronger or weaker than before, but I couldn¡¯t find a difference.


    The golems were, if anything, even more numerous than the last time I¡¯d been in here. If I hadn¡¯t already mapped out the entire tower, I would have suspected some sort of autonomous manufacturing room that was materializing raw material out of mana and stamping golem cores to be inserted into metal and stone frames. Then again, I never had determined where the original wave had come from. It hadn¡¯t seemed important considering I was planning on tearing the tower down anyway.


    I didn¡¯t have time to fight my way through the legion of unthinking constructs before me, so I cheated and teleported directly to the closest mysteel generator. Surprisingly, it was still in one piece and had produced about thirty pounds of mysteel. I collected it into my phantom space, drew in enough mana to power a teleportation spell, and skipped to the next spot to repeat the process.


    The mana levels appeared to be stable and all the generators were in one piece, which left just the theory that the Order had interfered. My last stop was the control room for the tower, where I received a nasty surprise: I was completely locked out of the system.


    Somehow, it had reset itself back to its state prior to my modifications. It was no wonder the tower was still standing. All the damage I¡¯d done by sabotage had been reverted or repaired. ¡°Clever bastard,¡± I muttered. I hadn¡¯t expected Ammun to have something like this, but I probably should have.


    Spending the evening cracking everything back open wasn¡¯t ideal, but this tower needed to come down, now. This time, I didn¡¯t bother ripping everything open again. I didn¡¯t need access to every facet of the tower, and I didn¡¯t have time to be thorough.


    Instead, I manually brought down the wards reinforcing the tower¡¯s walls. By itself, that would have been enough if not for the damned control room resetting everything. This time, I was going to aggravate the problem. With all the wards down, I refocused the mana flows to build up in key locations, essentially forcing them to overload control nodes and add another layer of repairs the magic would need to handle before it could patch up anything.


    That would probably be enough to bring the tower down now, but I wasn¡¯t going to risk it. It was better to spend an extra six hours on this today than risk coming back in two weeks to find it was still whole and fully repaired. With the tower¡¯s defenses down, I begin actively damaging it. I had what was for my purposes an unlimited supply of heavy mana gushing up from beneath my feet and I intended to use it.


    Explosions rocked the tower, first from my own spells, then from sections of it collapsing. I avoided targeting the residential floors in the beginning, but it was inevitable that they¡¯d take damage. Hopefully the innocent civilians still living in the tower managed to evacuate before it was too late.


    It was only after the top two hundred floors had collapsed that I switched to delayed explosive spells. All throughout the night, I worked to add more and more of them, thousands of master-tier destructive conjurations scattered across every sub-level and intake shaft. When my work was finally complete, I teleported myself a few hundred miles straight up into the sky above the wreckage of the upper half of the tower.


    Then, with a single mental command, I triggered the destruction of the rest of the tower. Chunks of stone flew in every direction, some even reaching the height I was observing from. The ground shook for a thousand miles, new cracks and fissures opening from shore to shore, breaking the hundreds-miles long islands into even smaller chunks as seas rushed in to fill the new openings.


    There was no telling how many people I¡¯d just killed. I wasn¡¯t even sure who¡¯d been left in the tower, let alone who¡¯d been caught in the devastation. But when it was done, the miles-wide crater was half filled with loose stone. I hovered in silence, only the wind to keep me company, and watched trillions of gallons of water pour into the crater to drown what had once, so many centuries ago, been my home, before Ammun had built his monstrosity atop it.


    ¡°Are you watching from up there?¡± I asked as I glanced up into the night sky. ¡°This is just the beginning.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 42

    Grandfather stared doubtfully at the chain. It was six feet long, each link an inch thick and covered in runes. Thirty more exactly like it hung from a rack standing nearby. ¡°Why would we need such a thing?¡±


    ¡°Because you have an entire wall of portals connecting Eyrie Peak to the rest of the continent,¡± I said. ¡°You may need to defend it.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not arguing that point. I simply fail to see why any threat should be so powerful that we could not destroy it with our own magic.¡±


    ¡°And maybe that will be the case,¡± I said. ¡°Something might come through that you can easily defeat. Then again, whatever finds you might be strong enough to challenge an adult brakvaw, in which case, you¡¯ll be glad your warriors have these.¡±


    They weren¡¯t anything that complicated ¨C just a shield ward specialized in deflecting ranged projectiles and mana. My thought process was that any fight a brakvaw got involved in would be high speed and aerial, with little chance of things devolving into a brawl. By focusing on ranged defense, I sacrificed flexibility for efficiency. They also had a single-use recall enchantment anchored to them, independently powered from the shield ward, that would return the user to the top of Eyrie Peak.


    ¡°The gestalt should be able to warn you if and when Ammun sends his forces through any of the portals,¡± I said. ¡°Hopefully, that will be enough warning to gather your strongest to defend yourselves.¡±


    It would be better to just close the portals, but the brakvaw had become too reliant on easy access to hunting grounds. That, combined with their complete lack of knowledge on how to preserve food, meant that the portals had to stay open unless I wanted giant birds descending on human settlements looking for lunch.


    ¡°If it comes down to the worst-case scenario and the enemy is too overwhelming, this will close the portals permanently,¡± I told Grandfather. In my hand was a large red rock, speckled with gold and stuffed with mana. ¡°It¡¯s a spatial disruption bomb. Using this will collapse any nearby portals and disrupt all sorts of spatial effects, including teleportation. It doesn¡¯t lock the area down in any way, but it will break all ongoing effects.¡±


    ¡°Do you really think this will be necessary?¡±


    ¡°I honestly don¡¯t know what Ammun is planning. You might never see a single one of his soldiers, but on the other hand, an army of golems could come marching through those portals the second he gets back. I could have wasted my time and a great deal of mysteel making these, but I¡¯d rather you have them and not need them.¡±


    It wasn¡¯t like I had anything better to do with all the mysteel I¡¯d collected. It wasn¡¯t nearly enough to patch the shell around the world core, and I could recycle it later once this threat was dealt with. Nigh-indestructible inscribed battle gear seemed like a good use for it. I¡¯d been sitting on the chains for months now, anyway, just waiting until it was time to start equipping my allies.


    ¡°I appreciate that you spent the time to make these, but I hope we don¡¯t need them,¡± Grandfather said. ¡°I also hope you don¡¯t think this will buy you a wing of brakvaw to fight for you elsewhere.¡±


    ¡°I would hope that you would come to an ally¡¯s defense, regardless of whether exorbitant bribes were paid to you beforehand.¡±


    ¡°That will depend entirely on what the trouble is and how much we can afford to spare anyone from defending our own home,¡± Grandfather told me.


    ¡°I¡¯ll keep that in mind,¡± I said. I hadn¡¯t exactly been keeping score, but I was pretty sure that in the grand scheme of things, I¡¯d helped the brakvaw out far more than they¡¯d helped me. Most of what I¡¯d needed from them was for them to stop eating humans and a donation of mana. Admittedly, lossless casting wouldn¡¯t exist without their techniques and instruction to show me how to adapt it to my own magic, so maybe we were even after all.


    I spent another ten minutes instructing Grandfather in how to use the chains and portal breaker, not that there was much to them. Then I excused myself to continue my circuit around the island, while noting that Grandfather seemed almost relieved to see me leave.


    I couldn¡¯t blame him, not really. I was about to bring a whole heap of trouble down on the island, and anyone associated with me was probably going to get caught in the crossfire. I wouldn¡¯t be surprised if, by the time Ammun returned, the entire brakvaw civilization had flown off through one of the portals and closed the way behind them.


    * * *


    I dropped off more equipment all over. Hyago and his druids got a few pieces, as did Keeper and the Hierophant. I even left a pile of wands for their mage enforcers to help guard the city with. Senica had already been equipped with a mixture of my left-overs and a few pieces I¡¯d made specifically for her for a few years now, but I updated everything I could to use stronger material and have larger mana reserves.This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    I also equipped my parents and several of the stronger mages in New Alkerist with their own wands, shield wards, and flight charms. I didn¡¯t bother to let my family know that the shield wards had hidden enchantments that would pull them to a safehouse I¡¯d prepared ahead of time if I needed to evacuate them, but I caught Senica peering at the enchantments closely and I had no doubt she¡¯d noticed that hidden effect.


    I even went so far as to find Tetrin and warn him about the potential upcoming attack, though I doubted he¡¯d be in the direct line of fire. I hadn¡¯t had much interaction with the man since Ammun had woken back up, so he probably wasn¡¯t in danger, but on the off-chance that the Order¡¯s fumbling around had revealed his existence to Ammun¡¯s generals, I felt it was worth the ten-minute conversation.


    The only person who didn¡¯t receive a king¡¯s ransom in magical gear from me was Querit, and it wasn¡¯t because I hadn¡¯t invested in making him the strongest combat frame I could manage. I¡¯d pulled apart every one of his frames over the last year to study their designs, and while they were quite ingenious, I¡¯d streamlined a few efficiency issues and fixed a handful of flaws, then scaled the whole thing up for my own version.


    Standing at nine feet tall, the combat frame was an amalgamation of mysteel and mana-reflective plates, eight individual layers of runework that made up over a hundred different combat spells, including six master-tier spells that Querit himself couldn¡¯t even power. I¡¯d included fourteen super-dense storage crystals, each capable of holding enough mana to fire a single master-tier spell before running itself dry, just to activate those spells.


    And I had nobody to wear it, not unless I could find a six-year-old prodigy or another shapeshifter. It had been designed specifically for Querit, and without him, it was useless. I was still holding out hope that he¡¯d show back up at some point; I¡¯d let enough people know about Ammun¡¯s upcoming return that he¡¯d definitely hear about it. Whether or not that was enough to get him to come back to work was another matter.


    With all the gear I¡¯d been stockpiling over the last few months handed out, I was ready to return to my goal of crippling Ammun¡¯s support network. Thus far, I¡¯d been chipping away at his standing army. Chasing them off the field and back into the tower had slowed down their resource gathering and might even starve them out in the long-term, but that strategy was only ever going to work if it took Ammun long enough to get back. I was going to have to be more-proactive in killing the remaining thousands of mage-soldiers over the next week or two.


    That would be easier now that they had no safe haven to retreat to. In fact, I expected a rash of deserters in the next few days once the dust settled. The collapse of the tower had literally thrown up a screen so thick that it was making scrying in the area difficult. If I was really lucky, the gestalt would soon be telling me that they¡¯d learned most of the army had been lost in the tower, and that everyone still in the area were civilians.


    I doubted I was lucky.


    More likely, the innocents had all been trapped in the tower while the military monopolized access to every single teleportation platform to evacuate as many of themselves as possible. Much as I¡¯d have preferred it to be the other way around, chances were good that I¡¯d killed off a not-insignificant portion of the Sanctum of Light¡¯s population, and that the civilians had taken the brunt of that. I¡¯d know in a day or two.


    All I could do in the meantime was keep preparing. To that end, I visited the hidden room buried five hundred feet below the surface in the center of my valley. No one knew about this room ¨C not Querit, not my family, not the gestalt. No one. The only way in was to be the master of the demesne to bypass the teleportation wards, or to physically dig to it. Even then, I doubted anyone besides me could actually crack it open.


    It was a vault, a solid fifteen-foot diameter orb of mysteel, the walls six inches thick. Inside it was the thing I¡¯d poured a lot of effort into when I wasn¡¯t busy conducting experiments or creating weapons for my allies in my crucible. The entire room was layer upon layer of rune-inscribed diamond sheets sandwiched between living stone.


    It was, in short, a golem core, one big enough to power a titan and hidden in every way I could think of. Hovering in the very center of the orb was a chunk of obsidian I¡¯d fetched from a volcano, two-hundred-feet tall at full size and under heavy spatial compression to shrink it down to the mere eight feet it stood at right now. It could hold enough mana to destroy the entire island if something were to happen to it.


    And it was only a quarter of the way full, despite my best efforts. Oh, I could have diverted all of my mana production into it, but that wouldn¡¯t have been enough to complete it, and it might have drawn undue attention from Querit, who I definitely didn¡¯t want to discover that I¡¯d made a larger-than-life scale replica of his own core, albeit with some alterations.


    Querit was too human-like, but this golem would be perfectly obedient. It would be trust-worthy. If I was right, it would be able to perform the outer portion of the ritual to advance to stage nine. I¡¯d based it on one of my original designs from my past life, modified with what I¡¯d learned from studying Querit himself.


    Unfortunately, it would need far more than ten weeks to finish filling. Even if I diverted everything I had access to, I might be able to fill it in eight, but that wouldn¡¯t leave me enough time to test it before I tried it out. I¡¯d be risking everything on an unproven design that no doubt needed a great deal of iteration before it was ready to be used.


    It was still my one great hope for reaching stage nine again, but it had taken too long to get to this point. Accidentally releasing Ammun from stasis had started a clock I¡¯d been struggling against, and unless I could find another way to stall him from escaping Yulitar, I wasn¡¯t even going to come close to beating it.


    Still, I was stage eight, and I had time to finish cutting away his support. When Ammun did show back up, it wasn¡¯t going to be a hopeless battle. It just wouldn¡¯t be as easy as it could have been. I¡¯d beat him, somehow, and then I¡¯d continue to think toward the future, to fixing the world core and reaching stage nine unassisted.


    It was just the part in the middle that I still needed to figure out. No problem.

 Book 5, Chapter 43

    I spent the first week systematically tearing apart the remnants of Ammun¡¯s army. It turned out I¡¯d been a bit too pessimistic in my estimates on how the evacuation would go. By the gestalt¡¯s count and my own estimations, something like seven in ten people had escaped the collapse of the tower, split heavily in the favor of the noncombatants.


    The units that attached themselves to civilians were left alone. Usually, they were no more than ten or fifteen mages and casual spying tended to reveal some sort of familiar relationship with the civilians. Instead of wasting my time on them, I focused my efforts on groups that were still following military doctrines and entrenching themselves in fortifications.


    The first time I¡¯d attacked Ammun¡¯s army, I¡¯d done my best to conserve mana. That meant limiting myself to advanced-tier or lower spells except in emergencies, which had been fine back when I thought I had more time to whittle down their numbers. Now, I had a very good guess of the amount of time Ammun needed to get back here, and I didn¡¯t need a strong core of loyalists waiting to greet him.


    My primary goal was to kill large numbers of mages quickly and without leaving behind bodies that could be reanimated into another zombie army. Fire magic worked great for that, so that was what I used. Guided by the gestalt¡¯s scrying, I visited a dozen groups and incinerated mages by the hundreds. Though I didn¡¯t get an exact count myself, the gestalt assured me that I¡¯d killed a little over two thousand people scattered across eighteen groups in that week.


    Those that remained were more of a dilemma. I didn¡¯t want to kill them, but leaving them there was going to cause problems. Some of them would be pressed back into service when Ammun returned. Others would be killed and reanimated. I needed to clear the whole area out if I wasn¡¯t going to be actively contesting Ammun for control of it. To that end, I got a little creative over the second week.


    Using the same spell I¡¯d performed to talk to the Global Order all at once, and with the help of the gestalt to forge the connections to the many, many small groups of survivors, I spent my time gathering them together and creating a portal to an island not too far from where I¡¯d dumped Ammun¡¯s diviner corp.


    A surprising number of the refugees came in willingly, though an even larger portion were compelled by threats and force. A small faction refused all attempts to coax or browbeat them into cooperating, though usually I managed to get through to them after killing off the stubborn ones. Once they¡¯d all been gathered into groups, a task that didn¡¯t take all that long since they hadn¡¯t had much time to spread out in the first place, I opened the portal and sent them through.


    That left nothing but a few isolated deserters, less than a hundred people in total and not worth the mana to teleport around and collect. If Ammun wanted to waste weeks or months chasing them down, that was fine by me. From what I could see through the gestalt¡¯s thousand scrying eyes, none of them were beyond stage three. Nor were they officers or anyone important. Most likely, they were drafted conscripts who¡¯d taken advantage of the chaos of my attacks to escape.


    At this point, their fates were their own, and I¡¯d already wasted enough time.


    * * *


    There was no particularly good reason to assume Ralvost would be the battlefield, but the giant hole that used to be the tower was still a particularly mana-rich environment. Wanting to take advantage of that, I placed my mysteel generators in the crater. They wouldn¡¯t make much, and certainly not as fast as when they¡¯d been positioned inside intake vents being flooded with heavy mana, but every little bit helped.


    I wanted to fix the world core, but I had no problem with harvesting what little mana it still had coming out of it rather than letting it dissipate back into the Astral Realm today. Ideally, I¡¯d have the whole thing set up to cycle right back in, and that was actually a big part of my plan in the coming years, but for now, the more mana I could get my hands on, the better off I¡¯d be.


    I trapped Ralvost wherever I thought I might encounter Ammun. The tower was an obvious choice, as were his various facilities and labs that I¡¯d discovered. I doubted he¡¯d need them once he got back, but even a slim chance to catch him without a fight was worth taking. And when I was done in Ralvost, I went back home and did the same thing there.


    That took me another week, leaving me with just seven. Other than the fact that I wouldn¡¯t be able to gather enough mana to even attempt advancing to stage nine with my experimental assistance golem core, I actually felt like I¡¯d done a good job of preparing for Ammun¡¯s return. If he showed up tomorrow or in three months, I¡¯d be just as ready for him.


    That was what I¡¯d thought, until the gestalt uncovered a new problem.


    * * *


    ¡°What the hell is that?¡± I asked.If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    ¡®We are not sure.¡¯


    ¡°Because it looks like an army of golems digging themselves out of the rubble,¡± I said. ¡°But it can¡¯t be that. They would have to have all been destroyed when a hundred thousand tons of rock collapsed on them. Even the ones that weren¡¯t crushed couldn¡¯t possibly dig through a hundred miles of stone in just a few weeks.¡±


    Despite my claims, that was precisely what seemed to have happened. There were already fifty of the damned things standing in the crater. It was impossible. There was just no way. Even with the evidence in front of my eyes, metaphorically speaking, I couldn¡¯t make myself believe it.


    ¡°They must be from somewhere else,¡± I muttered, more to myself than to the gestalt.


    ¡®We have witnessed all of them unearthing themselves from the remains of Ammun¡¯s tower.¡¯


    ¡°Teleported in from somewhere else, maybe¡­ Some sort of teleportation beacon buried underground. No, that¡¯s stupid. The beacon would have shattered from such a radical shift in the geography, not to mention the mass displacement required to clear enough space for them to appear would have cost an enormous amount of mana.¡±


    ¡®Perhaps less focus on the ¡®how¡¯ of the problem and more on what you¡¯ll be doing to solve it.¡¯


    ¡°Well, they¡¯ve got to go,¡± I said, gesturing toward the scrying orbs. ¡°The real problem is doing it. One or two would be no problem, but hundreds or even thousands of them?¡±


    ¡®Do they need to be destroyed?¡¯


    ¡°If we don¡¯t want Ammun to have an army of combat golems waiting for him when he returns, I¡¯d say so. I¡¯d hoped with the tower destroyed, all of these golems would become a non-issue. It¡¯s clear that, if nothing else, they need the high amounts of ambient mana in that area to function. Another year or two and they¡¯ll all stop moving on their own.¡±


    But we didn¡¯t have a year. We had maybe six weeks. And while it was certainly possible that I could smash a few thousand golems in that time frame, doing it while maintaining my mana reserves was a significantly more difficult goal. Worse, I didn¡¯t even know if that would accomplish anything useful in the end. Without knowing where the damn things were coming from¡ªbecause it absolutely could not be that they¡¯d dug themselves up through a hundred miles of stone¡ªI had no guarantee that more wouldn¡¯t show up to replace whatever I destroyed.


    Maybe I didn¡¯t need to destroy them. I¡¯d displaced the human population. Could I do the same to the golems? There was plenty of ocean to dump them into, far enough away that even if they survived the crushing pressure of the depths and started walking back to Ralvost somehow, it would take years to return. Or I could widen the channels letting the ocean pour into the massive pit and finish flooding it.


    I couldn¡¯t teleport them all individually, and opening up a massive miles-wide portal under their feet to swallow them was just as infeasible, but maybe I could bait them in. They hadn¡¯t shown any sort of intelligence when I was fighting them back in the tower. A big magic hole in the air with me standing in plain view on the other side and some force spells to shove them through might actually do the trick.


    If I was going to maintain it for hours or days, I needed a permanent framework, however. That would take a bit of time to put together, but I could do it. I was more concerned about the golems¡¯ sensory runes. If they couldn¡¯t ¡®see¡¯ through the portal, it was going to be a lot harder to stand there as bait. It might be worth it to capture one and give it a thorough examination before I wasted too much time and effort on this plan.


    ¡°I think you might be right,¡± I said after giving my plan a few more moments of thought. ¡°Destroying them all is impractical. Relocating them is much easier, as long as we pick a place Ammun won¡¯t be able to easily retrieve them from. I¡¯m going to go grab one so I can take it apart and poke at its core. I need to know what kind of guidance runes these things are working with so I can properly bait the trap.¡±


    ¡®Do you require any further assistance from us?¡¯ the gestalt asked.


    ¡°Not regarding this. For now, we¡¯re just kind of holding. Keep an eye on everything, and let me know the instant something goes wrong.¡±


    ¡®Very well. And the matter of our payment?¡¯


    ¡°Coming along, but it¡¯s a slow process. Depending how long it takes me to engineer a solution to this whole mess, I should have the prototype done by the end of the week.¡±


    ¡®That is good. We are pleased with your progress.¡¯


    I did my best to keep from rolling my eyes. If the gestalt didn¡¯t have a perfect memory, I¡¯d have said they¡¯d forgotten who was the stronger one in our relationship. But, as arrogant the entity might be, they were rapidly becoming my most useful ally. I could appease them for a few more months until this business with Ammun was settled. Then I¡¯d settle up accounts and hopefully wouldn¡¯t be relying so much on the gestalt¡¯s services.


    Querit was never this much of a pain to work with. He offered smart ideas and contributed readily without trying to extract concessions from me. When I stopped to think about it, I was actually starting to miss working with him. Hopefully he¡¯d get over whatever his issues were soon.


    Maybe I would check in with him soon. Ammun¡¯s descent on Manoch affected him, too. If nothing else, self-preservation might motivate him to look past his issues with me. He could have handled stuff like dissecting a golem core for me, or continuing the research on creating mysteel. That was important.


    ¡°I¡¯ll let you know when the first version is ready for testing,¡± I said. ¡°For now, I¡¯ve got some other work to take care of.¡±


    ¡®The golem problem?¡¯


    I studied the image of the golems crawling out of the rubble. Even as I watched, a new hand busted free and started dragging a metal body out into the sunlight. ¡°Exactly. Right now, it¡¯s nothing. But if Ammun can take direct control of them, he still has an army to wield. I need to get rid of them and wipe out any trace of where they went so that he can¡¯t retrieve them.¡±


    With a final word of farewell, I teleported to the first point in the chain between Eyrie Peak of the former Sanctum of Light. Two more jumps saw me to my destination, where I found an isolated golem and promptly smashed it apart.


    ¡°Too much force,¡± I muttered to myself as I looked at the partially destroyed golem core I¡¯d pried out of its chest. With a sigh, I tossed it aside and scanned for another golem. There was one a few hundred feet away, part of a group of three. That¡¯d do.

 Book 5, Chapter 44

    Five weeks remained. Ammun¡¯s army was broken and the civilians had been stashed away. My allies were as kitted out as I could make them. The Order hadn¡¯t dared to show its face anywhere on Olpahun, at least not that the gestalt had seen. If they were back over here, they¡¯d come some other way than their chain of island teleports.


    And I¡¯d wasted more time than I was comfortable with setting up my little honeypot to draw all these golems in. It had taken me a few days to work out the specifics, but once I¡¯d figured out how the golems perceived the world around them, it wasn¡¯t too hard to set up some mana shaped to trip their targeting systems and string it out as bait. A slow stream of them were steadily making their way to the portal I¡¯d opened over the middle of the ocean and happily tipping themselves through it to sink down into the sea.


    Incidentally, while studying the cores, I¡¯d confirmed that they had been mass-produced by the tens of thousands at a conservative estimate. The design collected all sorts of matter¡ªdust, dirt, loose rocks, whatever it could get that wasn¡¯t alive¡ªand transmuted it into a new body. It wasn¡¯t efficient, but considering the amount of ambient heavy mana in the area they¡¯d been assigned to guard, it didn¡¯t need to be.


    They weren¡¯t so much digging themselves out as cycling through the process of making new bodies out of the surrounding ground, being crushed again as they tried to move, and then building another new body in a glacial effort to free themselves. If the mana levels didn¡¯t drop, every one of them would likely eventually resurface, but I expected the cores to deactivate long before most of them got anywhere near open air.


    Water was still flooding in and would probably someday turn the rubble-strewn chasm into a lake, but that would take several more months. At the moment, it was just a collection of waterfalls pouring into an unimaginably huge pile of loose stone, and it was nowhere near the level needed to even reach the top of the pile, let alone the top of the pit.


    I did make a mental note to map out where the water might be spilling into below ground, just on the off chance that a number of those golem cores were swept away by the current. A few here and there weren¡¯t a big deal, but I didn¡¯t need a thousand of them showing up on a shore somewhere, having rebuilt themselves from sand and gravel and trudging across the bottom of the sea.


    The ones walking through the portal wouldn¡¯t be getting anywhere near the coastline, not any time in the next few decades, at least. In a century, I might be addressing the problem again, but hopefully at that point I¡¯d have the time and resources to dispose of the cores properly. As long as they were out of Ammun¡¯s reach for the next few months, I was happy with my current solution.


    After getting everything set up and hanging around for a few hours to make sure it was working, I quickly teleported back across the continent to my demesne. The gestalt would keep an eye on things from here and let me know if I needed to take any further actions, but I was confident that wouldn¡¯t be necessary.


    The instant I arrived back home, I knew something was wrong. Someone had bypassed the wards, and the list of people who could do that was small enough to count on my fingers. Half the people keyed into the wards couldn¡¯t even get here, people like my parents and Nailu. Senica could do it if she flew the whole way, but I wasn¡¯t confident in her sense of direction to actually find this one specific valley hidden in the mountains.


    The only person who could actually get here under their own power and wouldn¡¯t be hindered by my wards was Querit. A quick sweep of my demesne confirmed my suspicions ¨C the golem was standing in front of the combat frame I¡¯d built for him, examining it carefully with a set of divinations.


    I appeared next to him and said, ¡°You¡¯re back.¡±


    ¡°Yes,¡± he said absently. ¡°When did you start working on this?¡±


    ¡°A month or so before you left.¡±


    ¡°This¡­ is a lot of potential. Are you sure you trust someone else with this much power?¡±


    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t have built it if I didn¡¯t trust you with it,¡± I told him. It wasn¡¯t nearly strong enough to threaten someone like me or Ammun, but from what I¡¯d seen of the rest of the world¡¯s powers, it would probably put Querit in a solid third place. Grandfather might give him a run for it today, but I was confident Querit could beat him if he had a few weeks to get used to everything the new frame could do first.


    Standing upright next to Querit was a pedestal of what looked like quartz, three feet tall and a foot across. It had shielding enchantments woven into it, but it obviously contained a significant amount of mana. Even if I couldn¡¯t get a read on exactly how much was in there, a storage crystal that massive was a rarity.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    ¡°What¡¯s this?¡± I asked, gesturing to the pedestal.


    ¡°All the mana I could beg, borrow, or steal over the past few months. It should be enough to get you to stage nine.¡±


    I blinked in surprise. Of all the things he could have been up to, I hadn¡¯t expected him to be out campaigning for resources for me. Querit had a solid grasp of how quickly my demesne produced mana, so if he thought he¡¯d gathered a significant enough amount to affect my advancement, there was even more mana trapped in that quartz than I¡¯d thought.


    It didn¡¯t change anything, however. Even with perfect transference, it wouldn¡¯t be enough to finish charging my ascension chamber. And even if by some miracle it was, I still needed to test the design before I actually took the plunge and tried to step across that final boundary. The time constraints alone prevented me from reaching stage nine before Ammun returned.


    ¡°I appreciate the thought, but it doesn¡¯t work that way,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯m sorry you wasted your time on¡ª¡±


    ¡°No. It¡¯s enough,¡± Querit said. ¡°Examine it. You¡¯ll see.¡±


    ¡°There isn¡¯t enough time even if¡ª¡±


    ¡°Yes, there is.¡±


    ¡°Querit, the process isn¡¯t as easy as you seem to think it is.¡±


    He shook his head. ¡°I know it¡¯s not easy, but the only thing stopping you from advancing is your own fear.¡±


    I gave him a flat look. ¡°I¡¯m done discussing this. This changes nothing. You don¡¯t know what goes into the last step if you think the lack of mana is the only problem to be overcome.¡±


    ¡°I do,¡± he said. ¡°You need someone else to serve as your anchor to keep you from dissolving into the Astral Realm and a beacon for you to find your way back.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s a big part of it, yes,¡± I said in exasperation. ¡°Even if I knew anyone strong enough to do it, it¡¯s still complicated. The sheer amount of knowledge that¡¯s been lost makes it impossible.¡±


    ¡°No. I can do it,¡± he argued. ¡°And you know I can do it, but it would mean trusting me.¡±


    ¡°Yes. It would. I hope you¡¯ll forgive me if I don¡¯t trust you with my life after having only known you for a year or so.¡±


    ¡°Keiran, if we could afford to wait, that would be one thing. I¡¯m sure you¡¯ve had longer relationships end in blood, ones that you thought were far more solid than our friendship. I¡¯m not offended that you¡¯re having a hard time trusting me if even a quarter of the stories I¡¯ve heard about your life are true.


    ¡°What upsets me is that we both know your advancement to stage nine is the best¡ªmaybe only¡ªchance this whole planet has to avoid Ammun becoming its permanent ruler. Even if you don¡¯t trust me to be altruistic, are you really so stupid that you can¡¯t trust my desire to preserve my own life? I didn¡¯t think you were, but every chance you get, you prove otherwise.¡±


    ¡°Enough,¡± I said, cutting him off before he could get going. ¡°It¡¯s easy to say from your perspective. ¡®Just trust me with your life. Let me hold the knife to your throat. It¡¯s fine. I won¡¯t actually kill you.¡¯ And no, I don¡¯t think you¡¯d do anything like that, but it¡¯s a big risk for me and no risk for you, Querit. Worse, you¡¯re a golem. Someone could literally alter your personality if they got access to your golem core. I have no idea who you¡¯ve been in contact with lately. You might not even be the same person you were when you left.¡±


    ¡°So check.¡±


    That brought me up short. I stared at Querit for a moment while I tried to think of what to say. ¡°Your core?¡± I asked stupidly.


    ¡°You¡¯re right. I¡¯m asking for a whole lot of trust from you, so it¡¯s only fair that I extend some of my own, right? Check my core. Make sure it hasn¡¯t been tampered with. My life will literally be in your hands while you do it, the same as yours will be in mine when you advance to stage nine.¡±


    The cynical part of my mind whispered that it was a trap, that he could be willing to risk his own life just for a chance at taking mine. I¡¯d had ¡®friends¡¯ that had spent far more time with me, only to betray me in the end. At least twice, they¡¯d been planning it all along. But on the other hand, Querit wasn¡¯t wrong about checking his core. Unlike a living person, I could quite literally examine his stored memories and knowledge. It wasn¡¯t foolproof, but it was a lot more assurance than I could get with anyone else.


    I just hadn¡¯t expected him to let me. That, more than anything else, convinced me that he might actually be sincere in his offer, that I might actually be safe in his care. And he wasn¡¯t wrong. Defeating Ammun was by no means a certainty, despite everything I¡¯d done to prepare. Advancing to stage nine would go a long, long way toward making sure I won that fight.


    ¡°Alright,¡± I said after a minute of deliberation. ¡°You win. I am going to examine every inch of your core, every single enchantment, all the memories stored in them. If I am satisfied, we¡¯ll begin practicing the magic I need you to be able to use. You¡¯ll need to withstand heavy mana for an extended length of time, and we¡¯ll have to stress test your body to ensure it can hold up.¡±


    ¡°I already know the spells,¡± he said, apparently unperturbed at the idea of having his entire life and identity laid bare before me.


    ¡°Good. A quick review and a demonstration of your capabilities will save us a few days.¡±


    The whole thing would still take probably three weeks, although most of that would be the vetting process. Going over Querit¡¯s entire life was not something I could do in a leisurely afternoon, but if we were doing this, I was going to do it right. I¡¯d also need to prepare a new room for it, something separate from my hidden titan core. Nobody could ever know about that.


    The new room would be equally disconnected from the world at large. If I died trying to reach stage nine, I wanted that place to become Querit¡¯s tomb. I would be making that abundantly clear to him, as well. I didn¡¯t care if that damaged our friendship afterwards, so long as we were both around to hate each other.


    He hefted the chunk of quartz with telekinesis and gestured at me. ¡°Lead the way. There¡¯s no point in delaying, not if we¡¯ve got so little time left.¡±


    And so we started preparations for what would be the ultimate show of trust for both of us, and quite possibly the one thing that would tip the scales firmly in our favor during the upcoming battle.

 Book 5, Chapter 45

    I used every bit of mysteel I had left to make the cage surrounding this room. There wasn¡¯t enough to make solid walls of it, nor did we have that kind of time, but the cage was possible. I wrapped divination and teleportation wards around it, sealing Querit and myself inside, then I systematically rooted through his golem core for days.


    In the end, as he knew I would be, I was convinced of his sincerity. This was going to happen, and if I didn¡¯t survive it, Querit would be trapped in a mysteel cage forever. As a golem, he didn¡¯t even have a mana core, let alone a way to modify it. Without some sort of frame to augment his abilities, he lacked the raw power needed to break through mysteel.


    For the moment, there was enough mana inside the cage that he could probably find a clever way to escape, but that would get used up during the ritual and I was sealing the whole room off to block ambient mana from leaking in. What we took in with us would be all the mana we¡¯d have to work with, and Querit couldn¡¯t generate new mana on his own. The only way he was getting out was if I let him.


    With the threat of our mutual destruction assured, the true work began. Two-inch thick sheets of granite went up inside the mysteel cage to give us space to write on. Elaborate ritual designs inscribed every wall, inlaid in gold, silver, cobalt, rubies, and pearl. Simple steel caps were inserted, temporary plugs designed to be pulled at the appropriate time, and more enchantments were laid down to keep me from suffocating inside an air-tight box.


    With two weeks remaining until Ammun¡¯s predicted arrival, I was ready to begin the process of advancing to stage nine. If I was successful, I would double my power. If I failed, the world would be left to Ammun uncontested, and I pitied the fates of those still alive at that point. Perhaps I would be reborn again in a few thousand years and could challenge Ammun for control of Manoch, but I doubted I¡¯d be successful if he was given millennia to entrench himself.


    ¡°Are we ready?¡± Querit asked, drawing me out of my musings.


    With a final look around, I nodded and we both took our places. The old way to do this required two archmages capable of using heavy mana while the ascending archmage delved into the Astral Realm. They would alternate roles, with one of them serving as the anchor and the other as the beacon. The anchor kept me from merging into the Astral Realm and becoming a being of pure mana, forever lost from the material world, and the beacon guided me back home once I¡¯d completed the modifications to my core.


    The anchor couldn¡¯t take a break to sleep. Any slip up in their job, accidental or otherwise, would cast me adrift forever. The beacon, on the other hand, could simply cast out their signal at regular intervals and, eventually, when I was ready, I could follow it back. The two archmages would pass off the anchor role to each other so that they could rest and recover.


    In this case, there was only Querit. As a golem, he didn¡¯t need sleep, food, or to go to the bathroom. He didn¡¯t get tired, his concentration wouldn¡¯t waver, and he wouldn¡¯t slip up. He was probably the only person in the world capable of serving as an anchor for the entire ritual. That having been said, being the anchor wasn¡¯t an easy job. He¡¯d have to contend with the shifting mana currents of the Astral Realm to ensure that the connection wasn¡¯t distorted and snapped.


    ¡°Keiran,¡± he said. ¡°Thank you for trusting me.¡±


    I snorted. ¡°We¡¯re just holding the knives to each other¡¯s throats. There¡¯s not much trust to be found here.¡±


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so. I don¡¯t know everything that happened to you, but I know you have good reason for your paranoia, and that sitting here with me isn¡¯t an easy thing for you to do.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s necessary, though. You¡¯re right that without reaching stage nine, Ammun might well be impossible to contend with.¡±


    That wasn¡¯t to say I¡¯d been planning to fail, just that the odds of success were a lot lower if things didn¡¯t play out the way I was envisioning. With my core at stage nine, I could correct problems in the moment when Ammun deviated from my predictions. Going through this ritual was the smart move, assuming I was successful.


    ¡°Let¡¯s begin,¡± I said.


    Querit and I both drew from our sources, his being the quartz pedestal and mine the chunk of obsidian I¡¯d fetched from my titan core. I¡¯d installed it in the ceiling of the room, nothing more than a ribbon of gleaming darkness overhead that fed mana into the cage. Unless things went horribly wrong, it would be far, far more mana than I needed.


    The anchor rune circles lit up around Querit and reached out to me. Instantly, the connection formed, binding part of my mind to this room. With that accomplished, I reached into my mana core and pulled it inside out until it enveloped my entire body. Then my shadow and I slipped fully into the Astral Realm.The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    * * *


    The first time I¡¯d done this, I¡¯d lost hours just drifting on currents in a world made of pure mana. It was somewhat like being underwater, but that was a wholly insufficient description of the sensation. If water was made of lightning, but the lightning invigorated instead of destroyed, perhaps that would accurately reflect the reality of the situation. Then again, perhaps not.


    This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I would have liked to enjoy it. I didn¡¯t, for two reasons. First, and most obvious, was that back in my own world, time marched on and Ammun¡¯s return drew ever closer. Time spent luxuriating in the Astral Realm was time wasted, and I couldn¡¯t afford to pay that price.


    The second and more immediate reason was that the Astral Realm wasn¡¯t empty of life. They were somewhat similar to mana wraiths in a superficial sense, and every bit as hostile toward me as their counterparts back in the physical world were. Thousands of years ago, I¡¯d arrived in the Astral Realm at the equivalent of shallow, beachfront water.


    This time, I was in the depths.


    My shadow swept out, carried away on invisible currents as it searched for threats, and I got to work harnessing the raw mana of the Astral Realm to shape it into a mirror of me. The amount I¡¯d used to create my shadow at stage eight was a pittance compared to what I alone needed, and that was only half the equation. My shadow needed to create its own reflection, then we needed to join all four of us into a braided existence before following the beacon back.


    For centuries, I¡¯d considered this process and wondered if it was truly the way to achieve stage nine. Supposedly, we were one step removed from immortal at this point, a being made more of mana than of flesh and blood. Everything a mage did as they advanced in strength moved toward this ideal. Our mana cores were inflated in size, then our bodies were turned into living crystals. We wove mana into our very shadows and breathed life into them.


    The popular theory had been that the reason we still aged and died at stage nine was that a quarter of our body was still mortal, even if it had been finessed into being a living mana crystal. If we could just find the next step, advance to stage ten, then we¡¯d be truly immortal. If that was the case, I¡¯d never found a way to move forward, and I¡¯d started to wonder if we¡¯d erred in our assumptions all the way up the ladder.


    My reincarnation was supposed to be an opportunity for me to go back and experience it all again, so see it with fresh eyes tempered by thousands of years of experience and knowledge. I¡¯d thought I¡¯d find something we¡¯d all missed the first time, some hidden route to true immortality. In that, I¡¯d been disappointed.


    Even now, at the cusp of molding my body into something that was more mana than man, I couldn¡¯t see a better way than the one I¡¯d come up with before I¡¯d even started my journey. I was set to live for at least three thousand years this time instead of two, maybe even more, but it still wasn¡¯t true immortality.


    I reflected on that as I built my simulacrum out of raw mana, stopping occasionally to switch places with my shadow so it could do the same thing. Mana entities drifted past us, some ambivalent to our presence, others hungry to tear us apart. We killed what we had to and ignored what we didn¡¯t, always mindful of our link back to the anchor. At long as that stayed firm, we wouldn¡¯t drift off into the Astral Realm.


    Time had little meaning in this state. I was aware that it was rushing by, but without the need for sleep or sustenance, it was difficult to keep track of it. It was on perhaps the third day, judging only by how many times Querit had pulsed the beacon, something finally took notice of us. It was long and sinuous, a sea serpent of unfathomable scale, so large that I doubted we even registered to it on its initial pass.


    I watched it drift by warily, a body miles and miles long carried on the great currents of the Astral Realm. I¡¯d never seen the likes of it before, and with any luck, it wouldn¡¯t show back up again. Though the threat of astral entities was well known, fighting one that big was sure to be problematic. At the least, it could unravel all my work and force me to start over.


    Of course, I¡¯d never been a lucky man. The serpent returned a few hours later, this time swimming against the current to circle around us. Distance was a funny thing in the Astral Realm, but I got the distinct impression that just because it seemed miles away didn¡¯t mean it couldn¡¯t reach us in moments. Those eyes, each one fifty feet wide, peered at my shadow first before shifting slightly to look at me.


    For long minutes it studied us while my shadow worked. We couldn¡¯t afford to pause our weaving, not if we wanted to keep to our schedule, so I shifted myself between my shadow and the serpent¡¯s gargantuan face. Watching its mouth drop open in a toothy grin was among the most terrifying things I¡¯d ever seen.


    The serpent let the current drag it away as it coiled in on itself to reorient its direction and I breathed out a metaphorical sigh of relief. Fighting something like that would have been disastrous, but it had apparently merely been curious. Hopefully, we wouldn¡¯t see any more of the Astral Realm¡¯s leviathans before we finished up.


    It wasn¡¯t until a few hours later that I realized the truth. We weren¡¯t a curiosity to be observed. We were a meal whose location had been marked. My mistake was in assuming the serpent wanted to eat us itself. Why would it? We wouldn¡¯t even be a morsel for such a being. Besides, in this state, we were just blobs of mana clumped together in defiance of the Astral Realm¡¯s natural flow, no different than scooping up a mouthful of mana from anywhere else.


    The serpent had no interest in us personally, but that didn¡¯t mean we weren¡¯t a valuable find. Maybe we were a good challenge, or just something of interest. Whatever its reasons, it became apparent that the only reason it had left us alone was to allow its offspring to challenge us instead ¨C all hundred of them.

 Book 5, Chapter 46

    Being attacked while working was an expected event and we¡¯d figured out what to do thousands of years ago. It was well known that things lived in the Astral Realm even before the first archmage reached stage nine, and had in fact been one of the driving forces behind developing a mage¡¯s shadow in the first place. Nobody else could go in with us, not when the gateway to the Astral Realm was our own mana cores.


    So when the baby serpents, each one at least a hundred feet long and with a toothy mouth big enough to swallow me whole, descended on us, I was ready for them. My shadow took over maintaining the mana construct I¡¯d been building in addition to its own, and I started casting my first spell.


    Magic worked differently in the Astral Realm. First, I had no core while I was here. Instead, I¡ªand everything else¡ªwas pure mana. That meant I didn¡¯t need to worry about things like running out of mana or how quickly I could release it from my core. It also meant that I was operating in something like a totally saturated environment, far worse than the haze of heavy mana that had shrouded the base of Ammun¡¯s tower.


    Spells could and would go awry simply from the currents of mana washing over them. The only counter to this phenomenon was an unbreakable will and absolute focus. Unfortunately for the serpents coming at us, I had plenty of that to spare. I targeted the front of the swarm and unleashed my magic.


    Something I¡¯d learned during my first time becoming a stage nine archmage was that spells which affected mana cores directly were worthless here, but the phantasmal line, which had reality-warping properties revolving around phasing through solid matter, were not. In fact, they worked even better here than they did back on Manoch. That was why I poured an absolutely incalculable amount of nearby mana into the spell.


    Needles appeared in front of me, hundreds of them. Each one was the size of my forearm and tapered down to a deadly point. By themselves, they might account for one of the serpents if it held still and took the entire spell to the face. That wouldn¡¯t do, of course, which was why the instant the first wave shot off, a new one materialized in its place.


    At a speed of roughly three waves per second, I launched thousands of needles into the swarm and tore apart better than half their numbers before the rest scattered in every direction. Of those that got away, I doubted any but the ones in the very back did so unscathed.


    With my opponents now circling around in every direction, it got significantly more difficult to keep track of them. In a normal fight, I would have relied on divinations to see around me. Here, that wouldn¡¯t work. My body didn¡¯t have its normal senses. The spells were designed to show me the world in visible light, or even in the absence of light, and those that detected mana would simply detect everything in a world made of nothing else.


    I made a mental note to research combat divinations for use in the Astral Realm someday, though that was going to be a difficult field of study since I¡¯d need to simulate the environment and noncorporeal entities made of pure mana that moved through it. For now, I simply relied on the senses my astral form came equipped with.


    Instead of forming more needles, I cast a different spell. A porous sphere of phantasmal essence bloomed around us, not as solid an aegis as I¡¯d normally use, but if I did that, I¡¯d block out all the mana my shadow needed to maintain our work. At that point, we¡¯d be starting over and I wasn¡¯t willing to waste the time. This was a compromise between offense and defense.


    As the first serpent looped around to study us from another angle, a long, whip-thin tendril of phantasmal magic whipped out of the barrier and sliced through the entity¡¯s face. It flitted away like a frightened fish in a pond, injured but still alive. Another one took its place, and another after that.


    In moments, I had a few dozen tendrils flailing around, hacking at anything and everything that dared to get close. As a strategy, it was a losing one. Eventually I¡¯d falter, and all the serpents had to do was wait outside the radius of my magic, then close in once I was vulnerable. Fortunately, this spell¡¯s purpose was more to buy me time and protect me when I couldn¡¯t see in every direction at once. The true attack was something else.


    Those holes all throughout the barrier had a second purpose: port holes to fire more phantasmal needles through. It wasn¡¯t a concentrated salvo, but at far greater range and with new salvos shooting off in every direction, it served its purpose. The serpents that were too slow were killed and the rest were driven off.


    I considered the benefits of relocating, but the truth was that we were adrift in an ocean of mana. Movement was possible, but we wouldn¡¯t be able to work at the same time, and I had no way of knowing where the next threat would come from. We could drift right into something I couldn¡¯t take care of, or we could find a safe harbor twenty minutes away. I¡¯d never know if I didn¡¯t go personally explore.


    With that thought in mind, the only true safety was leaving the Astral Realm. Since we couldn¡¯t do that without finishing the ascension ritual, the best thing to do was get it done as swiftly as possible. It was possible the giant serpent would come back, and if it did, I¡¯d handle that, too, somehow. For now, every second delayed was another second we were vulnerable.Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    I reclaimed my half of the ritual from my shadow and we got back to work.


    * * *


    At the beginning of my new life, I¡¯d been weak. Then I¡¯d ignited my mana core, the first stage. After that, I¡¯d built my lattice, expanded my core, and lacquered the whole thing for stability. That was the limit for most mages, those first four stages, because stage five was when I¡¯d stopped being human. First, I¡¯d transformed my entire body into a living mana crystal. Then, I¡¯d formed an artificial consciousness that spanned the length of my entire valley and forged a bond with it, turning it into my demesne.


    That was the second bottleneck, where those who went beyond mere humans remade themselves in body and mind. The last three stages were to bind a mana core tightly to the Astral Realm, to use it to become something more than any single mage could ever be. Stage seven laid the foundation, and stage eight formed the twin shadow, literally doubling a mage¡¯s ability to multitask. But that didn¡¯t grant the mana reserves two entities required.


    That was what stage nine was for ¨C one mortal body reforged in magic, one ethereal body made of mana and shadows, and the mirror held up between them that reflected two more. With those doppelgangers completed, it was time to braid everything together into a unified whole.


    This was the part where I¡¯d be most vulnerable. My shadow couldn¡¯t guard the ritual while I worked, not when it was such an integral part of the process. Anything that attacked us now would disrupt the process and force us to start over, and in the Astral Realm, there was no such thing as guaranteed safety. Arriving out in the crushing depths of this ocean of mana was just my bad luck, but at the same time, if I could pull this off, I¡¯d be all that much more powerful for using such a strong, pure base as the building blocks of this final transformation.


    The sole saving grace here was that this final part of the ritual would take bare minutes at most. We¡¯d been attacked five or six times over the last few days, always with hours and hours between each battle. Unless we were extremely unlucky, we would have plenty of time before the next interruption.


    The ritual began, and all was well. I intertwined with my reflection, merging it into my being, and opposite of me, my shadow did the same. The process was quick and efficient, even faster than when I¡¯d done it the first time. Unless something went wrong, I¡¯d drastically overestimated how long it would take to complete. We¡¯d be done in under a minute.


    My shadow, facing opposite of me, spotted it first. It was a bare glimmer off in the mana, a subtle shift in the currents that flowed out of sync with everything around it. Within seconds, that glimmer took on the undulating, miles-long form of the massive sea serpent we¡¯d seen when we¡¯d first arrived.


    I¡¯d been expecting to see that thing again after we¡¯d chased off or murdered the clutch it had sent back to snack on us. When days had gone by and it had failed to make an appearance, I¡¯d started to wonder if it had simply drifted too far away to find us. On the off chance that my luck hadn¡¯t miraculously turned good, however, I¡¯d done my best to buy myself some time in the event that it did make an appearance.


    Blocking the flow of mana through the Astral Realm was impossible, both because we needed that mana for ourselves and because any truly solid wall would have to withstand the pressure of an impossible amount of mana pushing on it. Forming a wall was no better than raising a sail to let the current speed us along the way.


    Instead, I¡¯d littered the mana round me with twisted knots of phantasmal energy, all tied together into a huge net that let everything flow through it, at least up to a certain size. The serpent was impossibly fast, especially swimming against the current like it was, but when its snout hit that first knot, it got a face full of razor-sharp phantasmal blades.


    The serpent was more surprised than injured. More importantly, it checked its own advance a mile or so away, which gave us a few extra seconds. My mirror image was almost completely merged into me. Once that was complete, my shadow and I would come back together to bring all four pieces that were ¡®Keiran¡¯ together, completing the ritual and creating a stage nine mana core.


    All we needed was another twenty seconds or so. If the serpent bulled through the defenses I¡¯d scattered around, it could still disrupt the ritual. I was gambling on its caution at encountering something unknown and hoping that it wasn¡¯t intelligent or malicious enough to understand what it was capable of doing.


    Based solely on the wicked grin it flashed me as it nosed forward and set off another of the phantasmal blasts, it knew exactly what the score was. Something its size couldn¡¯t really weave through the traps, but then again, the traps couldn¡¯t do much to actually hurt it. They might sting, but they couldn¡¯t stop the serpent.


    It figured that out with ten seconds left to complete the ritual. Suddenly growing bold, it lunged through my net of improvised phantasmal explosives. With an unhinged jaw big enough to swallow Grandfather whole, its mouth closed around the entire ritual.


    Five seconds to go.


    Being inside an astral entity was a novel experience, one I hadn¡¯t thought to ever go through personally. We were tossed around, but thanks to the strange rules of reality in the Astral Realm, the ritual wasn¡¯t anchored to a specific place. It was anchored to us, and it came with us when the serpent swallowed us whole.


    Zero seconds to go.


    The biggest danger here was actually that the serpent would sever my anchor, but the merger was complete now. My shadow, our reflections and myself were a singular entity on this plane of existence. There was nothing left to disrupt.


    Phantasmal energy exploded out of me in every direction, ripping and tearing a thousand feet out and shredding the serpent¡¯s skull. Pieces of it drifted around me as its corpse was slowly pulled away by the current. I watched it dissolve, half of it already gone in the next minute, just to see if the battle drew any scavengers looking for an easy meal.


    When nothing showed up, I settled back and started calculating the time I¡¯d need to wait until the next beacon call came through. It wouldn¡¯t be long now, an hour at most. Then I¡¯d follow it back home, step through the portal that was my own mana core, and return to Manoch as a fully realized stage nine archmage.


    Something resembling a puffer fish swam past me, a few hundred feet away. I glanced at it. It looked back at me. Suddenly, its speed tripled as it shot off in the opposite direction. With a satisfied smile, I resumed counting down the minutes until I could return home.

 Book 5, Chapter 47

    Returning from the Astral Realm was an ordeal in and of itself. Pulling myself through my own mana core was rather like turning myself inside out, and reversing that was far from easy. In some ways, succeeding in advancing to stage nine actually made it more difficult, since my new body was so unfamiliar to me, but the massive increase in my capabilities more than made up for the extra handicap.


    Querit had been true to his word, though, which already made this life¡¯s advancement a marked improvement over the last time I¡¯d done this. At this point, the only way I¡¯d die was if he actively attacked me while I was putting myself back together. Even then, I was willing to bet I could hold him off.


    I didn¡¯t have to, however. It was a refreshing change of pace from the world of cold-hearted betrayals I¡¯d known during my original tenure as Keiran of the Night Vale. For now, I could trust Querit with my life. He¡¯d proven that, unambiguously. That might change in the future, once Ammun was no longer a threat, but today, I had an ally I could count on without fear of being stabbed in the back.


    It was¡­ nice. Different. I could see myself growing used to it.


    ¡°You were gone for six days,¡± he said before I¡¯d even gotten around to asking.


    ¡°Good. Hopefully that leaves me a few days to fully recover,¡± I said with an audio illusion. My actual throat was in no shape to make sounds yet.


    ¡°You were successful, I take it. Though¡­ This isn¡¯t permanent, I hope.¡±


    I was vaguely man-shaped at the moment, but only part of me was actual flesh and blood. That was all mixed up and needed to be sorted out, else I¡¯d be forced to rely on mana to sustain a physical body. Without my magic, I¡¯d die almost immediately. ¡°I¡¯m fine. I just need a few hours to put myself back together properly. The process of returning from the Astral Realm jumbles up the physical body.¡±


    After that, I needed some sleep, and then I had a few last-minute upgrades in mind now that I¡¯d reached my old levels of power. If our timeline was correct, I had somewhere between ten and fifteen days before Ammun finished his work and could return home. Whether he would remained to be seen. It was entirely possible that he¡¯d lurk up there, gathering his strength to come down on me with a single, crushing blow.


    Either way, we¡¯d need to be on standby to respond the instant he appeared. Until then, though, I would double check that everything I¡¯d prepared was still ready to go and make any last-minute adjustments. At least, I would once I could move my body without magic again.


    Perhaps sensing that I wasn¡¯t in the mood to talk, Querit remained silent and watched me work. Slowly, I started to rebuild my body into something more than a mass of mana and sallow skin. Veins and arteries threaded themselves through muscles wrapped around bones. Organs were repaired or regrown as needed. I put my face back more or less in the configuration I remembered it being.


    When I was done, I released the magic keeping me alive and took my first deep breath as a stage nine archmage. ¡°I did not expect to regain this for years,¡± I said softly as I flexed my hands open and closed. ¡°This method wouldn¡¯t have been possible without your help, and I was nowhere ready for my experimental processes to be tested. Thank you.¡±


    ¡°If you really want to thank me, destroy that lich before he causes another magical cataclysm and ruins the world again,¡± Querit told me. ¡°But¡­ still, you¡¯re welcome. I was happy to help a friend in need.¡±


    ¡°A friend. Yes.¡± I smiled. ¡°Let¡¯s get out of here. I imagine you¡¯d like some time to familiarize yourself with that combat frame before the fighting starts.¡±


    * * *


    ¡°What are you wearing?¡± Senica asked, her face twisted up incredulously.


    ¡°What¡¯s wrong with it?¡±


    ¡°It looks¡­ uh¡­ Unique.¡±


    ¡°I imagine it fell out of style a few thousand years ago,¡± I said dryly. ¡°Probably even before I died the first time. I didn¡¯t do much to keep up on fashion trends.¡±


    Then again, the aesthetics might change, but the basic function of battle garments remained the same. They protected their wearers from hostile magic, provided quick access to various enchanted objects or wands, helped deploy to the battlefield as fast as possible, and kept an emergency reserve of mana for last-ditch spells.


    Mine happened to look something like a long coat made of black and silver metals spun so fine that they flexed like cloth. Those metals were a mysteel alloy, weakened to give it some flexibility, but largely impervious to magic. Unlike a drawstone shield, the coat would protect me from incoming spells without hindering my own ability to perform magic. Additionally, I¡¯d enchanted it to extend my core shielding so that I could cast more complex spells without giving Ammun the opportunity to counter them.Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°Maybe you¡¯ll start a new trend,¡± Senica said.


    The coat was what I¡¯d been used to using back when I¡¯d still needed crutches like this in battle. Against Ammun, it seemed prudent to give myself every possible advantage, so I¡¯d used some of the mysteel I¡¯d reclaimed from my stage nine ritual cage to weave it. I¡¯d spent my remaining time building a few things that were especially hostile to undead, not that I expected I¡¯d get much use from them. Ammun was far too aware of his own weaknesses to not have taken steps to guard against them.


    ¡°Where¡¯s everyone else?¡± I asked, ignoring her snark. I didn¡¯t have the time to waste on it. ¡°We need to start your evacuation.¡±


    ¡°Our what?¡±


    ¡°We talked about this,¡± I said. ¡°Ammun should be returning any day now. You¡¯re a vulnerability that he can target, like he did when he sent that bone dragon here. I can¡¯t afford distractions, so I need you tucked away somewhere safe until this is settled.¡±


    ¡°Uh, yeah, you mentioned that, and Mom and Dad told you no.¡±


    ¡°It wasn¡¯t optional.¡±


    ¡°Are you planning on kidnapping us?¡± Senica shot back.


    ¡°If necessary.¡±


    I already had scrying spells out sweeping the town. Father was in the town hall and Mother was at a park they¡¯d started building a few months ago. It was a little sparse still, but another season would see it fill out. All the transmutations the farmers were doing with the soil were paying off, even if it was nowhere near on the scale Hyago¡¯s circle of druids were attempting.


    I frowned. Neither of my parents had Nailu with them. ¡°Where¡¯s our brother?¡±


    Senica shrugged. ¡°Probably playing with the other kids.¡±


    I swept the park again, and while there were some children there, my brother wasn¡¯t in the group. Had he wandered off and gotten lost? New Alkerist wasn¡¯t that big, so someone should have seen him somewhere. The streets near the park were all empty, though. ¡°Is he with Mother?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Yeah.¡± Senica must have caught onto my tone, because she started getting agitated. ¡°Why? What¡¯s wrong?¡±


    ¡°I can¡¯t find him. He¡¯s not in the park anywhere or on the surrounding streets.¡±


    Senica spun up her own scrying spell and sent it out to scour the neighborhood. ¡°Weird. Does Mom know he¡¯s gone?¡±


    ¡°She doesn¡¯t seem worried,¡± I said.


    ¡°Wait, is that him in that tree on the north side?¡±


    My scrying spells swooped back around to the park and looked into a crop of trees about three hundred feet away from Mother. There was a child in there, but I¡¯d dismissed him at first because he was twenty feet up a tree that Nailu definitely couldn¡¯t have gotten into. At least, he shouldn¡¯t have been able to. Clearly, I¡¯d underestimated him.


    ¡°How?¡± I asked. ¡°Did someone lift him up?¡±


    It was immediately obvious that that wasn¡¯t the case. Even while we watched, Nailu stood upright and stretched, balanced on his toes, to grab the branch above him. It was a good six inches past his fingers, but that didn¡¯t deter him. The branch bent down slightly and he snagged it.


    ¡°Was that telekinesis?¡± Senica gaped.


    ¡°Unstructured and weak, but yes. It looks like Nailu is unconsciously spending mana.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s not even three yet!¡±


    ¡°Maybe he¡¯s a reincarnated archmage, too.¡±


    Senica shot me a dirty look and hurried for the door. After a moment¡¯s hesitation, I chased after her. The two of us took to the air and went on a short, thirty-second flight across town, much to the annoyance of a few of the townsfolk we startled as we passed by.


    ¡°Mom,¡± Senica called out as she landed. I passed by her to head for the tree, where Nailu had already gone up another five feet. He stopped when he saw me levitating next to him.


    ¡°Gravin!¡± he said. ¡°Play?¡±


    ¡°Sure,¡± I told my little brother. ¡°I¡¯ve got a new game. Do you want to try it with me?¡±


    ¡°Game!¡± was all the warning I got before Nailu threw himself out of the tree and into the open air, no doubt expecting me to catch him. Even if I hadn¡¯t, I wasn¡¯t sure he would have hurt himself. In the brief moment he¡¯d been in free fall, it had looked like he was dropping just a little bit slower than he should have been.


    Mother and Senica hurried over, but stopped when I produced a simple block of stone out of my phantom space and placed it in front of Nailu. It was about twenty pounds, far too heavy for a toddler to lift. I would know, having retained all of my own memories of that time. If my brother was capable of enhancing himself with instinctive invocations, however, he¡¯d be able to move the rock.


    ¡°Okay, the first step is to pick this up,¡± I explained. ¡°It might be a little bit heavy, but I¡¯m sure you can do it.¡±


    ¡°Gravin, what are you doing?¡± Mother asked.


    ¡°One moment,¡± I said without looking at her. ¡°Nailu? Ready?¡±


    He didn¡¯t hesitate for a moment. Nailu bent down and grabbed the stone block, tipped it slightly to get his fingers under it, and then heaved. At first I thought he was going to fail, but then mana flooded out of his tiny baby core and he heaved the block up to chest level. ¡°Now what?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Now you hang on,¡± I said as I caught the block up with my own magic and made it fly into the air with my little brother still clinging to it. Three more blocks appeared and floated up to join it. ¡°Jump to the next one.¡±


    Doing as I instructed and giggling wildly the whole time, Nailu navigated my aerial obstacle course while we watched. ¡°That¡¯s not normal,¡± Mother said after a minute.


    ¡°No,¡± I agreed. I shot a sly glance at Senica. ¡°Looks like there¡¯s another prodigy in the family. He might even be better than you.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not threatened by a toddler,¡± she declared haughtily.


    ¡°We¡¯ll see how you feel in thirty or forty years.¡±


    Senica just rolled her eyes while I laughed and sent up stone rings for Nailu to jump through. He wobbled a bit on the landing, but otherwise executed the acrobatics with far more skill than any child that age should have been able to display. The game only came to an end with his mana reserves bottomed out.


    ¡°I¡¯m sleepy,¡± he informed Mother, holding his hands up and making grabby motions with his fingers. She obliged him and gave him a quick kiss on his forehead.


    ¡°I guess we can take a nap early today. You played so good.¡± Mother smiled down at him before glancing over at me. ¡°Uh, Gravin¡­ I didn¡¯t want to interrupt while you were doing whatever that was, but what are you wearing?¡±


    ¡°Everyone¡¯s a critic,¡± I muttered. ¡°I¡¯m going to fetch Father and I¡¯ll meet you all back at the house.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 48

    ¡°Why now?¡± Mother asked. ¡°He never showed any signs before.¡±


    We were gathered around the kitchen table. I¡¯d gone to fetch Father, and Mother and Senica had gone home with a now-soundly napping Nailu in tow. Once the whole family had reassembled, we¡¯d sat down to have what I was expecting to be an unpleasant conversation. Before anyone would discuss that, however, there were questions about Nailu.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know. Why do some babies walk faster than others? They just do,¡± I said. ¡°It¡¯s the same with mana. Nailu¡¯s core is undeveloped and he¡¯s using mana at a fairly basic level. He¡¯s probably a bit young, but on the other hand, he¡¯s the first person in the family to not have to deal with being around draw stones. Have any of the other new children shown any signs of using mana?¡±


    ¡°I¡­ don¡¯t think so? I can ask around.¡±


    ¡°Even if it¡¯s just Nailu, is that really so surprising? I mean, look at the family line. Dad was some prodigy last generation before the old governor died and the new governor showed up to steal all the mana,¡± Senica pointed out. She gestured to herself and said, ¡°And then there¡¯s me. I¡¯m the best mage in town. No, you don¡¯t count, Gravin.¡±


    ¡°I suspect that ¡®Gravin¡¯ would have been a competent mage even if I hadn¡¯t regained my memories, assuming there was any chance of anyone becoming a mage in the environment of Old Alkerist.¡±


    ¡°What can I say?¡± Father preened. ¡°I make good babies.¡±


    Mother rolled her eyes and shoved him. ¡°Seems like I did all the work after the first ten minutes of the process.¡±


    ¡°Hey! I get credit for at least the first twenty!¡±


    ¡°Okay, I do not want to be involved in this conversation,¡± Senica said.


    As amusing as it was to witness, I had a severe lack of free time in my schedule. Even the extra hour I¡¯d taken with Nailu was more than I should have. ¡°You can talk about this, or not, after I¡¯m done,¡± I told them. ¡°By my best guess, we¡¯ve got less than a week before Ammun returns and I¡¯m not sure how well that¡¯s going to go. It¡¯s time to gather everything up and evacuate.¡±


    ¡°Right. About that¡ª¡± Father started to say.


    ¡°No. You are not staying here. I don¡¯t care what responsibilities you have. This whole town is a target and everyone should be evacuating, but that¡¯s their choice. You four do not have an option. We¡¯re leaving.¡±


    ¡°You can¡¯t just make that decision for us,¡± Father said hotly.


    ¡°You remember the dragon,¡± I told him. ¡°I fought it bare miles from here. The guy who sent that is coming back. I expect fighting to resume in literal days. What are you going to do when the next dragon shows up, but I¡¯m a thousand miles away fighting Ammun in Ralvost?¡±


    ¡°You said you destroyed that dragon.¡±


    ¡°I doubt that¡¯s the only dragon skeleton left on the planet. And even if it is, there are other threats. I¡¯ve been working to break apart an army of mages and what seems to be a near-infinite number of golems under his command for months now. Ammun has plenty of tools at hand, and it would be foolish to believe that he¡¯s out of options just because I¡¯ve taken steps to stop him from using some of them.¡±


    ¡°We knew this day was coming eventually,¡± Mother said. ¡°And it¡¯s not permanent.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯ve got a harvest coming in a week,¡± Father told her. ¡°We can¡¯t leave. Other villages are depending on that food.¡±


    ¡°Hold a town meeting,¡± I suggested. ¡°Explain the situation to them. Let everyone decide for themselves what they want to do. Either harvest a bit early and lose some of your crop, or leave and hope it¡¯s not too late when you get back. Hope that there still is a crop when you get back. If you get back.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got a place prepared for you. It can comfortably support a hundred people for a month. Two hundred can squeeze in, but you¡¯d better tell people to pack food.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯ve got close to five hundred people here,¡± Father said.


    ¡°Then I suppose most of you should evacuate to somewhere else. Derro might be a good idea. You guys figure out who¡¯s going where. I¡¯ll come back tomorrow and help move people. But everyone in this house is going to the safe haven I built for you. That part isn¡¯t negotiable.¡±


    Father started to argue, but I cut him off before he could get going. ¡°Not. Negotiable. I don¡¯t care if you hate me afterward. I don¡¯t care if I have to kidnap all of you to keep you safe. You will survive this.¡±If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    There wasn¡¯t much new to the conversation after that. Various objections were raised. I shot them down. The evacuation was an inconvenience. Yes, I understood that. No, I didn¡¯t care. No, nobody else had to leave if they didn¡¯t want to. Yes, I did consider it a strong possibility that Ammun would make at least a token effort to sack the town. No, I didn¡¯t think the automated defenses I¡¯d placed here would be enough if he decided to take things seriously.


    I cut things short and left soon after. I still needed to check in with Querit to see how he was adjusting to the new frame, and the gestalt always had more work for me to do, either because they¡¯d identified another problem area or because I owed them so much that I literally couldn¡¯t produce all the enchanted trinkets they wanted fast enough.


    They did their town hall while I was away, but I got the highlights from Senica. It was an event I was more than happy to have not been a part of. I got plenty of vitriol aimed my way when I came back the next day to transport the hundred people¡ªmostly younger couples with small children¡ªto the refuge I¡¯d built for my parents. A few dozen more people took the teleportation platform to Derro, and a handful of volunteers went in every direction to deliver fair warning to the rest of the villages.


    I didn¡¯t expect Ammun to spread his efforts that thin again, not when he¡¯d accomplished so little the first time around, but it didn¡¯t hurt to let people know so they could make their own decisions. If those villages were wiped out, it wouldn¡¯t be because they hadn¡¯t seen it coming.


    I just had to hope that I¡¯d predicted enough of what Ammun would and could do that we all survived his return.


    * * *


    He was late. We were a full three days past his expected return date now, and there was no sign of him. Any attempts of scrying his little tower up on Yulitar had failed, and getting near it was no longer an option since Ammun had extended his wards out past the base of the structure. There were even visual barriers now, making it appear as though the whole area was caught up in some sort of dust storm.


    On the one hand, that gave us more time to prepare, but on the other, there wasn¡¯t a lot I could actually do while keeping myself ready to move at a moment¡¯s notice. Any project I started needed to be one I could drop instantly, which ruled out a lot of alchemy and enchanting, since most of those tasks had precise timing requirements. I occupied my time with making more of the consciousness relays the gestalt wanted to expand their domain instead, but even those required some enchantments to be laid down on them. Whichever unlucky unit I was working on when I did finally get the signal was destined to be scrapped out.


    ¡°Keiran,¡± the gestalt said through my scrying mirror. I glanced up at it to see the moon in question still in view on the glass. Rather than how it normally looked if I were to peer up into the night sky, it was covered in a cloud of soft light with brighter strands flowing through it. Ammun¡¯s tower was in the center of its own vortex, one that had been steadily growing until it covered perhaps a tenth of the moon¡¯s surface.


    It was far more mana than he needed just to activate the long-range teleportation spell that would bring him back to Manoch, no matter how cobbled together it was. Obviously, he was preparing for a fight when he returned, just as I was doing the same. We¡¯d soon see who¡¯d done the better job of it.


    ¡°Movement?¡± I asked.


    ¡°We believe so.¡±


    I studied the moon again. ¡°The mana patterns look the same.¡±


    ¡°Not on Yulitar. On Ralvost. It might not be Ammun, but the timing¡­¡±


    Had he managed to sneak back down here without anyone noticing? It was certainly possible, and a bit of groundside prep time might help him considerably. ¡°Show me.¡±


    The mirror shifted from displaying Yulitar to a mountain side blanketed in snow. The view was up near the peak, where the snow never really melted. That didn¡¯t mean it was undisturbed, however. In fact, it looked like something huge had erupted out from underneath it, or rather, dozens of somethings.


    The view shifted again, this time swinging up to the open sky, where better than a hundred wyverns were winging their way west. For a moment, I mistook them for living, breathing monsters and had to wonder how they¡¯d survived all this time, then I realized the truth. They were dead and preserved in ice and snow all these years.


    ¡°Ammun had a cache of undead soldiers left to use after all,¡± I muttered to myself. A quick calculation of the mana costs required to raise so many monsters back up into their current state revealed all I needed to know about why he hadn¡¯t used them before, and it created a worrying picture of how much mana he had available to him now.


    Of the lich himself, there was no sign. I cast my own scrying spell to scan the area for him on the off chance that he was still there, but he¡¯d stayed just long enough to do his work under the frozen sheet of ice, then teleported off somewhere else. All he¡¯d left behind was the disturbed graves of the colony of wyverns.


    ¡°Where are they heading? One of the portals, maybe?¡±


    ¡°There is one in that direction, though it¡¯s not the closest one to their current location.¡±


    ¡°Perhaps Ammun doesn¡¯t know about that one. The brakvaw need to get ready for a fight, either way. You¡¯ll let Grandfather know?¡±


    ¡°We already have. He wants to know if you¡¯re coming to assist.¡±


    ¡°No. This is a feint. We need to find Ammun and stop him from doing whatever his real goal is. His people can handle this. They outnumber the enemies several times over.¡±


    ¡°He does not seem pleased by your answer.¡±


    ¡°I wasn¡¯t expecting him to be, but I have to prioritize the whole planet. If he doesn¡¯t want to fight, tell him to break the portals now.¡±


    ¡°Will you set them back up when the fighting ends?¡±


    ¡°If we win, yes, eventually.¡±


    ¡°That does not reassure him. He is sending a wing of fighters to intercept the wyverns, with instructions to retreat back through the portal if they get overwhelmed so that it can be closed.¡±


    It was a risky course, but that was Grandfather¡¯s decision to make. With any luck, everything would work out in his favor. If not, the wyverns might get through and the brakvaw would have to defend Eyrie Peak directly. We¡¯d known this was a possibility, however, and had set up an evacuation portal for noncombatants. That, combined with the battle harnesses, was everything I could do for my allies short of taking the field myself.


    ¡°Keep me updated on how the fight¡¯s going, please,¡± I said. ¡°And keep looking for more signs of Ammun¡¯s activities. As soon as we spot the lich, I¡¯ll be moving to engage him.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 49

    It didn¡¯t take long for Ammun to make an appearance. Or rather, it didn¡¯t take long for the next prong of his assault to manifest. Despite my best efforts to clear Ralvost of people and deprive Ammun of his army, the old lich had one secreted away anyway. He¡¯d just needed to dig it up first.


    It was fairly unimpressive, as far as undead hordes went. I could only assume they were leftovers from his last attempt at invading my home, or maybe they just hadn¡¯t been worth raising in the first place. Given the terrible condition all the bodies were in, that second option seemed likely.


    Regardless of the why, the fact of the matter was that he¡¯d kept a few thousand bodies tucked away and was now making that my problem. If we¡¯d caught it before he¡¯d opened up a portal and started shoving them through, it probably would have been easy to deal with. I could have teleported there, laid down a firestorm on the whole horde, and incinerated them on the spot.


    Now, it was split into five different pieces: one to threaten New Alkerist, one for Derro, one that for some reason was trying to occupy Eyrie Peak, one for Hyago¡¯s grove out in the desert, and one outside my own demesne. That one was easy enough to destroy, at least.


    Eyrie Peak was ignorable. A landbound army was no threat to the brakvaw, not unless one of those skeletal wyverns knocked a bird to the ground. In theory, that might happen, but the odds of the undead being in the exact right location for it to matter were not high. With my family already evacuated, New Alkerist was a low priority. Derro could defend itself.


    That just left the grove and my valley that needed immediate responses. ¡°Why don¡¯t you go stop the ones besieging our poor reagents supplier?¡± I suggested. ¡°I¡¯ll take care of the ones here.¡±


    ¡°What about the town?¡± Querit asked.


    I shrugged. ¡°Help them if you want. The wards I placed around it should hold the undead back for hours, so there¡¯s no rush.¡±


    I sent him through my demesne, instantly transporting him from the scrying chamber to the teleportation platform. A few seconds later, he disappeared from that. I watched through the mirror focused on Hyago¡¯s grove to keep an eye on the situation, but the bulk of my attention turned to the threat outside my own door.


    ¡°Have any other hordes turned up?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Not that we can see, either here or on Ralvost. We caught Ammun forming the portals, but he disappeared as soon as they were complete. At the speed he made them, it seems likely that he used some sort of device he¡¯d prepared ahead of time,¡± the gestalt¡¯s voice came from another mirror.


    ¡°I guess we know what he spent some of his time on up there.¡±


    This was within expectations. When I¡¯d gotten a glimpse at his construction speed, I¡¯d known the time frame didn¡¯t add up, and that he¡¯d probably been preparing to kick off the battle the instant he was back while he could still work uninterrupted. He was a lich and a necromancer. I¡¯d foreseen an army and a way to transport it quickly.


    The thousand or so mobile corpses trudging toward my demesne were about half a mile from the edge of my wards. If I waited a bit longer, they¡¯d likely fry themselves marching toward me, but that would let anyone watching learn about my defenses. I didn¡¯t have proof that Ammun was scrying the area, but I had no doubt that he was. Otherwise, there¡¯d be no point in wasting minions here.


    The question became: what was the most efficient way to eliminate the threat without revealing my defensive capabilities? Ammun already knew I¡¯d reached stage eight from our previous encounter, so sending my shadow out to handle the incoming zombies wouldn¡¯t tell him anything new. From there, a few explosions and a sweeping inferno should clean things up nicely. It might waste a bit of mana, but it presented a plausible picture of how I would deal with the issue were I still limited to stage eight.


    While my shadow slipped out of my demesne, I watched for signs of Ammun attempting to ambush it, and the gestalt entity kept me updated on how the brakvaw were faring against the aerial force of skeletal wyverns.


    ¡°Grandfather is once again requesting assistance,¡± they told me. ¡°A second wyvern colony has appeared, almost triple in size, and the brakvaw are now outnumbered.¡±


    ¡°Where did that come from?¡± I snarled, whirling in place to activate a new mirror so that I could see the battle for myself. It was spread out over three locations now ¨C Eyrie Peak and just beyond two of its portals. One location was the sky over an open, empty plain, and the other was near a high seaside cliff where the brakvaw hunted for fish and other animals.


    The fiercest fighting was at Eyrie Peak itself, with the bulk of the brakvaw defending the mountain and their kin from about two hundred or so skeletal wyverns. They had the advantage in size and speed, but the wyverns didn¡¯t mind taking any amount of punishment to rake their talons across living flesh or sink their teeth into plumage.Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.


    Even with the battle harnesses giving them an edge, it was obvious that the fight was going to utterly decimate their numbers if something didn¡¯t change. They should have collapsed the portals like I¡¯d warned them to, but they¡¯d waited too long, or maybe Ammun had done something to hold them open. Either way, their forces were split trying to defend against attacks coming from every direction, and they wanted me to bail them out.


    I could do it, but it would mean exposing myself to Ammun. I had no doubt that he was waiting for exactly that. All of these attacks were designed to draw me out of my demesne, because of course that benefited Ammun. Fighting me while I was here was foolhardy, and he knew it. That was why the last time he¡¯d attacked me, he¡¯d spied on me and chosen the moment when I was most vulnerable, and even then, he¡¯d only stuck around for a few seconds to crack my wards before retreating again.


    I was going to have to come out eventually, but I wanted to exhaust a few more of Ammun¡¯s tricks before I met him in battle. That didn¡¯t seem like it was going to happen, not if I was coming to my ally¡¯s aid. How annoying. I was being outmaneuvered, not because of some clever tactic, but because of the brakvaw¡¯s general incompetence.


    ¡°Keep a close eye on everything,¡± I instructed the gestalt. ¡°If Ammun is about to teleport in on top of me, I¡¯d like a bit of warning.¡±


    My shadow finished destroying the undead outside the valley, and we both swept through the demesne to the teleportation platform. Hopefully, this didn¡¯t blow up in my face.


    * * *


    I already had a good idea of the state of things before I arrived, but my first action was to simultaneously cast eight fresh divinations to take in the entirety of Eyrie Peak. Two of them were for sensing life and death energy, which allowed me to grab the placement and condition of every single combatant at the same time. One of them connected me to the gestalt again so I could keep them on overwatch in the event Ammun made an appearance, and one monitored general mana levels just in case any big spells suddenly appeared.


    The last four were my standard scrying spells, designed to remove any blank spots in my immediate area, including things that human eyes couldn¡¯t normally see like particulate-based attacks or invisible stalkers. In a normal fight, I would have said it was overkill. In this one, I wasn¡¯t taking any chances.


    I exploded into the air, angling toward where three wyverns were harassing a single brakvaw that was wheeling through the air, weaving through attacks desperately and trying to put some distance between itself and the undead. Unlike the dragon I¡¯d fought a year ago, these monsters were weak enough that I didn¡¯t even need heavy mana to destroy them.


    A simple force cleave cut through the necrotic net wrapped around one wyvern¡¯s bones. I chopped it into pieces, so many that the animating magic couldn¡¯t hold things together anymore, and the body rained down to the stone a thousand feet below.


    That drew the attention of the other two wyverns. One of them split off from harassing the brakvaw and made a beeline for me, only to come up short when I took both wings off with another force cleave. At the same time, my shadow leaped across the sky to destroy a wyvern that was swooping down on a trio of hatchlings left undefended near the torn and bloody corpse of an adult brakvaw.


    Everywhere around me, the scene was repeated in endless variety. Brakvaw harried skeletal wyverns, blasting them with their own magic or relying on the mana sealed into their harnesses if their reserves weren¡¯t up to the task. Some of them simply couldn¡¯t cast anything offensive, or couldn¡¯t manage it fast enough for a live combat situation, and were doing nothing but leading a wyvern away at a speed just fast enough to stay ahead of it without getting so far away that it lost interest.


    My first priority was to rescue anyone on the verge of death. Unfortunately, there were a dozen cases of exactly that, spots where a defender had been swamped by numbers or a noncombatant had run afoul of a wyvern. The pragmatic part of me said to let the children die, that they couldn¡¯t contribute, and the warrior that I saved could go on to stop other wyvern.


    I didn¡¯t need to talk to Grandfather to know that wasn¡¯t what he wanted. So, even though it wasn¡¯t the best tactical move, I focused my efforts on saving those who couldn¡¯t fight back over the next few minutes. More than a few wyvern attacked me directly, some with tooth and claw, others by channeling necrotic energies into noxious purple-black clouds of smoke that tried to leach the very life out of my body.


    ¡®Keiran, we have spotted Ammun above Ralvost,¡¯ the gestalt sent.


    The timing couldn¡¯t have been worse, but maybe that was the point. ¡®What¡¯s he doing?¡¯


    ¡®Building something. He¡¯s pulling pre-constructed components out of a phantom space and assembling them. We were not able to determine its purpose, but can provide you with images of the visible runes.¡¯


    Now really wasn¡¯t a great time to be multitasking, but I needed to know what he was up to. Could I finish saving the brakvaw from the colony of wyverns, or did I need to abandon this fight now to do battle elsewhere? ¡®Show me.¡¯


    Images slammed into my brain, hundreds of them, all showing complicated, multi-layered rune structures. Overlaid on top of them were ethereal enchantments, more suggestions of magic than magic itself. It was impressive the gestalt had even been able to detect that much, considering the scrying information it was sharing obviously came from a long-distance viewing of the area, not a targeted scry.


    I knew a lot of these patterns ¨C things that dealt with the ultra-long-range communications and teleportation spells used to connect to the moons. That was no surprise. I¡¯d known Ammun would need an anchor on this side of the connection to maintain the tether, but why would he build it out in the open?


    The obvious answer was that he wouldn¡¯t. Whatever this was, it had something to do with a moon¡ªmaybe Yulitar, maybe a different one¡ªbut it wasn¡¯t the connection that was keeping his body and spirit linked together. If not that, then¡­


    ¡°No,¡± I hissed out. ¡°He wouldn¡¯t dare.¡±


    ¡®You know what he¡¯s doing?¡¯


    ¡°It¡¯s a command console to use a moon core to target the surface of Manoch with a massive mana beam. He¡¯s rebuilding the weapon used against him just before he broke the world.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 50

    History books weren¡¯t entirely clear on whether it was the moon beam firing down on Manoch or the mana draw from Ammun¡¯s reprisal that had caused the death of the world core. The only one who knew for sure was Ammun himself, and even then, I wasn¡¯t willing to bet that he¡¯d ever bothered to figure it out.


    It would be a stupid, short-sighted decision to ignore researching that, but then again, that sounded exactly like the apprentice I remembered, so I was quite willing to believe it had played out exactly that way. As far as I could tell from my own digging, it had been Ammun pulling so much mana out of the world core all at once that had started the chain reaction of it dying.


    The only pertinent question was whether or not the cabal controlling Amodir had done the same thing to the moon. It was impossible to tell, since Ammun¡¯s counterstroke had destroyed it, and most of the core fragments I¡¯d discovered had been inert. I had one that still generated mana, but whether that was because the moon hadn¡¯t suffered a core collapse like Manoch or because everything had fractured to pieces before that particular part could die would forever remain a mystery.


    Unless, of course, Ammun repeated history and used his link to Yulitar to repeat the ancient cabal¡¯s actions. Then I¡¯d be able to see what kind of backlash such a magic had on the moon it used firsthand ¨C provided I lived through the attack. My demesne seemed like a logical place to destroy, but there was no telling exactly how precise Ammun would be. He might shoot me down from a few thousand miles away if I stood here and did nothing.


    The fact that the very act of smiting me out of existence had the potential to fracture the moon he was relying on to power his body and phylactery would be small comfort. Him dying immediately after me would be best for the world at large, but I preferred to prioritize my own survival. That meant the control device he was assembling needed to be destroyed right now.


    ¡®I have to go. Ammun can¡¯t be allowed to complete construction or he¡¯ll be able to destroy any place on this side of the planet.¡¯


    ¡®The brakvaw still need your help. Grandfather won¡¯t approve of you abandoning the battlefield,¡¯ the gestalt warned.


    ¡®You explain it to him. I don¡¯t have time.¡¯


    Part of me wanted to destroy the remaining wyverns here in one explosive burst. I could do it, but between that and three teleports, I¡¯d be cutting deeply into my reserves. There¡¯d be no time to pull in more mana, not even if the brakvaw had a convenient storage crystal sitting here for me to drain, and I couldn¡¯t risk going into a battle with one of the most powerful beings on the planet at anything less than my best.


    My shadow met me on the teleportation platform, some forty or so wyverns slain between the two of us. It would have to be enough. I activated the platform, pumping mana into it to get it to cycle. Whoever was supposed to be keeping it maintained had been slacking, apparently. What a terrible time to catch that bit of laziness.


    It finished charging¡ªenough to be used, at least¡ªat almost the exact same time I heard the outraged shriek of a brakvaw heading my way. ¡°Coward!¡± it called out to me. ¡°Stay and fight!¡±


    We were all fighting the same battle, in the end. Hopefully when it was all over, there¡¯d still be brakvaw left who understood that. I cast the spell and allowed the magic to pull me a thousand miles northwest, leaving the giant birds and the undead wyverns to their struggles.


    * * *


    The first two jumps were straightforward, one platform to the next, quick and easy. The final one was a bit harder. I hadn¡¯t personally scried out Ammun¡¯s location, which meant I had to collaborate with the gestalt in order to actually teleport there. That was further complicated by the fact that Ammun had plenty of mana to spare now, and he¡¯d used some of it to heavily ward the area. Even with help, the closest I could get to him was a few miles away.


    Normally, that wouldn¡¯t be a problem. At the speed I moved, a few miles was a minute or so of flight. I launched myself out of the field I¡¯d teleported to, fully prepared to swoop down on Ammun and blast his nightmare machine to pieces. That was the plan, until the boughs of the trees up ahead started swaying. A moment later, a monster of bone and magic burst forth.


    It was nowhere near the size of the dragon that had assaulted New Alkerist, but it was a dragon nonetheless. I could kill it if I was willing to devote the time and mana to the effort. I took a split second to weigh the likelihood that I could reach Ammun, destroy his machine, and drag the fight far enough away from where it started that his undead minion wouldn¡¯t be able to interfere.


    The odds weren¡¯t good. Better to go through it now than to have it sneak up behind me later. Just as I started to spin out the mana needed to obliterate it, a second dragon clawed its way out of the trees and joined it in the air. That complicated things, but it was still nothing I couldn¡¯t handle, providing a third dragon didn¡¯t appear.If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    I didn¡¯t even need to look behind me to know what was happening. The swaying of the trees and snapping of the branches was enough. ¡°Is that all of you?¡± I asked in exasperation. Damn Ammun and his wards blocking us from being able to properly scout the battlefield.


    All three dragons roared in unison, then attacked.


    Like living dragons, they each boasted a breath weapon. In their case, it was a deep purple beam of necrotic energy, deadly to living creatures. A normal human struck by it would find their flesh melting off their body and their organs sloughing out of their exposed abdominal cavity in a matter of seconds. Against a mage at stage five, the delicate mana structures that made up their reforged body would start to collapse, causing great pain and reducing the amount of mana they could hold.


    Against me, I simply redirected the beams with a subversive target spell. All three of them arced off their straight paths to chase after the decoy I shot out. It danced through the air in a pattern too complicated to follow, leading the breath shots on a brief chase that ended with all three beams crashing into each other and destabilizing.


    Even if I had let them hit me, I doubted there was enough power in them to get through my shield ward. These were the skeletons of lesser dragons, prepared long ago and hastily reanimated in the last few hours. They were nothing like the monster I¡¯d destroyed prior to my trip to Yulitar. What they lacked in individual prowess, however, they attempted to make up for with numbers.


    As a stalling tactic, it wasn¡¯t half bad. I could outrun them, but they¡¯d catch up when I reached Ammun. Fighting three of them would take longer than fighting one, and it would give Ammun more time to prepare additional surprises for me. How had he known I¡¯d be coming from this direction, though? It couldn¡¯t just be rotten luck.


    Maybe he¡¯d ringed the whole area with minions, dozens upon dozens of dragon skeletons reanimated and slaved to his will. The mana costs would be exorbitant, but if there was anyone who could afford to waste it, it was the old lich. I had no choice but to deal with them now, else I¡¯d be fighting them later. Either way, Ammun won.


    The closest dragon was the one behind me. I didn¡¯t need to be touching it, but I did need to be within a thousand feet of it, so I zipped backwards, not bothering to turn as I prepared the massive dispelling wave that would hopefully overpower the core of necrotic energy holding it together. The dragon reacted immediately, breathing out another beam of energy that got sucked up into my decoy. The mana drain on my core catching it was a slight strain, but not so much that I couldn¡¯t tolerate it. Heavy mana was good that way. The more of it there was, the more it reinforced itself and remained stable.


    At the same time, it flared its wings and lunged through the air, powered not by muscle and flesh but by webs of necrotic energy tangled through the boney fingers where membranes should have been. I was sure it was just as fast now as it had been in life, and easily cleared half of the distance between us before we came in contact. No doubt it planned to shred me with teeth longer than I was tall, but its plans were abruptly foiled when I unleashed the one-two punch of my dispel and a master-tier force spell directly in its face.


    Temporarily stripped of its protecting magic, the skull fractured into six different pieces, not counting the dozens of teeth that went flying across the treetops. That wasn¡¯t enough to destroy the undead dragon by itself, but a follow up force lance shredded its spine and dropped ribs into the forest below. An undead didn¡¯t feel pain, and lopping off a limb wouldn¡¯t slow it down, but breaking it into enough pieces was a good way to overwhelm the animating magic and shut it down.


    With the necrotic web shrouding its bones in tatters, it was a lot easier to attack its limbs, and I had it in pieces well before either of the other two dragons could interfere. I didn¡¯t even bother to spin around to face it while I worked. My scrying spells were enough to guide me, and that meant I had a good view of its siblings closing in.


    All said and done, the first dragon had cost me maybe five or six seconds of time and far, far too much mana. I¡¯d need to be more frugal with the other two. They split up in an attempt to hit me from both sides at once, or to at least keep from being caught in the same spell. Their timing was perfect; if I did nothing, they¡¯d reach me at exactly the same time. That was easy enough to manipulate, though. I just had to pick one and fly toward it.


    Still determined to succeed in their plan, the one on the right slowed down when I started moving its way and the one on the left sped up. The on-the-spot adjustment was too impressive to credit the undead with, especially considering how new they were. There was no way Ammun had built them well enough to make those kinds of decisions.


    He was controlling them directly, which meant even fighting out here, a few miles away, I was still slowing him down. That was only a minor victory and would ultimately cost me the battle if I let him have his way, so I repeated my tactic of opening with a point-blank dispelling wave to disrupt its necrotic coating, then slammed it with a few dozen staccato blasts of pure force before it could recover.


    It didn¡¯t shatter under the pressure like the first one, but then, I hadn¡¯t expected it to. It also didn¡¯t cost me any appreciable amount of mana, since I was able to cleanly recover just about every last bit that went into the spells. The dragon stayed in enough of one piece that the animation spell didn¡¯t fail outright like it had with the first one.


    That was all I had time to do in terms of offense. Now both dragons were within a hundred feet of me, and even with their death beams neutralized, they had plenty of other weapons. I couldn¡¯t trust my shield ward to hold up to the sheer kinetic power behind their claws or teeth, so letting myself get caught in close range between them was a bad idea.


    It galled me to do it, but I burned the mana on an expensive combat teleport to escape the pincer. I¡¯d taken a gamble on being able to break the second dragon using a barrage of cheaper spells and it hadn¡¯t paid off. The difference was clear, of course. With Ammun taking active control of the remaining two dragons, I couldn¡¯t afford half-measures. I needed to commit to ending the fight immediately, even if that meant exposing my true level of power.


    With an annoyed huff, I started casting my next spell.

 Book 5, Chapter 51

    It was beyond obvious that Ammun was controlling both of the undead dragons, but I suspected he¡¯d split the workload between himself and his shadow. In a way, that was good for me, since it meant this battle was tying up more of his resources, but it did make things harder. Both monsters worked in perfect unison, and with Ammun coordinating them, they became his eyes so that he could target me with long-range spells.


    That was why I wasn¡¯t terribly surprised when explosive waves of force started detonating in my flight path, both in front of and behind me. They were extremely localized, only twenty feet across, and well-timed to batter my shield ward. More importantly, they disrupted my movements and gave the dragons time to close in on me. Archmage I might be, but I still wasn¡¯t keen on the idea of being within biting range of a monster a thousand times my size.


    I threw up a force wall of my own to block a set of snapping jaws and slipped away, but without anything to anchor it to, the spell was quickly overloaded. I gained a bare hundred feet of distance before another force wave blasted across me, throwing me sideways into the other dragon.


    It was waiting for me, anticipating the collision, and already had its jaws open to reveal pale white teeth and the black-purple knot of necrotic energy that moved it. If I let those teeth clamp down on me, there was no doubt in my mind that they¡¯d overpower my shield ward and tear through my body. Fortunately, I had other options.


    Undead weren¡¯t powered by muscles. Even the ones that still had them didn¡¯t use them. The necrotic nets woven around their body moved them like puppets, from the biggest to the smallest, and these dragons were no exceptions. I couldn¡¯t destroy their animating cores easily, but I could still attack the net. Sure, it would repair itself, but I only needed a few seconds.


    Blades of dispelling energy whipped through the air, targeting either side of the dragon¡¯s jaw and severing the connecting energy that controlled it. Abruptly, it no longer had a maw poised to tear me apart. When I slipped past the teeth, it lacked the ability to close them around me, and I found myself in a position where any attacks on me would damage the construct Ammun was controlling.


    This wasn¡¯t a good place to be, of course. I gave it ten seconds at most before the dragon regained the use of its mouth and started trying to kill me, but that was more than enough time to destroy it. Magic rippled through my outstretched hand, slamming into the back of the skull and blasting a hole wide enough for me to pass through.


    I was inside its rib cage now, past the defense its necrotic net granted. The dragon twisted into a corkscrew spin, trying to throw me around and prevent me from doing what Ammun knew I was about to do, but it was too late. I was already ripping apart the dragon¡¯s core. It unraveled in moments, and bones started raining down from the sky to crash into the trees below.


    I deflected the spine off to the side to avoid being slapped by it on the way down, then spun in place to face the final remaining dragon. It had been a bit of a risky tactic, but that was a dragon destroyed with a single master-tier force spell and a bunch of advanced-tier magic that cost me nothing. Even better ¨C it was nothing I hadn¡¯t already shown Ammun I was capable of.


    The third dragon flew in toward me, perhaps hoping to overwhelm me with sudden ferocity. At the same time, another force wave blasted across my back and tried to throw me forward. That trick was getting too predictable to work, though. The instant I felt the magic burst into existence, I threw out my own force wave, just strong enough to meet and cancel out Ammun¡¯s spell.


    The end result was that instead of crashing into the dragon, I glided forward a few feet, then flew past it when I wasn¡¯t where Ammun was expecting me to be. I left behind a floating mine field of dispelling waves, none powerful enough to break the animating core on their own, but hopefully enough of a distraction that Ammun would focus on defending his minion from that and lose track of me.


    Necromancy was a powerful branch of magic, but not because it was inherently stronger than any other one. Ammun himself was a representation of what heights a powerful necromancer could strive to, an immortal being who could come back from his physical body being destroyed endlessly. He would never age, never tire, and never die. Whether that was worth the price was a matter of debate, but he¡¯d evidently felt it was a good trade.


    But in terms of destructive power, there were plenty of conjurations that could equal necrotic magic. Invocations could strengthen a mage to temporarily match the most powerful of undead in a physical contest. Enchantments could enslave victims to the caster¡¯s will to create an endless legion of minions.


    The true danger of necromancy, that one thing that made it unique, was that it was self-propagating. Necromancers were rightly feared for their ability to raise whole armies to fight on their behalf, but the wise archmage knew that the clean up after that army was destroyed was the real challenge. Necrotic energy didn¡¯t like to break back down into raw mana and return to the Astral Realm. It lingered, a blight on the land, and attached itself to other, suitable vessels.The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    Or, in the hands of a skilled necromancer, it was harvested to enhance his remaining minions.


    We¡¯d been fighting a moving battle thus far, which meant that the first dragon I¡¯d killed was almost a mile back. The lingering necrotic energy wasn¡¯t close enough to matter, but that wasn¡¯t the case for the second dragon. Ammun directed his remaining minion to dive into the devastated stretch of forest where the fallen bones were still laying in dust-filled craters.


    That much energy would destroy the body in hours at most, maybe minutes if Ammun was clumsy about weaving it all together. I¡¯d probably be dead before then, and even if not, letting him stall me here for however long it took for that dragon to fall apart wasn¡¯t a winning strategy. I couldn¡¯t stop its descent, but maybe I could take it apart before it got there.


    I started pulling together the same combination of master-tier force and dispelling magic I¡¯d used to drop the first dragon in seconds, but this time, I didn¡¯t have an easy, convenient target. I released both spells in perfect rhythm, thanks in part to my shadow handling one of them, and blasted one of its wings off. The bones exploded outward, showering a quarter-mile stretch of forest in a thin line and causing the dragon to shift from a dive into an uncontrolled spin.


    It didn¡¯t actually need the wings to fly, unlike a living dragon, so the loss of control was mostly a result of being hit with a massive amount of force. Still, that was enough to send it off-course so that when it hit the ground a few seconds later, it was a thousand feet away from its destination. Now I just needed to finish tearing it apart before Ammun managed to harvest that trove of energy.


    A cloud of necrotic breath rose from the dragon¡¯s maw, and this time I didn¡¯t have a decoy ready to spin out. For just one dragon, though, I didn¡¯t need it. It attacked my shield ward as I dove through it, but I was out the other side before the breath attack could find any purchase. I rained bolts of force down on it mixed in with dispelling waves to scramble the necrotic energy net, which wasn¡¯t terribly effective, but I¡¯d already pinned this dragon down and could afford to take an extra thirty seconds destroying it.


    That was what I thought, at least, until a black silhouette appeared in front of me ¨C Ammun¡¯s shadow making an appearance. A beam of brilliant white mana lanced out of its outstretched hand, narrowly missing me as I twisted to the side. My shield ward lit up as it absorbed the stray mana streaming past me, but I¡¯d avoided enough of the spell that it didn¡¯t break.


    My own shadow detached itself and flew up to meet Ammun¡¯s, and I put the two of them out of my mind. I was more than capable of ignoring the draw on my mana core from its spells as it defended me. Shadows weren¡¯t really something that could be killed, so the best-case outcome of that scuffle was imprisoning Ammun¡¯s temporarily or banishing it far enough away that it burned up a lot of mana getting back to the fight.


    Meanwhile, I had a dragon that was attempting to either get back in the air or claw its way through a few hundred trees to reach the bones of its fallen brethren. I wasn¡¯t about to let that happen ¨C not unless Ammun threw some new surprise my way.


    Unfortunately, even if he couldn¡¯t bring the dragon to the pool of necrotic energy, there was nothing stopping him from doing it the other way around. It wasn¡¯t as efficient, of course, but what did he care about that when he had an entire moon to draw from and his shadow on-site to overcome any handicap distance might provide?


    I sensed more than saw the necrotic energy start to clump together into a thick stream that wove through the trees. All of a sudden, I didn¡¯t have a minute or two to destroy this last dragon. I had seconds unless I contested Ammun for control of the energy.


    I could do it. I¡¯d been a necromancer once. I still knew the magic, and I was far closer than he was. But I¡¯d sworn never to practice necromancy again, and in all the other ways I¡¯d failed and broken promises over my long life, that was one I¡¯d held myself to.


    Today wasn¡¯t the day I broke my word on that, but I found myself irrationally angry at Ammun for putting me in a situation where resorting to necromancy was the best option. I didn¡¯t need that kind of temptation. Rationally, it wasn¡¯t his fault. He was a lich, after all. Necromancy was a huge part of his toolkit, even as an archmage.


    For all that, it was with a touch more vindictiveness that was absolutely necessary that I slammed an enormous blast of force into the base of the dragon¡¯s skull. A lance of dispelling magic preceded it, piercing the necrotic defenses protecting the bone and allowing the force spell to disintegrate a twenty-foot chunk of spine into powder.


    Nobody else on the planet could have dove directly into a necrotic core and come back out unharmed. It was only the fact that my body was mostly solidified mana that resonated with the Astral Realm so much that it altered the mana flow around me that I wasn¡¯t obliterated by magic that embodied the antithesis of life.


    I tore it apart in seconds. Magic spilled from me, wastefully and with no attempt to recycle it and save my reserves. Blade of mana slipped through knots in the core and severed them, unraveling the whole net with the suddenness of a snapping line. What had been a moving, violent monster around me literally fell apart over the span of two seconds and became nothing more than a massive skeleton tangled up in the trees.


    With no core to reinforce, the necrotic remnants from the other dragon had nothing to work on. Ammun released his hold on it and I flew up over the trees to rain destructive blasts of force magic down on the body. Leaving it behind for him to reanimate wasn¡¯t a good idea, and I¡¯d be repeating my spell on the other two in a moment.


    I looked up at where our shadows were still tangling together, and I knew that he was watching me. I gestured down to the cloud of bone dust filtering through the trees and said, ¡°You¡¯re next.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 52

    Ammun¡¯s shadow fled the battle immediately. I let it go; there was no point in chasing after it. Destroying it would have done nothing but allowed him to reform it at his side once more. That might have cost him more mana than simply letting it return, but it wasn¡¯t likely that he was going to run out.


    Instead, I powdered the skeleton nearby and sent my shadow after the one we¡¯d left a mile back. Without needing to use master-tier spells to destroy them, it was a quick, easy, efficient job that only took a minute. Normally, I¡¯d have been pleased to make that trade off, but I was acutely aware that every second that passed was one that brought Ammun closer to finishing his control console to use a moon as a weapons platform.


    I had no doubt there¡¯d be other distractions between me and my goal, but I couldn¡¯t take the time to weave my way through all of Ammun¡¯s wards to properly scout them out. So, with his trio of undead dragons fully destroyed, I flew onward and hoped the next challenge would be easier to defeat.


    The first ward wall showed up two miles later. It appeared as a solid sphere of repellent force, specifically designed to push back equally against anything brought to bear. Ammun had been thorough in its creation, even going so far as to form it underground. He¡¯d probably carved the ward stone up on Yulitar and brought it with him, else he wouldn¡¯t have had time to develop such a complete defense.


    Normally, my strategy for something like this would be to brute force it open. A handful of high-powered conjurations would quickly drain such a barrier, and with lossless casting, I¡¯d lose nothing but some time. It was worth trying, but I didn¡¯t expect it to succeed. While I considered how best to circumvent the ward, I hammered it with force lances, lightning bolts, explosions, and huge blocks of conjured ice and stone. Light played across the ward¡¯s surface as it reflected the attacks back out, none of them even close to hitting me.


    Against a normal mage, it was a potent defense, but anyone with the ability to remotely cast a spell even fifty feet away from their body could bypass the deflection completely. Once upon a time, that would have cost me some time, but these days, I sometimes needed a specially crafted staff to deliberately hinder the flow of mana in my spells when I was setting up something big. Remote casting wasn¡¯t an issue, especially not with my shadow assisting me.


    As I¡¯d suspected, the ward held strong with no signs of stuttering mana flows that would indicate it was taking damage. Ammun had built the ward stone to hold an enormous amount of mana, far more than was practical, but which was perfect for his needs right now. I might break through in five minutes, or it might take me an hour. I had no way to tell.


    The problem with these kinds of wards was that they functioned similarly to how I¡¯d set my shield ward up, and that had a weakness intrinsic to the design: phantasmal spells. The solution to that was a simple one. Savvy mages simply placed a second layer to their ward, a phantasmal shell that only activated if the divinations detected an intruder trying to use something like phantasmal step to bypass the first layer.


    An archmage, on the other hand, wouldn¡¯t be content simply to repel the would-be intruder. If it were me, I would trap the second layer, cause it to invert the phantasmal step spell the intruder used, and shred them on the ward they got stuck in. It would be a particularly gruesome death, all that inverted kinetic energy being kicked back through a human body ¨C quick, but gruesome.


    That was exactly what Ammun had done. I couldn¡¯t scry far past the ward, but I¡¯d gone deep enough to see the trap for what it was. Seeing it and defeating it were two different things, but I had a good idea of how to do that. It wasn¡¯t anything clever, either. Maybe I could have picked apart the ward, teased open the strands of mana woven through it, and slipped through, but Ammun already knew I was here. Why bother with subtlety? It was far easier to just set the trap off in a way that it wouldn¡¯t catch me, then fly through right after.


    To that end, I used the most direct and quickest solution: I sent my shadow in first. It didn¡¯t have a physical body, not one that would be shredded by this trap, at least. It phantasmal stepped right through the kinetic ward with some assistance from me holding open the parts that would have interacted with its body, then got twisted and wrung out like a dirty rag by the phantasmal trap.


    The instant the spell was done mauling my shadow, it snapped right back into shape, utterly unharmed. A moment later, we were both flying free past the outer ward. Spatial locking was still in effect, and I was now cut off from my divinations on the outside world, including my line to the gestalt entity, but Ammun himself was in sight.


    His machine was a fifty-foot-tall spire built of interlocking metal bars covered in runes. The internal structure was complete, and he was busy fusing outer plates to it. It resembled a grain silo in the process of being constructed, except with a far more robust skeleton than was necessary for such a structure.


    He was floating in the air above it, a few divinations swirling around him and inspecting it from various angles while three airborne golems attached the plates. The whole thing had an air of being a slapdash construction, something that could easily be knocked over and destroyed beyond repair. All of Ammun¡¯s defenses felt like that, despite his obviously extensive preparations.Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.


    Those three weren¡¯t the only golems, but the rest were obviously combat units. They locked in on me immediately, and my eyes narrowed as I studied them. If I wasn¡¯t mistaken, those were the exact same golems I¡¯d been dealing with beneath Ammun¡¯s tower. I thought I¡¯d taken care of those. Apparently, he¡¯d had a few spares lying around.


    That, or¡­ Now that I was looking for it, I could feel a pinprick in the spatial lock. Someone had opened a portal in the area recently and the lock hadn¡¯t quite smoothed it over. Had Ammun fetched the golems I¡¯d dumped into the ocean? It was certainly possible, despite my efforts to erase all evidence of the baited portal I¡¯d left at the ruins of his tower before he came back.


    I didn¡¯t think it was likely, however. A better explanation was that Ammun simply had more of the golems in storage offsite. He¡¯d certainly had enough of them, and I hadn¡¯t done more than a cursory inspection of his facilities and research sites that I knew of. It wouldn¡¯t surprise me at all to learn that he had a golem storage bunker buried somewhere underground where I¡¯d never find it.


    The important thing to focus on was that he¡¯d portaled a large number of them here, and that I might need to deal with them. I knew there were two different ward stones based on how the wards were set up, both of which I wanted to destroy if the opportunity presented itself. This spatial lock only applied to me, and being pinned down while Ammun could teleport unhindered was not a good way to conduct a battle.


    My shadow disappeared to take care of that problem while I came to a stop a few hundred feet from Ammun. He glanced up at me and gave an exaggerated sigh, then turned in place and floated up to my level.


    ¡°Master Keiran,¡± he greeted, his voice booming across the distance. ¡°I see you¡¯ve fully recovered from that scuffle with my excavation golem.¡±


    ¡°And you¡¯ve got a soul tether thousands of miles long now,¡± I replied. ¡°How¡­ wasteful.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not like I¡¯ll run out of mana,¡± he said with a laugh. ¡°I¡¯ve ensured my immortality, despite whatever fate this planet might suffer in the future.¡±


    ¡°I suppose that¡¯s what¡¯s important to you.¡±


    ¡°Selfish, isn¡¯t it?¡± He snorted and shook his head. ¡°I¡¯m sure you see it that way. The reality is that I had to take care of myself before I could start fixing everything else that¡¯s gone wrong on Manoch. You¡¯re not the only one who disappeared and wasn¡¯t pleased with the mess you came back to.¡±


    ¡°And rebuilding the weapon that started the last mess helps how, exactly?¡±


    ¡°You and I both know that the only true measure of success is power. This is power, enough to destroy whole cities, anywhere, any time. I will rebuild this planet, and I¡¯ll do it right. We could have worked together to achieve that, but you were so busy seeing me as a threat to your own power that you couldn¡¯t even conceive of a world where we collaborated, could you?¡±


    ¡°I was more concerned about your tower than you. You had it wedged in the shell around the world core. Removing it was necessary to start the healing process, but you never would have allowed it,¡± I argued.


    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t I? I told you there were other ways. And, despite all your efforts to stop me, here we are. The tower is gone. I remain. Let the healing commence, and I will be here to witness it.¡±


    ¡°Just you,¡± I said. ¡°Does one single other person get to benefit from your work, or is the rest of the world a prize to be won and controlled?¡±


    Ammun let out a dry, raspy laugh and shook his head. ¡°I know you far, far too well to think you¡¯re taking the moral high road. You don¡¯t care about those people any more than I do.¡±


    Well, he wasn¡¯t exactly wrong. I¡¯d committed my fair share of slaughter and wouldn¡¯t hesitate to do it again if I felt it was necessary. That didn¡¯t change how much of a threat Ammun was, though I¡¯m sure there were many mages who¡¯d argue I was just as much of one. I wondered if the Global Order of the Arcane had found some way to watch this, and, if so, who they were hoping would win.


    If they were smart, they¡¯d back me. Ammun no longer needed to fix Manoch¡¯s core. Without his own survival being dependent on it, I didn¡¯t suspect he¡¯d even try, which left the rest of the world in shambles. I also doubted he¡¯d be keen to share his knowledge with future disciples, at least not ones he couldn¡¯t exert absolute authority over.


    ¡°Besides,¡± the lich went on, ¡°I see what you¡¯re wearing. Milduran battle robes, aren¡¯t they? Those were out of style when I was a child thirteen centuries ago, Master.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not trying to be fashionable.¡±


    ¡°No. You¡¯re here to fight, to keep fighting, really. You do understand dragon skeletons are a precious, irreplaceable resource now, don¡¯t you?¡±


    ¡°Manoch is better off without them,¡± I said. ¡°Just like it¡¯ll be better off without you.¡±


    ¡°Yes, yes, I¡¯m a blight upon humanity and all that garbage,¡± Ammun said. ¡°You¡¯re going to smite me, destroy my body, and send me back to my phylactery. I suppose you¡¯ll teleport back up to the moon and hunt it down to prevent me from ever resurfacing.¡±


    ¡°Something like that.¡±


    ¡°Consider this, then. You¡¯re here. But who¡¯s helping all those weak, pathetic mortals you call friends?¡±


    He raised one bony hand and snapped his fingers, a sound that should have been impossible but which he managed nonetheless. Instantly, a hundred panes of glass faded into existence. Each one displayed a different scene. Querit fought against a zombie horde outside Hyago¡¯s grove in one. The brakvaw were being slowly overwhelmed by the colony of wyverns in another. Other undead stalked through the villages outside Derro, hunting those with ignited cores.


    There were places I hadn¡¯t thought he¡¯d known about displayed as well. That little town the survivors of his army¡¯s initial push had founded was visible through one of the mirrors. Some sort of sea serpent, a gaping bloody hole in its head, was destroying their boats and ignoring their feeble attempts to drive it off. I had no doubt it had killed dozens of people already.


    Derro was being assaulted by its own legion of zombies, including an entire swarm of giant wasps. Most of those were missing legs or had other obvious wounds, but as long as they still had two wings, it didn¡¯t slow them down. The walls around the city weren¡¯t doing much to hold them back, and they didn¡¯t have near the numbers needed to hold the entire length. Refugees were already streaming through the streets and flooding the inner district.


    ¡°What will you do, Master Keiran? Would you like to teleport away and save them? I¡¯ll let you run, if you want.¡±


    ¡°You know I won¡¯t,¡± I said shortly.


    ¡°No, I didn¡¯t expect you would. You know where the only thing that can threaten you is. So what if everyone else dies, so long as you¡¯re safe, right? It¡¯s funny. I feel the exact same way.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 53

    I¡¯d done my best to keep this conversation going now that I was here, not because I wanted to talk to my former apprentice, but to give my shadow time to break the first ward stone. As soon as that happened, the fight was guaranteed to kick off, and I¡¯d have to hold my own against Ammun, his shadow, and his squadron of golems while my shadow went after the second ward stone.


    I was hoping the defenses wouldn¡¯t be radically different at the second location, but there wasn¡¯t enough time to check both before breaking one. I¡¯d just have to wing it until I gained full freedom of movement. The spatial lock needed to be destroyed if my plan was going to work. Everything hinged on me having control over the local area. If I failed there, then I was wasting my time doing anything but breaking Ammun¡¯s construction project, which he could simply rebuild elsewhere.


    ¡°Nothing to say to that?¡± Ammun asked with a sneer.


    ¡°I think you¡¯re forgetting who I am,¡± I told him. ¡°Let me remind you that I am a bigger monster than you could ever hope to be. The difference between us is that you¡¯re thoughtlessly destructive, even self-destructive, though that seems to be more of a consequence of your inability to predict how your actions will affect the world. If you think you¡¯ve rattled me by comparing how evil we both are, you are quite mistaken.¡±


    It was hard to read the expression of an animated skull, but he had enough humanity left in him that his body radiated anger. Whatever he¡¯d been hoping to get out of taunting me, I hadn¡¯t given it to him. Really, though, all I¡¯d done was point out the obvious. Ammun¡¯s actions over the last few years, particularly the way he¡¯d gone after soft targets on the off chance that I¡¯d have some connection with them, revealed that he had indeed forgotten what kind of person his master was.


    I supposed the thousand or so years of subjective time between my death and us both being alive and active today were enough to dull his memory, but I wondered what kind of stories people had told about me that he¡¯d thought I¡¯d succumb to na?ve idealism like some storybook knight rushing out to save the world. I wasn¡¯t trying to save anyone. I just wanted the mana back the way it was supposed to be.


    My shadow located both ward stones and was just starting to work on the first one. I figured I had about thirty seconds left before Ammun realized what was happening and attacked. For now, he was quite happy to stall. His golems hadn¡¯t ceased construction, and every second he kept me talking was another panel they could attach to the delicate framework. He probably thought I wasn¡¯t aware of the separate barrier surrounding the silo, but I¡¯d spotted that the instant he¡¯d flown through it in an attempt to make sure my opening salvo was directed at him instead of his fragile project.


    ¡°No, I haven¡¯t forgotten,¡± Ammun said sourly. ¡°You never did appreciate my capabilities. I¡¯m simply pointing out the hypocrisy of the persona you¡¯ve crafted for yourself in this day and age. I¡¯ve seen the towns. You put teleportation platforms in them. You¡¯ve helped Dherevo recover. That druid grove you¡¯re sponsoring is coming along nicely, isn¡¯t it?¡±


    ¡°So what? Do you have something against an honest trade of resources and knowledge?¡±


    ¡°Since when did you ever do anything but take what you want, Master Keiran? Are you just growing soft in your old age, or did your reincarnation alter some fundamental part of your personality?¡±


    Considering the whole reason I¡¯d taken Ammun on as an apprentice in the first place was to appease his family as part of a trade deal, I wasn¡¯t really sure where he¡¯d gotten this idea of me from. Even in my younger, blood-soaked days as a necromancer, I¡¯d never had a problem with a fair deal. I¡¯d just been unwilling to accept that what I wanted was out of reach at any price. Come to think of it, that part of me hadn¡¯t really changed that much.


    I spotted the exact moment Ammun realized I¡¯d been stalling him as much as he¡¯d been stalling me. His mouth hung open, more meaningless drivel about to spew out, when he froze in place. The flickering red beads nestled in his eye sockets slid off toward his ward stone for just an instant before he mastered his expression and turned a shrewd, cunning gaze on me.


    ¡°So that¡¯s how it is, huh?¡± was all he said.


    Ammun might have taken a shot at my choice of attire, but it hadn¡¯t escaped my notice that his own robes, tattered as they might be, were similarly fortified. Inscriptions didn¡¯t really play well with flexible materials since the position of a rune in relation to the others was so important, but that didn¡¯t mean enchantments couldn¡¯t be laid down on a shirt or robe. Ammun¡¯s in particular were closer to rags than anything else, but in all fairness, I had left him stranded on a moon for the better part of a year.


    The whole time we¡¯d been speaking, I¡¯d been sizing him up, and like just about everything else I¡¯d seen from him, he lacked the ability to craft something original. His methodology came directly from me, something I¡¯d expect from a recently graduated apprentice, not someone who¡¯d had centuries to iterate and come up with his own style. The techniques I didn¡¯t recognize had probably been stolen from someone else, but the defensive enchantments were definitely mine.Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    Unfortunately, copying me did mean that his battle robes were well-crafted and would be difficult to get past. For the moment, that was fine. I wasn¡¯t ready to push the fight to the point where I destroyed his mortal body just yet.


    Ammun made the first move. Of all the possible ways he could have started the fight, he went with the most obvious one. His primary advantages were that he wasn¡¯t bound by his own spatial lock and that he had effectively unlimited mana. So it was no surprise that he leaned into that and cast an instant teleport to try and get the cheap shot off.


    Even with his wards putting a damper on what my divinations could pick up, it wasn¡¯t hard to predict his opener. I was already moving as soon as I felt his mana start to flex into a spell, straight down to put his silo in the line of fire. Ammun came out of his teleportation with his hand raised, a wand made of some sort of wood and studded with tiny iron spikes up and down its length held in it. A spiraling beam of mana lanced out, cutting through the air where I¡¯d just been floating.


    It was made of a thousand individual threads, and the farther it went, the more it unraveled until the beam was ten times thicker than it started. If Ammun had teleported fifty feet behind me instead of ten, it might have hit me. Of course, the diffusion of the beam¡¯s structure meant that even if it had, it wouldn¡¯t have hurt.


    He started to swing the wand around, realized what he¡¯d be putting in the line of fire if he did, and jerked his hand back up before cutting the spell off. At the same time, I sent a volley of probing, conjured metal needles to dimple his shield ward. The purpose wasn¡¯t to get through, though I certainly wouldn¡¯t have complained if they had, but to test the properties of the ward.


    Would it push him away or absorb the kinetic energy? How quickly would the ward refresh itself up to full strength? Could it selectively let through attacks that were weak enough that Ammun could safely ignore them, or would it waste mana deflecting anything and everything I threw at it? That one simple spell told me the answers to all those questions, and I immediately used that information to formulate a new strategy.


    Shield wards were extremely useful, but I¡¯d noticed people of this era tended to use them as their first, last, and only level of personal protection. In all fairness, I¡¯d often relied on them that way myself, especially once I¡¯d reached the point where my magic was overpowering to everyone I met. But that wasn¡¯t what they were meant for. Their primary purpose was to prevent a mage from being killed by a sneak attack. They were designed to take one good, solid hit before breaking, and the mage was supposed to take over their own defense at that point.


    My own shield ward was so powerful that no one I¡¯d fought outside of Ammun himself had been able to break through. The only exception was that one mage who knew a single destructive master-tier conjuration, and he¡¯d needed a full cadre of support mages to even use it. Not even any of the so-called archmages of the Global Order had been able to do much more than force me to actively push mana into the shield ward to hold it against their attempts to break through.


    There was a weakness to them, though, and that weakness was that they could only protect against what their designer could predict. My wards were very thorough, and that meant Ammun¡¯s were as well, but I¡¯d sacrificed durability to achieve flexibility. His shield ward had the same weakness.


    I didn¡¯t need to find a clever hole in his defenses, though there were undoubtedly a few. I just needed to exploit the facts I¡¯d already determined. His shield ward drained quickly and was refreshed manually, just like mine. It would protect him from anything of any potency, and was probably tuned more strongly against typical undead weaknesses than it was to deal with kinetic force.


    I tore through it like paper in less than two seconds by hitting it from six different angles with continuous streams of pure heavy mana while Ammun gaped at me in shock.


    ¡°Wha¡ª¡± he started to say, but I interrupted him with a shot of force magic to the chest, knocking him end over end.


    I¡¯d timed that shot specifically to coincide with my shadow breaking the first of his ward stones. He might notice anyway, but my hope was that he¡¯d be too focused on the fight in front of him to pay attention. With one of his ward stones down, the spatial lock in the area loosened and the divination wards fell completely. Abruptly, I could see everything around me in all the ways I was used to looking at them, with so much detail that all my earlier observational guesswork felt pointless.


    It was gratifying to know exactly how much I¡¯d correctly deduced, and slightly annoying to spot the things I¡¯d gotten wrong, but overall, this was progress. There was no time to gloat, however. Ammun had already recovered from what had basically amounted to a slap in the face.


    ¡°You¡¯re as sloppy as ever,¡± I said. ¡°Let¡¯s see how well you fight when your opponent isn¡¯t stage five and has air to breathe.¡±


    ¡°You think I need those advantages to beat you? I have a thousand years of magical advancements in my head that occurred after your death. You haven¡¯t even begun to catch up to me.¡±


    My shadow skimmed across the forest and settled on the second ward stone, then started viciously tearing into it. Ammun¡¯s cheekbone twitched slightly in facsimile to a real face, and I gave him a cold smile. ¡°That¡¯s right. None of your tricks are amounting to anything at all. At the end of the day, all the preparations and all the distractions are worthless.¡±


    ¡°Not all,¡± he growled, lifting his hands up to send dual master-tier flame conjurations directly into my face.


    At the same time, his shadow slipped free and transmuted the air around me into solid form to hold me in place for my immolation. The funny thing about it was that a few minutes ago, that strategy would have been extremely draining to defend against. Now, without a full spatial lock in place, it was trivial to avoid.


    Phantasmal step let me slide backwards through the hardened air like it wasn¡¯t there, and a simple heat sink cast upward drew the majority of the flames away from me. I shot backwards to escape the rest of the thermal bloom, then fired off my own flame lance in retaliation.


    It was time to test just how well he¡¯d woven the enchantments into his tattered robe while my shadow brought down the second ward stone. Then I could enact my real plan.

 Book 5, Chapter 54

    Up to this point, we¡¯d mostly been testing each other and buying time. At first, I¡¯d thought that Ammun was just stalling to give his worker golems more time to build his control silo, but as soon as I¡¯d applied any cursory amount of critical thinking to that idea, it fell apart. It didn¡¯t matter if the silo was finished while I was here. It wasn¡¯t like Ammun could use it on me when I was right next to him. The best he could hope for was to threaten to destroy some place he thought was important to me.


    So, he had some other reason for stalling, and I imagined it was similar to mine. He had minions of some sort setting something up, or he was calling up reinforcements that had yet to arrive ¨C something like that. It was probably more golems, if only because that was the least creative thing I could think of that I suspected he could pull off.


    The golems he already had guarding the area were all landbound, and thus weren¡¯t much of a threat. They had the capability to emit mana as an attack, but I was intimately familiar with how their targeting systems worked. It would be trivial to dodge them. For that matter, it would be trivial to deactivate them if I was willing to touch them, but I was saving that for the ¡®surprise¡¯ reinforcements.


    That was assuming, of course, that there weren¡¯t literal thousands of them all trying to kill me at the same time like I¡¯d dealt with beneath Ammun¡¯s tower. There was only so much an archmage could do in a situation like that, but thirty or forty wouldn¡¯t be too big of a problem to deal with. I was already subtly testing the golems present on the battlefield while I flew around dodging big, flashy conjurations to confirm the specifications of the golem cores. The last thing I needed was to get grabbed by one that I couldn¡¯t deactivate with a thought.


    At the same time, Ammun and his shadow were circling around me and launching a volley of lightning bolts, explosive fire blasts, waves of telekinetic force, and even a few phantasmal blades. I dodged what I could, but some spells were impossible to avoid without teleporting. Those that I couldn¡¯t slip past, I did my best to deflect in an attempt to spare my mana pool. I was nowhere close to empty, but I was going to need everything I could scrounge up for the final round. If I exhausted myself now, I wouldn¡¯t make it that far.


    ¡°Fight back,¡± Ammun called with a cackle. ¡°You did better the first time we fought above my tower.¡±


    In response, I cast out a wall of force to block a splitting blade made of sharpened air that could have overwhelmed my shield ward, which was still recovering from absorbing half a dozen mind spikes his shadow had thrown at me. When neither attack managed to land, Ammun teleported again. I was already dodging, this time straight up, when he reappeared in front of me, his hand outstretched and crackling with red lightning.


    There was no time to dispel the magic, nor could I build a lightning rod if he was planning on physically touching me. My shield ward was all but drained, a fact he was well aware of. Otherwise, he wouldn¡¯t have chosen a touch-range attack. The only thing I could do was take the hit and make him pay dearly for it.


    Normally, my shield ward would prevent anyone from touching me without my express permission. In this case, all it took was a push from him to rip through it. His skeletal fingers clamped down on my leg and lightning arced up to wreath my entire body. Being stage nine helped blunt the damage, but it wasn¡¯t a perfect defense. Ammun was also throwing around heavy mana.


    If this spell had hit my sister, there would have been nothing left but a scorched corpse with smoke rising out of the empty sockets where her eyes had been a moment before. Against someone like Querit, taking the full brunt of it would have scrambled his higher reasoning functions and probably caused an enormous spike in mana consumption in an attempt to repair it. It might even have forced a complete shutdown.


    Against me, wearing the enchanted battle robes, it left a line of scorch marks as it jumped from spot to spot. It stung a bit. I¡¯d probably spend a bit of mana healing the injury once the fight was over rather than suffer the discomfort for however many days it took to heal on its own. Mostly, I was just annoyed that my brand-new robes were going to have some burn marks on them.


    I wasn¡¯t good at sewing clothes. These had taken a lot of effort to put together, and even though I knew they¡¯d get roughed up when I finally met Ammun face-to-face, I was still put out that the metallic threads were already scorched.


    I was willing to bet Ammun was even less pleased about my retaliatory strike, however.


    At the same time lightning arced between my limbs, I reached down and planted a hand firmly on his skull. He probably wasn¡¯t expecting me to be able to move¡ªlightning being notable for its ability to cause muscles to seize up involuntarily¡ªelse he¡¯d have made some effort to defend himself. Instead, he got a point-blank injection of blindingly white fire directly into his skull.Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Not much could truly hurt an undead. They could lose limbs and feel nothing more than annoyance at the fact. Without nerves to feel, they were left cold and empty. The smarter ones manifested their senses through magic and could indeed feel things, but they never included pain.


    My cleansing fire didn¡¯t care about such petty concerns. While it was real fire and burned hot enough to melt steel, it also caught mana on fire. For an undead lich, having their mana ignited was intolerable agony.


    Ammun started screaming, and he didn¡¯t stop. The fire poured through his eye sockets and his jaw, cascaded down his rib cage and into his pelvis, and the whole time, he flailed about in wild, raw, existential anguish. I didn¡¯t have it in me to feel bad for him, especially since as soon as he took a moment to think, he¡¯d know how to defeat the attack.


    Really, it was a stroke of good luck for me. My shadow had just broken the second ward stone, and Ammun was too busy screaming his metaphorical lungs out to pay attention to it. I was sure he¡¯d realize in a moment, but that gave me time to act.


    We were already touching, and I¡¯d been preparing for this fight for a long time. I produced a cube of black fire glass from my phantom space and channeled enough mana into it to activate it. Unlike my normal emergency escape pendants, this one had been made with the assumption that my travel companion wouldn¡¯t be willing. Since he was also a stage nine archmage, that meant I¡¯d have to overcome a great deal of resistance to bring him with me.


    Or set his mana on fire to distract him. That worked, too.


    I pulled us both through the cube¡¯s magic, unfortunately bringing his shadow with us and leaving mine behind. The only way it was getting back into this fight with me was if it teleported itself¡ªpossibly a waste of mana¡ªor if the battle lasted the hour or so it would need to fly over here. That did leave me outnumbered two-to-one, but on the other hand, that had been how things had been since the beginning.


    More importantly, I now had Ammun inside the radius of my own preparations. His precious silo was safe, and after I destroyed him permanently, I¡¯d go investigate that. It would probably end up destroyed, but I¡¯d had a thought about moon connections I was eager to explore once time permitted. No doubt I¡¯d be building off Ammun¡¯s work, but it gave me a place to start.


    ¡®Keiran,¡¯ the gestalt¡¯s voice echoed in my head.


    ¡®Little busy right now,¡¯ I thought back as I sent out mental commands to the devices I¡¯d placed all around us in a mile-wide circle.


    ¡®A sizable force of golems is on the move. Ammun sent them through a portal, which we were able to trace to a warded location. We are not certain, but this may be the sanctuary you built for your family. Unless the wards go down, we can only confirm the rough coordinates the portal connects to.¡¯


    I froze in place. Shit. There was no way¡­ Ammun couldn¡¯t possibly have known. I¡¯d picked a remote island far off the coast, some place I¡¯d found while specifically scrying for a good location. I¡¯d never physically traveled there prior to the teleportation I used within the safe confines of my demesne.


    ¡®An island?¡¯ I asked. ¡®Five hundred miles southeast of your location? Big mountain on the north side with two arms coming around to cradle it? Connected by a beach about four miles long on the south coast?¡¯


    ¡®That is correct.¡¯


    Ammun gave a great jerk and slapped his hand into his chest. With a grunt of supreme effort, he pulled it back away, and my cleansing fire came with it. Hurling the offending flames away, he turned to me with a screech of pure rage and flung himself through the air in my direction. I dodged out of the way by dint of letting my flight spell lapse, but that just put me in the path of his shadow.


    My shield ward was still down. Black claws infused with mana ripped across my battle robe, tearing long rents in the metallic weave and scoring the flesh beneath. The only thing that prevented Ammun¡¯s shadow from tearing out an organ or two was the force wave I detonated right between us. I was thrown backwards and fell toward the ground, and the shadow went spiraling away into the sky, unharmed.


    ¡°Before, I just needed to kill you because you were in the way. It was a sign of respect, really. Who else could threaten my plans but you?¡± Ammun ranted. ¡°Now, now it¡¯s going to be a pleasure. I¡¯ll trap your soul so I can torture you for eternity. You can rot away in there waiting for the next time I bring you out to torment you. And when I¡¯m done killing you, I am going to wipe out that entire island you call a home. There won¡¯t be a single thing left alive from one end to the other.¡±


    If he¡¯d been smart, he wouldn¡¯t have wasted time talking. I was in a freefall, still recovering from the unexpected hit and smacking myself with a massive force wave just to get some distance. I barely even paid attention to what he was saying; it wasn¡¯t like it was anything I hadn¡¯t heard from previous rivals in the past.


    By the time he was done with his threats, he¡¯d finished channeling mana into his next attack and I¡¯d recovered from my fall. Perhaps three hundred feet separated us now, with him in the air and me close to the ground. His shadow hadn¡¯t fared as well in the force wave explosion and was out of the fight for at least a few seconds while it reoriented itself.


    ¡®Keiran, we need to know what you want us to do. Our resources are limited, but we may still be able to help your family.¡¯


    It was hard to focus on the gestalt¡¯s thoughts, and not just because of the pain. This wasn¡¯t part of the plan. My family was supposed to be safe. Now, even if I defeated Ammun right here, there was every chance that his mindless automatons would kill everyone on the extremely short list of people I cared about.


    Fortunately, I could be in two places at once. ¡®I¡¯ve got it under control,¡¯ I sent back as the answer came to me.


    Miles away, my shadow sped through the intricate casting of a teleportation spell. I could only pray it was fast enough to save everyone.

 Book 5, Chapter 55

    I was willing to bet that Ammun hadn¡¯t felt pain in a thousand years or more. His soul might be writhing in tortured agony every moment, but the copy of his mind that piloted that skeleton didn¡¯t feel any of that. Getting lit up by a mana burn spell was not the way to gently ease someone back into that particular facet of the human condition.


    Regardless of his motivations, he¡¯d decided he was done talking. There were no more threats, taunts, or insults. The next few minutes of my life were pure chaos as we flew circles around each other and lit the sky up with explosive conjurations. Planes of force met each other and cracked like thunder. Enormous orbs of fire scorched the air as they rained down on the ground below, and the wind shrieked as cutting gales streamed around us.


    Mixed into the cacophony was the cold, silent, deadly beat of constant divinations and enchantments pounding on my brain. They wouldn¡¯t work ¨C couldn¡¯t work, not against me. But they were a distraction, a gang of burglars rattling at my mental windows, seeking a weakness to exploit while I prevented an invading army from battering down the gates.


    The whole while, my focus was thousands of miles away, watching my shadow teleport itself to my family¡¯s sanctum, where Senica was battling the first wave of golems to pass through the portal. She¡¯d barricaded it with transmuted earthen ramparts in an effort to prevent the ones already there from receiving reinforcements, but that was only a temporary stall.


    I should have foreseen this threat and created a fallback shelter. The wards I had left in place were primarily designed to prevent the island from being scried out, or rather, the people on the island. The defenses were actually weaker than what I¡¯d placed in New Alkerist because I¡¯d lacked the time to properly fortify the hideaway.


    That wasn¡¯t to say there were no defenses at all. If that had been the case, there was no way my little sister could have held off a dozen murder machines. She was actually doing a masterful job of working with what tools she had available, stalling the golems¡¯ advance while my father organized an evacuation of the tiny village deeper into the interior of the island.


    I wanted to reach out to him, to tell him that was the wrong move to make, but the truth was the alternative wasn¡¯t any better. Leaving the radius of the wards would leave them exposed, but staying where they were was just asking to be torn apart or disintegrated by mana beams. And it was obvious that Senica, brave and skilled beyond her years as she might be, was not going to actually stop the golems.


    She was doing exactly what I needed her to, though. She was buying everyone enough time for my shadow to finish its teleportation spell and reach her. It needed three jumps, but after the first cast, it could use the platforms I¡¯d scattered across Ralvost and beyond. Five minutes, maybe six, was all the time Senica needed to hold.


    Stressful as it was to watch her work and know that there was nothing I could do to help at the moment, that nobody could get there any faster than my shadow anyway, I couldn¡¯t focus on it. Ammun was a threat that required all of my attention, so I pushed the divination to the back of my mind, a little scrying mirror tucked away in the corner while I worked on something else.


    Defeating Ammun here was important, but it was also just the first step in my plan. If I broke this body, it would set back his plans, give me more time to prepare for him, but he¡¯d come right back. I wasn¡¯t going to give him the chance.


    The enchantments I¡¯d placed over the area were primed, ready to unfold and encompass us both, but I held off on that. I wanted Ammun to think this teleport had been wholly about removing him from his prepared battlefield. No doubt he¡¯d expect a few surprises here, and I¡¯d give him enough to feed into those expectations.


    But the real reason had to remain a secret, poised and ready to come down on him at the exact right moment. If he figured out what I was planning too soon, he¡¯d break away and run. I needed to maneuver him into a position where that was impossible, first.


    ¡®Keiran, the Global Order is mobilizing,¡¯ the gestalt sent me.


    I should have killed more of them back when I¡¯d gone through their bases the first time.


    ¡®How many, and where are they going?¡¯ I asked as I blocked a conjuration that froze the air around me by sending out a blast wave of fire in every direction. At the same time, sparkling golden shackles appeared out of nowhere, constructs of pure, solid mana, and clamped themselves onto my wrists.


    That would make it harder to direct my magic with my staff, but not impossible. It was a mild inconvenience at best, except that when I started to build my next spell, the shackles began pumping extra mana into it. Far from restricting my casting, they were destabilizing it. I would have laughed at the cleverness had it not been wasted on me. If Ammun wanted to give me some free mana, I¡¯d take it and run.


    If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    I quickly leashed the excess mana and adjusted my own output to bring the spell back under control, then fired off a trio of black, jagged-edged discs that left shadowy trails as they sliced through the sky. The spell was specially designed to cut through necrotic energy webs, and it was a total mana hog. Originally, I¡¯d only been planning to use one, but if I wasn¡¯t paying for it, I might as well go all out.


    The shackles broke apart into motes of light, their mana expended in an unsuccessful attempt at sabotage. Immediately, I flew straight up to put some distance between me and a handful of force mines Ammun was scattering around me. Their main strength was how difficult they were to detect, especially amidst all the mana we were dumping into the area, but if either of us bumped into one, it would detonate into a force wave that would likely throw us into the rest.


    Defending against repeated explosions as I was tossed around the sky would quickly drain my mana, so it was better to just mark that part of the sky as a place to be avoided and move the battle off to the side. That way, all that happened was Ammun wasted some of his practically unlimited mana and, more importantly, his extremely valuable time.


    ¡®Twenty-two,¡¯ the gestalt finally told me a few seconds later. ¡®They appear to be converging on various locations Ammun¡¯s forces are attempting to occupy. The first group has begun jumping across the intercontinental teleportation bridge and is targeting Derro as their final destination. A second group is approaching Eyrie Peak. Individuals are moving on various towns that Ammun¡¯s forces are assaulting.¡¯


    ¡®They¡¯re working against him? Good. Do any of them appear to know about my family¡¯s hiding place?¡¯


    I wasn¡¯t sure which answer I was hoping for. If the Order did know about the island, then they might arrive sooner than my shadow could. But it would also put my family in danger from them, and that was far worse than the golems. If they didn¡¯t, then I was still relying on Senica to stall the enemy long enough for my shadow to arrive.


    ¡®Unclear. They could also be moving to reinforce the undead.¡¯


    ¡®Let me know once you know what their intentions are,¡¯ I sent.


    Could I do anything about it if they were hostile? The answer to that was complicated. There were resources I could spend, but ultimately it came down to a matter of priorities. If the Order helped wipe out Derro, I¡¯d punish them for it, but I was willing to sacrifice that city for this shot at ending Ammun permanently.


    Even if they were here to help, I¡¯d expressly forbid them from setting foot anywhere on Olpahun, so I¡¯d still need to have a conversation with them. Whether that was a stern reminder of boundaries or an execution event would depend on them. Either way, unless they found their way into my demesne or went after my family, I was too busy to do anything about them at the moment.


    ¡®The wyverns are increasing in number as well,¡¯ the gestalt reported. ¡®Grandfather has collapsed the portal network. Seventeen brakvaw have been lost in other lands. Twenty-four are dead here.¡¯


    Another problem I didn¡¯t have a solution for. Ammun deflected two of the black discs with some specialized necromancy designed to confuse the divination portion of the spell, a sort of mirror decoy to the one I¡¯d used against his dragons earlier. The third slipped by, but it broke on the defensive enchantments of his robes without ever doing any real damage.


    Another few minutes went by as our battle dragged itself across the sky, and I started to worry that I hadn¡¯t given myself enough space to keep the fight contained. At this point, I was ready to activate the next stage of my plan, but I needed to pull Ammun back into the center. Unfortunately, he¡¯d been liberal in scattering those force mines, so liberal in fact that I wondered if he suspected something in particular or if he was just operating under the idea that it was better to be anywhere but where I¡¯d put him.


    Either way, I needed a nice, non-suspicious way to recenter him in the formation. If those mines were going to be such a huge problem, well, I¡¯d just have to take care of them. I closed in on Ammun, drawing a surprised gape from his skeletal face for just an instant before bands of necrotic energy leaped out of his hands to grab at me like so many icy cold fingers.


    My wards kept me safe for a moment, but my time here was sharply limited. Without a second¡¯s hesitation, I reached out and pressed the tip of my staff against Ammun¡¯s chest, or at least as close as I could get through his layers of defensive magic. Then I released the same force blast I¡¯d used on his dragons, only this time, there was no cloud of bone dust to accompany it. Ammun was far better protected than his hurriedly-animated minions.


    What the spell did do, however, was throw him back almost half a mile, right into his minefield. To an outside observer, it would have seemed like that was my intention all along. His force mines exploded, shredding his wards and bouncing him back and forth through them while I closed in and helped the process along with several precision applications of my own force magic.


    It wasn¡¯t really doing any damage, just draining his mana reserves. Since I was never going to run him dry, there was no point in coming at him from that direction, but my hope was that he wouldn¡¯t realize the true objective wasn¡¯t to clear the mines or hurt him, but to keep him properly centered in my trap.


    Besides, it was rather amusing watching his bony body get tossed around by hundreds of force mines over the span of thirty seconds. Had circumstances not been so dire, I would have laughed at the sight. Unfortunately, it was hard to summon up any mirth when my family was still threatened by Ammun¡¯s creations.


    It was about that time that my shadow finished its teleportation spell and jumped to the first platform. In moments, it would arrive at the hidden island to relieve Senica and destroy those golems. Now, that was something to smile about.


    ¡°What are you laughing about?¡± Ammun snarled at me. ¡°Wipe that stupid grin off your face! Do you really think you¡¯ve done anything more than inconvenience me for a few minutes while your pitiful mana reserves burn away to nothing?¡±


    ¡°I think stopping you from completing your doomsday weapon was a good start,¡± I told him. ¡°But I¡¯m not done yet.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 56

    Ammun¡¯s shadow rejoined the fight about twenty seconds later, which, while entirely expected, didn¡¯t make things any easier for me to deal with. Suddenly, I had twice as many spells coming at me, with a disproportionate number of them being attacks on my mind. That was a losing strategy on Ammun¡¯s part, and I knew that he knew better. More attempts at distracting me the same way wouldn¡¯t make it more difficult to shrug them off, so I had to assume he was trying something else.


    Were the mind spikes a screen for a different spell, and if so, what could Ammun possibly think would actually take hold on me? All mages were resistant to mental attacks to some degree, and I was an archmage. Not only that, I had wards designed specifically to prevent these kinds of spells from affecting me.


    After that one mage of his had trapped me in an illusory world spell for a few seconds, I¡¯d made sure to strengthen my defenses against that kind of magic. Even if I hadn¡¯t, this was an entirely different situation where I was on my guard instead of walking into a friendly encampment. I couldn¡¯t see any plan that started with a barrage of mental probes ending in success.


    With the mines more or less cleared out, I activated the first layer of my trap. The soul tether between lich and phylactery was generally considered inviolable, and for good reason. Even the most powerful archmage would struggle to sever it with a cooperative victim. A lich who was fighting back took that proposition completely off the table.


    In this case, however, I was reasonably certain that the mana flow coming from the moon was something grafted on to that tether, and it was a lot more vulnerable to being modified. That was why, when I gave the mental command to the ring of ward stones I¡¯d planted around our battlefield, a shimmering dome appeared that acted as a mana filter.


    Ammun stopped for a moment to scan what had just happened. ¡°That¡¯s it? That¡¯s your big plan?¡± He laughed and gestured up at the moon. ¡°You have no idea how much mana is up there, do you? Your attempt at slowing down my mana feed was entirely successful. I¡¯d estimate I have, oh, I don¡¯t know, three percent less mana coming into me each second while I¡¯m inside the field. If you made it thirty times stronger, then I¡¯d have to worry about conserving my resources.¡±


    I was sure he was exaggerating the numbers a bit, but he was right in general terms. The filter didn¡¯t limit him in any practical way, but that wasn¡¯t the point. Still, I gritted my teeth and put on an annoyed expression for half a second. It was in my best interest to let him think I¡¯d played my hand and failed to have any appreciable impact.


    At the same time he was gloating, my shadow reached the wave of golems besieging my family and tore into them like a shark through a school of minnow. I¡¯d had a lot of practice against this particular style of golem already, and I¡¯d taken several apart to get a better idea of exactly how they worked.


    My shadow ripped them apart at far greater speeds than I¡¯d managed the first time I¡¯d encountered Ammun¡¯s golem legion. In less than a minute, five of them were nothing but piles of rubble on the ground with their golem cores completely shredded to prevent them from reforming. At the same time, Senica was screaming and trying to blast my shadow with great gouts of fire.


    That was the moment I realized I¡¯d never actually explained the concept of a mage¡¯s shadow to her, let alone shown her mine. Fortunately for both of us, she didn¡¯t actually have the ability to hurt it or even slow it down. My shadow ignored her and continued its work. After a few more seconds of panicked casting, she seemed to realize it wasn¡¯t there to hurt her and got back to her own work defending the small refuge from the invaders.


    Ammun must have been keeping an eye on the situation as well, because his face fell the instant my shadow arrived. He¡¯d probably been hoping to kidnap my family in a bid to keep me pliable if he failed to overwhelm me outright, but that was off the table now.


    ¡°All your plans are falling apart,¡± I told him as I deflected a burst of necrotic energy that would have chewed the flesh right off my bones if I¡¯d let it connect. ¡°Your invasion failed. The targeted attacks failed. That deal your generals tried to broker in your absence? I¡¯m not even sure how involved you were with that one, but it failed, too.¡±


    ¡°Minor victories of no consequence in the grand scheme of things,¡± he said dismissively. ¡°The only real obstacle here is you, and you can¡¯t stop me. Even if, by some miracle, you manage to defeat me on the field today, I¡¯ll be back. And if you beat me next time, I¡¯ll come back again, and again, and again. I am immortal, a feat you were too cowardly to reach for.¡±


    What an idiot.


    ¡°Your allies are being whittled down, but my forces are eternal,¡± he went on. ¡°Break their bodies. It doesn¡¯t matter. I¡¯ll put them back together or build new ones. Where will you be when you have no one to help you? No supplier for your alchemical experiments, no subcontractor for your enchanting work, no lab assistant to help you carry the load?¡±


    The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    It was embarrassing that this guy was my most successful apprentice. I¡¯d always thought of myself as a good teacher, but really, if he was the only student still left, and none of my other, brighter, more successful apprentices had managed to stop him, what did that say about me?


    I supposed it said that I hadn¡¯t felt a great need to step up and right global wrongs that didn¡¯t affect me, and I¡¯d imparted that attitude into my apprentices. Probably none of them had felt the slightest inkling of a desire to interfere with Ammun and the cabal he was battling it out with until it was already too late.


    Or maybe he¡¯d murdered them all before things had gotten to that point. I hadn¡¯t found any mention of any of them in the history books, so that was certainly a possibility. Honestly, my specialty was teaching magic, not ethics. I probably should have hired somebody else to do that part.


    The whole time he was monologuing at me, his shadow was bombarding me with more mental intrusions and my shadow was successfully fending off the attacking golems. They¡¯d broken down the earthen bulwark blocking the portal after just a few minutes, but that had bought Senica enough time for reinforcements to arrive, despite her not knowing any such thing would happen.


    Now my shadow had finished destroying the last of the golems on the island and was flying straight through the portal, where it planned to close it from the other side. With any luck, it would lead us to one of Ammun¡¯s hidden facilities and not just some random staging point. As much as the gestalt had been watching the entire country of Ralvost, I had to believe that portal had originated from some place warded and probably underground.


    That place, apparently, had thousands and thousands of golems yet to be activated. My shadow entered an enormous underground bunker, probably a mile long, stuffed to the gills with rack after rack of inert golems. An open floor in the middle had enough space to hold a few hundred golems and the wall the portal was mounted on, which was an intricate piece of clockwork made to shift the rune sequence around.


    That was an interesting design, and more complicated than I was willing to give Ammun credit for coming up with. I¡¯d made something similar once, but it turned out to be too delicate and not worth the effort just to save some space. It had ended up in a storage vault somewhere, where¡­


    Where Ammun had probably looted it and repurposed it. That bastard. That was my modular portal!


    With firm orders to shut that portal down and rip the whole facility apart, my shadow got to work. Immediately, new golems started waking up, likely at a remote command from Ammun, but the portal went down first. After that, it didn¡¯t much matter whether the golems were awake or not. It would be a lengthy job, but every last one of them was going to be destroyed unless Ammun managed to get there personally in time to defend them.


    That wasn¡¯t going to happen. He wasn¡¯t leaving our battle alive, not without killing me.


    By now, the mana filter had been up for a good thirty seconds. Ammun had reacted to it, dismissed it, and renewed his assault on me. We circled each other, hurling massive conjurations at each other and warding off cataclysmic spells while the ground below ruptured and broke under the strain. This particular area would be scarred for decades, maybe longer, unless I bothered to come clean it up later.


    If he was ignoring the mana filter, that meant he hadn¡¯t realized what else I¡¯d snuck into it. Perfect. That was the opening stages of my plan successfully completed. Only three more steps to go. With a thought, I expanded the next field from my warding ring. It was considerably wider than the mana filter, and for good reason. Ammun would definitely notice it, and with any luck, he¡¯d think all he needed to do was escape the bounds of the mana filter to get free of this one as well.


    At the same instant I activated the warding ring, he vanished. My eyes widened and flicked around, trying to locate him by sight when my divinations failed to get a lock on him. There¡¯d been no flare of teleportation magic, nothing to indicate that he¡¯d relocated himself, but both him and his shadow had completely disappeared.


    It had to be some sort of trick. Of course it was. It took me all of three seconds to realize what he¡¯d done. This was the purpose behind the constant bombardment of my mind, to do the same thing I was doing to him: give me too much background noise to pick out the real threat when it finally hit. Ammun wasn¡¯t gone; he was forcing my mind to ignore him. He was probably right in front of me, but he¡¯d successfully forced an attention redirection spell on me.


    It''d last for seconds at most, but maybe that was all he needed. I immediately poured all my energy into defense, reinforcing my shield ward and pulling a full aegis of force magic around my body. I layered a phantasmal shell over that, then pulled two palm-sized ward stones out of my phantom space and poured mana into them. New wards popped up around me, one that locked out all forms of teleportation, and one that countered all mind-influencing effects.


    Ammun snapped back in focus, directly in front of me. A flat disc, a foot wide and made of platinum, floated between his two hands, concentric circles of runes carved into its surface. Mana crackled as it surged through the runes, gathering at the center point and ready to lance out.


    I had at most a fraction of a second to respond ¨C not enough time to cast a single spell, but enough to cancel my flight magic and start falling. Then a beam the width of my finger struck my force aegis and sliced through it like it wasn¡¯t there. The beam tracked my descent as Ammun angled the disc, quickly overpowering my shield ward.


    I twisted in place, my spell almost complete, when it struck me. The beam lanced cleanly through my stomach, disintegrating flesh, organs, and a chunk of my spine all before I could blink, and suddenly all I could feel was burning pain with nothing below it.


    My teleport spell took hold, just strong enough to move me a thousand feet behind Ammun. I reappeared, my legs limp below me and my hands strangely numb. Blood poured out of my stomach down both the front and back, but my flight magic caught me and held me stable. I didn¡¯t need my legs to keep fighting.


    In a way, this was a good thing. It looked like Ammun had been so intent on his surprise attack that he hadn¡¯t realized the second field had activated. I honestly couldn¡¯t have asked for more.


    It was time to bring it all together and end this before I passed out from blood loss in the next few minutes.

 Book 5, Chapter 57

    A band of force girdled my stomach, serving as a tourniquet to put pressure on a wound I couldn¡¯t really feel. It was serious enough that had I still had a normal human body, it might have been the end of me, but as things currently stood, it was more of an annoying distraction that happened to put a timer on this battle than anything else. I¡¯d heal from it, but not while I was in the middle of a fight. If I couldn¡¯t finish Ammun off in time, I¡¯d have to retreat.


    And that was unacceptable. I¡¯d put far too much work into preparing for this moment to let things go wrong.


    ¡°Ah, the fragilities of mortal flesh,¡± Ammun crowed as he faced me, the platinum disc still in his hands. The mana he¡¯d been channeling through it had tapered off, and for the moment, it was nothing more than a pretty piece of wall d¨¦cor. It would take him a few seconds to activate it again, and now that I wasn¡¯t being blinded by a temporary illusion, he wouldn¡¯t get that much time. ¡°Yet another weakness I shed. That trick never could have worked on me.¡±


    I studied him carefully and remained silent. It didn¡¯t seem like he¡¯d noticed the second field I¡¯d activated at all, which, while expected, was the most concerning part of the plan. This field expanded all the way out to the ring of ward stones I¡¯d scattered to circle the battlefield, and would be far harder to escape than the simple mana denial field he was ignoring.


    That had served its purpose as a screen to keep him from realizing the second field had gone up, and now all that was left to do was break apart his body and spring the third field. Ammun was about to find out what kind of trap was closing in around him.


    For the past fifteen minutes or so, I¡¯d been fighting defensively, conserving my mana by mostly blocking his magic and throwing out occasional attacks to distract or disrupt him as needed. Ammun had burned through a few of his tools, and I¡¯d used my prepared cube to pull him into my trap. I didn¡¯t for a second think either of us were doing our best to kill each other.


    That was over now.


    My previous master-tier spells had been comparatively low-cost and mixed heavily with advanced-tier magic that I could fully reclaim my mana from. I raised my hand and poured out more heavy mana than I¡¯d used for any single spell before, creating a brilliant pulse of light that scoured the air in front of me for hundreds of feet in a cone of disintegrating magic. Everything inside it broke down into nothingness, even the infinitesimally small creatures that caused people to get sick.


    The only thing to survive was Ammun himself, and even then, only because he instantly countered with a shield of crackling, black necrotic energy that completely engulfed his body. That lasted all of two seconds before it started to break down under the sterilizing light of my magic. By the time my magic faded away, the shield had cracks running all throughout its length.


    Ammun dismissed his defensive spell, revealing a figure crossed with blackened burn lines with smoke curling off them. His robes were actually on fire, though the flames were already suffocating under the weight of the cloth¡¯s enchantments. Laughably, a single line of scorched bone ran down the center of his skull, like a scar that threatened to split him in two.


    Notably, his shadow was gone. It hadn¡¯t managed to survive being bathed in scouring light, not even for a second. That was a minor victory at best, as Ammun could simply spend some of his unlimited budget to build a new one, but if he did that, I¡¯d have a few seconds uninterrupted to take shots at him. That alone made it worth the massive expenditure of nearly a tenth of my remaining mana reserves.


    ¡°Do you even have anything left after that little display?¡± he sneered at me. ¡°Here, let me show you how to really pour some mana into a spell like that.¡±


    In a mirror to my own gesture, his hand came up and pointed at me. Boney fingers splayed out, and black lightning crackled between them. An instant later, the whole world went dark as his spell engulfed us both. Only my divinations watching the battlefield from hundreds of feet away showed me the truth: we were trapped in an orb of absolute darkness so huge that all three of Ammun¡¯s dragons could have hidden inside it.


    For an undead lich, this wasn¡¯t harmful. If anything, this was more of the same energy that held Ammun¡¯s frame together, just on a far grander scale. For things like me that had flesh and blood, however, it was instant death to let it invade my body. I could see the logic behind his choice of attack as a response to mine. It was a different route to the same result, with the twist being that instead of destroying everything, including undead, it only destroyed every living thing.


    There was no dispelling it, not with the amount of mana Ammun was channeling through the spell. Even for him, I doubted he could keep this spell up for more than a minute, but that was a minute longer than he needed to destroy me.


    If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    If ever there was a good time to use a combat teleportation to escape, this was it. Thankfully, he hadn¡¯t tried this back when I was still in his spatial denial field, probably due to him not wanting to damage his moon control station or his golems. This spell would eat even mana, and anything caught in the area would be drained to uselessness.


    That same trait made it incredibly difficult to defend against, which is why I spent the two seconds I had before my own mana shield dissolved teleporting to safety three hundred feet straight up. It was only after I escaped and could see myself that I realized I¡¯d lost part of my feet to the magic, necessitating another set of tourniquets to keep me from bleeding out even faster than I already was.


    I produced a misshapen lump of what could be mistaken for steel from my phantom space. As soon as my mana started coursing through it, it ignited into a vibrant, scintillating rainbow hue and shed hundreds of tiny sparks into the air. Those sparks shot off and grew in size until there were a thousand of them all bigger than my head circling the orb of darkness, waiting for the chance to lunge at the lich still inside.


    I had some brief concern that Ammun would teleport out and flee the battle, but if he did, his massive antilife orb would immediately dissolve. And while I knew he could produce the mana to support the spell indefinitely, keeping it from encroaching on his own mana would also get progressively harder. That was his soft limit there, one he was going to reach soon enough.


    And then, as abruptly as the darkness had bloomed in the sky, it vanished. Ammun stood on the empty air, his arms swinging in wide circles going the opposite direction, fire spilling from his hands to form interlocking rings that spread out to make room for more and more of them.


    Before he could finish setting up the spell, I activated my own. The starlight sparks my chunk of meteor metal had been the focus for all descended on Ammun like a swarm of oversized, angry hornets, and they weren¡¯t content to merely fly past him as he dodged. Every one of them was imbued with the ability to change direction and seek out their target.


    Explosions of fire rocked him, disrupting his own spell and setting his robes alight again. Within seconds, he¡¯d lost control of his flight spell, and the only thing keeping him off the ground was the kinetic energy of the sparks as they detonated against him. I saw the exact moment the wards woven into his robes broke and he took the full force of one of those sparks. It hurled him a thousand feet into the air in a bloom of blinding light so great that even my divinations temporarily lost track of his position.


    The massive chain of fire he¡¯d been working on twisted through the air, snaking its way toward me, but without Ammun to properly guide and defend it, a simple wave of dispelling magic snapped the links apart. The whole spell lost cohesion in moments, and I turned my attention back to the sky above me.


    I didn¡¯t expect this particular magic to be the one that broke the lich. It was all heat and kinetic energy, a series of explosions that could leave a whole city covered in craters, but bricks and wood weren¡¯t nearly as strong as Ammun¡¯s bones. No, he¡¯d survive. There was no question of that. His robes, on the other hand, were likely destroyed.


    My prediction proved true. When the last starlight spark had detonated and Ammun finally regained control of his flight, he was nothing but a skeleton draped in deep purple bands of necrotic energy. They wrapped tightly around his bones, forming a moving suit of magic that twitched in response to his will.


    I¡¯d moved past the point where I was interested in a battle with my former apprentice. What I was doing now was an execution, and my only goal was to finish it as quickly and efficiently as possible. Everything was in place; I just needed to break the vessel currently connected to his soul tether.


    Ammun¡¯s defenses were gone. I¡¯d broken his shield ward at the beginning of the fight. His robes had gone up in flames, shredded and incinerated while he was still wearing them. His phantom space was still connected to him, but he¡¯d apparently only stocked that with ways to maim me, not expecting me to be able to hit hard enough to actually damage him.


    In all fairness, other than a few scorch marks on those bones, I hadn¡¯t actually hurt him all that badly. He was far, far stronger than he¡¯d been during our first match after he¡¯d woken up in his tower, using a body that he¡¯d meticulously crafted to perfection now. I¡¯d barely been able to withstand heavy mana back then, let alone wield it effectively, and I¡¯d crushed him.


    Now, at stage nine and in possession of my full range of powers, I¡¯d already used ten times as much mana just to peel back all the barriers protecting him. And unlike me, he wasn¡¯t hindered by the ¡®injuries¡¯ he¡¯d received. I had blood leaking out of four different places, with only my magic holding me together.


    Neither of us bothered with words. At this point, there was nothing left to say, no reason to hurl taunts or throw barbs. Stalling accomplished nothing for me, and if he let me, I¡¯d start healing the wounds he¡¯d already dealt. The only thing left that either of us could do was try to finish it.


    I wondered what was going through Ammun¡¯s mind. He knew I wasn¡¯t stupid, that if I was here fighting, and still pushing even after he¡¯d crippled me, that I thought I could win more than just a simple victory over a disposable vessel. Was he examining me even now, hoping to find some clue about my plan? Or was he too blinded by his own rage and hatred to care?


    Lines of jagged black lightning raced through the air between us ¨C his creation. I met them with conjured buffers that soaked up the electrical component, and deflected the cloud of death left behind once the lightning destabilized. At the same time, I flew low to get around the visual obstruction we¡¯d created between us.


    For what was sure to be the last time, we started trying to kill each other again.

 Book 5, Chapter 58

    Bones were a lot more fragile than people gave them credit for. Comparatively, they were stronger than skin and muscle, but in the grand scheme of things, there was a reason nobody built tools out of animal bones when they had other, better resources on hand.


    That was before magic came into play, however. Human bones were nothing special. Animal bones, no matter how large they got, were never useful as more than ornamentation. But monsters had a tendency to get so big that normal bones couldn¡¯t support them, and that meant they needed mana to reinforce their bodies. Humans did the same thing with invocations, but not on the same scale, and not indefinitely.


    The early necromancers had studied those monsters in an effort to reinforce the skeletons they controlled, and while it was largely agreed that it just wasn¡¯t worth the effort for an entire army, the research had given rise to a line of necromantic minions known as the death knights. A lot went into the raising of a single death knight, and one of those investments was in creating a skeletal structure as hard as diamond.


    Liches took the process even further. With no base skeleton to modify, their bodies were made wholly of crystallized mana. Every inch of bone, every scrap of flesh or muscle¡ªwhen they bothered to make such disguises at all¡ªwas pure mana given form. Their existence was the culmination of thousands of years of research in how to advance from stage nine to stage ten, to become a perfect mana being.


    We¡¯d pretty much all agreed that lichdom was a dead end. It worked, after a sort, but the changes were too radical and, even otherwise ignoring the state of the caster¡¯s soul, the loss of the ability to generate mana, to become completely cut off from the Astral Realm, was far too great a handicap for any self-respecting archmage to ever accept.


    Some lesser mages disagreed, of course. There were those that were desperate, at the end of their natural or unnatural lifespans, or just plain knew they weren¡¯t good enough to advance another step on the path of immortality. Ammun was a prime example of what a lesser talent could do with the powers of lichdom. Being backed by an entire moon core was, admittedly, a pretty good compromise to the loss of a personal mana core.


    Now that he¡¯d had a few years to invest in his current vessel, it was no surprise that the bones buried at the bottom of all his shields, barriers, wards, and enchantments were actually stronger than everything else. Systematically stripping away his protections had revealed a core of mysteel, or something close to it, but I had an answer for that, too.


    Delivering that answer was going to be tricky, as it required me getting within a few feet of him and holding him still long enough to hit him. Ammun wasn¡¯t likely to cooperate with that, just judging from the fact that dozens of conjured comets were hurtling through the sky to crash down on my head.


    Conjured stone and real stone were not the same, however, and while dispelling a fellow archmage¡¯s magic was out of the question, changing it was not. Every comet that got within a hundred feet of me abruptly unraveled, transforming from an amalgamation of stone, fire, and speed to one of fire, air, and inertia.


    To an onlooker, it would have looked like the comets simply evaporated, but what really happened was that the kinetic energy burst outward in a wave, hitting the comets trailing behind them and altering their course so that once the first ten or fifteen had been twisted, the rest came nowhere near striking me.


    At the same time I was defeating Ammun¡¯s spell, I was enacting one of my own, an application of pure telekinesis even beyond the grand telekinesis spell, one that pitted my willpower against Ammun¡¯s for control of the kinetic energy around his body. The very air itself stilled and became solid, an immovable jacket that could only be contested by Ammun¡¯s own magic.


    He didn¡¯t even notice ¨C not at first. It was only when he tried to lift his hand and pull something else out of his phantom space that he realized what I¡¯d done. That was when he started pushing back. Our battle took on another dimension then, in addition to the physical world we were destroying around us and the mental strain of holding off the various enchantments and divinations he¡¯d kept up a light barrage of even after his shadow vanished.


    Now it became a sort of metaphysical wrestling match, one where we pitted ourselves against each other for control of the very magic in the air. The spell couldn¡¯t be dispelled or countered; that was what made it so strong in the first place. Being unbreakable, all that was left to struggle over was control. If I overpowered him, he¡¯d remain locked in place. That would hinder his spellcasting to some extent, but not stop him.


    If he won, he¡¯d turn the spell on me, and I¡¯d be the one under his control. Worse, my body was not nearly as indestructible as his. He¡¯d be able to bypass all my wards and literally rip me apart ¨C not that he needed much help there. This was literally a gamble with my life as the stake just to immobilize him.


    It worked, of course. A contest of willpower between the two of us was never in doubt. He struggled and flailed about and he no doubt mentally raged against me, but in the end, Ammun was the kind of person who took shortcuts, whose arrogance was backed by power stolen instead of earned, and who lacked the imagination and perseverance to truly overcome the challenges that accompanied this level of skill.


    The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    I¡¯d seen it time and time again. Every time he unveiled something new, it was a spell or a machine he¡¯d stolen from someone else. Every design he used was copied, but never properly understood. Oh, he¡¯d done well enough, I supposed. Even as a cheat, he was a successful one, but originality wasn¡¯t his strong point.


    As it turned out, being undead did nothing to change that. Maintaining control over that spell was never a contest, and all that was left to do now was survive the approach. More magic rained down on me, everything from conjured blades of force attempting to dissect me to frigid blasts of air so cold that they left trails of ice in their wake. Any of those spells could have killed me, had I let them.


    Instead, I kept a careful eye on the mana remaining in my reserves and calculated how much more I was likely to generate before this whole affair reached its now-inevitable conclusion, and decided to splurge a bit. Rather than fight my way through the rest of those defenses, I took the simple expedient of teleporting myself to Ammun¡¯s side.


    As soon as I appeared, he did exactly what I¡¯d expected. He tried to teleport away. I hadn¡¯t put down a spatial denial field to stop him, knowing how obvious those were from the inside. If I¡¯d tried that, he¡¯d have spent the effort trying to relocate our battle again. The mana filter had given him reason to believe he knew what my goal in bringing him here was, that I¡¯d simply miscalculated how effective it would be at slowing him down.


    Instead, the second field was hidden beneath the first, and Ammun hadn¡¯t noticed that one. It had slowly permeated his magic, a subtle intrusion, a parasite just waiting for the right moment to strike. And right now, as Ammun¡¯s confidence finally broke and he attempted to whisk himself out of danger, was that moment.


    His emergency teleportation failed, its mana eaten away from the inside. That was the whole purpose of the second field, to instantly destroy one single spell, even a contingency spell woven into his very bones. The field burned its mana up doing it, rendering it completely inert in the process, but it did its job. It kept Ammun here long enough for me to throw out the spatial denial now that I had his physical body locked down.


    ¡°This changes nothing,¡± he roared at me. ¡°Not even this can sever the connection to my phylactery. Destroy this body! It doesn¡¯t matter. I¡¯ll be back for you.¡±


    Even at this point, he didn¡¯t stop fighting. I deflected, dispelled, or countered the magic pouring out of him, every spell draining my reserves just a little bit more. There was no time to waste, not if I wanted to end this before I ran out of mana and bled out.


    I summoned a vial from my phantom space, its contents based on the one that I¡¯d taken from the Order to see how it interacted with mysteel. I¡¯d already duplicated the formula, and without hesitation, I tossed it at Ammun. The vial crunched as it broke apart on his face, and the liquid inside phase-shifted into acidic, mana-devouring gas.


    The thing about having a body made of pure, crystallized mana was that no matter how sturdy it was, things that attacked mana directly worked very well on it. That could be compensated for partially by the nature of the construct ¨C in this case, solid, physical matter. But then again, this particular gas also attacked solid matter, too. I¡¯d seen it when it melted the floor back when the now-deceased Tredor had tried to kill me with it.


    In moments, Ammun¡¯s physical vessel would melt away to nothing, and the soul tether would snap. His phylactery would start growing a new body for him to inhabit back up on Yulitar, and he¡¯d return in a few months to try again. At least, that was what he expected to happen.


    I¡¯d spent decades, centuries even, studying souls as the basis for my reincarnation magic. I doubted there¡¯d ever been a more accomplished soul mage in history, even including those who¡¯d decided to become liches. In the course of that research, I¡¯d discovered there were a few things we¡¯d held as immutable truths on the subject of souls that were actually anything but.


    I activated the third and final field of my ward stone rings, and what was left of Ammun immediately reacted. ¡°No!¡± his voice howled, echoing around me as he formed the words with magic discrete from his body. Those spells were already broken. ¡°This won¡¯t stop me! It¡¯s only temporary! Eventually you¡¯ll run out of mana to power this trap!¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not surprised you recognize a soul trap,¡± I told him. Then I reached into my phantom space and held up something. ¡°Did you know I kept this, though?¡±


    It was the phylactery he¡¯d tricked me with back when he¡¯d first woken up, a phylactery he¡¯d made by his own power, unattuned to him, but still tainted with the essence of its creator. That metaphysical bridge was enough for me to build on. It took moments to link it to him, to direct the soul trap into the phylactery.


    ¡°Trapping this incarnation is meaningless. My real phylactery will just make a new body. All you¡¯ve done is create two of me!¡± Ammun¡¯s voice snarled. ¡°I told you, you can¡¯t win this. I¡¯ll come back. I¡¯ll always come back.¡±


    ¡°Wrong again.¡±


    That was when I made my final move, the one thing I knew he¡¯d never see coming. It was a spell that had only existed for about two years now, one I¡¯d made myself by reversing the reincarnation magic I¡¯d invented. Instead of guiding the soul outward through the afterlife and into a new form while keeping it insulated to preserve memories and personality, it drew a soul inward.


    And it did it using a lich¡¯s soul tether. In a normal scenario, the soul tether would snap back from the vessel to the phylactery, returning all the memories the vessel had accumulated to be deposited into the new body once it was finished forming.


    My spell reached out to that tether and chased it all the way back to the source. The sheer distance was almost too much of a passive defense to overcome, but I¡¯d made some modifications once I¡¯d figured out where the phylactery was going to be, and super-long-range spells were no longer a new concept for me. My magic worked without flaw.


    The spell streamed up the soul link, found the phylactery, and ripped Ammun¡¯s soul out of it. Somewhere up on Yulitar, no doubt buried near the core under hundreds and hundreds of miles of stone, was what was now an inert rock that had once been the center of Ammun¡¯s existence.


    The soul came back down, chasing its tether to the end, where it reached its new home. The phylactery I¡¯d turned into a soul trap grabbed hold of Ammun and drew him inside. For all intents and purposes, he was still a lich, but this was his soul¡¯s new home.


    And I held it in the palm of my hand.


    I crushed it to dust with my magic, rupturing the prison and releasing his soul to the afterlife. Ammun, the man who¡¯d ended the world, the lich who¡¯d caused incalculable suffering, was finally, truly, once and for all, dead.

 Book 5, Chapter 59

    I took a few seconds to just breathe. It was over. Ammun was gone. His soul had been released from its phylactery and passed into the reincarnation cycle. Someday, it would return as a new person, one without all its memories from over a thousand years as a lich. That was probably for the best, as that soul had been abused in a way that defied words.


    A few seconds was all I could afford at the moment, unfortunately. My injuries quickly made themselves known to me, intruding on my moment of reflection as darkness encroached on my vision. For all that I would have liked to just collapse on the spot, the battle technically wasn¡¯t over. I needed to patch myself up and go to the aid of my allies.


    Healing was a delicate form of magic, one of the few that demanded my full attention even at the lowest levels. I quickly found a stable patch of ground to land on, pulled a salve out of my phantom space, and smeared a generous portion across both my abdomen and my back where Ammun¡¯s spell had skewered me. Then, using that as a base to draw on, I began the delicate process of transmuting the raw material into a patch on my stomach.


    It wasn¡¯t as simple as just sealing up the holes to stop the blood from leaking out, of course. Ammun had hit my spine, severing some fairly important nerves in addition to rupturing an organ. Right now, the only thing keeping me upright was that I had my back to a tree that had miraculously survived the bombardment we¡¯d put several acres of wilderness through. A big rock I¡¯d hauled over and placed next to the tree gave me something to lean on, since the muscles needed for posture weren¡¯t exactly working right now.


    This wasn¡¯t an injury I¡¯d get fixed up today, but I could spend ten minutes or so to keep it from killing me before I rejoined the fight. My feet were another issue, though that was more about stopping the blood loss than anything else. I¡¯d regrow the missing toes later ¨C once I had a proper environment to do so.


    ¡®Keiran,¡¯ the gestalt sent. ¡®Grandfather wishes you to know that he would appreciate your presence at Eyrie Peak.¡¯


    Right. Wyverns. Foreign archmages. That was probably a priority to deal with. I also needed to see how Querit was doing and fetch my family at some point. As nice as that island was, they¡¯d want to go home and currently lacked a way to get there. At least they were all safe, thanks to Senica¡¯s efforts to hold the golems back until my shadow could get there.


    I wasn¡¯t sure how Ammun had found them, and I¡¯d probably never know the truth. I¡¯d told literally nobody where that island was, made no permanent portal to it, and put considerable effort toward keeping it hidden. I had to wonder if Ammun hadn¡¯t just been sitting up on Yulitar, staring down at me and watching me work. It was theoretically possible, though it didn¡¯t answer the question of how he¡¯d known where to look.


    More likely, there¡¯d been some spies among the refugees who¡¯d been snooping around and learned of my evacuation plans. How they¡¯d known exactly where I was sending people to¡­ well, other people had gone with my family. I¡¯d be taking a hard look at everyone on the island to see if I could find a source for the information leak.


    ¡®I¡¯ll be there in ten minutes,¡¯ I replied.


    I finished repairing my stomach lining and cleaning things out, but there was still a lot of work to do. Ignoring that for the time being, I sealed off the damage to my feet, leaving ugly, scarred nubs there. I¡¯d be flying around for the next day or two; there was no way I could walk on what I had left. An invocation to stimulate blood generation would help keep me from passing out, but that was all the time I could afford to spend on triage.


    At least I couldn¡¯t feel it. I¡¯d definitely want to fix my feet before I finished up with my spine, however uncomfortable it was to leave things as they were right now.


    * * *


    There were four strange mages at Eyrie Peak, all of them coordinating with the brakvaw defenses against what had to be at least a hundred skeletal wyverns. Grandfather projected himself to me the instant I appeared on the teleportation platform, his face twisted into a ferocious scowl. Before he could say so much as a single word, he took in all the blood covering me, most of it still wet, and the massive scars across my stomach. I caught his eyes flickering down to my feet, which hovered a foot off the ground.


    ¡°Ah,¡± was all he said before he faked a cough and swallowed whatever he¡¯d been about to snap at me. ¡°The gestalt let me know that you¡¯d finished your battle. It was¡­ successful?¡±


    ¡°It was,¡± I said. ¡°Ammun himself is gone. All that¡¯s left is to clean up his remnants. You seem to be holding your own against these monsters.¡±


    ¡°We are, thanks to the reinforcements you sent¡ª¡±


    ¡°I didn¡¯t send anyone,¡± I said. ¡°In fact, I specifically warned them never to set foot on this continent again after I caught them trying to make deals with the generals in Ammun¡¯s army.¡±


    This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    Grandfather¡¯s brow furrowed and he cast a glance up the slope of the mountain to where two unfamiliar mages were anchoring the defense near the now-dead portal wall. Both mages were fighting with conjurations, one using blades of force to hack at the wyverns and the other controlling streams of water that he whipped about at high speeds to achieve a similar effect.


    ¡°I will take into consideration how helpful they¡¯ve been to you when I speak to them,¡± I promised.


    ¡°The gestalt has been monitoring them closely. It¡¯s not that I didn¡¯t trust your allies, but with everything going on, it seemed better to be sure. That was apparently the right call, since they lied about actually being your allies.¡±


    ¡°Not to be rude,¡± I said, changing the subject, ¡°but this looks like you¡¯ve got things in hand. Do you actually need my help with something? Because if not, I¡¯ve got a few other places to be.¡±


    ¡°We need you to open some of the portals back up,¡± Grandfather said shortly. ¡°Not all of them right now, but the ones where we left people behind. If there are any still alive¡­¡±


    I doubted it, but I could see why he¡¯d want to know. Grandfather regarded all brakvaw as his family, no matter how they behaved. They¡¯d had a bit of a coup a few years back and he¡¯d been completely torn up about it. Even now, tensions still ran high, and it was rare to see him in a good mood. Usually, he was at least polite, but I supposed I could forgive some terseness in his voice today.


    I got to work and started by scrying out each location. Surprisingly, quite a few of the stranded brakvaw were in fact still breathing, mostly because they¡¯d smartly fled the battlefield as soon as they realized the portals they¡¯d been defending had been shut off. That wasn¡¯t to say there weren¡¯t still a few dozen bodies to be recovered.


    I dutifully opened the portals back up, then assisted with destroying any skeletal wyverns still in the areas so that the brakvaw could collect their dead and fetch back the runners. While I was working on that, I got the gestalt to fill me in on everything else that was happening. It turned out that a few towns had been overrun, victims of Ammun¡¯s random shots in the dark. Querit had saved Hyago¡¯s grove ¨C sort of. It had taken heavy damage and probably set them back a year or more, but no one had died.


    New Alkerist was in one piece, though the wards had suffered greatly and there was basically no mana left in that town. The citizens had rightfully prioritized the security measures for pouring their mana into, otherwise things would have gone much worse for them. Thankfully, my family had evacuated, otherwise Ammun would have thrown a lot more at that location and completely broken through, probably slaughtering the entire town in the process.


    Derro, it turned out, had gotten the worst of it. I wasn¡¯t entirely clear why Ammun had devoted so much effort to assaulting the city, other than perhaps it just being the largest target. It wasn¡¯t really an important location to me personally, so it all seemed rather wasteful. Considering how many of his golems we¡¯d found in that storage facility, I supposed he¡¯d had the numbers to spend.


    It took another four hours of work to finish cleaning up the various hunting grounds Ammun had sent his wyvern colonies to in an effort to siege Eyrie Peak. I didn¡¯t do much of the work, both because the brakvaw didn¡¯t want me handling their dead and because they were eager to avenge their fallen brethren on those wyverns that remained. With the battlefields isolated and the four Order mages helping to hold the defenses back home, they were free to attack the colonies beyond the portals in large numbers.


    For me, personally, that meant a lot of time spent recuperating. There were a few things I¡¯d need to wait until I returned home to complete, specifically the regrowing of the ends of my feet, but I managed to repair a lot of the damage. I also took on the tedious and intricate task of regrowing my spine, with only partial success before I ran out of time.


    It might actually be worth it to extract Querit from whatever he was working on so I could secure his assistance. That would speed up the process considerably, especially since I¡¯d need to repurpose some of that troll¡¯s blood I¡¯d gathered into a limb regeneration potion. I had no compunctions at all about shoving that piece of alchemy off on him while I worked on the more delicate parts of my physical rehabilitation.


    My shadow rejoined me at some point, having finished dismantling Ammun¡¯s underground storage bunker and its many thousands of golems. I decided to keep the golem cores just in case I ever wanted to refurbish them, but that meant a great deal of transmutation to make specially sealed containers if I wanted to safely store them. For the moment, it was easier to leave the inactive ones where we¡¯d found them.


    I did reclaim my modular portal, however. It was damaged in a number of superficial ways ¨C nothing that would stop it from functioning, but its efficiency was significantly degraded. This was why I¡¯d stopped using the thing in the first place. It worked, but it was too expensive to maintain and didn¡¯t have the smooth rune sequences of a permanent portal, making it costly to run.


    Still, as a souvenir and a curiosity, it was impressive. I¡¯d find a use for it eventually. Maybe it could serve as a training aid for Senica when she got to the point that she was ready to start working on master-tier level spells. That was still a long way in the future for her, and even longer for our little brother. I had no doubt he could get there, if he chose to.


    Finally, the brakvaw were done. The wyverns were destroyed, and not just to the point where their animation had failed. I¡¯d turned the skeletons to dust and broken down the lingering necrotic energy everywhere I could find it. That part at least hadn¡¯t been too bad, if only because I¡¯d put the Order mages to work at Eyrie Peak where the majority of the fighting had taken place.


    Once cleanup was done, the four mages assembled before me. Their leader, a woman who looked to be in her fifties, stepped forward and gave me a slight bow. ¡°Master Keiran,¡± she said, ¡°thank you for taking the time to meet with us.¡±


    ¡°Yes, well, I had considered just killing the lot of you. I thought I made it clear that I didn¡¯t want you on this continent again. But, since you came to help, let¡¯s start with an explanation and go from there.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 60

    ¡°First, my name is Andyla Felstbater,¡± the Order mage said. ¡°I am one of the ranking archmages left in the Global Order of the Arcane, a Third Order archmage.¡±


    That was better than Bakir¡¯s Fifth Order, but I¡¯d never determined exactly how they structured their cabal or what qualifications were required to advance up the hierarchy, so that didn¡¯t tell me anything beyond that Andyla was closer to the top than most, though not quite as high as the leader of Bakir¡¯s group had been.


    I just stared silently at the whole group and watched them squirm for a second. The two younger ones especially were struggling not to fidget. It would have been amusing if not for how serious this was. Part of me had to admire the sheer gall they¡¯d had in coming here, knowing they were risking their lives to do so.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure you¡¯re aware that any organization that gets bigger than two people inevitably falls victim to politics,¡± Andyla said. ¡°The Global Order is no exception. When you showed up and, ahem, restructured our leadership, you caused a shift in our politics.¡±


    ¡°Killed off all the crusty old bastards who were trying to play both sides,¡± one of the other mages muttered. Andyla shot him a murderous glare, and he subsided with a sullen look.


    ¡°The archmages who took over decided that the threat from a lich was too great to ignore, and called for volunteers to come assist anyone Ammun attacked. We all knew there was a risk of running afoul of you for breaking your ban on our presence here, but¡­¡±


    ¡°But fuck that lich,¡± the other mage said again.


    ¡°That will be quite enough out of you,¡± Andyla said, her voice cracking like a whip. She turned back to me and added, ¡°But the threat was deemed great enough to risk incurring your anger.¡±


    On the one hand, they were right to want to stop Ammun, and they¡¯d opposed him on fronts that were theoretically important to me, some more so than others. They¡¯d done me an unasked-for favor by showing up to help. On the other hand, I¡¯d told them to stay away, and letting them think they could ignore that on their own judgment was going to cause problems down the road.


    There was also the fact that I was now going to have to scour every place they¡¯d gone to ensure they¡¯d left nothing behind. Any spying divinations would need to be found. Any beacons of any kind would have to be broken. Any people they¡¯d slipped in with instructions to blend in with the locals would have to be rooted out. I did not want them on this continent, not for another fifty years at minimum.


    Once Senica, and possibly Nailu, were old enough to fend for themselves, I¡¯d consider rescinding that ban. Until then, the Order represented the most dangerous collection of mages on the planet that I was aware of, and I wanted them to stay far, far away.


    ¡°I am not unaware of the service you¡¯ve done for my allies,¡± I began after a few moments¡¯ contemplation. ¡°That does not excuse the fact that you¡¯ve intruded where you were specifically commanded not to go.¡±


    The tension thickened among the mages standing in front of me. Perhaps I was a bit more intimidating than usual with my metal battle robes partially destroyed and covered in my own blood, or perhaps these mages were just smart enough to know what kind of person I was. That would certainly put them a step ahead of their predecessors, but then, these ones had the advantage of having watched me execute their ruling council.


    ¡°Grandfather!¡± I said loudly.


    Grandfather appeared a moment later, projecting his human form to where we all stood¡ªor levitated, in my case¡ªnear the teleportation platform. ¡°I¡¯m busy,¡± he said. His true form was up on their floating graveyard above the clouds, laying the fallen brakvaw to rest, but I knew he¡¯d been keeping an eye on things down here.


    ¡°I¡¯ll try to keep it brief. These four mages are here on Eyrie Peak in defiance of my mandate that they remain off this continent. They claim they arrived to help fight back the lich¡¯s undead forces. Can you corroborate this story?¡±


    ¡°I can say with some certainty that we¡¯d have many more dead brakvaw without them,¡± Grandfather said. ¡°Whatever issues you¡¯ve had with their group, they dealt honestly with us. I would not punish them for trying to redress whatever wrongs you believe their cabal committed against you.¡±


    This was all pageantry. A large part of me wanted to kill them all, to set an example to the rest of the Order that I was not to be crossed, that when I said not to do something, that was a complete statement without exceptions.


    But.


    We were past the crisis now. The threat was over, and all that was left was the cleanup. For the first time in what felt like years, I could afford to think about not just what I needed to do to fix Manoch¡¯s broken world core, but what kind of relationships I¡¯d have with the people I shared this planet with. And the truth of it was that I didn¡¯t really want to be like Ammun.


    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    It wasn¡¯t just a lack of desire to rule, though that was certainly part of it. Ammun had had a conqueror¡¯s ambition and a tyrant¡¯s disregard for anyone he¡¯d killed in pursuit of his goals. There had been a lot of me in his personality.


    ¡°Fine,¡± I said. ¡°Just this once. Gather up the rest of your people, all of them, everywhere, and return to your homes on Jeshaem. Do not come back to Olpahun. In a month or two, once I¡¯ve gotten everything moving in the right direction, I will pay the Order a visit, and we can discuss your cabal leadership¡¯s new disposition.¡±


    ¡°We could help¡ª¡± Andyla started to say.


    ¡°No. I don¡¯t want your help. You¡¯ve already helped more than enough. The people whose lives you saved are very grateful, but the threat is over. Do not test my mercy. I¡¯ve killed better mages than you for less.¡±


    It probably said something about the impression I¡¯d made on the Global Order of the Arcane that nobody rose to the bait. I was being deliberately antagonistic, even more so than I normally was, just to see if anyone would give me an excuse, but none of them did. Good ¨C maybe this new version of the Order would be a little bit smarter than the old one.


    I followed their journey as they teleported from location to location, gathering up mages who¡¯d stepped up to defend people they¡¯d never met living in places they¡¯d never seen. Grandfather¡¯s projection stood nearby, a frown stamped on his features as he absently kept me company. I¡¯d expected him to disappear once he¡¯d said his piece, but it appeared there was more on his mind.


    ¡°You¡¯ve wronged them,¡± he said at last.


    ¡°I know. They wronged me first, and I¡¯m not sure I¡¯ve completely excised those responsible from their organization. It¡¯s not fair to them, but it¡¯s also a risk. Just letting them live is a risk. It makes me appear weak, gives the impression that they can test my word to see how far it can be pushed before I break.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t think that mercy is a weakness.¡±


    ¡°Then you¡¯ve had a kinder life than I have,¡± I told him bluntly. ¡°Some people are good. They¡¯re rarely the ones who rise to power. It¡¯s the evil, self-serving bastards like me who end up at the top, the ones who aren¡¯t fit to rule.¡±


    ¡°You always said you had no interest in ruling,¡± Grandfather pointed out.


    ¡°I don¡¯t, but the world doesn¡¯t leave me alone just because I want nothing to do with it.¡±


    The old bird started laughing then, a strange avian cawing note to his voice even in his assumed human shape. ¡°When have you ever wanted nothing to do with the world, Keiran? Since the day you were reborn, you¡¯ve done nothing but meddle in things that were none of your business. You could have walked off into the desert and built yourself a home where none but the monsters would ever find you.¡±


    ¡°I¡ª¡±


    Well, he wasn¡¯t wrong. I had meddled quite a bit, first to protect myself from the Wolf Pack, then to find answers in an attempt to fix the broken world, and finally to stop Ammun from fulfilling his mad dreams of conquest. It wasn¡¯t like I¡¯d set out to end up in the position I was in, though. That was just a natural consequence of power. There was no point in having it if I wasn¡¯t going to use it for something.


    ¡°Go see to what business remains, then rest and recover. We¡¯ve all taken injuries this day, but the wounds will heal and the scars will fade,¡± Grandfather told me. ¡°And our insectoid friends will come calling soon enough, demanding payment for all their services.¡±


    I grimaced at that. I owed the gestalt a lot of work for keeping so many eyes on so many things. But then, I had time to do that now. With the threat dealt with, I had all the time I could ever need. I could finish my alchemical experiments with biometal. I could craft as many relays as the gestalt wanted. I could help Senica with her ointment of aging treatments and be more hands-on with her training. Nailu would see a lot more of me, especially if he decided to focus on his magical talents.


    First, I needed to return to New Alkerist and ensure everything was as it should be, as well as pour some more mana into its defenses. I was expecting to find a few gaps where enchantments had bled out that would need to be repaired, but none of that was a big deal now that Ammun was gone. I was mostly stopping by to make sure the town was secured for my family to return to it.


    I chuckled and shook my head. ¡°I don¡¯t know how much rest I¡¯ll be getting for the next few months. I¡¯ve had a whole life I put on hold for years now. There¡¯s a lot of catching up to do.¡±


    ¡°But you have time,¡± Grandfather said.


    ¡°I do.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s good, because we still have a mountain to lift into the sky.¡±


    I groaned. ¡°You¡¯re still intent on doing that? You know how wasteful that is, right? I know you do. You¡¯ve already got a floating island.¡±


    ¡°Who better than us to pull it off, then? Our magic is as efficient as it gets!¡± Grandfather told me. ¡°Though we wouldn¡¯t say no to some consulting on a few technical aspects that escape us. It turns out scaling the magic up is¡­ more difficult than we expected.¡±


    ¡°Who would have guessed? Alright, no promises as to when, but I¡¯ll add it to my list. It might be a year or two.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re not in any hurry,¡± Grandfather assured me. ¡°Although, if it¡¯s not too much of a bother, before you leave¡­¡±


    He trailed off and gestured toward the portal wall, where only a handful of portals had been reactivated.


    ¡°Not today,¡± I said. ¡°Too much to do, but within a week or two, I¡¯ll come back and get things moving again.¡±


    ¡°More than fair,¡± Grandfather agreed.


    ¡°What I really should do is take a brakvaw apprentice so that you don¡¯t need me to keep doing all this for you.¡±


    Grandfather let out a soft grunt and scratched at his chin. ¡°That¡¯s not a bad idea, if you¡¯re serious.¡±


    I shrugged. ¡°I can¡¯t promise I¡¯d teach them directly. The whole point of disseminating this knowledge was so that it could spread without my personal effort, but there are plenty of people who know the basics of human magic. I would be willing to teach a class of brakvaw what they¡¯d need to know to adapt your style of casting to it.¡±


    ¡°An interesting suggestion, but one to be pursued in the future. For now, I believe it is time for you to go home and see to your own family¡¯s well-being while I tend to mine.¡±


    ¡°That sounds like a good idea.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 61

    The few dozen refugees streamed through the portal I¡¯d set up to bring them to New Alkerist. Most of them were young mothers with small children, those who couldn¡¯t fight or run on their own. My own family came through last, Nailu in the lead and Father bringing up the rear.


    ¡°¡ªnever could have imagined so much water in one place,¡± Mother was saying as she stepped through the portal next to him.


    ¡°I know! It just went on and on, endlessly,¡± he replied. ¡°I get why Gravin said you¡¯d need boats to cross it. My arms would get tired and fall off before I got halfway.¡±


    ¡°You wouldn¡¯t make it a tenth of the way,¡± Senica said.


    I chuckled to myself. Even seeing it, they still couldn¡¯t grasp the magnitude of an ocean compared to the ponds and streams they were used to. They simply lacked a frame of reference for how long it would take to swim any appreciable distance, or how quickly they¡¯d get tired.


    The portal closed behind them and I walked over. ¡°Gra-vin!¡± Nailu called, being the first to spot me. He rushed toward me, arms outstretched. I obliged him by scooping him up telekinetically and swirling him around me in a wide arc before plopping him back down onto the street.


    ¡°Son,¡± Father said, ¡°I know you said it¡¯s over, but is it really over? For good?¡±


    ¡°For good,¡± I confirmed. ¡°He won¡¯t be coming back again. No more zombies or skeletons. No more spies, assassins, or saboteurs.¡±


    ¡°There were saboteurs?¡± Senica asked.


    ¡°Well, not here,¡± I admitted. ¡°But once or twice, yes. Honestly, I probably did more of that type of work than anyone on Ammun¡¯s side of the fight. But either way, yes, it¡¯s over. I won. We won.¡±


    I didn¡¯t have a casualties list. As far as I was personally concerned, no one important had died. But people were gone now, and I didn¡¯t know how many or how they might be connected to my family. There were probably going to be some sad days in the near future as the reports trickled in and they found out that friends from other towns or villages hadn¡¯t made it through Ammun¡¯s attack.


    That was something for another day. Right now, they could just be happy that our family had made it through entirely intact, and that the wards around New Alkerist had been strong enough to defend against the undead Ammun had sent to destroy it. Admittedly, that might not have been the case without the assistance of the two Order mages who¡¯d shown up here. That, more than anything else, had weighed in their favor when I¡¯d decided not to retaliate for breaking my rule about them being on this continent.


    They were going to be a whole mess to deal with, I knew. Organizations like that were, as Andyla had said, rife with politics. The people in charge right now might be interested in working with me, but that didn¡¯t make them altruistic, nor did it guarantee they wouldn¡¯t be replaced by someone else next month. The Global Order of the Arcane needed time to stabilize its leadership before any long-lasting agreements could be worked out.


    ¡°You did good,¡± I told Senica. ¡°Kept calm. Blocked off the portal and held back the golems that got through.¡±


    ¡°You still had to save us,¡± she said, shaking her head. ¡°I thought¡­ But no matter what I did, I couldn¡¯t figure out a way. I wasn¡¯t strong enough to protect everyone.¡±


    ¡°Give yourself some credit. You¡¯re barely into intermediate spells, which is still fantastic, all things considered. You¡¯ve got a long way to go before you¡¯re an archmage.¡±


    She sighed, clearly still unhappy about what she saw as a personal failing. Mother reached out to grab her and pull her into a hug, which Senica accepted with far more grace than I could have mustered. ¡°I¡­ I was scared. I thought we were all going to die, that it was going to be my fault,¡± she said. ¡°I was supposed to protect us, but I couldn¡¯t do it.¡±


    ¡°Let¡¯s get home,¡± I offered quietly. We were still standing in a street that was rapidly becoming more crowded as those who¡¯d stayed behind arrived to find their families who¡¯d gone into hiding. ¡°We can talk about things there.¡±


    It was a quick trip back. Father deflected some of his neighbors who approached, wanting to talk about one thing or another, and promised to see to a few things his position on the town council required as soon as he could, but refused to be dragged away no matter how persistent people got. Eventually, we made it through our front door to find the house more or less exactly like we¡¯d left it.


    ¡°It¡¯s so dusty in here! It¡¯s only been a few days,¡± Mother complained.


    Well, maybe it wasn¡¯t exactly like we¡¯d left it, but I could fix that. A bit of fine elemental manipulation gathered the thin layer of dust up to be ejected out into the street, and I gave some thought to refining the house¡¯s wards to include air filtration. It wasn¡¯t generally necessary in a home this small, but I supposed it wouldn¡¯t hurt anything to add it. The mana draw would be negligible, especially when weighed against three people with ignited cores, only one of whom was actually training as a mage.


    Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    Mother watched all the dust stream together to clump into a ball, then rounded on Senica. ¡°All that magic, and I¡¯ve never once seen a cleaning spell out of you, young lady!¡±


    ¡°Moooooom, I¡¯ve got more important stuff to work on!¡±


    ¡°In all fairness,¡± Father said, coming to her rescue, ¡°she¡¯s right about that. Things could have gone a lot differently yesterday if she¡¯d been focusing on domestic magic instead of learning to throw giant balls of fire and stone.¡±


    ¡°I suppose¡­ Still, maybe she should consider rounding out her education.¡±


    ¡°You know, you could learn this spell,¡± I told Mother. ¡°It¡¯s not that hard.¡±


    Of course, if she did take the time to pick it up herself, she¡¯d probably realize that there was no way Senica didn¡¯t know elemental manipulation. It was the most basic conjuration spell there was, the first thing any novice mage learned. Senica could have dusted the house with it, and quite easily. She just hadn¡¯t been.


    Everyone got settled in¡ªor in Nailu¡¯s case, put down for a nap¡ªand I sat down with Senica to have a serious conversation while Mother and Father puttered around the kitchen.


    ¡°I wasn¡¯t just trying to make you feel better about yourself, before,¡± I told her. ¡°You did an excellent job. If you hadn¡¯t been there, those golems would have killed everyone before I could have reached you. If anyone screwed up, it was me. I didn¡¯t keep the secret hideout secret enough, and I didn¡¯t have contingencies to get me there in case it was discovered.¡±


    ¡°Gravin, I didn¡¯t have a plan,¡± Senica said. ¡°You make it sound like I knew what I was doing, but I didn¡¯t. I was panicking the whole time. They were everywhere, and no matter what I did, they just kept coming. I used all my mana and almost all the reserve mana, and it wasn¡¯t enough. Nothing I did made a difference. It was your wards that held them back.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s not true,¡± I said. ¡°You were the deciding factor. Without you, the wards would have failed. They damn near did, anyway. You¡¯re a stage two mage right now, but in a couple of years, you¡¯re going to be much stronger. If something like this ever happens again, you¡¯ll be more than ready to meet the challenge, and I¡¯m going to be with you, helping you grow, the whole way.¡±


    ¡°You always say that, but then something always comes up.¡±


    I winced internally. It was true. Senica¡¯s education had been a project in the background for years now, always getting pushed off so I could deal with the next catastrophe. It wasn¡¯t fair to her, but she hadn¡¯t complained.


    ¡°I¡¯m not going to say that I¡¯ll never have to leave for a few days to go deal with something, or that I won¡¯t have my own projects going on, but I promise you, now that Ammun is gone, the number of emergency fires I have to respond to is going to go all the way down,¡± I said. ¡°Besides, I need to make sure you¡¯re learning everything right so that you can teach Nailu when he gets a bit older.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re not going to teach him yourself?¡± she asked, surprised.


    ¡°Oh, I will, a little. But teaching is a great way to learn, too. You¡¯re going to find as you get older that you took a lot of things for granted back in the beginning. Now that you have a greater understanding of how stuff works on a large scale, when you sit down to teach someone else the basics, you¡¯ll see all sorts of connections you missed the first time. It¡¯s a whole cyclical process.¡±


    ¡°Is that why you agreed to teach me?¡±


    ¡°Ah, well, no. I¡¯m pretty well past that stage by now. Most of my early teaching experience came about as a result of trading knowledge with other mages. I expanded that into taking on an apprentice as a favor, and things kind of got out of hand from there.¡±


    Truthfully, I much preferred research to teaching, but the world didn¡¯t always give me what I wanted. Right now, I needed a new generation of mages, and that meant fixing the world core and disseminating knowledge of the proper way to go about spellcraft. A lot had been lost, and what this world had retained, it had done so imperfectly.


    ¡°You don¡¯t like teaching very much, do you?¡± she asked.


    I shrugged. ¡°Depends on the student. Some are a pleasure. Others are not.¡±


    ¡°And me?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re my sister.¡±


    ¡°That doesn¡¯t answer the question,¡± she said.


    ¡°I know.¡±


    ¡°Ancestors forbid. You¡¯re the worst little brother ever.¡±


    We shared a laugh and stood back up. ¡°Feeling better now?¡± I asked.


    ¡°A little. It¡¯s¡­ It¡¯ll take some time to process, but you¡¯re right. I was scared, and I didn¡¯t have a plan, but I did enough. I¡¯ll keep learning new magic and if something like that ever happens again, I¡¯ll do better.¡±


    ¡°Gravin!¡± Mother called, a note of concern in her voice.


    We both turned to look, only to see Nailu clinging to the ceiling while Mother anxiously positioned herself to catch him. The fact that he was crawling around like a giant, toddler-shaped spider did not make that easy for her.


    ¡°I really think that you, as the most experienced mage in the family, are the better choice for teaching Nailu,¡± Senica said. ¡°I might find my abilities lacking in the face of such a challenge.¡±


    I didn¡¯t answer. Obvious as it was that Senica was just trying to foist some responsibility off on me, I had to admit part of me was intrigued. Nailu seemed to have an instinctive knack for invocations. That didn¡¯t necessarily mean it would translate into a well-rounded body of knowledge for all things magical, but it was certainly making him a handful to deal with right now.


    ¡°Gravin!¡± Mother yelled again. ¡°Come help me get your brother down.¡±


    ¡°You should probably take care of that,¡± Senica said casually. ¡°Looks like he¡¯s about to run out of mana.¡±


    A second later, Nailu slipped off the ceiling and tumbled into Mother¡¯s arms, laughing wildly the whole time. I might have slowed his fall just enough to keep it under control so he wouldn¡¯t get hurt, but not so much that I thought anyone would notice. The sly grin on Senica¡¯s face told me otherwise, however.


    ¡°Maybe we¡¯ll both teach him,¡± I offered as a compromise.

 Book 5, Chapter 62

    I walked into the alchemy lab Querit was using two days later. He¡¯d come out of the fight unscathed, though the combat frame I¡¯d built him had lost about a third of its functionality when he¡¯d put down a pair of reanimated skeletons made from literal giants. Each of them had been close to thirty feet tall, and Ammun had taken some pains to give them a bit of extra power.


    The fight sounded thrilling to hear Querit tell it, all desperate weaves around lumbering punches or dodging thrown boulders while he slowly chipped away at the animation spells keeping the bones held together. At one point, one of them had literally flattened a house when it lumbered through the building in its pursuit of my assistant.


    ¡°Glad to see you back on your feet!¡± Querit said with a snicker.


    ¡°I do not now, nor have I ever, appreciated puns,¡± I told him gravely.


    The process to regrow the missing parts of my feet had been every bit as tedious and painful as I remembered, though thankfully it wasn¡¯t a whole foot. Once, I¡¯d lost everything from my calf on down, and that had taken me a week to rebuild. Human bodies were complicated. Fortunately, very little of my body was actually human at this point, and that sped things up considerably. Crystallized mana in squishy, fleshy form grew much faster than actual body tissue.


    The fact that it was only the bottom third or so of each foot had also helped. I¡¯d worked on them both at the same time, with Querit¡¯s help, and we¡¯d gotten the whole thing done in a single session. After that, it had just been a night¡¯s sleep to recover and I was once again ready to face the world, standing on my own two feet.


    ¡°Liar,¡± he said with a smirk. ¡°You just don¡¯t appreciate when other people make puns.¡±


    ¡°Irrelevant,¡± I said, brushing past his point effortlessly. ¡°What are you working on?¡±


    ¡°Breaking down mysteel using that mana eating potion you, ahem, developed. I know you can do it manually, but for the volumes you¡¯re talking about needing, it seemed like having an alternative would be helpful.¡±


    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t complain about not having to do that chore myself,¡± I agreed. Even once I reclaimed and recycled all the mysteel I¡¯d put to other purposes for the battle against Ammun¡¯s forces, I had barely a tenth of what I¡¯d need to produce, if that. It was going to be the work of years to make everything I needed, and that didn¡¯t even include the other preparations I had to make.


    I¡¯d taken over Ammun¡¯s silo already. The golems were destroyed and their cores salvaged. I was still considering refurbishing my own workforce from them, but I wasn¡¯t sure it was worth the effort. They weren¡¯t very sophisticated golems, built more for the most basic of tasks than to perform any sort of complicated labor.


    The silo itself was complete, and I¡¯d promptly warded the place over with every method at my disposal, then removed a few core components from the interior just to be safe. No one should ever find it, and if they did, it wouldn¡¯t work. To be honest, my cursory study revealed that it probably didn¡¯t work even with the pieces I¡¯d taken. I suspected Ammun held the final key in his own phantom space, which was now lost, the connection severed with his demise.


    Somebody might stumble upon the real location of that cache one day, but I doubted it would be me. If I¡¯d been willing to hold onto Ammun¡¯s phylactery, I probably could have traced it, but I hadn¡¯t thought to. I¡¯d just wanted it all to be over, and I¡¯d destroyed him the first chance I¡¯d gotten. I didn¡¯t regret it, either.


    Besides, it wasn¡¯t like I needed Ammun¡¯s key. Almost all of his spellwork was based on the lessons he¡¯d learned from me. I had a few spots I wanted to redo to increase overall efficiency, and I knew what was missing to make it all work. I doubted it would take me even a week to make that silo fully operational, giving me sole access to a globally destructive weapon.


    I wouldn¡¯t be using it for that. In fact, I was going to use it much the same way Ammun had been using his connection to Yulitar. I needed it as a source of mana. In fact, I needed so much mana that I was planning on building four more silos just like it to connect to the other moons.


    A few thousand years ago, we¡¯d have to wait for a lunar convergence to build up the ambient mana to its peak levels to pull off powerful ritualized spells like my reincarnation invocation. I¡¯d expected I¡¯d be doing something similar when I went to reignite the world core, but this worked better. The plan now was to just forge direct connections to all five remaining moons and use that mana instead.


    That was still a few years off, however. First, we needed the mysteel, then we had to actually transport it all the way down to the world core, which would involve an impressive amount of excavation. It was going to be a monumental task, something that I could use plenty of help doing. I was willing to bet I could convince the Order to assist me, however. For something like this, a chance to bring back the halcyon days of magic, where abundant mana saturated the very air we breathed, I was confident they¡¯d help.


    If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    ¡°Well, come look at this,¡± Querit said, drawing my attention to the vials he was working in front of. ¡°I¡¯m trying to get the ratio balanced here, but I¡¯m having problems getting an accurate measurement with these tools. The liquid keeps trying to phase-shift into gaseous form unless I run a current of mana through it, and that¡¯s causing problems getting the mysteel to properly dissolve.¡±


    I stood there for an hour, exchanging theories with my assistant and experimenting to see where to refine our ideas. We didn¡¯t solve the problem, but we were one step closer by the time the conversation ended.


    * * *


    Three months had gone by. My projects progressed at an acceptable pace, the damage Ammun had wrought was slowly being repaired, and, most importantly, my sister was now fully grown. Despite our parents¡¯ objections, Senica had opted to continue the aging treatment now that I could devote all the attention needed to ensuring nothing went wrong.


    She was a tall woman, close to six feet in height, and objectively speaking, I could say she was attractive. I was sure the glances she got around town were more from the fact that she¡¯d aged several years in the span of a few months than from her actual physical appearance, but the fact remained. Senica looked very much like our mother, only with our father¡¯s height.


    Since she lacked the ability to change how things grew, she hadn¡¯t added the extra few inches of height that I¡¯d managed to stack on when I¡¯d been aging myself up, but in the end, it made little difference. She¡¯d met all the prerequisites to get the most out of her transition to stage three, and had been studying diligently to ensure she made that transition successfully.


    ¡°I can¡¯t believe I ever thought our written language matched spoken Enotian,¡± she said as she flipped through the manual one last time. I¡¯d written it myself in true Enotian, an alphabet I¡¯d insisted she familiarize herself with. ¡°This makes so much more sense now.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m hopeful that in a generation or two, I¡¯ll have spread this enough that spoken and written Enotian will have synced back up,¡± I said.


    ¡°Did you ever discover how that whole thing came about in the first place?¡±


    I shrugged. ¡°I have some guesses. Most likely, it was something Ammun did as a method of ensuring the world would struggle to recover from the world core breaking. He knew he was going to be hibernating for a long time, and didn¡¯t want to come back to find dozens of new archmages able to rival his power.¡±


    ¡°Do you have any evidence to support that theory?¡± she asked.


    ¡°Not really. It¡¯s difficult to find proof of what happened even a few hundred years ago, let alone a thousand. Querit didn¡¯t know anything about it, so my guess is that it happened after he ran out of mana and shut down, which makes Ammun one of the only entities on the planet capable of conducting such a powerful ritual. And I could see him easily deciding to doom the world¡¯s magical traditions just to safeguard his own return.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re better off with him gone,¡± she said.


    ¡°Agreed, but let¡¯s focus. I¡¯ve supplied the mana, but it¡¯s on you not to waste it. How¡¯s the ritual circle coming along?¡±


    Senica gestured to the floor, where she¡¯d been laboriously carving the pattern for the last three days. ¡°Completed, checked, rechecked, and ready to go.¡±


    ¡°And you¡¯re entirely confident there are no mistakes?¡±


    ¡°As confident as I can get without actually running mana through it, which I considered doing just to see what would happen.¡±


    The circle was perfect, of course. I¡¯d already checked myself and knew that, but I wasn¡¯t going to tell my sister. She needed to be confident in her work, not because she knew I was looking over her shoulder, but because she was comfortable with her own level of skill and knew her limitations. The stage three ritual circle was probably the most complicated piece of work she¡¯d ever done, but she¡¯d risen to the challenge.


    ¡°It¡¯s not the worst plan in this case, but I wouldn¡¯t rely on it as a method of checking ritual circles in the future. Some of them aren¡¯t reusable.¡±


    ¡°I know that! But I already checked. Mana cycling won¡¯t fundamentally alter the material in any way, so I could do a dry run on the circle before I actually set foot inside it to make sure that¡¯s not going to reveal any problems.¡±


    ¡°You can,¡± I acknowledged. ¡°I¡¯m just saying, don¡¯t get used to relying on that as a way to catch problems.¡±


    ¡°Yes, thank you, oh wise and magnanimous brother of mine. I know what I¡¯m doing.¡±


    ¡°Fantastic,¡± I said. ¡°Then you¡¯re ready to get started. Good luck. Come find me when you¡¯re done and let me know how it turned out.¡±


    ¡°Oh no you don¡¯t!¡± she yelled, lunging forward to grab my arm as I turned to leave. ¡°What¡¯s the point in having an archmage for a brother if you can¡¯t leverage it for your own personal gain? Get back in here and go over things with me.¡±


    Laughing, I shook Senica loose. ¡°You said you were confident. Own that. Besides, you¡¯ve been preparing for this for months. You know what to do. You know the risks. You know how to handle it if things go wrong. Worst-case scenario, you botch the whole thing and shatter your mana core, leaving you crippled and unable to cast spells ever again. But, I mean, that¡¯s the absolute worst case. What are the odds of that happening?¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t be an ass.¡±


    ¡°Senica,¡± I said, my voice turning serious. ¡°I know it¡¯s scary, but you¡¯ll be fine. If I didn¡¯t think you were ready, I¡¯d say so. I have faith in you. Now, quit stalling and get in there. You¡¯re never going to make it to archmage if you keep coming up with excuses to hold off on the next step.¡±


    She took a deep breath, then nodded. ¡°Alright. I¡¯ve got this. I¡¯m going to begin now. You¡¯ll watch over me, make sure nothing interferes?¡±


    ¡°Of course,¡± I told her. ¡°We¡¯ll have a big party to celebrate when you¡¯re done, and you can show off all your new tricks to Nailu.¡±


    That was assuming Mother would let us. She was quite frosty toward the both of us right now, having strongly disapproved of Senica¡¯s decision to resume the aging process and my support of that. We hadn¡¯t seen much of the family in the last few months, but we¡¯d be forgiven sooner or later, at least so long as we promised never to tell Nailu that ointment of aging existed. Mother was determined that at least one of her children would grow up normally.


    Senica stepped into the circle, met my eyes, and gave me a firm nod. Then the mana started to flow, and she took her next step on the path to becoming an immortal archmage.

 Book 5, Chapter 63

    ¡°You know, you could have saved us a whole lot of work if you¡¯d just¡­ not knocked the damned tower down,¡± Querit told me.


    ¡°You¡¯re not even doing the digging. Why are you whining about this?¡± I asked.


    I¡¯d found a use for Ammun¡¯s legion of golems after all. There were several thousand of them below us, slowly digging through and transmuting the remains of Ammun¡¯s tower as we burrowed to Manoch¡¯s core. They¡¯d been at it for about four years now and had made a good thirty miles of progress, which was greatly hindered by the fact that they were now all completely underwater. The ocean had poured in and turned the crater into a massive inland sea years ago, long before I¡¯d even launched this project.


    We¡¯d considered other locations, even going out into one of the ocean trenches directly to skip the excavation portion. That provided a quick route down to the planet¡¯s crust, but left us digging sideways thousands of miles to reach the spot we needed to patch. In the end, it didn¡¯t save us any work, so we¡¯d opted to head right to the center of the damage.


    ¡°Because I¡¯m the one who has to redo the rune structures on all those golem cores,¡± Querit said.


    ¡°You would be doing that either way.¡±


    ¡°Not this many!¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m doing all the modifications for underwater digging to their frames. You don¡¯t hear me complaining about it,¡± I told him.


    ¡°At this rate, it¡¯s going to take decades to finish.¡±


    ¡°We always knew that was likely to be the case. Even if we blocked off the incoming water and drained trillions of gallons out of this hole, it wouldn¡¯t save us any time.¡±


    ¡°I still don¡¯t know how you expect to keep the whole ocean from flooding into the core once we get there,¡± Querit said. ¡°The amount of mana needed to hold that much pressure back¡­¡±


    ¡°Trust me, I know what I¡¯m doing. The spell will work.¡±


    We stood in the air, silently staring down at the massive sea of blue stretching out in every direction. Below us, out of sight, a small army of mechanical soldiers slowly took us one more step into the future.


    ¡°Might have been less work to kill Ammun with the tower intact,¡± Querit muttered.


    ¡°If you¡¯re so sure, you can take care of the next insane lich that comes along,¡± I offered.


    * * *


    It was Nailu¡¯s sixteenth birthday, making him officially an adult. True to our word, Senica and I had never breathed even a hint of the existence of ointment of aging to him ¨C not that I thought he¡¯d have taken us up on it. But it kept Mother happy.


    Naillu was less interested in magic than I¡¯d expected. He was good at it, unsurprisingly, but he seemed to treat it as more of a fun hobby than something he wanted to devote his life to mastering. Despite that, his core was stage two and as robustly developed as possible. Whether he¡¯d ever go past that remained to be seen.


    ¡°You¡¯re thinking about it again, aren¡¯t you?¡± Father asked me while we stood off to the side and watched my baby brother tear into his presents. Considering how rich the family was now, and not through much effort of my own, it was a haul fit for a merchant prince. There was a lot of gold, ivory, richly colored clothes, some sort of instrument that he favored that I couldn¡¯t recall the name of, and of course, a few enchanted pieces from me.


    ¡°No, it¡¯s fine,¡± I said. ¡°It¡¯s his life and his choice. If he doesn¡¯t want to be a mage, well¡­¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s going to look older than you and your sister in another few years,¡± Father said. ¡°At the rate we¡¯re going, people are going to think the two of you are our grandchildren.¡±


    ¡°I could¡ª¡± I started to say, but Father cut me off.


    ¡°Maybe in another decade or two when the aches and pains start to set in, we¡¯ll change our minds,¡± he told me.


    It would be better to start them on alchemical treatments now to prolong their youth rather than try to regain it, but we¡¯d had that conversation too many times already. They weren¡¯t interested in immortality or anything close to it, though I suspected they¡¯d both age with grace. I also had enough firsthand experience with creaking joints and the indignities of an aging bladder to know I¡¯d choose to spare them that for as long as possible if they¡¯d let me.


    ¡°How¡¯s your world core project coming along?¡± he asked, changing the subject.


    ¡°Slow, but steady,¡± I replied. ¡°We¡¯re still digging. Getting close to the bottom now, I think. And I¡¯ve got all the mysteel we¡¯ll need ready to go. All that¡¯s left is to reach the core and start the process.¡±


    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    ¡°So it¡¯ll happen in our lifetime after all,¡± Father said. ¡°What a strange world it¡¯ll be.¡±


    ¡°Better in practically every way. Well, except for the monsters. There will be new monsters taking advantage of things, but trust me, there were always going to be monsters either way, and we¡¯ll be better prepared to deal with them.¡±


    ¡°Senica did say she opened another branch of her school a few weeks ago.¡±


    I watched a steady stream of people heading for the food now that Nailu¡¯s presents had all been revealed. He stood there next to Mother, grinning from ear to ear and clutching something with a long neck and too many strings on it. I still wasn¡¯t sure what it was, and I¡¯d etched the runes into it myself. As long as it had mana, he could smash it into anything he wanted and it would never take so much as a scratch.


    ¡°I told her she was moving too fast, that she needs to get more professors up to standard before she started a fourth location, but you know how well she likes to listen,¡± I said.


    ¡°Wonder where she got that from,¡± Father muttered, but there was a smile on his lips as he said it.


    ¡°At least she finally gave up on that ridiculous idea of hers.¡±


    ¡°No, she didn¡¯t. She just isn¡¯t talking to you about it. She¡¯s been over at Eyrie Peak every other day talking to them instead.¡±


    I groaned softly and tried to cover the noise by taking a sip of my drink. If that particular project ever got off the ground, I just knew I¡¯d be the one doing all the work. Wasn¡¯t one impossible dream at a time enough?


    ¡°Whatever. Just leave me out of it,¡± I said. ¡°How¡¯s the farm doing?¡±


    It wasn¡¯t a farm in a traditional sense. They grew things there, but not food. Father had decided to branch out from basic crops years ago and started a distillery, mostly on Senica¡¯s advice. She¡¯d shown him the process, including a few alchemical twists that really changed the whole experience of getting drunk, and he¡¯d decided it was a product worth chasing after. Their biggest challenge had been keeping up with demand, even after three other competitors had sprung up.


    ¡°Fantastic! I¡¯ve actually run out of room and had to expand out into the desert again. Tetrin charged me a fortune to extend the wards after Hyago finished the terraforming, but I¡¯ll make it all back again inside a few years.¡±


    Before I could respond, Senica appeared in the door and rushed over. ¡°Gravin! There you are.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s that supposed to mean? I¡¯ve been here the whole time watching the party. Where have you been?¡±


    Senica¡¯s cheeks flushed and she glanced over at Mother and Nailu, only to flinch when she saw the expression on Mother¡¯s face. She¡¯d been less than impressed at my older sister¡¯s tardiness. Senica quickly rallied, though, and said, ¡°Never mind that! I need to talk to you about something.¡±


    ¡°Is it this stupid idea you have for your demesne again?¡± I asked.


    ¡°It¡¯s not stupid! It¡¯s brilliant.¡±


    ¡°You could have reached stage six five years ago if you¡¯d just give this notion up and pick a place to start working on.¡±


    ¡°But this way is better,¡± she said. ¡°You have to see how much better it is once we figure out how to make it work.¡±


    If it actually worked, she¡¯d have a point. I just didn¡¯t think it would, which was exactly what I¡¯d told her the last three times she¡¯d tried to rope me in on it. Senica was nothing if not persistent, however. Ignoring my protests, she pulled out a large sheaf of papers and spread them out over the nearest table.


    ¡°Look, here, this was the problem before,¡± she told me as she jabbed her finger down on a particular chunk of the runic script. ¡°We couldn¡¯t find a way to support the weight without the mana costs cascading into failure, but what if we did this instead?¡±


    ¡°Already considered it. It won¡¯t work. In a vacuum, it would do what you think, but you didn¡¯t consider how it would affect the linking to the next section. Then multiply that problem a hundred times as it chains through the entire structure.¡±


    ¡°Aha! You¡¯re right, except I did think of that, and look what I came up with!¡±


    I peered at the next sheet in the stack she presented to me, then chuckled. ¡°Clever, except it¡¯ll be fifty years or more until there¡¯s enough ambient mana to support that, and then you¡¯re still locked to high density zones.¡±


    ¡°Think long term,¡± Senica said. ¡°No, it won¡¯t be anything special for the next century, but once that passes¡ª¡±


    ¡°It still won¡¯t be viable. I know you understand how mana propagation works. We¡¯ve gone over the theory.¡±


    ¡°Not on its own, but what if we installed collection arrays to create sort of¡­ refueling points for it to coast between?¡±


    I considered that for a second. It could work, in theory. It would be a massive undertaking, but then again, that was nothing new. I¡¯d literally linked up five moon cores and was digging a hole down to the very center of the planet. Compared to that, this was maybe a decade of infrastructure, then some hefty maintenance and upkeep forever.


    ¡°Okay, fine. Technically, that could work,¡± I said begrudgingly. ¡°But it¡¯s still a stupid idea.¡±


    ¡°Hah!¡± she said, a bit too loud. Everyone looked over at us, but she was too excited to notice.


    ¡°Alright, you two, whatever you¡¯re doing can wait until later. Don¡¯t ruin your brother¡¯s day,¡± Mother scolded us.


    ¡°No, it¡¯s fine, Mom,¡± Nailu said. ¡°Really, no big deal. We¡¯re all here to have a good time. If they want to do their magic thing, that¡¯s what makes them happy.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, Mom,¡± Senica said. ¡°Don¡¯t be such a grouch.¡±


    ¡°She¡¯s going to make you pay for that,¡± Father muttered softly.


    ¡°I think¡­ I¡¯m going to head out soon,¡± I replied. ¡°I¡¯d just as soon miss that conversation. I¡¯ll just go have a few words with Nailu, then I¡¯m gone.¡±


    Chuckling, Father pulled me into a one-armed hug. ¡°You always were the smartest of my kids,¡± he said. ¡°Go on, do what you¡¯ve got to do and then run for the hills.¡±


    Mother was already on her way over, and she¡¯d reach us long before Senica finished gathering her papers back up. Leaving her to her fate, I cast a quick short-range teleport spell and reappeared behind Nailu. Senica glared murder at me from across the room, but by then it was too late.


    ¡°She¡¯s kind of tightly wound these days,¡± Nailu said. ¡°I try to keep her level, but she¡¯s not having it.¡±


    ¡°I think it bothers her that Senica and I stopped growing older,¡± I said.


    ¡°Don¡¯t know why. It¡¯s not a big deal or anything.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll tell you in a few years. She made us promise not to until you were done growing.¡±


    Nailu shrugged, unconcerned, and I once again felt a pang at my little brother¡¯s lack of interest in all things magical. That was his choice, though, however much I wished he felt otherwise. ¡°Happy birthday, Nailu,¡± I said. ¡°Show me what this instrument sounds like before I go?¡±


    ¡°Sure. I wanted to try it out anyway.¡±


    Despite my intentions to cut and run before Mother could turn her vengeful wrath on me, I ended up staying for a few more hours. Everything else could wait.

 Book 5, Chapter 64

    It took me thirty years to reach this point, almost to the day since I¡¯d defeated Ammun and dispersed his soul to the afterlife. There had been unexpected windfalls and setbacks, and I¡¯d found some unlikely allies along the way. I¡¯d hoarded enough mysteel to finance multiple kingdoms and set foot on all five of Manoch¡¯s moons in a bid to harness their mana for this purpose.


    I stood in a mile-wide underground chamber buried so far under the planet¡¯s surface that even the bottoms of the oceans were far, far overhead. A mere thousand feet separated us from Manoch¡¯s world core, and all around us were the twisted, ruptured shards of shattered mysteel from Ammun¡¯s ill-advised counterstroke against the lost sixth moon.


    Senica stood to my left. Querit was on my right. Next to Senica was a brakvaw who¡¯d successfully mastered shapeshifting invocations to the extent that he was physically present in a human shape. They¡¯d taken each other as apprentices and begun the process of learning the magical traditions of both our cultures a decade ago, something of an ambitious project, but who was I to judge?


    There were four Order archmages¡ªreal ones that I¡¯d personally vetted to ensure they had the skills necessary¡ªopposite us, and the circle was rounded out by Zara, formerly known as Echo of the Wolf Pack, and a skilled sorcerer named Akunva I¡¯d discovered a few years back and helped ignite his core. Being entirely self-taught and unable to produce his own mana, he¡¯d had some fascinating theories on mana cycling and efficiency.


    Looking around, I had to admit that I hadn¡¯t foreseen much of any of this. Zara had been an enemy when we¡¯d first met, and even after that conflict had ended, she¡¯d shown no signs of growing to the capacity that she¡¯d ever be able to participate in something like this. Something about Ammun¡¯s second attack on her home had lit a fire in her, though.


    Or maybe it had always been there, but it wasn¡¯t until Senica¡¯s schools started appearing everywhere that she finally had access to the knowledge she needed. Whatever the reason, she was the poster child for success in Senica¡¯s program, the undisputed queen of the inaugural graduating class. No one since had come close to her abilities, and she¡¯d grown to a stage six master mage since then.


    Technically, that made her more powerful than Senica herself who, despite having the breadth of knowledge and skills to truly earn an archmage title now, was still at stage five. She continued to stubbornly cling to her dream of a perfect demesne and refused to advance until she achieved it, which couldn¡¯t happen until Manoch¡¯s world core started working again.


    ¡°All five machines are online with a stable connection,¡± Querit said. ¡°We¡¯ve got about three hours at maximum mana flow before Nalicin and Lasrin start to slip out of position and the output drops by thirty percent.¡±


    ¡°Everyone is ready?¡± I asked. When I got affirming nods all the way around, I began the ritual.


    Thirty years of effort. It was hard to believe it was finally time to reignite the world core.


    Almost the entirety of this cavern was filled with stockpiled mysteel, leaving only an empty space a few dozen feet wide filled with the most complex ritual circle I¡¯d ever made in my life. We¡¯d taken up our positions around it and, at my nod, Querit released five moon cores¡¯ worth of mana to stream into the chamber.


    Acting in concert, the ten of us took hold of that mana and steered it toward our desire, channeling it down through the hole in the center of the circle. It was a smooth bore all the way to the dead stone that encased the faintly beating heart of the world, and we aimed to wake that stone back up.


    World cores, I¡¯d discovered, were interesting things. They had much in common with living stone, except that they were such a great mass, and under such tremendous pressure from being encased in a shell of mysteel, that they turned into a molten mass of mana-emanating magma instead. When Ammun had shattered the world core, he¡¯d done so primarily by rupturing the mysteel.


    The explosion had been weaponized and used to destroy Amodir, the orange moon that no longer graced our night sky, but then he¡¯d been unable to patch the mysteel, and the core had begun to cool. Before long, it was nothing but a dead lump of rock.


    I knew there was still a living heart in the very center, though. All the evidence pointed to it. Some of my earlier theories had been disproved, but Manoch did still produce mana. It was a dying world, but not completely dead. There was every chance that it could come back to life, given a little help. If we patched the shell properly, it would probably recover on its own in a few hundred years.


    I thought we could do better than that.


    We flooded the dead stone with mana poured through the filter of the ritual spell I¡¯d designed, and slowly, it started to come back to life. The stone melted at a pace that would have seemed incredible taken on its own, but which I feared was far from quick enough to make our window. Thankfully, the more of the core we superheated, the faster the effect spread.


    An hour passed, and we¡¯d revived perhaps a fifth of the world core. All around me, I could see sweating, anxious faces as we fought to hold the ritual steady and channel mana from the moons through it. I knew the others were doing the same calculations I was, looking at our progress and measuring it against how far we had to go.


    The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°Steady,¡± I called out. ¡°We¡¯re not beaten yet. The process is speeding up. Just keep doing your parts.¡±


    At the second hour, we were halfway there. Things were progressing, but too slowly. The ritual wouldn¡¯t end at the three-hour mark, but its throughput would drop significantly. We¡¯d planned for that, but even I was starting to grow concerned that it just wouldn¡¯t be enough. Perhaps we should have waited for a lunar convergence after all.


    I kept it off my face, though. As far as everyone else needed to know, I had absolute confidence that there was nothing wrong. The mana kept flowing through our ritual circle and down into the bore hole, and the world core kept slowly churning as it came back to life.


    Half an hour later, we¡¯d reached three-quarters saturation, and I could see hope starting to blossom in the circle. Everyone here was smart; they could do the math. Even if the propagation of living magma didn¡¯t speed up, as long as it didn¡¯t slow down, we¡¯d make our window. That said, with each passing minute, it became more and more difficult to push more mana into the world core. As the dead stone heated up, it started to do what everything else did: it expanded.


    That expansion put pressure on the mysteel shell. More importantly, it tried to push through the rent in the shell where we were sending mana in. More and more of our resources were being diverted to holding it in place, and we¡¯d reached the point where we needed to start sending mysteel down the bore hole as well to begin repairing the shell.


    With our concentration split, progress on reviving the core slowed down. The pressure started to stabilize, but that wasn¡¯t a good thing. It needed to go higher, and we needed to hold it together while it did so.


    ¡°Lasrin is slipping out of alignment,¡± Querit announced ten minutes later.


    ¡°You said we had half an hour,¡± one of the Order archmages spat out through gritted teeth.


    ¡°Until both are out. Lasrin is the smallest; it has the least impact.¡±


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t matter,¡± I snapped. ¡°Focus on what you¡¯re doing. I¡¯ll make up the difference.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ll what?¡± the archmage asked. ¡°How are you going to make up the difference of a whole moon?¡±


    I ignored the question and tapped into my personal mana reserves. Decades of harvesting mana from the dynamo that was my demesne and constantly refining my mana crystal until it was the size of a mountain had left me with more mana than probably the next twenty most powerful mages on the planet combined. That wasn¡¯t even looking at all the mana I¡¯d siphoned off the moons for years already. All of it had been for this day.


    I fed mana into the ritual, keeping the input flow level with what we¡¯d been dealing with for the last few hours, but it didn¡¯t take me long to run the numbers. At this rate, I¡¯d be completely tapped out in half an hour. In a few minutes, that equation would change again when a second moon started to rotate out of position and the connection weakened.


    We¡¯d still be pulling mana from it, more than any single person could need for just about anything else, but not enough for this. ¡°Shift to pushing the mysteel,¡± I ordered. It was better to patch the core that was three-quarters alive than to let all this drain away and have nothing. With luck, we could make a small hole in the shell and finish the job later.


    That was assuming the core didn¡¯t cool down again if it wasn¡¯t fully pressurized. It was far from the ideal outcome, but I¡¯d take a chance at coming back to try again over failing utterly and wasting decades of preparations.


    And then, as the mana flow from Nalicin started to dwindle, something unexpected happened. ¡°You¡¯d better wake me back up,¡± Querit said.


    He poured all the considerable mana reserves he¡¯d built up into the ritual. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn¡¯t much, perhaps enough to keep going for another minute, but it gave us time. Senica added her own, and one by one, every archmage in the circle contributed what they could. All of them together wasn¡¯t half what Querit himself had dropped into the pot.


    ¡°The core¡¯s fully awake!¡± someone yelled. I was so focused on keeping the pressure from erupting that I barely heard the words.


    ¡°Get the rest of this mysteel down there,¡± I ordered.


    It was getting harder and harder to manage the ritual, and with a start I realized that Querit had dropped out completely. Opposite him, two of the Order archmages were down, and Zara was struggling to stay on her feet. We were failing.


    And then, abruptly, the last of the mysteel poured down the bore hole like quicksilver, and the ritual tugged it into place. A wall of crystallized mana clung to the patch, holding it steady as the mysteel bonded itself to the shell and kept the pressure inside from breaking loose.


    ¡°Is¡­ is it over?¡± Akunva asked.


    I took a deep breath and let go of my hold on the mana. Following my lead, those of us still standing did the same. ¡°I think it is,¡± I said. ¡°We did it.¡±


    A tired and ragged cheer erupted from the circle. We¡¯d done it. The world core was fully energized and the patch on its shell was holding. I¡¯d have to monitor it for the next few years to make sure nothing broke, but as of this moment, Manoch had a living core again.


    I knelt down next to Querit¡¯s still form and shook my head. ¡°Smart of you,¡± I murmured, too quietly for the others to hear over their celebrations. Senica shot me a knowing look, though. She¡¯d realized how close we¡¯d cut it, how that extra minute Querit had bought us had made the difference.


    I quickly flooded his core with mana, what little I had left, and his eyes popped open. ¡°Did¡ª¡± he started to say, but then he relaxed and smiled. He could hear the celebration going on. ¡°Good.¡±


    ¡°Yeah,¡± I said. ¡°We did it. You pushed us over the edge.¡±


    ¡°And now, things will be like they were,¡± he said, his voice content.


    ¡°Well, give it a few decades,¡± I told him. ¡°But yes, it looks like everything went according to plan. Mostly.¡±


    He snorted. ¡°Mostly, except for the part where I killed myself at the end.¡±


    ¡°Oh, get over it. I brought you right back five minutes later.¡±


    I helped my golem assistant to his feet and he peered around at the now empty cavern. It looked a lot bigger without all the mysteel. ¡°I can¡¯t believe it really took all of it. I thought for sure you were exaggerating about how much we¡¯d need, just trying to be cautious.¡±


    ¡°It was a big hole,¡± I said.


    ¡°You know, if this works, if it doesn¡¯t need maintenance or anything, then you¡¯ve effectively pioneered the process for creating whole worlds. We know how to do everything. It¡¯s just a matter of time, resources, and scale.¡±


    ¡°Who says we pioneered it? Obviously somebody must have done this process millions of years ago to make this world, right? Maybe a true immortal archmage who¡¯d made it to stage ten. Maybe someone even stronger.¡±


    ¡°I think we just proved we can do it as plain old mortals,¡± Querit said.


    ¡°I suppose so, but I think I¡¯ll start a bit smaller than a whole planet for my first attempt at doing it from scratch. Maybe I¡¯ll make my own moon instead.¡±


    Laughing, we turned to join the celebrations of our comrades.

 Book 5, Chapter 65 (Epilogue)

    300 years later¡­


    I appeared on the teleportation platform of Senica¡¯s demesne, just as I¡¯d done every decade on schedule for the last few centuries. In the early days, she¡¯d been there to greet me, but she was far too busy now. It used to be that she at least sent someone to meet me, but for the last fifty years, she hadn¡¯t even bothered with that much.


    It was a bit rude of her, if I was being honest. But then, I supposed it wasn¡¯t unreasonable to expect me to just take care of myself. It wasn¡¯t like I didn¡¯t know exactly where she was. The whole demesne¡¯s mana flows warped around her, subtle as the effect might be. For anyone with the skill to read the pattern, it was like having an arrow pointing the way.


    I took a few seconds to study the latest wards. She¡¯d mentioned upgrading them since my last visit, citing something about needing a more modular design with multiple levels of authentication as things had grown too cumbersome for the old schema. Well, that was what happened when she¡¯d turned her demesne into an entire city.


    Really, she¡¯d missed the point of having a private sanctum entirely.


    I realized there was another person on the platform with me a moment later when I caught him gawking at me. I turned to look at him directly and asked, ¡°You need something?¡±


    ¡°No, I was¡ªthat is, I mean¡­¡± he trailed off with a gulp. ¡°No, sir. Sorry for being rude. I didn¡¯t mean to stare.¡±


    I grunted. At least someone on this stupid rock had some manners. ¡°No harm done.¡±


    I stepped off the platform and rose into the air in a slow flight. At about three hundred feet up, I passed beyond the ward¡¯s range and the screaming winds of the upper atmosphere ripped past me. Below, Senica¡¯s demesne, the floating city known as Skyhaven, sprawled around me. It was about eighty square miles, with a considerable portion of that given over to the academy grounds, but there was still plenty of space for the city proper.


    It was a craftsman¡¯s paradise, home to a hundred thousand enchanters, alchemists, scribes, golemancers, and more. Professors lived and taught at the academy, thousands of students resided in its dorms, and its hundreds of teleportation platforms saw traffic from all over the world. There was even a two-mile-wide lake that housed a small population of sapient aquatic golems.


    Those were my fault, supposedly, but how was I supposed to know they¡¯d evolve like that when I¡¯d dumped them all into the ocean? I still maintained that something or someone else had interfered there.


    For all that I had disagreed with the whole idea in the first place, the demesne was impressive ¨C entirely too wasteful, and there was absolutely no reason it couldn¡¯t have been built on the ground, but impressive nonetheless. I sometimes wondered how things might have been different if I¡¯d never told Senica about Grandfather¡¯s idea to throw a mountain up into the sky and keep it there.


    My sister was in the academy, as always. She literally lived there, but running it also kept her so busy that I doubted she left more than a few times a year. I flew straight to the sixth-floor window that led to her office, setting off a dozen wards in the process when they detected me. A squadron of guardian golems flew up to intercept me, but they were too slow to actually do anything, and besides, Senica threw the window open at the same time.


    A pulse of mana shot out from her, traveling down the invisible web of connections that tied her to her demesne, and the golems abruptly turned around and flew back to the ground. She sent a withering look my way and stepped back from the window to give me room to land.


    ¡°You could have just walked through the front door like everyone else,¡± she groused the moment I was inside.


    ¡°No thanks. You built this place entirely too large for me to want to walk all the way from the teleportation platform.¡±


    ¡°Then why didn¡¯t you use the platform on academy grounds?¡± she asked.


    ¡°Because then I wouldn¡¯t be able to trip all your alarm wards by flying through them.¡±


    Senica, Headmistress of Skyhaven Academy, archmage at the ninth stage, dressed in full regalia and with the staff of her office floating beside her, scowled at me like the petulant six-year-old I still remembered her as. ¡°You¡¯re an ass. How old are you again?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t even keep track anymore,¡± I told her. ¡°Besides, you¡¯re only as old as you feel, right?¡±


    I felt, and looked, like a man in the prime of his life, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. And I planned on staying that way for at least another thousand years. To be fair, Senica looked barely forty, and that was a deliberate choice to appear middle-aged. She¡¯d told me once that it added some weight to her appearance, made people treat her with more respect.


    I¡¯d told her that any idiot who couldn¡¯t see past a youthful face to understand how powerful she actually was wasn¡¯t someone whose respect she¡¯d needed. It turned out we had very different outlooks on how to deal with the rest of the world. That was probably why she was respected as one of the most powerful archmages on the planet, and I was a reclusive hermit that some people weren¡¯t even sure had ever existed.


    Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°You know that look doesn¡¯t work on me,¡± I said, pointedly ignoring the expression of utter disappointment she was directing my way. I¡¯d seen our mother do the exact same thing too many times for Senica¡¯s version to have any effect. ¡°Save it for your students.¡±


    ¡°Ugh. You¡¯re impossible. How is it that you get even more troublesome every decade?¡±


    ¡°Lack of responsibilities keeping me grounded,¡± I said. ¡°I haven¡¯t had to deal with anything really problematic since that leviathan tried to flood the southeast coast of Jeshaem fifty years ago.¡±


    ¡°That was eighty years ago,¡± Senica said.


    I shrugged. What was three decades in the grand scheme of things? I wasn¡¯t sure why she was even bothering to keep track when she was already¡­ Actually, I wasn¡¯t sure how old Senica was anymore. It had to be close to four hundred.


    ¡°What?¡± she asked, taken aback. ¡°Why are you looking at me like that?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s nothing,¡± I said. ¡°Just considering a question I know better than to ask.¡±


    ¡°Then don¡¯t ask it,¡± she said flatly.


    ¡°I wasn¡¯t going to!¡±


    ¡°Good.¡±


    Our mock fight ended with us both laughing, and she came forward to hug me. ¡°It¡¯s good to see you again, little brother, even if you refuse to ever grow up.¡±


    ¡°There was a time when you thought otherwise,¡± I reminded her. ¡°A time when you couldn¡¯t wait to grow up faster.¡±


    ¡°Oh, that was so long ago, who even remembers?¡±


    A knock at the door interrupted our chatter. Without waiting for an answer, a golem poked his head through the door. ¡°Headmistress, it¡¯s time for the scheduled city core examination.¡±


    ¡°Thank you, Veln,¡± she said. Turning to me, she added, ¡°For someone who claims to not be able to keep track of time, you certainly managed to get here at exactly the right moment.¡±


    ¡°Querit reminded me,¡± I admitted.


    ¡°Hah. I knew it. Well, come on, let¡¯s go get this taken care of. I¡¯ve got a thousand things to do before the new semester starts in three days.¡±


    * * *


    Our success in reigniting the world core all those centuries ago had inspired us to experiment with smaller versions of the same thing. Living stone, turned to magma and pressurized inside a shell of mysteel, as it turned out, produced far more mana than it otherwise might have for the same volume. Unfortunately, that wasn¡¯t enough for what Senica wanted, so we¡¯d delved further into the process.


    It had taken a bit of tinkering, but eventually we¡¯d figured out the missing ingredient: a mana resonance point in the center of it. Those three pieces together were the secret to forming a world core, or, in this case, what we¡¯d dubbed a city core. It was a much, much smaller version of the same thing, not even a thousandth of the size of the one in the center of Manoch. But it was devoted entirely to keeping this massive slab of stone stable and floating through the sky.


    This was accomplished through an immense and intricate series of ward stones, enchantments, and literal miles upon miles of inscriptions, all of which needed regular maintenance. That was performed by a full crew of mages whose job was to do nothing else, but once every ten years, I came to Skyhaven, and the two of us descended into the bowels of the island to where the city core was embedded in the bedrock to confirm its stability and mana production levels.


    ¡°Everything looks good,¡± I said, somewhat reluctantly. ¡°Somehow, this unsightly blight upon the night sky is still running smoothly.¡±


    ¡°It had better be,¡± Senica told me. ¡°You have no idea how much effort goes into keeping it that way.¡±


    ¡°Well, whose fault is that? I told you to just build it on the ground.¡±


    ¡°But it¡¯s so much more amazing up here.¡±


    ¡°Pointless,¡± I muttered.


    ¡°For a man who¡¯s nearly three thousand years old, I¡¯d think you¡¯d appreciate the novelty of it all. And as someone who professes to love magic more than anything else, you could show a bit of wonder at the feat of engineering Skyhaven is.¡±


    ¡°Alright, fine,¡± I admitted somewhat grudgingly. ¡°You¡¯re not wrong. It¡¯s an amazing piece of work. I should know, considering I did all the initial designs for it.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m glad you think so,¡± Senica said primly while I rolled my eyes.


    We stared at the city core for another minute through the divination window. The mysteel shell was as perfect as always, unblemished by so much as a single scratch, and the core of living magma inside it glowed red and white, pulsing with mana that slowly emanated through the shell to be harnessed by the immense crystalline pillars that formed a cage around it.


    ¡°How¡¯s the moon project coming along?¡± she asked.


    ¡°Slowly,¡± I said. ¡°It¡¯ll be probably another forty or fifty years before I even have the mana built up to try.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s what you said three decades ago.¡±


    ¡°I decided to change the orbital path and increase the size.¡±


    ¡°Ah. That would certainly delay things. I guess you¡¯re not in any hurry, though.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not,¡± I agreed. ¡°It¡¯s more of a ¡®to see if we can¡¯ sort of project anyway. If it works, the next step will be creating a whole new planet, and that would be the work of thousands of years.¡±


    ¡°In the more immediate future, what are you doing for the next decade?¡± Senica asked.


    ¡°No,¡± I said instantly.


    ¡°Gravin, come on. I haven¡¯t even¡ª¡±


    ¡°Absolutely not.¡±


    ¡°Just for a few years, then? Five. Give me five.¡±


    ¡°Nooooope.¡±


    ¡°Fine. I hate to do it this way, but you owe me. I¡¯m calling in my favor,¡± she said.


    ¡°Favor for what?¡± I demanded.


    ¡°Remember at Nailu¡¯s hundredth birthday party, when you stuck your foot all the way into your mouth and he had to restrain Mom while I calmed her down?¡±


    I blanched. ¡°Oh. That. When I said, ¡®I owe you one,¡¯ I didn¡¯t mean¡­¡±


    Senica was merciless. ¡°Time to pay up.¡±


    ¡°Damn it. Fine,¡± I grumbled. ¡°What subject?¡±


    ¡°Divinations,¡± she said. ¡°Cheer up. I know how much you love the discipline.¡±


    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t say I love it, just that it¡¯s important.¡±


    ¡°It is,¡± she agreed, ¡°which is why the students should have the very best professor for it. Don¡¯t you think?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± I muttered, somewhat petulantly. With a great sigh, I asked, ¡°When does the semester start, again?¡±


    ¡°Three days. I¡¯ve already got some rooms furnished for you. There are faculty robes in your size hanging in the wardrobe. Veln can show you the way once we¡¯re back topside.¡±


    ¡°Damn it, Senica,¡± I muttered. ¡°Five years, that¡¯s it. We¡¯re even.¡±


    ¡°Thanks, Gravin. You¡¯re the best. Love you.¡±


    ¡°Love you, too.¡±


    The End

 Afterword

    And so ends this series. It didn¡¯t end up being as long as I planned, but I think I covered everything I wanted to get done. I hope you¡¯ve enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thank you for your patronage.


    In regards to the future of Keiran, yes, I do plan to return to this world with a sequel series. Keiran himself won¡¯t be the protagonist, but he¡¯ll still be a prominent character. I¡¯m sure you noticed the groundwork I¡¯ve laid down in these last few chapters for the new setting ¨C a magic school on a floating island, with Keiran¡¯s sister as the headmistress. I¡¯ve always enjoyed magic school stories, and I¡¯ve been meaning to write one for years now.


    However, that won¡¯t be happening this year. My surprise writathon story is going to take me several more months to finish, and then I¡¯m returning to the story that was supposed to be my next project (a regressor tower climber that I¡¯ve already written about 100k words of). The two of those will take up most, if not all, of my 2025 writing schedule. But! 2026 will probably see the return of the Keiranverse. You know, unless I come up with something more interesting to work on. We¡¯ll see how it goes.


    This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    I¡¯ll do my best to answer any questions about lingering plot points so long as they don¡¯t spoil the premise for the next story set in this world. I can¡¯t think of anything I didn¡¯t clear up off the top of my head, but I¡¯m sure you guys have got some questions that I¡¯d be happy to answer. You can see comments and questions patrons have asked already here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/119566447</a>


    <hr>


    Books 1-4 are currently available on Amazon (https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0D1JQSJXZ</a>), and Book 5 will finish the series. It releases in a month on April 9th (https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0DS9DS25P</a>). The audiobook for book 5 should come out sometime in May, but I don''t have any hard dates for that yet. I''ll do an update post next month when I have more info on that.

 Book 4, Chapter 67

    The main silo of the summit was undamaged by my attack, but was just as empty as everywhere else. Theories whirled through my mind, one after another. Was this whole site a decoy? Everything Ammun had thrown at me had been a long series of distractions, and I¡¯d made assumptions as to the purpose. Maybe Ashinder was the world¡¯s best actor, one who¡¯d willingly sacrificed dozens of his coworkers to pull off the con.


    Or maybe I¡¯d been trapped in a mental illusion, like that one mage of Ammun¡¯s had used on me back at Eyrie Peak. I doubted it, especially since none of the telltale signs were there and I¡¯d already tested that theory to confirm there was nothing to break out of while I was exploring. If this was some sort of mind cage, it was the most powerful one I¡¯d ever seen, something that I doubted Ammun could create even with help.


    There was one explanation that I didn¡¯t like, but which I thought was probable. The summit was a true base: an expensive, long-term project with thousands of man-hours and an incalculable amount of mana put into it. It really could reach the moon from the surface of the planet.


    And Ammun had already finished it. But if so, what had he used it on? And how had he done it without us noticing? I found one of those answers in the top chamber of the ritual silo. It was carved into the wall with some sort of spell that had literally melted the stone away. The remnants were a viscous puddle on the floor and I could still feel the heat rising out of the runes.


    It was a clever bit of counter-divination that caused anyone scrying on the location to see something else from the recent past. Ammun must have made it as soon as he¡¯d sent out his dragon to keep me busy. Querit¡¯s scrying probably revealed what had happened hours ago, set to loop over and over again, and he¡¯d never noticed.


    The ward also prevented anyone from looking anywhere else in the past, but that at least I could bypass through the simple expedient of destroying it. Force magic hammered the wall repeatedly until the stone finally cracked and gave way. I made a mental note to study the ward schema reinforcing things around here; my own methods were durable, but this went beyond even that. I suspected I knew how Ammun was doing it and that it was too mana-intensive for casual use, but I wanted to confirm my theory when I had time.


    With the temporal redirection ward broken, I started scrying into the past to see exactly what I¡¯d missed. Had Ammun completed his project? If so, what were the results? And where had everyone gone?


    It started normally enough ¨C diviners took their positions on every floor and worked in conjunction to feed the ritual. I skipped past Ammun¡¯s delivered threats, having already seen those in real time, and moved to what happened after he¡¯d sicced his minions on me. The ritual started pulling mana from the banks stored in the mountain, enormous amounts of it, from what I could tell. One floor at a time, the diviners activated their portions until the entire center of the summit was lit up with magic.


    Ammun stood at the top floor and worked his own magic, something that his counter-divinations obscured from me. I spared a brief moment to wonder how I was even getting this much of a picture, given how strong I knew those wards were, but soon enough, the answer was revealed to me.


    The wards were draining, and Ammun¡¯s mana was too tied up in what he was doing to keep them going. Or perhaps they were just interfering with the divination aspects of the ritual and he¡¯d had no choice but to let them fall. Either way, as things went on, it became clearer and clearer around him.


    About three hours after he¡¯d sent Averin to keep me distracted, the diviners established a link with Yulitar. That was a sight to behold, a new frontier to magic being pushed right before my eyes, but I couldn¡¯t appreciate it. All I could feel was dread at knowing it was too late.


    I kept watching anyway, hoping against hope that I was wrong, that this was just a step in the plan and there was still time to stop it. Maybe Ammun had to build some sort of targeting infrastructure to harness the moon core into a weapon. If not, then I wasn¡¯t sure how my demesne was still in one piece, since I¡¯d obviously been too late to stop all of this.


    Then something unexpected happened: Ammun vanished from the top of the silo. Some of the diviners got excited about that; others merely slumped down in exhaustion. It was a rather mixed reaction that only served to showcase exactly how many people had been forced into helping their undead overlord.


    I wondered if there¡¯d been any serious attempts at destroying him when he¡¯d first woken back up, and, if so, if any of them had succeeded. It was easy to picture a group of rebellious mages fighting back against an archmage lich, breaking his body, and celebrating their victory while mourning their losses, only to have Ammun show back up the next day like nothing had happened. That was the kind of tactic that broke spirits and led to the despair I¡¯d seen in some of the diviners.Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    From what I could see, it looked like the outcome of the ritual was a known factor. Nobody looked surprised or confused, at least. Whatever had happened, there had to be clues in the ritual. Unfortunately, the farther back I tried to look, the harder it was to see what the actual beginning of it looked like. I could study the symbols carved into the floor, but that wouldn¡¯t show me the active part the diviners were responsible for.


    In my temporal vision, mana surged down through the silo, hitting each floor in sequence while the diviners screamed in terror. It reached the bottom, then snapped back up to the top, taking every single person with it. I blinked in surprise and pushed my sight back through time to see it again.


    When I still couldn¡¯t figure out what had happened the second time around, I decided I had no choice but to ask some questions. I pulled out my mirror and contacted Querit. When his face appeared, I asked, ¡°Do you still have Ashinder with you?¡±


    ¡°Yes,¡± the golem said. ¡°I was just about to¡­ Never mind. You need to talk to him?¡±


    ¡°I do,¡± I said. ¡°Ammun¡¯s gone. The diviners are gone. Whatever he was trying to accomplish here, he pulled it off. But I don¡¯t think it was what we theorized, based on the fact that he hasn¡¯t vaporized us already.¡±


    The diviner came into view as Querit manipulated his mirror to expand my field of view outward. Ashinder was standing nearby, his back to the golem while he spoke to a few people I didn¡¯t recognize. ¡°One moment, let me get his attention,¡± Querit said.


    I watched him walk away for a second, then something else caught my eye. A man walked through the background, probably a hundred feet or so away from the mirror. He stopped and eyed the scene curiously, which wasn¡¯t unusual. It wasn¡¯t often a big mirror floated in the air, completely unsupported by anything but magic.


    ¡°It figures,¡± I grumbled. ¡°I should just be happy about it, I suppose.¡±


    ¡°Happy about what?¡± Querit asked as he walked back over.


    ¡°That man behind you wearing the green vest,¡± I said. The golem looked over his shoulder and spotted who I was talking about. ¡°His name is Hyago. I¡¯ve been looking for him for a while now. Can you keep track of him for me until I¡¯m done with what I¡¯m doing here?¡±


    ¡°Does it matter if he knows I¡¯m keeping an eye on him?¡±


    ¡°No. In fact, you should just go approach him openly. He used to work for me, helped create the petrified forest, actually. I have a job offer for him, mostly the same stuff he always did, but he moved while I was distracted with other stuff and I lost track of him.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll let him know as soon as we¡¯re done here.¡±


    ¡°I can maintain the link,¡± I said. ¡°And this is going to be a long conversation. Go ahead and catch up with him now.¡±


    ¡°It is?¡± Ashinder asked. ¡°What are we talking about?¡±


    ¡°We need to go over the technical details of what Ammun had you doing. This ritual obviously doesn¡¯t do what we were originally thinking, and I need to know more about the active portion the diviners had to control to figure out what its actual purpose is. Let¡¯s start with these ignition runes on the bottom floor¡­¡±


    * * *


    ¡°Incredible,¡± I muttered. ¡°It actually works. It¡¯s insane, but it works.¡±


    This whole silo, multiple floors of runes, hundreds of thousands of them on each individual floor and powered by more mana than the valley could produce in a month, served one singular purpose. It was a damned teleportation platform with a single destination: Yulitar itself.


    Ammun was actually up there, standing on the surface of a moon. It was possible that he was looking down on Manoch right now and laughing. He¡¯d done something that should have been impossible, and for some reason, he¡¯d taken a hundred or so people with him. That part didn¡¯t seem voluntary to me, but that didn¡¯t make it any less incredible.


    It also meant something incredibly important. If Ammun was on the moon, he had to have his phylactery with him. There wasn¡¯t enough mana on the planet to stretch a tether that long. Or if there was, it would run out long before he accomplished anything useful. The only logical conclusion was that he¡¯d pulled his phylactery out of hiding.


    That meant that if I could replicate this ritual, I could get up there, kill him, and claim possession of his phylactery. I just needed to figure out how. The mana usage wouldn¡¯t be a problem, at least. As far as I could tell, the massive amounts of mana had been because Ammun had felt the need to take his whole entourage with him. I would be going by myself, meaning I needed a small fraction of what they¡¯d used the first time.


    The more I studied the design, the more I was sure that the diviners who¡¯d bridged the gap between Manoch and Yulitar had just followed Ammun¡¯s orders without any understanding of what they were powering. Now that I knew how the active portion of the ritual worked, or at least the singular fragment of it that Ashinder had been responsible for understanding, I could already see how little of it was actually necessary if the spell wasn¡¯t transporting a group.


    I could make this work. It would be expensive, but presumably, Yulitar¡¯s moon core was intact, and I¡¯d be able to harvest new mana once I got there. There were some risks, but that was true of any plan that involved confronting Ammun. The difference here was that this might be my single best chance to catch the lich and put him down permanently.


    I powered the ritual, one floor at a time. It was difficult holding it all together, but compared to the mana resonance point, it wasn¡¯t the hardest thing I¡¯d done recently. At the top, I stood in the center of the circle, right where Ammun had. The rooms didn¡¯t glow since I didn¡¯t need almost any of those pieces, and with a sudden pulse of mana as the spell completed, I felt myself pulled upwards in defiance of gravity for just a moment before everything went black.

 Book 4, Chapter 68

    For a second, I thought I¡¯d somehow been teleported back to Derro, to the tunnels deep underground where I''d found Querit. A moment later, I started noticing the differences in the room. If nothing else, it was cold, considerably colder than anywhere I¡¯d been since my reincarnation. The air had a lot less dust in it, too.


    The confusing part was that I knew this ritual was a one-way teleportation to the moon. I¡¯d verified the whole thing myself. I even knew that it only worked when the moon was in a certain spot, one that had very little leeway. But, if I was on Yulitar, it looked far, far different than anyone had ever imagined.


    Were there cities on the moon? Did a whole civilization exist up here? That seemed impossible, considering astronomy was a hobby many, many mages indulged in, and there were hundreds of spells that allowed them to peer up into the night sky in great detail. Any city would have to be shrouded in some kind of massive camouflaging illusion to avoid detection.


    Maybe this wasn¡¯t a city, then. It could be something smaller, a singular building or even a camp. Obviously, at some point in the past, mages had figured out how to overcome extreme distances, and the fact that I was here at all was proof that it was possible to not only reach a moon, but to bring supplies and equipment here. Given that, there was no reason to assume those ancient mages hadn¡¯t started the process of colonizing all six moons, at least until one of them had been destroyed.


    Runes glowed on the wall, all in patterns I was intimately familiar with. There were inscriptions for keeping the room clean, for keeping it heated¡ªnot that those seemed to be working properly¡ªfor creating air and cycling it through purifiers, and many other things. There were even complex workings that manipulated gravity. I could only assume it was a whole suite of effects designed for the singular purpose of mimicking life on Manoch.


    The one thing I didn¡¯t see was Ammun or his gaggle of diviners. My first guess was that they were at some kind of control room, and I immediately spun out several scrying spells and sent them out to scour the building for signs of life while I started processing moon mana. It didn¡¯t feel any different than the mana I made myself or harvested from my demesne.


    That was something of a relief. It wasn¡¯t that I¡¯d expected the mana to be different, especially not since I¡¯d already obtained a slab of moon core for my own personal use back home, but absorbing it from a moon still circling the planet was a new and novel experience. If there was ever a set of circumstances that might alter the fundamental nature of mana itself, it was here and now.


    But no, everything appeared to be fine. As far as I could tell, the mana was just regular old mana. It filled the air the way I remembered Manoch being back in the old days ¨C maybe a little bit thinner than normal, but nothing that unusual. And even that thinness could be partially blamed on all the active runes drawing in mana to keep themselves powered, not that I was complaining about that. Generating breathable air and keeping the temperature from being fatally cold were perfectly acceptable uses of mana.


    The diviners found me before I found them. I¡¯d been sitting there for a few minutes, carefully exploring the moon base with my magic to avoid setting off any traps or being spotted by Ammun, when I sensed a foreign scrying spell settle on me. Surprised, I turned to face it fully and quickly cast a tracing spell that would follow it back to its source. Immediately, a vision of a room with an enormous bay window appeared in my mind. The hundred or so diviners were all huddled together there, most of them simply sitting on the floor wherever they could find an out-of-the-way spot to do so. The few that were active and alert were all casting spells, and it was one of those who¡¯d found me.


    Her face paled when she realized that I¡¯d noticed her magic and followed it back. ¡°We¡­ might have a problem,¡± she announced.


    ¡°What kind of problem?¡± one of the other diviners asked.


    ¡°Remember that guy we were spying on? The one that Lord Ammun didn¡¯t want finding out anything about what we were doing?¡±


    ¡°Yeah?¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s here.¡±


    That got some attention. A dozen people who¡¯d been slumped over, staring listlessly at the floor between their feet, all snapped upright. Fear spread through the room, and everyone started talking at once.


    Ammun wasn¡¯t with the group, and my own scrying spells hadn¡¯t found him, either. The building was impressively large, three floors at least, with plenty of spaces left for me to check, but the diviners were a good place to start asking questions. I traced out a mental map from me to them, then headed in their direction while I held the connection I¡¯d piggybacked on open.


    While I walked, I listened in on the conversation. I¡¯d gotten a reputation among Ammun¡¯s people as a major threat, certain death if encountered. I wanted to be a bit offended by that; I¡¯d spared plenty of people, after all, but when I considered that I hadn¡¯t let a single one of them return home, it was hard to fault anyone for thinking the way they did.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.


    ¡°I¡¯m not here to kill you,¡± I told them through an audible illusion I remotely cast to their room. ¡°I¡¯m just here for Ammun.¡±


    ¡°How are you even here at all?¡± one of the diviners asked, his voice on the edge of hysterics. ¡°It¡¯s impossible! We¡¯re not even on the planet anymore!¡±


    ¡°Why would you think that I can¡¯t duplicate a spell you¡¯ve cast?¡±


    ¡°There are eighty-seven of us,¡± another diviner protested.


    ¡°And if I¡¯d needed to transport that many people, I probably would have needed some help, too. Just moving myself was much easier.¡±


    ¡°Impossible,¡± the diviner whined again. ¡°Impossible.¡±


    ¡°You keep using that word,¡± I pointed out.


    It wasn¡¯t a very long walk, but I¡¯d still expected them to make a run for it. It was only after I arrived that I discovered why they hadn¡¯t. Ammun had locked them in the room. They literally couldn¡¯t escape, and their attempts at stopping me with their own offensive divinations were pathetic. I barely even noticed the weak mind spikes and sensory snares buzzing around me like a cloud of gnats.


    ¡°Seriously?¡± I asked when I stood outside the door. ¡°You¡¯re actually trapped by this?¡±


    It wasn¡¯t even a master-tier spell. It was barely advanced. This group was dangerously overspecialized in divinations if there wasn¡¯t a single mage in there that could break the seal Ammun had left behind. A basic transmutation could defeat this prison just by targeting one of the walls.


    ¡°We were asked not to move,¡± the diviner who¡¯d found me said.


    ¡°Ordered to on pain of death is more like it,¡± another one muttered.


    ¡°Ah. I see. It¡¯s not that you can¡¯t defeat the magic. It¡¯s that you¡¯re afraid of the consequences if you do.¡±


    I unceremoniously ripped the mana out of the seal on the door and pulled it open, sparing it just a single glance when I realized it was made of the same reflective metal as that combat frame I¡¯d found Querit in. I never had found the time to investigate that more thoroughly with everything else going on.


    ¡°Now then,¡± I said in my physical voice. ¡°I¡¯d like to ask you a few questions.¡±


    A cloud of ice barbs distorted and shattered against my shield ward while an orb of solid force smacked against it and was deflected at an angle. No less than three different mages tried to puncture my mana core while a dozen of them cooperatively cast a mind crush spell in an attempt to render me insensate.


    I spared a moment to top up the mana reserves in my shield ward and took a second step into the room, only to be greeted with a burst of fire aimed directly at my face. ¡°Now that¡¯s just stupid,¡± I said. ¡°Are you trying to suffocate us?¡±


    ¡°Better than letting you torture and kill us,¡± a diviner snarled as he pulled together another powerful conjuration.


    Foolishly, he¡¯d chosen a spell that took several seconds to cast while standing mere feet from me. I absently reached out with a tendril of mana and twisted the spell¡¯s framework so hard that the whole thing snapped into pieces, then I repeated the action to six other mages doing the same thing.


    ¡°Look, I¡¯m really not here to hurt you. I don¡¯t care about you at all. I just need to know where Ammun is and what he¡¯s trying to do up here.¡±


    ¡°We don¡¯t know where he is,¡± someone said.


    I snorted. ¡°Oh, come on. Who would believe that? A group of diviners trapped in a locked room with nothing to do but use their magic to look around, and you¡¯re telling me you don¡¯t know where your boss is?¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s not in this building. He took Ergl and went¡­¡± the diviner trailed off and waved a hand at the giant wall of glass. Beyond it was an endless expanse of fish-belly white stone that eventually faded off into the darkness.


    ¡°Ammun went for a walk on the surface of the moon?¡± I asked. ¡°Huh¡­ okay. Why? And who¡¯s Ergl?¡±


    ¡°His personal golem,¡± the diviner explained.


    I wondered if Querit would be offended or find the comparison hilarious. Maybe it would be better to avoid telling him.


    ¡°And as to why Lord Ammun does anything he does¡­ He¡¯s not in the habit of explaining his plans to us.¡±


    That sounded about right. I¡¯d interrogated enough people in Ammun¡¯s organization to know that they rarely had more than unfounded speculations. Still, I¡¯d been hoping these particular people would have some insight into what was going on since they¡¯d been important enough to drag up to the moon.


    Or had they been? The spell ritual they¡¯d used had called for that many people and had certainly pulled mana from them to power it, but why would Ammun bring them up here if he was just going to leave them behind? There had to be a reason. He¡¯d built an entire mountain to house the silo with the long-range teleportation ritual.


    It couldn¡¯t be as simple as him not being able to puzzle out the ritual and modify it for use by a single person. He¡¯d managed to make it to archmage and then transform himself into a lich. That implied a level of competency that exceeded such a simple task.


    Come to think of it, how had he managed to transition to lichdom? That wasn¡¯t something I could picture my old apprentice managing on his own. And he¡¯d stolen a bunch of my ward schema to use on his tower, too. Every spell I¡¯d seen him cast had been powerful, but also brutally straightforward. The cleverest thing I¡¯d personally seen him do was use a decoy phylactery in our first confrontation. I¡¯d only been fooled because it was real, just not attuned to him.


    Was it possible that Ammun had just stolen a bunch of spell designs from that insurrectionist faction who¡¯d enslaved a moon core a thousand years ago and wasn¡¯t smart enough to figure out how they actually worked? Had I been giving him far too much credit this entire time?


    What did that say about me if my theory was right?


    Regardless of whether or not Ammun really was a big dumb metaphorical hammer who¡¯d been propped up to his current level of power by unknown¡ªand probably long dead¡ªbackers, he was still a threat now. Whatever his goal here was, I needed to figure it out, find him, and put a stop to it. There was far too much potential mana up here to let him have free rein of it.


    ¡°Which way did he go?¡± I asked. When no one spoke up, I snapped. ¡°You¡¯re going to tell me. I don¡¯t believe for a second that not one of you at least looked out the window to watch him leave. Now. Which. Way.¡±

 Book 4, Chapter 69

    Once I really started pushing, I found four different diviners willing to admit that they¡¯d spied on Ammun using wide-area scries that wouldn¡¯t be passively detected. None of them knew where he¡¯d stopped, but they all independently confirmed which direction he¡¯d set out in. My own brief divinations centered in that area showed me that it wouldn¡¯t be too difficult to track him, if for no other reason than he was maintaining his temporal scrambling wards. It was easy¡ªbut expensive¡ªto sweep an area with a temporal scry and follow the trail of where I couldn¡¯t see into the past.


    That left me with the problem of what to do with the diviners. They were all low on mana from the ritual, but recovering rapidly. The ones who¡¯d attacked me were more or less completely tapped out, which meant I wouldn¡¯t get a better opportunity to slaughter them all without resistance. That was certainly a possibility, but I preferred not to leave a pile of corpses in the area when I was about to engage in a battle with a lich.


    I could burn them, but that seemed like a short-sighted plan with the most likely result being suffocating myself and leaving a partially charred pile of bodies behind for Ammun to find when he got back. The lack of air certainly wouldn¡¯t hurt him if the runes hadn¡¯t regenerated it by the time he returned. The only thing I¡¯d accomplish was stranding him up here.


    There was an idea. Ammun obviously didn¡¯t need these people to do whatever he was up here to do. As far as I could tell, he¡¯d only brought them along because the ritual he was using was designed to pull a large group of people with him. Its mana costs and complexity were reflections of that fact. What could Ammun do if I simply took his mages and left him here?


    Well, he could do whatever he¡¯d come here to do, which could very well include tapping into Yulitar¡¯s core and firing catastrophic mana beams down onto the surface of Manoch. At the very least, I¡¯d need to stay behind to interfere with Ammun, but sending his minions back to the planet was a good way to get rid of them without leaving potential weapons for him to claim.


    ¡°Alright,¡± I said. ¡°You¡¯ve all been poking around this place just like me. Who knows where the ritual silo to get us back home is?¡±


    ¡°In the center,¡± one of the leaders of the group said. Most of the diviners had justifiably shied away from having anything to do with me, but a few of the stronger ones had either volunteered or had the responsibility foisted on them. ¡°It¡¯s the only place with enough height to set it all up.¡±


    I hadn¡¯t found it myself, but I trusted it was where they said it was. It also explained why Ammun had locked everyone in here. He didn¡¯t want them trying to go home without him. ¡°Right, we¡¯re heading there. Everyone on your feet!¡±


    A wave of fear rolled through the assembled mages, probably at the thought of their leader punishing them for disobeying orders. Protests started coming at me from every angle, but I silenced them with a burst of raw mana. ¡°This isn¡¯t a debate,¡± I said. ¡°If you don¡¯t want to die here, get walking.¡±


    They were hesitant. They dragged their feet. They tried to come up with excuses to delay. But in the end, they obeyed. I walked along at the end of the line, my very obviously placed divinations keeping track of everyone I couldn¡¯t physically see. ¡°And no magic,¡± I announced as we filed out of the room. ¡°Focus on recovering your mana reserves so we can cast the ritual to get everyone back home.¡±


    I was almost surprised to see no one fighting me on that, but not once did I detect any stealthy telepathic messages between them. No one was casting out scrying spells to look around, or attempting to contact Ammun. Though, when I thought about it, that part made sense. That would essentially be telling on themselves if they let him know I¡¯d moved them. Sure, he might reward whoever did it. Or he might show back up and kill a few people.


    Unlike back on Manoch, there were no mana banks to draw power from here. The ambient mana of the moon was enough to make the ritual work, so all we were waiting on was the mages I¡¯d forced into participating to recover enough of their personal supplies to play their parts. While they did that, I set the leaders of the groups to organizing each floor of the silo. Roughly seventeen mages occupied each ring, with three of them at the very top platform where I stood.


    The rune structures were slightly different, mostly to account for the more diffuse power source and the fact that this silo was designed to send us back to the planet. The differences were minute enough that I was comfortable making a few on-the-spot modifications to suit my purposes, ones that I was reasonably certain none of them could understand well enough to spot.


    Eventually, I got them moving and took my place¡ªAmmun¡¯s place¡ªat the top of the formation, surrounded by my three chosen diviners. ¡°This is going to work a bit differently than the ritual you used to get up here,¡± I told them. ¡°As far as I can tell, this has a locked location that I¡¯m just going to assume doesn¡¯t exist anymore, so we¡¯ll be redirecting that to some empty space outside the tower.¡±The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.


    ¡°That¡¯s this part here that we¡¯re bypassing?¡± the diviner on my left asked.


    I glanced down at the rune structure carved into the floor panel and nodded. ¡°And also this section over here.¡±


    That was a lie. Both of those pieces locked onto what I was mentally referring to as the ¡®bridge¡¯ target. That was supposed to be me. The spell functioned by pushing that one person first and using them as a relay beacon to drag everyone else along behind them. I¡¯d cut the mana costs on my own version by simply severing everything after the bridge portion. There was no need to build something that allowed everyone else to cross if I was the only one going.


    In this case, I didn¡¯t want to go, so I was redirecting that role onto these three guys. If I could have trusted one of them to play the role of the ritual director, it would have been even easier, but since I still had to do that, splitting the bridge amongst three other people was the best way I¡¯d come up with to make the ritual work on short notice.


    We got started, and the mana slowly built up in the silo. Seeing it through temporal scrying was one thing, but experiencing it live was an entirely different experience. The amount of mana going into this ritual was, frankly, incredibly dangerous, and there were far too many potential points of failure for me to be comfortable here. I honestly wasn¡¯t sure I¡¯d survive if things went wrong.


    I worked hard to make sure that didn¡¯t happen, which included reaching out multiple times to correct bad mana flows on various levels. Nothing catastrophic occurred, and it was clear that this group had practiced this ritual more than a few times. Most of the errors came about in the parts that were different from what they were used to. That was a small portion of the overall ritual, and within half an hour of starting, things were ready to go.


    Light flashed up and down the silo, grabbing the three diviners I¡¯d stationed around me and transporting them back down to the planet. A second later, a second pulse of light snatched up everyone else, leaving me alone on the platform strung up at the top. Perfect. Unless Ammun could figure out how to modify the ritual, he was stuck up here. The only other way he was getting home was if I was wrong about him bringing his phylactery with him.


    The real question in my mind was whether or not I could get home if I destroyed this silo. I wasn¡¯t willing to die up here just to cut off another potential escape route for Ammun, especially one I was relatively certain he couldn¡¯t utilize on his own. But it would be prudent to make sure I understood long-range teleportation well enough to pull it off without this silo, if only because fights between archmages often had collateral damage, and it was entirely possible he¡¯d target the facility just to keep me trapped here with him once he realized what I¡¯d done.


    I was very capable of multitasking, however. While my divinations scoured the surface of the moon to track down Ammun, I started working on adapting the long-range teleport into something I could use as a personal spell instead of a ritual that required equipment to set up.


    I started by gutting all the components that made it suitable for large groups. While it made sense that such a monumental feat of translocation would want to move as many people as possible at once to offset the enormous mana expenditure, that wasn¡¯t what I needed it for. Without all of that, I was down from a silo of multiple ringed balconies to a single room, at most. With a bit of time to refine the design, I was confident I could reduce it to something similar to my current teleportation platforms.


    Mana efficiency was my next concern. The long-range scrying portions used to target the moon devoured mana, and that was with them being streamlined to connect to a specific point. A free-targeting teleport spell that could cross this much distance was prohibitively expensive for a single person to use, even if that person was an archmage with a full demesne backing them.


    That alone was probably going to stop me from ever being able to cast this spell without some sort of equipment. I would have to choose a specific destination when designing the rune structure, which would at best give me a teleport-from-anywhere-to-one-spot spell. That wasn¡¯t necessarily useless, since I could rebuild the spell to take me directly to my demesne, and it wasn¡¯t like anyone besides me was ever going to use it, anyway.


    I continued to break down problems and redesign the spell one step at a time. Outside the base, my divinations followed signs of disturbance in the dusty surface of the moon or resorted to eliminating variables via temporal scrying when no other signs were available. It looked like Ammun was heading for lower elevations, possibly to remove as much physical distance between himself and the moon core as possible.


    I arbitrarily labeled Ammun¡¯s direction as north, since I didn¡¯t have a frame of reference for what actual north might be. He¡¯d already gone at least a hundred miles, though I thought he was moving very, very slowly for some reason. As soon as I found him, I planned to be ready to teleport there and force an immediate confrontation. With any luck, I¡¯d destroy his physical body, recover his phylactery, and put an end to his plans before he could bring them to fruition.


    The part where I destroyed his physical form was the sticking point. I just wasn¡¯t sure I could do it, even with access to my astral body. If I failed at that, confirming his phylactery was up here and leaving him stranded was an acceptable alternative, as long as I could break this silo down first.


    In order to do that, I needed to finish refining my own version of the teleportation ritual so that I no longer had to reference the rune structures here. I floated in the middle of the silo, going up and down as I checked various parts against my own designs and smoothed out flaws where I found them.


    It was too bad that I wouldn¡¯t have the opportunity to test this first, but life was full of risks. What was one more?

 Book 4, Chapter 70

    I paused in the middle of my preparations to pay more attention to one of my scrying spells. The more miles I had to cover, the slower my progress got, not in the least because Ammun had started using his own magic to actively obfuscate his trail about twenty miles or so from the base. I¡¯d been working for over six hours now, trying to track him down. Considering he¡¯d only had two or three hour¡¯s lead on me, at most, it was ridiculous how much effort it had taken to finally find something worth looking at.


    Whether that thing was actually relevant remained to be seen. It was entirely possible I¡¯d found something interesting but ultimately unimportant. Still, this was the first time I¡¯d seen anything more than white rock choked in fine dust. It turned out that Yulitar did have a thin atmosphere, though not something humans could breathe. It did provide enough air currents that a great deal of the landscape was obscured in clouds of dust that slowly drifted for miles and miles before settling back down until the next breeze came by to stir them up again.


    And in the middle of all that was a valley that sloped a few thousand feet before it started to rise again. It wasn¡¯t anything special by itself, but it did have several caves in it. Exploring those would have been an enormous expenditure of time except for the fact that one mouth had obviously been artificially enlarged by a significant amount, and not via transmutation.


    Broken rubble was scattered across the valley floor, looking for all the world like wet clay that had been scooped up by a giant¡¯s bare hands and casually tossed aside to dry and harden. Moon stone wasn¡¯t anything so soft as that, though, which meant whatever had done this was enormously strong ¨C strong enough to dig.


    Perhaps strong enough to dig straight down to the moon¡¯s core?


    I never had figured out how Ammun had managed to burrow so deep under Manoch¡¯s surface to build his tower. I¡¯d just assumed he¡¯d done it the hard way over a span of decades or even centuries, one transmutation spell at a time. Maybe I¡¯d been wrong. Maybe he¡¯d come up with something better. What had that diviner called the golem he¡¯d brought with him again? Ergl?


    I should have asked more questions about that thing before sending them all back to the planet. I¡¯d dismissed it as a concern, though, knowing it couldn¡¯t be anywhere near as powerful as its master and assuming it would be inconsequential to any fight between the two of us. War golems were a known entity and well within my limits to destroy, but I¡¯d been working right next to a sentient golem for months now. I should have given more consideration to the possibility that Ammun¡¯s golem wasn¡¯t there to fight.


    So he was digging, presumably to get closer to the moon¡¯s core. Why? Was he going to build another tower up here? Was that what he needed to harness the mana into a weapon? If that was the case, then I couldn¡¯t just leave him stranded up here. Eventually, he¡¯d find a way to attack Manoch¡¯s surface even if he couldn¡¯t get home.


    I finished up my preparations for the ritual silo while my scrying spell chased after Ammun through a surprisingly robust network of underground tunnels. It didn¡¯t take much work to figure out where he was going now, not with all the damage being done to any opening that wasn¡¯t large enough for the golem to fit through.


    Without warning, my scrying spell was completely shredded. ¡°I guess that¡¯s where he¡¯s at,¡± I said to myself as I prepared a teleportation spell. A few minutes later, I was standing inside a pitch-black cave, breathing only because I¡¯d taken a considerable amount of air with me. The spell was one used for diving underwater and fighting back pressure, but it had been simple to repurpose it to work here. If anything, it was even easier since it took no effort to hold the air steady against the moon¡¯s natural environment.


    Flying, on the other hand, was a bit more complicated. It turned out that spell was calibrated to function in Manoch¡¯s atmosphere and didn¡¯t work so well out here. The best I could manage was a series of long, floaty hops that almost felt like being underwater, and the spell really didn¡¯t do much to make that happen. It did speed up my progress, however, and it wasn¡¯t like it cost me anything, so I relied on that to take me deeper underground.


    While I was mastering movement in low gravity, a constant, muted banging sound filled the air. At first, I couldn¡¯t understand what I was hearing, mostly because the weird not-air currents of the moon didn¡¯t seem to be transmitting sound properly. Once I realized that, I figured out that the thumps, which sounded more like someone dropping a book in slow-motion than anything else, was actually the golem digging its way through too-tight tunnels.


    Following the distorted sound was impossible, but I didn¡¯t need to. Divinations were enough to keep me on track, and it was too late to keep Ammun from knowing he was being followed. I chased after him, eventually arriving in a large cavern that sloped sharply downward while narrowing into a funnel. The golem was at the bottom, widening the exit, while Ammun floated in the air above him.


    I took a moment to analyze that flight spell. It was an obvious sign that the lich had prepared for a trip off-world far more thoroughly than I had, but that didn¡¯t mean I couldn¡¯t copy what he was doing. Adjusting the rune structure to work with the local air wasn¡¯t going to be possible for me, not if I wanted to keep breathing, but it was good to know what to do if the need to move freely became more important than the need to breathe.Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    The golem itself was fifteen feet tall and could best be described as lanky. It was thinner than I was, with arms that ended in big hands shaped like scoops. The fingers were pointed spikes of mysteel, designed to drive into stone and fracture it. Its legs were only about three feet long, but it had six of them firmly planted to help it hold its position while it dug. I could see spots where it had anchored itself inside the stone to keep its grip, too.


    Surprisingly, this actually wasn¡¯t too far off the standard design of a digging golem used in city infrastructure projects back in my original time. The real changes were in the way it used mana to help it dig and process stone. Spells compacted the stone down to a fraction of its original size, not through transmutation, but through simple force and heat. The lumps it discarded probably would have made for a good building material; that might even have been the original purpose.


    I took all of that in over the span of about three seconds, then Ammun spun in place and glared up at me. ¡°I should have expected this,¡± he growled. ¡°Somehow, you¡¯d find a way to follow me even here.¡±


    ¡°It wasn¡¯t that hard,¡± I said. ¡°You left everything I needed to know just sitting there.¡±


    ¡°And you just so happened to have close to a hundred capable mages on hand to help,¡± he sneered. ¡°How convenient that half my corp of diviners deserted at the last second.¡±


    That made sense, even if it was entirely wrong. I decided against correcting Ammun. There was no need for him to realize I¡¯d modified his ritual to work for a single person. ¡°I¡¯ll admit, having to chase you all the way up to Yulitar was a surprise. I was under the impression that the cabal that managed to turn Amodir into a weapon did so directly from the ground.¡±


    Our voices were warped so badly that it would have been impossible to understand each other without a bit of magic to straighten things out. Ammun did that naturally¡ªthe act of speaking anywhere was a magical process for him¡ªand I managed it by duplicating the part of his body¡¯s animating magic that did that. It would have been a bit wasteful under normal circumstances, but I was hoping to drag some information about his plans out of him.


    ¡°Oh, they did, but not without doing some work up here, first. Foolish little mages. They stumbled across something that could change the world, but failed to understand the true scope of their discovery. They¡¯d barely gotten started duplicating their success on a second moon before they had to unveil their project to the world. Of course, the powers that ruled immediately realized the potential and agreed unanimously that it couldn¡¯t be left in the hands of a group of dissidents.¡±


    ¡°And so you broke the world rather than let anyone else have it,¡± I finished for him. ¡°And now, what? You¡¯ve been back for two years. Already trying to repeat history?¡±


    It was creepy how much emotion a skinless skull could convey. He had no lips, but I could hear the grin in his voice. ¡°Is that what you think I¡¯m up here to do?¡± he practically purred. ¡°Master, I¡¯m disappointed. After everything you¡¯ve discovered and all the ways you¡¯ve interfered, you never figured out the end goal of my little moon project?¡±


    He didn¡¯t appear to be bluffing, but I couldn¡¯t think of what else there was up here worth the effort of obtaining it besides the moon core itself. And that was far too big to take anywhere. Destroying it felt equally pointless. So it had to be the mana itself he was after ¨C but why?


    ¡°I recognize that look,¡± Ammun said. ¡°You¡¯ve got a puzzle to ponder over. You know, I used to be so jealous of that expression. You¡¯d stand there for a few seconds, oblivious to the world, and then just suddenly have the solution like it was no effort at all. No matter how complex the problem, you could pull it apart. I always hated that I couldn¡¯t think like that.¡±


    ¡°Yes, I¡¯ve been meaning to ask who helped you achieve your current state,¡± I said. ¡°After seeing your prowess over our last few years of picking at each other, I¡¯m not inclined to believe you managed it on your own, just like I¡¯m not inclined to believe you came up with whatever plan you¡¯re working toward right now.¡±


    ¡°Always so arrogant,¡± the lich snarled. ¡°Always so smug and convinced of your own superiority. You just can¡¯t conceive of a world where anyone might be your equal, let alone one of your students.¡±


    The golem stopped digging and pulled itself out of the tunnel. It looked up at me, its one large eye a smooth emerald sphere that reflected my own image. Perhaps it was responding to some mental signal from Ammun, but I doubted it. Undead were practically impossible to affect with things like mind magic, which was a double-edged sword when it came to them connecting their minds to others telepathically. Any orders he gave would need to be verbal or visual.


    And yet, the golem had stopped its work and started paying attention to me, which meant that Ergl was smarter than I¡¯d given it credit for. What other surprises did it have in store for me? What other ways could it shape mana ¨C not to dig, but to fight?


    ¡°Mana,¡± I murmured as I looked down at my former apprentice. ¡°Of course. That¡¯s what it¡¯s all about, isn¡¯t it?¡±


    The pinpricks in Ammun¡¯s eye sockets erupted in furious red light, but he said nothing.


    ¡°An entire moon core for yourself. No one to share it with. It¡¯s a lot of mana, enough to reach all the way to the planet itself. And the distance from Yulitar to Manoch is so great that it would hardly make a difference if you were all the way on the opposite side of the planet from the moon, would it?¡±


    That¡¯s what this was. Ammun was tired of being tied to the tower, which could only pull up the mana a broken world core produced. He wanted the freedom to go anywhere at any time. He was trying to tap into a moon and take its entire mana production for himself, just to ensure that he¡¯d never be so starved that he¡¯d have to go into hibernation again.


    He¡¯d be free to hide his phylactery anywhere, no longer bound by distance to it. In theory, there¡¯d be no way to ever truly be rid of him, because it would become impossible to find and break the phylactery. No matter how many times he was destroyed, he¡¯d just come back again.


    ¡°I see,¡± I said softly. Our eyes met. ¡°I can¡¯t let you do this.¡±


    ¡°Kill him, Ergl,¡± Ammun ordered.

 Book 4, Chapter 71

    There was a hundred feet of space at a steep incline between myself and the golem. I could have jumped down there in a single leap, probably without using any sort of magic to assist my movement. For Ergl to reach me was an entirely different matter. It would have to claw its way up what was essentially the side of a mountain.


    I¡¯d expected the golem to have a bit more trouble with that task than it actually did. Not only was it frighteningly fast, but the almost vertical surface didn¡¯t slow it down one bit. Maybe the lowered gravity helped it out, too, but either way, it cleared those hundred feet in less than two seconds. Even throwing myself out into the open air the instant it started moving only barely got me clear of one of its long arms.


    And then that long arm extended, the plates protecting it splitting open to give it even more length. I practically willed a force wall into existence since I didn¡¯t have the time to cast the spell properly. It lasted a fraction of a second, just long enough to deflect Ergl¡¯s shovel-like hand from clamping down on my leg.


    Then the wall shattered, and the arc of my jump started taking me down. Quick as a flash, the golem reversed direction and skittered back down the slope without any apparent regard for the constraints of gravity. Obviously, this golem was designed for more than just digging.


    A chunk of stone sped through the air and struck my shield ward, pushing me closer to Ergl before it bounced away. Ammun picked another one up with telekinesis, this time angling it overhead and firing it off to drive me closer to the ground. I shot it down with a force bolt, which didn¡¯t do nearly the damage it should have, but still had enough momentum to deflect the shot wide.


    I pushed myself upward with a burst of flight magic after taking a deep, deep breath. My air scattered as the magic ripped through it, which gave me at most ten minutes before I suffocated, even with invocations helping me get the most out of the lungful I¡¯d gotten. It was that or let Ergl grab hold of me, however, and that made the choice easy.


    There was a reason Ammun was using pure force magic to attack me. Yulitar¡¯s atmospheric composition was fundamentally different from Manoch¡¯s, and without doing any experiments, I couldn¡¯t definitively say I knew what would happen if I conjured up an open flame or a lightning bolt. Even transmutation could have unforeseen effects.


    Throwing a rock was predictable and easy to do. Sure, it took a bit more effort to make it fly the same speed, and sure, it took a bit of practice to get used to the reduced gravity, but those were trivial problems to overcome, especially with something like telekinesis that ignored those issues to begin with.


    That was why I immediately adopted Ammun¡¯s strategy and started snapping up my own rocks to slam into the golem. It staggered when a stone the size of my chest smacked into its head, but its huge emerald eye stayed locked on me the entire time, even when I managed to knock it loose from its perch with a concentrated barrage at its feet.


    Defending myself against Ammun was surprisingly easy, though I couldn¡¯t for the life of me figure out why he was holding back. Maybe he was just afraid of exhausting his mana so far away from the tower, but the mana here was thick enough that I didn¡¯t think that particular explanation held water.


    I started paying more attention to his mana as he cast a series of weak spells to keep me distracted while his golem leapt through the air to grab me. It didn¡¯t take long to figure out the problem. It wasn¡¯t that Ammun was trying to conserve mana. It was that he physically couldn¡¯t use most of it. It was already tied up with his attempt to bind his phylactery to the moon core. I¡¯d caught him in the middle of the process, and he¡¯d either need to abandon the ritual completely to fight me off or stall me long enough to dig deeper and fully establish the connection.


    In the meantime, all of his spells were constructed by skimming ambient mana at an admittedly impressive speed, but which made for a series of weak attacks that he knew wouldn¡¯t do anything more than distract me. I really only needed to destroy the golem to mess everything up.


    I set about doing just that. I¡¯d been holding back myself, trying to keep Ammun from getting a good look at lossless casting in action. We were both limiting ourselves to intermediate-tier magic for different reasons, but the bigger handicap was mine. Ammun was a lich. His golem wasn¡¯t living. I was the only one who¡¯d suffocate down here if I didn¡¯t end this fight quickly.


    My mana reserves weren¡¯t built up enough to survive a brawl with another archmage without lossless casting, which meant it was time to put an all-or-nothing bet on myself. I needed to reveal what I could do and hope that I¡¯d prepared well enough to stop Ammun once and for all. If I pulled that off, it wouldn¡¯t matter what he saw. He¡¯d be too dead to act on that knowledge.If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    Master-tier telekinesis spells didn¡¯t struggle with the weight or velocity limits their lesser brethren did. It was incredibly easy to pick up Ergl and slam it into the ceiling, then hurl it down the slope at Ammun. He deflected the golem away with a casual gesture, and it twisted in the air to land, cat-like with its six legs splayed out beneath its frame, on the wall.


    Jaws of stone rose up around it and slammed shut, catching the golem in their teeth. I knew that wouldn¡¯t hold for long, not against a construct designed to tear through the ground, but the spell managed to catch one of its arms and pin it against the golem¡¯s torso. That would help hold it for the duration of the spell.


    Metal screeched as stone scraped across it. Even then, the golem¡¯s single eye stayed locked on me while its free arm arced around and slammed down on the jaw-shaped trap. A spark of light erupted from its eye and a beam of pure mana lanced through the air to hit me before I could react. It breached my shield ward in an instant, completely overloading it and leaving me almost defenseless.


    Almost, but not quite. My body was akin to living mana crystal now. Even as the beam tore through my shirt, my skin drank it up. Seared flesh aside, I stole most of the mana from the attack and returned it as an orb of crushing force that blinked into existence around the golem the exact moment it broke free and leaped at me.


    ¡°No, you don¡¯t,¡± Ammun snapped. A wedge of his own mana drove into the orb and sent cracks spidering across its surface. The orb held against the first strike, but the wedge was already in, and a second blow of force magic sent it completely through. Both our spells flashed into mana as they unraveled, and Ammun paused for a moment.


    He¡¯d noticed the recycling aspect of my magic, and far quicker than I¡¯d been hoping. Before he could focus too much on it, I conjured up metal spikes by the dozens and rained them down the slope. As an attack, it was an utter failure. But as a distraction, it worked well enough to allow me to funnel mana into my shield ward and get it back up.


    ¡°You don¡¯t really think this crazy plan of yours is actually going to work, do you?¡± I asked. ¡°I mean, sure, there¡¯s a lot of mana up here, but the sheer miles between a moon and the planet are prohibitive. Have you actually done the math on this? I know how much you hate the math.¡±


    ¡°Shut up,¡± Ammun snapped. That was a sore subject for him, I supposed.


    Mana wove itself into Ergl, empowering the golem and refilling whatever reserves it had spent. Freshly energized, it bounded up the slope and hurled itself through the air to reach me. As it got close, its arms shot out to triple their usual length. I let my flight spell drop and started to drift out of the way, remembering at the last moment that the moon¡¯s lower gravity was going to drop me slower.


    It wasn¡¯t enough to get out of the way. Small squares of force appeared between us, not to stop the multi-ton golem¡¯s momentum, but to try to deflect it up and over my head. The damn thing was too agile for something so big; it just curled at the torso and came right back down toward the back of my skull.


    There was no good way to prevent getting tagged, not without expending more mana than I could afford. The golem struck me, but this time, the moon¡¯s lower gravity worked in my favor. We sunk back to the ground at a relatively sedate pace, giving me full seconds to react. My shield ward still had mana in it, which was preventing direct contact. Its limbs were wrapped around me to stop the magic from pushing it away, all of them steadily tightening in an attempt to overpower the ward¡¯s kinetic resistance.


    I wasn¡¯t going to outmuscle a golem physically, not even pitting telekinesis against it. Sure, I could pick it up and throw it, but that wouldn¡¯t do me any good if it was wrapped around me like a murderous octopus. I needed to switch strategies to take advantage of our relative positions, and I had a good idea of how to do that.


    First, I needed time. I subtly pushed back against our descent, slowing it even further and giving me a few extra seconds. Hopefully, Ergl wasn¡¯t intelligent enough to realize this was anything more than the strange gravity we were fighting under. Then I let my shield ward peel back from the hand I slapped on the golem¡¯s torso.


    Finally, I cast a spell similar to rupture core, only designed to work on artificial cores instead of natural ones. Golems didn¡¯t feel pain, so it wouldn¡¯t be writhing around in agony as mana flooded a body that wasn¡¯t designed to withstand it, but it would weaken a construct to the point that it quickly lost the ability to keep moving. I¡¯d rupture the core, then I just needed to find a way to stay alive for the next thirty seconds or so until Ergl wound down to a stop.


    The spell took no time at all to weave together. It was as simple as wanting it to happen, and my mana leaped to obey my command. Fully formed, the core breaker surged out through my hand, using my fingertips as a bridge to enter the golem¡¯s body.


    Ammun¡¯s magic slammed into the spell, shattering it into motes of unstructured and worthless mana. The destruction was so complete that I couldn¡¯t even claw back the fraction of a master-tier spell I usually recycled with lossless casting, not that I had time to worry about that. At the same time my spell failed, the lich disrupted the flight effect slowing us from hitting the ground.


    Even the weak gravity wasn¡¯t enough to save me. We slammed into the stone slope, my body still tangled up in Ergl¡¯s limbs, and my shield ward popped like a soap bubble. Cloth and flesh tore away as we slid down to the base of the cavern, and I dimly saw one of Ergl¡¯s arms raise up.


    Then it descended on me and struck me full-force. Everything went black, and what little air I still had left in my lungs after minutes of holding my breath escaped in an explosive gasp of pain.

 Book 4, Chapter 72

    In hindsight, I¡¯d overestimated my ability to fight in such a hostile environment. Ammun was far better suited to exist here than I was, even with his magic severely handicapped. Now I was pinned down and suffocating, with a hostile archmage watching for the slightest mana fluctuations so he could counter any attempt I made at saving myself. It wasn''t a good position to be in.


    ¡°Ah, yes, the weaknesses of the flesh,¡± Ammun said with a dry chuckle. ¡°Sustenance. Sleep. Air. Your method of attempting immortality was novel, I¡¯ll give you that, but you¡¯d have been better off transitioning to lichdom instead.¡±


    It was hard to argue, given my current predicament. Then again, I¡¯d have likely been starved of mana a thousand years ago if I¡¯d gone that route. Besides, a life lived as a lich wasn¡¯t really a life worth living. The creature I was calling Ammun now had the memories of my former apprentice, but he wasn¡¯t really him. He was an artificial construct, a caricature of a person that was powered by the real Ammun¡¯s soul, itself trapped in some bauble somewhere. Ammun¡¯s soul hung in a state of perpetual agony while a puppet pretending to be him roamed the world.


    I had no doubt that the real Ammun, that soul entity, had regretted his decision to transform himself into a lich every single second for the last thousand years or more. It was a fate far worse than death to be trapped as a severed soul, and only an absolute fool would consider it an acceptable road to power.


    Death would be my fate, however, if I didn¡¯t come up with something clever in the next few seconds. Once I blacked out from lack of air, that would be the end for me. I¡¯d be completely at Ammun¡¯s mercy, and I didn¡¯t have any illusions about how that would play out.


    I released a burst of mana in a huge, unstructured cloud. It was nothing more than a screen to keep Ammun from targeting my next spell to counter it, a fact that he knew. A wave of dispelling magic rolled across me, dissipating the mana cloud into a fine mist that quickly faded into nothingness. But right after that dispelling wave hit, there was a single moment where I could act unimpeded.


    I activated the recall bracelet on my wrist and the instant teleportation magic took hold.


    I was gone before Ammun could react, but even so, I could almost hear the shriek of rage no doubt pouring out of his mouth.


    Something went wrong in the spell. It twisted and stretched, almost to the point of breaking, then it snapped back into place, and the stone slope I was pressed into disappeared. It was replaced by smooth tile instead, and I immediately sucked in a ragged gasp of air. It was a good thing I¡¯d had the foresight to update my recall contingency to the moon base. If I¡¯d left its destination as my sanctuary down on Manoch, the spell would have failed.


    It was only as I was taking my second deep breath that I realized the problem. Somehow, against my own will, I¡¯d brought a passenger with me. Ergl was still wrapped around me, doing its best to squeeze the life out of my body and being held at bay only by the flickering remnants of my shield ward. Even as my eyes snapped open to take in the danger, I felt mana building up in that brilliant emerald orb in the center of its head.


    A mana beam shot out, just like the one that had pierced my shield ward earlier. It would do the same now, doing painful but superficial damage as my body absorbed the mana. What it would also do was finally allow Ergl¡¯s limbs to crush me. I wondered briefly if the golem was intelligent enough to understand that, or if it was just blindly attacking me with every way it possibly could at the same time.


    Either way, things were not going to plan. I cursed myself for even including the option to teleport with a passenger in the design. Somehow, the golem had gotten carried along with that, possibly because it wasn¡¯t alive in any meaningful way and the spell had gotten confused about whether it was equipment to be carried along. Since it had the mana capacity, it had used it.


    This was why it was better to cast complicated spells manually. Errors like this couldn¡¯t happen if I was in full control of the magic. It was too bad teleportation had such a lengthy cast time. Once I¡¯d allowed myself to be pinned, there¡¯d been no good options left. Ammun¡¯s golem had outmaneuvered me, and I¡¯d failed to adapt to the environment quickly enough.


    That having been said, separating the golem from the lich was the best possible outcome I could have hoped for. I just needed to survive the next few minutes. My mana was low from venting out a whole cloud, but it wasn¡¯t gone.


    I started with grand telekinesis to grab the golem¡¯s head and pull it to one side. The mana beam still flashed out of its eye, but it struck the floor next to me instead of my face. I was still tangled up in its legs, so when my spell sent it careening off balance, I went along for the ride. That only worked in my favor as I flooded more mana into my shield ward and started creating bars of force to wedge between my body and Ergl¡¯s legs.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    It was a tenacious foe, however, one that was unwilling to give up any advantages. Every time I pried myself free from one leg, another one snaked around to grab hold of me again. Finally, I accepted that I wouldn¡¯t be freeing myself by physically repelling Ergl. It just had too many limbs and too much strength.


    Without Ammun here to stop me, I revisited my idea of shutting down its core. It wouldn¡¯t immediately stop Ergl, but it would guarantee an eventual victory in a few minutes. I put together the spell, then reached out to slap one of the golem¡¯s metal legs. Mana arced from my hand into its body, and the shell of magic defending its core buckled under the pressure.


    For its part, Ergl was smart enough to recognize what I¡¯d done. It abandoned all restraint¡ªnot that it had much to begin with¡ªand started firing off mana beams more or less at random while increasing the pressure of its constricting grasp to the point where my shield ward couldn¡¯t hope to keep up with it.


    Small force walls bloomed around me, curved and stretched to contour to a human body instead of being flat, square planes. Even those didn¡¯t last long, but I could recycle the mana I used to chain them endlessly, and I had plenty of ambient mana to draw on as well. Ergl¡¯s damaged core only added to my reserves as I siphoned that away, too.


    Something in the golem¡¯s logic structure finally reached the inevitable conclusion: it was doomed. Even killing me now wouldn¡¯t save it. I could only guess at the cascade of reasoning that led it to the point it reached, but it quickly became apparent that the golem had decided to turn itself into a mana bomb.


    As confident as I was in my body¡¯s ability to withstand the beams it had been shooting at me, I suspected surviving this attack would be a different story. I needed to get away, and I needed to do it now. Attempts to escape the grapple physically had all failed, but I was now at the point where I couldn¡¯t worry about how little mana I¡¯d have left to fight with after. It was time to get drastic.


    I initiated a short-range teleport, this time under my full control and excluding the golem latched onto me. It took almost all of my remaining mana, but that was better than being obliterated in the next ten seconds.


    Only, when I reappeared a few rooms away from my starting point, the golem was somehow still clinging to me. Now that I was clearheaded, I saw the problem immediately. It had stabbed barbs of its own mana into the structure of the spell ¨C not enough to disrupt it, but they had allowed Ergl to hitch a ride along with me.


    Far from escaping to safety, I¡¯d brought the impending explosion with me and run myself practically dry of mana in the process. Was I really about to die, my corpse reduced to dust, on the surface of a moon a hundred thousand miles away from home? It certainly seemed that way. I was out of ideas and out of resources.


    No. There was no way I was letting this happen. I might not have enough mana left in me for a master-tier spell, but that still left me with thousands of weaker spells that I could use. There had to be one that would get me out of this situation.


    Escaping the blast was no longer an option. Now that I knew what the golem had done, I could block it on future teleports. But it was too late for that. I didn¡¯t have nearly enough mana left, nor did I have the time to recover it. I needed to focus on mitigating the damage. My shield ward couldn¡¯t help; Ergl had already proven it was capable of punching through with pure mana attacks, and the wards were fully stressed just preventing the golem from physically crushing me.


    A phantasmal shell might work, but it would only block the mana from hitting me directly. The rest of the room would still be blown to pieces, and the shrapnel would almost certainly kill me. I needed a multi-layered defense, something that could protect me when my shield ward inevitably failed.


    I sucked in mana as quickly as I could, knowing I had only seconds left. The golem¡¯s core was fully destabilized, teetering on the brink of starting a cascading failure that would result in all of its mana detonating at the same time. Worse, it was still actively pushing to make it happen.


    The phantasmal shell appeared around me, shaped more as a cloak clinging to my body than a sphere I stood in the center of. That was a harder shape to maintain, but it was necessary in order to exclude any parts of Ergl from being physically inside it. It would do me no good to let the mana detonation go off inside its arm if that limb wasn¡¯t on the outside of the shell.


    And then I did the tricky part. The whole time I¡¯d been building my phantasmal shell, I was busy casting another spell, one that I¡¯d never expected to use on myself. Force crush created a sphere of force around the target that constricted, tightening until it crushed them to death. It would be my all-around physical defense even as it tried to kill me.


    The spell sprang to life, already small enough to fit inside my shield ward, and only my expert control over its parameters prevented it from immediately tightening around me. Even with my dual-layered defense, I wasn¡¯t confident this would be enough. It was too bad I didn¡¯t have more mana or time, but I was out of options.


    The last thing I did was put up a series of thin force walls between myself and Ergl¡¯s torso, where its golem core was located. Then I felt its mana reach the tipping point and spiral out of control. An instant later, the panes of force started shattering under the pressure of an expanding mana reaction, and everything went white. I lost track of where I was as the force of the explosion threw me around the room, bouncing me off walls, the ceiling, the floor, and chunks of golem repeatedly.


    My defenses were battered, broken, and reformed as quickly as possible. Raw mana seeped through the cracks in my phantasmal shell, then jetted in as I failed to hold the spell together under the onslaught. More mana than I could process bombarded me, scorching my body in the process and leaving me ragged and worn out.


    But then I could see again, and I was still alive. That was more than I could say for Ergl.

 Book 4, Chapter 73

    I laid there on the floor for a minute, just coming to terms with the fact that I¡¯d survived a mana bomb exploding two feet from my face. Even for me, that was an accomplishment. I was injured, in part from my own force crush spell, but I was still breathing. I did make a mental note to design a more permanent version of a protective force crush to cast so that I didn¡¯t have to tweak the spell¡¯s structure on the fly to avoid being killed by it, just in case something like this ever happened to me again.


    Slowly, my body started recovering. Mana filled my core and I sped that process up by processing some of the ample amount of ambient mana in the room. It would take days to regain everything I¡¯d lost if I stayed up here, far more time than I actually had.


    The room I¡¯d teleported myself and Ergl to was completely and utterly destroyed. The walls had collapsed, revealing the adjoining chambers. Most of the ceiling was gone, and the devastation had obliterated the room directly above us as well. The ceiling in that chamber also had some holes in it, and a few pieces of furniture had fallen through to shatter themselves on the pile of rubble scattered across the floor.


    Somehow, the floor itself was actually intact. I suspected that had more to do with me being in the way than any structural integrity the room might have possessed. My own magic had no doubt reflected a great deal of the mana and kinetic energy away from the floor, which also accounted for the greater-than-expected devastation going straight up.


    And yet, for all of that, things were in relatively good shape. Nothing looked to be in danger of falling down, which meant I was unlikely to be buried alive. The spells I¡¯d placed around the base were still functional, as far as I could tell. At least, the important ones were. It was possible some of the ones out where Ergl had self-destructed were too damaged to function now.


    As for myself, my clothes were ripped to shreds and I had a full-body ache, the kind of pain I¡¯d felt at the end of my previous life when it had been nothing but life-extension magic holding my body together. Everything hurt. Literally everything.


    I was tired and drained and ready to drop. As much as I hated to admit it, Ammun had won that fight without even really trying. The moon itself had been enough of a handicap for a simple golem to defeat me. I couldn¡¯t fight him out there, but at the same time, I couldn¡¯t just let him go through with his plans.


    Could I?


    He was almost certainly stuck up here now. Even if he appeared in the next second and killed me, that wouldn¡¯t help him get back to Manoch. If he was to be believed, the cabal who¡¯d pioneered the extreme-long-distance spells powered by a moon had needed to build ritual sites on the moon¡¯s surface in order to turn it into a weapon. They¡¯d only finished one of those on Amodir, which had promptly been destroyed.


    So, Ammun couldn¡¯t get home, and he couldn¡¯t use the moon core to attack Manoch¡¯s surface without spending years building the ritual sites, and maybe not even then. He was going to succeed in linking his phylactery to the moon core, giving him the ability to go anywhere he wanted on the planet with nearly unlimited mana. Except he couldn¡¯t get off the moon, so that was a hollow victory.


    Yes, the ideal scenario was to destroy his physical body, take possession of his phylactery, and shatter it. That was the only way to permanently end the threat of Ammun. But at the same time, if he was stuck up here for even a year or two, that gave me plenty of time to advance my core to stage eight while I tore down his tower and started the process of healing the world core. Even if he made it back, Ammun would be too late to save his demesne, and honestly, him being stuck up here for a few decades while the planet healed was probably the only way it could happen without him being destroyed in the process.


    I could wait a few hours, try to recover my mana, and take the fight back to him for round two. Maybe I¡¯d even catch up to him before he completed his bonding ritual and regained full use of his mana. And maybe if I did, he¡¯d kill me anyway.


    Or I could put together enough mana to get home, trigger the contingency spells to bring down the moon base and destroy the ritual silo so Ammun would have nothing to reference when he tried to engineer a solo-teleportation version of the spell, and leave him to his own devices while I prepared for his eventual return unimpeded.


    I checked the rate I was generating mana against how much I needed. Five minutes, at most. Unless he showed back up in that time frame, I was out of here, and Ammun could find his own way home.


    I hobbled across the base to view the explosive enchantments I¡¯d woven into the ritual silo one more time. Those were the most important ones, and I took the effort to manually activate them. When I got too far away or ten minutes passed, whichever happened first, they¡¯d bring the base down. Once I was done, I sat down and started constructing the spell that would take me home.If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    Ammun never showed up. I imagined he was digging his way deeper underground, slowly creeping toward the moon core with each passing minute. Or maybe he was frantically trying to put together a functional teleportation spell that would carry him across Yulitar to stop me from killing the diviners he still thought were alive up here.


    Whatever he was doing in those last few minutes, he didn¡¯t find me. The ritual went off without a hitch, and I appeared on the peak of a mountain twenty miles from my home. Above me, a flash of light bloomed on Yulitar¡¯s surface ¨C the explosions ripping apart the moon base. It lasted for about five seconds, just a silent speck of light, there and gone so fast I wouldn¡¯t have been surprised if no one else in the world noticed it.


    And that was that. The die was cast. Either I was right and Ammun was trapped on a moon orbiting around Manoch, or I was wrong and in the next few days, he¡¯d show up to personally murder me. Or maybe he¡¯d fire a city-sized mana beam down from the heavens and wipe me out that way.


    Time would tell.


    * * *


    ¡°You just left him there?¡± Querit asked.


    ¡°Yes,¡± I said as I slowed the drip of liquid mana onto the pane of glass. It darkened to a deep blue color for a moment, then turned silver. I angled the glass to get the liquid mana running across its length, then used telekinesis to spread it evenly. When that wasn¡¯t enough, I fetched some more from the giant tank in the corner of my alchemy lab.


    ¡°And you¡¯re not going back?¡±


    ¡°Not anytime soon.¡±


    ¡°But what if he¡ª¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re hoping for the best right now,¡± I told him. ¡°I lost that fight, and I¡¯m not in any shape to try again. Why do you think I¡¯m making this scrying mirror?¡±


    Querit peered at my creation, specifically at the rune-covered silver frame it was mounted in. ¡°I¡¯m afraid I don¡¯t know what this does.¡±


    ¡°Good for scrying on far, faraway places. I made it using the ultra-long-range scrying portion of Ammun¡¯s moon teleportation ritual.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ll spy on him all the way from here?¡± Querit asked.


    ¡°I thought I might get some help from our new friends, the gestalt ant colony.¡±


    ¡°Speaking of friends, I spoke to Hyago on your behalf. He gave me the location of the new grove he¡¯s started and says you¡¯re welcome to come visit as long as you promise not to turn all the trees to stone again.¡±


    I snorted. ¡°That shouldn¡¯t be a problem.¡±


    ¡°I also repelled another two zombie invasions while you were gone. It seems that Ammun¡¯s absence isn¡¯t slowing down his generals.¡±


    ¡°Any further attacks on New Alkerist?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Nothing yet, but the last attack was led by a master mage with a stage four core. My combat frame is basically scrap metal now. I won¡¯t be able to stop another one.¡±


    ¡°Just keep watch for me,¡± I said. ¡°As long as they don¡¯t launch an attack in the next three hours, I¡¯ll handle it personally. With Ammun out of the way, time is on our side now.¡±


    At least, I hoped it was. There was no telling how many more minions like that dragon Ammun might have. With another year of uninterrupted work, I could get within spitting distance of my former strength, but there were no guarantees I¡¯d have that much time. I¡¯d need to make the most of every day, which meant not letting myself get bogged down fighting a bunch of weak mages.


    ¡°Maybe you should consider aggressively training some combat mages of your own,¡± Querit suggested.


    ¡°Or suborning some of the enemy into fighting on my side. Plenty of the children of light weren¡¯t happy to find themselves under his command. There were even some rebel groups which I imagine will keep the loyalists busy in the near future. Perhaps we could lend some support to a few of them.¡±


    The liquid mana coating complete, I stowed the mirror away in my phantom space and stood up.


    ¡°Where are you going?¡± Querit asked. ¡°To the eyrie?¡±


    ¡°I have other things to do first,¡± I explained. ¡°Come on. Time to go.¡±


    The golem paused to make a show of looking around. ¡°It¡¯s a nice lab,¡± he said. ¡°I¡¯m glad I finally got to see it.¡±


    I rolled my eyes and pulled us both through my demesne to the surface. ¡°Think you can repair that combat frame on your own? I have another errand to take care of.¡±


    ¡°Ehhhh. Probably not,¡± Querit said. ¡°If it was just the rune structure, I could. I don¡¯t have the skills to transmute steel like you do, and my silver steel frame is missing the chest plate.¡±


    ¡°Ah, right. That. I¡¯ve been meaning to study that and figure out how to replicate it when I get some free time.¡± I wondered what the odds of that happening in the next six months were.


    Recruiting Hyago. Researching silver steel. Stage eight advancement. Destroying Ammun¡¯s tower. Mysteel scavenging. Training Senica. Testing Nailu and possibly training him, too. Lecturing at New Alkerist¡¯s school. Keeping an eye on Yulitar and watching for Ammun¡¯s return. Defeating the remaining loyalists. Opening up the brakvaw portals and watching out for the gestalt ant colony I¡¯d stuck there.


    And, of course, fixing the world core, which I still had to figure out how exactly to accomplish. Why did I always have so much to do?


    ¡°Where are you going?¡± Querit asked. ¡°New Alkerist?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°Are you going to tell me what¡¯s so special about that town?¡±


    I hesitated and glanced over at the golem. After all this, he¡¯d earned some trust. ¡°My family,¡± I admitted.


    Honestly, getting to see the shocked expression on his face alone was worth it. He stood there, completely poleaxed and staring mutely with his jaw hanging open, as I walked over to the teleportation platform.


    ¡°Wait, what? You have a family?¡± he sputtered.


    ¡°I do. Is that really so strange?¡±


    ¡°For the most powerful archmage in history, who is a notorious recluse that sees the outside world once every few decades at most? It¡¯s a bit weird.¡±


    I laughed. ¡°I¡¯m not that guy anymore.¡±


    ¡°Can I meet them?¡± Querit asked.


    I was about to say no out of hand, but I paused. What was the harm? I trusted him. ¡°Sure, come on.¡±


    Querit, a sapient golem and possibly the first person I could consider a friend in the last five hundred years, joined me on the teleportation platform.


    End of Book 4

 Book 5 Blurb/Catch up summary

    Blurb:


    It¡¯s been six months since Keiran left his greatest enemy stranded on one of Manoch¡¯s moons, six months of feverish work preparing for the lich¡¯s seemingly inevitable return. Keiran is gathering allies and resources, and working to strengthen himself as much as possible.


    But when he hits a bottleneck just one step short of finally regaining his full power, never mind solving it before Ammun returns, he¡¯s not sure he¡¯ll be able to solve it, ever. Distractions abound as payments come due for past aid, an order of archmages takes an unhealthy interest in his activities, and friendships begin to fracture under the weight of both Keiran¡¯s responsibilities and his secrets.


    Can he survive the crushing weight of a lich clad in a moon¡¯s full power bearing down on him, or will he be washed away in the flood?


    ----


    Summary of book 4:


    After two years of effort, Keiran¡¯s plan to create a petrified forest of living stone comes to fruition. It¡¯s now producing incalculable amounts of mana and he¡¯s ready to bind the valley as his genius loci to finish his mana core¡¯s ascension to stage six. The ritual goes off smoothly, and he heads to the town he helped his family establish, New Alkerist, to celebrate.


    After enjoying an evening with his parents, his sister, and his new little brother, Nailu, Keiran is about to leave when a force of armed warriors teleports onto the town platform. Far from being hostile, they¡¯re refugees from a coastal town near the tower that fled by ship. Ammun¡¯s mages are attacking everybody, driving people out of towns or killing them and stealing food and supplies. Keiran takes a day to help get the refugees integrated on a peninsula hidden behind the mountains that they¡¯ve settled on, then starts actively poking around Ralvost.


    What he finds is that Ammun is reclaiming the land controlled by the old empire with military force, and that, more importantly, there are secret facilities beyond even that border that are getting shipments of mysterious components. Keiran lays a series of divinations throughout the countryside in the hopes of finding one of these shipments and tracing it to its delivery site.


    When he returns home, it¡¯s to find a message from Keeper, former records keeper of the Wolf Pack cabal, wanting to talk to him. She¡¯s discovered some passages in old books indicating that the city of Derro has a large quantity of mysteel buried deep underground, originally used as part of its infrastructure. Keiran needs this to patch up the broken shell around the world core, and pays Keeper for the info before descending underground to salvage it.


    What he finds instead are thousands of giant sand worms, all intent on consuming any source of mana they can reach. After fighting his way through, Keiran eventually discovers the cache of mysteel in the form of an enormous pillar. It has layers and layers of metal wrapped around it, each one carved with tens of thousands of runes. They were designed to empower the city with all sorts of functions, not in the least of which was protecting it.


    He also finds a dormant golem, one made of a strange material he doesn¡¯t recognize. Keiran relocates the pillar¡ªalong with all of its smaller companion pieces¡ªand the golem back to his demesne to research them further. After modifying the pillars to work in conjunction with his own wards, Keiran then examines the golem and determines it has an incredibly complex personality matrix, so detailed that it acts like a living person.


    He wakes the golem up by feeding it mana, and it introduces itself as Querit. He is a research golem that was active a thousand years ago when the world broke, who then shut down after being starved of mana. Keiran quickly puts the golem to work in exchange for the mana he needs to survive, and his new assistant proves most capable.


    Keiran¡¯s spying on Ammun¡¯s lands bears fruit. He discovers not only the facility that deliveries are being made to, but that there are eight of them total. Each one is building some sort of complicated machine, one that has something to do with spatial magic and which is incredibly delicate. Working with Querit, he constructs mobile bomb golems that can be remotely piloted. They sneak one into each facility and destroy the machines, hoping to set back Ammun¡¯s plans.


    In the process, Querit comes under attack, but he manages to hold the group of mages that found him off long enough for Keiran to intervene. Their mission accomplished, the pair retreat back to Keiran¡¯s demesne to plan their next move.


    Keiran wants to advance his core again, but to do that, he needs to find a mana resonance point. With mana having disappeared from the world, he doesn¡¯t believe any natural points remain. Querit agrees with that assessment, but suggests that he can help Keiran build an artificial one instead. The catch is that they need to go digging under Derro to find an archive owned by Querit¡¯s creator in order to find the knowledge needed.You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    While they¡¯re down there, Keiran has a realization about the sand worms. They¡¯re much bigger than Querit remembers them being, and they have to have a source of mana to feed on. Keiran theorizes that a piece of the shattered moon¡¯s core struck Derro, leaving the massive crater he¡¯s already explored, and that a thousand years ago, the sand worms dragged the actual core farther underground, where they¡¯ve been feeding off it ever since.


    That much mana would be incredibly valuable in creating an artificial resonance point, and Keiran devises a plan to feed scrying beacons to the sand worms to track their movements in the hope that they¡¯ll lead him to the core. Querit recovers the books he wants while Keiran works on creating the beacons needed.


    Soon after, a group of Ammun¡¯s mage hunters attack the valley. Their attempt fails utterly, and they are quickly killed or captured. He interrogates one of the mages and discovers that Ammun is attempting to build some sort of tether system that will link him to the tower, allowing him to roam anywhere inside the circle of the eight facilities without worrying about running out of mana.


    Keiran traces the mage hunters entry to the island back to one of the brakvaw portals and goes there to shut it down, much to the consternation of Grandfather and the elder council. Unwilling to leave an open portal for his enemies to use, Keiran closes it anyway. Then he begins making plans to fortify New Alkerist, plans which include removing the island-wide teleportation platform network to prevent the enemy from using it.


    While Keiran fortifies the island, Querit is hard at work researching both the designs of Ammun¡¯s machines they gained from interrogating prisoners and adapting lossless casting to give himself an infinite source of mana. Ideally, he wants to expand his research to perpetual enchantments and inscriptions as well, but that requires more work.


    With everything else taken care of for the moment, Keiran follows up on his search for a buried moon core. He goes digging deep under Derro, miles down, where the sand worms are so big they could swallow him whole. Instead of finding the moon core, he finds a colony of ants gifted in mind magic who¡¯ve formed a gestalt entity. Keiran quickly strikes a deal with the gestalt that involves relocating its colony to the brakvaw eyrie, where it will keep an eye on the portals using its divinations in exchange for unlimited food and the location of the moon core.


    After handling that transaction, Keiran finishes his delve. He finds the broken chunk of moon core nestled in the coils of a massive, multi-mile long sand worm. After killing the monster, he extracts the core from its clutches and takes it to the valley, where he harnesses its mana-producing capabilities to increase his demesne¡¯s rate of production even further. Soon, he and Querit are ready to forge their artificial mana resonance point.


    Just as they complete it, Ammun¡¯s forces launch their second attack. Ammun himself makes a brief appearance via a portal and breaks Keiran¡¯s wards, allowing mages to swarm the valley. Keiran and Querit fight them off, killing all of them but leaving Keiran too exhausted to retaliate. He speculates that Ammun must have found a way to spy on them in order to time the attack so well.


    Querit realizes that during his own fight months ago, one of the mages tagged him with a sympathetic scrying rune and piggybacks on the magic to turn it into a two-way viewing. Keiran gains access to the diviners¡¯ hall in Ammun¡¯s tower, where he kills close to a hundred of the mages and frees several dozen more. They tell him about the secret project in the heart of a hollowed-out mountain.


    Before Keiran can follow up on that, Ammun sends his next distraction to New Alkerist. A massive skeletal dragon arrives via portal, shepherded by none other than Averin, the master mage who worked to revive Ammun back in the tower. Keiran fights the dragon off, killing Averin in the process, then returns to the valley.


    They determine that they still have some time before Ammun finishes harnessing a moon to use as a weapon like the rebel cabal did a thousand years ago. Keiran uses that window to finally advance his core to stage seven and gains the ability to use heavy mana in his spells. Fully empowered now, he takes the fight to Ammun¡¯s hidden mountain, where he destroys the undead dragon completely before entering the sanctum inside the summit.


    There he finds the place empty but for a massive ritual chamber that he determines is an ultra-long-range teleportation spell that can take a group of people all the way to the surface of the moon. Using the ritual construct as a base, he pars it down to operate on a single person: him.


    Once he arrives, Keiran quickly realizes that Ammun can¡¯t make the magic work on his own. He couldn¡¯t figure out how to do what Keiran did, and if Keiran takes the group of mages Ammun has left in the moon base back down to the planet, Ammun will have no way home. After sending them away, he tracks Ammun down in a cave network under the moon¡¯s surface.


    After catching up to the lich, Keiran realizes Ammun¡¯s true goal. It¡¯s not to turn the moon into a weapon. It¡¯s to embed his phylacerty in the moon core to create a permanent connection to it as a source of mana. Ammun will be able to go anywhere on the planet with no fear of getting too far from his phylactery and starving himself of mana. He¡¯ll have an unlimited amount of mana to cast spells at the same time. Even if he¡¯s defeated, he¡¯ll simply grow a new body far out of anyone¡¯s reach.


    Ammun and his golem, Ergl, attack and overpower Keiran. Unfamiliar with the strange gravity and needing things like air to survive, Keiran loses the fight and activates his emergency recall, which he¡¯s retooled to take him back to the moon base. Ergl, who is grappling Keiran at the time the spell goes off, ends up coming along for the ride. Without its master to help, the golem is unable to defeat Keiran and detonates its core as a mana bomb to in an attempt to kill Keiran.


    Keiran survives, but is now injured, exhausted, and out of mana. He concedes Ammun¡¯s victory, but, knowing that the lich can¡¯t return to Manoch on his own, destroys the moon base and teleports back down to the planet¡¯s surface. As soon as Keiran recovers, he gets to work adapting the ultra-long-range portion of the ritual into scrying mirrors to keep an eye on what Ammun¡¯s doing up there, just in case, and begins planning the final steps to regaining his lost power in preparation for their inevitable final confrontation.

 Book 5, Chapter 1

    Golemancy was considered by many mages to be the absolute peak of the inscription discipline. To carve the language of magic into a physical object in such a detailed and intricate way that running mana through it created something akin to a living being was a difficult and rewarding task. And, of course, there were infinite variations. Golems could be as simple as having no function beyond opening a door when it sensed someone approaching or so complex that they were practically indistinguishable from a human being.


    The sheer breadth of knowledge needed was a huge hurdle to be overcome. Divinations were mandatory just to allow the golem to interact with environmental stimulus. Invocations and conjurations were needed if the golem was to exceed its base material in any way. All in all, a great deal of skill, time, material and effort went into even the simplest of creations.


    Breaking a golem, however, was quite easy.


    A bolt of pure force, a conjuration of kinetic energy, cut through the air and slammed into the closest golem¡¯s head. It rocked back on its heels precariously before shifting enough of its ponderous weight forward to settle solidly onto its feet and continue its advance. The few seconds it wasted on that were enough to allow me to distance myself from the encroaching line of enemies.


    Ammun¡¯s golems were quite durable, even for ones built specifically with defense in mind. It helped that the tower itself was feeding them all the mana they needed to run at maximum power for an unlimited amount of time. That was a clever bit of synergy there. But it didn¡¯t make them unbeatable; it just meant I needed to adjust my strategy.


    Initially, I¡¯d been attempting precision attacks. Since I had no idea how many golems were defending the lower levels of Ammun¡¯s tower, I didn¡¯t want to burn through my mana going all-out on this batch, only to be forced into a retreat later on. That was still an option, but it was quickly becoming apparent that it would take a prohibitive amount of time to break through with anything approaching finesse.


    ¡°The hard way it is,¡± I told a swiftly approaching golem.


    When attacking a being made of stone that wasn¡¯t actually alive, my options were limited. Fire was worthless. Ice wasn¡¯t much better. Lightning would do practically nothing, and they had no minds for me to dominate in mental combat. That was why I¡¯d opted for force magic initially, but their stone bodies were repairing themselves too quickly.


    I could rupture their cores, but not only would that not destroy them immediately, it would take far too much mana to do hundreds of times. Instead, I grabbed hold of them with a grand telekinesis spell and slammed them around until pieces started falling off. It was expensive, but I was able to siphon some of the excess mana they bled out as they broke down, and the fact that I was grabbing a dozen or more golems at a time to smack into each other helped mitigate the cost.


    My progress wasn¡¯t as fast as I wanted it to be¡ªI had another appointment when I was done here that I didn¡¯t want to be late for¡ªbut it was steady. More and more golems poured out of hidden rooms, relentless in their efforts to reach me and empowered with nigh-infinite mana. I just kept breaking through them as I advanced up the massive intake shaft.


    This was getting annoying. I¡¯d destroyed or disabled hundreds of golems already, not to mention shredding a few thousand mana wraiths on my way down to the tower¡¯s base, and no matter how many I took out, there were always more ready to take their place. When had Ammun found the time to make all of these?


    Maybe they were leftovers from before he¡¯d cracked the world core and destroyed global civilization. They could have laid dormant for all those centuries and only been activated as a defense when Ammun himself returned from his hibernation. That was the only way I could see them existing in such numbers, since they certainly hadn¡¯t been here the last time I¡¯d come through.


    Eventually I won against the masses, but it was a slog. I reached the point in the mana intake shaft where it started splitting dozens of directions and took a moment to consider my approach. What I wanted to leave behind probably wouldn¡¯t be recognized as something the golems should attack, but even if it was, it would only have to survive for a few weeks.


    Just to be safe, I burned the mana to conjure up a platform made of pure force, then spun an enchantment around it to keep it existing indefinitely. If there was anywhere that could afford such an extravagant and wasteful demonstration, it was here. There was enough mana down here¡ªheavy mana, at that¡ªto power the platform for years.


    I stood in the middle and lifted it to float in the air a full twenty feet above the floor. That should keep everything outside the reach of any future golems that might come wandering by. Then, one by one, I started pulling out the pieces I¡¯d fabricated back home and assembling them into one big machine.


    When I was done, I fed it the initial spark of mana to bring it to life, then stood back and watched to make sure everything was working right. It sucked mana in from the environment around it, not bothering the platform it was sitting on, but drawing massive quantities of loose mana out of the air. After a minute of that, it had a sufficient volume to start refining it into the one thing it was capable of making: mysteel.The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    I had no time to watch it after I was sure it was cycling correctly. After all, it would take a full day to make a chip the size of my pinky nail. I simply ensured that there were no problems with the process since I already knew it would work from previous testing. The only variables were whether I¡¯d constructed it properly, which I knew I had, and if the heavier mana down here would cause a problem. Since I¡¯d accounted for that in the initial construction, I was confident everything would work fine.


    What I wasn¡¯t sure about was the golems. Those hadn¡¯t been here last time I¡¯d come into the tower through the mana intake vents and I really didn¡¯t have time to pick apart one of their cores to map out their defense protocols. That was the kind of project that would take days, unless it was something stupidly simple like ¡®attack anything that moves,¡¯ and even then, there¡¯d be additional layers of runic scripts to coordinate with the other golems and determine how best to kill the intruder.


    Golems were complicated.


    With my work done, I retreated back down the intake to the outside of the tower and flew around its base to the next entrance. I was miles and miles deep in an enormous chasm, so far down that no sunlight could reach me where the air was so thick with mana that it would kill any normal person exposed to it.


    The new intake had its own set of golems, proving that I hadn¡¯t just gotten unlucky with my initial pick. I fought my way through them as well, eventually reached the spot I wanted where it split and placing a second mysteel generator. Then I backed out and repeated the process for a third time, but that was all I could get done before I ran out of time.


    I wanted to leave a teleportation platform down here, but I needed to spend some extra effort shielding it from detection. There were still thousands of mages a hundred miles up, many of whom were skilled enough to notice such a platform, and that wasn¡¯t even counting whatever automated defenses Ammun had activated. The best I could hope for was to leave a platform deep inside the intake valve and hope the golems would ignore it.


    I wasn¡¯t that worried about it being destroyed. A platform was a convenience, not a necessity. Losing it wouldn¡¯t stop me from regaining access to my mysteel generators. It would just take a bit longer. I suspected the golems were probably operating on a ¡®destroy anything that¡¯s not supposed to be here¡¯ set of commands, which could very well include the platform. I supposed I¡¯d find out when I came back to check on things later.


    With my work as done as I could get it in the limited amount of time I had left, I used the platform to teleport to my first relay point a thousand miles southeast of the tower. A second jump brought me close to my destination, and a third saw me there.


    Two massive black-feathered birds, each one with beaks longer than I was tall, loomed over the platform. They looked down at me in unison, and I felt mana surge through one up into its throat to form sounds its mouth had no hope of ever accurately replicating on its own.


    ¡°You¡¯re late,¡± the brakvaw said. ¡°Everyone is waiting for you up at the peak.¡±


    ¡°I know,¡± I groused without bothering to explain. Some random brakvaw stuck on platform guarding duty wasn¡¯t going to care about my excuses. I lifted myself into the air with a flight spell and zoomed up the slope, dodging a flock of juvenile birds when they suddenly poured out of a crevice in the side of the mountain. Every single one of them was almost as big as me.


    They didn¡¯t even notice me, so intent were they on each other and their game. A larger, adult brakvaw streaked after them, his voice harsh and screechy as he scolded them. I caught a single glimpse of them looking back and up to see me flying away, then I was around the curve of the mountain and approaching the peak.


    In normal times, it was a huge depression, a sort of bowl left over when the tip of the mountain had been broken off and sent up past the clouds. In the center was a single, enormous roost, home to the brakvaw leader known simply as Grandfather. He¡¯d been stuck there for years now, and even that had been an improvement from his original position on the floating island up beyond the clouds.


    Today, we were fixing that once and for all. Thanks almost entirely to my assistant¡¯s hard work over the last four months, we were finally ready to attempt merging lossless casting into a standing enchantment to make it entirely self-sufficient. If it worked, the magic Grandfather had been continually channeling for centuries to hold the floating island aloft would power itself autonomously, finally freeing the brakvaw patriarch to leave his roost.


    Querit was standing there waiting for me, as were a few thousand eyeless, crystalline ants. Those were a small fraction of the gestalt entity that lived inside the mountain, a sapient colony of mind magic specialists, all joined together in a singular consciousness. On the ground, circling the whole bowl in row after row of runes joined in a complex array of connecting lines, was the inscribed portion of the ritual. If everything went as planned, it wouldn¡¯t be necessary.


    Grandfather had wanted a backup system in place, however, so Querit had labored for weeks to shape the whole ritual, then spent another week going over everything. He was a golem, however, and didn¡¯t suffer from human foibles like fatigue or loss of focus. He¡¯d simply worked, hours upon hours stacking up without so much as a break, until the runes were carved.


    ¡°Finally,¡± he said when I landed next to him. ¡°How was the mission?¡±


    ¡°I only got three of them done. Ammun filled the lower levels with thousands of war golems. I¡¯m a little bit concerned about the machines being attacked, but I took steps to mitigate the chances of that happening.¡±


    ¡°Maybe we can come up with something to trick their sensory inputs,¡± Querit said. ¡°Did you bring back a few core samples?¡±


    ¡°I didn¡¯t have time to sift through the rubble to find one that was intact. I¡¯ll try to preserve one when I go back to install the rest of the harvesters.¡±


    Querit nodded, then turned his attention to the center of the caldera when Grandfather appeared on top of his roost. ¡°Time to get this going,¡± he said.


    Together, we started casting the spell that would free the old brakvaw from his self-imposed prison.

 Book 5, Chapter 2

    We¡¯d tested plenty of smaller enchantments, measured their efficiency and their output, and confirmed our theories. Everything worked as expected ¨C they had higher initial mana costs, but then they recycled all but the tiniest fraction of their expended mana, increasing their lifespan by near a hundred-fold what the old method granted.


    Small enchantments were fine, but there was the possibility that our predictions would fail on something this massive, so Grandfather was approaching the procedure with a noticeable amount of trepidation despite our safeguards. I didn¡¯t expect any issues with scaling things up, but his concerns were understandable.


    ¡°You¡¯re sure you¡¯ve accounted for everything?¡± he asked again.


    ¡°Yes. And if something does go wrong, either of us can manually take over the spell. Stop worrying so much and stop pestering me,¡± I said. ¡°Look, Querit¡¯s in position. It¡¯s time to start. Get out of the center so you don¡¯t disrupt anything.¡±


    ¡°How quickly can you get this online?¡± Grandfather asked. ¡°As soon as I move out of position¡ª¡±


    ¡°I know,¡± I interrupted. ¡°Just move. We¡¯re ready to go.¡±


    Maybe I could have been nicer about it. An objective part of my mind noted that I was still angry about failing to plant all the mysteel generators thanks to the unexpected resistance of thousands and thousands of golems, but that wasn¡¯t Grandfather¡¯s fault and taking it out on him wasn¡¯t fair.


    Before I could say anything, the old grayfeather broke the spell that was holding the island aloft above the clouds and sped out of the ritual circle with two flaps of his huge wings. His bulk landed behind me, shaking the ground slightly as he settled into place. I ignored that and started the enchantment.


    A huge surge of mana chased the retreating trail of Grandfather¡¯s magic up into the sky, steadily gaining on it until it overtook it completely. The first step had gone off without a hitch, and the island would maintain its altitude uninterrupted. If anything, it might rise up a few hundred feet before settling back to its current position.


    Mana raced through the ritual, both mine and Querit¡¯s, as it provided the initial spark to get things going. We had about three minutes before the temporary surge abated and the enchantments were forced to hold the island up. If things weren¡¯t ready by then, someone would have to step in and the whole ritual would be ruined.


    But, for a change, everything went smoothly. Querit did his part of the ritual and I handled mine. The enchantments flowed into place smoothly, each one locking around its fellows to create a unified whole that powered a massive feat of long-distance levitation. It was backed by the inscription array, but that was a failsafe, not a necessity. That had enough mana in it to keep things in the air for an entire day if the enchantments somehow failed, more than long enough for someone to step in.


    They wouldn¡¯t, I knew, not unless some flaw started a cascading reaction that burnt out the mana powering the enchantments before anyone could correct it. And I doubted such a flaw existed, but I understood why Grandfather would be concerned. This was an island he¡¯d spent centuries holding up, and now he was trusting it to the workings of a man who wasn¡¯t even brakvaw.


    ¡°And we¡¯re done,¡± I announced. ¡°I imagine you¡¯ll want to hang around here and reassure yourself that nothing¡¯s going to go wrong. Feel free to do so. You can move through the center now that the ritual is complete. As long as the runes aren¡¯t physically damaged, the safeguard system will stay intact, though it will need regular infusions of mana if you plan to keep it operational.¡±


    ¡°The mana batteries we buried under the stone are holding steady as well,¡± Querit reported as he walked up to us. ¡°At the rate they¡¯re draining power, I would say they¡¯ll need to be recharged once a month, just to be safe. They should last three months without maintenance before the backup has to take over.¡±


    ¡°We will keep an eye on them,¡± the gestalt added, their feminine voice seemingly coming from nowhere. ¡°It is no trouble for us.¡±


    ¡°I appreciate that,¡± Grandfather said. He peered down at the cluster of crystalline ants that had observed the ritual. ¡°Do you think it will all hold?¡±


    ¡°If Keiran says it will, then we believe him,¡± they said. ¡°He has not misled us, so far.¡±


    It was good to see the brakvaw and the gestalt getting along. I¡¯d sort of dumped the ant colony in the eyrie with no warning and Grandfather had been justifiably upset about that. Creating this enchantment to free him from his duties as a living channel for the massive levitation spell holding their graveyard up in the sky had been a sort of apology for that.


    Plus, it was the perfect test to confirm massive enchantments handled the lossless modifications before I risked any of my own demesne¡¯s enchantments trying it. No sense in making sweeping changes to my own setup without checking to see if they worked first.You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    ¡°Speaking of things that work, I also have your new scrying¡­ orbs,¡± I said. They weren¡¯t really orbs, but they might as well have been at a casual glance.


    ¡°Excellent. We will show you where to place them.¡±


    ¡°You guys alright up here?¡± I asked. ¡°Fine if I go take care of other things?¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re good,¡± Querit assured me. ¡°Everything is working correctly.¡±


    ¡°Perfect. In that case, I¡¯ll be on my way.¡±


    I followed the stream of ants as they scurried down the side of the mountain. The permanent portals I¡¯d built for the brakvaw were stationed on a vertical cliff face that had been magically smoothed out, and the gestalt¡¯s lair was right below that. It had expanded its caverns considerably and the stone now looked more like smooth volcanic glass than the rough granite that existed here when the gestalt had first moved in.


    My own access point was a bit grosser than the ones the gestalt used. They simply crawled through the thousands of cracks in the stone, filing in one after another, but I had to use the feeding hole, a fissure opened in the ground that brakvaw dropped whole carcasses in as part of the deal between them and the gestalt. It watched over the portals for threats, monitoring all of them at once, in exchange for what was barely a snack for the average brakvaw once a day.


    The hole was not regularly cleaned. Bits of fur and meat were stuck to the walls. To say it was an unpleasant passage would be an understatement.


    But I could fly and my shield ward protected me from actually coming into contact with any of the remains, so I didn¡¯t complain about it. Instead, I floated through the air to the main chamber, where a massive stone tree grew out of the ground. Somehow, it was even bigger than the last time I¡¯d seen it, despite the fact that stone generally couldn¡¯t grow.


    I pulled the three orbs out of my phantom space and held them in the air with telekinesis until I felt the gestalt¡¯s own magic pluck them out of my grip. Each one was a thousand-sided polyhedron, its facets so small as to make it appear to be a sphere. To anyone other than a gestalt entity, it would be an utterly pointless device.


    For a collective consciousness composed of millions of ants, each orb would let them look at a thousand different places at once. Getting the spellwork small enough while keeping it functional had been quite the task, but I¡¯d been working on them diligently for months now. Much like the enchantments I¡¯d designed to take Grandfather¡¯s place, there was no way to be sure the scrying orbs would work without actually testing them, and I couldn¡¯t do that with my singular mind.


    But a colony of magical ants that specialized in divinations could. The orbs held themselves off the ground, only an inch or two, and the ants climbed up and swarmed them so thick that I could no longer see the mirrored surfaces. Only the fact that mana swept through them told me that the gestalt had activated the orbs, and even that wasn¡¯t enough to confirm if everything was working properly.


    ¡°Well?¡± I asked after a minute.


    ¡®The design is functional,¡¯ the gestalt projected into my mind. Without Querit¡ªa being that had no mind to connect to¡ªhere, there was no need for them to use physical words. ¡®With these, we shall see farther than ever before. Soon, there will be nowhere that escapes our sight. Wherever invaders think to hide, we shall find them.¡¯


    ¡°Good. That¡¯s exactly what I need you to do.¡±


    Ammun himself was trapped up on one of Manoch¡¯s moons right now, but that wasn¡¯t stopping the people running his army from continuing his campaign against me. Of course, they were a lot less threatening without their lich overlord, but there were still thousands of them. Keeping them off my island was high on my priority list, especially with them knowing where my family lived.


    ¡°Any movement up on Yulitar?¡± I asked.


    ¡®This being that you claim is up there continues to block all attempts to scry on it,¡¯ the gestalt sent. ¡®We know of its movements only in the places we cannot look, and while the ultra-long-range scrying mirror you gave us works, a single mirror is not enough to keep track of the entirety of the moon¡¯s surface. Nor would we have the mana to scry so much land so far away.¡¯


    I frowned. ¡°I¡¯m still working on it. We probably won¡¯t ever be able to pierce Ammun¡¯s scrying wards, but I think I can streamline the cost with these new lossless enchantments.¡±


    Surprisingly, the gestalt had proven completely incapable of mastering lossless casting. Something about the way their mana functioned as a collective consciousness ran counter to the technique in a way that we hadn¡¯t quite been able to figure out. Whenever they¡¯d tried to use it, any ant involved in the spell had been disconnected from the gestalt. That had caused several splinter consciousnesses to form that the main entity had needed to excise.


    It hadn¡¯t taken them long to deem even practicing lossless casting too dangerous to continue, despite the potential gains. As inconvenient as that was, I couldn¡¯t blame them. If I¡¯d been forced to cut out part of my body every time I cast a spell, I would have stopped, too.


    ¡°No signs of anything new being built up there?¡± I asked.


    ¡®Nothing in any area we¡¯ve been able to see.¡¯


    That wasn¡¯t a ¡®no,¡¯ unfortunately. It was entirely possible that Ammun had set up underground where we wouldn¡¯t be able to physically see him on top of using a standard set of archmage-level scrying wards. For that matter, it was possible that he¡¯d figured out how to modify the ritual he¡¯d used to get up there and was already back down on the planet, though I didn¡¯t think that was likely. If Ammun had returned home, I¡¯d never have gotten away with placing my mysteel generators in his tower.


    ¡°I¡¯ll keep working on something else to make that easier. Thank you for doing your best with the tools I¡¯ve created so far.¡±


    The gestalt brushed off the gratitude. ¡®It is little enough trouble. We are well supplied with mana and food and a single mirror takes an insignificant portion of our mind to direct.¡¯


    ¡°Still, I feel better knowing you¡¯re keeping an eye on things.¡±


    I left then, stopping only to check on the peak once more before moving on to my next errand. Everything was still operating smoothly up there, much to Grandfather¡¯s delight. It would probably be a few more weeks before he felt comfortable enough to truly leave the caldera unattended, but I knew he was looking forward to seeing the rest of the world in person for the first time in centuries.


    My work on Eyrie Peak was done for the day, so I returned to the teleportation platform and headed off to my next destination.

 Book 5, Chapter 3

    The wastes were a bit unusual for a desert climate due to one simple fact: there was plenty of water. Hundreds of streams came down from the mountains, and near their banks, short grasses or scraggly bushes did often grow. But without mana from the world core, nothing was vibrant. Nothing was healthy. Plants lived or died on their own mana production, which was generally insufficient even with a ready source of water.


    It was the soil that did it, or rather, the lack of soil. The island had never been good, arable farmland, but the cataclysmic disaster that was Ammun¡¯s breaking of the world had driven it to its current state. I doubted so much as one part in a hundred of the island was capable of supporting human life.


    ¡°And you plan to change that,¡± I said to Hyago, who stood proudly in front of a grove of close to a thousand large, healthy trees.


    ¡°Oh, not in my lifetime,¡± the druid said. ¡°But I can get it started. I have gotten it started.¡±


    I glanced at his work. Admittedly, it had only been a year or so and it was impressive how far he¡¯d come, but a century of work just like this wouldn¡¯t be enough to cover even a fraction of the island. I doubted the trees he left behind as he continued to expand would remain healthy without his care, either.


    ¡°This doesn¡¯t seem sustainable to me,¡± I said. ¡°How much can you really do when every tree you grow operates at a mana deficit?¡±


    ¡°By myself, I¡¯d be limited,¡± he admitted. ¡°But I¡¯ve got eight assistants now.¡±


    ¡°You know that won¡¯t be enough. It wouldn¡¯t even be close to enough.¡±


    His voice turned sly and he said, ¡°We might not be able to cover more than an acre or two, but with you helping us¡­¡±


    I laughed. ¡°Hyago, I came to you because I don¡¯t have enough time in the day to do everything that needs doing. I do not have the time to help you.¡±


    ¡°No, but you have ember blooms. I¡¯ll do your herb gardens for you in exchange for some cuttings.¡±


    While that was true, the cuttings hadn¡¯t done nearly as well as the original I¡¯d taken them from. Without that one anchor tree, my whole system would have collapsed years ago. Fortunately, I didn¡¯t strictly need the ember bloom anymore, not now that the petrified forest was complete. It produced more than enough mana to power the wards and enchantments in my valley, and as soon as I got around to redoing those with the same techniques we¡¯d used on Eyrie Peak, even the living stone trees would be unnecessary.


    I couldn¡¯t produce the mana Hyago needed out of nothing, but I could ease the amount of mana the trees used to the point where they started generating excess. Teaching Hyago how to make the enchantments would take far too long, but if I could get Querit out here to set them up, that would certainly help continue the expansion efforts.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think an ember bloom cutting would help,¡± I said. ¡°And the tree still hasn¡¯t dropped any kind of seeds that I can find. However, I have an alternative proposition.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m listening.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ve got some enchantments running to keep your trees healthy, to protect the soil against erosion, climate adjustments, so on. That¡¯s got to be hard on your budget. How much more could you do if you didn¡¯t need to keep the mana batteries topped off?¡±


    ¡°A lot,¡± the druid admitted. ¡°That¡¯s an unexpectedly generous proposal, though. Can you really afford to spend that much mana just to avoid a bit of gardening?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve learned some new tricks since you left my employ,¡± I said with a grin. ¡°Remember what those giant birds taught me?¡±


    ¡°The mana recycling thing? But you said it was only useful for certain kinds of spells¡­¡± Hyago trailed off. Then he laughed and said, ¡°You sly bastard. You figured out how to adapt it.¡±


    ¡°I can¡¯t take all the credit. I had some help from my new assistant.¡±


    ¡°Ah, right. I met him ¨C seemed like a nice enough fellow.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s a golem,¡± I said.


    Hyago¡¯s eyebrows climbed up to his hairline. ¡°That was a golem?¡±


    ¡°The most advanced one I¡¯ve ever seen in my life. I found him deactivated in some old ruins and fed him some mana to get him moving again.¡±


    ¡°Incredible,¡± Hyago said with a laugh and a shake of his head. ¡°And the two of you cracked your infinite mana trick for enchantments. You¡¯re willing to redo ours?¡±This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    ¡°It¡¯s not infinite,¡± I said. ¡°More like¡­ ninety-five percent reduction in cost. If the enchantment could have run for a day without being refreshed, it¡¯ll last about three weeks instead. Maybe a bit longer, depending on the enchantment.¡±


    ¡°That would still help us expand quite a bit. Would we need to do anything?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d expect you to grow some plants for me,¡± I said dryly.


    ¡°Besides that. Would we need to do anything special to maintain them?¡±


    ¡°No, they act just like normal enchantments. Feed the mana batteries regularly and they¡¯ll last forever.¡±


    Hyago nodded along and regarded his little oasis in the desert. ¡°Okay, you¡¯ve got a deal. Let¡¯s talk about what you need grown and how much.¡±


    * * *


    By the time I left, I¡¯d invested far more effort than I¡¯d planned. Monsters were a bit of a problem for the druids, specifically some sort of ringed serpent that apparently loved trees. How or why those existed in a desert was a bit of a mystery, but I suspected they were used to climbing cracks in rock walls and had simply adapted to Hyago¡¯s forest.


    I raised walls to keep out the less nimble monsters and crafted some strong vermin repellent wards under the theory that without any mice or the like to pray on, the monstrous snakes would quickly abandon their new homes under threat of starvation. I also opened a portal to a far greener land, one which Hyago eagerly sent his underlings through to collect copious amounts of good soil and a few new tree species.


    Finally, I opened portals to a few specific locations I¡¯d marked during my travels to allow Hyago to gain access to several breeds of tree I wanted to see flourish on the island. It wasn¡¯t so much that I thought he had a chance of succeeding at his goals in the next century, but if he was going to try, there were a few fruits I¡¯d like to see readily available.


    First was a peculiar type of apple tree. Its bark was a rich, distinctive gold color, quite beautiful in its own right. But the tree¡¯s true value was the fruits that it produced. Each harvest took years to come in, or at least that¡¯s how long it had been back in my original life. With the limited mana available now, we¡¯d probably be measuring its fruiting cycles in decades.


    But those apples could be eaten raw and would grant increased health and longevity. Properly prepared, the effect could prolong a life by a good century. They were so famous that there were all sorts of myths and stories told about them. Having spent a few hundred years eating them myself, I could confidentially say that they worked well at first, though with diminishing returns until they finally did nothing at all.


    Less impressive, but far more practical, I led the druids to some vines that grew grapes bursting with mana. It was no substitute for a good mana crystal, and they would draw monsters to them once they ripened, but they had plenty of alchemical uses.


    Finally, they obtained three shield willows, perfect for travelers seeking shelter. The thick, flexible branches could easily protect against bad weather and hide whoever was camping inside. Even better, a mage who knew the trick of it could convince the tree to fend off predators when needed.


    I got a bit more than I was originally looking for as payment for the extra work. Alchemy relied heavily on various plants grown in mana-rich environments, but it could also make use of monster parts. Those were significantly more difficult to get hold of, for obvious reasons. While the druids weren¡¯t hunters, they were already fending off all sorts of monsters. Adding the mana-bearing grape vines to their orchards was going to make that problem worse.


    It wasn¡¯t much of a stretch to get them to save certain parts for my use. All I needed to do was get a look at a few of the more common monsters while they were still alive so that I could point out what to harvest off them, which was easy enough to do with a few simple divinations pointing me in the right directions.


    ¡°I think that¡¯s everything,¡± I said as I glanced at the setting sun. ¡°And I am officially out of time now anyway.¡±


    ¡°Got somewhere to be?¡± Hyago asked.


    ¡°Family thing. I¡¯m probably already late.¡±


    ¡°Say no more. You¡¯ll send your golem assistant over to do the enchantments tomorrow?¡±


    ¡°Maybe not tomorrow, but sometime in the next few days. We¡¯ve got a lot going on right now.¡±


    Hyago shrugged. ¡°Take your time. Can¡¯t start growing your stuff without the seeds anyway.¡±


    ¡°Right. I¡¯ll get those to you.¡±


    It was technically possible to store seeds in my phantom space, but organic matter was always tricky even if it wasn¡¯t really alive yet. Some of the seeds would inevitably end up damaged and fail to sprout if I went that route, and I wasn¡¯t in that much of a hurry. I¡¯d get Hyago the starter samples soon enough.


    ¡°Good luck with all of this,¡± I said, waving a hand at his miniature forest. ¡°I¡¯m hoping to get the world core itself fixed in the next decade or so. It¡¯ll take a while, but if I can pull it off, mana will start flooding the land again. That¡¯ll make everything a lot easier.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°Huh?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Why the obsession with the world core?¡± he asked. ¡°I know things aren¡¯t the same as how they were in your last life, but you¡¯re plenty powerful. I know how much mana your demesne makes. And I know how little you care about helping strangers when there¡¯s nothing in it for you. So¡­ Why?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not for them. I just¡­ It¡¯s for magic itself. I know I¡¯m not good with people. I¡¯m impatient and rude and have no empathy for them. I run roughshod over everyone I meet, and I get away with it because no one can actually stop me. But magic¡­¡±


    I trailed off and gathered my thoughts while Hyago waited patiently. ¡°Magic saved me,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯d have died in the gutter without it. It¡¯s everything to me. I want mana to come back so I can rebuild what this world lost. You¡¯ve lived your whole life with things like this. You can¡¯t even imagine what it was like before Ammun. If you¡¯d experienced it, you¡¯d understand why it¡¯s worth the effort.¡±


    The druid glanced around at his grove. ¡°I think I get that, a little bit. Living in your valley for a few years really showed me how much better our lives would be if this whole island wasn¡¯t an endless desert.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s true enough,¡± I said. ¡°But I don¡¯t think you¡¯re going to be able to scale this up to accomplish your goals. Still, it¡¯ll be a nice few miles of green amidst an endless yellow and brown. That¡¯s worth something.¡±


    ¡°Says the man who turned his whole forest to stone,¡± Hyago snorted.


    ¡°It wasn¡¯t because I thought it looked better this way.¡± I looked past Hyago to the setting sun again and sighed. ¡°Good luck with all of this, though. Honestly, I hope you prove me wrong. Now, where would you like me to leave this teleportation platform? I need to drop it and get going.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 4

    There was a backpack sitting just inside my bedroom door, presumably packed by my sister. It was the first thing I saw when I teleported to my parents¡¯ home. I chuckled softly; Senica had probably been obnoxiously impatient all evening while she waited for me to finish up everything else on my agenda. Truthfully, the most efficient way to organize my tasks would be to delay this outing until I finished setting all the mysteel generators in the mana intakes of Ammun¡¯s tower, but in the end, a few extra days without them in place wouldn¡¯t make a real difference.


    New Alkerist¡¯s population had swollen to almost double its original size after Ammun sent a few thousand zombies through portals all over the island to attack random villages in an attempt to distract me. I hadn¡¯t taken the bait, with the end result being that a dozen different settlements were destroyed, their populations scattered into the wastes to live or die depending on how well they could fend off the local monsters.


    Querit had done an admirable job rescuing many of the survivors, and the island¡¯s only city had absorbed most of the displaced villagers easily. For those that weren¡¯t interested in city life and had no family elsewhere to take them in, New Alkerist had become their new home. The council had been trying to get me to help them build more housing for months now, or rather to get me to do the standard set of housing enchantments in them. I¡¯d been too busy and had ignored their requests.


    It was for exactly that reason that I¡¯d teleported directly to my family¡¯s house and would be leaving the same way. No one on the council¡ªexcluding my father¡ªwould ever know that I¡¯d been here.            And he wasn¡¯t going to tell on me.


    Annoyingly, it seemed only one of the two people coming with me on this trip was actually here. Senica was sitting at the table, watching Nailu run around chattering and my parents worked together in the kitchen preparing food. Senica¡¯s boyfriend was nowhere to be found. I stood in the doorway, as of yet unnoticed, and sent scrying spells out to sweep the town.


    ¡°You¡¯re late,¡± Nailu announced in a high-pitched voice as he jabbed a finger at me. That caught everyone else¡¯s attention, causing them to stop what they were doing and look up.


    ¡°I know,¡± I said. ¡°It was a very busy day.¡±


    ¡°Told you he¡¯d show up just in time to eat the food,¡± Father said out of the corner of his mouth to Mother. I rolled my eyes and pretended not to hear while I kneeled down and readied myself for my little brother¡¯s charge across the room.


    Just before he could hit me, I swept us both up into the air to spin around in circles while he giggled. I stayed in place, but the arc of his rotation got bigger and bigger until he was flying around the entire room with each pass. Slowly, I settled back onto the floor. Nailu, however, kept kicking his legs and flailing his arms in an attempt to speed up.


    ¡°Hey, not in the house,¡± Mother scolded us after one of his feet clipped a clay jar set on a shelf halfway up the wall. I caught and steadied the jar with telekinesis before it could do more than wobble, but that was the end of the game for my little brother.


    ¡°So, what was the problem?¡± Senica asked as I claimed the chair opposite of her.


    ¡°Ammun left an unexpectedly high amount of security behind,¡± I grumbled. ¡°Thousands and thousands of golems. I only got three of the generators placed and I stayed for almost double my allotted time. The stuff at Eyrie Peak went smoothly, but getting Hyago on board also took far longer than I expected.¡±


    ¡°He agreed, though. That¡¯s something.¡±


    ¡°He did,¡± I said. ¡°But I need to send Querit out there to do probably a whole day¡¯s worth of work now. That crazy druid is trying to reforest the entire island.¡±


    ¡°Reforest?¡± Father asked. ¡°Was it ever forested in the first place?¡±


    ¡°Not to my knowledge, but I guess the basin used to be mostly prairies prior to Ammun¡¯s mistake.¡±


    ¡°Can he actually do it?¡± Mother asked. When I shook my head, she added, ¡°Not even with your help?¡±


    ¡°Not before you¡¯re dead and dust,¡± I told her. ¡°Not the way he¡¯s currently going, at least. Even with a hundred druids to help, they won¡¯t have the time and the mana to cover more than the smallest fraction of the island. The only way this works is if I get the world core fixed, and even then, it¡¯ll probably be another fifty years before ambient mana levels rise to the point where trees could support themselves naturally in this environment.¡±


    My scrying spells finally found Juby, out on the far edges of the south fields. He was staring off into the desert, perched on a rather large rock that marked the boundary of the town. Just judging by how the farmers completely ignored him, I was guessing he¡¯d been there a while.


    It wasn¡¯t hard to put the pieces together. There was only one backpack. Juby was sitting off by himself, sulking¡ªor maybe it was angry brooding¡ªat the edge of town. Senica hadn¡¯t mentioned his name once, even though he was supposed to be going on this trip with us.Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    ¡°So, what was the fight about?¡± I asked my sister.


    She let out an exasperated sigh and said, ¡°It doesn¡¯t matter. I don¡¯t want to talk about it. He¡¯s not coming, if you haven¡¯t already figured that out.¡±


    ¡°I assumed as much. I just wanted to know if this is going to be something that distracts you from doing your job?¡±


    ¡°No, I¡¯m fine. He¡¯s the one being a¡ª¡± she cut herself off glared out the window.


    ¡°Right. Well, if you¡¯re sure¡­¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m fine,¡± she said again. ¡°Let¡¯s just eat and then we can go.¡±


    ¡°Speaking of eating, dinner¡¯s ready,¡± Mother said. Four metal pots floated off the stove to the table and spaced themselves out in the center on a thin slab of thin stone placed there for the purpose of holding them.


    It was a far cry from the cauldron they¡¯d boiled every meal in when I¡¯d first awakened in my new body, but my family had taken to using an enchanted stove with gusto and learned quite a few ways to prepare dishes besides ¡®raw¡¯ or ¡®boiled,¡¯ not that I had anything against stew in all of its infinite variations.


    ¡°Gravin,¡± Nailu said, demanding my attention. ¡°Up.¡±


    ¡°No magic during din¡ª¡±


    But it was too late for Mother¡¯s admonishment. Nailu was already floating through the air in a graceful hop to land on his chair. He even did a flip halfway through, much to Mother¡¯s consternation and everyone else¡¯s amusement.


    ¡°Tada!¡± he announced, holding his arms up and looking about expectantly.


    ¡°Did you¡­?¡± Senica looked at me.


    ¡°Nope, that was all him.¡±


    * * *


    We appeared on a rocky overlook above a few-mile long stretch of old forest sometime later. I was pleased to see that the instant we arrived, Senica spun up a divination spell to sweep the area for threats. It took her six seconds to fully cast it, but the fact that she was using it at all was a massive improvement over her capabilities even a few years ago.


    ¡°Well?¡± I asked.


    ¡°I don¡¯t see anything that could be a threat to us,¡± she said. ¡°Not that I expected to.¡±


    ¡°You never know.¡±


    ¡°I might not, but you do. I don¡¯t believe for a second that you teleported us here without scrying the area first.¡±


    ¡°Oh, I did. But what I consider a threat and what you consider a threat aren¡¯t necessarily the same thing.¡±


    Senica rolled her eyes and stepped off the edge of the overlook. Flight magic took hold of her body and sped her off over the trees to the north. Our destination was only a mile or two away, easily close enough for her to fly at her top speed without getting tired. If she thought that was going to be enough to beat me, though, she was sadly mistaken.


    Ten seconds later, I caught up to her and slowed down to match her speed. ¡®How long can you keep this up now?¡¯ I asked telepathically.


    ¡®Depends how I cast it,¡¯ she replied.


    That was honestly a fair answer. We¡¯d spent some time working on lossless casting, but the truth was that in exchange for reclaiming spent mana, spells were significantly more difficult to cast. For something channeled like flight, that added a considerable burden to the process. Unfortunately, as a stage two mage, mana was in short supply and Senica needed to save as much as she could.


    ¡®Lossless style,¡¯ I sent.


    ¡®At full speed? Fifteen minutes? Maybe twenty. At half speed, I¡¯m good for an hour or so.¡¯


    I mentally translated that to half the spell¡¯s actual maximum speed, which wasn¡¯t bad for a mage who was only technically past the apprentice stage by the strictest definition of what a full mage actually was. Senica met the actual requirements to be a mage¡ªproficiency in intermediate spells in at least three different disciplines¡ªbut it was generally expected that apprentices would also have a grasp on the basic spells in all the other disciplines as well.


    Her education had been¡­ spotty. It wasn¡¯t her fault. Mana was a precious resource now and we¡¯d had to focus on giving her the tools she needed. Even with my recent advancements up to stage seven over the last few years, my own mana was tied up so heavily in fighting Ammun that I hadn¡¯t had much to spare for her.


    This outing was a step toward changing that. I¡¯d done the best I could teaching my sister magic under the circumstances, but the fact of it was that my best wasn¡¯t very good. I couldn¡¯t really afford the time or resources she needed, despite her clear talent. Unfortunately, there wasn¡¯t anybody else around who was really qualified, so Senica had done her best with a part-time tutor and no help with training.


    ¡®Where are we landing?¡¯ Senica asked thirty seconds later when the ruins of an old city started poking through the trees.


    I¡¯d already picked out a spot, a large, three-story building that was missing most of the roof and was near the center of the city. We landed on the moss-covered stone and peered around at the streets below. Old cobblestones had been busted up practically everywhere either by tree roots or by the city¡¯s new occupants, several of which were going about their business under the canopy of green leaves.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t mention how bad they¡¯d smell,¡± Senica said.


    I shrugged. ¡°You¡¯ll get used to it.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d rather not.¡±


    ¡°Think of it as a good training opportunity to practice filtering harmful fumes out of the air.¡±


    ¡°Wait, are you not smelling this, too?¡± she demanded.


    ¡°I am not,¡± I confirmed.


    ¡°That is completely unfair.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯d better figure it out quick. They smell worse up close, and the stink is basically weaponized once you start cutting them up.¡±


    ¡°I regret agreeing to this,¡± she muttered.


    ¡°Too late for regrets. Some of them noticed us.¡±


    Down below, a group of six of trolls were looking up at the roof and pointing. Each of them was over eight feet tall and probably weighed six hundred pounds at minimum. Their skin was mottled green and brown, surprisingly good at blending in with the forest growing up through the ruined city.


    And they were strong, as one of them demonstrated by hauling up a loose hunk of stone and throwing it fifty feet into the air. It flew unerringly at me, only to be deflected at the last moment by my shield ward. ¡°Good arm on that one,¡± I said.


    ¡°Are you going to help?¡± Senica asked.


    ¡°What? Why would I do that. This is why you¡¯re here. You¡¯ve got practically unlimited mana to use and you specialize in fire conjurations. I have every confidence that you¡¯ll defeat these monsters.¡±


    Four more stones, each the size of my head, sailed up from the ground to pelt us. Senica shot me a dirty look and produced her wand. ¡°Yeah, if they don¡¯t split my skull open first,¡± she said.


    Then she got to work setting the trolls on fire.

 Book 5, Chapter 5

    I floated along behind my sister as she flew through the air, moving like a particularly acrobatic dancer to avoid the barrage of rocks the trolls were hurling at us. More and more of the monsters were showing up, and there was plenty of loose stonework to serve as ammunition. Senica spun around, her limbs contorting to get them out of the way and her magic shifting her from side to side.


    I caught my own fair share of attacks as well, but for me, they weren¡¯t such a serious threat. I simply kept an eye on my shield ward and made sure its mana reserves were topped off while I focused on ensuring that Senica was far better protected than she thought she was. The whole point of a training mission was to get real-world experience, after all. If she knew that I had invisible strands of telekinesis threaded around her, ready to stop any attack that she couldn¡¯t dodge, she wouldn¡¯t be trying so hard to keep herself safe.


    Of course, just dodging wasn¡¯t going to win this fight, so while Senica darted through the air, she was also flicking her wand out and dropping lines of fire on the trolls. Back in my day, trolls had a well-known weakness to being burnt, but apparently these ones had gone without any sort of predators in their environment for so long that they¡¯d forgotten it was possible to be hurt.


    Senica taught them better.


    At first, the trolls ignored her retaliatory spells. That was their primary method of defense ¨C to just accept any number of hits in exchange for one of their own. They were monstrously strong, probably used to ending a fight with anything they could reach in a single blow. It wasn¡¯t until more than a dozen of their numbers were on the ground, bellowing so loud that they shook the leaves off the trees, that the rest finally realized something was wrong.


    Predictably, their response was to simply keep doing what they¡¯d been trying all along. If it were just Senica up here, it probably would have worked, too. More and more trolls kept showing up; more and more rocks filled the air. Even with some of them targeting me, it was getting to be too much for Senica.


    ¡°Time to retreat,¡± she announced.


    We flew up together, her dodging around rocks and me just deflecting them away, until we were five hundred feet up and well out of the range of the trolls. Dozens of them stared up at us, their prominent, floppy noses sniffing repeatedly and squished, beady little eyes squinting to pick us out from so far away.


    ¡°Thoughts?¡± I asked.


    ¡°There are a lot of them,¡± she said. ¡°More than I thought I¡¯d be facing at one time. They take longer to kill than I was expecting. I think it¡¯s safe to say I underestimated how difficult a fight this would be.¡±


    ¡°What else?¡±


    ¡°I need something better than just dodging for defense. I think it might be easier to just stay away from them and modify my conjurations to increase their range. I won¡¯t get all of them that way, but we don¡¯t need to kill all of them, do we?¡±


    ¡°That depends entirely on whether you can harvest troll blood without killing everything in the area first,¡± I said.


    ¡°You know I can¡¯t.¡±


    Troll blood worked well as an alchemical reagent, but it did require a lot of work refining it into something suitable for use. Like many monsters, trolls could use mana instinctively to mimic various magics. In the case of trolls, they could recover from almost any kind of damage given enough mana. Fire was the hardest to bounce back from, but if they had the time, they¡¯d regenerate charred flesh, too.


    That magic was present mostly in their blood, which of course circulated everywhere and repaired the body using the same mechanics as a regeneration spell. It was entirely possible to create a synthetic liquid for use in alchemy that did the same thing, but it was also altogether cheaper and faster to harvest troll blood and purify it. Since Senica couldn¡¯t rely on my mana reserves for her own purposes, we were going to be working on the harvesting and purification process tonight.


    ¡°Alright,¡± I said, looking down at the assembled trolls and counting upwards of a hundred. ¡°This is partially my fault for being so late. Dusk is the prime hunting time for trolls, so there are more active now than usual. That having been said, sometimes you¡¯ll have to deal with suboptimal circumstances. If I wasn¡¯t here, how would you adapt to the extra challenges?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d wait for the sun to come back up,¡± Senica said dryly. ¡°I¡¯m not in any hurry, certainly not enough of one to justify taking more risks than necessary.¡±


    I laughed. ¡°Excellent answer. That¡¯s exactly what you should do. But what if there was a pressing need for this reagent? Someone is injured and you need to make a healing potion.¡±


    ¡°Well, it¡¯s not like I need dozens of trolls for this. I¡¯d scry for an isolated troll off on the outskirts of the city, bait it to a location I¡¯d already secured, kill it there, and bleed it dry.¡±This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    ¡°Good, good. That¡¯s smart. Rational. It¡¯s the path forward with the least resistance and the least risk. However¡­¡±


    Senica groaned. ¡°Why do you have to keep changing the rules?¡±


    ¡°Why should you only take one lesson from this mission when you could explore multiple scenarios?¡± I countered.


    She just groaned again. ¡°Fine, what restrictions are you adding this time?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re trying to retake the city so it can be filled with human settlers. Every troll needs to be killed in order to make this dream a reality.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s dumb. Why would I try to take an entire city by myself?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re the only one who can. Everyone else in your group is too busy trying to find food and keep your base camp safe.¡±


    ¡°We would just go live somewhere else. There¡¯s nothing worth fighting over here.¡±


    ¡°Sure there is,¡± I said. ¡°According to Keeper, there¡¯s a fortune in mysteel under the city.¡±


    ¡°Mysteel is worthless to anyone but you,¡± she pointed out.


    ¡°And I¡¯m paying you a fortune to retrieve it for me, but in order to accomplish that, you need to clear out the troll tribes in the city.¡±


    Senica paused to consider that. ¡°Is there actually a bunch of mysteel under the city?¡±


    ¡°Yes. That¡¯s why I¡¯m here,¡± I said. ¡°You¡¯re here to get some hands-on problem-solving experience. At minimum, you need to secure a portion of the ruins so that I can dig uninterrupted.¡±


    ¡°Again, I wouldn¡¯t come here myself.¡±


    ¡°Your trusty companions have met a variety of bad ends along the way. You¡¯re all that¡¯s left and the job is depending entirely on you.¡±


    ¡°In that case, it doesn¡¯t matter if I can harvest any troll blood. I¡¯m burning the whole city down. There are plenty of trees I can light up. The trolls will either burn to death or they¡¯ll flee. Either way, you can dig in peace.¡±


    I considered the city below us. It was overgrown, most of the buildings swallowed up by nature. In fact, it was surprisingly green compared to everywhere else I¡¯d been in the new world. That made me wonder what else I¡¯d find buried under its streets. When Keeper had come to me with information about a city called Geldrisa, everything she¡¯d found had led us to believe the setup would be similar to Derro. I was starting to suspect that wouldn¡¯t be the case.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think you fully appreciate how hard it is to get a wildfire started, or how hard it is to stop one,¡± I said. ¡°But that¡¯s alright. This is an impossible job, and I know that you know that. Let¡¯s narrow down the scope. Your new mission is to clear everything in that block of the city.¡±


    I pointed to a square that had at one time held a public fountain, but these days was filled with thin trees that hung over the edges of a green, scum-covered pond. Trails worn through the brush told me that trolls¡ªand possibly other monsters¡ªwere using it as a watering hole, but that wasn¡¯t why I¡¯d picked it.


    The north side of the square had what looked like some sort of temple, miraculously intact even after a thousand years of neglect. Vines ran up its walls, thick leafy things that pulsed with mana. Even as I watched, two new vines crept out through a crack and stretched out to catch hold of nearby tree branches.


    ¡°Uh, what was that?¡± Senica asked.


    ¡°Different type of monster,¡± I said. ¡°Probably why that building is still in one piece. The trolls must know better than to get near.¡±


    ¡°And you want me to fight that?¡±


    ¡°No. I want you to secure the square. I¡¯ll handle whatever¡¯s inside the temple.¡±


    ¡°You make it sound so easy,¡± she said. ¡°How many trolls do you think will come running when the fighting starts.¡±


    ¡°I guess that depends on how many of them you¡¯ve made afraid of fire. My advice would be to keep a clear escape route and not to overestimate yourself.¡±


    ¡°Oh, sure. I¡¯ll just abandon you.¡±


    I rolled my eyes. ¡°I appreciate the show of loyalty, but when we go back down, I¡¯ll be working and you¡¯ll be training. I don¡¯t actually need you to protect me from a bunch of forest trolls. Now, I¡¯ll be clearing out the interior of the temple. You¡¯ll be killing or driving off anything else that comes into that square. Hold it for as long as you can, then retreat. Don¡¯t follow me into the temple.¡±


    ¡°I can do that,¡± she said, but she didn¡¯t sound too sure of herself. That was good. This job was too big for her to handle and I wanted her to get some experience feeling the limits of her abilities while I was around to bail her out if she overestimated herself.


    ¡°Here we go, then.¡±


    We descended through the canopy using force spells to make a hole and landed on the north side of the pond. The ruined stone face of the fountain statue sticking halfway out of the center of the water stared at us, what little that was left of its expression somehow mournful. I spared a moment to wonder if Keeper knew this particular statue¡¯s history and what, if any, relation it had to the temple it faced.


    Then the first troll appeared between the trees a hundred feet away. It paused, its nostrils flaring as it sniffed the air, then advanced into the open. ¡°Can it really smell us from that far away?¡± Senica asked.


    ¡°Probably. Their eyesight isn¡¯t that great, but their noses help them make up for it. They¡¯re pursuit predators, and this is how they run down their prey. Fortunately, trolls are dumb as a rock, barely even sentient. Just don¡¯t let their numbers overwhelm you.¡±


    ¡°Got it,¡± she said, flicking her wand to where a second troll had appeared and igniting the air around it into flames.


    While she torched the incoming trolls, I floated through the air, my feet a foot or so off the ground to avoid touching any of the vines coming out of the temple¡¯s main door. I noticed that several of them stirred as I approached, somehow sensing my passage anyway. Something must have confused them, because they didn¡¯t lash out at me, not that they would have been able to grab me anyway, and I drifted by unhindered.


    I¡¯d chosen the temple as my base of operations for two reasons. First, it was highly defensible, being one of the few buildings left in Galdrisa that was mostly intact. Second, it had several sublevels below it that would save me a few hundred feet of digging.


    The drawback was that I needed to kill this plant monster living down in the basement, but, well, there were always going to be monsters no matter where I started. I might as well enjoy the perks of using this temple. Besides, maybe the plant monster would be alchemically interesting.


    As I entered the foyer, vines writhed across the walls and rose up behind me, weaving themselves together into a living net that blocked my retreat. I glanced back over my shoulder, snorted, and flew deeper inside the temple.

 Book 5, Chapter 6

    There wasn¡¯t a single inch of bare stone to be found. Instead, layer upon layer of vines coated everything, even the ceiling. I wasn¡¯t sure how exactly they clung to the stone, but my guess was some sort of magic rather than the physical methods non-mobile vines used.


    There were surprisingly still, considering the plant monster had made its move to seal off the exit. I¡¯d expected an attack already. When that didn¡¯t happen, I flew over to the interior door and sent a burst of force blades scything through the vines clogging the entrance. They were so thick that I wouldn¡¯t even have known there was a door there at all if not for the scrying I¡¯d already done.


    The monster, predictably, didn¡¯t appreciate me cutting apart its vines. The entire temple quivered as its body flexed and ripped itself free. By the time the room was done coming to life, I¡¯d already flown past it and blocked the door with a force wall. The mana drain was negligible enough that I decided to just leave the spell active purely to inconvenience my opponent. If it wanted those particular vines to be part of this battle, it would need to withdraw them through the various cracks and side passages they¡¯d filled.


    The monster had filled the interior of the temple over years and years, and there were plenty of vines ahead of me. As soon as I floated out of the foyer, I was set upon by a hundred or so, all lashing out as one in an attempt to batter and restrain me. Individually, their attacks were too weak to matter, and that meant there was no danger of them piercing my shield ward.


    Monsters like this didn¡¯t really care about individual attacks failing, not when they had thousands of limbs to bring to bear. Additionally, plants didn¡¯t feel pain like animals did, which meant that while the monster definitely knew I¡¯d damaged it, I¡¯d done nothing to actually slow it down.


    My only concern here was that I could conceivably be pinned down, though the vines couldn¡¯t actually grab hold of me. Even if that remote possibility came to pass, I saw no reason I couldn¡¯t simply brute force my way free, so I advanced without concern. Blades of force rotated around me, chopping apart anything that got within their range and allowing me access the inner rooms of the temple.


    I didn¡¯t bother heading for the main worshipping hall. There was nothing interesting there, and the heart of this monster was underground. I followed the hallways, stopping occasionally to hack through walls of vegetation, until I reached the staircase leading down into the cellar.


    While I worked my way forward, I kept an eye on Senica outside. She was doing well, mostly because the trolls had quickly rediscovered their fear of open flames. The trees provided excellent cover as she flitted through their upper branches and ducked behind the trunks. Even better, the trolls themselves were wary about getting too close to the temple, which greatly reduced the amount of open space they could occupy in the square.


    More than one of them had been snagged by the surprisingly strong vines and dragged into the temple. Unlike me, they hadn¡¯t made it past the first room and now their regeneration was working against them as the vines repeatedly tore off chunks of flesh and wormed their way inside the trolls¡¯ bodies. Eight of them were being slowly pulled deeper and deeper into the temple, all still alive while the vines repeatedly tore them apart.


    It was a gruesome reminder of the fate that awaited me if my magic were to fail for some reason. I could take some solace in the fact that I¡¯d be dead in under a minute, at least. Those trolls would last for as long as they still had mana in them. The irony that this plant monster was essentially doing the same thing to them that we¡¯d come to do¡ªdrain them of their blood¡ªwas not lost on me.


    Light spells guided me forward, not that I really needed them with all the divinations I had going right now. I flew at a sedate pace, a little slower than an unempowered run. If I¡¯d had any concerns about running out of mana, now was when I would have turned back. The stairwell was a writhing mass of vines, these ones covered in metallic thorns instead of leaves. As they reared up and snapped at me, I could see the gouges in the stone walls beneath them.


    That made them considerably more dangerous than the outer defenses, enough so that I felt it would be impractical to let my shield ward handle them. I cast a spell to drain the heat from the area that flash froze every vine ahead of me. That wouldn¡¯t kill the plant monster as a whole, but it did make it exceedingly easy to bust up this particular section with a simple force wave.


    The first basement level had two sets of stairs leading back up to the ground floor and one more leading even deeper. It wasn¡¯t clear what exactly the purpose of that layout was, but I¡¯d already figured out the entire layout before I entered the temple, so I wasn¡¯t worried about finding my way. I simply floated through the darkness, only my light orb bobbing ahead to illuminate my path.


    Up above, Senica had gotten herself into a bit of a sticky situation. She¡¯d overcommitted to the east side of the square, and had done an admirable job of keeping those trolls at bay. As a result of that effort, more trolls on the west side had gotten to the point where they could start climbing trees to get at her. That, combined with the third group on the south side who were bombarding her position with rocks, was making it hard for her to fight back.Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.


    I could see a few ways to turn things around, but I wasn¡¯t sure Senica had the skill needed to cast so many spells in that tight a timeframe. The point where she needed to break away from the fight and flee was fast approaching, and if she didn¡¯t realize it in time, I¡¯d have to go rescue her.


    I figured she¡¯d last another few minutes one way or another, so I hurried down a third set of stairs and found myself in the plant¡¯s core room. It was a massive grayish-purple sac that hung suspended from its own vines. Thick, razor-edged, ropy lengths of vegetation were tangled all throughout the room, wrapped around the stone pillars supporting the temple overhead. The whole room writhed like a pit of snakes crawling across each other, and the second the core came into sight, I was under attack.


    Ice flowed out across the room, radiating from me and lancing toward the core a hundred feet away. It caught the vines in the air and buried them as more and more layers built over the plants. Unlike what I¡¯d used upstairs, this wasn¡¯t an instant effect. It took several seconds for the ice to coat the room, which was far too large for my previous spell to cover.


    It probably wouldn¡¯t kill any part of the plant monster, either, but I didn¡¯t need it to. Now that I had access to the core, it would be a simple matter to finish it off. I formed a force lance and launched it across the basement to strike the sac, only for the magic to rebound and shatter.


    ¡°Huh. That¡¯s¡­ surprising.¡±


    Fire exploded around it, but did little more than leave greasy soot across the sac¡¯s surface and thaw out half an inch of ice over the nearby vines. I approached cautiously and studied the sac, both with my eyes and with a series of divinations.


    The first thing I realized was that I¡¯d been mistaken about the sac. It wasn¡¯t any sort of vegetation or fruit like its appearance had led me to believe. It was hardened, like an ironbark tree. Strangely, it didn¡¯t seem to be any sort of innate magical invocation, either.


    I prodded it a few times while I analyzed its composition, then pulled back in surprise. Unless I was very much mistaken, this plant was actually an incredibly valuable find. Not destroying it was going to make digging here harder, though. It might be worth finding some other starting location just to preserve this specimen.


    I summoned my scrying mirror and fed a trickle of mana into it. ¡°Querit,¡± I called out, but, annoyingly, he didn¡¯t answer. ¡°Come on. What are you so busy with?¡±


    That wasn¡¯t exactly fair, considering how much work I¡¯d dumped on him to do for Hyago. My golem assistant did have the advantage of never needing to sleep or rest, which gave him the ability to get through an incredible amount of work very quickly, but it had only been a few hours since I¡¯d filled his plate. He was probably just doing what I¡¯d asked.


    ¡°Keiran?¡± a voice came out of my mirror a few seconds later. I glanced down at it and blinked.


    ¡°Hyago,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯ll assume Querit¡¯s busy redoing enchantments.¡±


    ¡°He is, but if it¡¯s urgent, I could go get him.¡±


    Now that I thought about it, Hyago was someone who¡¯d be interested in this, too. ¡°Take a look,¡± I said, angling the mirror to catch the core sac¡¯s reflection. ¡°Some kind of plant monster that took over tens of thousands of square feet with prehensile vines. This is what¡¯s at the center, about fifty feet underground.¡±


    ¡°A plant monster,¡± the druid said, his tone not quite unfriendly but clearly unimpressed.


    ¡°Yes. That¡¯s not the interesting part. The vines are all held down with a layer of ice right now, but they¡¯ve got razor-edged thorns growing out of them. And this thing,¡± I said, pausing to rap a knuckle against the sac. ¡°This is entirely metal. Living, growing, biological metal.¡±


    ¡°Not really metal,¡± Hyago argued. ¡°Just a plant structure that mimics the properties of metal when it¡¯s charged with mana.¡±


    ¡°No,¡± I said with a laugh. ¡°That¡¯s what¡¯s so interesting. It¡¯s not using any mana to maintain its structure. I think it¡¯s actually growing this way. It might be doing some sort of transmutation to use troll blood to fuel the change, but once it¡¯s complete, it stays that way.¡±


    ¡°Really?¡± Hyago was eyeing the plant hungrily now.


    ¡°I¡¯m thinking about cutting the vines and relocating the sac for further study,¡± I said. ¡°Would you be interested in being part of that?¡±


    ¡°I¡­¡± He paused and shook his head with a sigh. ¡°I have too much work to do already. There just aren¡¯t enough hours in the day. Let me go grab your golem for you¡ª¡±


    ¡°Damn it,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯ll be right back. I have to go save an overconfident teenager from her own bad decisions.¡±


    ¡°Wait, what?¡±


    But I was already gone. Phantasmal step would have been the perfect spell to get out of the temple quickly, except that it couldn¡¯t pass through living objects and everything was coated in vegetation. Instead, I used an expensive combat teleport with a limited range to pull myself five hundred feet straight up.


    I appeared in the sky just in time to watch a troll leap out of a tree and catch my fleeing sister by her foot. She plummeted with the monster, unable to hold both their weights and not strong enough to break its grip. With a sigh, I caught them in a grand telekinesis spell, broke the troll¡¯s fingers in an act of precision, and flung it away. Then I pulled Senica up into the air next to me and looked her over.


    ¡°I¡¯m going to bruise where it grabbed me, but I¡¯m fine,¡± she said.


    ¡°I¡¯m still disappointed. I thought you knew when to disengage.¡±


    ¡°I was trying to! I wasn¡¯t expecting the damn tree to come to life and grab me.¡±


    I frowned at that and mentally reviewed what I¡¯d seen with my scrying spells. It was subtle, but she was telling the truth. There was a moment, just when she¡¯d decided to cut and run¡ªprobably about thirty seconds later than she should have, but still with enough room to escape¡ªwhere a branch shifted in front of her.


    It could have been the wind, if I looked at that branch in isolation. But it wasn¡¯t. Nothing else had moved ¨C just that one branch.


    ¡°Huh,¡± I said. ¡°This place is full of interesting flora.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 7

    The mystery of the mobile tree would have to wait. I¡¯d left my scrying mirror down by the plant core in my rush to bail Senica out of trouble. Taking her back underground with a teleportation spell wasn¡¯t really feasible, not because it was impossible, but because the quick combat versions didn¡¯t generally allow for passengers. There wasn¡¯t much point in casting a full teleportation spell just to move a few hundred feet when we weren¡¯t in that big a rush, so we flew back instead.


    ¡°This place is creepy,¡± Senica said. She peered around at the mass of vines wherever they¡¯d survived my initial passage. New vegetation had crawled in to cover some of the bare patches of stone, but they hadn¡¯t finished the job yet. Perhaps reaching the monster¡¯s core had caused it to divert its resources away, or perhaps it simply wasn¡¯t fast enough to grow new appendages in such a short amount of time.


    Either way, the second trip underground went much faster. I deflected the plant¡¯s feeble attacks when it mustered the strength to make the attempt and spared a brief moment to wonder if there were actually two plant cores whose bodies were tangled together, but if that had been the case, my scrying spells would have located the second one.


    I frowned and traced the vines that were still moving back into the darkness. Could a second core be buried somewhere outside the temple¡¯s stone walls? I could picture its core hidden away, the vines penetrating cracks in the walls and infesting the interior. There were thousands of them covering the temple; it was certainly possible that there was more than one core. What was less likely was that my divinations had failed to detect them.


    Once I removed the core I knew about, that would settle the question. The vines attached to it would wither and die, and if anything was still moving about, I¡¯d know there was a second core. Before that, I needed to determine how best to go about preserving the sac of biological metal for future experimentation.


    ¡°What¡­ is that?¡± Senica asked, her face twisted into a mask of disgust.


    Admittedly, the sac looked something like an enormous raison with a tree trunk¡¯s worth of intertwined vines coming out of the top, but it wasn¡¯t that ugly. ¡°It¡¯s the part of this monster I want to preserve,¡± I said. ¡°Somehow, it¡¯s growing metal like living tissue.¡±


    ¡°It looks like a bruised ball sac. And why it is¡­ uh¡­ pulsing?¡±


    Choosing to deliberately ignore part of that description for the time being, I asked ¡°Pulsing?¡±


    ¡°The temperature.¡±


    ¡°Hmm¡­ I haven¡¯t looked at it that way yet.¡± I cast a quick heat sensing divination and confirmed Senica was correct. The temperature was fluctuating over the course of a minute or so, peaking at a point so hot that the sac should have been glowing red before dipping back down to a more reasonable level, only to pulse out another wave of heat again. Each time, heat rushed down the vines before they cooled again.


    ¡°Ah, I see. It wasn¡¯t doing that before. I think it¡¯s generating heat to counteract the ice blanket I laid on the vines here. Look there, you can see where it¡¯s almost completely melted its way free.¡±


    ¡°Should we do something about that?¡±


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you take care of it?¡± I suggested. ¡°Ice is just the opposite of fire. You should be able to thicken up that layer easily.¡±


    We both knew it wasn¡¯t that easy. Conjuring up an ice prison involved condensing water out of the air while simultaneously pulling heat away to freeze everything, which wasn¡¯t that complicated, but was mana intensive. Since Senica was working off the mana I¡¯d donated to her, she didn¡¯t have any room to complain about the expense.


    Scowling, she set about renewing the ice layer keeping us safe from being mauled by razor-thorned vines while I circled back around to my mirror. Both Hyago and Querit were visible in it now, talking in hushed tones and scribbling down notes while they waited for me to come back.


    ¡°Keiran,¡± the golem said when he spotted me. ¡°You find the most interesting things.¡±


    ¡°This one was entirely on accident. But I think this might be the key to something big. I just need to figure out how to extract the core without killing it.¡±


    ¡°How important could it be?¡± Hyago asked. ¡°It¡¯s novel to see metal growing, sure, but I know you can transmute any quantity you need easily enough.¡±


    ¡°For steel or gold, yes. But what I need is a massive amount of mysteel.¡±


    Querit¡¯s eyes lit up with understanding, but Hyago just looked confused. ¡°What¡¯s mysteel, and why do you need it? And what does it have to do with this monster?¡±


    ¡°Mysteel is nigh-indestructible,¡± Querit explained. ¡°It doesn¡¯t form naturally and takes prohibitive quantities of mana to transmute.¡±If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    ¡°It¡¯s also what surrounds the world core,¡± I added. ¡°Patching up the hole Ammun tore in it when he blew up a moon is going to be difficult. If I could get this thing to start growing bio-mysteel, then replicate that a few hundred times, that would go a long way toward harvesting the amount I¡¯m going to need.¡±


    ¡°So, the same strategy you used making the petrified forest?¡± Hyago asked.


    ¡°Same theory, at least. I¡¯m sure it¡¯ll be a vastly different process, if it even works at all.¡±


    ¡°Are you bringing that thing back to my grove?¡±


    I shook my head. ¡°Too dangerous. I¡¯m sure it¡¯ll put every effort into regrowing its vines once I amputate them. It¡¯ll go back to my demesne where I can ensure it can¡¯t hurt anybody.¡±


    ¡°Let¡¯s get a look at the top of the core,¡± Querit said. ¡°I think I know what to do, but I need to check something first.¡±


    I obliged him and tilted the angle of the mirror to give him the view he wanted. Tendrils of a divination reached out through the mirror and burrowed into the sac while I watched, and a minute later my assistant and Hyago were discussing the results.


    ¡°You were right,¡± Querit said. ¡°If you just sever the vines, you¡¯ll kill the core. To be fair, the amount of metal I¡¯m sensing there would make cutting through a difficult task for a normal person. Did you harvest any troll¡¯s blood yet?¡±


    ¡°No, There were¡­¡± I shot Senica a look. ¡°Complications.¡±


    ¡°Alright, well, for my idea to work, you¡¯re going to need a gallon or two. The more purified it is, the less you¡¯ll need.¡±


    ¡°This thing¡¯s been feeding off trolls directly. It probably doesn¡¯t need to be purified at all,¡± I said.


    ¡°That¡¯s how it¡¯s been growing,¡± Hyago said, ¡°but you¡¯re going to need the regenerative properties.¡±


    I nodded. ¡°You want me to cut the connection, relocate the core, then basically force feed it a massive dose of a regeneration potion.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d probably put up some sort of force wall between the sac and the severed vines on the ceiling when you do it, just to make sure it can¡¯t reconnect, then hit it with the potion immediately. I¡¯m not sure how long this thing will survive with that kind of damage. Despite what it looks like, it¡¯s more monster than plant. I¡¯d bet it bleeds like an animal when the core gets injured.¡±


    That was more or less what I¡¯d been planning on doing, though I probably wouldn¡¯t have bothered to refine the troll¡¯s blood. I doubted it was truly necessary, but it wouldn¡¯t hurt. Besides, I could make Senica do the work there. That¡¯s what apprentices were for.


    ¡°Alright, I think we¡¯ve got a plan moving forward. Querit, I¡¯ll be moving this by portal back to the valley. How much longer do you need before you¡¯re done at the grove?¡±


    ¡°Two or three hours,¡± the golem said.


    ¡°Can you head back after to help me get this monster relocated? I¡¯m going to have Senica do the alchemy, so figure it¡¯ll be about five hours before we¡¯re ready.¡±


    ¡°Sure. I¡¯ll set up a specimen lab for containment. Maybe convert the one on the east side of the valley over.¡±


    ¡°Perfect,¡± I said. ¡°I think we have a plan. Thanks for the help.¡±


    * * *


    ¡°This is so gross,¡± Senica complained. ¡°Why is everything in this place disgusting?¡±


    ¡°The fresher the ingredients, the better,¡± I said.


    ¡°It¡¯s still alive! We¡¯re basically torturing it.¡±


    I glanced over at the troll, which was suspended above a wide stone funnel by manacles that stretched its arms and legs out to hold it tight. A spike of steel had been driven into the artery in its thigh, and blood gushed out to splash down into the funnel. Despite the fact that the troll had been up there for twenty minutes, it still thrashed and roared in rage.


    ¡°Trolls don¡¯t really feel pain like you or me, if that helps you feel better about the whole thing,¡± I said.


    Senica shot a look at the four corpses visible through an open archway. Their regeneration lasted only until they ran out of mana, and at that point, the blood was no longer valuable. The bodies had been tossed to the vines, which were slowly constricting around various limbs, trying to squeeze mana-rich blood out.


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t, no,¡± she said. ¡°How much more of this do I have to make?¡±


    ¡°How much liquid mana is left in that barrel?¡±


    ¡°Half.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d say you¡¯re halfway there, then,¡± I told her.


    I was doing my own work on the table next to her while simultaneously keeping the vines from intruding into the room. Really, Senica had the easiest part of the whole process. All she had to do was run the blood through a series of filters and mix the resultant base liquid in a two-to-one ratio with liquid mana, then add in the catalyzing agent I¡¯d already prepared.


    I was the one doing the other six steps of the process while keeping us safe and remotely hunting down the next troll. There was one drinking from the scum-covered pond just outside the temple I was about to grab with telekinesis if it didn¡¯t wander away in the next few minutes, which it didn¡¯t appear to be in any hurry to do.


    If they weren¡¯t so dumb, the troll probably would have smelled all the blood in the air and realized something was wrong, but I¡¯d never met a troll that could do anything but batter its problems into submission and then stuff them in its mouth. Not much had changed in the last thousand years in that regard.


    ¡°If you want to take a break, the ice is starting to thin again,¡± I said.


    ¡°Ugh. No, you do it. I don¡¯t want to go back down there alone.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s perfectly safe. Most of the vines are inert now.¡±


    ¡°Tell that to the trolls over there,¡± she said, gesturing to the corpses being slowly pulped.


    ¡°I¡¯m pretty sure those belong to a second core somewhere else.¡±


    ¡°Is that supposed to make me feel better? Why would I care which particular monster is strangling me?"


    That was a fair point. ¡°Fine, I¡¯ll go refreeze it,¡± I said. ¡°As soon as we replace this troll. Pull the shiv, please.¡±


    ¡°So gross,¡± she grumbled as she telekinetically plucked the hunk of metal out. The wound sealed itself closed, but it took several seconds instead of doing it instantly. This particular troll probably could have lasted another few minutes, but I didn¡¯t need blood that didn¡¯t carry its full regenerative capabilities, not when there were a thousand replacement trolls nearby.


    My magic tossed it to the vines with the rest and pinned it down until they had it good and tangled. Then I snatched up the surprised and confused troll outside the temple and dragged it to our impromptu lab. The manacles fitted themselves around its wrists and ankles, then pulled themselves apart to stretch it to its full height while it bellowed in fury.


    With a sigh, Senica drove the shiv in to our newest victim. If the troll felt it at all, it didn¡¯t show it. It just kept roaring at us while it futilely tried to rip itself free of its bindings. Blood ran down its leg into the funnel, and Senica set the filters back into place.

 Book 5, Chapter 8

    Removing the core was a delicate process, but with a bit of patience and plenty of mana, I managed to extract it without killing the thing. When I finished severing the connection, every single vine in the room went limp all at once, and my scrying revealed that the rest of the temple stilled as well. ¡°I guess that kills off my theory about there being more than one core,¡± I said.


    In a way, that made things easier. I just needed to clean out the dead vegetation and reinforce the temple walls to prevent anything new from getting in. Then this place would serve as a fine base for exploring the area and excavating the city¡¯s underground. If nothing else, we were going to need a steady supply of troll blood to keep the core alive until it stabilized itself. Even then, I¡¯d probably still have to throw trolls into its pen regularly, though hopefully not as often without its massive network of vines to maintain.


    ¡°Here, hold onto this while I open the portal,¡± I told Senica. Her own telekinesis spell grabbed the sac and held it steady, but it was an obvious strain for her to handle the weight.


    ¡°How long does a portal take to make?¡± she gasped out.


    ¡°Not too long. I¡¯m sure you¡¯ll be fine.¡±


    ¡°Just. Hurry.¡±


    I might have taken a little bit longer than was strictly necessary to open the portal, just in the name of Senica¡¯s training. Sometimes, it was best to push an apprentice to stretch their limits beyond what they thought they could accomplish, even if Senica technically wasn¡¯t an apprentice anymore. But soon enough, the doorway through reality opened to reveal Querit waiting for us.


    ¡°Oh. It looks a bit bigger in person,¡± he said. ¡°This lab might be too cramped once it starts regrowing the vines.¡±


    I guided the core through, with Querit catching it on the other side. He spun it around and floated it upright to a harness he¡¯d rigged up. It settled into place, its hardened biometal exterior more than up to the task of protecting it. I followed the sac through with several flasks of rejuvenating troll¡¯s blood potions to get the core back into good shape.


    ¡°You¡¯ll take care of the initial testing?¡± I asked.


    Querit laughed and said, ¡°It¡¯s a good thing I don¡¯t need to sleep, huh? As much work as you¡¯re piling on me lately, I¡¯d never keep up otherwise.¡±


    ¡°Sorry,¡± I said.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it. I know you work yourself just as hard.¡±


    There was some truth to that. With the hours I kept, I wouldn¡¯t be able to function without a significant investiture into ongoing invocations to keep me upright. When I did eventually crash, I was basically dead to the world for days at a time now.


    ¡°I¡¯ll sleep like a regular person once I get that tower torn down and the world core repaired,¡± I said.


    ¡°How many decades will that take?¡±


    I didn¡¯t answer. The truth was that even without interference from Ammun, this wasn¡¯t a short-term project. That having been said, I probably wouldn¡¯t have felt half the pressure to move quickly if I didn¡¯t know Ammun was still out there. Trapping him on one of Manoch¡¯s moons was a temporary solution, and I had no real way of knowing when he¡¯d get back to the planet.


    ¡°Anyway,¡± Querit said after a moment of awkward silence, ¡°I¡¯ll get this thing ready for your experiments when you get back. I should have a fresh stock of alchemy supplies from Hyago by then, too. He¡¯s got a whole circle of druids growing things out there at ten times normal speed.¡±


    ¡°Too bad the most valuable ones can¡¯t be grown like that.¡± Then again, if they could, they wouldn¡¯t be as valuable. Still, I¡¯d prefer that the reagents I needed be cheap and plentiful if at all possible. ¡°As far as the troll¡¯s blood goes, I¡¯ll have my sister work on processing as much as possible over the next few days for you.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m sure that wasn¡¯t what she was expecting to be doing when she signed on for this trip,¡± the golem said dryly.


    ¡°Absolutely not, but what¡¯s the point of having apprentices if you can¡¯t unload the scut work on them?¡±


    ¡°Speaking as the golem created specifically to do scut work, I can¡¯t say I appreciate the sentiment.¡±


    ¡°Oh, come on. You were made for much more than that.¡±


    Though I couldn¡¯t really agree with his creator¡¯s priorities, Querit had what was without a doubt the most complicated personality matrix I¡¯d ever seen in a golem core. His behavior was so natural that it was easy to forget he wasn¡¯t a human, at least until he shifted the shape of his body or sat down on a piece of furniture that wasn¡¯t designed to hold four hundred pounds of golem.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    ¡°Yes,¡± he said, an unhappy frown on his lips. His creator, and everyone else he¡¯d known in his old life, were long dead, victims of a meteor strike on his home city caused by Ammun destroying one of the moons. Querit had been surprisingly resilient about being woken up to that fact after I¡¯d discovered his inert body deep under Derro and fed it enough mana to bring him back to life.


    ¡°Uh, Gravin,¡± Senica called through the portal. ¡°I think the trolls noticed that the vines all died. There¡¯s a bunch approaching the temple.¡±


    ¡°Looks like it¡¯s time for me to go,¡± I said. ¡°Thanks for the help.¡±


    I stepped back through the portal and let it close while I reestablished my scrying network in the old city. If anything, Senica had been understating the problem. It was more like a horde than a bunch. Apparently, killing off the vines was a big deal to these trolls. That, or the smell of all that meat up near the entrance was pulling them in. Trolls hunted more by scent than anything, and they had no problems with cannibalism.


    Either way, we had far more trolls coming in than we actually needed, so it was best to take care of the problem now before it spiraled out of control. ¡°Come along,¡± I said. ¡°Let¡¯s see how your fire spells are progressing.¡±


    We flew back up the ground floor of the temple, mostly to avoid the nuisance of tripping over thousands of thick, ropy vines. Even dead, they were still tangled across the entire floor, and their thorns were still sharp. I made a mental note to scavenge those bits of biometal out after burning the rest of the vegetation later. There was no telling what they¡¯d be useful for.


    The trolls were ripping their way through the curtains of plant matter when we found them. There were five of them, all fighting each other as much as the vines in their struggle to be the first one through. Senica stepped in front of me, brandished the emberbloom wand I¡¯d made for her, and sent a jet of fire streaming across the room.


    Bellowed screams of rage filled the temple as flames washed across the trolls. The two at the back came out of the spell in the best shape, but even the ones in the front were already visibly regenerating. As one, the group turned to charge at us, only to slam into a quickly formed force wall. The lead troll was flattened by two of its fellows before their combined weight overloaded the spell and sent them all sprawling to the floor.


    Senica sent out another line of fire, this time tightened down to a finger-thick bar that sliced across their faces and burned into their brains by melting through bone. Working quickly, she cut the beam left, then right, each movement sweeping it across the enemy group to strike a different troll.


    ¡°That won¡¯t put them down for long,¡± I warned.


    ¡°I know. Isn¡¯t it kind of weird that they don¡¯t actually need their brains?¡±


    I shrugged. ¡°It¡¯s not like they use much of them to begin with.¡±


    She snorted out an indelicate laugh. ¡°Even animals die if their brains are destroyed.¡±


    ¡°Nothing else regenerates quite like a troll. If you were to attack their mana cores directly, they¡¯d die a lot quicker. Failing that, fire¡¯s a reliable way to force them to burn their mana quickly enough to actually kill one.¡±


    Even that short conversation gave the first troll enough time to regenerate enough brain matter to get back to its feet. It rushed forward, fists raised to turn us into paste, only to be blasted backward by a front-facing wave of force. The spell carried it all the way across the room to slam into the rest of the trolls, knocking all of them back down and setting them up to receive a fire burst that engulfed the whole group.


    ¡°Trolls are annoying,¡± Senica said. ¡°Nothing should get back up that many times.¡±


    ¡°You should see some of the hardier varieties of undead. There are a few that don¡¯t stop even if the body is completely destroyed. They just keep coming in spiritual form.¡±


    While Senica was keeping this group pinned down with a non-stop barrage of fire spells in an attempt to burn through their mana and halt their regeneration, a few dozen more trolls grew bold enough to enter the temple. I cast my own fire magic, a master-tier spell called inferno, and scorched them down to the bone from eight rooms and a thousand feet away.


    The boom of my spell going off caused Senica to flinch¡ªor maybe it was seeing the sudden fire storm immolate twenty trolls at once in her ongoing scry¡ªand shoot me an angry look. ¡°Warn me next time,¡± she said.


    ¡°Adjusting to unexpected magic on the battlefield is an integral skill for any combat mage.¡±


    Senica just huffed in displeasure and kept throwing spell after spell at the group of five trolls she¡¯d pinned down. Meanwhile, the other few dozen I¡¯d attacked had been reduced to nothing more than charred skeletons, their natural regeneration completely overwhelmed by the intense heat of my magic.


    That did nothing to deter hundreds of other trolls attracted by the sound and smells of the fight. In retrospect, disabling the core and killing off the temple¡¯s defenses before I¡¯d started the digging and established an underground base camp might have been a mistake.


    Well, it was easy enough to fix, at least. I cast a few rapid mana puncture spells to riddle the trolls¡¯ cores with holes and let Senica finish them off. ¡°What¡¯d you do that for?¡± she asked.


    ¡°I need to go seal off the front of the temple. Rather, we need to. How have you been doing on stone shaping transmutations?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s¡­ not my best discipline, but I¡¯m passable. I helped make the new school back home.¡±


    I kept my expression carefully neutral at that proclamation. That school was an architectural disaster, functional only by dint of brute force. Walls a foot thicker on the bottom than the top were the main reason it hadn¡¯t fallen down already, and every time I visited New Alkerist, I was taken by a strong desire to tear the building down and remake it properly.


    ¡°I suppose that means now is as good a time as any for a lesson in remedial structural engineering,¡± I told her. ¡°Now, an important distinction to make here is that there¡¯s a difference in a home built to be functional and safe for its occupants and defensive fortifications designed to hold against a half-ton troll that doesn¡¯t even understand the concept of stopping.


    ¡°To start with the obvious, the wall needs to be far thicker than normal. It also needs to be fully integrated with the rest of the structure, else a particularly stubborn opponent might knock the thing down as one whole piece simply because the building the your modification is anchored to isn¡¯t as strong as the rest of the wall. This brings up two more subjects: material and support structures¡­¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 9

    With the temple fully secured against troll incursions, I set Senica to work disposing of the vegetation. We ignored the stuff out near the edges that lacked metallic thorns in favor of the rooms near the core. A constant, moderate heat was enough to incinerate the vines, though I did end up having to create a chimney in the room we picked to hold the bonfire. Bits of thorns remained behind, mixed in with the ashes, the sorting of which was another perfect task for my sister to take on.


    She didn¡¯t see it that way, of course. I wasn¡¯t sure what exactly Senica thought she¡¯d be doing on this trip, but we weren¡¯t on vacation. The only reason I¡¯d agreed to bringing her along was to get some work out of her in exchange for her getting to experience a new environment, new monsters, and new spells.


    While she worked on that, I cleared out the very lowest room in the temple and got to work digging. Using transmutation to excavate wasn¡¯t like using a shovel. I made progress by compressing dirt into stone and using it to line the walls of the tunnel a few feet at a time. It was a slow process made even worse by the fact that scrying didn¡¯t really work in solid ground. The best I could do was use a spell called earth sense or one of its variations to try to get a feel for the ground composition in a small radius around me.


    Querit had developed a stronger version of it that I was using today, but it was by no means failproof. I got a bit more range and it did a better job of separating out what I was sensing, but it didn¡¯t let me scan for miles in every direction. It was entirely possible for me to miss any underground facilities, especially since I was going off Keeper¡¯s speculations based on old books she¡¯d read and my own knowledge of city planning.


    The temple was ideally placed to line up with the city¡¯s buried infrastructure, which probably wasn¡¯t a coincidence. It had been an important building back when people still lived here. Even so, it was well over a thousand feet wide and I doubted any maintenance rooms I might find buried down here would be even a fraction of that size. I also didn¡¯t know for sure how far I¡¯d have to dig and what, if anything, I could expect to find living underground.


    Last time it had been sand worms ranging from man-sized to miles-long. But Galdrisa wasn¡¯t located in a desert, so that was unlikely to be a problem here. We also weren¡¯t in a mountainous area, so their cousin species, the rock worm, also probably wasn¡¯t an issue. Was there some sort of¡­ dirt worm? Root worm? It wouldn¡¯t surprise me to find something like that.


    After going down about five hundred feet, I took the time to expand the tunnel into a small cave complete with lighting and air recycling enchantments. The walls were reinforced with a steel net, just in case some sort of burrowing monster did find the place and tried to get in. Anything small enough to dig through the net probably wouldn¡¯t be much of a threat given that the lack of ambient mana had called off pretty much anything that had the magical capabilities to compensate for a tiny body.


    There were exceptions, of course, but it was a decent safety measure for a temporary camp that only took ten minutes to slap together. That combined with some basic security wards and my own ability to sense mana would be enough to keep us safe.


    ¡®How are things coming along up there?¡¯ I telepathically sent to Senica.


    ¡®Hot. Smokey. Stinky. Why do these things smell so bad when you torch them?¡¯ she complained back.


    ¡®Probably something in the sap. Have you recovered much biometal?¡¯


    ¡®I haven¡¯t even started sifting it out of the ash yet. Are you in a hurry to get your hands on a sample?¡¯


    ¡®No,¡¯ I told her. ¡®Just checking in and letting you know I¡¯ve hollowed out a spot underground for us to use as a base camp. When you¡¯re done, bring the thorns with you, please.¡¯


    ¡®It¡¯s going to be a few hours, at least. If this magnetic spell thing doesn¡¯t work, it¡¯ll be even longer,¡¯ she sent. After a pause, she added, ¡®But wouldn¡¯t that just mean they¡¯re not metal and we don¡¯t need to collect them?¡¯


    ¡®No. Not all metals are magnetic, and I have no ideas what kind of properties a biologically growing metal might have. I¡¯m not even sure if it can go into my phantom space, though it probably can since it¡¯s ¡®dead¡¯ now that it¡¯s been cut off from the core.¡¯


    ¡®Right. I¡¯ll be down when I¡¯m done. The barriers are holding, by the way. And you were right about them not giving up. The pounding has been non-stop. I¡¯m kind of starting to worry that one of them will get smart enough to break through the stone wall instead.¡¯


    ¡®Keep an eye on it and retreat if necessary,¡¯ I suggested. ¡®The hole I bored is too small for a troll to fit through and I can seal it up easily enough.¡¯Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    With that said, I went back to digging and Senica went back to setting things on fire. For a girl who professed a deep and abiding love for burning monsters, I would have thought she¡¯d enjoy cleaning all the vines out of the temple. There really was no pleasing some people.


    * * *


    Eight hours later, we were lounging on a pair of plush chairs I¡¯d pulled out of my phantom space and snacking on cold leftovers from dinner. Senica had reeked of smoke when she¡¯d finished clearing out the sublevels of the temple, but a few cleaning spells went a long way toward taking care of that problem.


    I, on the other hand, just smelled like dirt. Considering that everything else here smelled the exact same, it was hard to notice. I was sure that once we left, I¡¯d be working some magic of my own followed immediately by a shower. Hopefully that would be happening in the next day or two, but it would mostly come down to luck. I might find a chunk of mysteel within minutes of resuming my digging, or it might take weeks.


    Either way, I was only going to be here for three days before returning Senica home and going back to Ammun¡¯s tower to install the rest of those mysteel generators. I also needed to check on the three I¡¯d already placed to ensure that they were operating properly and free of damage.


    It seemed that giving Senica downtime was doing her no favors. Based on the scowl on her face as she picked at her food, I suspected she¡¯d started thinking about whatever it was that had upset her back home.


    ¡°So,¡± I said, dragging the word out a bit. ¡°You want to talk about it?¡±


    Startled, she looked up at me. ¡°Talk about what?¡±


    ¡°About whatever¡¯s got you looking like you¡¯re going to light someone¡¯s hair on fire.¡±


    I had my assumptions, but I¡¯d learned the hard way that it was better to let her just tell me what was on her mind. That way, she had the choice of whether or not to share and I didn¡¯t end up being the one she was mad at for bringing up the topic. Senica was not a person who appreciated being figured out.


    ¡°It¡¯s Juby,¡± she said. ¡°Obviously. Thanks for not asking earlier, by the way.¡±


    ¡°I assumed. He was supposed to go with us, but since nobody was worried, I figured he wasn¡¯t in any danger or hurt.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s going to get hurt if he doesn¡¯t knock it off,¡± she muttered darkly.


    ¡°Knock what off?¡±


    Senica let out a growl of frustration. ¡°He¡¯s just¡­ He¡¯s so damn pushy lately. It¡¯s like he doesn¡¯t care what I want at all. It¡¯s always him nagging me that I should be focusing on learning enchantments or inscriptions to maintain the town¡¯s magic. I need to give up fire magic and conjurations in general. No more traveling. No more monster hunting. Just stay at home and learn to keep the house in good shape for him.¡±


    I frowned. That was not exactly an uncommon attitude, but I hadn¡¯t expected it from Juby. Prior to my reincarnation, there¡¯d been a clear division of labor in the villages. Men went out to work in the fields. Women stayed home and tended the garden attached to the family hut. Children were sent to communal schools for a few years until they were old enough to take on their gender-assigned roles.


    With the knowledge of mana core ignition becoming widespread again, those roles were starting to fall apart. It was simple for a mage to maintain an invocation that boosted their strength all day, which went a long way toward balancing the difference in muscle size between the average men and women. Beyond that, as the communities became more and more magically developed, less people were needed in the fields to begin with. Everyone was discovering new professions now.


    So hearing that Juby subscribed to more traditionalist views on gender roles in relationships was a bit of a surprise. He¡¯d grown up as an orphan and knew as well as anyone that everyone had to do their best regardless of whether or not they squatted down to pee. I wondered if this was a new attitude he¡¯d picked up from one of the locals, though I doubted it. Most of the people who¡¯d chosen to relocate to my valley and then to New Alkerist held progressive views, so I wasn¡¯t sure who would have given him these ideas.


    ¡°Maybe he¡¯s jealous,¡± I mused aloud. ¡°Does he feel threatened by your prowess?¡±


    ¡°Not as much as he is by yours,¡± she said wryly.


    I waved the joke away. Everyone who was threatened by power was afraid of me. That was nothing new, and I¡¯d known Juby for the better part of a decade now. ¡°It¡¯s different when you¡¯re romantically involved with the other person.¡±


    ¡°How would you know?¡± she asked. ¡°I seem to recall your one marriage ended in murder. Wait¡­ It wasn¡¯t because¡­?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± I said. ¡°Nothing like that. That was more because of greed, lies, and betrayal. She thought she was cleverer than she actually was, that I wouldn¡¯t notice her snooping for secrets and selling them to my enemies.¡±


    I cut myself off before I could go any further down that line of thought. It had been a spectacularly violent end to what had started as one of the best times of my previous life, but now it was just an old wound that had scarred over. There was no point in picking at it anymore. I¡¯d done enough of that at the time.


    ¡°But we¡¯re not talking about me. We¡¯re discussing Juby,¡± I finished.


    ¡°There¡¯s not much more to say,¡± she said. ¡°He¡¯s been really pushy lately and what he wants me to do isn¡¯t what I want to do. I¡¯m starting to think it¡¯s time to break it off with him. I¡¯m going to be a master mage, then an archmage. I¡¯m not giving up on that. Whatever his hangups are over that, they¡¯re his problems. Either he gets over them or I¡¯ll get over him.¡±


    I nodded approvingly. ¡°Magic never lets you down,¡± I said. ¡°Much better than people.¡±


    ¡°Present company excluded?¡±


    ¡°Did you finish collecting all the biometal?¡±


    ¡°Most of it,¡± she said.


    ¡°Then sure. Present company excluded.¡±


    ¡°Whatever. You¡¯re a jerk.¡± She rolled her eyes when she said it, but I could hear fondness in her voice.


    ¡°That¡¯s what brothers are for.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t need you anymore. I¡¯ve got Nailu now, and I¡¯m going to teach him to be the sweetest little boy. None of this snark I get from you.¡±


    I considered our little brother¡¯s behaviors. He was fully mobile and more or less talking now. Some of his comments, though¡­


    ¡°Good luck with that,¡± I said.


    Senica just sighed.

 Book 5, Chapter 10

    It ended up taking me three weeks to find what I was looking for, including a two-day side trip back to Ammun¡¯s tower to place the rest of the mysteel generators. Those would take years to produce what I pulled out of Galdrisa, which was itself barely a quarter of what I¡¯d found beneath Derro.


    It was going to be a long few years of repeating this process if I couldn¡¯t find a better way to acquire mysteel. If not for the looming threat of Ammun hanging over the world, I would have been content to devote that time to fixing the world. It was certainly worth the effort.


    Senica had returned home after the first few days. Harvesting troll blood had lost its thrill almost immediately, especially once she¡¯d learned that she was expected to process it as well. After we¡¯d run out of all the other ingredients, I¡¯d sent her back to New Alkerist. She¡¯d been more than happy to leave.


    ¡°That is a lot of mysteel,¡± Querit said when I returned to the valley and unloaded my new stockpile into the vault.


    ¡°And yet, not nearly enough,¡± I replied with a sigh. ¡°We¡¯ll see how much I can pull out of the tower before it collapses, but I foresee a lot more digging ahead of us.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll keep working on refining the divination spells,¡± the golem said.


    ¡°That¡­ would be appreciated. The whole process would go a lot smoother if I knew where to dig in the first place.¡±


    ¡°This biometal lead might make your archeology adventures unnecessary, too.¡±


    I wasn¡¯t going to put a lot of hope in that. We didn¡¯t even know how fast the monster could grow biometal as it stood, let alone if we could get it to grow mysteel the same way. It was an angle worth exploring, but not so likely to pan out that I was willing to devote all of my time and resources toward nurturing it.


    ¡°Let¡¯s hope so. Keeper doesn¡¯t have another lead for me, yet. She¡¯s looking at three more old cities, but last I knew, she hasn¡¯t narrowed down where to start digging at. If she can¡¯t get me the information I need, this project and Ammun¡¯s tower will likely be our biggest sources of mysteel.¡±


    We stared at the vault in silence for a minute. It was so much mysteel, piled up in five-foot cubes I¡¯d shaped it into, dozens of them, in fact. Even back in my old life, it would have been a king¡¯s ransom. These days, it was literally priceless. Mysteel didn¡¯t exist naturally and I doubted anyone besides me and possibly Ammun was capable of producing it.


    ¡°So much, and yet so far from being enough,¡± I murmured again. ¡°Just sourcing everything needed will be the work of years. Actually placing the patch will be another level of difficulty altogether.¡±


    ¡°One step at a time,¡± Querit said. ¡°Speaking of next steps, let¡¯s get started, shall we?¡±


    I gave the contents of my vault one last look before I closed things up. ¡°Alright. Show me where we¡¯re at.¡±


    * * *


    Without an endless supply of trolls to feed on, the plant monster didn¡¯t seem to be able to grow the way it had back in the temple. There were only seven vines coming out of its core now, each one as thick around as my wrist. None of them had anything remotely resembling thorns, and it seemed like the only metallic part of it was the shell around its core.


    ¡°Without a constant supply of troll¡¯s blood elixirs, I haven¡¯t been able to get it to produce any new biometal,¡± Querit confirmed after I¡¯d looked through the notes. ¡°Even setting up a regeneration enchantment that encompasses the whole room didn¡¯t replicate the effect.¡±


    ¡°Not surprising,¡± I said. ¡°The elixirs don¡¯t really work the same way. This chart shows that the monster is responding better to the elixirs than to unfiltered troll¡¯s blood, though. So we don¡¯t necessarily need trolls. I wonder if I could convince Hyago to maintain another field for me to make it artificially.¡±


    I used to have a set of greenhouses in New Alkerist, but Senica and Juby had been in charge of maintaining them. The quality had been so inconsistent that half of what they¡¯d produced had been unusable, and I¡¯d given up on it a few months ago when I¡¯d found Hyago again. Getting the time to actually talk to him had been a different story what with everything else I¡¯d been working on, but that was set now. Soon, my alchemy table would receive a significant portion of my attention.


    Querit and I worked through the next several nights experimenting with the plant monster core. What we learned only served to confirm my initial theory: the monster could only grow biometal if it was fed on a diet of troll blood or the alchemical equivalent of it. Even then, attempting to control what kind of metal the monster produced was currently beyond us.Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    ¡°Ah. I think I understand,¡± Querit said while we were studying the fifth set of samples. ¡°The metal is based on iron. Here, look.¡±


    The research station we were using had a mirror mounted on it to display divination results, and at Querit¡¯s gesture, an enhanced view of one of the thorns appeared. ¡°That¡¯s not iron,¡± I said as I peered at the thorn in far greater detail than an unenhanced human eye could perceive.


    ¡°No, but it¡¯s close.¡±


    ¡°Your theory then is that the iron in the troll blood is influencing the structure of the metal it grows?¡±


    ¡°Exactly so. If that¡¯s true and we already know that the core will grow new thorns when subjected to your elixir instead of pure troll¡¯s blood, then it would stand to reason we could introduce mysteel into the mix through alchemy. If the core replaces its pattern with a mysteel one, then the thorns should start growing the new metal.¡±


    ¡°Makes sense,¡± I said, scratching at my chin as I considered the problem. ¡°Dissolving mysteel into liquid isn¡¯t easy, though. The formula I¡¯m using now isn¡¯t going to cut it, not even at the levels we¡¯re talking about.¡±


    A tiny fingernail¡¯s worth of metal dissolved into a full-sized barrel was the appropriate ratio, but mysteel was practically indestructible. It didn¡¯t just dissolve on its own, which meant I¡¯d need to invest a lot of mana into getting it to do what I wanted. That, in turn, meant altering the formula to account not only for the different material but for the dramatically increased amount of mana. Those alterations would force even more changes, all the way down until at the end, the formula was completely different than the one I¡¯d started with.


    ¡°This is going to take some thinking,¡± I said. ¡°For now, I guess let¡¯s just focus on keeping this sample alive. I¡¯m going to see about restocking my alchemy lab so I can run a few experiments.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t think Hyago¡¯s got anything ready for you quite this soon,¡± Querit said.


    I nodded. ¡°Likely not. I do still have my greenhouses in New Alkerist. I¡¯m going to see if there¡¯s anything left in there I can salvage, and then¡­ I do know another place that grows herbs. Maybe I¡¯ll go visit there and see what I can convince them to part with.¡±


    * * *


    It was kind of funny how, once New Alkerist had been built, the original Alkerist couldn¡¯t just remain ¡®Alkerist¡¯ in anyone¡¯s mind. It was now commonly known, and with some measure of affection by most, as Old Alkerist. This moniker did not please those who lived in that village, which was just fine by me.


    I hadn¡¯t made many friends in Old Alkerist. I couldn¡¯t even fairly say that I had any left there now ¨C just acquaintances and enemies. Though, if I was being honest, calling anyone there an enemy was a stretch. None of them were a threat. They just didn¡¯t like me for flouting village law. That had led to an exile, which only really stuck because I¡¯d already been planning on leaving.


    The one thing Old Alkerist had that I was interested in today was a group called the Arborists. They were primarily responsible for the trees north of the village, including the fruit trees that supplemented everyone¡¯s diets. More importantly, they had a number of greenhouses that, once upon a time, had been capable of growing the specific plants I needed.


    It had been years since I¡¯d set foot in Old Alkerist, but the leader of the Arborists was a one-time student of mine. I¡¯d introduced her to alchemical gardening, and my hope was that she¡¯d kept up on the process. I had no idea what I could expect to find, but I was willing to bet I could convince her to part with at least some of it.


    Old Alkerist looked almost exactly like I remembered it. The mud-brick huts with thatched roofs were still lined up in their neat little grid. The Collectors office sat in the middle of town, though I had no idea what they used it for anymore. There was no evidence of modernization anywhere, not even the standard teleportation platform that so many other villages had adopted.


    I suspected the council¡¯s personal feelings toward me had motivated their decision to reject any of the standard upgrades everyone else was enjoying. Even most of the mana cores I could sense around me were still dormant despite the village having the knowledge of how to complete the process for years. But, with my scrying spells all but instantly mapping out the town, I quickly realized that it was far emptier than it should be.


    That begged the question: had they lost half their population in an attack when Ammun had unleashed hordes of zombies all over the island, or had half the village simply packed up their bags and left because they disagreed with the council¡¯s decisions? As a distant third possibility, I considered that perhaps a bunch of families were simply off somewhere else together, soon to return.


    That one didn¡¯t seem likely to me, but I expanded the range of my divinations just in case there was some campsite set up a few miles out of town. It didn¡¯t really matter one way or another, but I had to admit to a bit of curiosity about what had happened here.


    With no platform in the village, there was no need to appear in plain sight. My destination was a spot a mile in the air. I promptly turned myself invisible the moment I arrived, having no real desire to speak to anyone involved with the council or any of my extended family while I was here. They hadn¡¯t been kind to Mother when we¡¯d left, or for many years before that, from the way I understood things. As far as I was concerned, they were no family of mine.


    Instead, I turned my focus north and flew over to the arbor, where a small circle of huts was surrounded by no less than eight greenhouses, with several more tucked away between the trees. It seemed the Arborists had been hard at work expanding their operations in the last few years.


    The person I was looking for was a woman perhaps forty or fifty years of age. She¡¯d had a stage one mana core when I¡¯d left, but that had been a number of years ago. It was possible she¡¯d advanced to stage two, though it was also equally possibly the knowledge of how to do that had never made it here. In that case, she¡¯d probably be stuck at stage one still.


    Either way, she wasn¡¯t anywhere in the arbor, as far as I could tell. Maybe she¡¯d abandoned the village after all. She¡¯d stayed behind when we left, citing her duty to the arbor as the council member in charge of it, but a lot could change in half a decade.


    If I couldn¡¯t find her, I¡¯d just have to start asking questions. I located the nearest Arborists, landed behind a nearby tree, canceled my invisibility spell, and walked out into view. ¡°Hi,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯m looking for Shel.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 11

    The villager¡ªhe looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn¡¯t put a name to his face¡ªblinked at me slowly. ¡°Shel?¡± he repeated. ¡°She left years ago.¡±


    ¡°Left?¡± I asked. ¡°Left where?¡±


    The man just shrugged, but then a suspicious look came over his face. ¡°Who¡¯re you, anyway?¡±


    ¡°Who would know?¡± I asked, ignoring his question.


    ¡°You one of those, what¡¯cha call ¡®ems, the magicals?¡±


    It seemed things had changed more than I¡¯d expected. It had been a while since I¡¯d used this particular interrogation tactic, but I doubted my victim would realize what was happening. I formed a connection with his mind and started reading his surface thoughts.


    There was suspicion there, of course. I was a stranger in a village that didn¡¯t see much of the outside world. I was asking for a woman who was no longer around, thus confirming I knew something about Old Alkerist, but not enough to keep up with recent events.


    ¡°What¡¯s a ¡®magical¡¯ supposed to be?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Maybe you ought to ask around in town,¡± he said, ¡°They might be able to tell you more.¡±


    But his thoughts painted a different story. He was planning on siccing the local militia on me, such as they were. Their numbers were reduced to the point where instead of having dedicated village guards and hunters, they had a bunch of farmers who were trusted to access the local armory in times of need.


    I also picked up that he meant mage when he called me a magical. It seemed the knowledge I¡¯d introduced to Old Alkerist had caused a schism in the population. ¡°So a bunch of people decided they were going to practice magic despite the council trying to stamp down on it,¡± I said, more to myself than to the man.


    His face screwed up in confusion. ¡°Who are you?¡± he demanded, reaching out a hand to grab my shoulder.


    My shield ward caused him to stagger to the side when it shoved him away. He blinked down at his hand for a moment like it had personally betrayed him, then his brain caught up to his eyes. ¡°You are a magical!¡± he snapped. ¡°Get out of here. We don¡¯t want your kind. Go back to your fucking caves!¡±


    ¡°Caves? What caves?¡±


    ¡°Screw you. Get lost before I call someone over to give you a beating.¡±


    So much for subtlety. I gripped the man with greater telekinesis and lifted him off the ground. ¡°I¡¯ve done nothing to deserve this attitude,¡± I said coldly, ¡°but if you¡¯re going to treat me this way, I might as well play the part. Now, you¡¯re going to explain to me exactly what the hell happened to half this village.¡±


    The spell enveloped him, preventing any part of his body from moving. I left enough slack in it to keep his chest rising and falling so he didn¡¯t suffocate, but it wouldn¡¯t be hard to correct that if needed. It would be even easier to just wrap a band of force around his throat and prevent him from getting any air in the first place.


    ¡°The caves,¡± the man stammered out. ¡°West of town! Most of the magicals fled town a few years ago. Abandoned their families, too.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°Wanted to practice their evilness. Wouldn¡¯t listen to the voice of the ancestors.¡±


    I needed more context on that. Had Old Alkerist been infested by a cult? I knew there was a general belief that the spirits of their ancestors guided them, but this whole voice thing was new to me. Actually, now that I thought about it, I didn¡¯t care that much. The person I was here to see didn¡¯t live in town anymore. Worse, those who remained were undeniably hostile toward mages.


    There wasn¡¯t much reason to stick around at this point. I wasn¡¯t going to change any minds with my presence, and if I truly wanted to address this problem, my efforts would be better spent tracking down those who¡¯d been driven out of town and ensuring they¡¯d found a way to live without being poised on the brink of starvation or fallen victims to monster predation.


    More importantly, it wasn¡¯t likely that I¡¯d get what I came here for, and I didn¡¯t need someone else to grow things for me. I had that covered. I needed supplies today. It was probably worth the effort to scry the area and attempt to find this group, just in case. If they were really living out of some caves, I could probably offer some tempting services and knowledge in exchange for any magically infused herbs they did have.


    I released the man with a shove, sending him backward three steps in a futile attempt to regain his balance before he fell on his backside. ¡°I think I¡¯ve seen enough of this place. It¡¯s just as backward as it¡¯s always been.¡±


    There was no need to wait for an answer. I didn¡¯t care what this man had to say about me or anything else, really. I¡¯d already plucked the information I wanted from his mind; all that remained was to confirm it, and I could do that just as easily in the air where no one could distract me.Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    While my scrying sensors swept across the foot of the mountains west of town, I debated on what to tell my family. They¡¯d been born here. Mother still had family living in town. Senica had left friends behind that she probably held some fondness for. Whether those people had stayed¡ªand in the case of Mother¡¯s family, I¡¯d checked to confirm that they had¡ªor left, there were bound to be individuals my parents would want to know about.


    Alternatively, I could simply not tell them. It would save me a headache, but I felt like that was the wrong answer. It was easier for me, but this was something I knew they¡¯d want to know about. This was going to be one of those annoying morality things.


    Maybe I could just leave them a note detailing what I¡¯d discovered. That way they could process without me there to hold any hands. That was probably a good compromise. I¡¯d pay for it later, but it was better than dealing with breaking the news to them in person.


    While I pondered the best way to navigate this situation, my divinations worked overtime scouring the mountains trying to figure out where the rebellious villagers had disappeared to. I would have thought this would be easy, considering how few caves there were that could actually hold a few dozen people. That was proving to be an incorrect assumption.


    Most likely, I was operating on bad information. Sure, that guy believed what he¡¯d said about a bunch of people squatting in caves, and maybe that had even been true for a little while, but why would they remain there for years? At best, I was going to find a starting point to a longer journey that probably led to them founding their own little magic village out in the mountains.


    Half an hour of searching didn¡¯t suddenly reveal the location, which meant that I¡¯d officially reached the threshold for how much effort I was willing to invest into looking for them. I had better things to do, and this was the kind of project that would be perfect to hand off to someone who cared a whole lot more than me. I¡¯d just have to deal with the fallout of breaking the bad news.


    ¡®Hey, are you busy?¡¯ I telepathically asked.


    I could feel a wave of surprise roll back through the connection, then my sister angrily formed a reply. ¡®Don¡¯t do that! I didn¡¯t even know you were here.¡¯


    ¡®I¡¯m not. I¡¯m in the sky above Old Alkerist.¡¯


    ¡®What? But then how are you connecting? That¡¯s way outside this spell¡¯s range.¡¯


    ¡®Linked it off the scrying mirror in my bedroom,¡¯ I explained.


    ¡®Oooooh. I¡­ didn¡¯t know it could do that.¡¯


    ¡®I¡¯ll show you how to do it some other time. It¡¯s the same basic concept those emergency messaging stones I made for you last year run off of.¡¯


    ¡®Right. That makes sense.¡¯ There was a pause, then, ¡®So, did you need something or¡­?¡¯


    ¡®Well, I stopped by the old village and found out that everyone who ignited their core was driven out of town. I haven¡¯t been able to figure out where they went though. I need someone to do some long-distance scrying to track them down.¡¯


    ¡®Oh, that. That¡¯s easy. I know where they are.¡¯


    If my will wasn¡¯t as unbending as steel, I¡¯d have fallen out of the sky in shock. ¡®You what?¡¯


    ¡®I know where they built their new village. They reached out to Dad years ago to purchase enough food to make it through their first season until the crops started growing in.¡¯


    ¡®Wait, so you all knew about this? And nobody bothered to tell me?¡¯


    ¡®It¡¯s been mentioned in your presence more than once, Gravin. You¡¯re just so self-absorbed that you don¡¯t care. I¡¯m surprised you¡¯re interested now. Actually, hmm, what did you want from them?¡¯


    ¡®Alchemy ingredients,¡¯ I admitted. ¡®And I¡¯m not self-absorbed. I have a lot of other problems I¡¯m dealing with!¡¯


    ¡®That, and you don¡¯t care about them beyond your own needs.¡¯


    ¡®That¡¯s not fair.¡¯


    There was another pause. Finally, she sent back, ¡®Do you want to know where they are or not?¡¯


    ¡®Yes,¡¯ I sent, somewhat grumpily.


    One of the nice things about mind-to-mind communication was that words weren¡¯t necessary. It was easy to have a conversation that mimicked talking, but we could also do things like share images or even memories if the mages involved were skilled enough. Senica¡¯s map was a bit rough and unfocused, but I managed to line it up with the landmarks I could see.


    That explained the failure of my divinations to find them. They were technically ten miles or so west of Old Alkerist, where the foothills started to turn into mountains. But they were also fifty miles south, buried deep in a hidden valley that was completely inaccessible without flight or the blood of a mountain goat running through an expert climber¡¯s veins.


    It was a pretty enough valley, I supposed. There weren¡¯t nearly as many trees, and the valley floor was far flatter than mine. Two streams cut it into roughly equal thirds, and the village had been built in the center with fields flanking it on either side. Just going by the count of homes, I expected to find at most fifty people there, which lined up with my guesses based on how many of Old Alkerist¡¯s citizens my own actions had reduced the village¡¯s population by.


    Unlike Old Alkerist, this new mage village definitely had contact with the rest of the island. Even through my scrying spell, I could see traces of my designs in their buildings. It was obvious that a lot of transmutation magic had been utilized in their construction. The wards were too far away to study, but I knew they were there and I was willing to bet I¡¯d see a lot of familiar rune structures if I bothered to look.


    Perhaps most importantly, there were greenhouses and herb gardens in the village. This whole trip hadn¡¯t been a total waste after all. If Shel was there, and I suspected she was, it would be easy enough to trade some lessons or resources for what I wanted.


    That was assuming they had the ingredients I needed. I had no proof of that yet, so I made an effort to keep my expectations reasonable. This was simply an exploratory mission. I wasn¡¯t out much beyond an hour of my time if things fell through


    ¡®Thanks,¡¯ I sent to my sister. ¡®This saves me a lot of time.¡¯


    ¡®You¡¯re welcome. You can pay me back by showing me the linking spell like you said you would.¡¯


    ¡®I will, next time I come home.¡¯


    We ended the connection there and I took a moment to consider whether I wanted to fly or teleport. It was a nice day, and, ultimately, flight cost me no mana. Master-tier spells, unfortunately, were still too difficult to combine with lossless casting, though I was getting better every month. With that in mind, I started cruising across the sky toward the hidden village. I wondered what exactly I¡¯d find when I got there.

 Book 5, Chapter 12

    I had an audience waiting for me when I landed, a full twenty familiar faces from the beginning of my new life in Old Alkerist. Shel was there, along with six other Arborists. A few random villagers I hadn¡¯t had much interaction with also stood below, watching me. There were four children, none of them older than ten or eleven, but I didn¡¯t know them. I¡¯d been exiled before my mandatory enrollment in the village school, not that I¡¯d had any plans of going.


    It was possible Senica might know a few of them from school, but given the age gap and how young she¡¯d been after we¡¯d left, I doubted it. Thankfully, the school teacher, a man named Cherok who harbored a great deal of hatred for my father, was still back in Old Alkerist. Satisfying as it might have been to verbally abuse him today, it would make my task here all the more difficult.


    Surprisingly, Karad was there. That head of the Garrison and de facto governor of Old Alkerist was not someone I expected to defect when the village had split apart over the usage of magic. If anything, I would have thought that, given his surprising stance on it, those who hated magic would have been the ones to leave.


    ¡°Stranger,¡± Karad said, stepping forward. ¡°Welcome to Vestrus.¡±


    ¡°Stranger?¡± I repeated with a laugh. ¡°I suppose none of you remembers me? I was born in Alkerist, too.¡±


    Brows furrowed, Karad exchanged a confused look with Shel. When nobody stepped forward with any information, he turned back to face me. ¡°I¡¯m sorry, but I don¡¯t recognize you.¡±


    That was fair enough, really. I¡¯d sped up my aging with alchemy and looked to be in my early twenties, an age I planned to maintain for a few thousand years. Not having back pain, joint pain, constantly upset stomachs, and a sagging face appealed to me. But my reincarnation¡¯s actual age was ten or so ¨C I¡¯d lost track over the years. Maybe I was twelve? It wasn¡¯t really that important to me.


    ¡°Keiran,¡± Shel said suddenly.


    ¡°What? No,¡± Karad said. ¡°Keiran would be¡­¡±


    He held a hand to his chest, then gestured to me. At around six and a half feet tall, no one else even came close to my height. That was also due to my abuse of alchemy on my body. A bit of height was a small advantage when determining core size, but I¡¯d been tall in my previous life too and there¡¯d been no reason not to make myself the same size when the option was available.


    ¡°The aging ointment must have worked,¡± she said.


    ¡°Is she right?¡± Karad asked, turning back to me.


    ¡°She is,¡± I confirmed.


    ¡°Well¡­ Welcome to Vestrus, Keiran. This village wouldn¡¯t exist if not for you.¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Uh, about that. What happened? Last I remember, the council was a united front on wanting to get rid of me, not get rid of magic completely.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s a delicate subject,¡± Karad said.


    ¡°No, it¡¯s not.¡± Shel shoved her way past the man. ¡°Melmir was being a jackass about the whole thing. He was pissed that the Collectors got disbanded once everyone knew how to donate mana to the ward stone directly. So, he lobbied for some rule changes prohibiting people from using magic on the basis that we should all be donating all our mana to the defense of the village, never mind the fact that we were making so much mana now that it only took twenty people to keep everyone safe.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s more complicated than that,¡± Karad objected. ¡°There were other factors to consider, like when Tsurai accidentally destroyed both her home and her neighbor¡¯s trying to figure out that fire blast spell. Melmir had some good points. That¡¯s why Solidaire agreed with him.¡±


    ¡°But you two didn¡¯t,¡± I said. ¡°I get why Shel would be against banning magic, but I¡¯m a little bit surprised you backed her up.¡±


    ¡°Magic isn¡¯t evil,¡± Karad said. ¡°Yes, Noctra did some bad things to the village. For that matter, you did a few yourself. But you also saved us all, twice. And you saved Nermet¡¯s life. I haven¡¯t forgotten that.¡±


    That had really been more Father than me. Yes, I¡¯d untangled the mind control spell Old Alkerist¡¯s former governor had laid on Nermet, but Father was the one whose mana had kept the man alive until I could free him. I would have simply put him out of his misery to prevent Noctra from using the enslaved man against us.


    I glanced around at the gathered villagers. ¡°You all felt strongly enough about the new rules demanding you stop using your mana for yourselves that you banded together and left? Why? With this many people against it, surely you could have just rejected the ruling.¡±


    ¡°We tried that,¡± one of the gathered villagers said sourly. ¡°Didn¡¯t work out.¡±If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    ¡°Things got violent,¡± Karad added. ¡°It was tearing Alkerist apart. The jail cells were full even after we added a few more. The way it was going, we were going to starve just because there weren¡¯t enough people to grow food.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s all history now,¡± Shel said. ¡°We left. We founded this village. And now we¡¯re doing just fine. No offense, but you¡¯ve never shown any interest in Vestrus before. Why are you here now?¡±


    ¡°I always liked that about you,¡± I said. ¡°Direct. To the point. None of this waffling and politics I¡¯m always dealing with. Put simply, I am in need of some emergency alchemy supplies, and I¡¯m here to offer you a trade for access to your gardens and greenhouses.¡±


    They didn¡¯t outright reject the idea, but I could tell they weren¡¯t happy about it. They probably had good reason for growing the things they did and lacked the manpower and the supplies to grow extra. If I took some of their stock, there was the potential that it would hurt them down the road.


    I¡¯d just have to offer enough to make it worth their while, then. Relatively speaking, I was rich. I had what was an effectively unlimited mana budget, as far as they were concerned. I had all the knowledge to make practically any sort of tool or enchantment they might desire. It was very rare for me to enter into a negotiation where I didn¡¯t have something the other party wanted.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we find a place to talk things over?¡± I offered. ¡°I¡¯m sure these people have lives they need to get back to anyway.¡±


    ¡°Hmm,¡± was all Karad said before gesturing toward a nearby building.


    I followed him in with Shel and two other Arborists¡ªor whatever they were calling themselves now¡ªbehind us. At first glance, it looked like we¡¯d stepped into some sort of communal kitchen. There were a few tables set up at the front half of the hut, which was all one large room, and the back side had several firepits. Two of them had cauldrons suspended over them, and another was some sort of grill with a flat sheet of metal suspended over the flames.


    Upgrading their cooking equipment was probably a good place to start the negotiations. Then again, it was hard to demonstrate the immediate benefits when their current system no doubt felt fine to them. And honestly, if their town was struggling to survive, maybe a magical stove wasn¡¯t the luxury good they needed.


    The building itself was sadly reminiscent of the mud-brick huts they¡¯d been using back in Old Alkerist. Apparently, their advances in magic hadn¡¯t extended deeply enough into the discipline of transmutation to allow for stone-shaped homes. There was nothing wrong with their current construction methods, but they weren¡¯t terribly sturdy, certainly not anything I¡¯d want to waste time reinforcing with enchantments.


    That being said, renovating the entire town was a little much for access to their herb gardens. I could offer to raise a single building and do some enchantments on it. Then they could study and copy it at their leisure. That was probably a good deal.


    ¡°Let¡¯s start with the hesitation I¡¯m sensing from your side of the table,¡± I said. ¡°You¡¯re obviously growing those plants for a reason. I assume it¡¯s important. Medicine for the village? Some sort of catalyst to increase crop yields?¡±


    ¡°Crop yields? Is that even possible?¡± Shel asked.


    ¡°Sure. It works on the same concept as fertilizer, just¡­ uh¡­ without the associated smell.¡±


    Karad gave me a wry smile. ¡°Now that¡¯s something I¡¯d be interested in.¡±


    ¡°But no, it¡¯s not either of those. It¡¯s just that we¡¯re sort of under contract to produce them for somebody else already,¡± Shel said. ¡°It¡¯s not that we¡¯re not willing to trade them away.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s that they¡¯re already sold,¡± I finished. ¡°I see.¡±


    ¡°How urgently do you need the reagents?¡± the former leader of the Arborists asked. ¡°We could sell you the next crop. Or even clear some new patches and start growing something now.¡±


    I shook my head. ¡°I¡¯m afraid my need is quite a bit more urgent than that. I¡¯ve already made arrangements for future supplies. I need reagents to get me through this week and I don¡¯t have the time to go hunting for wild plants.¡±


    ¡°Then I¡¯m afraid there¡¯s not much we can do to help right now,¡± Karad said. ¡°This particular crop is already spoken for.¡±


    Well, that certainly limited my options. It didn¡¯t necessarily eliminate all of them, however. ¡°If you don¡¯t mind me asking, what exactly are the terms of the contract?¡±


    ¡°Two dozen ointments that block scents for hunters, ten healing potions, and a flask of¡­ ahem, let¡¯s just call it renewed manhood.¡±


    I frowned at that, not because I cared that some old man wanted an alchemical pick-me-up for the bedroom, but because their fields held far more reagents than were needed for such a small order. ¡°That¡¯s everything?¡± I asked.


    ¡°It is, so you can see¡ª¡±


    ¡°I can make all of that with less than a quarter of your yield.¡±


    Shel paused for a moment. ¡°A quarter?¡±


    ¡°Less than that,¡± I repeated.


    ¡°That¡¯s¡­ I know our techniques aren¡¯t as good as yours, but are we really that far behind?¡±


    ¡°I have no idea what techniques you¡¯re using. I¡¯m just saying that you¡¯ve grown far more than you need for what you¡¯ve listed.¡±


    ¡°Are you offering to make everything for us? Because if not, it doesn¡¯t really matter.¡±


    ¡°Yes, that¡¯s what I¡¯m offering,¡± I said. ¡°A few hours of alchemy. I¡¯ll take everything you planned on using, and you get your contract filled. This way, you¡¯re not out any of the ingredients you grew and you don¡¯t have to actually do any of the work making it.¡±


    ¡°Give us a few moments to confer, please.¡±


    Shel¡¯s group retreated to another table and talked in hushed whispers while I did my best to ignore what they were saying. That took an active effort on my part since the far table was still only ten feet away, but it was a short conversation. The only possible downside was that I might screw something up, but Shel laughed away that suggestion when one of her subordinates mentioned it.


    Even an active effort not to eavesdrop was doomed to fail in such confined quarters.


    After a minute, Shel and Karad returned to the table I was seated at. ¡°We¡¯ll need to clear up some details,¡± Karad said. ¡°The contract is due in a week. Can you get everything done by yourself by then?¡±


    ¡°I can have it all done this evening,¡± I assured him.


    ¡°And you can guarantee the quality?¡±


    ¡°Please. Don¡¯t be insulting.¡±


    ¡°Our people will harvest everything for you. You¡¯ll return everything needed to fulfill the contract and the rest of the supplies are yours to keep.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s what I¡¯m proposing, yes,¡± I said.


    ¡°I think we have a deal,¡± Karad said, holding out a hand.


    ¡°Not just yet!¡± Shel said. ¡°I have one more condition.¡±


    Oh, no.


    ¡°I want to watch. And ask questions.¡±


    I hadn¡¯t missed that part of Shel¡¯s apprenticeship, not at all.

 Book 5, Chapter 13

    I¡¯d offered to make extra potions. I¡¯d offered the town storage crystals packed full of mana. I¡¯d offered them a teleportation platform ¨C though to be fair, I¡¯d given a few dozen of those away already, so that last one wasn¡¯t much of an offer.


    Shel had declined all of that. She knew what she wanted, and she knew I wanted access to their reagents bad enough that she could push for it. I spared a moment to remember the old days, when I just took what I wanted, stepping over literal bodies if I had to. I was a very different person now, and had been for centuries, but at the moment, it had a certain appeal.


    But no, this was a petty annoyance that didn¡¯t actually cost me anything other than an extremely limited amount of extra mana teleporting her along with me. Somewhat ungraciously, I accepted the deal. It stung all the more because I could see an amused twinkle in Karad¡¯s eyes.


    ¡°Fantastic!¡± Shel said. ¡°I¡¯ll have my people start gathering everything up immediately.¡±


    She rushed out the door, followed by the other Arborists, leaving me alone with Karad. The former leader of Alkerist regarded me silently for a second, then said, ¡°So how many years did you give up to make yourself look like an adult.¡±


    I shrugged. ¡°A decade or so, I suppose. It hardly matters much when I have a lifespan measured in millennia.¡±


    ¡°You haven¡¯t changed much, have you?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a little late in life to still be figuring out who I am,¡± I said dryly. ¡°I¡¯m at the point where I¡¯m rounding my total age to the nearest century and occasionally losing track.¡±


    Karad shook his head, bemused. ¡°Ancestors guide me. I can¡¯t even imagine what kind of thinking a life like that leads to. It¡¯s a wonder you¡¯re as well-adjusted as you are.¡±


    ¡°Some people wouldn¡¯t agree with your assessment of me. I can think of more than a few who think of me as a right bastard.¡±


    ¡°Oh, you are,¡± Karad agreed. ¡°It hasn¡¯t been so many years that I¡¯ve forgotten what dealing with you was like. As soon as you told us what you wanted, I knew you¡¯d get it. The only real question was how much we could convince you to pay for it.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not that bad,¡± I protested. ¡°I always paid a fair amount for anything I needed.¡±


    ¡°Negotiating with you is like trying to talk the weather into behaving. Maybe the village gets what it needs, but it¡¯s more of a coincidence than because of anything we did. That¡¯s one of the big reasons you rubbed so many people the wrong way. That and the fact that no one likes being bullied by someone who¡¯s less than three feet tall, regardless of how old they actually are.¡±


    ¡°Yes, I recall that being a point of contention.¡±


    Apparently, Karad was planning on babysitting me while we waited. That was probably just for his own peace of mind rather than out of any foolish belief that he could stop me if I decided to do something he didn¡¯t like. If he was here, he could at least try to talk me out of it instead of having to clean up after I was done.


    ¡°For all you rubbed us the wrong way, though, you¡¯ve honestly done a lot to help this whole island. Heh, ¡®island.¡¯ We didn¡¯t even know we were on an island ten years ago. We barely knew the names of the next village over and the city Noctra came from. And forget about magic. I kind of suspect, looking back on it now, that Noctra knew almost nothing, too. There are probably six or seven people in this village now who are better mages than he was.¡±


    ¡°That wouldn¡¯t surprise me, to be honest. You¡¯re right that Noctra was not a very good mage. I don¡¯t know if he was even technically a true mage. His core was ignited, but his skills were lacking. His assistant knew more magic than he did; she just lacked the ability to generate her own mana at any appreciable rate.¡±


    ¡°Ah. Her¡­¡± Karad trailed off with a dark scowl. I supposed his position as the guy who enforced the rules had probably put him in close contact with Iskara, the governor¡¯s aide and the woman truly in charge of everything. No doubt he had plenty of bad memories that he¡¯d recovered after I¡¯d killed both Noctra and Iskara. Without them there to maintain all the mind magic they¡¯d been laying on people, a whole lot of negative feelings had cropped up about the pair.


    ¡°Enough of bad times,¡± I said. ¡°How has this new village been doing since you founded it?¡±


    ¡°A bit of a rough start, but having everybody here able to produce mana with an ignited core has smoothed things out considerably. Other than a few kids who haven¡¯t reached that point yet, we¡¯re all able to spend mana freely to grow crops and defend Vestrus from the rare monsters that find us all the way out here.¡±This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    ¡°No teleportation platform, though. You¡¯re completely disconnected from everywhere else.¡±


    Karad shrugged. ¡°For now. Someday, I¡¯m sure we¡¯ll reach out to your new town to buy one.¡±


    I laughed. ¡°Nobody buys one. I give them away.¡±


    ¡°You do?¡±


    ¡°You have to power it yourself, but yes. It doesn¡¯t take very long to make a platform. The mana banks are the expensive portion. The rest is just a chunk of stone. Do you want one?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re really just giving something like that away? There has to be a catch.¡±


    ¡°There isn¡¯t, but you don¡¯t have to accept it. I don¡¯t really care one way or another. I doubt I¡¯ll ever be back after today.¡±


    While Karad turned that offer over and tried to spot the non-existent trap in it, I watched Shel organize about twenty people into harvesting herbs from various gardens scattered throughout the village. She personally hit no less than three greenhouses, where I was pleased to see her gardening skills had grown considerably since back when we¡¯d been working in the greenhouses of Old Alkerist. The various plants that required mana to thrive were all healthy and green. Even some of the tricky ones that could die if they were oversaturated were in perfect condition.


    It was going to be a few hours before everything was packaged up, which unfortunately left me with some time to kill. I looked back at Karad and asked, ¡°You make a decision yet?¡±


    * * *


    Shel and I stood on Vestrus¡¯s new teleportation platform while I filled it with enough mana for a single trip. All the herbs were packed up in baskets or crates and safely stowed away in my phantom space, meaning we¡¯d be leaving in about twenty seconds.


    ¡°¡ªtell her I¡¯ll deal with it tomorrow when I get back,¡± Shel was telling one of the Arborists.


    ¡°But Shel, you know she¡¯s going to want an answer now. It¡¯ll only take a few minutes. Can¡¯t you take care of that before you leave?¡±


    Shel shot a glance at me, but I shook my head. Turning back to the Arborist, she said, ¡°Guess n¡ª¡±


    Then the world vanished and we reappeared in my biggest alchemy lab inside my demesne.  ¡°¡ªot,¡± Shel finished. She blinked and looked around. ¡°Oh, damn. This is a lot of equipment. Is this how you¡¯re going to make everything so fast?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s part of it,¡± I said. ¡°Having six tables and being good enough to keep all of them running smoothly at the same time will speed things up, but the real trick is the refined recipes. Alchemy requires a lot of expensive trial and error to truly distill a potion down to the fewest steps and least amount of materials, but fortunately for us, I¡¯ve long since done that work.¡±


    ¡°Or stolen someone else¡¯s work,¡± she added.


    ¡°Yes, or that. Now, let¡¯s get started processing this stuff. You can help with that while you bombard me with questions.¡±


    I set her up with a mortar and pestle to pulp a stack of leaves into the powdered base we¡¯d need for the ointments while I used some very precise force spells and delicate telekinesis to dice up everything else. While we worked, I explained what spells I was using, how to cast them, and what sorts of drills worked best for practicing this kind of magic without wasting expensive materials.


    Shel¡¯s questions, just as annoyingly thorough as I recalled them being, did not stop there. She got ahead of the process and started questioning me on the tools filling the work stations, with a special focus on the heat emitters. Those had been finely tuned by various enchantments to hold exact temperatures, something that was vitally important in alchemy.


    ¡°I want one,¡± she said. ¡°No, actually, I want five of them. How much would you charge to make them?¡±


    ¡°I won¡¯t make them for you, but if you really need them that badly, there¡¯s a guy named Tetrin who makes his living off commissions like that. I¡¯ll help you get in contact with him and you can negotiate the rate.¡±


    ¡°Will they be as good as yours?¡±


    I pointed to one of the heaters on the back table. ¡°He made that one. His work is good enough that I have no problem using it.¡±


    She considered that for a moment before putting down the mortar and walking over to examine the heater. ¡°I can¡¯t see a difference between this and the one I was looking at before.¡±


    ¡°How about that?¡± I deadpanned.


    ¡°I know, I know. But can you blame me for wanting to experience it for myself? Why take someone¡¯s word for it when you don¡¯t have to?¡±


    It went on like that for another hour or so while we finished prepping anything. Then I started loading up the tables, which prompted a whole new round of questions every time my method deviated from the one she knew.


    ¡°Why are you putting the base in first? Isn¡¯t there too much air in the flask if you do it this way?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s not enough calbera root for a full dose.¡±


    ¡°Why doesn¡¯t your recipe use gold thistle? And what are you substituting for it?¡±


    Some questions I answered. Some I ignored. Shel seemed to have a sixth sense for when she was growing too annoying and would occasionally get quiet for a few minutes. It never lasted though, and it was with a great amount of relief that I finished up the last part of the order a few hours later and placed it in the box.


    ¡°Here you go. One contract fulfilled, and the leftover reagents are now mine,¡± I said.


    She peered into the box and silently counted it all up, even though she¡¯d done that several times already while I was preparing the very last part. While she was busy doing that, I teleported us both across my demesne to the platform I used for traveling to the outside world, causing her to start and almost drop the box.


    ¡°I¡¯d appreciate if you didn¡¯t destroy all of that,¡± I told her. ¡°I¡¯m not in the mood to make it again.¡±


    ¡°No, that would be bad,¡± she agreed. ¡°The sudden jump was just surprising, is all. I suppose this is goodbye for now, then?¡±


    ¡°For now,¡± I said, having absolutely no intention of ever seeing this most annoying of temporary students ever again if I could help it.


    I sent her back to the new platform in her home village, then let out a long groan. ¡°What a day,¡± I muttered.


    Querit appeared next to me just then. ¡°Who was that?¡± he asked.


    ¡°It¡¯s a long story. Trust me, that one¡¯s too much of a nuisance to want to get to know. What¡¯s important is that I got what we needed to start running the experiments on dissolving mysteel.¡±


    ¡°So soon? And here I thought we might actually get a few weeks off.¡±


    ¡°No such luck,¡± I said. ¡°To the lab.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 14

    ¡°Keiran, it¡¯s time to stop.¡±


    I ignored Querit and started preparing the reagents for the next experiment.


    ¡°Keiran! Please.¡±


    Force magic chopped the herb into thin slices, then did a second pass to dice them into cubes.


    ¡°Keiran¡­¡± Querit reached out to grab my shoulder.


    I shrugged him off and turned an angry glare on the golem. ¡°I don¡¯t have time to stop right now.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s been a month. I haven¡¯t seen you sleep. You cannot tell me that the quality of your work hasn¡¯t suffered.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not going to argue with you about this. You know how important it is,¡± I said.


    ¡°I agree. It¡¯s important. I will stay here and keep things running while you sleep, but please, please, go find your bed.¡±


    I¡¯d burned through the reagents I¡¯d gotten from Shel¡¯s new village faster than I¡¯d wanted, but Hyago had come through for me and now had no less than five of his druids working in shifts to keep up with me. Each batch was a bit smaller than the last, but it was enough to keep pushing forward. We¡¯d find the answer sooner or later, but only if we kept looking.


    ¡°Why are you so obsessed with this experiment?¡± Querit asked, not for the first time. ¡°We have other sources of mysteel. It might take us a few extra years, but you weren¡¯t in such a rush before.¡±


    ¡°You damn well know why,¡± I said, jerking myself free of Querit¡¯s hand.


    Six weeks ago, the gestalt had contacted me to let me know that something had appeared on Yulitar. It wasn¡¯t much, just a single, solitary tower peeking out of the ground, but there was only one person capable of making it. And if Ammun had built it, that meant there was a reason. Maybe that reason was just that he was getting a spot of revenge by making us panic, but I couldn¡¯t assume there wasn¡¯t any greater purpose.


    And if that was the case, then we needed to get things resolved down here before he showed back up. My mysteel generators were running full tilt inside the tower¡¯s foundations, starving it of mana and producing the all-important metal at the same time. It wasn¡¯t as fast as taking a metaphorical sledgehammer to it and breaking it to pieces, but it did have the upside of probably not killing everyone living inside it. They¡¯d have plenty of time to realize the mana was gone, that it wasn¡¯t coming back, and that there was no reason to stay.


    I hoped.


    ¡°This isn¡¯t the way to do it. You¡¯re not thinking right. What happens if that lich shows up tomorrow and you¡¯re in this state?¡±


    ¡°This is all I can do to prepare,¡± I said.


    ¡°Well¡­¡±


    ¡°Well, what?¡±


    ¡°Have you looked at the valley¡¯s mana levels in the last few days?¡± Querit asked.


    I frowned. ¡°No¡­ Why would¡­¡± My eyes popped wide open as I realized what he was saying. ¡°We hit our threshold?¡±


    ¡°As far as I can tell, yes.¡±


    ¡°Even with all the mana we¡¯ve been burning?¡±


    ¡°See for yourself,¡± Querit said. ¡°And then go get some sleep. You¡¯re going to need to be in good shape.¡±


    When I¡¯d advanced my core to stage seven, I¡¯d planned on quickly taking the next step to stage eight. That plan hadn¡¯t worked out for a very simple reason. I didn¡¯t have enough mana. Stage seven involved creating an astral body double that existed inside the Astral Realm, essentially multiplying my capabilities and allowing me to easily handle heavy mana.


    Stage eight was the forging of the mage¡¯s shadow, which was essentially the creation of two more astral bodies, except one of them existed in this world. The shadow was connected to me, but could operate independently and couldn¡¯t be truly destroyed. And the amount of mana needed to create it depended entirely on how powerful the stage seven mage was.


    I was significantly more powerful than I¡¯d been the last time I¡¯d reached stage seven, and not just because I¡¯d taken advantage of the opportunity to build my mana core perfectly. Something about my reincarnation had caused my core to exceed even my most optimistic expectations as far back as stage two, and that advantage had only been growing each time I advanced.


    In short, I¡¯d underestimated the amount of mana I¡¯d needed significantly, so much so that it had taken over six months for my demesne, itself practically a mana dynamo with a fragment of moon core buried beneath a petrified forest of living stone, to make what I needed. In all fairness, I spent my mana quite readily these days and probably could have shaved a month or two off the buildup if I¡¯d tried.


    Advancing to stage eight would be a significant advantage if it came to another fight with Ammun. I would have done it months ago if I could have. If everything was ready now, then Querit was right. I needed to take a break from my attempts to integrate mysteel into the plant monster¡¯s biometal processing and prepare myself to weave my new shadow.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    ¡°Fine. You win,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯m going to get something to eat, then hibernate for a few days. When I come out of it, I¡¯ll be busy for a week or so.¡±


    ¡°Thank you,¡± Querit said, clearly exasperated. ¡°Go, I¡¯ll finish this up.¡±


    ¡°Okay, but first, let me just¡ª¡±


    ¡°Keiran!¡±


    ¡°Alright! Alright. I¡¯m going.¡±


    * * *


    As much as it pained me to admit it, once I got my mind off working, the past month hit me like a herd of stampeding horses. Human bodies weren¡¯t meant to withstand what I¡¯d been putting mine through, and I¡¯d stretched it beyond my limits with a dozen invocations running every second of every day. I¡¯d accomplished a lot in that time, but unfortunately, not the one thing I¡¯d been trying to do.


    Now that I¡¯d stopped, the only thing I wanted was to sleep ¨C the bed was optional. Food wasn¡¯t, however. Once I went down, I wasn¡¯t getting back up until my stomach made me. If I didn¡¯t eat first, that¡¯d be in less than a day, and I needed way more time than that. So I shoveled raw vegetables into my mouth, rounded them out with a few pieces of fruit, detoured to the bathroom, then teleported myself the twenty feet to my bed.


    I didn¡¯t even remember releasing the invocations keeping me conscious.


    * * *


    Coming out of a hibernation was a strange feeling. On the one hand, I felt amazing after even just a few days of sleep. On the other, I was in desperate need of a trip to the bathroom and something to drink. A shower wouldn¡¯t go amiss either.


    While I was doing that, I used my connection to the valley¡¯s genius loci, the very aspect of my mana core that formed my demesne, to get caught up on what I¡¯d missed. For the most part, things were unchanged. The trees were still stone. The artificial mana resonance point we¡¯d forged still hung in the air over a shelf of bare rock on the south side. The wards were functioning, and the collection of mysteel pillars that formed the backbone of my defense network were intact and ready to be used.


    In the labs, Querit was hard at work overseeing the experiments we¡¯d designed, and our test subject was as alive and well as it had ever been. The golem noticed my divination sweep over him and paused in his work to look up at the source of the spell. ¡°Six days,¡± he said.


    My eyebrows shot up. That was a hell of a hibernation cycle, even for an archmage. No doubt, my mana had worked to keep me from dying of dehydration, however inefficiently it might have done the job. It certainly explained a few things about my trip to the bathroom after waking up, not in the least among them the ripeness of my smell.


    Now that my head was fully clear, I could admit that Querit had been right. I¡¯d been flailing at a problem to no effect. I cringed just thinking about how bad some of my ideas had been toward the end. It was incredibly obvious how those experiments would turn out, and I should have seen that without the need to waste resources.


    I got the feeling Querit was going to be insufferable about this, probably holding it over my head every time I went without sleep for any extended period of time. He was always just a little bit smug about his golem body being able to function indefinitely. The joke was on him, though. I was ready to move up to stage eight.


    Stage nine was going to be more of a problem, but I¡¯d done it before. I could do it again. I just didn¡¯t know how yet. Things were different this time around, but I¡¯d adapt. It was really more of a question of how long it would take me.


    And then I could resume the search for the mythical stage ten: true immortality. I had thousands of years left to figure it out, too. And if I failed again, well, there was always the reincarnation method. Admittedly, with the planet being down a moon and the world core itself broken, I was going to have to revise my methods, but I could figure that out if I devoted some time to it after I got everything else fixed on this busted up planet.


    Once I was presentable and nourished again, I teleported to the resonance point. It wasn¡¯t strictly necessary to do this here, but I figured it would be easier if the local mana flows were more tightly leashed. There¡¯d be less interference that way.


    Perhaps sensing my intentions, or just knowing me well enough to know I¡¯d be impatient to get on with it as soon as possible, Querit was already there. ¡°Before you get started, I¡¯ve got a few things to update you on,¡± he said.


    ¡°Anything dire?¡±


    ¡°No. Hyago dropped off another shipment. He was concerned at the rate we¡¯re going through the ingredients, but I assured him we¡¯d be slowing down for a few weeks at least as something else had come up that required your attention. As I understand it, this will give his team a chance to do¡­ something¡­ I¡¯m afraid I didn¡¯t quite follow all the technical terms, but I understood it as rejuvenating the soil between crop cycles.¡±


    I nodded along. ¡°What else?¡±


    ¡°Grandfather showed up to talk to you three days ago. It seems everything is going smoothly at Eyrie Peak, but he wants you there to do one final check with him before he starts some long trip he¡¯s planning. I didn¡¯t get the details, but there¡¯s no rush to get that done right now.


    ¡°Finally, your father has been trying to reach you via your scrying mirror all week. When he was unable to, he contacted me instead. I assured him that you¡¯re alright, just in the middle of something.¡±


    ¡°What did he need?¡± I asked, my mind already conjuring all sorts of trouble that could beset the town.


    ¡°Shel showed up in New Alkerist. I¡¯ve been told that she was quite insistent that she speak with you, but of course, no one could produce you. Your father said it wasn¡¯t an emergency.¡±


    ¡°All of that in just a few days, huh? How¡¯s the progress coming on our experiments?¡±


    ¡°Slowly. I¡¯ve ruled out a few more catalysts and redesigned the acclimation process four times. All I¡¯ve managed to do was cross out a few more potential combinations.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve got a few new ideas to try,¡± I said. ¡°Just kind of came to me when I woke up.¡±


    ¡°Imagine that.¡±


    ¡°Yes¡­ Imagine that.¡± I gave him a flat look. ¡°Okay, let¡¯s talk about the base liquid. We¡¯ve tried using acids to help dissolve the mysteel, but that was never going to work. On other metals, sure, but mysteel just won¡¯t melt. It¡¯s hard enough to reshape it, let alone dissolve it. We need to powder it, instead.¡±


    ¡°How would you go about powdering mysteel?¡± Querit asked, clearly bewildered.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got a few ideas for you to try out while I¡¯m busy. To start, a mysteel grinder combined with a transmutation spell to soften metal. I¡¯ve already figured out how to recalibrate the spell from brass to mysteel. I think it will work better than any other type of metal transmutation.¡±


    I finished giving Querit my ideas for the next round of experiments, then he left to prepare them. I took a breath, then opened myself to my demesne again. I would need all of the mana it could give me over the next few days.


    Exhaling, I closed my eyes and plucked at the first thread of mana.

 Book 5, Chapter 15

    No mage, not even me, had the mental capacity to weave a mage¡¯s shadow on their own. It was just too complex a task to be done without assistance. That was why the sixth stage was the forming of a genius loci and binding it to my mana core. It helped focus my magic, allowed me to pull off feats of mental gymnastics that I never could have anywhere else in the world. Without my demesne, the artificial resonance point hanging in the air overhead wouldn¡¯t exist.


    Even that wasn¡¯t enough in and of itself to accomplish what I was trying to do here. That was why I pulled a device of my own invention out of my phantom space. I¡¯d made the prototype about seven hundred years before my last death. At the time, there was nothing like it in the world and I was advancing through uncharted territories. I doubted I was the first archmage to reach stage eight, but all those who¡¯d gone before had taken their secrets to the grave.


    That had forced me to come up with my own solution: the mana loom. It looked nothing like an actual loom, of course. There was no need for it to mimic the shape when its purpose was to organize mana, not threads. My original version had been a sprawling, clunky thing almost the same size as the hut I¡¯d been born in as Gravin. Since then, I¡¯d made numerous improvements and helped no less than four other archmages follow in my footsteps.


    Suffice to say that the new design was considerably more elegant.


    From the outside, it looked like a simple jewelry box, one that easily fit between my hands. It was made of gold and silver and glinting gemstones, far too ornamental and tawdry looking to be practical. There was a reason for that, however. Certain metals influenced mana drawn through them, and in the case of gold, it made the mana more rigid. It would help the threads I wove keep their shape for just a little bit longer as long as I concentrated.


    Silver, on the other hand, made mana more malleable, which I needed for the parts where I sculpted mana into shape around that inflexible base. Similarly, the various gems studding the box both inside and out were designed to hold mana and alter it in different ways. To be more specific, they worked with heavy mana, which no mage below stage seven could reliably shape into magic without immediately exhausting themselves.


    I placed the box on the ground in front of me and activated it with a mental command, causing it to unfold itself repeatedly until it formed a ritual platform for me to stand on that was far bigger than the outer dimensions allowed for. In between the sapphires, diamonds, garnets, and more were rune structures, deep channels carved into the wood that were waiting to be filled with liquid mana.


    I sat in the center, inside a circle with lines of runes radiating out from it in a sunburst pattern. Compared to my original mana loom, this one was barely more than a carpet placed under a kitchen table, but it was undoubtedly the most powerful loom I¡¯d ever created. It would have to be, seeing as to how it was personally designed to take advantage of my mana reserves, willpower, and knowledge.


    Back when I was just Keiran, my first try at becoming a stage eight archmage had taken me two weeks and failed in the end. It was only on my fourth attempt that I¡¯d succeeded after a month of effort. But now I knew every mistake I¡¯d made on the road to success, and I was older and stronger. I was getting this done in the next week.


    I pulled the first thread of mana through the loom and started weaving my shadow. In the Astral Realm, my opposite mirrored me.


    * * *


    No spider had ever woven a web to match what I sat in the middle of. It connected to my body at a million different points. A single twitch would ruin it. Even taking a breath would be too much. I¡¯d been feeding myself air using a combination of conjuration to force the air to move and invocation to cycle it through my lungs without actually inhaling.


    Slowly, delicately, I mentally grabbed hold of two strands of mana being held in place by my loom and twined them together.


    * * *


    I was trapped in a cocoon of mana so dense that I was oblivious to the world around me. Or maybe ¡®trapped¡¯ wasn¡¯t the right word. It was so delicate that I could easily rip my way free if I had to. But the waste¡­ It would set me back months if I gave up at this point. No, the only way out was forward.


    My astral body shifted on its own for the first time, not in mirror of my actions, but in response to my thoughts. Good. It was beginning to break free.


    * * *


    No longer was the mana a cocoon. Now it was a fine suit, tailored for me and so flexible that it was practically a second skin. I could move again, but not off the ritual platform. My weave was done, and my astral body has mimicked that using pure mana suffusing the Astral Realm. Now it was time for the penultimate step: removing myself from the second skin of mana without ruining it. Emergence was as much a mental act as a magical one. Like wards that only I was allowed to pass through, I needed to part the heavy mana around me, to take that step without disturbing what I left behind.


    There would be no second chance if I made a mistake here. This was the step that I¡¯d bungled in two of my four attempts in my previous life, and even when I¡¯d managed to do it successfully, it had been a near thing.Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    The loom was fully engaged, holding everything in place. I just had detach it from my physical body now without breaking it apart. Carefully, I snipped the first thread wrapped around me, then smoothed out the loose end. With it sealed and the weave still stable, I cut another one.


    Repeat.


    Repeat.


    Repeat.


    * * *


    I stood face to face with myself, or rather a copy of my astral body, but fully in the real world. There was just one step left. I needed to take that connection between my mana core and my astral body and flip it inside out, to pull the astral body into this world so it could inhabit this body made of mana that I¡¯d built for it.


    Saying it and doing it were two different things. There were no words to describe the sensation of reaching into my own mana core to grab hold of a mirror of myself, but that was what I did. Our hands met in the middle and clasped, and then the mirror broke. I pulled, and instead of exerting equal pressure pulling me back, my astral body moved independent of me.


    It slipped through and was flung into the vessel I¡¯d prepared for it, the me that was made of pure mana. Now it was out of my hands. My astral body could draw on my power, but it would have to acclimate on its own. The only thing I could do was wait to see if it would survive, or if I¡¯d just broken myself back down to stage six.


    I wasn¡¯t worried. After all, that was my astral body. In a very real way, it was me. And I had plenty of faith in my own abilities.


    * * *


    I stood on the ground, my mana loom now closed up and back in its compact travel form. Behind me, my shadow flickered back and forth of its own volition. It leaped across the grass, merging with the shadow of a fallen pillar that had been part of the creation process back when Querit and I had forged the artificial mana resonance point.


    My shadow was perfectly invisible, swallowed up in the larger shadow it was hiding in. Despite that, I knew exactly where it was. In many ways, a mage¡¯s shadow was a living creature. It thought like me, almost perfectly in sync, but it wasn¡¯t me. And the longer it existed independently of me, the more we would diverge. Mages who never took the time to merge with their shadows again often found themselves with a companion possessed of its own opinions and desires.


    Most archmages agreed that letting a shadow run wild was a bad idea, if for no other reason than because we were technically sharing mana cores. We had a pair between us, and each could draw from either or both. Both cores also regenerated at the same rate, meaning I¡¯d effectively doubled how much mana I could hold and how quickly I regained it.


    My shadow pulled on our mana core, and a needle of stone rose ten feet into the air. With a thought, it shattered the temporary construction back into mana. Good. As it should, the shadow possessed all the skills I did. Lossless casting was no problem for it, and together we might even manage to cast master-tier spells without giving up any mana.


    We experimented for a few more minutes before I was satisfied with the results. It looked like true lossless master-tier spells were still out of reach, but we were up to something like seventy percent efficiency. This was as close to my true power as I was likely to get in a dead world with a stage eight core.


    I slipped through my demesne to appear in the bio testing lab. Querit wasn¡¯t there at the moment, but he was good about keeping records. Our monster specimen was still alive, but it didn¡¯t look like we¡¯d made any progress. Maybe I could fix that.


    The problem had always been getting mysteel dissolved to the point where the monster could assimilate it and start producing it for its biometal. We kept failing at that; even our most refined mixes weren¡¯t producing any metal at all.


    Mysteel¡¯s defining quality was that it was nigh-indestructible to both physical and magical forces. It was in fact so difficult to do anything with it that a thin shell of it was enough to contain the mana core of the entire planet. It had taken a force powerful enough to destroy a moon in orbit to fracture that shell.


    I couldn¡¯t generate that kind of magic, but then, the mysteel piece I was working with was much smaller. I could¡ªand had¡ªreduce it to a fine powder. That wasn¡¯t really the issue. The issue was getting it to combine properly with the elixir instead of remaining inert. In order for that to happen, I needed to fully suffuse the mysteel with mana.


    That was something I could probably do. And even if not, the attempt would be an excellent test of the maximum amount of mana my shadow and I could handle. I selected a vial of powdered mysteel and considered which alchemical bases were ready. Some of them were incompatible with the method I was planning, but I had a few that could handle the stress of that much mana being moved through them.


    My shadow and I both started cycling mana through the mysteel dust, more and more of it each second. Rather than let it flow back into me, I forced it to be more compact, denser, heavier. Then I added another layer, and another, and another, so many that it was a fight just to keep it all from venting out. If that happened, the glass vial would shatter, pelting me with the world¡¯s most expensive metallic sand.


    The only thing stopping it was our combined efforts. And slowly, ever so slowly, the mysteel was infused with so much raw mana that it couldn¡¯t hold. Carefully, I poured it into the already-prepared alchemical mixture and swirled it around. Its resistance overcome through sheer force, the mysteel couldn¡¯t resist reacting.


    The liquid turned from a rich blue to a murky silt-gray. Working swiftly, I started heating the elixir while stirring it with a slender glass rod, the end of which was flattened into a paddle. At the same time, my shadow starting casting the spell needed to engage the catalyst.


    Thirty seconds later, there was a burst of mana, so strong that it triggered my shield ward, and the elixir was a solid, sparkling gray. Subtle currents swirled through the bottle, barely visible even to my mana sense.


    Querit rushed into the lab, then froze when he saw me. ¡°You¡¯re done,¡± he said. With a glance at the elixir I¡¯d crafted, he added, ¡°I¡¯m assuming your core advancement went well.¡±


    ¡°Very well. I was able to apply a new level of pressure to the mysteel thanks to my shadow¡¯s help. It¡¯s not a clever solution, but I think it might work.¡±


    He studied the elixir intently, then straightened and said, ¡°You might just be right. The mysteel is actually alchemically bonded to the regeneration elixir this time. It¡¯s not going to separate no matter how long it sits.¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s only one thing left to do,¡± I said with a grin. We both turned to look at the plant monster safely contained in its pen. ¡°Try it out.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 16

    After making a few more samples for Querit to play with, I left him to his work. There were a few other things I had to catch up on, namely checking on what Ammun was doing up on the moon and helping Grandfather confirm everything was fine so he could do whatever it was he was planning. After that¡­ helping Father get rid of Shel should have been a priority, but I was very much alright with ignoring that particular problem.


    Before I left for Eyrie Peak, I spent a bit of time doing my own long-range scrying. I¡¯d modified my scrying chamber months ago so that I wouldn¡¯t have to go through the trouble of spending half an hour setting up the ritual every time I wanted to use it. Now it included an actual basin of liquid mana big enough for me to completely submerge myself in, the interior of which was covered in the necessary runes.


    I scoured the surface of the moon Ammun was trapped on, hindered mostly by the fact that his own magic was hiding whatever it was he was building. Unraveling it from this distance was sure to be difficult, which made me wonder exactly how the gestalt had done it ¨C probably by brute force. That was the primary advantage of having millions upon millions of bodies to throw at a problem.


    It wouldn¡¯t surprise me in the slightest to find out the gestalt was looking at the entirety of the moon through thousands of different scrying mirrors at the same time and noting which places they couldn¡¯t see so they could refine their spells to search there. It was impossible for a normal person to do, even someone like me, but for a gestalt entity, the only limiting factor would be the mana. It was too bad their ability to utilize lossless casting was practically nonexistent.


    Giving up the attempt at scrying Ammun¡¯s activities as a bad job, I slipped through my demesne to appear on my teleportation platform. One quick spell later, I was standing on an identical platform on Eyrie Peak and on my way up to speak to Grandfather.


    Surprisingly, the old grayfeather was nowhere to be found. Either he¡¯d decided to proceed with his vacation without me, or he was just somewhere nearby on the mountain. I could see him slowly starting to venture out as he got more comfortable with the new enchantments holding the brakvaw¡¯s graveyard up above the clouds.


    Rather than go looking for him, I decided to just seek out the gestalt instead. They were, as always, in their underground cavern, and also crawling across the portal network, and on the other side of it. Odds were they were quite a few other places I wasn¡¯t aware of, as well.


    ¡®Keiran,¡¯ their odd voice spoke in my head. ¡®You¡¯ve received our message about your enemy?¡¯


    ¡°I did,¡± I said. ¡°I would have been here earlier, but I was delayed with another project.¡±


    ¡®We see that your core has changed again. This is the second time since we have known you.¡¯


    That was a bit surprising to find out that the gestalt was able to feel enough of my mana core to notice the changes. I kept it shielded from casual observation at all times, and I would have expected to know if someone was snooping around, trying to get a good look.


    Assuming my shielding technique was as good as I thought it was, that meant the gestalt was able to tell the difference based on the visible mana that supported the various spells I¡¯d cast in their presence. So, they probably didn¡¯t know what stage my core was at, just that I¡¯d advanced it twice. Still, it was impressive that they could feel the difference in my mana well enough to note the change.


    ¡°Yes. Just earlier today I finished my advancement. You told my assistant that you¡¯d detected a building on Yunitar¡¯s surface, but I wasn¡¯t able to find it with my own scrying.¡±


    ¡®Correct,¡¯ the gestalt sent. ¡®We will show you.¡¯


    I flew over the carpet of ants below me so as not to step on any part of the gestalt and approached the three mirror balls I¡¯d made. All of them were already working, each individual facet showing a stretch of empty moonscape. As I¡¯d suspected, with thousands of images to work from and their unique ability to piece together disparate sensory perceptions, the gestalt had sniffed out Ammun¡¯s secrets through pure brute force.


    Next to the scrying orbs was an illusion of the moon with a particular spot highlighted in red. It showed a small, square tower perhaps four floors high. ¡®We were not able to see inside of this structure,¡¯ the gestalt told him ¡®Not without some way to transfer some of our bodies to this location, and that would present its own series of challenges.¡¯


    Maintaining the connection to the rest of the gestalt would be damn near impossible over that kind of distance. They would almost have to split off a second, smaller gestalt to find what they wanted, then merge them back together after, something that a gestalt preferred to avoid doing. There was no guarantee the new gestalt would consent to rejoin their host once they¡¯d been separated.Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.


    I might have to go back up there and investigate this myself. I¡¯d been hoping to avoid another fight with Ammun after I¡¯d lost so bad in our last encounter. Unused to fighting under the effects of the moon¡¯s gravity and with no air, I¡¯d failed to properly defend myself, nearly died, and ended up fleeing.


    Now, Ammun had been up there for months and was fully acclimated to the environment. Worse, he¡¯d no doubt already finished tying his phylactery to the moon¡¯s core. He¡¯d be at full strength if we fought again.


    No, going back up to Yulitar was out of the question. I needed to spend however much time I had left preparing for Ammun¡¯s return. If I was lucky, his tower would be starved of mana before he got back, leaving him with no demesne to return to. He¡¯d still be formidable, but not unbeatable. Of course, just destroying his body would just send him back up to the moon, where he¡¯d teleport back again once he was recovered.


    I had plans to deal with that. Ammun wouldn¡¯t find it so easy to flee the next time I beat him.


    ¡®Do you have any requests for what you¡¯d like us to search for now?¡¯ the gestalt asked.


    ¡°Presumably, if Ammun¡¯s anti-divination wards on this tower fall, that means he¡¯s left. That could be used as a warning to let us know that he¡¯s returned,¡± I said. ¡°Then again, it¡¯s just as likely that he¡¯s built them to run on ambient mana up there. It¡¯s not a reliable indicator. Damn. There¡¯s got to be something we can do with this information.¡±


    If I did go up there, could I do it without being discovered? And if so, could I infiltrate Ammun¡¯s wards? For that matter, was this tower even real? It could be a simple decoy he stone shaped then warded to keep our attention on it. There was no way to tell, not right now.


    ¡°Keep trying to get a look inside,¡± I said. ¡°Hopefully this tower is the real deal. I¡¯ll keep making preparations to deal with Ammun when he makes it back here.¡±


    What those preparations were going to be, I didn¡¯t yet know. There was no way I was going to be able to create an emergency recall charm that would take me back down to the planet. If I went up there, it¡¯d be a one-way trip until I managed to carve out a ritual circle to bring me back. I¡¯d need to make sure I destroyed it as soon as I left, too. If it fell into Ammun¡¯s hands, he could use it to follow me back down here. The more I considered the idea of making a second trip to Yulitar, the more I found reasons not to do it.


    I glanced at the illusory moonscape again and scowled. I¡¯d hoped to get another year or two before he figured out how to get home. The fact that it was a multi-floor tower was encouraging. It meant he was still thinking in terms of a group ritual, probably trying to figure out how to do every part of it at once by himself. Or it meant that he wanted me to think that and his real ritual chamber was underground where we¡¯d never be able to scry it. That was the smart thing to do.


    ¡®We shall continue to monitor the surface of this moon,¡¯ the gestalt said. ¡®It is no great trouble to our mind, but you shall need to supply the needed mana for us.¡¯


    I nodded absently and poured mana into the three mirror balls. The enchantments were incredibly efficient, but a thousand different scrying mirrors were still a steady drain on their reserves, especially viewing something so far away. Topping all three of them off took all the mana I had in my core.


    As long as I didn¡¯t need to cast any master-tier spells in the next hour, that was fine. And if I did, my mana crystal was over half full, easily able to support a dozen or so spells. I was in no way defenseless.


    ¡°Done,¡± I said. ¡°Do you know where Grandfather went? I¡¯m supposed to find him, too.¡±


    ¡®The patriarch departed, flying straight up past the clouds an hour ago.¡¯


    Crap. Of course he did. ¡°Did anyone else go with him?¡± I asked. If not, I could probably sneak up there and see what he needed.


    ¡®Four of the elder brakvaw,¡¯ the gestalt told me


    Out of luck, again. I wasn¡¯t on good terms with the elder council to begin with, and intruding on some brakvaw ceremony that took place on their floating graveyard island was just asking for trouble. I¡¯d have to come back some other time, and it probably wouldn¡¯t be anytime soon. My hibernation and ascent to stage eight had put me behind schedule.


    ¡°Did you scry out that other thing I asked for?¡± I asked.


    Information flooded my mind, almost too much to process. It was damn near a mental attack, but I¡¯d been expecting something like this and I was prepared for it, even going so far as to suppress the mental defenses on my shield ward for a few seconds.


    ¡°Thank you for the information,¡± I said as I flew back out of the gestalt¡¯s lair. They sent a feeling of acknowledgement after me.


    I¡¯d leave Grandfather a message and see about scheduling some time with the old bird later. I just needed to find a brakvaw to pass the message along to. Luckily, there was always at least one guard at the teleportation platform. One of them could serve as my messenger.


    I flew back down and picked the larger of the two to let Grandfather know I¡¯d come by. I got something that I took to be an acknowledgement without words, mostly because brakvaw couldn¡¯t speak anything remotely resembling a human language naturally, and not all of them knew enough magic to mimic words. Some of them also didn¡¯t understand Elotian, for that matter.


    Usually the platform guards were in the group that could communicate with outsiders, though I didn¡¯t know how many people actually showed up here besides me. In this case¡­ I wasn¡¯t sure with this guy. Maybe he just didn¡¯t like me. Either way, I suspected someone would tell Grandfather I¡¯d been around and he¡¯d come find me. If nothing else, the gestalt could let him know.


    Or not. And that was fine, too. I had other stops to make and plenty to keep me busy. There was a whole map in my head now, just waiting for me to address it. It would probably be best to wait for my mana core to refill before I started on that, though, so I headed home to speak to my family next.

 Book 5, Chapter 17

    As was typical, Father was out of the house when I got there. More unusually, Mother and Nailu were also gone. Then again, with the town grown significantly from what Old Alkerist had boasted at its peak, and with the advent of magical knowledge making everyone¡¯s lives easier, people found themselves with a lot more free time. Mother used hers to socialize with a far wider circle of friends, especially those who also had young children.


    As for Senica, she could be anywhere. Much to our parents¡¯ dismay, she was no longer limiting herself to staying in New Alkerist. Our successful troll hunt had given her enough confidence to push back against their desire to shelter her, not that she¡¯d had much trouble fighting them on that in the first place. Besides, she was closing in on sixteen now, which was the point where she was considered an adult in this culture.


    I could think of a few others I¡¯d found over the years that had much younger ages of majority. It was probably for the best that we hadn¡¯t been born in any of those places, however. Societies that acknowledged ten-year-olds as adults usually only did so in order to prey upon them in various unsavory ways.


    I¡¯d hoped to catch up with my whole family, but I wasn¡¯t surprised that I¡¯d missed everyone by popping up unannounced in the middle of the day. On the other hand, the only person I actually needed to talk to was Father, so I searched him out. Unsurprisingly, he was out in the fields. That was where he spent most of his time when not being swamped with his duties on the town¡¯s council.


    Good. It was far easier to get a chance to talk to him when he was working the fields than it was when he was busy talking to everyone else. I flew across town, skimming the roof tops both to shorten my journey and to avoid anyone on the streets who might try to flag me down. That didn¡¯t mean people didn¡¯t see me, just that I was gone over the next building before they could say anything.


    Father waved up at me as I approached, then turned and said something to the two men standing nearby. One of them nodded, and he handed off the shovel he¡¯d been holding before stepping away to meet me.


    ¡°Gravin,¡± he said. ¡°Finally feeling better?¡±


    ¡°Yes and no. Lot of work to catch up on,¡± I told him. ¡°I¡¯m refilling my mana core before I tackle the next problem and thought I¡¯d use the time to see what you need.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s the next problem?¡± Father asked curiously.


    ¡°Boring experimentation and lab work,¡± I lied. It wasn¡¯t that my parents would try to stop me from going into dangerous situations, but they worried, sometimes over nothing. My next job would only become dangerous if Ammun happened to teleport on top of me while I was doing it. Admittedly, the likelihood of that actually happening seemed to be on the rise.


    However, it would seem dangerous if I explained it to Father, plus a lot of people were probably going to die today, so it was easier to just¡­ not tell him. Part of me thought I should feel bad about that, but that part was only whining because it was my parents I was keeping things from. Besides, I was technically a teenager now, probably. Hiding things from my parents was practically a rite of passage.


    ¡°I heard you were delivering a message from Shel?¡± I prompted in a bid to change the subject before Father could ask any follow up questions.


    A flicker of annoyance crossed his face, but he¡¯d spent enough time arbitrating disputes on the council to smother it immediately. ¡°Yes¡­ Shel. Thanks so much for bringing her back into my life,¡± he said.


    ¡°She can¡¯t possibly be that annoying when she lives hundreds of miles away.¡±


    ¡°For the two days she was here, yes, she could. Very insistent on seeing you again. She only gave up and went home after I got back from the valley and told her that not even I could get to you at the time.¡±


    ¡°Okay, but what did she want?¡± I asked. I assumed it was for me to help with something, but that didn¡¯t really narrow it down.


    ¡°To know what you wanted them to start growing next, I think.¡±


    ¡°Uh¡­ nothing? That was a one-time deal. I¡¯ve got my supplier sorted out and we¡¯ve invested a lot into his operation. Shel and the village got a harvest at a premium price because I needed it right then, but I¡¯m all set now.¡±


    Father snorted. ¡°Of course. All this time pestering me, and the answer is just, ¡®No thanks.¡¯ You think she¡¯ll accept that next time she comes around?¡±


    ¡°Does she have much choice? What would you do with anyone else if someone refused to accept an answer?¡±


    ¡°Warn them to get over it before they spent the night in the jail.¡±Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    ¡°So do that,¡± I suggested.


    We had sound wards on the cells. She couldn¡¯t annoy whoever was on duty too much that way. It seemed like a simple solution to me.


    ¡°Might be better to hear it from you, just so there¡¯s no ambiguity and you can address any other problems she has,¡± Father said.


    I squinted at him suspiciously. ¡°That sounds a lot like trying to foist a problem off on me.¡±


    ¡°It was your problem in the first place!¡± he protested. ¡°If anyone foisted anything, you did it to me!¡±


    There was a fair amount of truth in that statement, much as I hated to admit it. ¡°Fine, fine. I¡¯m up and about now. Next time she shows up, just let me know. I¡¯ll come back and deal with her.¡±


    Damn it, that was exactly what I didn¡¯t want to do. Why did I like having a family again?


    * * *


    I spent a few more minutes catching up with my father, then flew myself back to the town¡¯s teleportation platform. I hadn¡¯t nearly filled my mana core to full, but time was more valuable to me right now. I drew on my personal mana crystal to power a series of teleportation spells that ended with me in the old empire of Ralvost, now a mostly deserted land thanks to Ammun¡¯s predations.


    He¡¯d gotten a legion of zombies in exchange for killing almost everyone who¡¯d lived here, one that Querit had been remarkably thorough in killing when they¡¯d been sent through portals to besiege the various villages and towns located on my home island. He¡¯d also taken out a few dozen necromancers as well.


    That did not mean things were pacified over in this corner of the world ¨C far from it, in fact. Ammun had left an army of mages behind when he¡¯d teleported himself and a few dozen diviners up to Yulitar. I¡¯d sent those diviners back, stranding him up there with no one to help him work the ritual to get back, and most of them had had the good sense to run for the hills upon returning to Manoch.


    The rest of his army was a mixed bag. Some had deserted. A lot of them had gone running back to the tower, though I expected the ones who¡¯d disappeared into the wilderness had only done so because they were afraid of Ammun returning, easily finding them, and punishing them.


    I wasn¡¯t terribly worried about the deserters. The tower was getting weaker by the day, the mana needed to support the gargantuan building being siphoned away by my mysteel generators. Once the wards and enchantments holding it together started to fail, it would be crushed under its own weight.


    No, the problem was the rest of the army. There were still a few thousand hostile mages loyal to Ammun¡¯s cause that I¡¯d been ignoring for the last few months simply because there were so many other, more important problems demanding my attention. Collecting enough mysteel to repair the shell around the world core was one of my top priorities, right up there with destroying Ammun¡¯s demesne and figuring out how to return my mana core to stage nine.


    But now that I had to worry about my former apprentice showing back up, it was time to do something about them. The gestalt had helped me out by using my network of scrying beacons to do a lot of the busywork, even if their method of transferring that information left something to be desired. If I¡¯d had more time, I would have insisted it be delivered the normal way, but there was too much and I didn¡¯t have a few days to go through it all.


    Instead, I got a brain full of troop locations, defensive systems, supply lines, and identified officers. The gestalt had even found a lot of the deserters who¡¯d opted to flee instead of returning to the tower, and marked a hundred or so spots with anti-scrying wards that probably held the more competent mages, including Ammun¡¯s diviners.


    While I¡¯d been taking care of other business, I¡¯d been reviewing everything the gestalt had sent me. There were too many sites to just start raining destruction down on them randomly. I needed a strategy. At the very least, I needed to identify the most important places to destroy and plan the most efficient route to hit them all.


    That had been on my mind for the last half an hour or so, and I¡¯d slowly settled into a definitive plan of action. The most important aspect was preventing my victims from alerting other parts of the army. I¡¯d cut off the more isolated camps first, the ones that wouldn¡¯t be missed for days or even weeks. Then I¡¯d go after the high priority targets. They¡¯d be missed in a matter of hours, maybe less.


    After I hit the first one, it¡¯d be a race to take advantage of the information for as long as it remained accurate. At some point, the army would start to collapse back on its main base and there¡¯d be too many of them for me to do more than strafing runs. I didn¡¯t have the time to whittle them down, so the goal was to break them before they figured out what was happening.


    I considered bringing Querit in on this, but if I was being honest, I didn¡¯t need him and the work he was doing was probably more important. Or maybe I just didn¡¯t want him to have to kill thousands of people. I was already a monster; there was no need to turn anyone else into one.


    I flew above the clouds, trusting in my divinations to lead me to the first site I was going to attack. It was a small encampment fortified with transmuted earthworks and staffed by about fifty mages. Its only purpose, as far as I could tell, was to keep an eye on the northeast border of Ammun¡¯s empire. Considering they¡¯d killed or driven off all their neighbors, I wasn¡¯t sure why the fort hadn¡¯t been abandoned already.


    The first order of business was to place a divination lock on the fort, just in case anyone inside was decent enough to scry out for help. After that, a few carefully placed ward buster spells blew the defenses wide open, leaving the ward stone vulnerable to a mana surge that cracked it in half.


    That was when the soldiers started making noise. Some of it was panicked, but most of it was impressively disciplined. Discipline only got a soldier so far, however. Without the skill to back it up, they had no chance of spotting me before I was ready to reveal myself.


    Mindful of my reserves, I opted to send ropes of lightning down into the fort, killing its defenders one by one as it chained between bodies. It wasn¡¯t the fastest way to wipe everyone out, but it got the job done. Once I¡¯d ensured there was no one left alive, I flew to the next outlying encampment.


    It was a butcher¡¯s work, killing those soldiers loyal enough that they were still serving their absent emperor, but I was determined that by the time Ammun got back, he wouldn¡¯t have an army left.

 Book 5, Chapter 18

    I didn¡¯t even keep track of how many places I destroyed, let alone how many people I killed. All I knew was that it was a lot, and that I¡¯d almost certainly ended the lives of a significant number of people who didn¡¯t deserve it. That did not stop me from moving on to the next base, encampment, or fortification to repeat the process.


    Ammun was going to return eventually. I needed to cut away any and all support I could, even if the cost was an ocean of blood. These people had already threatened me and mine too many times already.


    While I went about my gruesome work, part of me wondered why I was bothered at all. The old Keiran had broken armies multiple times, and he¡¯d never paused to consider the fates of those unfortunate soldiers. Why was I? It couldn¡¯t just be the Gravin part of me. I¡¯d long ago determined that Gravin¡¯s defining contribution to my new personality was affection for my immediate family, and that was it. It was a small circle, and even my new little brother was only loosely connected to it.


    Maybe it was how closely I¡¯d been working with others for the last decade making me go soft and sentimental. I¡¯d spent more hours around other people since being reincarnated than I had in the past two centuries of my old life, and as it turned out, they weren¡¯t really all that bad. Sure, they could be annoying and selfish and greedy, but I wasn¡¯t any better. And usually, the things they wanted were so trivial that it took almost no effort on my part to fulfill those desires.


    But I wasn¡¯t a charity, and thus was under no obligation to actually help anyone just because they wanted something. Besides, my time was too valuable to be spent on random engineering projects or putting up newer, better homes for people who honestly didn¡¯t like me that much and hadn¡¯t treated me that well anyway.


    Shel was on my mind more than I cared to admit. She was hardly the first person to show up and want something, and I supposed I understood her thinking since I¡¯d initially made contact with the village, but it was a lot harder to give her the brush off than I¡¯d expected. Shel was one of my first apprentices since I woke back up in Gravin¡¯s body, even if she was incredibly annoying. I hadn¡¯t technically abandoned her, but only by virtue of the fact that I¡¯d been banished from the village.


    Damn it. Did I owe her some help like I would any other apprentice? If so, what form did that help take? It definitely wasn¡¯t helping out her whole village, but it might be teaching her the spells needed so that she could do it herself.


    My musings were interrupted by a squad of artillery mages who¡¯d somehow shielded themselves from detection long enough to get a ritual spell up and running. A pillar of stone thirty feet tall and ten feet wide came flying up through the air with enough momentum to kill me on impact. Something that big and heavy had no right to move that fast, especially not moving straight up, but there it was all the same.


    It was too big to swat aside with telekinesis, even with master-tier grand telekinesis. Instead, I layered force walls in front of it, stressing the rock structure and bleeding off its speed as it blasted through each one. By the time it reached my altitude, I was already a hundred feet away and it was shedding small chunks of stone to rain down on the mages below.


    I quickly located the artillery squad hiding beneath an anti-divination ward with some attention redirection qualities woven into it. My earlier distraction had made it easy for the magic to keep me focused on killing everyone else, but now that I was focused on them, I ripped through the ward easily. Javelins of force rained down, dozens falling to spear through the artillery mages.


    Personal shield wards popped and shattered as they were bombarded with more damage than they could stop. Mages were shunted in every direction, often slamming into each other, and three seconds later, they were dead. What had been a potentially lethal threat was now a tangle of bodies leaking blood from punctured torsos and severed limbs.


    It did serve to drag my attention firmly back to the task at hand, though. Mages died or fled by the dozens until all two hundred or so that had been stationed here were disposed of. None of them had possessed the ability to teleport, or if they had, they hadn¡¯t found the time to actually cast the spell. Six had ¡®escaped¡¯ by flying away, only to be shot down by mana beams from the defensive embankments I¡¯d built and seeded around the camp in a large circle. The rest had died where they stood.


    I collected my equipment back into my phantom space through the simple expedient of triggering an enchantment on them that caused them to all fly toward me, then headed off for the next spot.


    * * *This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    A few other times, artillery squads managed to protect or hide themselves long enough to take a shot at me. Usually, it was a combination of hiding and sacrificing other mages as a distraction, since it was rather difficult to go hunting mages down while fending off a few dozen of their fellows hurling fire, ice, lightning, force, mind probes, and hexes at me all at once.


    The usual cycle for these things was to thin as much as half their numbers in my opening attack, whittle down another quarter or so over the next few minutes, then mop up the survivors once they broke and fled. That time I spent whittling was the only dangerous part, and a bunch of mages at stages one or two just weren¡¯t that threatening. Even the occasional stage three officers were more of a nuisance than anything else.


    That¡¯s how it went for the first eight hours or so. After that, all the isolated camps where gone and I had to start taking risks. I¡¯d already worked out my strategy, which was to change my priority targets to any communications centers first, then to prevent escape second. Taking out mages specializing in offense was the third most important part of the job, and I focused on it just heavily enough to ensure I didn¡¯t need to retreat.


    Even now, it was still a chore to be handled, the butchering of larger groups of mage soldiers that took slightly longer to murder than my original targets. I was still killing more people faster when I accounted for my travel time, especially since my mana had completely recovered and I¡¯d started opening up my assaults with devastating master-tier spells, just one or two for each base I destroyed.


    That worked for another hour or so, but then someone managed to get a message out and the whole plan unraveled. Once the soldiers were forewarned and had time to prepare, it got a lot tougher to devastate their forces with surprise attacks. That in turn reduced my effectiveness, drastically increased my mana costs, and left me facing considerably more danger.


    I hadn¡¯t gotten them all. I¡¯d killed maybe a third, and probably the worst third at that. Important and competent soldiers didn¡¯t get sent to isolated outposts that guarded nothing. But still, single-handedly destroying a third of an army several thousand strong in a single day was nothing to turn my nose up at.


    They weren¡¯t just going to take it lying down, however. Not only did I fail to take the next spot by surprise, but they actually ambushed me first. I was still setting up for my attack when my shield ward flared with mana, blocking some sort of overpowered mind crush spell. At the same time, a giant ball of force appeared around me and started trying to constrict on me, to crush me into paste.


    A few more attacks targeting my mind came my way, probably as a distraction, while I reached into the mana matrix of the force spell and broke it apart. By the time I freed myself, thirty mages were flying up to attack me, various spells already forming around them.


    A wave of dispelling magic rolled out from me, wide enough to catch all of them even if it was a bit wasteful. Conjurations designed to burn, tear, or bludgeon me to death fizzled out, and no small number of mages found their weight suddenly unsupported when they failed to protect their ongoing flight spells, too.


    More mages were coming out of everywhere to attack me, including no less than six artillery squads. It was somewhat flattering to know they were taking me seriously, but it was also making my job considerably harder. In fact, with so many enemy mages arrayed against me, all of them organized and with a plan to kill me in mind, this was looking like the point in my campaign of genocide where I needed to retreat.


    That was my plan until someone two miles north of the camp fired off a massive beam of heat and fire at me. It struck me squarely, breaking through my shield ward and turning my skin an angry red as it blistered. I was only in the edge of the beam for half a second before gravity pulled me clear, but that was enough to do some real damage. I¡¯d need to magically heal myself if I didn¡¯t want a face full of burn scars for the rest of my life.


    A simple intermediate-tier invocation killed my sensation of pain, allowing me to ignore the burnt skin for now. The deadly fire beam swept the sky, catching a few of the enemy mages in its path as it chased me around, but I¡¯d seen this spell a few times already and I knew how to handle it.


    It belonged to a mage who¡¯d gone by the moniker of Seven back when he¡¯d been in the Breakers. I¡¯d watched him use it to assassinate his own grandmother when I¡¯d first met him, and he¡¯d tried to kill me with it more than once. I hadn¡¯t exactly expected to run into him here and now, but that didn¡¯t mean I wasn¡¯t ready to deal with him.


    First, I had to rebuild my shield ward. It couldn¡¯t stand up to the fire beam, but he wasn¡¯t the only mage trying to kill me right now. A few dozen other conjurations were heading my way, all of them weak enough that my shield ward could defend me from them, but only if I could pump enough mana into it to get it back up fast enough.


    Two force bolts slammed into my back, rattling me and stealing my breath. My instinct was to spin in place and return fire, but I didn¡¯t have the time, not if I wanted to avoid becoming a charred corpse. Instead, I let myself keep falling for the second it took to get my shield ward back up, then jerked myself sideways with a short-range instant teleport.


    Blood seeped down my back and I definitely had a broken rib or two. I wrapped a band of force around my chest to hold everything mostly in place, but I needed to be careful for the rest of this fight or else I¡¯d end up with a punctured lung on top of everything else.


    Fortunately, flight didn¡¯t require me to actually move any part of my body, so the injury didn¡¯t slow me down. It did make dodging a bit riskier since sudden changes in direction were a problem, but I only had one goal left before I retreated from this battle.


    I flew toward the source of that fiery death beam that had scorched me. For as many times as I¡¯d seen Seven, this was the day I made sure he died.

 Book 5, Chapter 19

    The closer I got to the source of the beam, the harder it was to dodge it. That might have been a problem if I wasn¡¯t already so familiar with the spell, but I¡¯d been on the receiving end enough times to have a good idea of both the spell¡¯s and the person controlling its limitations. Seven aimed the spell visually and seemed unable or unwilling to use divinations to assist with that. I had a theory that he just wasn¡¯t a good enough mage to channel a master-tier spell and cast anything else at the same time, but either way, it meant he had a lot of blind spots.


    One of those was that he couldn¡¯t see what was directly next to the beam since it blocked his own view, though he compensated by shifting it in a slight circular pattern to fry anyone who tried to hide there. Even without that, the amount of heat rolling off the beam was enough to cook anyone who got that close.


    It was a powerful spell on its own, made all the more dangerous by the fact that Seven had a full squadron of mages supporting him. They worked the divinations that fed him information and protected him from retaliatory magic. They were also the ones who tried to pin me down with telekinesis or mental attacks, to slow me enough to let Seven catch me. Really, they were the ones I was fighting right now. Without his support mages, it would be trivial to dance around Seven¡¯s death beam until he ran out of mana.


    So, I didn¡¯t target Seven directly with my counterattack. He was too well defended, anyway. Instead, I latched onto one of the dozen or so defenders on the platform working both to cover him and to maintain the wards, and I drove a massive mind spike into the man¡¯s brain. He cried out in pain and collapsed on the spot, leaving a small hole in the platform¡¯s coverage. Automated wards partially compensated for it, but it was obvious the system had been designed to have humans holding its hands. It wasn¡¯t robust enough to read what was attacking it and respond accordingly.


    Without that guidance, there were vulnerabilities to exploit. Normally, something as complex as wardbreaking wouldn¡¯t be done during live combat. However, in this case, messing the wards up would most likely result in an explosion that killed everyone on the platform. Since that was pretty much the goal, and because I wasn¡¯t going to be anywhere nearby when it happened, I sent a surge of mana into the hole left by the mage I¡¯d already dropped.


    It wasn¡¯t subtle. There were certainly better ways to unravel that defense, but I didn¡¯t have time for that, nor did I particularly care about breaking anything. My mana was a hammer, and I swung it with the intent to break something.


    As it happened, the wards looked to have been made by some mages who didn¡¯t really know what they were doing. It had been slapped together with nothing to anchor it to and no mana reserves outside what the mages could feed into it. When I hit it, I didn¡¯t just break something. I broke a lot of things.


    Miniature explosions filled the platform, outright killing at least four people and injuring a handful more. A few of them had personal shield wards strong enough to survive the catastrophic feedback the fallen ward let out, which unfortunately included Seven. I¡¯d give him his due; his concentration never wavered.


    His aim, on the other hand, got a lot worse all a sudden. I accelerated and got another hundred feet of distance from the beam even as I closed the distance on its source, and Seven couldn¡¯t keep up with my abrupt change in speed and direction. His magic sliced through the air, but by the time it reached where I¡¯d gone, I¡¯d already disappeared again.


    I was still too far out to use any sort of conjurations without having to worry about them being dispelled, but that was a risk I was willing to take. The mages left alive were still reeling from the failure of their wards. While it was a safe bet that just because they could dispel any spells I threw at them didn¡¯t mean they actually would.


    Force bolts spiraled through the air, striking unerringly and throwing bodies off the platform. I closed in, spinning a large loop to keep ahead of Seven, whose shield ward was still intact despite everything. The difference between Seven¡¯s gear and the average army mage¡¯s was night and day.


    ¡°Damn it!¡± Seven bellowed, finally releasing the beam of fiery destruction and spinning to face me as I approached. Mana welled up in him and burst out into four smaller beams that curved around to meet with me as their focal point.


    Unlike the big one he¡¯d been trying to cook me with, these ones were pure mana, designed to punch through shield wards, and not even close to up to the task. Maybe if I¡¯d been using the kind of shield wards that appeared to be standard issue in Ammun¡¯s army, I¡¯d have been in trouble. Instead, I brushed the spell off like it wasn¡¯t even there. I probably could have done it even without my shadow enhancing my magic.


    There were six feet and two shield wards separating us. A look of absolute rage twisted Seven¡¯s features as he glared at me, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure why. We were enemies, sure, but we¡¯d barely ever had any personal interactions.This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.


    Oh. Right. I¡¯d killed a few thousand soldiers. He probably had some friends in that group. That would do it.


    ¡°Just die already, you monster,¡± he screamed at me as he conjured up some sort of steel ball. It shot across the platform, grew spines and dug into my shield ward, trying to break it down. I shattered it with a pane of force and sent three blades at Seven. The feedback let me know that, despite everything, his defenses were still holding strong.


    This was not going to be quick, not unless I stumbled across some flaw in his shield ward, and unfortunately for me, I still had the rest of the army stationed here to deal with. I¡¯d gotten ahead of them momentarily, but now that I¡¯d stalled out, they¡¯d quickly catch up. I needed to end this fight before circumstances forced a draw.


    There was always the easy way. I could just dump tons of mana on Seven¡¯s head until the shield ward just couldn¡¯t take it anymore. If I was fast enough, I might even get away with not chaining master-tier spells so that I could recover all the mana I used. As much as it pained me to once again use the hammer, I didn¡¯t know what the right tool for this job was and I didn¡¯t have time to experiment.


    I dumped lightning on Seven¡¯s head. I flash froze the air around him. I bombarded him with force bolts, lances, and crushing waves. I cycled through various powerful conjurations, enough to break a small army, and when that still wasn¡¯t enough, I started attacking him with divinations and hexes as well. I didn¡¯t need any one thing to stick. I just needed to find the last straw that would prove too much weight.


    Seven wasn¡¯t stupid. He understood exactly what was happening. I was turning our fight into a contest of who had more mana available, and the fact that I might run myself dry killing him, only to be killed in turn by his allies, probably wasn¡¯t any sort of comfort to him. The way he won this was to stall, to turtle up and reinforce his shield ward long enough for his allies to arrive.


    I didn¡¯t think he realized that, not fully. Conventional wisdom was that attacking forced an opponent to split their attention so that they couldn¡¯t hit back quite as hard. And, for the most part, I agreed with that. However, lossless casting allowed me to win any sort of contest over who had the most mana by default, which meant I didn¡¯t need to budget or be clever.


    When Seven tried to distract me with his own spells, I let my shield ward take the hit and kept my focus on hammering him down. He quickly gave up on trading spells with me and shifted focus to blocking as many conjurations as possible while pumping mana into the shield ward. It was a losing proposition for him, but if he was lucky, he¡¯d last just long enough for someone to save him.


    At least, that was what I assumed he was thinking right up until he decided to be a bit more proactive about the whole thing and threw himself off the platform. Lightning chased him down, striking him no less than six times and sending skittering lines of electricity across his shield ward. Then his flight magic caught hold of his weight and whisked him toward his allies.


    I ripped up chunks of stone to pelt him with, the smallest the size of my head and the bigger ones more than three feet across. It wouldn¡¯t stop him, nor did dealing with repeated kinetic impacts make it harder to fly since his shield ward apparently wasn¡¯t sophisticated enough to push him aside to lessen the mana load. Instead, he just took and stopped each attack, probably spending triple the mana and making this easily the most viable way to break through.


    The thirty seconds or so I¡¯d estimated I had left to finish him was shrinking rapidly, down to five or six before he made contact with the rest of the army, so it was time to do something a bit more drastic. While Seven was fleeing, I started setting up a master-tier spell. There was no chance anyone would interfere from this distance, but even so, I put it together as quickly as possible. It still took a good fifteen seconds, allowing Seven to rejoin the ranks of his supporters. He spun in the air to flash me a condescending smirk, but the expression slipped off his face when he realized what I was casting.


    Rather than explain to the rest of the mages, he turned and fled at maximum speed. No mana was spared on defense, not when he knew how pointless it would be. He managed to get a quarter mile or so away before I finished the spell I¡¯d been building while he flew.


    Then a beam of fiery destruction split the sky, instantly vaporizing anyone caught in its wake. I swung it across the approaching army, killing a hundred people in a second but not catching Seven. Unlike the erstwhile heir to now-defunct House Adelyn, I was more than capable of casting other spells while I channeled Seven¡¯s signature fire beam. I didn¡¯t need my eyes to tell me exactly where he was, and it was easy to tweak the spell¡¯s parameters to extend the beam¡¯s range.


    Now it was his turn to dart and weave through the air, desperately trying to keep ahead of me. I even let him think he could for a few seconds while I set up the next part of my trap. Perhaps he thought to just flee beyond the spell since I wasn¡¯t chasing after him. Or perhaps he was too panicked to think of anything beyond staying alive for another moment.


    Either way, he wasn¡¯t prepared for my modification, when the fire beam split from one twenty-foot-wide bar of destruction into ten two-foot-wide tendrils. They lashed out like living things, corralling Seven between them and quickly caging him in on all sides. Then, without pausing, they collapsed back together, catching him in their deadly embrace. His shield ward vanished like smoke on the wind, and Seven was reduced to a cloud of ash lightly drifting toward the ground.


    I turned the beam on the rest of the army. There was no point in wasting it when I already had the spell up and running. It cost more mana than I strictly needed to spend, but it got the job done. Survivors fled in all directions, more than I could possibly hunt down. I let them flee. My work busting armies was just about done for the day, anyway. If any of them dared to regroup, I¡¯d do a second pass and show them the error of their ways.


    For now, I was ready to head back home.

 Book 5, Chapter 20

    ¡°Querit,¡± I said, ¡°Did we have visitors while I was away?¡±


    I stood in the middle of the valley on my teleportation platform and frowned as I felt out the foreign node of mana embedded in my wards. My assistant was in the lab, peering over my shoulder through the scrying mirror I¡¯d pulled out of my phantom space.


    ¡°None that the wards detected,¡± he said. ¡°I suppose I could have missed somebody coming in who was already keyed in. But I¡¯m having trouble coming up with anyone who fit the criteria and could do something like this.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s because there isn¡¯t anyone like that,¡± I muttered. My immediate family could pass through unhindered. Querit himself could. And that was the end of that list. ¡°Someone could have stood outside the wards and done this, though.¡±


    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t the divination components have detected them?¡±


    ¡°Unless they were really good, yes.¡±


    The golem considered that for a second, then said, ¡°Do you think one of Ammun¡¯s mages came here to spy on us?¡±


    ¡°No. This isn¡¯t anything like that. This is¡­ as far as I can tell, something I never expected to see again. It doesn¡¯t look quite right, but it¡¯s close enough that I feel comfortable calling this an archmage¡¯s knock.¡±


    ¡°I have no idea what that is,¡± Querit told me.


    ¡°It¡¯s exactly what it sounds like ¨C a way for archmages to announce their presence to each other without triggering a bunch of killing wards by trying to breach each other¡¯s demesnes.¡±


    I just had no idea who¡¯d put it there. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only archmage on the planet until Ammun figured out a way to return, and I was starting to doubt his credentials anyway. Of course, there were still a lot of unexplored continents left. It was possible whole magical civilizations existed there, and we just hadn¡¯t discovered them. Our recently adapted long-range scrying spells could let me see anywhere on the planet now, but I hadn¡¯t really had the time to do it yet.


    That sounded like yet another job to pass off to the gestalt, and one I probably should have asked them to do as soon as I¡¯d completed those scrying polyhedrons. But no, I¡¯d had legitimate concerns about keeping an eye on what Ammun was doing. He was an active threat, and I had limited resources and manpower. This¡­ whatever this was, was something new.


    ¡°Do you know any other archmages?¡± Querit asked. ¡°I was under the impression that magical culture had completely died out.¡±


    ¡°Me too. I guess maybe we were wrong about that. I wonder where they¡¯re from, and what they want.¡±


    I scried backward through time while I casually picked at the knot of mana. A middle-aged-looking man left the knock for me from about three miles away, outside the range of my wards¡¯ detection capabilities, but not outside my own scrying abilities. I doubted that was a coincidence.


    I studied him while he wove together the spell and embedded it in my demesne. He was tall, an inch or two over six feet, with a thick head of hair gone to gray the beginnings of crow¡¯s feet at the corners of his eyes. A close-cut beard lined his jaw, brown with more streaks of gray in it. I wasn¡¯t willing to take that at face value, not when it was so easy to appear significantly younger than he actually was. He looked middle-aged because he chose to, not because he was actually in his forties or fifties.


    Of more interest were his clothes. He was dressed in brown robes, simple and unadorned. Generally speaking, people with the level of power this man was displaying could afford to buy whatever clothes they wanted, so if he was wearing that, it was because he wanted to. It was a statement of some kind.


    The robe vaguely reminded me of some monastic orders that had existed back in my old life, ones who mixed magic and spirituality together in a way I¡¯d never quite found myself understanding the purpose of. It worked for them, though, and if their descendants were still around, maybe they¡¯d done something right, after all.


    Or it could just be a coincidence. Those kinds of people hardly had some sort of exclusive right to wearing plain brown robes even back in my last life. There was no telling how much things had drifted over a few thousand years.


    I finished unraveling the knock while I studied the mage who¡¯d left it. The pattern was a little different than I remembered, but once again, I was willing to blame that on millennia of culture drift. The important part was that the core of the knot contained a message, just like I¡¯d expected it to.


    ¡®Greetings, Keiran of the Night Vale. The Global Order of the Arcane would like to extend an invitation to meet with us regarding the recent events occurring in the Selivar Region, known locally as the kingdom of Ralvost. It has come to our attention that the lich lord known as Ammun Nescent has returned. You have been called upon to submit any and all information on this situation so that we can form an appropriate response. Please see the attached instructions for contacting us with a reply.This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.


    ¡®Respectfully, Bakir Odrinac, Archmage of the Fifth Order¡¯


    It was a sort of mental image of the man I¡¯d scried out speaking to me, along with the mana signature of a scrying beacon and general location of it to find him. The message itself faded away after I¡¯d listened to it once, apparently not sophisticated enough to be repeatable.


    ¡°Well, I have some questions,¡± I said. ¡°Have you heard of any of this stuff?¡±


    I gave Querit the pertinent names, none of which he recognized. ¡°If such an organization existed back in my time, it was not general knowledge. I would hazard a guess that it¡¯s possible they formed post-cataclysm as a direct response to Ammun destroying a moon and shattering the world core.¡±


    That was a fair guess. Something like that was certainly a good reason for the archmages of the time to put aside their differences and focus on mitigating the damage. But that just raised the question of what exactly had attracted their attention to this part of Manoch now. Ammun had been awake for years already.


    ¡°Is there any way we can find out more about these people before I agree to meet with them?¡± I asked. ¡°Any books your creator left behind that might talk about them?¡±


    I wasn¡¯t eager to step into a cabal of archmages, all of whom had an unknown amount of strength. I was close to my former strength in terms of raw power and skill, but decidedly lacking in all the tools and workshops I¡¯d built up over a thousand years. My ability to prepare for a battle was a mere shadow of what it used to be, so much so that I wasn¡¯t confident I could learn anything at all about these new archmages.


    Perhaps a meeting with this Bakir Odrinac was the best move. I could invite him into my demesne, where I¡¯d be at the height of my power, and assess him before I agreed to talk to anyone else. If it seemed too risky, I¡¯d just send him on his way. I¡¯d tell him what his cabal wanted to know if there was some advantage to it, otherwise it¡¯d just be one more potential problem to deal with.


    I had plenty of things I needed to keep secret in my demesne, however. I would need to take steps to mitigate Bakir¡¯s ability to snoop if I didn¡¯t want him discovering my mana resonance point or moon core fragment. The labs were all individually warded, so the contents of those were safe. The petrified forest itself was impossible to hide. Anyone with eyes could simply look into the valley from miles away and see the trees.


    A private room, warded against scrying and that my unexpected guest could be teleported directly into would be best. He might already know about Querit, but if not, this was a good way to hide the golem¡¯s presence. It would also block him from detecting other mana sources inside my demesne. I just needed to set it up first.


    * * *


    The chamber was buried in the side of the mountain that made up the north slope of the valley. It was freshly formed, shaped entirely of magic and stocked with a few comfortable chairs and tables I¡¯d picked up and put into storage for the next time I needed them. I spent the most effort on the wards, designed to completely isolate it from any and all outside influences. A scrying mirror provided the only access to the rest of the world, and without enchantments constantly recycling the air, anyone trapped in here would soon pass out and die.


    One half of the room was filled with furniture and other comforts. The other half was a ritual summoning circle designed to bring my guest directly to me, assuming he was cooperative. I¡¯d given strong consideration to lacing the room with traps just in case negotiations broke down, but I¡¯d decided against it.


    It was possible these people could become important allies. I did still have a world core to save, after all, and any help I could get would make things easier. A cabal of archmages would be highly motivated to assist with that goal, so I was hopeful that this meeting would end with us on good terms. Summoning their representative into a deathtrap probably wasn¡¯t the best way to facilitate that goal.


    Once I¡¯d finished the prep work and relayed instructions to Querit on keeping himself out of sight just in case things went poorly, I reached out through the mirror and found the scrying beacon Bakir¡¯s message had directed me to. I found it immediately, and as soon as I did, the archmage himself noted the connection.


    ¡®Ah. Archmage Keiran, I presume?¡¯ he mentally projected.


    ¡®The same,¡¯ I sent back. ¡®I received your message that you wished to speak.¡¯


    I hadn¡¯t been expecting to have a telepathic conversation, but that was also fine. The meeting room could sit here collecting dust until I needed it for something else, and this was probably safer for both of us, anyway.


    ¡®Very much so,¡¯ Balkir sent. ¡®It seems you¡¯ve been quite busy since your reincarnation. We didn¡¯t even realize you¡¯d returned until Ammun started up again, to be truthful. I¡¯m afraid we all rather thought that project of yours was something of a fool¡¯s errand, but, well, here you are. I guess you showed us! Ha!¡¯


    ¡®I hadn¡¯t realized my works were so well known,¡¯ I thought sourly. ¡®I suppose everything came out after my death when my vaults and workshops were raided.¡¯


    ¡®More or less, yes. Not all of it, but I¡¯m told there were plenty of people interested in knowing what your final fate was after two hundred years with no word from you.¡¯


    It wasn¡¯t a new concept for me. I¡¯d discovered the remains of the Night Vale where Ammun¡¯s tower now stood¡ªa fact I still hadn¡¯t forgiven him for¡ªand knew that the home had been pillaged. I even had an old mysteel vault door I¡¯d salvaged and had been using for scraps to run my biometal experiments sitting in my phantom space. It still rankled every time I thought of the delicate instruments being destroyed and my life¡¯s work being carted off.


    ¡®There were some unexpected complications to my reincarnation,¡¯ I said. ¡®And the world appears to have fallen apart while I was gone.¡¯


    ¡®True. I suppose you¡¯ve invested some considerable effort into catching up on everything that happened between your death and rebirth?¡¯


    ¡®As much as I could,¡¯ I sent. ¡®I¡¯ve obviously missed a few things, as I¡¯ve never heard of the Global Order of the Arcane.¡¯


    ¡®Ah!¡¯ Balkir sounded excited now. ¡®A proper introduction is in order then. Might I trouble you for an invitation into your demesne?¡¯


    Apparently, we were going to be doing this face-to-face after all. ¡®I have a summoning circle set up to bring you in,¡¯ I told my fellow archmage.


    ¡®Perfect. Give me just a moment and I¡¯ll be ready.¡¯

 Book 5, Chapter 21

    Bakir¡¯s eyes glittered with amusement as he surveyed the meeting room I¡¯d constructed, but he kept any comments about my security to himself. I guided him to his seat and claimed the one opposite of him, then settled back and let him start the conversation.


    ¡°I confess to some curiosity,¡± he said. ¡°Not to pry into the intimate details of your life, but you may be the only person to ever navigate the cycle of reincarnation and come out with your memories intact. Having experienced the process, would you say this is the true key to immortality?¡±


    I snorted out a laugh. ¡°No. Not at all. Maybe it could be with some more refinement, but¡­ no, just the fact that it took thousands of years for me to come back means something went wrong. Without being able to fix that, it¡¯s a flawed process at best.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ll continue to research it?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Someday, when I have the time. I¡¯ve got a lot of other problems competing for my attention right now.¡±


    ¡°Yes, that.¡± Bakir frowned. ¡°The lich lord is not someone we were expecting to show back up. Then again, I suppose the same is true for you. You¡¯re specters from the past, all but forgotten by civilization.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m perfectly fine with that,¡± I told him dryly.


    ¡°You¡¯ve certainly gone out of your way to draw attention to yourself, though.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m just trying to fix this broken world. If Ammun hadn¡¯t interfered, I¡¯d be halfway there already.¡±


    That wasn¡¯t strictly true, but I¡¯d certainly be farther along if I wasn¡¯t constantly getting sidetracked dealing with him. In his defense, fixing the world involved breaking his demesne. Prior to his little jaunt to a moon, that would have been a death sentence for him. Without an abundant source of mana to power his artificial body, he would be nothing but a tortured soul trapped in a rock. Eventually, even that magic would fade and break.


    Bakir leaned forward. ¡°It¡¯s true, then? The world really used to have so much mana that it just filled the air?¡±


    ¡°Not everywhere, and with varying degrees of density, but yes.¡± I frowned at the other archmage. How did he not know this? Now that I looked at him, really looked, I found myself a little bit suspicious.


    If this was an established group, and he was an archmage of the Fifth Order, whatever that meant, why were his robes plain, unenchanted material? Why couldn¡¯t I sense his connection to a phantom space? Where was his staff or wand? Where was the magic?


    ¡°Tell me about this Global Order of the Arcane,¡± I said. ¡°I don¡¯t believe any such organization existed back in my time.¡±


    ¡°That is correct,¡± he told me. ¡°We were founded about three hundred years before the world broke, though none of our founding members remain among the living. At least, not unless any of them managed to follow the path you set forth and simply chose not to reveal themselves.¡±


    Ah, all the old-timers had died off. I was willing to bet they¡¯d lost a lot of knowledge thanks to Ammun¡¯s bungling. That called into question exactly whether their members were even archmages at all. There was no telling what that title had come to mean over the last millennium. I certainly hadn¡¯t met anyone recently worthy of being called an archmage besides my former apprentice.


    ¡°Is there anyone left who predates the moon falling out of the sky?¡± I asked.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure none of the leaders of the Order would appreciate me revealing such information about them,¡± Bakir replied smoothly. ¡°Suffice it to say that we truly are a global organization and that no one has a stronger magical culture than us.¡±


    ¡°If that¡¯s the case, why haven¡¯t you fixed everything?¡±


    ¡°Some things can¡¯t be fixed,¡± he said with a frown. ¡°Why, are you saying that you can?¡±


    ¡°Of course I can. Either your leaders aren¡¯t nearly as strong as they want to pretend to be, or they¡¯ve deliberately left the world in the state it is.¡±


    Bakir sunk back into his chair and studied me. With a helpless sigh, he shook his head. ¡°I can¡¯t tell if you¡¯re delusional or if you truly can reverse even something as catastrophic as a destroyed moon raining down on the world and breaking mana.¡±


    ¡°Technically, that¡¯s not what caused the breakage,¡± I said. ¡°It¡¯s more like the outcome.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s¡­¡± Bakir trailed off. After a moment¡¯s consideration, he said, ¡°Could you describe to me exactly what you believe the cause of the mana density shift a thousand years ago was?¡±


    ¡°Your global archmage fraternity doesn¡¯t know?¡± I asked. ¡°What the hell have you all been doing all these years?¡±


    ¡°Please? Just¡­ please.¡±


    This hadn¡¯t been a long conversation, but already Bakir had transitioned from a smooth, confident member of the aristocracy into someone who looked slightly harangued, like a man who¡¯d been called on to defend his beliefs, only to find himself losing ground with every verbal exchange.Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    Maybe this group wasn¡¯t going to be a threat, but it was also starting to look like they wouldn¡¯t be much help, either. Then again, that wasn¡¯t really fair. Querit wasn¡¯t an archmage either, but his contributions to my work were immeasurable. A whole cabal of mages that were at least at the master level could be useful, once I disabused them of any notion that they were real archmages.


    It would probably be better to hold off on that until I actually met them, though. Bakir wasn¡¯t necessarily the gold standard to represent his entire organization. There was no point in making plans based on a bunch of unfounded assumptions. For now, it would be better to assume that the Global Order of the Arcane was full of potentially hostile archmages who could make my life far more difficult than it already was.


    ¡°Keeping in mind that I wasn¡¯t there to witness the actual event, this is what I¡¯ve pieced together from historical research and my own personal examination of Ammun¡¯s tower. Roughly a thousand years ago¡­¡±


    I outlined what I¡¯d learned, about the faction that had figured out super-long-distance teleportation and taken over an entire moon, about Ammun¡¯s demesne project, an enormous tower that sunk its roots all the way to the world core. I described how the tower had pierced the mysteel shell surrounding the core, and that when Ammun had used it to send a blast of pure mana through the empty space between Manoch and the orange moon known as Amodir, he¡¯d killed off almost all of the living stone that made up the world core.


    ¡°And with the mysteel shell ruptured, it¡¯s never been able to heal itself,¡± I finished. ¡°We need to patch the shell and inject a massive quantity of mana into the world core to act as a catalyst so that things can start moving again.¡±


    ¡°And Amodir¡¯s destruction, followed by the subsequent devastation of fully half the planet as it rained down from the sky, had nothing to do with Manoch¡¯s mana density vanishing? That¡¯s what you believe?¡± Bakir asked.


    ¡°That¡¯s what happened. If Ammun had missed and fired that blast off into the endless void, it wouldn¡¯t have changed the planet¡¯s fate. That he didn¡¯t miss just meant he managed to destroy the people who could very well have been our one chance to reverse the damage before it cascaded out of control.¡±


    I gave Bakir some time while he processed that. It was hard to say whether he actually believed me, but either way, I¡¯d certainly fed him an alternate theory than whatever it was he¡¯d been told before. I supposed I could see how the generations of mages born after the moon fell from the sky could attribute that level of destruction to a global catastrophe that had fundamentally altered the very fabric of magic, but they were grossly underestimating the planet¡¯s durability.


    No, it had taken a deliberate act of worming his way all the way down to the core itself, one foot of stone at a time cut through over decades, for Ammun to put himself in that position. I didn¡¯t think what he¡¯d done was actually common knowledge at the time, though at least some people had figured it out and recorded it in historical records.


    The real question was whether it was merely Bakir who was ignorant of the truth, or if it was his whole cabal. Even that was largely irrelevant next to the much bigger issue of how powerful they were and what they wanted. Now that I thought about it, I¡¯d spent far too much of this meeting humoring Bakir and not nearly enough obtaining information.


    ¡°What else can you tell me about the Global Order of the Arcane?¡± I asked.


    Bakir shook himself out of his thoughts and appeared to collect himself. ¡°The Order? Yes. As the name implies, we¡¯re situated all over Manoch. Our primary tenet is the accumulation and preservation of magical knowledge. I¡¯m sure you¡¯ve seen for yourself just how much has been lost. Some places are worse than others, of course. This whole continent was shattered, and I¡¯m afraid the Order never had much success in gaining a foothold within the Sanctum of Light.¡±


    ¡°And since they were the only place that had any real magical tradition here, you basically gave up on this part of the planet to focus your efforts elsewhere,¡± I finished for him.


    ¡°Precisely so,¡± he said. ¡°Archmages don¡¯t grow on trees, and we need to focus our efforts where they can bring about the most benefits. It wasn¡¯t until you and Ammun stirred things up around here that we noticed anything amiss. To be frank with you, we¡¯re still not entirely sure what happened.¡±


    He paused, apparently lost in thought, and let out a rich laugh. ¡°The look on their faces when your name came up though¡­ That¡¯s a memory I¡¯ll cherish. I wonder if you realize how much you¡¯ve strode right out of legend.¡±


    ¡°I am aware,¡± I said. ¡°Thousands of years have passed. The world basically ended. And there are still people eking out a living on its surface who remember my name. Some of them probably curse it. It wouldn¡¯t be entirely unreasonable to blame me for the state of affairs once you consider that Ammun was only able to do what he did by pilfering my libraries and modifying my research.¡±


    ¡°That hardly seems fair to me,¡± Bakir said. ¡°I wouldn¡¯t concern myself overly much with those who hold that opinion, especially when it seems you¡¯re hard at work trying to remedy the issue. But I¡¯ve gotten distracted. You wanted to know more about the Order itself.


    ¡°As I said, we lack the manpower to be everywhere at once, but we do invest a great deal of effort into preserving the art of magic in any way we can. Our vaults are full of books on the subject. We take apprentices and teach them. We¡¯re a well-known and respected organization based on the other side of Manoch, over in Jeshaem.¡±


    Manoch had four continents. What we were on currently was the shattered remains of Olaphun. Jeshaem was the farthest away, and also the largest of the four. It made sense that they were in the best shape, considering Amodir had crashed down on this side of the world. They¡¯d only had to deal with the loss of mana and cleaning up the dust and dirt kicked up into the air from the moon fall. The people here had also faced a devastating death toll and the destruction of their cities, their farms, and their roads. The continent itself had ruptured.


    ¡°And what does your cabal want with me, other than to hear stories about what I¡¯ve been up to here?¡± I asked softly.


    ¡°Don¡¯t misunderstand,¡± Bakir said. ¡°I wasn¡¯t sent here to demand your services or that you join the Order. I¡¯m sure it would make a few people very happy to have an archmage of your caliber working with us, but we just need to know what¡¯s going on with Ammun. He¡¯s a global threat and we take his movements very seriously.¡±


    ¡°So seriously that he¡¯s been active for going on three years now and you¡¯re just now showing up?¡±


    ¡°Yes, well¡­ as I said¡­¡±


    ¡°Understaffed, right.¡± I waved away his excuse. ¡°Very well. Let me catch you up on how I trapped the old lich on a moon.¡±


    He blinked. ¡°I¡¯m sorry, you did what?¡±


    I grinned and began my story.

 Book 5, Chapter 22

    The more time I spent talking to Bakir, the more I became certain that he was only at stage five or six. That didn¡¯t automatically disqualify him from the title of archmage, as it was more of an indicator of skill and knowledge than of raw power, but it did make me question the strength of his organization as a whole.


    It made sense, once I thought about it. One of the problems I¡¯d had to overcome to climb beyond stage six was that with mana no longer being freely available in the environment, there probably wasn¡¯t a single natural resonance point on the planet. Even back in my previous life, they¡¯d been extremely rare natural phenomena.


    I¡¯d had to forge an artificial one, something I¡¯d only been able to accomplish so quickly because of Querit¡¯s expertise and assistance. There was no telling how many years of experiments it would have taken to work out the process on my own. It was possible the Global Order of the Arcane knew how to make a resonance point, or that they¡¯d somehow shielded one from unraveling a thousand years ago and had kept it intact all this time.


    It was also possible that no one in their ranks had advanced past stage six, which meant they were completely locked out of the upper echelon of master-tier spells, the ones that couldn¡¯t be cast using regular mana. If that was the case, it also meant the Order was absolutely not a threat to me, and even better, that I had something they desperately needed, even if they didn¡¯t know it.


    How best to go about using that to my advantage? What did I need that they could provide? More mysteel was welcome, of course. I had nowhere near enough of it. Raw mana couldn¡¯t hurt, but at best that would just save me time. It wouldn¡¯t solve my issues with advancing to stage nine on its own, no matter how much of it there was. That involved reforging my physical body into something like a solid mage¡¯s shadow, something that could exist inside the Astral Realm and even allow my consciousness to remain intact if my body were somehow destroyed.


    It was in fact the basis for my reincarnation magic, which had worked from a technical viewpoint, but hadn¡¯t really achieved everything I¡¯d been going for. Specifically, losing a few thousand years between my death and rebirth had been an unexpected twist that had completely ruined my original plans. I couldn¡¯t even begin to express how different the world would be right now if I¡¯d been able to regain access to the Night Vale and my full power within a decade of dying.


    By the time I was finished sharing what information I felt like giving to my fellow archmage, he¡¯d long since given up trying to interrupt me with clarifying questions and had sunk into a sort of stupefied horror. It was only after I went silent that he finally roused himself in his seat and said, ¡°Well, that is¡­ certainly a lot to take in. I suppose I shouldn¡¯t be surprised at Ammun¡¯s casual cruelty. All of our records indicated that he was a very selfish man. Given his personal power, it¡¯s a terrifying combination.¡±


    ¡°All powerful mages are selfish,¡± I said. ¡°It¡¯s how we get so powerful to begin with.¡±


    ¡°Not all of us!¡± Bakir protested.


    ¡°That just means you¡¯re not powerful enough yet,¡± I said with a dark chuckle. ¡°Trust me, at some point you¡¯ll have to decide between power or principles. If you haven¡¯t had to face that decision, well, you got lucky and someone else carried you along on their own path. You don¡¯t get the luxury of morals when you¡¯re fighting to survive.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s an incredibly bleak outlook.¡±


    ¡°Yes,¡± I agreed. ¡°It is.¡±


    Silence stretched out between us for what I was sure Bakir found to be an uncomfortably long moment while I studied his reaction. He quickly broke it by standing and saying, ¡°I think I have obtained everything I need to know, but might I be able to call upon you again if the Order has any further questions?¡±


    ¡°You are welcome to leave another knock in my wards,¡± I said. ¡°I can¡¯t promise when I¡¯ll be able to respond. I have quite a bit of work to get done and not a lot of time to do it in.¡±


    ¡°Erm, yes. Quite so. Regardless, you have my thanks for your hospitality and for allowing me to impose upon your schedule today.¡±


    The Bakir of right now was considerably different than the one who¡¯d greeted me. Gone was any semblance of warmth and congeniality. Instead, he looked harrowed and exhausted, no doubt a reaction to finding out that it was entirely possible the whole world would be threatened by a reawakened lich, now truly immortal with a nigh-infinite source of mana and an unassailable home for his phylactery.


    Seeing how poorly he was taking the news was yet further proof that he might be an archmage on paper, but he wasn¡¯t one in reality. I opened the way for him to leave and wondered who would come calling upon me from his organization next, and if they¡¯d be receptive to making a deal or two.


    * * *


    ¡°I went through everything we recovered from the archives,¡± Querit told me. ¡°I¡¯m confident the Global Order of the Arcane did not exist prior to the breaking of the world. If it did, they were either so small as to be unnoticed by anything but local powers, or so incredibly well-hidden that only the greatest of powers knew of their existence.¡±If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    ¡°And you don¡¯t think it was the last one,¡± I said. That more or less lined up with what Bakir himself had told me of their history.


    ¡°I do not,¡± the golem said. He was reshelving a pile of books almost as tall as I was, rapidly slipping them back into their assigned spaces using some logical scheme I wasn¡¯t privy to.


    ¡°Which means that it¡¯s entirely likely that none or very few of them were alive prior to the world core dying. So none of them have access to a mana resonance point.¡±


    ¡°Ah, I see,¡± Querit said, pausing in his work. ¡°You¡¯re speculating that at best, their strongest are only stage six.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s only a theory. It¡¯s possible they made their own resonance point just like we did. The knowledge obviously existed back then.¡±


    ¡°It did, but it wasn¡¯t common. My creator was a researcher with a powerful backer. The things we worked on weren¡¯t by any means something a regular mage or even an archmage would have access to.¡±


    ¡°Which just means it¡¯s even more likely than I thought that the very best of them is still no higher than stage six, and that they most likely won¡¯t be leaving their genius loci behind to travel to another continent. Bakir¡¯s going to have a long, expensive journey home, and whoever comes next will have an equally long journey back. I¡¯d say we¡¯ve got a week or two before we can expect a visitor.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re sure they¡¯ll send someone else? Why not just negotiate through Bakir if that was what they wanted?¡±


    ¡°Bakir¡¯s a field investigator. His job is to gather information and report it back for other people to make decisions. Either they¡¯ll think what¡¯s going on here is important enough to send someone with real power, or they won¡¯t. Considering what¡¯s at stake if we fail to stop Ammun, I can¡¯t imagine they¡¯ll be content to ignore it.¡±


    ¡°And in the meantime, we¡¯ll continue with our own preparations?¡± Querit asked. At my nod, he continued, ¡°Would you like to do anything in particular to get ready for the arrival of what could possibly be a few dozen archmages?¡±


    ¡°If they¡¯re all as weak at their representative, I¡¯m not concerned. If more than one or two are as strong as Ammun or me, there¡¯s nothing we can do that would stop them from getting in.¡±


    That didn¡¯t mean I didn¡¯t have plans for it. If anything, Ammun¡¯s appearance in the sky over my demesne just long enough to drop one spell on me last year had proven I was a fool to assume he couldn¡¯t get to me. The amount of mana it had cost him was prohibitive and he¡¯d barely stayed for a few seconds before disappearing again, but that move had taken me by surprise and allowed a few dozen of his minions inside my defenses.


    Of course, it wouldn¡¯t have happened that way if he hadn¡¯t picked the moment I was at my absolute weakest to strike, but that excuse felt a little thin when I considered how much potential damage those invaders could have done. I¡¯d made it a priority to shore up those potential weaknesses in the future, which meant I¡¯d already proofed the valley against hostile archmages as well as I possibly could with my current limitations.


    ¡°How did the new biometal experiments work out?¡± I asked, changing the subject.


    ¡°I think we¡¯re heading in the right direction now, but I¡¯m worried about how replicable it will be,¡± Querit said. ¡°No one but you can process the mysteel for the elixirs.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s fine. I don¡¯t need a technique that can be used by any random mage. I just need a quick way to grow mysteel in large quantities. Once we reach the threshold, I don¡¯t care if the recipe never gets used again.¡±


    ¡°In that case, give me about five hundred gallons more of that elixir, and I¡¯m confident that we can grow that much weight back in biometal. I want to test it for possible adverse reactions over the next few months, but assuming the sample survives, you¡¯ll need to head back out and capture a few more of them to ramp things up.¡±


    Maybe that was a job I could pawn off on the supposed archmages I was sure were going to be showing up. It should be within their abilities to complete without getting themselves killed, even if none of them were any stronger than Bakir. I¡¯d keep that on hand as a bargaining chip to use when I revealed that I had control of a resonance point.


    Querit finished up his work and turned to face me fully. ¡°I have a question,¡± he said.


    ¡°What¡¯s that?¡±


    ¡°Do you think our priorities are right? We¡¯re devoting an awful lot of effort to the long-term problem of fixing the world. Maybe we should be preparing for Ammun¡¯s inevitable return instead.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re doing both.¡±


    ¡°We are, but it¡¯s clear where the majority of our time is going.¡±


    ¡°I get what you¡¯re saying, but you have to understand that I did a lot of my preparations for fighting Ammun back before we ever met. I was hoping to use them on him when I chased him up to Yulitar, but the environment there was so difficult to function in that I didn¡¯t get the chance.¡±


    ¡°That was before we learned about his plans to tie himself to a moon core,¡± Querit said. ¡°Surely things are different now.¡±


    ¡°More difficult, maybe, but my plan hasn¡¯t really changed that much. And I¡¯ve gotten stronger, too.¡±


    Our first real fight had occurred when I was at stage five. I¡¯d beaten him, but only because he¡¯d been freshly awakened and near starved for mana. The second battle had gone to him. I¡¯d barely survived the golem he¡¯d brought with him, one that wasn¡¯t even specialized for combat, thanks to the difficulty of fighting in an environment with low gravity and no breathable atmosphere.


    Now, my core had reached stage eight and our next encounter would take place on Manoch. Ammun would have unlimited mana to fight with, but that didn¡¯t guarantee victory. It simply became one more obstacle for me to overcome.


    ¡°Maybe you should be focusing your efforts on reaching stage nine,¡± Querit said.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know if there¡¯s enough time for that, but I¡¯m going to try,¡± I said, only partially a lie. ¡°If this organization has the resources I hope they do, gaining access to them will be part of the price I extract from them. That will hopefully be enough to push me to where I need to be.¡±


    ¡°And if they don¡¯t?¡±


    I shook my head. ¡°Then we¡¯ll figure something else out.¡±


    Querit was a bit of a worrier, but in this case, he wasn¡¯t wrong to be concerned. I knew how I planned to defeat Ammun. I just wasn¡¯t sure if I could pull it off. Even if I did manage to ascend to stage nine and reclaim all my former strength, that still might not be enough.


    Or maybe I was overthinking things, and I could easily crush him as I was right now. Time would tell.

 Book 5, Chapter 23

    While Querit oversaw the experiments I¡¯d outlined, I returned to the jungles around Galdrisa just to do a bit of quick scrying and mark down the locations of any other vine-encrusted plant monsters nearby. I wasn¡¯t interested in harvesting them right now, but I did want to make sure there were more left just in case my assistant accidentally killed the one I¡¯d already collected. There were none quite that big, but it did turn out that they weren¡¯t terribly uncommon for the area.


    I sent my shadow out to harvest troll blood while I scried the area, not because we were running low, but just to be efficient. We¡¯d need more eventually, one way or another, and without Senica here slowing down the process by learning, I was able to collect a few thousand gallons worth and process it over the span of an hour or two.


    Satisfied with my reconnaissance, I switched focus to the next problem. I still had multiple people demanding my time and attention, but they were all trying to get me to address their issues, and I had enough of my own to deal with already. Whatever Shel wanted was so far away from being important that I didn¡¯t care if I never spoke to her again. Grandfather, however, was a different matter. Eyrie Peak was an important resource, both as a home for my portal network and because the gestalt was living there, and they served as my many eyes across the continent and beyond.


    Now that I thought about it, I still needed to check in and see how my rampage across Ralvost had gone. I was hopeful that I¡¯d killed at least two-thirds of Ammun¡¯s standing forces, but I expected the actual number to be somewhat lower. Not only had I failed to target all of the major encampments, but my run against the last one where I¡¯d been sidetracked by Seven had been the farthest thing from thorough.


    On the bright side, that was one less of Ammun¡¯s elites I needed to worry about, and that one had been causing a lot of problems over the last few years. It was too bad he¡¯d ended up in the lich¡¯s pocket. With a bit of tutelage, he could have been a fine archmage. Though, his priorities left much to be desired. Still, he¡¯d been young, and that could have been fixed.


    Once I was finished securing my harvest, I placed a teleportation platform in a small room in the temple of Galdrisa, sealed it up with stone shaping, and used it to cross as much distance as I could in a single jump. I had to cast the spell manually a second time to reach Eyrie Peak, but that only took a few minutes.


    ¡°Is Grandfather here?¡± I asked one of the platform guards.


    Mana shaped itself in the brakvaw¡¯s throat as it cast the spell that allowed it to speak Enotian. ¡°Not here,¡± it said, with what I had to assume was supposed to be a scowl. It was always hard to tell. Beaks did not lend themselves well to expressing emotion. ¡°Gone for many days now.¡±


    ¡°Still?¡± I muttered. ¡°What is that old bird up to?¡±


    I wasn¡¯t really asking, but the guard answered me nonetheless. ¡°Pilgrimage to Third Peak.¡±


    ¡°Third what now?¡±


    It was such a generic name that I could think of dozens of different mountains that might qualify, but none of them were holy sites as far as I knew. Then again, it wasn¡¯t like I knew all that much about brakvaw cultural history, and the world was a big place.


    ¡°Homeland,¡± the brakvaw said.


    ¡°Ah. I didn¡¯t realize¡­¡± I trailed off and shook my head. It wasn¡¯t important and I had enough other problems to deal with. The only relevant part was when Grandfather would be back, and whether or not he actually needed my help. ¡°Do you know how long he¡¯ll be gone for?¡±


    ¡°No. Takes however long it takes.¡±


    This conversation served to remind me that brakvaw as a species weren¡¯t overly concerned with punctuality. Grandfather was a notable exception, but I suspected that was more a consequence of him having dealt with humans in the past, while most of the younger generations had never seen people as anything but prey. In fact, now that I thought about it, I wasn¡¯t sure how old the second-oldest brakvaw was, but I was betting it was several hundred years less than Grandfather himself.


    ¡°Alright, well, if he does come back, please let him know I¡¯m still waiting to see what he needs. In the meantime, I need to speak with your other guest.¡±


    Yep, that was definitely a scowl. I hadn¡¯t known beaks could do that. The brakvaw, somewhat ungraciously, waved a wing to send me on my way. I flew off, watching with a divination to make sure it didn¡¯t try anything behind my back.


    The brakvaw were never going to do more than tolerate me, it seemed.


    * * *


    ¡®You ask much,¡¯ the gestalt spoke in my mind. ¡®What will you offer us in return?¡¯


    ¡°You were already going to be watching there anyway,¡± I objected. ¡°All I¡¯m asking is that you keep an eye out for some specific individuals.¡±This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    ¡®And how would we know these creatures? We have never seen them. You have never seen them. Humans do not walk around with signs on their necks announcing their status as archmages.¡¯


    ¡°I showed you what the one who sought me out looks like. If any other humans show up in his company, it¡¯s a safe bet that they¡¯re people of interest to me.¡±


    ¡®We agree with this logic, but nevertheless, there remains the matter of payment.¡¯


    ¡°Well, what do you want?¡±


    ¡®We want our own portal, one just for our use.¡¯


    That wasn¡¯t a difficult request, providing it exited somewhere I could reach, but there was a snag. ¡°You¡¯d have to power it yourself,¡± I said. ¡°The brakvaw aren¡¯t going to pour mana into a portal that doesn¡¯t benefit them.¡±


    ¡®Acceptable,¡¯ the gestalt sent.


    An image of a craggy mountainside came to me. I¡¯d never seen this particular one before, but I recognized it as belonging to the mountains that ringed the island we lived on. The gestalt confirmed that guess a moment later when it added a set of reference landmarks to help me lock in the position. It wasn¡¯t enough to teleport to on its own, but I was confident I could find it.


    ¡®The portal should go here. Additionally, we shall require more of your thousand-faceted scrying devices. The ones you¡¯ve given us are already at capacity watching the other locations you wish observed.¡¯


    That was a bit more time-consuming than I wanted this deal to be, but it was also kind of a fair request. Observing the entirety of our largest moon and a country several thousand miles away at the same time was no easy task. ¡°I can supply you with one more,¡± I offered.


    ¡®Four.¡¯


    ¡°That¡¯s way more than you should need for a job like this.¡±


    ¡®They are payment for our services.¡¯


    ¡°Two now, and one more after this crisis with Ammun is resolved.¡±


    The gestalt hesitated over that, which was telling when they had so many individual minds working together that they literally thought several times faster than us mere mortals. Eventually, they reached some sort of majority agreement in their collective consciousness and said, ¡®Agreed.¡¯


    I immediately pulled two of the spheres out of my phantom space and floated them over to the gestalt. ¡®You have anticipated our demands,¡¯ they remarked.


    ¡°That, or I figured you¡¯d need them sooner or later to fulfill my own requests,¡± I said. ¡°But I¡¯ve only got these two prepared for now, so the last one will have to wait.¡±


    ¡®We should have asked for more,¡¯ the gestalt lamented. ¡®But the bargain has been struck. We shall watch for these archmages you believe are coming and ensure that they do not collaborate with your enemy.¡¯


    ¡°Our enemy,¡± I corrected. ¡°If Ammun shows up and takes the army back over, it¡¯ll mean more assaults on the island. They won¡¯t spare you if you get in their way.¡±


    ¡®We do not fear these weak mages.¡¯


    ¡°Speaking of weak mages, have you finished counting up what¡¯s left?¡±


    ¡®Yes. You destroyed roughly one fifth of the gathered humans, and another fifth have deserted their ranks.¡¯


    That news soured my mood. Either I¡¯d vastly overestimated how much damage I¡¯d done, or I¡¯d underestimated their numbers. It was probably the former since I¡¯d been using the gestalt¡¯s head count. I wouldn¡¯t get another chance to surprise them like that again, not any time soon again. I could continue to try to thin out the numbers, but it¡¯d be an uphill struggle now.


    ¡®The survivors have regrouped together and are retreating in the direction of the tower,¡¯ the gestalt added. ¡®We estimate it will take no longer than a week for them to arrive.¡¯


    ¡°Great,¡± I said. ¡°Just what I needed ¨C a time limit.¡±


    That meant I either needed to give up, infiltrate the tower and waste months on a campaign of assassinations and sabotage, or knock the entire tower down in the next few days. None of those options appealed to me. Was there a fourth option? Could I gather together enough allies to assist me that we could kill thousands of hostile mages out in the field while they marched toward safety?


    That seemed unlikely to work. Querit was undoubtedly the most powerful person on my team, after myself, of course. He was roughly equivalent in strength to a stage five or six mage, but his repertoire of spells was decidedly pointed toward research. Even with a proper combat frame, I doubted he¡¯d make a significant impact against an enemy that size, and he¡¯d run the very real risk of being destroyed.


    No, he was far more useful to me doing exactly what he was doing. Maybe I could put together some simple traps that dealt a lot of damage over a wide spread area and seed the road with them before the mages got there. Manufacturing them in such a tight timeframe would be difficult at the very least. Damn it. This was exactly the kind of thing having a few dozen archmages to call on would be helpful for.


    I might just have to take the loss on this one. I¡¯d taken my shot, done some damage, and escaped unscathed. If it wasn¡¯t as much as I wanted, well, that was the way it went. I¡¯d known there was a strong possibility the survivors would turtle. I¡¯d just been hoping there wouldn¡¯t be so many of them, and that there¡¯d be a significantly higher percentage of deserters.


    Still, there was no reason to make it too easy for the survivors to return to the tower. Even if I couldn¡¯t kill all of them, I could still slow them down and inflict some more casualties. My mind churned with ideas as to how best to accomplish that, most of which were wildly impractical for a variety of reasons.


    With enough mana to throw at the problem and a little more time, I could probably devastate the retreating force, but there was no point in making a plan using resources I didn¡¯t have. I¡¯d settle for using what I knew had a good chance to work.


    ¡°Thank you for your help,¡± I told the gestalt. ¡°Could you send me everything you¡¯ve got on the army¡¯s current positions?¡±


    ¡®Of course. That is part of our bargain.¡¯


    With that information safely stowed in my head, I started calculating how quickly the various squadrons and contingents were moving, which ones were small enough to be attacked directly and which ones I¡¯d have to scatter traps in their path and hope for the best.


    I bade the gestalt farewell and returned to my demesne. I had a lot of work to do and not too much time to get it done. As soon as I got back, I pulled myself directly through the genius loci that inhabited the valley and arrived at my crucible. ¡°Querit,¡± I said into my portable scrying mirror. ¡°Could you join me? I have a time-sensitive project of high priority.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 28

    I¡¯d been putting off a particular task for a few weeks now, one that I could justify delaying because I had other things to do that were arguably more important. However, now that three new archmages were here, I couldn¡¯t delay it any longer.


    It was time to go talk to Keeper again.


    I teleported directly into her warehouse library in open defiance of her wards, something that I knew bothered her to no end. Every time I arrived, I noticed that the warding schema was more robust, better developed and with greater and greater amounts of mana powering it. Every time, I phased through it like it wasn¡¯t there, anyway.


    It was a bit of a game, her trying new and different ways to stop me. Maybe one day I¡¯d tell her that what she was doing was never going to work against my teleportation spells. Her method of locking out a spatial shift was entirely dependent on creating a sort of metaphysical moat that prevented intruders from crossing a shell that encompassed the whole building.


    My teleportation spells didn¡¯t send me across space. The relative distance between the starting and stopping point had no bearing on how difficult the spell was to cast or how much mana it took outside of the absolute maximum reach. Instead, it forged a sort of path into the Astral Realm, one that sucked the caster in and then spit them back out again somewhere else an instant later.


    Until Keeper figured out that she needed to flood the entire area with anti-teleportation wards, not just a shell wrapped around the outside, she was doomed to fail. But it was amusing watching her struggle, and she never once asked for so much as a hint to how I was getting in. And so, the game continued.


    ¡°Keiran,¡± she grumbled at me when I appeared next to the chaise she was resting on. A glow lamp on a nearby table cast light over her, and a pile of books sat on the floor near her hands. Another one was open, balanced on her leg so that she could read it. ¡°You do always manage to interrupt me when I get to the good part.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a gift,¡± I told her. ¡°I honestly don¡¯t even try. It just happens.¡±


    Keeper looked to be in her late fifties, but only because I¡¯d been trading her life-extending magic for the last few years. When I¡¯d first met her, she looked twenty or thirty years older and was approaching the end of her life. Now, if nothing was done, I guessed she had a good half a century left in her. She¡¯d learned enough magic from me that it was far more likely she¡¯d live three times longer than that on her own, but her willingness to sort through the staggering amount of information available in the archive made her valuable, and she was quite happy to trade that value for more of my expertise.


    ¡°You¡¯ve finished Galdrisa?¡± she asked. ¡°Was there mysteel in there like I thought?¡±


    ¡°There was,¡± I confirmed.


    ¡°Perfect. The reference was a bit archaic, but I was sure that¡¯s what the tome was referring to. In that case, I probably have another location or two for you to loot.¡±


    ¡°Later,¡± I said. ¡°A new problem has come up. Tell me, have you ever heard of the Global Order of the Arcane?¡±


    Keeper blanched, the color draining from her face. She froze in place, but for a slight tremor in her hands. ¡°Why do you want to know about them?¡± she asked.


    ¡°They¡¯re here. And they¡¯re annoying me.¡±


    Her mouth worked silently for a few seconds before she sputtered out, ¡°They¡¯re what?¡±


    ¡°Annoying. Trying to sneak around and spy on me. Lying to my face when confronted.¡±


    ¡°They¡¯re¡­ they¡¯re archmages! Dozens of them. They¡¯re all the best mages in the world.¡±


    ¡°Oh, good. You do know about them. Tell me everything.¡±


    Whatever fear Keeper might have had of them, it didn¡¯t extend to me. Perhaps I¡¯d been too familiar with her over the years. Or, more likely, she just knew that she was too useful to get rid of, and that I wasn¡¯t the type of person to casually execute someone because they¡¯d committed some minor trespass. Those kinds of tyrants never lasted long, usually only to the first time they ran into someone stronger than them who felt the same way.


    ¡°Off the top of my head, they have a reputation for seeking out and cultivating great magical talents, though they¡¯re not particularly active in this corner of the world. Their leadership is a council of five archmages, all of whom they rank as ¡®First Order.¡¯ There are six total orders in their hierarchy, but I¡¯m not sure what you¡¯d need to do to advance through the ranks. Even gaining entry to the Order requires far greater magical expertise than anyone I¡¯ve ever met possesses, excluding you.¡±Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.


    ¡°What about their goals and their methodologies?¡±


    ¡°I think that¡¯s highly individual. They work on their own projects and support each other when needed. I¡¯m sure the lower ranking members act directly on behalf of their superiors, but it¡¯s not publicly available information. Most of what I¡¯ve read about them is speculation from those who¡¯ve come in contact with agents of the Order, though I do have one first-hand account of a member of the Sixth Order. It was a personal journal that was lost when he was killed eight hundred years ago and ended up in a box of books I acquired.¡±


    That was almost certainly useless. I had a strong suspicion none of the current members had been alive to witness Ammun¡¯s folly, which meant it was extremely unlikely anything that deceased archmage had recorded would mention the trio I was dealing with. Maybe it could give me a general feel for how the Order operated, assuming they hadn¡¯t changed drastically in close to a thousand years, which was basically an impossibility.


    Individuals might stay set in their ways, especially old pseudo-immortals. Organizations did not. New people meant new goals and new ideas how to get there. I¡¯d been hoping Keeper would have something more modern on the Order, especially since she seemed to afraid of them now. That was a bit suspicious, actually.


    ¡°What do you know about their activities today?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Why would I know anything about what¡¯s going on today?¡± she retorted. ¡°I¡¯m a historian, not a gossip.¡±


    I squinted at her. ¡°You know something. One of them was here, in Derro. Did they meet with you personally?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± she denied. ¡°They just have a reputation for getting what they want, regardless of the consequences to anyone else ¨C not unlike a certain someone I know.¡±


    Scrying for a specific person could be difficult, but it wasn¡¯t impossible. Scrying for that person back through time was a whole new layer of complication. Doing if it that person had warded themselves specifically against temporal divination wasn¡¯t really worth the effort to even try. However, I was confident I could make some assumptions.


    So, instead of searching for Bakir, who I already knew had been active on the island prior to introducing himself to me, and hoping to find his comings and goings around Derro, I limited myself to here, in Keeper¡¯s home, and to a time span of about a month prior to Bakir showing up at the valley.


    It didn¡¯t take long to find a stretch of about three hours that was blocked from my magic. Someone with the time, mana, and desire to cast a temporal divination blocking spell had visited Keeper. It could have been someone from the royal family. They did specialize in time magic, though with more of a focus on divination rather than warding. Or it could have been a nosy archmage, looking for information about me and coming to the one person in Derro I still had any sort of regular contact with. If I were in his shoes, investigating an unknown mage with enough power to be a threat, I¡¯d do the exact same.


    ¡°What did you tell him?¡± I asked. ¡°I¡¯m going to assume it was Bakir who showed up here wanting to know about me.¡±


    ¡°What was I supposed to do, Keiran? He could have killed me.¡±


    ¡°I could kill you,¡± I said mildly.


    ¡°You¡¯re a lot more reasonable than he is.¡±


    He¡¯d seemed so mild-mannered to me, too. Though, perhaps I was making a mistake in assuming it was Bakir. If Nevlac had been her surprise guest, I could see him threatening her. ¡°What did he look like?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Tall. Handsome. Brown hair with just enough gray to look distinguished.¡±


    That was definitely Bakir. I supposed he was one of those people who was only polite to those who rivaled his social station. He must have been a devil to his servants. Or perhaps he was just playing the role in his pursuit of information. I¡¯d certainly done that enough times in recent years to get what I wanted, though I generally found it more of a hassle than it was worth.


    ¡°He wanted to know what spells you knew, how many you could cast without stopping, how well you shielded your core, stuff like that,¡± Keeper said. ¡°He seemed to be sizing you up.¡±


    ¡°You could have warned me,¡± I said. ¡°Why didn¡¯t you?¡±


    ¡°He¡¯d know. He¡¯s going to know about this!¡±


    ¡°No, he won¡¯t. I¡¯ve blocked out this meeting from temporal scrying and destroyed the four surveillance spells he left here. The most he¡¯ll know is that someone was here. He¡¯ll probably assume it was me.¡±


    Keeper shook her head. ¡°It won¡¯t matter. He¡¯ll know he missed something and then he¡¯ll be back with more questions.¡±


    ¡°Yes, yes he will.¡± I grinned. ¡°And when he does come, you¡¯re going to let me know. I¡¯d like to have a few words with them.¡±


    Specifically, I wanted to catch one of them alone and away from their wards. I should have killed Bakir when he first showed up, but I¡¯d been wary of upsetting an unknown cabal of archmages. Now that I knew they were all a bunch of pretenders to a title they didn¡¯t understand, I was done handling them gently. It was time to get some answers.


    ¡°Here, take this. It¡¯s a transmission stone. Keep it on you, and when the Order¡¯s representative shows up, you message me immediately. I¡¯ll come handle him.¡± I pulled a duplicate of one of the stones I¡¯d made for New Alkerist from my phantom space and handed it over to Keeper. ¡°Unless he¡¯s in your mind reading your thoughts at the time you use it, it¡¯s undetectable. You don¡¯t even need to touch it, just keep it on you. Anywhere within three feet of your body is fine.¡±


    Keeper accepted the stone somewhat hesitantly. ¡°I thought you¡¯d be¡­ more upset.¡±


    ¡°Oh, I am livid,¡± I said. ¡°Not at you. I don¡¯t expect you to stand up to an archmage, even a fake one like the people from the Order. But I am tired of getting sidetracked from my work putting out new fires every other week. It¡¯s become very obvious to me that the Order is not here to help. They¡¯re looking to advance their own agenda and trying to find a way to use me to do so. I¡¯m going to smack their noses once and they¡¯d better learn their lesson.¡±


    ¡°And if they don¡¯t?¡±


    I considered Nevlac¡¯s open hostility, and Adilar¡¯s almost slimy false politeness. Bakir had behaved pleasantly enough to my face, but he was still a nuisance who¡¯d been threatening allies I relied on to further my interests. So far, the Global Order of the Arcane had shown themselves to be nothing more than a hinderance to my plans, one with no interest in anything but themselves.


    ¡°You¡¯ve read your history books. I¡¯m sure I¡¯ve made a few appearances in them. Back in my day, I was not known for my benevolent nature. I don¡¯t imagine the historians got that part wrong, did they?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± Keeper said softly. ¡°No, they did not.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 33

    Surrendering his mana crystal voluntarily actually made me even more suspicious of Bakir, so I took the time to make sure I had him properly secured. There was no real way to keep him long-term, not without a massive expenditure of my own mana to maintain a draining field on him at all times. Even if I were willing to invest that much into Bakir¡¯s capture, I¡¯d still need to keep an eye on him. Draining fields could be resisted, and it wouldn¡¯t take much mana for someone at Bakir¡¯s level of skill to attack the delicate magical structures keeping him prisoner.


    No, the second I took my eyes off him, he¡¯d start working on breaking free. Maybe I could hold him if I wanted to check on his progress and refresh everything every half an hour or so for the rest of my life, but since that was obviously infeasible, that meant this meeting was either going to end with me setting him free or me killing him.


    Bakir had to know that, and yet he was remarkably calm. Either he had a trick in reserve that he thought I wouldn¡¯t find, or he was confident in the aegis of the Global Order¡¯s reputation to keep him safe. If it was the latter, he was making a mistake. So far, his cabal had done nothing to endear me to them and, while a few extra helping hands would make my life easier, I didn¡¯t have any real need of their services.


    I suspected they were operating under an inflated impression of their own importance, given that they¡¯d reached what was likely the pinnacle of magic by today¡¯s standards. That struck me as remarkably foolish, considering I¡¯d found ample evidence of magic on the scale I was used to. History hadn¡¯t been erased, not completely, and that meant they had to know what the archmages of the last era had been capable of.


    Perhaps they simply thought that the tales were exaggerated, or that I¡¯d require an entire cabal of my own to pull off the magic described in those stories. If so, they were in for a rude awakening once I found the rest of them.


    I completed my investigation of Bakir¡¯s current capabilities and determined that, in addition to the mana crystal he¡¯d willingly surrendered, he had a pair of metal bracers hidden under his sleeves inscribed with runes that would shroud him in a mana barrier. They only worked at his direct command, and needed to be supplied with mana, so they did nothing for him in his current situation.


    There was a small metal rod embedded in his leg under his skin, about the length of my pinky and half as thick. That was probably the source of Bakir¡¯s confidence. It was an implanted emergency escape device, just waiting on him to trigger it to flee. My divinations swept over the enchantment, analyzing its structure and confirming that it wouldn¡¯t be able to bypass my anti-teleportation wards. I was tempted to break it just to be certain, but on the off chance I could salvage some sort of working relationship with his cabal, I decided to leave it in place.


    I added my own tracking enchantment to it, of course. If he somehow did manage to flee, I might as well follow him back to wherever it took him. There was every possibility that he¡¯d run straight toward where I wanted to go. I might even let him escape on purpose if it proved to be too difficult to get answers out of him.


    There were a few other pieces on him, but nothing that was going to help him out right now. Everything either needed mana injected into the inscriptions, of which he currently had none, or were enchantments entirely unrelated to combat. Finally satisfied that Bakir was as safely contained as it was possible to make him, I asked my first question.


    ¡°The Global Order of the Arcane is full of mages at stages five and six, correct?¡±


    ¡°For the most part,¡± he said smoothly. ¡°Some of our initiates and a few legacy members are still at stage four. We¡¯ve got a prodigy student who¡¯s only at stage three, but he¡¯s barely into his thirties, so exceptions were made to nurture such a promising talent.¡±


    ¡°How impressive,¡± I said dryly. Admittedly, it¡¯d taken me far longer to reach stage three in my last life, but I hadn¡¯t had the tutors or resources of a powerful lineage backing me.


    If I hadn¡¯t been watching Bakir so closely, I might have missed that single instant where the corners of his mouth started to curl into a frown before he mastered his expression. ¡°If I might inquire, why the curiosity? Are you interested in joining the Order?¡±


    ¡°No, I¡¯m determining how useful your cabal might be to me.¡±


    Left unsaid was, ¡®Or how much of a threat they are.¡¯ I had no doubt Bakir caught the subtext, though.


    ¡°There are better ways to get our attention. I already came to talk to you once. You know where we¡¯ve set up locally. Why summon me into this prison and drain my mana? I¡¯ll be expecting that back, by the way.¡±


    ¡°Your cabal is based in Jeshaem, you said. Where at?¡± I asked, ignoring Bakir¡¯s question.


    ¡°We have offices in several large cities, including¡ª¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t care about your public-facing buildings. Where do the senior members actually live? Where do they do their experiments? Where do they keep their vaults? If I want to see whoever¡¯s in charge, where do I go?¡±Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    ¡°You can¡¯t,¡± Bakir said. ¡°You see the Elder Council if and when they decide they want to see you, not the other way around.¡±


    Why did every group need an Elder Council? That hadn¡¯t been a thing been in my day. The mages who ruled did it with absolute power. They had subordinates, not colleagues. Maybe it was a matter of relative strength, of needing to share what little mana was still available in order to accomplish their goals.


    I certainly had no plans on elevating a handful of mages up to be my equal so that I could share my authority with them, and yet I kept finding everywhere I went that the power structure included a few individuals at the same level. Usually there was one person who was the clear leader, but they weren¡¯t typically so much stronger that they had unquestioned power over the rest.


    Grandfather had an Elder Council. They¡¯d triggered a minor civil war just a few years back. The Wolf Pack had used a similar structure, led by Monarch, but with Keeper, Velvet, Freak, and Weaver controlling different aspects of their cabal. The Sanctum of Light had four ruling Houses that were balanced against each other ¨C at least it had until Ammun had woken back up and assumed unilateral control.


    In my experience, cabals worked cooperatively, but maintained their own territories that might touch borders, but never overlapped. That power structure had apparently morphed into this cohabitative mess I kept finding everywhere.


    ¡°And where would your Elder Council want me to go when they decide to talk to me?¡± I asked.


    Bakir remained silent for a moment. ¡°I don¡¯t know,¡± he finally admitted. ¡°I have¡­ not had the honor of speaking to them.¡±


    The funny thing was that I believed him. He sounded genuinely embarrassed, or possibly just frustrated, that he hadn¡¯t managed to climb the ladder high enough to be granted an audience. Pathetic.


    ¡°Archmage Keiran,¡± he said suddenly. ¡°I mean no offense when I say this, but reconsider whatever this ill-conceived notion you¡¯re pursuing is. I do not doubt your great skill, but seeking a confrontation with the Order is an unwise move. Not even you can defeat more than a hundred mages of equal power.¡±


    ¡°Equal power?¡± I asked with a laugh. ¡°Do you really believe that?¡±


    ¡°You cannot bluff me in this regard,¡± Bakir said. ¡°I fully believe you¡¯ve reached the apex of what¡¯s possible in this new world, but surely you realize that even with your great knowledge backing your power, a single stage six archmage cannot hope to win against such a great number arrayed against him?¡±


    That gave me pause. ¡°Why would you think¡­¡± I trailed off. Was he fishing for information about the resonance point by implying that I was stuck at stage six? I¡¯d overheard them speculating about its existence. They had to have at least an idea that I controlled it, didn¡¯t they?


    The Order needed access to my mana resonance point to advance their own cores to stage seven. With all the spying they¡¯d done, especially while I¡¯d been away, I¡¯d assumed they¡¯d managed to pierce enough of my wards to find it, that the whole reason they were bothering me was to gain access to it.


    ¡°I suppose I gave you too much credit,¡± I murmured. ¡°There I go, overestimating the magical knowledge of this new world again. You all really are just children, even the greatest of you.¡±


    ¡°Archmage Keiran?¡±


    Either this was some sort of bluff to try to get me to brag and confirm the existence of the mana resonance point, or I was vastly overestimating their resources and abilities. There was no real point in speculating, though, not when I had someone with the answers I needed at my mercy.


    ¡°Archmage Bakir,¡± I began. ¡°What is your cabal hoping to get from me?¡±


    ¡°What do you mean? We¡¯d hoped to form some sort of alliance, possibly induct you as a member of the Order if you were amicable, but that did not appear to be likely based on our previous meeting.¡±


    ¡°An alliance to what purpose?¡± I asked.


    ¡°To stop the lich lord Ammun, of course.¡±


    ¡°Oh, of course. That¡¯s why fellow members of your cabal are over in Ralvost right now making deals with the leaders of Ammun¡¯s army.¡±


    There it was again, that micro expression that he struggled to control. Bakir hadn¡¯t known about what the other members of his cabal were up to. I wondered if Adilar or Nevlac were aware, or if the Order had a few factions that hid their actions from each other.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure where you got your information from, but I can assure you that nobody wants to see Ammun in power. The world barely survived it last time,¡± Bakir said. ¡°Whatever you¡¯ve been told, if it¡¯s truly a group of archmages from the Order, they were not there to forge any sort of bargain with Ammun.¡±


    ¡°Interesting. It looks like I know more about what your cabal is up to than you do,¡± I said. ¡°That¡¯s not a good look for you.¡±


    ¡°You are mistaken,¡± my prisoner insisted.


    ¡°Am I? So there is nobody in your entire cabal who would work against someone else¡¯s interests? No divisions between members of your Elder Council? No split loyalties?¡±


    ¡°No, of course not¡­¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t sound confident.¡±


    Bakir¡¯s voice firmed. ¡°The Global Order of the Arcane is a united front. Our goal is to contain the threat Ammun represents to the entire world. My colleagues and I are here on this island for no purpose but to learn about you and to forge an alliance with the purpose of stopping the lich lord.¡±


    The sad thing was that I believed Bakir believed all of that. Whatever closed-door deals his superiors were making with each other, whatever betrayals they had planned, Bakir was low enough down the ranks that even at stage five, he was just following orders and repeating the party line.


    That kind of loyalty was commendable, at least, but his naivete wasn¡¯t good for his long-term health. Sooner or later, he¡¯d become someone¡¯s sacrificial pawn. Hell, that was basically the position he was in right now. I¡¯d been planning to kill him if I needed to.


    ¡°Can you stop him?¡± Bakir asked, interrupting my musing.


    ¡°Ammun?¡± I clarified.


    ¡°Yes. Can you defeat him if it comes down to it?¡±


    That was a complicated question. I had no idea how much stronger Ammun would be next time we fought. ¡°Maybe,¡± I said. ¡°I hope so.¡±


    ¡°Then we have the same goals.¡±


    I found myself believing his sincerity. ¡°Even if it means turning away from the Order?¡±


    ¡°They¡¯re not corrupt like you seem to believe.¡±


    ¡°What if they are?¡±


    ¡°If that were the case¡­ I know what¡¯s truly important,¡± he said.


    ¡°I¡¯d be happy to be proven wrong, but so far, the evidence doesn¡¯t point that way. So let¡¯s find out. I want to have a talk with the people in charge. How do I get to them?¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 34

    Despite Bakir¡¯s repeated proclamations that Adilar was who I needed to talk to¡ªthat the whole reason the senior archmage had come to my home was specifically to negotiate with me¡ªhe still guided me along the teleportation chains across the ocean.


    The Order had spent a considerable amount of time and effort surveying that route. They¡¯d settled on six islands anywhere from three to five hundred miles apart, determined mostly by mana density. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was an abundant amount of thriving plant life that produced excess mana. For a mage who couldn¡¯t afford to chain six teleportation spells in a row, which was most of them, the islands allowed them to skim mana from the trees to replenish themselves for the next jump.


    For us, it was merely a stretch of beautiful and varied scenery on our way to the eastern continent of Jeshaem. Unlike Olpahun, the landmass was still in one piece. It wasn¡¯t much of a surprise, considering no one had fired a mana beam from the heavens into it, nor had anyone drilled down to the core of the world and ruptured it while simultaneously destroying a moon and raining massive chunks of stone down on the continent.


    I really had gotten unlucky being reborn in the absolute deadest part of the entire planet. But I¡¯d made it work in the end, and it wouldn¡¯t have changed much in the long term either way. Besides, if I¡¯d been born elsewhere, my family would all still be unwitting mana slaves to the Wolf Pack. If nothing else, some good for the world had come out of my new life.


    The Order¡¯s teleportation platforms were even more outdated on the islands than the one I¡¯d spotted inside their base. In fact, they were the next best thing to worthless, taking so long to activate and being so inefficient that the only reason to use them at all was that they were pointed at the next stop along the chain.


    ¡°I¡¯m guessing your cabal doesn¡¯t travel across the ocean often enough to make a permanent portal worth the cost to maintain?¡± I asked as I set up to do the fourth teleport. I hadn¡¯t imagined quite this many platforms forming the chain, but apparently their teleportation spells didn¡¯t have the range I was used to. It might actually be cheaper to use a single portal, if they could do it.


    ¡°I suppose not,¡± Bakir said.


    ¡°You suppose? You don¡¯t sound sure.¡±


    ¡°Permanent portals are¡­ cost prohibitive.¡±


    ¡°Not if you make them properly,¡± I muttered to myself. Maybe that was something else that had been lost. Ammun was the only other mage I¡¯d seen use a portal.


    When we reached the last jump, I caught a whiff of mana coming from my unwilling travel companion, some sort of divination. Apparently, he¡¯d gained just enough to cast some sort of communication spell, probably up ahead to warn of our coming. ¡°Do you need to stall me for a few minutes while they get ready for us?¡± I asked casually.


    He jerked in place, an almost comical look of panic crossing his features. ¡°What? No, no. I didn¡¯t¡­ How did you¡­¡±


    I gave Bakir a few moments to pull himself together, but, as amusing as it was to watch him flail wildly, it wasn¡¯t productive, and I was already wasting enough of my time dealing with the Order. ¡°Relax. I don¡¯t care if they¡¯re aware that we¡¯re coming. In fact, it¡¯s better that way. Maybe we can get this taken care of quickly.¡±


    ¡°You are perhaps a bit too overconfident, Archmage Keiran.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s only overconfidence if I¡¯m wrong, and that doesn¡¯t happen too often.¡±


    An image of Ammun¡¯s golem beating the hell out of me while I struggled to find air to breathe up on Yulitar flashed through my mind. There had been a few occasions where I had been overconfident, but I¡¯d done a lot of prep work while I waited for him to find a way back down to the planet. Our next fight would be very different, no matter how much mana he¡¯d claimed.


    ¡°Perhaps,¡± he allowed. ¡°Still, to go against so many of equal strength alone seems foolish to me. No matter how many esoteric techniques you know that have been lost over the centuries, I cannot imagine an ending that doesn¡¯t go poorly for you.¡±


    ¡°Then you lack imagination,¡± I said bluntly. ¡°Ready?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve done my duty as well as I can in these circumstances,¡± he said.


    I finished the final teleportation and let the magic carry us away.


    * * *


    Whatever ambush Bakir might have been hoping to see¡ªand it couldn¡¯t have been much of one given how little notice he¡¯d given whoever was at the end of the last stop on the chain of platforms¡ªit failed to materialize when we reached Jeshaem. That was probably my fault, since I¡¯d altered the destination of the final teleport to be three miles north of where the last platform was located.


    ¡°Wha¡ª¡± he said, clearly confused.


    ¡°Sorry about that. It seemed easier to just avoid customs, and it¡¯s not like we¡¯re going to be here very long anyway.¡± Though I had sent some scrying spells out toward the platform¡¯s actual destination to see if I could spot a few more Order mages. So far, no one had managed to show up.Stolen novel; please report.


    ¡°But you can¡¯t¡­ You didn¡¯t change the rune structure¡­ How?¡±


    ¡°Oh, I didn¡¯t use the platform for the last jump.¡±


    ¡°Then how did you cast the spell so quickly? It should take twenty minutes to do it manually, not to mention needing to scry out an unfamiliar destination first.¡±


    I laughed and clapped the pretend-archmage on the shoulder. ¡°You¡¯ve still got a lot to learn. Don¡¯t worry, you¡¯ll get there someday.¡±


    Bakir gave a weak laugh, but I could see the wheels turning in his head. Good. That was what I wanted. His cabal had underestimated me by a significant margin and I needed my involuntary emissary paving the way to his leadership for me. Hopefully, this would impress upon them how monumentally they¡¯d screwed up trying to spy on me while hashing out deals with my enemies.


    ¡°Now, where do we go from here?¡± I asked.


    ¡°I suppose the best place to start would be Ibasha,¡± he said slowly. ¡°Archmage Tredor frequently works out of the research center there. He¡¯s on the Elder Council. If anyone can get you directly in front of them, it¡¯s him.¡±


    ¡°Fantastic. Which way is that and how far do we need to teleport?¡±


    Bakir¡¯s mana regeneration was somewhat obscured by his core shielding, but I was sure he didn¡¯t have any sort of lossless casting technique, and unless his regeneration dwarfed mine, he¡¯d probably spent almost everything he¡¯d regained sending out that little warning. He¡¯d be helpless for the next ten or twenty minutes.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid I¡¯m not familiar enough with the local geography to just point directly toward the city from here. I would normally use a teleportation platform, and it was not inside my sphere of responsibilities to coordinate trade caravans between cities for the Order¡¯s use.¡±


    ¡°Well, I am afraid that I was dead for the whole planetary rearrangement thing, not to mention how many new kingdoms rose and fell during those thousands of years. So I¡¯m going to need you to step up and point me in the right direction here.¡±


    I lifted us both into the sky and gestured around. ¡°I¡¯m not expecting you to just pick out a city you¡¯ve never had to physically travel to, but let¡¯s get moving. We can narrow it down as we get closer.¡±


    ¡°It would be far easier to simply return to the city and use the teleportation platform,¡± Bakir argued.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure it would, and that nobody there is waiting for us to show up so they can rescue you from my clutches.¡± They still weren¡¯t. Their response time was horrible, but I didn¡¯t need Bakir making contact with them just yet.


    The other archmage gave me a tight-lipped frown. I returned the look with a bland stare.


    ¡°Has anyone ever told you that you are unnecessarily confrontational?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Not in those exact words.¡±


    ¡°Then it¡¯s good for you to hear it now,¡± Bakir told me. ¡°I apologize that we¡¯ve given you the impression that the Global Order of the Arcane is your enemy. That was not our intent. I have done my best to be reasonable while you have this¡­ Whatever it is you¡¯re doing right now. But I cannot and will not entertain these ridiculous demands further. Now, I you will return my mana crystal and release me. If you still wish to meet with those in control of the Order, we can return to the teleportation platform and I will do my best to guide you from there.¡±


    ¡°You demand, do you? And what are you going to do when I refuse, Bakir? Do you have enough mana to save yourself if I let you fall right now? Let¡¯s not forgot what position you¡¯re currently in. You showed up, uninvited, and started interrogating friends and allies of mine, looking to dig up anything you can. Members of your cabal are currently consorting with my enemies.


    ¡°So yes, the impression you¡¯ve given me is that I would be an idiot to trust you. Frankly, the only reason I¡¯m here is to eliminate a threat. Now, I think that you personally are just doing what you¡¯ve been ordered to do without any real understanding of the motivations and goals of your superiors. But make no mistake, I will crush you if you get in my way. Now, make yourself useful before I decide that I have no more use for you.


    ¡°Which. Way. To. Ibasha.¡±


    Bakir regarded me, his face pale and his hands trembling. I couldn¡¯t tell if it was fear or rage coursing through him. ¡°You are a fool, Keiran.¡±


    Then he activated that recall pin stored inside his leg. The teleportation effect took hold of him, pulling him away from me too fast for respond. It sent him fifty miles straight east, presumably landing him at ground level when he came out of the spell.


    ¡°The hard way it is,¡± I muttered as I triggered the divination I¡¯d added to the enchantment to point me in the right direction. Cooperation might have saved Bakir¡¯s life, but I didn¡¯t see him surviving this whole fiasco at this rate.


    It would take me perhaps ten minutes to fly to his new location, time enough for him to regain some mana and call for help. Perfect. Whoever showed up would lead me to the next link in the chain, and if that failed, it wasn¡¯t like my ability to track Bakir would suddenly vanish.


    I cloaked myself in invisibility and hurtled through the sky, my magic a wedge that split the air around me to increase my speed. I had to channel an aura of silence just to keep my passage from cracking like thunder, else there¡¯d be no point in keeping myself invisible, but it was hardly an issue.


    While I flew, I considered my repertoire of tracking and divining spells. I¡¯d already tagged Bakir with the needed beacon, and it would propagate to the next person to get near him. If they were as unskilled as Bakir himself, I wasn¡¯t worried about the magic being detected. But I did want to arrive in time to physically witness the arrival of whoever showed up.


    Instead, I arrived at a patch of bare rock with blood splattered all over it. The metal pin was sitting in the sun, still glistening red and wet from being dug out of Bakir¡¯s leg. Apparently, I hadn¡¯t given him enough credit for noticing my attempts at subtly weaving another enchantment into it. I really hadn¡¯t thought he¡¯d caught my meddling, but it wouldn¡¯t save him.


    Altering his emergency escape trinket had been the most blatant portion of the tracking spells I¡¯d saddled him with. And even if I hadn¡¯t, Bakir had basically no mana and had wasted valuable time carving up his leg. He wasn¡¯t limping too far from here, not without help.


    I swept the area with a simple scrying spell, one designed to home in on the beacon I¡¯d left on him. He was two miles south of me, sitting in a cave with his back to the wall while another man fiddled with a screen of brush designed to hide the entrance.


    ¡°That ought to keep us from being spotted by anyone flying overhead,¡± the man said.


    ¡°Don¡¯t be so sure,¡± Bakir told him through gritted teeth. ¡°He somehow found the evacuation enchantment and modified it to let him track where it took me. I imagine he¡¯ll find it in the next hour or so. We should go deeper before he starts getting close.¡±


    ¡°Can you keep walking?¡±


    ¡°Another minute to finish this healing spell. Those storage crystals had terrible transference rates.¡±


    That was interesting. I spun off another scrying spell and sent it deeper into the cave to see if I could find their destination while I hovered, invisible, in the sky above the entrance. One way or another, they were going to lead me to where I wanted to go.

 Book 5, Chapter 35

    Bakir and his friend retreated from the surface to the back wall of the cave, then proceeded to transmute the stone until they¡¯d burrowed through five feet of it to reach a second chamber. That was a mildly clever bit of protection, enough to turn away a casual attempt at scrying by virtue of nothing but a decently thick layer of solid rock. It wouldn¡¯t stop a divination from piercing through it, but it would hide the fact that there was anything there to scry for in the first place. It was considerably less effective when I was watching them dig their way through, of course.


    While they worked on that, I scried out the rest of the cavern. It wasn¡¯t much, just three small rooms joined together by a narrow hallway that had been cut from the stone. One room had been recently unsealed and looked to have a cache of emergency supplies, based on what was missing and the lack of dust in the air. A second room was still closed off and simply held a set of beds.


    The third room was the interesting one. It had a junky old teleportation platform, obviously aged even by the Global Order of the Arcane¡¯s standards, and a divination pillar much like the ones Ammun had been using back in his tower. It appeared to be made of glass, though reflective instead of transparent, and lacking the hundred gallons of liquid mana it would take to fill the interior.


    Everything was old and obviously hadn¡¯t been used in a long time, which made sense when I considered that there were probably thousands of caches just like this all over the continent. Most of them were never touched, as was often the case with emergency preparations. I¡¯d certainly invested heavily in contingency planning that, best case scenario, would never be needed.


    At this point, I was running out of time to make a decision. Either I recaptured Bakir, or I let him escape and followed along behind him. If I had the time to study that teleportation platform and determine how extensive the network was, it would be an easy decision. But for all I knew, all emergency platforms went to the same place, and finding this one got me no closer to my goal.


    So I hung back and waited. The two archmages eventually got through the wall and patched it back up, then spent another few minutes dinkering around with the supply cache. When they were done, they pulled all the air out of the room and sealed it back up, then finally went to the teleportation platform.


    ¡°Just need to do a bit of scrying to make sure that guy isn¡¯t anywhere near here,¡± the unknown archmage said. ¡°Wouldn¡¯t want him sensing the mana usage.¡±


    ¡°We should be safe,¡± Bakir said with a thoughtful frown. ¡°I removed the escape rod that he laced his tracking magic into, but yes, probably best to take a few minutes and do things properly.¡±


    I rolled my eyes and watched the mage put together what was barely an intermediate-tier divination. It was broad and could cover miles in every direction quickly, but it was so weak that I didn¡¯t even have to try to avoid it. My shield ward blocked it all on its own.


    ¡°Looks like we¡¯re clear,¡± the mage said. ¡°Let¡¯s get the platform prepped before that changes.¡±


    Neither noticed me watching them as they worked, but there honestly wasn¡¯t much to see. They sped the process up by collaborating, but the activation ritual was archaic, slow, and needlessly complex. It used as much mana as my own version of teleportation, but took four times longer to cast even with two people, and looked like it had a range cap of about four hundred miles due to some shoddy rune work in the platform instead of the thousand I personally enjoyed.


    I frowned as I noticed a potential problem in the rune structure. Unless I was very much mistaken, several hairline cracks had formed in the stone. The spell might still work, but if it failed, that would likely be the cause. It would come down to Bakir and his friend¡¯s ability to hold the magic together when the construct shaping it warped. It was possible they already knew about it, but if that were the case, I would have expected them to repair the platform before they tried to use it.


    A soft sigh escaped my lips as the spell failed exactly where I¡¯d expected it to. The two men not only hadn¡¯t known about the damage, but they¡¯d been unable to hold the magic together when they hit the unexpected snag. I supposed I¡¯d see how fast they could figure it out, but my bet was that this was going to take a while.


    I¡¯d wanted this to be a sort of day trip, there and back before anyone could miss me. That was seeming less and less likely, to the point where I suspected I¡¯d have to come back to Jeshaem multiple times to finish this up. Thankfully, at stage eight, I could literally be in two places at once. So while I was stuck sitting in the sky, watching two supposed-archmages fumble around trying to fix a cracked rune structure, my shadow went to do something productive.


    I chose a spot about twenty miles away, far enough that I wasn¡¯t concerned about anyone feeling the mana usage. Then my shadow transmuted a hole an inch wide straight down about five hundred feet until it was well into the bedrock. Once it had a good spot, it hollowed out a twenty-foot square room, then got started laying the groundwork for the super-long-range teleportation ritual.If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    I¡¯d originally used this to make it up to Yulitar when I was chasing after Ammun, but I¡¯d put a bit of time into iterating on the ritual. First and foremost had been reducing it down from something that required several dozen people to just one, which hadn¡¯t been that difficult for me. The participants were mostly there to handle the massive amount of mana the magic required; removing them had lowered the cost to the point where I could afford it myself.


    After that, I¡¯d spent a bit of time refining the ritual to take up less space, mostly by cutting off various pieces that I didn¡¯t need. The distance to a moon was significantly farther than going anywhere on Manoch, and apparently, the old cabal that had designed the teleportation had discovered that moving off-planet had its own set of complications to be dealt with.


    It was far easier and cheaper to jump a single person three or four thousand miles than it was to teleport to a moon orbiting around the planet. For all that, the ritual needed a lot more work before I¡¯d be able to simply cast it spontaneously like I could with a normal teleportation spell. In its current incarnation, the elaborate ritual room was a necessity, and it could only target one specific spot. If I wanted to teleport somewhere else, I¡¯d need to alter the ritual circle or build a new room.


    Having an intercontinental teleportation platform would probably be worth a day of effort, but I was only carving out the ritual chamber now because I had nothing else to do with my time. It was either find something constructive, or watch Bakir and his friend try to figure out the problem with their device¡¯s rune structure.


    Sadly, with my shadow doing all the work, I had plenty of time to do both.


    By the time they finally located and fixed the problem, my ritual chamber was set up deep underground. It boasted hardened steel walls, self-sustaining light, air filtration and temperature controlling enchantments, and a mana bank that would keep everything online for about a century, or, more realistically, enough mana for one long-range teleport.


    Meanwhile, Bakir had spiraled more and more, often muttering to himself and stopping to cast additional scrying spells a few times an hour. His partner grew annoyed with him quickly enough, to the point where I thought I might have wasted my time waiting for them to finish when the whole project got shoved aside so that they could have a lengthy and loud argument.


    Eventually, though, my patience was rewarded. They got the platform working, charged it up, and teleported away. I swooped in immediately, an empowered phantasmal step getting me through the wall they¡¯d put up and allowing me access to their secret bunker. I¡¯d already explored everything else with my own divinations, but I hadn¡¯t dared to examine the enchantments on the platform, not with two archmages actively working on it.


    My visual examination of the runes was already complete, so I dove right into deciphering the mana locks that prevented casual access to the platform. That took a few minutes to break, at which point the entire network unfolded before me. There were hundreds of these platforms all linked together throughout the continent, usually no more than a few hundred miles away from the next one. That included no less than three of them near my current location, so close that it would have been faster for Bakir to fly to a new location and use that platform rather than to fix this one.


    He must have feared I¡¯d spot him if he left the bunker, which was a reasonable concern when accounting for the fact that he was unaware I¡¯d been watching him the whole time. It had made for a tedious afternoon for me, but I¡¯d got what I wanted in the end.


    With their network broken into, I now had locations all over the continent I could teleport to whenever I wanted. The difficult part now was figuring out where exactly I needed to go. I could chase Bakir¡ªI knew which location they¡¯d chosen¡ªand ask him some pointed questions, but I had my suspicions that he¡¯d be reporting to his superiors and probably be taken to where I wanted to go.


    There was every chance he¡¯d be debriefed remotely, of course, but I still considered him a better source of information if he didn¡¯t know I was watching him. If tracing his movements didn¡¯t work out, I could always catch up with him later. I doubted any of his colleagues were going to notice the scrying beacon I¡¯d placed on him, not unless they were familiar with my spells.


    For the time being, I was ready to start exploring. I could use the beacons built into the teleportation platforms as guidance points and appear nearby, much like I¡¯d done with my last jump in the chain to Jeshaem itself, so I started with the spot Bakir had fled to. A few minutes later, I appeared a mile up in the air, still invisible and as undetectable as I could make myself to divinations.


    The platform was somewhere in an immense city below me, hidden away in one of the hundreds of thousands of buildings. I could feel the beacon in my mind, probably underground in a cellar or basement. Bakir was also down there, a quarter mile west of the teleportation platform and stationary. He was behind far more sophisticated wards now, ones that were sensitive enough to prevent me from spying on him directly.


    That was fine. There was plenty of city that wasn¡¯t warded at all, and my immediate goal was to gain some familiarity with this continent¡¯s geography. It wasn¡¯t hard to find a few libraries or archives, though it did take me a minute to decipher the local language. It was similar to Enotian, but had diverged in a few meaningful ways. There were a number of terms I was unfamiliar with, but I picked most of them up from context and applied that new understanding to street signs and business advertisements.


    The real treasure trove was some sort of shop that had large maps under warded and magically-reinforced glass. It looked like the shop sold copies of the map for what appeared to be a significant amount of money, but I didn¡¯t need my own copy. Simply reviewing the maps would be enough for my purposes. I was looking for a specific city anyway.


    Unfortunately, before I could find Ibasha, Bakir returned to the teleportation platform and disappeared again. With a twinge of annoyance, I finished looking over the map I¡¯d been examining remotely and began teleporting myself after the archmage. Hopefully, he was heading to somewhere important, else I was wasting my time following him.

 Book 5, Chapter 36

    Bakir dragged me through two more teleportation jumps over the next few hours before he finally left the safety of the Order¡¯s warded fortresses. I¡¯d used the time to explore the new cities he¡¯d been taken to, mostly in an attempt to establish some baseline of the continent¡¯s geography. If all I could figure out was where I was, I¡¯d still count it as a win.


    Once Bakir left the city itself, it was time to move on. Sadly, it was an obvious trap. Whoever was in charge stuck him in a wagon, had another archmage pretend to be the teamster driving it, and apparently thought I wasn¡¯t going to notice the divinations watching its progress, or trace them back to the four mages following along a mile or so back.


    I was, frankly, a little bit insulted.


    What I needed was the location of the Order¡¯s so-called Elder Council. I was tired of screwing around over here, and I was out of time and patience. Searching an entire continent wasn¡¯t feasible by myself, but I could probably temporarily relocate the gestalt here and have a map of every warded building within a thousand miles by the end of the day. If I couldn¡¯t get a straight answer out of this group of idiots, that was my backup plan.


    As for how best to trigger the trap without getting my hand caught in it, I opted for a simple counter-ambush. I ignored Bakir and his driver and tracked down the four archmages waiting for me to make a move. They were competent, I¡¯d give them that. Just in the half an hour I shadowed them, I confirmed that each of them had a flexible repertoire of spells spanning multiple disciplines. At the very least, they were master mages.


    As to whether they were true archmages, I still had my doubts. It was certainly possible, but it wasn¡¯t like they were going to casually start casting multiple master-tier spells so I could confirm their abilities, and nothing I¡¯d seen from anyone in the Order I¡¯d spied on so far suggested that any of them had that level of skill. It looked like, for them, ¡®archmage¡¯ meant proficient in all disciplines, but not able to cast master-tier spells from them.


    Normally, my biggest issue with attacking four highly competent mages who were expecting trouble would be breaking through overlapping defenses while dodging a constant stream of attacks. Fortunately for me, this group was trying to be sneaky. Their defense was that they didn¡¯t think I¡¯d notice their presence.


    It would have been impossible to remain unnoticed with a bunch of magical barriers swirling around them, so they weren¡¯t using them. At best, they had personal shield wards like any other mage, and even those were muted to reduce their mana signature to the low levels their obscurement could actually cover.


    Hitting them wasn¡¯t a problem. Doing it hard enough to overwhelm them without killing them was. I had to judge exactly how much pressure I needed to exert to break their defenses without also breaking them in the process, and each of them required a different level of finesse.


    Doing that with a single spell was impossible, even for me. However, doing it with six different spells at the same time was well within my capabilities. The first two spells dropped out of the sky where I was invisibly perched above them, striking the group simultaneously and releasing a vortex of kinetic pressure that pulled the four together, stressing their shield wards and hindering their movements when they tried to escape.


    The second spell was a detonation of fire designed to soften up their defenses. That by itself was enough to overwhelm one shield ward, specifically the one belonging to the man in the middle who¡¯d gotten slammed by all three of his colleagues when my first spell forced them together, but he wasn¡¯t seriously injured and I simply compensated with my follow up attack to reduce the power I sent through the force bolt that smacked into him.


    The other three got far harsher spells aimed at them, mostly in the form of crushing blows or piercing lances. Somewhere between the third and fourth wave of spells beating them down, one managed to counter with a beam of mana flung from an outstretched hand. I casually batted it aside, then knocked him out with a concussive orb of force that smacked into his face and crushed his nose.


    Soon after, all four of them were subdued and pinned in the air with greater telekinesis. The scuffle had taken less than twenty seconds, but I had no doubt that the two remaining archmages down in the wagon had noticed it.


    The driver might get away, but I could always chase Bakir down. For the moment, I ignored them to focus on securing my new prisoners. Without the extensive setup I¡¯d built to pin Bakir down back home, I was going to have to be a lot rougher with these mages, especially since they outnumbered me. The first thing I needed to do was drain their mana reserves, something that was very difficult to do to a conscious mage.


    Well, it wasn¡¯t hard to fix the ¡®conscious¡¯ part with an application of blunt force trauma followed by a stabilizing round of healing to make sure none of them were dead or brain damaged. After that, I siphoned all the mana they had out of them and used it to replace what I¡¯d wasted on that chain of teleports that had taken me across the ocean.Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    Then I stripped away every last enchanted or inscribed trinket they had, including busting open the phantom spaces two of them had tied directly to their mana core and looting those. I followed it up with a few hexes to encourage lethargy and a sense of hopelessness. Those wouldn¡¯t last long, but only someone with an exceptionally strong will would be able to fight their way free before I came back to check on them in the next few minutes.


    My final act of security was to bury all four of them up to their necks in the ground. I built a small dome of rock around them to keep any local wildlife from stopping by for a snack, then flew off to where my shadow had been keeping an eye on the wagon. Bakir and his friend had abandoned it, but only far enough to try to hide while they waited for me to show up.


    It hadn¡¯t worked for their friends. I couldn¡¯t fathom why they thought the exact same spells would help them, but for some reason, they were trying it anyway. I quickly dismantled their defenses and both of them received the same treatment as the ambush team.


    Then I gathered my group of would-be attackers up, flew off in a random direction away from civilization, and debated how best to get the information I wanted out of them. With a sigh, I glanced down at the clump of bodies telekinetically bundled together.


    ¡°Why couldn¡¯t you guys have just been reasonable? If you hadn¡¯t tried to screw with me, we could have had a fruitful partnership,¡± I said, though none of them were awake to hear me.


    * * *


    The process of extracting information from all of them individually was tedious and tiresome, but by the time the sun came back up, I had a solid idea of the Order¡¯s main bases, who was in charge of what, and where to find the Elder Council.


    I had also confirmed that this little group had orders to ambush and capture me, then drag me back to the nearby city, a place named Feldirin. The abduction served a simple purpose: to do essentially what I¡¯d done to Bakir. The Order wanted my knowledge, and my willingness to participate wasn¡¯t a factor in how they planned to get it.


    Their ambassador team was really more of a spy group, with Bakir being the only member who actually had any experience in the fine art of diplomacy. Adilar had the clearest idea of his boss¡¯s objectives and wants. Nevlac was the muscle, and Bakir was their scout. He was the one who¡¯d visited most of my allies and snooped around. He was the one who pointed the way for the others.


    He was the one who¡¯d suggested their bunker be built near my family.


    In the end, none of this was that surprising. The Order probably did believe itself to be a bastion against the chaos Ammun¡¯s return represented, but they weren¡¯t interested in helping me stop him. They only wanted my knowledge and resources to leverage more power for themselves. Even the lower-ranking members of their cabal knew the truth of things.


    ¡°You were a surprisingly good actor,¡± I told Bakir after I was done interrogating everyone. ¡°I really, honestly believed you had good intentions, that you were willing to work with me and were just a bit too na?ve to realize that the people in the true positions of power inside your cabal were using you.¡±


    He glared at me, but remained silent. There was no point in lying now, not after I¡¯d gotten into his head and pried out the truth of things. It was a dirty, distasteful task, but seeing exactly how far the Order¡¯s influence extended across an entire continent had convinced me that I needed to take them seriously.


    I had five different locations to hit in rapid succession if I wanted to round up the entire Elder Council before they figured out what was happening. To do that, I couldn¡¯t afford distractions. If I let the ambush squad live, they¡¯d send messages and warn people that I was coming. Getting a surprise attack off probably wasn¡¯t in the cards anyway, since this group was supposed to report back hours ago regardless of whether I¡¯d taken the bait, but there was no reason to announce my plans.


    ¡°Such a waste, though. Your cabal could have been quite useful to me if you¡¯d been willing to cooperate. I wonder what the other group said to Ammun¡¯s generals. Do you suppose it¡¯s any different over there, or just more lies and angling to get what you want?¡±


    ¡°Spare me,¡± Bakir said. ¡°Just get it over with.¡±


    ¡°As you wish.¡±


    A blade of force severed his head from his neck, sending it spinning through the air and soaking the grass with blood. Bakir¡¯s body remained upright, still locked in the grip of my magic, and I tossed it onto a pile with the other corpses.


    ¡°I¡¯m not trying to take some moral high ground,¡± I told the mound of dead bodies. ¡°I¡¯m every bit as big a monster as your leaders. This was simply a case of your group picking a fight with the wrong target. Believe me, Ammun would have done worse. Well, it¡¯s too late for you to worry about that now.¡±


    Then I burned the bodies to ash and scoured the area down to the dirt. In seconds, there was nothing but a large, barren patch of black earth in the middle of the field, with no evidence that anyone had died here beyond a wisp of smoke curling away into the night sky. I sighed again and shook my head.


    Letting this group of idiots run around causing problems for me was just asking for them to pop up at precisely the wrong moment, probably when Ammun made his return. To that end, I had a few more stops to make before the sun came up, then I¡¯d see if I could salvage something useful out of this whole fiasco.


    The first city I needed to reach was Ibasha. Surprisingly, Bakir hadn¡¯t been lying about that. I suspected he¡¯d been thinking the archmage there might have stood up to me if he failed in his own escape attempt. Either way, the rest of my victims had confirmed Tredor of the Elder Council¡¯s labs were based in that city, and now that I knew where it was, it was simple to find the teleportation beacon tied to the platform there.


    And with that, my long night of work began in earnest.

 Book 5, Chapter 37

    The Global Order of the Arcane was, if nothing else, thorough. I¡¯d already broken down the exterior wards of Tredor¡¯s research lab and destroyed the ward stone. I¡¯d been expecting the remaining wards to collapse at that point, but instead, the interior defenses were holding strong. For such a comparatively small building, having multiple ward stones was a ridiculous amount of over-engineering.


    A roar shook a nearby door so hard it nearly rattled off its hinges. Sparks of mana flashed through my senses as something huge and angry tried to break down the wall. ¡°Huh, well, maybe it¡¯s an appropriate amount of warding after all,¡± I told the dazed mage struggling to get back to his feet in front of me.


    ¡°Who¡­ are you?¡± he slurred, his eyes not quite focusing properly as he peered in my direction.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about that right now,¡± I said. ¡°What¡¯s behind that door?¡±


    Another deafening roar washed over us. Wards popped and sizzled as they failed to contain what I assumed was a rather large and angry specimen. I was willing to take the blame for that, considering that my own rampage through the facility had probably been the direct cause of the monster getting free of its confinement and into an area that wasn¡¯t designed to stop it.


    The mage might have been too concussed to hold an intelligent conversation, but he wasn¡¯t so out of it that he didn¡¯t recognize an enemy. A flame lance flashed through the air, cast directly from his outstretched hand to splash harmlessly against my shield ward. If he¡¯d been in his right mind, the mage probably would have realized the smartest thing to do was turn around and run away. Instead, he followed his first spell with a net made of lightning.


    It settled on my shield ward and started pulsing, discharging the magic repeatedly in an attempt to drain the mana powering my defenses. It was an interesting take, somewhat similar to a monster I¡¯d once encountered that spat clinging acid at me, but even if I hadn¡¯t been able to dispel the attack, it had no chance of ever doing enough damage to weaken my shield ward.


    This was getting me nowhere. I wasn¡¯t here to beat down every random mage that stumbled into my path or kill monsters that had slipped out of their pens. I had one goal and one goal only: find and capture the archmage of the Elder Council known as Tredor.


    I crushed the man in an orb of force and left his crumpled body on the floor so that I could get back to what I¡¯d been doing before he¡¯d attacked me. Despite my best efforts, a significant portion of the lab¡¯s wards were still functioning. That was severely hindering my ability to scry the area, a problem I was eager to resolve.


    I ignored the roaring and slamming coming from the adjoining room while I worked, even going so far as to move down the hallway to get some distance. That didn¡¯t do much to stop the noise, but I suspected that when I ripped out the next section of wards, whatever it was behind that door was going to burst free and I didn¡¯t want to be in its way when it did.


    Two minutes later, I finished tracing the ward lines back to a hidden ward stone. It was far enough away that I was going to have to break stuff to get there, but that wasn¡¯t really my problem. Being quiet about this had never been in the battle plan. I only cared about being quick, and I was already annoyed that I¡¯d been here for ten minutes without finding Tredor.


    The wards went down and the roaring monster burst free, taking not just the door, but a whole section of the wall with it. It was about ten feet tall, had six huge, shaggy legs, and no head. Instead, its face was in its torso, though that was mostly mouth. If there were any eyes, they were hidden under its fur. It didn¡¯t seem to need them, though.


    The monster homed in on me immediately and let loose another floor-shaking bellow as it started its charge. I flicked a series of three phantasmal needles into its face, striking what passed for a brain, and disorienting it so much that it crashed into a wall. Blades of force sliced through its limbs, dismembering the monster in the span of a few seconds and leaving a bloody mess behind and beneath it.


    With that problem taken care of, I turned my attention back to locating my target. Now that the wards were fully down¡ªI hoped¡ªit would be much easier to find him.


    * * *


    ¡°Look, will you just stop running?¡± I yelled at Tredor¡¯s fleeing back.


    His response was a vial of some glowing green liquid telekinetically flung at me just before he turned a corner. The instant he was out of sight, the vial crushed itself and noxious gas whirled out to fill the hallway. Everything inside the cloud started melting, but that wasn¡¯t the true danger. The cloud was actually pulling on my mana, trying to drain me like some sort of overpowered draw stone in order to fuel its propagation.Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    That was interesting, and under other circumstances, I¡¯d be keen to get a sample and do some experiments. Right now, however, I was too busy to be messing around with it. I cast a simple spell to send a gust of wind out in front of me that split the cloud in two. Reclaiming the mana spent proved difficult, but I managed to snag a portion of it before the green gas ate the rest.


    Even the metal in the floor was half-melted after only a few seconds of exposure, so I flew over the ground instead of trying to walk it. Idly, I wondered if this concoction might be useful in dissolving mysteel without me having to brute force things, but I suspected it would have no effect at all. Mysteel was just too resilient for something like this to break it down.


    If I could find a sample, though, I¡¯d take it home with me to experiment with. Maybe I¡¯d get lucky and Tredor would have another vial or two I could claim once I caught up with him. I¡¯d have to keep an eye out and make sure to catch the next one he tried to throw at me before he could shatter the glass.


    Tredor was nowhere in sight when I rounded the corner, but he hadn¡¯t been able to stop me from scrying on him while he ran. I knew exactly which door he¡¯d gone through. The man was running for the teleportation platform, as far as I could tell. The only reason I hadn¡¯t caught him yet was that there¡¯d been a third ward stone deep in the inner core of the research lab, and the wards were hindering me just enough for Tredor to keep ahead.


    Unfortunately, now that I¡¯d found the man, detouring to rip apart a third set of wards would cost me too much time. I was left with no choice but to fight my way through them over and over again as Tredor wove a path through as many blocked-off doors as possible. The worst part was that I couldn¡¯t even jump ahead to cut him off, despite knowing his destination, because his own divinations would tell him what I¡¯d done and he¡¯d change course.


    I blasted my way through the door, shattering the line of wards with overwhelming force. Tredor was two rooms ahead of me, but I was quick to catch up. This time, we were in some sort of specimen holding area. It was a long hallway with six huge tanks set into the floors, three on either side. Reinforced steel grates capped each tank, thick enough that no amount of muscle was getting through them. The monsters held inside were going berserk without whatever magic that kept them calm functioning.


    Two more mages were flanking Tredor, who flashed me a grin and threw his hands up. Tendrils of magic streamed out of him to the grates, probably in an effort to unlock them. My own magic slashed through them, cutting the spells before they could cause problems. At the same time, I deflected a pair of conjurations from Tredor¡¯s assistants.


    ¡°Keep him busy,¡± the archmage snapped at them while he prepared another spell.


    A barrage of magic flew down the hall, half of it not even really aimed at me. I blocked what I needed to and ignored the rest as I advanced. At the halfway point, Tredor finished what he was working on, only for it to immediately shatter when I countered it.


    ¡°Really, I can¡¯t fathom why you thought such a complicated spell was the right choice for a battle,¡± I said while he gaped at me. ¡°Now, I feel like I¡¯ve killed more than enough of your people. Come with me, and we can leave the rest of them out of it.¡±


    ¡°You¡­ Why are you doing this?¡± he demanded in an attempt to stall for time while he stealthily started casting his next spell.


    He should have gone for something smaller, something that he could have put together inside his mana core where I wouldn¡¯t be able to see it. It probably wouldn¡¯t have worked, but he might have at least completed it before I broke it down.


    ¡°Because your cabal was causing me problems, and I decided to lodge a complaint with the leadership,¡± I told him. ¡°As I understand it, that¡¯s the Elder Council, on which you sit.¡±


    Stymied again and with his assistants¡¯ less-than-impressive attempts to slow me down utterly failing, Tredor snapped open his coat and produced two more of those glowing green vials. Perfect. It looked like I was getting my wish, there.


    I snatched them out of the air, dispelling his telekinesis before he could break them and stowed them away. For the moment, I placed them in a pocket instead of my phantom space. Tredor had been storing them physically for a reason, and until I had a chance to better examine exactly what the liquid was, I¡¯d follow his example.


    ¡°Damn you!¡± the archmage snapped. Abruptly, he turned to run again, but I¡¯d had enough of this game and there was no way I was letting him start up another round.


    I teleported forward fifty feet and landed directly in front of him, then unleashed a force wave that threw both him and his two assistants to the floor. ¡°That¡¯s enough of that,¡± I said.


    It wasn¡¯t a quick process to batter down an archmage¡¯s defenses, but I¡¯d been working him over for the last few minutes while I chased him around, and he hadn¡¯t had a chance to recover. I cast a master-tier spell I didn¡¯t get much chance to use, not because it wasn¡¯t useful, but because it was so damn expensive. It was almost always overkill and even now, I had to dip into my mana crystal to gather enough mana to pull it off.


    Aura Crash wasn¡¯t a spell I¡¯d normally use in combat anyway, not with it taking several seconds to put together. It was vulnerable to enemy tampering. Against someone like Ammun, it would be a massive waste of mana that he could easily counter. But Tredor wasn¡¯t that good of a mage, and if I was being honest with myself, I mostly wanted to do it because he¡¯d annoyed the hell out of me making me chase him.


    The spell slammed down on him, crippling his ability to control his mana. His core immediately spasmed, losing its shielding and revealing itself fully to me. His attempts to draw mana from it ended in failure, leaving him once again gaping at me.


    ¡°It¡¯s only temporary,¡± I said. ¡°Unfortunately. Now, let¡¯s go. I¡¯ve got four more of you to collect and I¡¯m already sick of being on this continent.¡±


    My magic seized the councilman and hauled him upright. His two assistants hadn¡¯t even managed to regain their feet when I blew a hole off the roof and flew straight up with my hostage. I took a moment to orient myself, then flew off toward my next destination, only a few hundred miles away.

 Book 5, Chapter 38

    The Elder Council sat on their chairs, more thrones, really, and glared at me with various levels of mixed animosity and fear. Rounding them all up had been a chore, especially once I had to start dragging them around while keeping them subdued. While I was grabbing the fourth one, the first three had tried to pull off some sort of ritualized spell that probably wouldn¡¯t have done much to me anyway, but which I didn¡¯t need to deal with at that exact moment. Number four was an expert transmuter, and blocking those kinds of spells in combat was difficult enough without the distractions.


    In the end, I¡¯d managed to snag the whole collection. At least, I was hoping I¡¯d gotten the five correct people. It was entirely possible I¡¯d snagged some decoy frontman who pretended to be a member of the Elder Council in public, but there wasn¡¯t a lot I could do about that today. If there was a hidden council, I might never find out as long as they dropped their activities back on Olpahun. That was still a win in my book. I wasn¡¯t here for vengeance, just to eliminate a problem.


    ¡°Alright,¡± I began from my position in the middle of the room. Supplicants were supposed to stand here so that the Council could study them while they petitioned for whatever it was they wanted. Without the enforced rear lighting casting them in shadows, they didn¡¯t look mysterious or dangerous. They just looked stupid.


    The head of the Elder Council was named Domon. As far as I could tell, he was more of an administrator than an archmage at this stage in his life, though I¡¯d seen firsthand that he could still fight if he needed to when I¡¯d abducted him. He sat in the center of their group, an unconvincing sneer on his lips as he stared down at me.


    ¡°You all know who I am, I¡¯m sure,¡± I said. ¡°You can probably guess why I¡¯m here, but just because I don¡¯t want there to be any misunderstandings, let me make it clear. You sent agents to my home and are actively working against me. I¡¯m not happy about that, so we¡¯re going to resolve the situation right now.¡±


    ¡°Who do you think you are?¡± one of the councilmen demanded from my left. I mentally identified him as Kalig. By all appearances, he was the Global Order¡¯s spymaster, but the fact that those low-level thugs I¡¯d interrogated knew who their spymaster was told me that he was either terrible at his job, or he was just a cover for the real one. Kalig was the reason I had my suspicions that I hadn¡¯t gotten the people who were really in charge.


    Well, I¡¯d still be sending a message today, even if I didn¡¯t kill the actual leaders of this cabal. Hopefully, they¡¯d take the hint and stay out of my business. If I had to come back to the other side of the world to deal with them again, I was going to be killing a whole lot of the best mages Manoch had to offer, and I really wanted to avoid doing that.


    ¡°Keiran of the Night Vale,¡± I told him. ¡°But you already knew that.¡±


    ¡°We know some kid is claiming that name. There¡¯s been no proof you¡¯re the actual reincarnation of Keiran.¡±


    ¡°I would think the fact that the five of you are sitting here, very much against your wishes and without enough mana to light a candle between you, would serve as sufficient proof of my capabilities.¡±


    Kalig bristled and started to choke out what he undoubtedly thought was a clever retort, but Domon cut him off before he could get going. ¡°Enough bickering,¡± the leader said. ¡°Whether or not you truly are Keiran is irrelevant. You¡¯re obviously powerful, but unlike us, you¡¯re alone. There are a hundred archmages in the Global Order. Not even you can challenge our combined might.¡±


    ¡°Yes, yes, you¡¯re very impressive in numbers. I¡¯m sure. But it¡¯s just the six of us here right now, so that doesn¡¯t help you all that much.¡±


    ¡°Stupid kid,¡± Tredor said. ¡°Whatever concessions you force out of us now will be temporary. The reparations you¡¯ll be making for your rash actions today will burden you for the rest of your life.¡±


    ¡°I doubt it.¡±


    Unlike with Bakir, I¡¯d made sure to rip out their emergency escape devices as I¡¯d captured them. The last thing I needed was to have to go haring off after a runaway. I¡¯d stripped them of every possible countermeasure, every magical contingency, every little trinket tucked away in real or phantom space, and corrupted the ward schema guarding this room. Unless an entire battalion of mages marched in here to rescue them, they were completely at my mercy.


    And if that did happen, I¡¯d kill all five of them before I let them get away.


    ¡°What do you even want us to do?¡± Domon asked after shooting a look at Tredor, who scowled back but lapsed into silence.


    ¡°Recall all of your agents back to Jeshaem. I don¡¯t care what you do on this continent, but you¡¯ll stay off mine.¡±


    I¡¯d half-expected this to result in an immediate round of blustering and posturing, especially given their outbursts so far, but it seemed that now that we were getting into the meat of things, the others were going to let Domon do the talking. It made sense, in a way. They wanted to present a united front to their petitioners. I¡¯d probably thrown them off by abducting all of them and draining their mana.Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    Now that they were back in familiar territory, previous behaviors were reasserting themselves. Domon didn¡¯t even glance at his fellow councilmen before saying, ¡°Easy enough to accomplish, but we¡¯d need a good reason to do so. What can you offer in return?¡±


    ¡°I could leave without killing you,¡± I said dryly.


    ¡°That¡¯s a poor basis for a negotiation.¡±


    ¡°Who said we¡¯re negotiating? You sent people out to harass my allies to dig up information about me, and you¡¯ve got a team actively working with my enemies now. I¡¯m not negotiating with you. I¡¯m dictating terms.¡±


    While it might not be strictly true that the Order archmages over in Ralvost had already hashed out a deal with the remnants of Ammun¡¯s military, I didn¡¯t want them speaking with those people in any capacity. The best result that could possibly come from that was that the cabal would come down on the army and wipe it out, and I didn¡¯t need their help with that.


    ¡°We¡¯d like a moment to discuss our options in private,¡± Domon said.


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°How can you expect us to work with you when you act like this?¡± one of the other councilmen snapped.


    ¡°I don¡¯t expect you to work with me. I expect you to do what I say because I¡¯m bigger, stronger, and meaner than you, and you operate in a world where might makes right. You don¡¯t get to choose what rules apply when it¡¯s convenient to you.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s hardly a charitable assessment of the situation,¡± Domon told me. ¡°Despite how you¡¯ve accosted us, I do still believe there are benefits to be found between us. Why not work with us instead of further antagonizing the Order with every action?¡±


    Ugh. Politicians.


    ¡°Listen, I¡¯ve got other problems to get back to solving. I¡¯m running out of time and patience, so let¡¯s just keep this simple. I¡¯ve told you what I want you to do. Are you going to do it or not? Feel free to vote on it if it¡¯ll make you feel better.¡±


    ¡°There is no need for¡ª¡±


    ¡°Nope. We¡¯re done talking about this. Yes or no,¡± I said.


    ¡°If you could just¡ª¡±


    I interrupted Domon again. ¡°Talk to your friends, not to me. You¡¯ve got a minute to come up with an answer.¡±


    I only gave them that long because that was how long it would take me to finish setting up the spell I¡¯d been slowly building over the last hour. With each passing second, it spread farther and farther, and it was now surging across the surface of Olpahun toward Ralvost.


    ¡°Alright, yes. Yes, we¡¯ll recall our field teams,¡± Domon said. ¡°It will take some time to relay updated orders to them, but you have my word that we¡¯ll get them back home as quickly as possible.¡±


    ¡°No need to worry about that. I¡¯ve already taken care of that part,¡± I said. I gestured behind me and a large, silvery illusion faded into existence. It appeared to be a mirrored wall, ten feet tall and thirty wide. Hundreds of little pictures were displayed on it, each one a different teleportation platform in the Order¡¯s network.


    ¡°This uses your platform network to open communication scrying windows in all your many, many bases. I¡¯ve even linked it to my own network back home to relay the message all the way to Ralvost. Here, you can speak into it using this.¡± I pulled a glass sphere the size of my head out of my phantom space and floated it across the intervening space to land on the table in front of Domon. ¡°Now. Go ahead. Recall your minions.¡±


    I didn¡¯t let my self-satisfied smile through to my face. Domon had only agreed because he thought it would give him a few days or so to work on the problem without me standing right in front of him. What I¡¯d put together here was an extraordinarily wasteful use of mana, but then, I¡¯d gained quite a bit by draining five archmages, one of whom had been at stage six and inside his demesne when I¡¯d caught up to him.


    That actually pushed me over my maximum capacity, so I¡¯d started building the spell right then and there. Half the prep work was done before I even finished that abduction, just in the interest of being thrifty with the mana. I¡¯d had to add a nice chunk of my own mana to the mix to keep the spell going, but I¡¯d recovered all of that off Domon when I¡¯d picked him up.


    The control orb I¡¯d fabricated glowed in the archmage¡¯s hands as he relayed his telepathic instructions. He knew that they were being broadcast to every single platform, many of which were attracting small crowds of two to five people. They couldn¡¯t all be archmages, but I supposed an organization this size needed some support staff, and maybe the rest were the students of the next generation.


    For those targets he was specifically trying to reach, the scrying portal just served as a conduit for Domon¡¯s telepathy to pass through. Fortunately for all of us, the team wasn¡¯t currently inside Ammun¡¯s tower, else I¡¯d have needed to take some drastic steps to get the message to them.


    ¡®Abandon your current objectives immediately and return home,¡¯ Domon¡¯s voice whispered into their minds.


    Though I couldn¡¯t see them, I could feel their confusion through the telepathic link. ¡®Sir? How are you doing this?¡¯ one of them asked.


    ¡®Unimportant at the moment. All will be explained later. Do you understand your instructions?¡¯


    ¡®¡­yes¡­ but¡­ If we leave now, we¡¯ll be weakening valuable connections we¡¯ve spent the last week cultivating. It will make our work much more difficult when we come back.¡¯


    I knew it. We hadn¡¯t been able to get eyes on the actual meetings, but it wasn¡¯t hard to guess. I knew exactly what the Order was about. They were trying to play both sides to their own advantage. Though Domon¡¯s face revealed nothing, he must have been wincing inside at the damning words.


    ¡®Irrelevant. All of you need to return at once.¡¯


    ¡®I understand. We¡¯ll be back within the next six hours.¡¯


    Considering the weak range of their teleportation spells and the fact that they were likely going to have to free-cast each and every one of them, six hours probably was excellent time by the Order¡¯s standards. It would have taken me perhaps ten minutes to get off the continent and another twenty to cross the ocean to my current location.


    And they called themselves archmages. This little group had a lot to learn if they wanted that title for real.


    ¡°There. Are you satisfied now, Keiran of the Night Vale?¡± Domon asked as he placed the glass sphere back down on the table.


    ¡°Not quite,¡± I said.

 Book 5, Chapter 42

    Grandfather stared doubtfully at the chain. It was six feet long, each link an inch thick and covered in runes. Thirty more exactly like it hung from a rack standing nearby. ¡°Why would we need such a thing?¡±


    ¡°Because you have an entire wall of portals connecting Eyrie Peak to the rest of the continent,¡± I said. ¡°You may need to defend it.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not arguing that point. I simply fail to see why any threat should be so powerful that we could not destroy it with our own magic.¡±


    ¡°And maybe that will be the case,¡± I said. ¡°Something might come through that you can easily defeat. Then again, whatever finds you might be strong enough to challenge an adult brakvaw, in which case, you¡¯ll be glad your warriors have these.¡±


    They weren¡¯t anything that complicated ¨C just a shield ward specialized in deflecting ranged projectiles and mana. My thought process was that any fight a brakvaw got involved in would be high speed and aerial, with little chance of things devolving into a brawl. By focusing on ranged defense, I sacrificed flexibility for efficiency. They also had a single-use recall enchantment anchored to them, independently powered from the shield ward, that would return the user to the top of Eyrie Peak.


    ¡°The gestalt should be able to warn you if and when Ammun sends his forces through any of the portals,¡± I said. ¡°Hopefully, that will be enough warning to gather your strongest to defend yourselves.¡±


    It would be better to just close the portals, but the brakvaw had become too reliant on easy access to hunting grounds. That, combined with their complete lack of knowledge on how to preserve food, meant that the portals had to stay open unless I wanted giant birds descending on human settlements looking for lunch.


    ¡°If it comes down to the worst-case scenario and the enemy is too overwhelming, this will close the portals permanently,¡± I told Grandfather. In my hand was a large red rock, speckled with gold and stuffed with mana. ¡°It¡¯s a spatial disruption bomb. Using this will collapse any nearby portals and disrupt all sorts of spatial effects, including teleportation. It doesn¡¯t lock the area down in any way, but it will break all ongoing effects.¡±


    ¡°Do you really think this will be necessary?¡±


    ¡°I honestly don¡¯t know what Ammun is planning. You might never see a single one of his soldiers, but on the other hand, an army of golems could come marching through those portals the second he gets back. I could have wasted my time and a great deal of mysteel making these, but I¡¯d rather you have them and not need them.¡±


    It wasn¡¯t like I had anything better to do with all the mysteel I¡¯d collected. It wasn¡¯t nearly enough to patch the shell around the world core, and I could recycle it later once this threat was dealt with. Nigh-indestructible inscribed battle gear seemed like a good use for it. I¡¯d been sitting on the chains for months now, anyway, just waiting until it was time to start equipping my allies.


    ¡°I appreciate that you spent the time to make these, but I hope we don¡¯t need them,¡± Grandfather said. ¡°I also hope you don¡¯t think this will buy you a wing of brakvaw to fight for you elsewhere.¡±


    ¡°I would hope that you would come to an ally¡¯s defense, regardless of whether exorbitant bribes were paid to you beforehand.¡±


    ¡°That will depend entirely on what the trouble is and how much we can afford to spare anyone from defending our own home,¡± Grandfather told me.


    ¡°I¡¯ll keep that in mind,¡± I said. I hadn¡¯t exactly been keeping score, but I was pretty sure that in the grand scheme of things, I¡¯d helped the brakvaw out far more than they¡¯d helped me. Most of what I¡¯d needed from them was for them to stop eating humans and a donation of mana. Admittedly, lossless casting wouldn¡¯t exist without their techniques and instruction to show me how to adapt it to my own magic, so maybe we were even after all.


    I spent another ten minutes instructing Grandfather in how to use the chains and portal breaker, not that there was much to them. Then I excused myself to continue my circuit around the island, while noting that Grandfather seemed almost relieved to see me leave.


    I couldn¡¯t blame him, not really. I was about to bring a whole heap of trouble down on the island, and anyone associated with me was probably going to get caught in the crossfire. I wouldn¡¯t be surprised if, by the time Ammun returned, the entire brakvaw civilization had flown off through one of the portals and closed the way behind them.


    * * *


    I dropped off more equipment all over. Hyago and his druids got a few pieces, as did Keeper and the Hierophant. I even left a pile of wands for their mage enforcers to help guard the city with. Senica had already been equipped with a mixture of my left-overs and a few pieces I¡¯d made specifically for her for a few years now, but I updated everything I could to use stronger material and have larger mana reserves.Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    I also equipped my parents and several of the stronger mages in New Alkerist with their own wands, shield wards, and flight charms. I didn¡¯t bother to let my family know that the shield wards had hidden enchantments that would pull them to a safehouse I¡¯d prepared ahead of time if I needed to evacuate them, but I caught Senica peering at the enchantments closely and I had no doubt she¡¯d noticed that hidden effect.


    I even went so far as to find Tetrin and warn him about the potential upcoming attack, though I doubted he¡¯d be in the direct line of fire. I hadn¡¯t had much interaction with the man since Ammun had woken back up, so he probably wasn¡¯t in danger, but on the off-chance that the Order¡¯s fumbling around had revealed his existence to Ammun¡¯s generals, I felt it was worth the ten-minute conversation.


    The only person who didn¡¯t receive a king¡¯s ransom in magical gear from me was Querit, and it wasn¡¯t because I hadn¡¯t invested in making him the strongest combat frame I could manage. I¡¯d pulled apart every one of his frames over the last year to study their designs, and while they were quite ingenious, I¡¯d streamlined a few efficiency issues and fixed a handful of flaws, then scaled the whole thing up for my own version.


    Standing at nine feet tall, the combat frame was an amalgamation of mysteel and mana-reflective plates, eight individual layers of runework that made up over a hundred different combat spells, including six master-tier spells that Querit himself couldn¡¯t even power. I¡¯d included fourteen super-dense storage crystals, each capable of holding enough mana to fire a single master-tier spell before running itself dry, just to activate those spells.


    And I had nobody to wear it, not unless I could find a six-year-old prodigy or another shapeshifter. It had been designed specifically for Querit, and without him, it was useless. I was still holding out hope that he¡¯d show back up at some point; I¡¯d let enough people know about Ammun¡¯s upcoming return that he¡¯d definitely hear about it. Whether or not that was enough to get him to come back to work was another matter.


    With all the gear I¡¯d been stockpiling over the last few months handed out, I was ready to return to my goal of crippling Ammun¡¯s support network. Thus far, I¡¯d been chipping away at his standing army. Chasing them off the field and back into the tower had slowed down their resource gathering and might even starve them out in the long-term, but that strategy was only ever going to work if it took Ammun long enough to get back. I was going to have to be more-proactive in killing the remaining thousands of mage-soldiers over the next week or two.


    That would be easier now that they had no safe haven to retreat to. In fact, I expected a rash of deserters in the next few days once the dust settled. The collapse of the tower had literally thrown up a screen so thick that it was making scrying in the area difficult. If I was really lucky, the gestalt would soon be telling me that they¡¯d learned most of the army had been lost in the tower, and that everyone still in the area were civilians.


    I doubted I was lucky.


    More likely, the innocents had all been trapped in the tower while the military monopolized access to every single teleportation platform to evacuate as many of themselves as possible. Much as I¡¯d have preferred it to be the other way around, chances were good that I¡¯d killed off a not-insignificant portion of the Sanctum of Light¡¯s population, and that the civilians had taken the brunt of that. I¡¯d know in a day or two.


    All I could do in the meantime was keep preparing. To that end, I visited the hidden room buried five hundred feet below the surface in the center of my valley. No one knew about this room ¨C not Querit, not my family, not the gestalt. No one. The only way in was to be the master of the demesne to bypass the teleportation wards, or to physically dig to it. Even then, I doubted anyone besides me could actually crack it open.


    It was a vault, a solid fifteen-foot diameter orb of mysteel, the walls six inches thick. Inside it was the thing I¡¯d poured a lot of effort into when I wasn¡¯t busy conducting experiments or creating weapons for my allies in my crucible. The entire room was layer upon layer of rune-inscribed diamond sheets sandwiched between living stone.


    It was, in short, a golem core, one big enough to power a titan and hidden in every way I could think of. Hovering in the very center of the orb was a chunk of obsidian I¡¯d fetched from a volcano, two-hundred-feet tall at full size and under heavy spatial compression to shrink it down to the mere eight feet it stood at right now. It could hold enough mana to destroy the entire island if something were to happen to it.


    And it was only a quarter of the way full, despite my best efforts. Oh, I could have diverted all of my mana production into it, but that wouldn¡¯t have been enough to complete it, and it might have drawn undue attention from Querit, who I definitely didn¡¯t want to discover that I¡¯d made a larger-than-life scale replica of his own core, albeit with some alterations.


    Querit was too human-like, but this golem would be perfectly obedient. It would be trust-worthy. If I was right, it would be able to perform the outer portion of the ritual to advance to stage nine. I¡¯d based it on one of my original designs from my past life, modified with what I¡¯d learned from studying Querit himself.


    Unfortunately, it would need far more than ten weeks to finish filling. Even if I diverted everything I had access to, I might be able to fill it in eight, but that wouldn¡¯t leave me enough time to test it before I tried it out. I¡¯d be risking everything on an unproven design that no doubt needed a great deal of iteration before it was ready to be used.


    It was still my one great hope for reaching stage nine again, but it had taken too long to get to this point. Accidentally releasing Ammun from stasis had started a clock I¡¯d been struggling against, and unless I could find another way to stall him from escaping Yulitar, I wasn¡¯t even going to come close to beating it.


    Still, I was stage eight, and I had time to finish cutting away his support. When Ammun did show back up, it wasn¡¯t going to be a hopeless battle. It just wouldn¡¯t be as easy as it could have been. I¡¯d beat him, somehow, and then I¡¯d continue to think toward the future, to fixing the world core and reaching stage nine unassisted.


    It was just the part in the middle that I still needed to figure out. No problem.

 Book 5, Chapter 43

    I spent the first week systematically tearing apart the remnants of Ammun¡¯s army. It turned out I¡¯d been a bit too pessimistic in my estimates on how the evacuation would go. By the gestalt¡¯s count and my own estimations, something like seven in ten people had escaped the collapse of the tower, split heavily in the favor of the noncombatants.


    The units that attached themselves to civilians were left alone. Usually, they were no more than ten or fifteen mages and casual spying tended to reveal some sort of familiar relationship with the civilians. Instead of wasting my time on them, I focused my efforts on groups that were still following military doctrines and entrenching themselves in fortifications.


    The first time I¡¯d attacked Ammun¡¯s army, I¡¯d done my best to conserve mana. That meant limiting myself to advanced-tier or lower spells except in emergencies, which had been fine back when I thought I had more time to whittle down their numbers. Now, I had a very good guess of the amount of time Ammun needed to get back here, and I didn¡¯t need a strong core of loyalists waiting to greet him.


    My primary goal was to kill large numbers of mages quickly and without leaving behind bodies that could be reanimated into another zombie army. Fire magic worked great for that, so that was what I used. Guided by the gestalt¡¯s scrying, I visited a dozen groups and incinerated mages by the hundreds. Though I didn¡¯t get an exact count myself, the gestalt assured me that I¡¯d killed a little over two thousand people scattered across eighteen groups in that week.


    Those that remained were more of a dilemma. I didn¡¯t want to kill them, but leaving them there was going to cause problems. Some of them would be pressed back into service when Ammun returned. Others would be killed and reanimated. I needed to clear the whole area out if I wasn¡¯t going to be actively contesting Ammun for control of it. To that end, I got a little creative over the second week.


    Using the same spell I¡¯d performed to talk to the Global Order all at once, and with the help of the gestalt to forge the connections to the many, many small groups of survivors, I spent my time gathering them together and creating a portal to an island not too far from where I¡¯d dumped Ammun¡¯s diviner corp.


    A surprising number of the refugees came in willingly, though an even larger portion were compelled by threats and force. A small faction refused all attempts to coax or browbeat them into cooperating, though usually I managed to get through to them after killing off the stubborn ones. Once they¡¯d all been gathered into groups, a task that didn¡¯t take all that long since they hadn¡¯t had much time to spread out in the first place, I opened the portal and sent them through.


    That left nothing but a few isolated deserters, less than a hundred people in total and not worth the mana to teleport around and collect. If Ammun wanted to waste weeks or months chasing them down, that was fine by me. From what I could see through the gestalt¡¯s thousand scrying eyes, none of them were beyond stage three. Nor were they officers or anyone important. Most likely, they were drafted conscripts who¡¯d taken advantage of the chaos of my attacks to escape.


    At this point, their fates were their own, and I¡¯d already wasted enough time.


    * * *


    There was no particularly good reason to assume Ralvost would be the battlefield, but the giant hole that used to be the tower was still a particularly mana-rich environment. Wanting to take advantage of that, I placed my mysteel generators in the crater. They wouldn¡¯t make much, and certainly not as fast as when they¡¯d been positioned inside intake vents being flooded with heavy mana, but every little bit helped.


    I wanted to fix the world core, but I had no problem with harvesting what little mana it still had coming out of it rather than letting it dissipate back into the Astral Realm today. Ideally, I¡¯d have the whole thing set up to cycle right back in, and that was actually a big part of my plan in the coming years, but for now, the more mana I could get my hands on, the better off I¡¯d be.


    I trapped Ralvost wherever I thought I might encounter Ammun. The tower was an obvious choice, as were his various facilities and labs that I¡¯d discovered. I doubted he¡¯d need them once he got back, but even a slim chance to catch him without a fight was worth taking. And when I was done in Ralvost, I went back home and did the same thing there.


    That took me another week, leaving me with just seven. Other than the fact that I wouldn¡¯t be able to gather enough mana to even attempt advancing to stage nine with my experimental assistance golem core, I actually felt like I¡¯d done a good job of preparing for Ammun¡¯s return. If he showed up tomorrow or in three months, I¡¯d be just as ready for him.


    That was what I¡¯d thought, until the gestalt uncovered a new problem.


    * * *


    ¡°What the hell is that?¡± I asked.This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    ¡®We are not sure.¡¯


    ¡°Because it looks like an army of golems digging themselves out of the rubble,¡± I said. ¡°But it can¡¯t be that. They would have to have all been destroyed when a hundred thousand tons of rock collapsed on them. Even the ones that weren¡¯t crushed couldn¡¯t possibly dig through a hundred miles of stone in just a few weeks.¡±


    Despite my claims, that was precisely what seemed to have happened. There were already fifty of the damned things standing in the crater. It was impossible. There was just no way. Even with the evidence in front of my eyes, metaphorically speaking, I couldn¡¯t make myself believe it.


    ¡°They must be from somewhere else,¡± I muttered, more to myself than to the gestalt.


    ¡®We have witnessed all of them unearthing themselves from the remains of Ammun¡¯s tower.¡¯


    ¡°Teleported in from somewhere else, maybe¡­ Some sort of teleportation beacon buried underground. No, that¡¯s stupid. The beacon would have shattered from such a radical shift in the geography, not to mention the mass displacement required to clear enough space for them to appear would have cost an enormous amount of mana.¡±


    ¡®Perhaps less focus on the ¡®how¡¯ of the problem and more on what you¡¯ll be doing to solve it.¡¯


    ¡°Well, they¡¯ve got to go,¡± I said, gesturing toward the scrying orbs. ¡°The real problem is doing it. One or two would be no problem, but hundreds or even thousands of them?¡±


    ¡®Do they need to be destroyed?¡¯


    ¡°If we don¡¯t want Ammun to have an army of combat golems waiting for him when he returns, I¡¯d say so. I¡¯d hoped with the tower destroyed, all of these golems would become a non-issue. It¡¯s clear that, if nothing else, they need the high amounts of ambient mana in that area to function. Another year or two and they¡¯ll all stop moving on their own.¡±


    But we didn¡¯t have a year. We had maybe six weeks. And while it was certainly possible that I could smash a few thousand golems in that time frame, doing it while maintaining my mana reserves was a significantly more difficult goal. Worse, I didn¡¯t even know if that would accomplish anything useful in the end. Without knowing where the damn things were coming from¡ªbecause it absolutely could not be that they¡¯d dug themselves up through a hundred miles of stone¡ªI had no guarantee that more wouldn¡¯t show up to replace whatever I destroyed.


    Maybe I didn¡¯t need to destroy them. I¡¯d displaced the human population. Could I do the same to the golems? There was plenty of ocean to dump them into, far enough away that even if they survived the crushing pressure of the depths and started walking back to Ralvost somehow, it would take years to return. Or I could widen the channels letting the ocean pour into the massive pit and finish flooding it.


    I couldn¡¯t teleport them all individually, and opening up a massive miles-wide portal under their feet to swallow them was just as infeasible, but maybe I could bait them in. They hadn¡¯t shown any sort of intelligence when I was fighting them back in the tower. A big magic hole in the air with me standing in plain view on the other side and some force spells to shove them through might actually do the trick.


    If I was going to maintain it for hours or days, I needed a permanent framework, however. That would take a bit of time to put together, but I could do it. I was more concerned about the golems¡¯ sensory runes. If they couldn¡¯t ¡®see¡¯ through the portal, it was going to be a lot harder to stand there as bait. It might be worth it to capture one and give it a thorough examination before I wasted too much time and effort on this plan.


    ¡°I think you might be right,¡± I said after giving my plan a few more moments of thought. ¡°Destroying them all is impractical. Relocating them is much easier, as long as we pick a place Ammun won¡¯t be able to easily retrieve them from. I¡¯m going to go grab one so I can take it apart and poke at its core. I need to know what kind of guidance runes these things are working with so I can properly bait the trap.¡±


    ¡®Do you require any further assistance from us?¡¯ the gestalt asked.


    ¡°Not regarding this. For now, we¡¯re just kind of holding. Keep an eye on everything, and let me know the instant something goes wrong.¡±


    ¡®Very well. And the matter of our payment?¡¯


    ¡°Coming along, but it¡¯s a slow process. Depending how long it takes me to engineer a solution to this whole mess, I should have the prototype done by the end of the week.¡±


    ¡®That is good. We are pleased with your progress.¡¯


    I did my best to keep from rolling my eyes. If the gestalt didn¡¯t have a perfect memory, I¡¯d have said they¡¯d forgotten who was the stronger one in our relationship. But, as arrogant the entity might be, they were rapidly becoming my most useful ally. I could appease them for a few more months until this business with Ammun was settled. Then I¡¯d settle up accounts and hopefully wouldn¡¯t be relying so much on the gestalt¡¯s services.


    Querit was never this much of a pain to work with. He offered smart ideas and contributed readily without trying to extract concessions from me. When I stopped to think about it, I was actually starting to miss working with him. Hopefully he¡¯d get over whatever his issues were soon.


    Maybe I would check in with him soon. Ammun¡¯s descent on Manoch affected him, too. If nothing else, self-preservation might motivate him to look past his issues with me. He could have handled stuff like dissecting a golem core for me, or continuing the research on creating mysteel. That was important.


    ¡°I¡¯ll let you know when the first version is ready for testing,¡± I said. ¡°For now, I¡¯ve got some other work to take care of.¡±


    ¡®The golem problem?¡¯


    I studied the image of the golems crawling out of the rubble. Even as I watched, a new hand busted free and started dragging a metal body out into the sunlight. ¡°Exactly. Right now, it¡¯s nothing. But if Ammun can take direct control of them, he still has an army to wield. I need to get rid of them and wipe out any trace of where they went so that he can¡¯t retrieve them.¡±


    With a final word of farewell, I teleported to the first point in the chain between Eyrie Peak of the former Sanctum of Light. Two more jumps saw me to my destination, where I found an isolated golem and promptly smashed it apart.


    ¡°Too much force,¡± I muttered to myself as I looked at the partially destroyed golem core I¡¯d pried out of its chest. With a sigh, I tossed it aside and scanned for another golem. There was one a few hundred feet away, part of a group of three. That¡¯d do.

 Book 5, Chapter 44

    Five weeks remained. Ammun¡¯s army was broken and the civilians had been stashed away. My allies were as kitted out as I could make them. The Order hadn¡¯t dared to show its face anywhere on Olpahun, at least not that the gestalt had seen. If they were back over here, they¡¯d come some other way than their chain of island teleports.


    And I¡¯d wasted more time than I was comfortable with setting up my little honeypot to draw all these golems in. It had taken me a few days to work out the specifics, but once I¡¯d figured out how the golems perceived the world around them, it wasn¡¯t too hard to set up some mana shaped to trip their targeting systems and string it out as bait. A slow stream of them were steadily making their way to the portal I¡¯d opened over the middle of the ocean and happily tipping themselves through it to sink down into the sea.


    Incidentally, while studying the cores, I¡¯d confirmed that they had been mass-produced by the tens of thousands at a conservative estimate. The design collected all sorts of matter¡ªdust, dirt, loose rocks, whatever it could get that wasn¡¯t alive¡ªand transmuted it into a new body. It wasn¡¯t efficient, but considering the amount of ambient heavy mana in the area they¡¯d been assigned to guard, it didn¡¯t need to be.


    They weren¡¯t so much digging themselves out as cycling through the process of making new bodies out of the surrounding ground, being crushed again as they tried to move, and then building another new body in a glacial effort to free themselves. If the mana levels didn¡¯t drop, every one of them would likely eventually resurface, but I expected the cores to deactivate long before most of them got anywhere near open air.


    Water was still flooding in and would probably someday turn the rubble-strewn chasm into a lake, but that would take several more months. At the moment, it was just a collection of waterfalls pouring into an unimaginably huge pile of loose stone, and it was nowhere near the level needed to even reach the top of the pile, let alone the top of the pit.


    I did make a mental note to map out where the water might be spilling into below ground, just on the off chance that a number of those golem cores were swept away by the current. A few here and there weren¡¯t a big deal, but I didn¡¯t need a thousand of them showing up on a shore somewhere, having rebuilt themselves from sand and gravel and trudging across the bottom of the sea.


    The ones walking through the portal wouldn¡¯t be getting anywhere near the coastline, not any time in the next few decades, at least. In a century, I might be addressing the problem again, but hopefully at that point I¡¯d have the time and resources to dispose of the cores properly. As long as they were out of Ammun¡¯s reach for the next few months, I was happy with my current solution.


    After getting everything set up and hanging around for a few hours to make sure it was working, I quickly teleported back across the continent to my demesne. The gestalt would keep an eye on things from here and let me know if I needed to take any further actions, but I was confident that wouldn¡¯t be necessary.


    The instant I arrived back home, I knew something was wrong. Someone had bypassed the wards, and the list of people who could do that was small enough to count on my fingers. Half the people keyed into the wards couldn¡¯t even get here, people like my parents and Nailu. Senica could do it if she flew the whole way, but I wasn¡¯t confident in her sense of direction to actually find this one specific valley hidden in the mountains.


    The only person who could actually get here under their own power and wouldn¡¯t be hindered by my wards was Querit. A quick sweep of my demesne confirmed my suspicions ¨C the golem was standing in front of the combat frame I¡¯d built for him, examining it carefully with a set of divinations.


    I appeared next to him and said, ¡°You¡¯re back.¡±


    ¡°Yes,¡± he said absently. ¡°When did you start working on this?¡±


    ¡°A month or so before you left.¡±


    ¡°This¡­ is a lot of potential. Are you sure you trust someone else with this much power?¡±


    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t have built it if I didn¡¯t trust you with it,¡± I told him. It wasn¡¯t nearly strong enough to threaten someone like me or Ammun, but from what I¡¯d seen of the rest of the world¡¯s powers, it would probably put Querit in a solid third place. Grandfather might give him a run for it today, but I was confident Querit could beat him if he had a few weeks to get used to everything the new frame could do first.


    Standing upright next to Querit was a pedestal of what looked like quartz, three feet tall and a foot across. It had shielding enchantments woven into it, but it obviously contained a significant amount of mana. Even if I couldn¡¯t get a read on exactly how much was in there, a storage crystal that massive was a rarity.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    ¡°What¡¯s this?¡± I asked, gesturing to the pedestal.


    ¡°All the mana I could beg, borrow, or steal over the past few months. It should be enough to get you to stage nine.¡±


    I blinked in surprise. Of all the things he could have been up to, I hadn¡¯t expected him to be out campaigning for resources for me. Querit had a solid grasp of how quickly my demesne produced mana, so if he thought he¡¯d gathered a significant enough amount to affect my advancement, there was even more mana trapped in that quartz than I¡¯d thought.


    It didn¡¯t change anything, however. Even with perfect transference, it wouldn¡¯t be enough to finish charging my ascension chamber. And even if by some miracle it was, I still needed to test the design before I actually took the plunge and tried to step across that final boundary. The time constraints alone prevented me from reaching stage nine before Ammun returned.


    ¡°I appreciate the thought, but it doesn¡¯t work that way,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯m sorry you wasted your time on¡ª¡±


    ¡°No. It¡¯s enough,¡± Querit said. ¡°Examine it. You¡¯ll see.¡±


    ¡°There isn¡¯t enough time even if¡ª¡±


    ¡°Yes, there is.¡±


    ¡°Querit, the process isn¡¯t as easy as you seem to think it is.¡±


    He shook his head. ¡°I know it¡¯s not easy, but the only thing stopping you from advancing is your own fear.¡±


    I gave him a flat look. ¡°I¡¯m done discussing this. This changes nothing. You don¡¯t know what goes into the last step if you think the lack of mana is the only problem to be overcome.¡±


    ¡°I do,¡± he said. ¡°You need someone else to serve as your anchor to keep you from dissolving into the Astral Realm and a beacon for you to find your way back.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s a big part of it, yes,¡± I said in exasperation. ¡°Even if I knew anyone strong enough to do it, it¡¯s still complicated. The sheer amount of knowledge that¡¯s been lost makes it impossible.¡±


    ¡°No. I can do it,¡± he argued. ¡°And you know I can do it, but it would mean trusting me.¡±


    ¡°Yes. It would. I hope you¡¯ll forgive me if I don¡¯t trust you with my life after having only known you for a year or so.¡±


    ¡°Keiran, if we could afford to wait, that would be one thing. I¡¯m sure you¡¯ve had longer relationships end in blood, ones that you thought were far more solid than our friendship. I¡¯m not offended that you¡¯re having a hard time trusting me if even a quarter of the stories I¡¯ve heard about your life are true.


    ¡°What upsets me is that we both know your advancement to stage nine is the best¡ªmaybe only¡ªchance this whole planet has to avoid Ammun becoming its permanent ruler. Even if you don¡¯t trust me to be altruistic, are you really so stupid that you can¡¯t trust my desire to preserve my own life? I didn¡¯t think you were, but every chance you get, you prove otherwise.¡±


    ¡°Enough,¡± I said, cutting him off before he could get going. ¡°It¡¯s easy to say from your perspective. ¡®Just trust me with your life. Let me hold the knife to your throat. It¡¯s fine. I won¡¯t actually kill you.¡¯ And no, I don¡¯t think you¡¯d do anything like that, but it¡¯s a big risk for me and no risk for you, Querit. Worse, you¡¯re a golem. Someone could literally alter your personality if they got access to your golem core. I have no idea who you¡¯ve been in contact with lately. You might not even be the same person you were when you left.¡±


    ¡°So check.¡±


    That brought me up short. I stared at Querit for a moment while I tried to think of what to say. ¡°Your core?¡± I asked stupidly.


    ¡°You¡¯re right. I¡¯m asking for a whole lot of trust from you, so it¡¯s only fair that I extend some of my own, right? Check my core. Make sure it hasn¡¯t been tampered with. My life will literally be in your hands while you do it, the same as yours will be in mine when you advance to stage nine.¡±


    The cynical part of my mind whispered that it was a trap, that he could be willing to risk his own life just for a chance at taking mine. I¡¯d had ¡®friends¡¯ that had spent far more time with me, only to betray me in the end. At least twice, they¡¯d been planning it all along. But on the other hand, Querit wasn¡¯t wrong about checking his core. Unlike a living person, I could quite literally examine his stored memories and knowledge. It wasn¡¯t foolproof, but it was a lot more assurance than I could get with anyone else.


    I just hadn¡¯t expected him to let me. That, more than anything else, convinced me that he might actually be sincere in his offer, that I might actually be safe in his care. And he wasn¡¯t wrong. Defeating Ammun was by no means a certainty, despite everything I¡¯d done to prepare. Advancing to stage nine would go a long, long way toward making sure I won that fight.


    ¡°Alright,¡± I said after a minute of deliberation. ¡°You win. I am going to examine every inch of your core, every single enchantment, all the memories stored in them. If I am satisfied, we¡¯ll begin practicing the magic I need you to be able to use. You¡¯ll need to withstand heavy mana for an extended length of time, and we¡¯ll have to stress test your body to ensure it can hold up.¡±


    ¡°I already know the spells,¡± he said, apparently unperturbed at the idea of having his entire life and identity laid bare before me.


    ¡°Good. A quick review and a demonstration of your capabilities will save us a few days.¡±


    The whole thing would still take probably three weeks, although most of that would be the vetting process. Going over Querit¡¯s entire life was not something I could do in a leisurely afternoon, but if we were doing this, I was going to do it right. I¡¯d also need to prepare a new room for it, something separate from my hidden titan core. Nobody could ever know about that.


    The new room would be equally disconnected from the world at large. If I died trying to reach stage nine, I wanted that place to become Querit¡¯s tomb. I would be making that abundantly clear to him, as well. I didn¡¯t care if that damaged our friendship afterwards, so long as we were both around to hate each other.


    He hefted the chunk of quartz with telekinesis and gestured at me. ¡°Lead the way. There¡¯s no point in delaying, not if we¡¯ve got so little time left.¡±


    And so we started preparations for what would be the ultimate show of trust for both of us, and quite possibly the one thing that would tip the scales firmly in our favor during the upcoming battle.

 Book 5, Chapter 47

    Returning from the Astral Realm was an ordeal in and of itself. Pulling myself through my own mana core was rather like turning myself inside out, and reversing that was far from easy. In some ways, succeeding in advancing to stage nine actually made it more difficult, since my new body was so unfamiliar to me, but the massive increase in my capabilities more than made up for the extra handicap.


    Querit had been true to his word, though, which already made this life¡¯s advancement a marked improvement over the last time I¡¯d done this. At this point, the only way I¡¯d die was if he actively attacked me while I was putting myself back together. Even then, I was willing to bet I could hold him off.


    I didn¡¯t have to, however. It was a refreshing change of pace from the world of cold-hearted betrayals I¡¯d known during my original tenure as Keiran of the Night Vale. For now, I could trust Querit with my life. He¡¯d proven that, unambiguously. That might change in the future, once Ammun was no longer a threat, but today, I had an ally I could count on without fear of being stabbed in the back.


    It was¡­ nice. Different. I could see myself growing used to it.


    ¡°You were gone for six days,¡± he said before I¡¯d even gotten around to asking.


    ¡°Good. Hopefully that leaves me a few days to fully recover,¡± I said with an audio illusion. My actual throat was in no shape to make sounds yet.


    ¡°You were successful, I take it. Though¡­ This isn¡¯t permanent, I hope.¡±


    I was vaguely man-shaped at the moment, but only part of me was actual flesh and blood. That was all mixed up and needed to be sorted out, else I¡¯d be forced to rely on mana to sustain a physical body. Without my magic, I¡¯d die almost immediately. ¡°I¡¯m fine. I just need a few hours to put myself back together properly. The process of returning from the Astral Realm jumbles up the physical body.¡±


    After that, I needed some sleep, and then I had a few last-minute upgrades in mind now that I¡¯d reached my old levels of power. If our timeline was correct, I had somewhere between ten and fifteen days before Ammun finished his work and could return home. Whether he would remained to be seen. It was entirely possible that he¡¯d lurk up there, gathering his strength to come down on me with a single, crushing blow.


    Either way, we¡¯d need to be on standby to respond the instant he appeared. Until then, though, I would double check that everything I¡¯d prepared was still ready to go and make any last-minute adjustments. At least, I would once I could move my body without magic again.


    Perhaps sensing that I wasn¡¯t in the mood to talk, Querit remained silent and watched me work. Slowly, I started to rebuild my body into something more than a mass of mana and sallow skin. Veins and arteries threaded themselves through muscles wrapped around bones. Organs were repaired or regrown as needed. I put my face back more or less in the configuration I remembered it being.


    When I was done, I released the magic keeping me alive and took my first deep breath as a stage nine archmage. ¡°I did not expect to regain this for years,¡± I said softly as I flexed my hands open and closed. ¡°This method wouldn¡¯t have been possible without your help, and I was nowhere ready for my experimental processes to be tested. Thank you.¡±


    ¡°If you really want to thank me, destroy that lich before he causes another magical cataclysm and ruins the world again,¡± Querit told me. ¡°But¡­ still, you¡¯re welcome. I was happy to help a friend in need.¡±


    ¡°A friend. Yes.¡± I smiled. ¡°Let¡¯s get out of here. I imagine you¡¯d like some time to familiarize yourself with that combat frame before the fighting starts.¡±


    * * *


    ¡°What are you wearing?¡± Senica asked, her face twisted up incredulously.


    ¡°What¡¯s wrong with it?¡±


    ¡°It looks¡­ uh¡­ Unique.¡±


    ¡°I imagine it fell out of style a few thousand years ago,¡± I said dryly. ¡°Probably even before I died the first time. I didn¡¯t do much to keep up on fashion trends.¡±


    Then again, the aesthetics might change, but the basic function of battle garments remained the same. They protected their wearers from hostile magic, provided quick access to various enchanted objects or wands, helped deploy to the battlefield as fast as possible, and kept an emergency reserve of mana for last-ditch spells.


    Mine happened to look something like a long coat made of black and silver metals spun so fine that they flexed like cloth. Those metals were a mysteel alloy, weakened to give it some flexibility, but largely impervious to magic. Unlike a drawstone shield, the coat would protect me from incoming spells without hindering my own ability to perform magic. Additionally, I¡¯d enchanted it to extend my core shielding so that I could cast more complex spells without giving Ammun the opportunity to counter them.A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    ¡°Maybe you¡¯ll start a new trend,¡± Senica said.


    The coat was what I¡¯d been used to using back when I¡¯d still needed crutches like this in battle. Against Ammun, it seemed prudent to give myself every possible advantage, so I¡¯d used some of the mysteel I¡¯d reclaimed from my stage nine ritual cage to weave it. I¡¯d spent my remaining time building a few things that were especially hostile to undead, not that I expected I¡¯d get much use from them. Ammun was far too aware of his own weaknesses to not have taken steps to guard against them.


    ¡°Where¡¯s everyone else?¡± I asked, ignoring her snark. I didn¡¯t have the time to waste on it. ¡°We need to start your evacuation.¡±


    ¡°Our what?¡±


    ¡°We talked about this,¡± I said. ¡°Ammun should be returning any day now. You¡¯re a vulnerability that he can target, like he did when he sent that bone dragon here. I can¡¯t afford distractions, so I need you tucked away somewhere safe until this is settled.¡±


    ¡°Uh, yeah, you mentioned that, and Mom and Dad told you no.¡±


    ¡°It wasn¡¯t optional.¡±


    ¡°Are you planning on kidnapping us?¡± Senica shot back.


    ¡°If necessary.¡±


    I already had scrying spells out sweeping the town. Father was in the town hall and Mother was at a park they¡¯d started building a few months ago. It was a little sparse still, but another season would see it fill out. All the transmutations the farmers were doing with the soil were paying off, even if it was nowhere near on the scale Hyago¡¯s circle of druids were attempting.


    I frowned. Neither of my parents had Nailu with them. ¡°Where¡¯s our brother?¡±


    Senica shrugged. ¡°Probably playing with the other kids.¡±


    I swept the park again, and while there were some children there, my brother wasn¡¯t in the group. Had he wandered off and gotten lost? New Alkerist wasn¡¯t that big, so someone should have seen him somewhere. The streets near the park were all empty, though. ¡°Is he with Mother?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Yeah.¡± Senica must have caught onto my tone, because she started getting agitated. ¡°Why? What¡¯s wrong?¡±


    ¡°I can¡¯t find him. He¡¯s not in the park anywhere or on the surrounding streets.¡±


    Senica spun up her own scrying spell and sent it out to scour the neighborhood. ¡°Weird. Does Mom know he¡¯s gone?¡±


    ¡°She doesn¡¯t seem worried,¡± I said.


    ¡°Wait, is that him in that tree on the north side?¡±


    My scrying spells swooped back around to the park and looked into a crop of trees about three hundred feet away from Mother. There was a child in there, but I¡¯d dismissed him at first because he was twenty feet up a tree that Nailu definitely couldn¡¯t have gotten into. At least, he shouldn¡¯t have been able to. Clearly, I¡¯d underestimated him.


    ¡°How?¡± I asked. ¡°Did someone lift him up?¡±


    It was immediately obvious that that wasn¡¯t the case. Even while we watched, Nailu stood upright and stretched, balanced on his toes, to grab the branch above him. It was a good six inches past his fingers, but that didn¡¯t deter him. The branch bent down slightly and he snagged it.


    ¡°Was that telekinesis?¡± Senica gaped.


    ¡°Unstructured and weak, but yes. It looks like Nailu is unconsciously spending mana.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s not even three yet!¡±


    ¡°Maybe he¡¯s a reincarnated archmage, too.¡±


    Senica shot me a dirty look and hurried for the door. After a moment¡¯s hesitation, I chased after her. The two of us took to the air and went on a short, thirty-second flight across town, much to the annoyance of a few of the townsfolk we startled as we passed by.


    ¡°Mom,¡± Senica called out as she landed. I passed by her to head for the tree, where Nailu had already gone up another five feet. He stopped when he saw me levitating next to him.


    ¡°Gravin!¡± he said. ¡°Play?¡±


    ¡°Sure,¡± I told my little brother. ¡°I¡¯ve got a new game. Do you want to try it with me?¡±


    ¡°Game!¡± was all the warning I got before Nailu threw himself out of the tree and into the open air, no doubt expecting me to catch him. Even if I hadn¡¯t, I wasn¡¯t sure he would have hurt himself. In the brief moment he¡¯d been in free fall, it had looked like he was dropping just a little bit slower than he should have been.


    Mother and Senica hurried over, but stopped when I produced a simple block of stone out of my phantom space and placed it in front of Nailu. It was about twenty pounds, far too heavy for a toddler to lift. I would know, having retained all of my own memories of that time. If my brother was capable of enhancing himself with instinctive invocations, however, he¡¯d be able to move the rock.


    ¡°Okay, the first step is to pick this up,¡± I explained. ¡°It might be a little bit heavy, but I¡¯m sure you can do it.¡±


    ¡°Gravin, what are you doing?¡± Mother asked.


    ¡°One moment,¡± I said without looking at her. ¡°Nailu? Ready?¡±


    He didn¡¯t hesitate for a moment. Nailu bent down and grabbed the stone block, tipped it slightly to get his fingers under it, and then heaved. At first I thought he was going to fail, but then mana flooded out of his tiny baby core and he heaved the block up to chest level. ¡°Now what?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Now you hang on,¡± I said as I caught the block up with my own magic and made it fly into the air with my little brother still clinging to it. Three more blocks appeared and floated up to join it. ¡°Jump to the next one.¡±


    Doing as I instructed and giggling wildly the whole time, Nailu navigated my aerial obstacle course while we watched. ¡°That¡¯s not normal,¡± Mother said after a minute.


    ¡°No,¡± I agreed. I shot a sly glance at Senica. ¡°Looks like there¡¯s another prodigy in the family. He might even be better than you.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not threatened by a toddler,¡± she declared haughtily.


    ¡°We¡¯ll see how you feel in thirty or forty years.¡±


    Senica just rolled her eyes while I laughed and sent up stone rings for Nailu to jump through. He wobbled a bit on the landing, but otherwise executed the acrobatics with far more skill than any child that age should have been able to display. The game only came to an end with his mana reserves bottomed out.


    ¡°I¡¯m sleepy,¡± he informed Mother, holding his hands up and making grabby motions with his fingers. She obliged him and gave him a quick kiss on his forehead.


    ¡°I guess we can take a nap early today. You played so good.¡± Mother smiled down at him before glancing over at me. ¡°Uh, Gravin¡­ I didn¡¯t want to interrupt while you were doing whatever that was, but what are you wearing?¡±


    ¡°Everyone¡¯s a critic,¡± I muttered. ¡°I¡¯m going to fetch Father and I¡¯ll meet you all back at the house.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 48

    ¡°Why now?¡± Mother asked. ¡°He never showed any signs before.¡±


    We were gathered around the kitchen table. I¡¯d gone to fetch Father, and Mother and Senica had gone home with a now-soundly napping Nailu in tow. Once the whole family had reassembled, we¡¯d sat down to have what I was expecting to be an unpleasant conversation. Before anyone would discuss that, however, there were questions about Nailu.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know. Why do some babies walk faster than others? They just do,¡± I said. ¡°It¡¯s the same with mana. Nailu¡¯s core is undeveloped and he¡¯s using mana at a fairly basic level. He¡¯s probably a bit young, but on the other hand, he¡¯s the first person in the family to not have to deal with being around draw stones. Have any of the other new children shown any signs of using mana.¡±


    ¡°I¡­ don¡¯t think so? I can ask around.¡±


    ¡°Even if it¡¯s just Nailu, is that really so surprising? I mean, look at the family line. Dad was some prodigy last generation before the old governor died and the governor showed up to steal all the mana,¡± Senica pointed out. She gestured to herself and said, ¡°And then there¡¯s me. I¡¯m the best mage in town. No, you don¡¯t count, Gravin.¡±


    ¡°I suspect that ¡®Gravin¡¯ would have been a competent mage even if I hadn¡¯t regained my memories, assuming there was any chance of anyone becoming a mage in the environment of Old Alkerist.¡±


    ¡°What can I say?¡± Father preened. ¡°I make good babies.¡±


    Mother rolled her eyes and shoved him. ¡°Seems like I did all the work after the first ten minutes of the process.¡±


    ¡°Hey! I get credit for at least the first twenty!¡±


    ¡°Okay, I do not want to be involved in this conversation,¡± Senica said.


    As amusing as it was to witness, I had a severe lack of free time in my schedule. Even the extra hour I¡¯d taken with Nailu was more than I should have. ¡°You can talk about this, or not, after I¡¯m done,¡± I told them. ¡°By my best guess, we¡¯ve got less than a week before Ammun returns and I¡¯m not sure how well that¡¯s going to go. It¡¯s time to gather everything up and evacuate.¡±


    ¡°Right. About that¡ª¡± Father started to say.


    ¡°No. You are not staying here. I don¡¯t care what responsibilities you have. This whole town is a target and everyone should be evacuating, but that¡¯s their choice. You four do not have an option. We¡¯re leaving.¡±


    ¡°You can¡¯t just make that decision for us,¡± Father said hotly.


    ¡°You remember the dragon,¡± I told him. ¡°I fought it bare miles from here. The guy who sent that is coming back. I expect fighting to resume in literal days. What are you going to do when the next dragon shows up, but I¡¯m a thousand miles away fighting Ammun in Ralvost?¡±


    ¡°You said you destroyed that dragon.¡±


    ¡°I doubt that¡¯s the only dragon skeleton left on the planet. And even if it is, there are other threats. I¡¯ve been working to break apart an army of mages and what seems to be a near-infinite number of golems under his command for months now. Ammun has plenty of tools at hand, and it would be foolish to believe that he¡¯s out of options just because I¡¯ve taken steps to stop him from using some of them.¡±


    ¡°We knew this day was coming eventually,¡± Mother said. ¡°And it¡¯s not permanent.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯ve got a harvest coming in a week,¡± Father told her. ¡°We can¡¯t leave. Other villages are depending on that food.¡±


    ¡°Hold a town meeting,¡± I suggested. ¡°Explain the situation to them. Let everyone decide for themselves what they want to do. Either harvest a bit early and lose some of your crop, or leave and hope it¡¯s not too late when you get back. Hope that there still is a crop when you get back. If you get back.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got a place prepared for you. It can comfortably support a hundred people for a month. Two hundred can squeeze in, but you¡¯d better tell people to pack food.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯ve got close to five hundred people here,¡± Father said.


    ¡°Then I suppose most of you should evacuate to somewhere else. Derro might be a good idea. You guys figure out who¡¯s going where. I¡¯ll come back tomorrow and help move people. But everyone in this house is going to the safe haven I built for you. That part isn¡¯t negotiable.¡±


    Father started to argue, but I cut him off before he could get going. ¡°Not. Negotiable. I don¡¯t care if you hate me afterward. I don¡¯t care if I have to kidnap all of you to keep you safe. You will survive this.¡±This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    There wasn¡¯t much new to the conversation after that. Various objections were raised. I shot them down. The evacuation was an inconvenience. Yes, I understood that. No, I didn¡¯t care. No, nobody else had to leave if they didn¡¯t want to. Yes, I did consider it a strong possibility that Ammun would make at least a token effort to sack the town. No, I didn¡¯t think the automated defenses I¡¯d placed here would be enough if he decided to take things seriously.


    I cut things short and left soon after. I still needed to check in with Querit to see how he was adjusting to the new frame, and the gestalt always had more work for me to do, either because they¡¯d identified another problem area or because I owed them so much that I literally couldn¡¯t produce all the enchanted trinkets they wanted fast enough.


    They did their town hall while I was away, but I got the highlights from Senica. It was an event I was more than happy to have not been a part of. I got plenty of vitriol aimed my way when I came back the next day to transport the hundred people¡ªmostly younger couples with small children¡ªto the refuge I¡¯d built for my parents. A few dozen more people took the teleportation platform to Derro, and a handful of volunteers went in every direction to deliver fair warning to the rest of the villages.


    I didn¡¯t expect Ammun to spread his efforts that thin again, not when he¡¯d accomplished so little the first time around, but it didn¡¯t hurt to let people know so they could make their own decisions. If those villages were wiped out, it wouldn¡¯t be because they hadn¡¯t seen it coming.


    I just had to hope that I¡¯d predicted enough of what Ammun would and could do that we all survived his return.


    * * *


    He was late. We were a full three days past his expected return date now, and there was no sign of him. Any attempts of scrying his little tower up on Yulitar had failed, and getting near it was no longer an option since Ammun had extended his wards out past the base of the structure. There were even visual barriers now, making it appear as though the whole area was caught up in some sort of dust storm.


    On the one hand, that gave us more time to prepare, but on the other, there wasn¡¯t a lot I could actually do while keeping myself ready to move at a moment¡¯s notice. Any project I started needed to be one I could drop instantly, which ruled out a lot of alchemy and enchanting, since most of those tasks had precise timing requirements. I occupied my time with making more of the consciousness relays the gestalt wanted to expand their domain instead, but even those required some enchantments to be laid down on them. Whichever unlucky unit I was working on when I did finally get the signal was destined to be scrapped out.


    ¡°Keiran,¡± the gestalt said through my scrying mirror. I glanced up at it to see the moon in question still in view on the glass. Rather than how it normally looked if I were to peer up into the night sky, it was covered in a cloud of soft light with brighter strands flowing through it. Ammun¡¯s tower was in the center of its own vortex, one that had been steadily growing until it covered perhaps a tenth of the moon¡¯s surface.


    It was far more mana than he needed just to activate the long-range teleportation spell that would bring him back to Manoch, no matter how cobbled together it was. Obviously, he was preparing for a fight when he returned, just as I was doing the same. We¡¯d soon see who¡¯d done the better job of it.


    ¡°Movement?¡± I asked.


    ¡°We believe so.¡±


    I studied the moon again. ¡°The mana patterns look the same.¡±


    ¡°Not on Yulitar. On Ralvost. It might not be Ammun, but the timing¡­¡±


    Had he managed to sneak back down here without anyone noticing? It was certainly possible, and a bit of groundside prep time might help him considerably. ¡°Show me.¡±


    The mirror shifted from displaying Yulitar to a mountain side blanketed in snow. The view was up near the peak, where the snow never really melted. That didn¡¯t mean it was undisturbed, however. In fact, it looked like something huge had erupted out from underneath it, or rather, dozens of somethings.


    The view shifted again, this time swinging up to the open sky, where better than a hundred wyverns were winging their way west. For a moment, I mistook them for living, breathing monsters and had to wonder how they¡¯d survived all this time, then I realized the truth. They were dead and preserved in ice and snow all these years.


    ¡°Ammun had a cache of undead soldiers left to use after all,¡± I muttered to myself. A quick calculation of the mana costs required to raise so many monsters back up into their current state revealed all I needed to know about why he hadn¡¯t used them before, and it created a worrying picture of how much mana he had available to him now.


    Of the lich himself, there was no sign. I cast my own scrying spell to scan the area for him on the off chance that he was still there, but he¡¯d stayed just long enough to do his work under the frozen sheet of ice, then teleported off somewhere else. All he¡¯d left behind was the disturbed graves of the colony of wyverns.


    ¡°Where are they heading? One of the portals, maybe?¡±


    ¡°There is one in that direction, though it¡¯s not the closest one to their current location.¡±


    ¡°Perhaps Ammun doesn¡¯t know about that one. The brakvaw need to get ready for a fight, either way. You¡¯ll let Grandfather know?¡±


    ¡°We already have. He wants to know if you¡¯re coming to assist.¡±


    ¡°No. This is a feint. We need to find Ammun and stop him from doing whatever his real goal is. His people can handle this. They outnumber the enemies several times over.¡±


    ¡°He does not seem pleased by your answer.¡±


    ¡°I wasn¡¯t expecting him to be, but I have to prioritize the whole planet. If he doesn¡¯t want to fight, tell him to break the portals now.¡±


    ¡°Will you set them back up when the fighting ends?¡±


    ¡°If we win, yes, eventually.¡±


    ¡°That does not reassure him. He is sending a wing of fighters to intercept the wyverns, with instructions to retreat back through the portal if they get overwhelmed so that it can be closed.¡±


    It was a risky course, but that was Grandfather¡¯s decision to make. With any luck, everything would work out in his favor. If not, the wyverns might get through and the brakvaw would have to defend Eyrie Peak directly. We¡¯d known this was a possibility, however, and had set up an evacuation portal for noncombatants. That, combined with the battle harnesses, was everything I could do for my allies short of taking the field myself.


    ¡°Keep me updated on how the fight¡¯s going, please,¡± I said. ¡°And keep looking for more signs of Ammun¡¯s activities. As soon as we spot the lich, I¡¯ll be moving to engage him.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 52

    Ammun¡¯s shadow fled the battle immediately. I let it go; there was no point in chasing after it. Destroying it would have done nothing but allowed him to reform it at his side once more. That might have cost him more mana than simply letting it return, but it wasn¡¯t likely that he was going to run out.


    Instead, I powdered the skeleton nearby and sent my shadow after the one we¡¯d left a mile back. Without needing to use master-tier spells to destroy them, it was a quick, easy, efficient job that only took a minute. Normally, I¡¯d have been pleased to make that trade off, but I was acutely aware that every second that passed was one that brought Ammun closer to finishing his control console to use a moon as a weapons platform.


    I had no doubt there¡¯d be other distractions between me and my goal, but I couldn¡¯t take the time to weave my way through all of Ammun¡¯s wards to properly scout them out. So, with his trio of undead dragons fully destroyed, I flew onward and hoped the next challenge would be easier to defeat.


    The first ward wall showed up two miles later. It appeared as a solid sphere of repellent force, specifically designed to push back equally against anything brought to bear. Ammun had been thorough in its creation, even going so far as to form it underground. He¡¯d probably carved the ward stone up on Yulitar and brought it with him, else he wouldn¡¯t have had time to develop such a complete defense.


    Normally, my strategy for something like this would be to brute force it open. A handful of high-powered conjurations would quickly drain such a barrier, and with lossless casting, I¡¯d lose nothing but some time. It was worth trying, but I didn¡¯t expect it to succeed. While I considered how best to circumvent the ward, I hammered it with force lances, lightning bolts, explosions, and huge blocks of conjured ice and stone. Light played across the ward¡¯s surface as it reflected the attacks back out, none of them even close to hitting me.


    Against a normal mage, it was a potent defense, but anyone with the ability to remotely cast a spell even fifty feet away from their body could bypass the deflection completely. Once upon a time, that would have cost me some time, but these days, I sometimes needed a specially crafted staff to deliberately hinder the flow of mana in my spells when I was setting up something big. Remote casting wasn¡¯t an issue, especially not with my shadow assisting me.


    As I¡¯d suspected, the ward held strong with no signs of stuttering mana flows that would indicate it was taking damage. Ammun had built the ward stone to hold an enormous amount of mana, far more than was practical, but which was perfect for his needs right now. I might break through in five minutes, or it might take me an hour. I had no way to tell.


    The problem with these kinds of wards was that they functioned similarly to how I¡¯d set my shield ward up, and that had a weakness intrinsic to the design: phantasmal spells. The solution to that was a simple one. Savvy mages simply placed a second layer to their ward, a phantasmal shell that only activated if the divinations detected an intruder trying to use something like phantasmal step to bypass the first layer.


    An archmage, on the other hand, wouldn¡¯t be content simply to repel the would-be intruder. If it were me, I would trap the second layer, cause it to invert the phantasmal step spell the intruder used, and shred them on the ward they got stuck in. It would be a particularly gruesome death, all that inverted kinetic energy being kicked back through a human body ¨C quick, but gruesome.


    That was exactly what Ammun had done. I couldn¡¯t scry far past the ward, but I¡¯d gone deep enough to see the trap for what it was. Seeing it and defeating it were two different things, but I had a good idea of how to do that. It wasn¡¯t anything clever, either. Maybe I could have picked apart the ward, teased open the strands of mana woven through it, and slipped through, but Ammun already knew I was here. Why bother with subtlety? It was far easier to just set the trap off in a way that it wouldn¡¯t catch me, then fly through right after.


    To that end, I used the most direct and quickest solution: I sent my shadow in first. It didn¡¯t have a physical body, not one that would be shredded by this trap, at least. It phantasmal stepped right through the kinetic ward with some assistance from me holding open the parts that would have interacted with its body, then got twisted and wrung out like a dirty rag by the phantasmal trap.


    The instant the spell was done mauling my shadow, it snapped right back into shape, utterly unharmed. A moment later, we were both flying free past the outer ward. Spatial locking was still in effect, and I was now cut off from my divinations on the outside world, including my line to the gestalt entity, but Ammun himself was in sight.


    His machine was a fifty-foot-tall spire built of interlocking metal bars covered in runes. The internal structure was complete, and he was busy fusing outer plates to it. It resembled a grain silo in the process of being constructed, except with a far more robust skeleton than was necessary for such a structure.


    He was floating in the air above it, a few divinations swirling around him and inspecting it from various angles while three airborne golems attached the plates. The whole thing had an air of being a slapdash construction, something that could easily be knocked over and destroyed beyond repair. All of Ammun¡¯s defenses felt like that, despite his obviously extensive preparations.You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    Those three weren¡¯t the only golems, but the rest were obviously combat units. They locked in on me immediately, and my eyes narrowed as I studied them. If I wasn¡¯t mistaken, those were the exact same golems I¡¯d been dealing with beneath Ammun¡¯s tower. I thought I¡¯d taken care of those. Apparently, he¡¯d had a few spares lying around.


    That, or¡­ Now that I was looking for it, I could feel a pinprick in the spatial lock. Someone had opened a portal in the area recently and the lock hadn¡¯t quite smoothed it over. Had Ammun fetched the golems I¡¯d dumped into the ocean? It was certainly possible, despite my efforts to erase all evidence of the baited portal I¡¯d left at the ruins of his tower before he came back.


    I didn¡¯t think it was likely, however. A better explanation was that Ammun simply had more of the golems in storage offsite. He¡¯d certainly had enough of them, and I hadn¡¯t done more than a cursory inspection of his facilities and research sites that I knew of. It wouldn¡¯t surprise me at all to learn that he had a golem storage bunker buried somewhere underground where I¡¯d never find it.


    The important thing to focus on was that he¡¯d portaled a large number of them here, and that I might need to deal with them. I knew there were two different ward stones based on how the wards were set up, both of which I wanted to destroy if the opportunity presented itself. This spatial lock only applied to me, and being pinned down while Ammun could teleport unhindered was not a good way to conduct a battle.


    My shadow disappeared to take care of that problem while I came to a stop a few hundred feet from Ammun. He glanced up at me and gave an exaggerated sigh, then turned in place and floated up to my level.


    ¡°Master Keiran,¡± he greeted, his voice booming across the distance. ¡°I see you¡¯ve fully recovered from that scuffle with my excavation golem.¡±


    ¡°And you¡¯ve got a soul tether thousands of miles long now,¡± I replied. ¡°How¡­ wasteful.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not like I¡¯ll run out of mana,¡± he said with a laugh. ¡°I¡¯ve ensured my immortality, despite whatever fate this planet might suffer in the future.¡±


    ¡°I suppose that¡¯s what¡¯s important to you.¡±


    ¡°Selfish, isn¡¯t it?¡± He snorted and shook his head. ¡°I¡¯m sure you see it that way. The reality is that I had to take care of myself before I could start fixing everything else that¡¯s gone wrong on Manoch. You¡¯re not the only one who disappeared and wasn¡¯t pleased with the mess you came back to.¡±


    ¡°And rebuilding the weapon that started the last mess helps how, exactly?¡±


    ¡°You and I both know that the only true measure of success is power. This is power, enough to destroy whole cities, anywhere, any time. I will rebuild this planet, and I¡¯ll do it right. We could have worked together to achieve that, but you were so busy seeing me as a threat to your own power that you couldn¡¯t even conceive of a world where we collaborated, could you?¡±


    ¡°I was more concerned about your tower than you. You had it wedged in the shell around the world core. Removing it was necessary to start the healing process, but you never would have allowed it,¡± I argued.


    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t I? I told you there were other ways. And, despite all your efforts to stop me, here we are. The tower is gone. I remain. Let the healing commence, and I will be here to witness it.¡±


    ¡°Just you,¡± I said. ¡°Does one single other person get to benefit from your work, or is the rest of the world a prize to be won and controlled?¡±


    Ammun let out a dry, raspy laugh and shook his head. ¡°I know you far, far too well to think you¡¯re taking the moral high road. You don¡¯t care about those people any more than I do.¡±


    Well, he wasn¡¯t exactly wrong. I¡¯d committed my fair share of slaughter and wouldn¡¯t hesitate to do it again if I felt it was necessary. That didn¡¯t change how much of a threat Ammun was, though I¡¯m sure there were many mages who¡¯d argue I was just as much of one. I wondered if the Global Order of the Arcane had found some way to watch this, and, if so, who they were hoping would win.


    If they were smart, they¡¯d back me. Ammun no longer needed to fix Manoch¡¯s core. Without his own survival being dependent on it, I didn¡¯t suspect he¡¯d even try, which left the rest of the world in shambles. I also doubted he¡¯d be keen to share his knowledge with future disciples, at least not ones he couldn¡¯t exert absolute authority over.


    ¡°Besides,¡± the lich went on, ¡°I see what you¡¯re wearing. Milduran battle robes, aren¡¯t they? Those were out of style when I was a child thirteen centuries ago, Master.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not trying to be fashionable.¡±


    ¡°No. You¡¯re here to fight, to keep fighting, really. You do understand dragon skeletons are a precious, irreplaceable resource now, don¡¯t you?¡±


    ¡°Manoch is better off without them,¡± I said. ¡°Just like it¡¯ll be better off without you.¡±


    ¡°Yes, yes, I¡¯m a blight upon humanity and all that garbage,¡± Ammun said. ¡°You¡¯re going to smite me, destroy my body, and send me back to my phylactery. I suppose you¡¯ll teleport back up to the moon and hunt it down to prevent me from ever resurfacing.¡±


    ¡°Something like that.¡±


    ¡°Consider this, then. You¡¯re here. But who¡¯s helping all those weak, pathetic mortals you call friends?¡±


    He raised one bony hand and snapped his fingers, a sound that should have been impossible but which he managed nonetheless. Instantly, a hundred panes of glass faded into existence. Each one displayed a different scene. Querit fought against a zombie horde outside Hyago¡¯s grove in one. The brakvaw were being slowly overwhelmed by the colony of wyverns in another. Other undead stalked through the villages outside Derro, hunting those with ignited cores.


    There were places I hadn¡¯t thought he¡¯d known about displayed as well. That little town the survivors of his army¡¯s initial push had founded was visible through one of the mirrors. Some sort of sea serpent, a gaping bloody hole in its head, was destroying their boats and ignoring their feeble attempts to drive it off. I had no doubt it had killed dozens of people already.


    Derro was being assaulted by its own legion of zombies, including an entire swarm of giant wasps. Most of those were missing legs or had other obvious wounds, but as long as they still had two wings, it didn¡¯t slow them down. The walls around the city weren¡¯t doing much to hold them back, and they didn¡¯t have near the numbers needed to hold the entire length. Refugees were already streaming through the streets and flooding the inner district.


    ¡°What will you do, Master Keiran? Would you like to teleport away and save them? I¡¯ll let you run, if you want.¡±


    ¡°You know I won¡¯t,¡± I said shortly.


    ¡°No, I didn¡¯t expect you would. You know where the only thing that can threaten you is. So what if everyone else dies, so long as you¡¯re safe, right? It¡¯s funny. I feel the exact same way.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 53

    I¡¯d done my best to keep this conversation going now that I was here, not because I wanted to talk to my former apprentice, but to give my shadow time to break the first ward stone. As soon as that happened, the fight was guaranteed to kick off, and I¡¯d have to hold my own against Ammun, his shadow, and his squadron of golems while my shadow went after the second ward stone.


    I was hoping the defenses wouldn¡¯t be radically different at the second location, but there wasn¡¯t enough time to check both before breaking one. I¡¯d just have to wing it until I gained full freedom of movement. The spatial lock needed to be destroyed if my plan was going to work. Everything hinged on me having control over the local area. If I failed there, then I was wasting my time doing anything but breaking Ammun¡¯s construction project, which he could simply rebuild elsewhere.


    ¡°Nothing to say to that?¡± Ammun asked with a sneer.


    ¡°I think you¡¯re forgetting who I am,¡± I told him. ¡°Let me remind you that I am a bigger monster than you could ever hope to be. The difference between us is that you¡¯re thoughtlessly destructive, even self-destructive, though that seems to be more of a consequence of your inability to predict how your actions will affect the world. If you think you¡¯ve rattled me by comparing how evil we both are, you are quite mistaken.¡±


    It was hard to read the expression of an animated skull, but he had enough humanity left in him that his body radiated anger. Whatever he¡¯d been hoping to get out of taunting me, I hadn¡¯t given it to him. Really, though, all I¡¯d done was point out the obvious. Ammun¡¯s actions over the last few years, particularly the way he¡¯d gone after soft targets on the off chance that I¡¯d have some connection with them, revealed that he had indeed forgotten what kind of person his master was.


    I supposed the thousand or so years of subjective time between my death and us both being alive and active today were enough to dull his memory, but I wondered what kind of stories people had told about me that he¡¯d thought I¡¯d succumb to na?ve idealism like some storybook knight rushing out to save the world. I wasn¡¯t trying to save anyone. I just wanted the mana back the way it was supposed to be.


    My shadow located both ward stones and was just starting to work on the first one. I figured I had about thirty seconds left before Ammun realized what was happening and attacked. For now, he was quite happy to stall. His golems hadn¡¯t ceased construction, and every second he kept me talking was another panel they could attach to the delicate framework. He probably thought I wasn¡¯t aware of the separate barrier surrounding the silo, but I¡¯d spotted that the instant he¡¯d flown through it in an attempt to make sure my opening salvo was directed at him instead of his fragile project.


    ¡°No, I haven¡¯t forgotten,¡± Ammun said sourly. ¡°You never did appreciate my capabilities. I¡¯m simply pointing out the hypocrisy of the persona you¡¯ve crafted for yourself in this day and age. I¡¯ve seen the towns. You put teleportation platforms in them. You¡¯ve helped Dherevo recover. That druid grove you¡¯re sponsoring is coming along nicely, isn¡¯t it?¡±


    ¡°So what? Do you have something against an honest trade of resources and knowledge?¡±


    ¡°Since when did you ever do anything but take what you want, Master Keiran? Are you just growing soft in your old age, or did your reincarnation alter some fundamental part of your personality?¡±


    Considering the whole reason I¡¯d taken Ammun on as an apprentice in the first place was to appease his family as part of a trade deal, I wasn¡¯t really sure where he¡¯d gotten this idea of me from. Even in my younger, blood-soaked days as a necromancer, I¡¯d never had a problem with a fair deal. I¡¯d just been unwilling to accept that what I wanted was out of reach at any price. Come to think of it, that part of me hadn¡¯t really changed that much.


    I spotted the exact moment Ammun realized I¡¯d been stalling him as much as he¡¯d been stalling me. His mouth hung open, more meaningless drivel about to spew out, when he froze in place. The flickering red beads nestled in his eye sockets slid off toward his ward stone for just an instant before he mastered his expression and turned a shrewd, cunning gaze on me.


    ¡°So that¡¯s how it is, huh?¡± was all he said.


    Ammun might have taken a shot at my choice of attire, but it hadn¡¯t escaped my notice that his own robes, tattered as they might be, were similarly fortified. Inscriptions didn¡¯t really play well with flexible materials since the position of a rune in relation to the others was so important, but that didn¡¯t mean enchantments couldn¡¯t be laid down on a shirt or robe. Ammun¡¯s in particular were closer to rags than anything else, but in all fairness, I had left him stranded on a moon for the better part of a year.


    The whole time we¡¯d been speaking, I¡¯d been sizing him up, and like just about everything else I¡¯d seen from him, he lacked the ability to craft something original. His methodology came directly from me, something I¡¯d expect from a recently graduated apprentice, not someone who¡¯d had centuries to iterate and come up with his own style. The techniques I didn¡¯t recognize had probably been stolen from someone else, but the defensive enchantments were definitely mine.Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.


    Unfortunately, copying me did mean that his battle robes were well-crafted and would be difficult to get past. For the moment, that was fine. I wasn¡¯t ready to push the fight to the point where I destroyed his mortal body just yet.


    Ammun made the first move. Of all the possible ways he could have started the fight, he went with the most obvious one. His primary advantages were that he wasn¡¯t bound by his own spatial lock and that he had effectively unlimited mana. So it was no surprise that he leaned into that and cast an instant teleport to try and get the cheap shot off.


    Even with his wards putting a damper on what my divinations could pick up, it wasn¡¯t hard to predict his opener. I was already moving as soon as I felt his mana start to flex into a spell, straight down to put his silo in the line of fire. Ammun came out of his teleportation with his hand raised, a wand made of some sort of wood and studded with tiny iron spikes up and down its length held in it. A spiraling beam of mana lanced out, cutting through the air where I¡¯d just been floating.


    It was made of a thousand individual threads, and the farther it went, the more it unraveled until the beam was ten times thicker than it started. If Ammun had teleported fifty feet behind me instead of ten, it might have hit me. Of course, the diffusion of the beam¡¯s structure meant that even if it had, it wouldn¡¯t have hurt.


    He started to swing the wand around, realized what he¡¯d be putting in the line of fire if he did, and jerked his hand back up before cutting the spell off. At the same time, I sent a volley of probing, conjured metal needles to dimple his shield ward. The purpose wasn¡¯t to get through, though I certainly wouldn¡¯t have complained if they had, but to test the properties of the ward.


    Would it push him away or absorb the kinetic energy? How quickly would the ward refresh itself up to full strength? Could it selectively let through attacks that were weak enough that Ammun could safely ignore them, or would it waste mana deflecting anything and everything I threw at it? That one simple spell told me the answers to all those questions, and I immediately used that information to formulate a new strategy.


    Shield wards were extremely useful, but I¡¯d noticed people of this era tended to use them as their first, last, and only level of personal protection. In all fairness, I¡¯d often relied on them that way myself, especially once I¡¯d reached the point where my magic was overpowering to everyone I met. But that wasn¡¯t what they were meant for. Their primary purpose was to prevent a mage from being killed by a sneak attack. They were designed to take one good, solid hit before breaking, and the mage was supposed to take over their own defense at that point.


    My own shield ward was so powerful that no one I¡¯d fought outside of Ammun himself had been able to break through. The only exception was that one mage who knew a single destructive master-tier conjuration, and he¡¯d needed a full cadre of support mages to even use it. Not even any of the so-called archmages of the Global Order had been able to do much more than force me to actively push mana into the shield ward to hold it against their attempts to break through.


    There was a weakness to them, though, and that weakness was that they could only protect against what their designer could predict. My wards were very thorough, and that meant Ammun¡¯s were as well, but I¡¯d sacrificed durability to achieve flexibility. His shield ward had the same weakness.


    I didn¡¯t need to find a clever hole in his defenses, though there were undoubtedly a few. I just needed to exploit the facts I¡¯d already determined. His shield ward drained quickly and was refreshed manually, just like mine. It would protect him from anything of any potency, and was probably tuned more strongly against typical undead weaknesses than it was to deal with kinetic force.


    I tore through it like paper in less than two seconds by hitting it from six different angles with continuous streams of pure heavy mana while Ammun gaped at me in shock.


    ¡°Wha¡ª¡± he started to say, but I interrupted him with a shot of force magic to the chest, knocking him end over end.


    I¡¯d timed that shot specifically to coincide with my shadow breaking the first of his ward stones. He might notice anyway, but my hope was that he¡¯d be too focused on the fight in front of him to pay attention. With one of his ward stones down, the spatial lock in the area loosened and the divination wards fell completely. Abruptly, I could see everything around me in all the ways I was used to looking at them, with so much detail that all my earlier observational guesswork felt pointless.


    It was gratifying to know exactly how much I¡¯d correctly deduced, and slightly annoying to spot the things I¡¯d gotten wrong, but overall, this was progress. There was no time to gloat, however. Ammun had already recovered from what had basically amounted to a slap in the face.


    ¡°You¡¯re as sloppy as ever,¡± I said. ¡°Let¡¯s see how well you fight when your opponent isn¡¯t stage five and has air to breathe.¡±


    ¡°You think I need those advantages to beat you? I have a thousand years of magical advancements in my head that occurred after your death. You haven¡¯t even begun to catch up to me.¡±


    My shadow skimmed across the forest and settled on the second ward stone, then started viciously tearing into it. Ammun¡¯s cheekbone twitched slightly in facsimile to a real face, and I gave him a cold smile. ¡°That¡¯s right. None of your tricks are amounting to anything at all. At the end of the day, all the preparations and all the distractions are worthless.¡±


    ¡°Not all,¡± he growled, lifting his hands up to send dual master-tier flame conjurations directly into my face.


    At the same time, his shadow slipped free and transmuted the air around me into solid form to hold me in place for my immolation. The funny thing about it was that a few minutes ago, that strategy would have been extremely draining to defend against. Now, without a full spatial lock in place, it was trivial to avoid.


    Phantasmal step let me slide backwards through the hardened air like it wasn¡¯t there, and a simple heat sink cast upward drew the majority of the flames away from me. I shot backwards to escape the rest of the thermal bloom, then fired off my own flame lance in retaliation.


    It was time to test just how well he¡¯d woven the enchantments into his tattered robe while my shadow brought down the second ward stone. Then I could enact my real plan.

 Book 5, Chapter 58

    Bones were a lot more fragile than people gave them credit for. Comparatively, they were stronger than skin and muscle, but in the grand scheme of things, there was a reason nobody built tools out of animal bones when they had other, better resources on hand.


    That was before magic came into play, however. Human bones were nothing special. Animal bones, no matter how large they got, were never useful as more than ornamentation. But monsters had a tendency to get so big that normal bones couldn¡¯t support them, and that meant they needed mana to reinforce their bodies. Humans did the same thing with invocations, but not on the same scale, and not indefinitely.


    The early necromancers had studied those monsters in an effort to reinforce the skeletons they controlled, and while it was largely agreed that it just wasn¡¯t worth the effort for an entire army, the research had given rise to a line of necromantic minions known as the death knights. A lot went into the raising of a single death knight, and one of those investments was in creating a skeletal structure as hard as diamond.


    Liches took the process even further. With no base skeleton to modify, their bodies were made wholly of crystallized mana. Every inch of bone, every scrap of flesh or muscle¡ªwhen they bothered to make such disguises at all¡ªwas pure mana given form. Their existence was the culmination of thousands of years of research in how to advance from stage nine to stage ten, to become a perfect mana being.


    We¡¯d pretty much all agreed that lichdom was a dead end. It worked, after a sort, but the changes were too radical and, even otherwise ignoring the state of the caster¡¯s soul, the loss of the ability to generate mana, to become completely cut off from the Astral Realm, was far too great a handicap for any self-respecting archmage to ever accept.


    Some lesser mages disagreed, of course. There were those that were desperate, at the end of their natural or unnatural lifespans, or just plain knew they weren¡¯t good enough to advance another step on the path of immortality. Ammun was a prime example of what a lesser talent could do with the powers of lichdom. Being backed by an entire moon core was, admittedly, a pretty good compromise to the loss of a personal mana core.


    Now that he¡¯d had a few years to invest in his current vessel, it was no surprise that the bones buried at the bottom of all his shields, barriers, wards, and enchantments were actually stronger than everything else. Systematically stripping away his protections had revealed a core of mysteel, or something close to it, but I had an answer for that, too.


    Delivering that answer was going to be tricky, as it required me getting within a few feet of him and holding him still long enough to hit him. Ammun wasn¡¯t likely to cooperate with that, just judging from the fact that dozens of conjured comets were hurtling through the sky to crash down on my head.


    Conjured stone and real stone were not the same, however, and while dispelling a fellow archmage¡¯s magic was out of the question, changing it was not. Every comet that got within a hundred feet of me abruptly unraveled, transforming from an amalgamation of stone, fire, and speed to one of fire, air, and inertia.


    To an onlooker, it would have looked like the comets simply evaporated, but what really happened was that the kinetic energy burst outward in a wave, hitting the comets trailing behind them and altering their course so that once the first ten or fifteen had been twisted, the rest came nowhere near striking me.


    At the same time I was defeating Ammun¡¯s spell, I was enacting one of my own, an application of pure telekinesis even beyond the grand telekinesis spell, one that pitted my willpower against Ammun¡¯s for control of the kinetic energy around his body. The very air itself stilled and became solid, an immovable jacket that could only be contested by Ammun¡¯s own magic.


    He didn¡¯t even notice ¨C not at first. It was only when he tried to lift his hand and pull something else out of his phantom space that he realized what I¡¯d done. That was when he started pushing back. Our battle took on another dimension then, in addition to the physical world we were destroying around us and the mental strain of holding off the various enchantments and divinations he¡¯d kept up a light barrage of even after his shadow vanished.


    Now it became a sort of metaphysical wrestling match, one where we pitted ourselves against each other for control of the very magic in the air. The spell couldn¡¯t be dispelled or countered; that was what made it so strong in the first place. Being unbreakable, all that was left to struggle over was control. If I overpowered him, he¡¯d remain locked in place. That would hinder his spellcasting to some extent, but not stop him.


    If he won, he¡¯d turn the spell on me, and I¡¯d be the one under his control. Worse, my body was not nearly as indestructible as his. He¡¯d be able to bypass all my wards and literally rip me apart ¨C not that he needed much help there. This was literally a gamble with my life as the stake just to immobilize him.


    It worked, of course. A contest of willpower between the two of us was never in doubt. He struggled and flailed about and he no doubt mentally raged against me, but in the end, Ammun was the kind of person who took shortcuts, whose arrogance was backed by power stolen instead of earned, and who lacked the imagination and perseverance to truly overcome the challenges that accompanied this level of skill.


    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    I¡¯d seen it time and time again. Every time he unveiled something new, it was a spell or a machine he¡¯d stolen from someone else. Every design he used was copied, but never properly understood. Oh, he¡¯d done well enough, I supposed. Even as a cheat, he was a successful one, but originality wasn¡¯t his strong point.


    As it turned out, being undead did nothing to change that. Maintaining control over that spell was never a contest, and all that was left to do now was survive the approach. More magic rained down on me, everything from conjured blades of force attempting to dissect me to frigid blasts of air so cold that they left trails of ice in their wake. Any of those spells could have killed me, had I let them.


    Instead, I kept a careful eye on the mana remaining in my reserves and calculated how much more I was likely to generate before this whole affair reached its now-inevitable conclusion, and decided to splurge a bit. Rather than fight my way through the rest of those defenses, I took the simple expedient of teleporting myself to Ammun¡¯s side.


    As soon as I appeared, he did exactly what I¡¯d expected. He tried to teleport away. I hadn¡¯t put down a spatial denial field to stop him, knowing how obvious those were from the inside. If I¡¯d tried that, he¡¯d have spent the effort trying to relocate our battle again. The mana filter had given him reason to believe he knew what my goal in bringing him here was, that I¡¯d simply miscalculated how effective it would be at slowing him down.


    Instead, the second field was hidden beneath the first, and Ammun hadn¡¯t noticed that one. It had slowly permeated his magic, a subtle intrusion, a parasite just waiting for the right moment to strike. And right now, as Ammun¡¯s confidence finally broke and he attempted to whisk himself out of danger, was that moment.


    His emergency teleportation failed, its mana eaten away from the inside. That was the whole purpose of the second field, to instantly destroy one single spell, even a contingency spell woven into his very bones. The field burned its mana up doing it, rendering it completely inert in the process, but it did its job. It kept Ammun here long enough for me to throw out the spatial denial now that I had his physical body locked down.


    ¡°This changes nothing,¡± he roared at me. ¡°Not even this can sever the connection to my phylactery. Destroy this body! It doesn¡¯t matter. I¡¯ll be back for you.¡±


    Even at this point, he didn¡¯t stop fighting. I deflected, dispelled, or countered the magic pouring out of him, every spell draining my reserves just a little bit more. There was no time to waste, not if I wanted to end this before I ran out of mana and bled out.


    I summoned a vial from my phantom space, its contents based on the one that I¡¯d taken from the Order to see how it interacted with mysteel. I¡¯d already duplicated the formula, and without hesitation, I tossed it at Ammun. The vial crunched as it broke apart on his face, and the liquid inside phase-shifted into acidic, mana-devouring gas.


    The thing about having a body made of pure, crystallized mana was that no matter how sturdy it was, things that attacked mana directly worked very well on it. That could be compensated for partially by the nature of the construct ¨C in this case, solid, physical matter. But then again, this particular gas also attacked solid matter, too. I¡¯d seen it when it melted the floor back when the now-deceased Tredor had tried to kill me with it.


    In moments, Ammun¡¯s physical vessel would melt away to nothing, and the soul tether would snap. His phylactery would start growing a new body for him to inhabit back up on Yulitar, and he¡¯d return in a few months to try again. At least, that was what he expected to happen.


    I¡¯d spent decades, centuries even, studying souls as the basis for my reincarnation magic. I doubted there¡¯d ever been a more accomplished soul mage in history, even including those who¡¯d decided to become liches. In the course of that research, I¡¯d discovered there were a few things we¡¯d held as immutable truths on the subject of souls that were actually anything but.


    I activated the third and final field of my ward stone rings, and what was left of Ammun immediately reacted. ¡°No!¡± his voice howled, echoing around me as he formed the words with magic discrete from his body. Those spells were already broken. ¡°This won¡¯t stop me! It¡¯s only temporary! Eventually you¡¯ll run out of mana to power this trap!¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not surprised you recognize a soul trap,¡± I told him. Then I reached into my phantom space and held up something. ¡°Did you know I kept this, though?¡±


    It was the phylactery he¡¯d tricked me with back when he¡¯d first woken up, a phylactery he¡¯d made by his own power, unattuned to him, but still tainted with the essence of its creator. That metaphysical bridge was enough for me to build on. It took moments to link it to him, to direct the soul trap into the phylactery.


    ¡°Trapping this incarnation is meaningless. My real phylactery will just make a new body. All you¡¯ve done is create two of me!¡± Ammun¡¯s voice snarled. ¡°I told you, you can¡¯t win this. I¡¯ll come back. I¡¯ll always come back.¡±


    ¡°Wrong again.¡±


    That was when I made my final move, the one thing I knew he¡¯d never see coming. It was a spell that had only existed for about two years now, one I¡¯d made myself by reversing the reincarnation magic I¡¯d invented. Instead of guiding the soul outward through the afterlife and into a new form while keeping it insulated to preserve memories and personality, it drew a soul inward.


    And it did it using a lich¡¯s soul tether. In a normal scenario, the soul tether would snap back from the vessel to the phylactery, returning all the memories the vessel had accumulated to be deposited into the new body once it was finished forming.


    My spell reached out to that tether and chased it all the way back to the source. The sheer distance was almost too much of a passive defense to overcome, but I¡¯d made some modifications once I¡¯d figured out where the phylactery was going to be, and super-long-range spells were no longer a new concept for me. My magic worked without flaw.


    The spell streamed up the soul link, found the phylactery, and ripped Ammun¡¯s soul out of it. Somewhere up on Yulitar, no doubt buried near the core under hundreds and hundreds of miles of stone, was what was now an inert rock that had once been the center of Ammun¡¯s existence.


    The soul came back down, chasing its tether to the end, where it reached its new home. The phylactery I¡¯d turned into a soul trap grabbed hold of Ammun and drew him inside. For all intents and purposes, he was still a lich, but this was his soul¡¯s new home.


    And I held it in the palm of my hand.


    I crushed it to dust with my magic, rupturing the prison and releasing his soul to the afterlife. Ammun, the man who¡¯d ended the world, the lich who¡¯d caused incalculable suffering, was finally, truly, once and for all, dead.

 Book 5, Chapter 59

    I took a few seconds to just breathe. It was over. Ammun was gone. His soul had been released from its phylactery and passed into the reincarnation cycle. Someday, it would return as a new person, one without all its memories from over a thousand years as a lich. That was probably for the best, as that soul had been abused in a way that defied words.


    A few seconds was all I could afford at the moment, unfortunately. My injuries quickly made themselves known to me, intruding on my moment of reflection as darkness encroached on my vision. For all that I would have liked to just collapse on the spot, the battle technically wasn¡¯t over. I needed to patch myself up and go to the aid of my allies.


    Healing was a delicate form of magic, one of the few that demanded my full attention even at the lowest levels. I quickly found a stable patch of ground to land on, pulled a salve out of my phantom space, and smeared a generous portion across both my abdomen and my back where Ammun¡¯s spell had skewered me. Then, using that as a base to draw on, I began the delicate process of transmuting the raw material into a patch on my stomach.


    It wasn¡¯t as simple as just sealing up the holes to stop the blood from leaking out, of course. Ammun had hit my spine, severing some fairly important nerves in addition to rupturing an organ. Right now, the only thing keeping me upright was that I had my back to a tree that had miraculously survived the bombardment we¡¯d put several acres of wilderness through. A big rock I¡¯d hauled over and placed next to the tree gave me something to lean on, since the muscles needed for posture weren¡¯t exactly working right now.


    This wasn¡¯t an injury I¡¯d get fixed up today, but I could spend ten minutes or so to keep it from killing me before I rejoined the fight. My feet were another issue, though that was more about stopping the blood loss than anything else. I¡¯d regrow the missing toes later ¨C once I had a proper environment to do so.


    ¡®Keiran,¡¯ the gestalt sent. ¡®Grandfather wishes you to know that he would appreciate your presence at Eyrie Peak.¡¯


    Right. Wyverns. Foreign archmages. That was probably a priority to deal with. I also needed to see how Querit was doing and fetch my family at some point. As nice as that island was, they¡¯d want to go home and currently lacked a way to get there. At least they were all safe, thanks to Senica¡¯s efforts to hold the golems back until my shadow could get there.


    I wasn¡¯t sure how Ammun had found them, and I¡¯d probably never know the truth. I¡¯d told literally nobody where that island was, made no permanent portal to it, and put considerable effort toward keeping it hidden. I had to wonder if Ammun hadn¡¯t just been sitting up on Yulitar, staring down at me and watching me work. It was theoretically possible, though it didn¡¯t answer the question of how he¡¯d known where to look.


    More likely, there¡¯d been some spies among the refugees who¡¯d been snooping around and learned of my evacuation plans. How they¡¯d known exactly where I was sending people to¡­ well, other people had gone with my family. I¡¯d be taking a hard look at everyone on the island to see if I could find a source for the information leak.


    ¡®I¡¯ll be there in ten minutes,¡¯ I replied.


    I finished repairing my stomach lining and cleaning things out, but there was still a lot of work to do. Ignoring that for the time being, I sealed off the damage to my feet, leaving ugly, scarred nubs there. I¡¯d be flying around for the next day or two; there was no way I could walk on what I had left. An invocation to stimulate blood generation would help keep me from passing out, but that was all the time I could afford to spend on triage.


    At least I couldn¡¯t feel it. I¡¯d definitely want to fix my feet before I finished up with my spine, however uncomfortable it was to leave things as they were right now.


    * * *


    There were four strange mages at Eyrie Peak, all of them coordinating with the brakvaw defenses against what had to be at least a hundred skeletal wyverns. Grandfather projected himself to me the instant I appeared on the teleportation platform, his face twisted into a ferocious scowl. Before he could say so much as a single word, he took in all the blood covering me, most of it still wet, and the massive scars across my stomach. I caught his eyes flickering down to my feet, which hovered a foot off the ground.


    ¡°Ah,¡± was all he said before he faked a cough and swallowed whatever he¡¯d been about to snap at me. ¡°The gestalt let me know that you¡¯d finished your battle. It was¡­ successful?¡±


    ¡°It was,¡± I said. ¡°Ammun himself is gone. All that¡¯s left is to clean up his remnants. You seem to be holding your own against these monsters.¡±


    ¡°We are, thanks to the reinforcements you sent¡ª¡±


    ¡°I didn¡¯t send anyone,¡± I said. ¡°In fact, I specifically warned them never to set foot on this continent again after I caught them trying to make deals with the generals in Ammun¡¯s army.¡±


    Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    Grandfather¡¯s brow furrowed and he cast a glance up the slope of the mountain to where two unfamiliar mages were anchoring the defense near the now-dead portal wall. Both mages were fighting with conjurations, one using blades of force to hack at the wyverns and the other controlling streams of water that he whipped about at high speeds to achieve a similar effect.


    ¡°I will take into consideration how helpful they¡¯ve been to you when I speak to them,¡± I promised.


    ¡°The gestalt has been monitoring them closely. It¡¯s not that I didn¡¯t trust your allies, but with everything going on, it seemed better to be sure. That was apparently the right call, since they lied about actually being your allies.¡±


    ¡°Not to be rude,¡± I said, changing the subject, ¡°but this looks like you¡¯ve got things in hand. Do you actually need my help with something? Because if not, I¡¯ve got a few other places to be.¡±


    ¡°We need you to open some of the portals back up,¡± Grandfather said shortly. ¡°Not all of them right now, but the ones where we left people behind. If there are any still alive¡­¡±


    I doubted it, but I could see why he¡¯d want to know. Grandfather regarded all brakvaw as his family, no matter how they behaved. They¡¯d had a bit of a coup a few years back and he¡¯d been completely torn up about it. Even now, tensions still ran high, and it was rare to see him in a good mood. Usually, he was at least polite, but I supposed I could forgive some terseness in his voice today.


    I got to work and started by scrying out each location. Surprisingly, quite a few of the stranded brakvaw were in fact still breathing, mostly because they¡¯d smartly fled the battlefield as soon as they realized the portals they¡¯d been defending had been shut off. That wasn¡¯t to say there weren¡¯t still a few dozen bodies to be recovered.


    I dutifully opened the portals back up, then assisted with destroying any skeletal wyverns still in the areas so that the brakvaw could collect their dead and fetch back the runners. While I was working on that, I got the gestalt to fill me in on everything else that was happening. It turned out that a few towns had been overrun, victims of Ammun¡¯s random shots in the dark. Querit had saved Hyago¡¯s grove ¨C sort of. It had taken heavy damage and probably set them back a year or more, but no one had died.


    New Alkerist was in one piece, though the wards had suffered greatly and there was basically no mana left in that town. The citizens had rightfully prioritized the security measures for pouring their mana into, otherwise things would have gone much worse for them. Thankfully, my family had evacuated, otherwise Ammun would have thrown a lot more at that location and completely broken through, probably slaughtering the entire town in the process.


    Derro, it turned out, had gotten the worst of it. I wasn¡¯t entirely clear why Ammun had devoted so much effort to assaulting the city, other than perhaps it just being the largest target. It wasn¡¯t really an important location to me personally, so it all seemed rather wasteful. Considering how many of his golems we¡¯d found in that storage facility, I supposed he¡¯d had the numbers to spend.


    It took another four hours of work to finish cleaning up the various hunting grounds Ammun had sent his wyvern colonies to in an effort to siege Eyrie Peak. I didn¡¯t do much of the work, both because the brakvaw didn¡¯t want me handling their dead and because they were eager to avenge their fallen brethren on those wyverns that remained. With the battlefields isolated and the four Order mages helping to hold the defenses back home, they were free to attack the colonies beyond the portals in large numbers.


    For me, personally, that meant a lot of time spent recuperating. There were a few things I¡¯d need to wait until I returned home to complete, specifically the regrowing of the ends of my feet, but I managed to repair a lot of the damage. I also took on the tedious and intricate task of regrowing my spine, with only partial success before I ran out of time.


    It might actually be worth it to extract Querit from whatever he was working on so I could secure his assistance. That would speed up the process considerably, especially since I¡¯d need to repurpose some of that troll¡¯s blood I¡¯d gathered into a limb regeneration potion. I had no compunctions at all about shoving that piece of alchemy off on him while I worked on the more delicate parts of my physical rehabilitation.


    My shadow rejoined me at some point, having finished dismantling Ammun¡¯s underground storage bunker and its many thousands of golems. I decided to keep the golem cores just in case I ever wanted to refurbish them, but that meant a great deal of transmutation to make specially sealed containers if I wanted to safely store them. For the moment, it was easier to leave the inactive ones where we¡¯d found them.


    I did reclaim my modular portal, however. It was damaged in a number of superficial ways ¨C nothing that would stop it from functioning, but its efficiency was significantly degraded. This was why I¡¯d stopped using the thing in the first place. It worked, but it was too expensive to maintain and didn¡¯t have the smooth rune sequences of a permanent portal, making it costly to run.


    Still, as a souvenir and a curiosity, it was impressive. I¡¯d find a use for it eventually. Maybe it could serve as a training aid for Senica when she got to the point that she was ready to start working on master-tier level spells. That was still a long way in the future for her, and even longer for our little brother. I had no doubt he could get there, if he chose to.


    Finally, the brakvaw were done. The wyverns were destroyed, and not just to the point where their animation had failed. I¡¯d turned the skeletons to dust and broken down the lingering necrotic energy everywhere I could find it. That part at least hadn¡¯t been too bad, if only because I¡¯d put the Order mages to work at Eyrie Peak where the majority of the fighting had taken place.


    Once cleanup was done, the four mages assembled before me. Their leader, a woman who looked to be in her fifties, stepped forward and gave me a slight bow. ¡°Master Keiran,¡± she said, ¡°thank you for taking the time to meet with us.¡±


    ¡°Yes, well, I had considered just killing the lot of you. I thought I made it clear that I didn¡¯t want you on this continent again. But, since you came to help, let¡¯s start with an explanation and go from there.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 60

    ¡°First, my name is Andyla Felstbater,¡± the Order mage said. ¡°I am one of the ranking archmages left in the Global Order of the Arcane, a Third Order archmage.¡±


    That was better than Bakir¡¯s Fifth Order, but I¡¯d never determined exactly how they structured their cabal or what qualifications were required to advance up the hierarchy, so that didn¡¯t tell me anything beyond that Andyla was closer to the top than most, though not quite as high as the leader of Bakir¡¯s group had been.


    I just stared silently at the whole group and watched them squirm for a second. The two younger ones especially were struggling not to fidget. It would have been amusing if not for how serious this was. Part of me had to admire the sheer gall they¡¯d had in coming here, knowing they were risking their lives to do so.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure you¡¯re aware that any organization that gets bigger than two people inevitably falls victim to politics,¡± Andyla said. ¡°The Global Order is no exception. When you showed up and, ahem, restructured our leadership, you caused a shift in our politics.¡±


    ¡°Killed off all the crusty old bastards who were trying to play both sides,¡± one of the other mages muttered. Andyla shot him a murderous glare, and he subsided with a sullen look.


    ¡°The archmages who took over decided that the threat from a lich was too great to ignore, and called for volunteers to come assist anyone Ammun attacked. We all knew there was a risk of running afoul of you for breaking your ban on our presence here, but¡­¡±


    ¡°But fuck that lich,¡± the other mage said again.


    ¡°That will be quite enough out of you,¡± Andyla said, her voice cracking like a whip. She turned back to me and added, ¡°But the threat was deemed great enough to risk incurring your anger.¡±


    On the one hand, they were right to want to stop Ammun, and they¡¯d opposed him on fronts that were theoretically important to me, some more so than others. They¡¯d done me an unasked-for favor by showing up to help. On the other hand, I¡¯d told them to stay away, and letting them think they could ignore that on their own judgment was going to cause problems down the road.


    There was also the fact that I was now going to have to scour every place they¡¯d gone to ensure they¡¯d left nothing behind. Any spying divinations would need to be found. Any beacons of any kind would have to be broken. Any people they¡¯d slipped in with instructions to blend in with the locals would have to be rooted out. I did not want them on this continent, not for another fifty years at minimum.


    Once Senica, and possibly Nailu, were old enough to fend for themselves, I¡¯d consider rescinding that ban. Until then, the Order represented the most dangerous collection of mages on the planet that I was aware of, and I wanted them to stay far, far away.


    ¡°I am not unaware of the service you¡¯ve done for my allies,¡± I began after a few moments¡¯ contemplation. ¡°That does not excuse the fact that you¡¯ve intruded where you were specifically commanded not to go.¡±


    The tension thickened among the mages standing in front of me. Perhaps I was a bit more intimidating than usual with my metal battle robes partially destroyed and covered in my own blood, or perhaps these mages were just smart enough to know what kind of person I was. That would certainly put them a step ahead of their predecessors, but then, these ones had the advantage of having watched me execute their ruling council.


    ¡°Grandfather!¡± I said loudly.


    Grandfather appeared a moment later, projecting his human form to where we all stood¡ªor levitated, in my case¡ªnear the teleportation platform. ¡°I¡¯m busy,¡± he said. His true form was up on their floating graveyard above the clouds, laying the fallen brakvaw to rest, but I knew he¡¯d been keeping an eye on things down here.


    ¡°I¡¯ll try to keep it brief. These four mages are here on Eyrie Peak in defiance of my mandate that they remain off this continent. They claim they arrived to help fight back the lich¡¯s undead forces. Can you corroborate this story?¡±


    ¡°I can say with some certainty that we¡¯d have many more dead brakvaw without them,¡± Grandfather said. ¡°Whatever issues you¡¯ve had with their group, they dealt honestly with us. I would not punish them for trying to redress whatever wrongs you believe their cabal committed against you.¡±


    This was all pageantry. A large part of me wanted to kill them all, to set an example to the rest of the Order that I was not to be crossed, that when I said not to do something, that was a complete statement without exceptions.


    But.


    We were past the crisis now. The threat was over, and all that was left was the cleanup. For the first time in what felt like years, I could afford to think about not just what I needed to do to fix Manoch¡¯s broken world core, but what kind of relationships I¡¯d have with the people I shared this planet with. And the truth of it was that I didn¡¯t really want to be like Ammun.


    The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    It wasn¡¯t just a lack of desire to rule, though that was certainly part of it. Ammun had had a conqueror¡¯s ambition and a tyrant¡¯s disregard for anyone he¡¯d killed in pursuit of his goals. There had been a lot of me in his personality.


    ¡°Fine,¡± I said. ¡°Just this once. Gather up the rest of your people, all of them, everywhere, and return to your homes on Jeshaem. Do not come back to Olpahun. In a month or two, once I¡¯ve gotten everything moving in the right direction, I will pay the Order a visit, and we can discuss your cabal leadership¡¯s new disposition.¡±


    ¡°We could help¡ª¡± Andyla started to say.


    ¡°No. I don¡¯t want your help. You¡¯ve already helped more than enough. The people whose lives you saved are very grateful, but the threat is over. Do not test my mercy. I¡¯ve killed better mages than you for less.¡±


    It probably said something about the impression I¡¯d made on the Global Order of the Arcane that nobody rose to the bait. I was being deliberately antagonistic, even more so than I normally was, just to see if anyone would give me an excuse, but none of them did. Good ¨C maybe this new version of the Order would be a little bit smarter than the old one.


    I followed their journey as they teleported from location to location, gathering up mages who¡¯d stepped up to defend people they¡¯d never met living in places they¡¯d never seen. Grandfather¡¯s projection stood nearby, a frown stamped on his features as he absently kept me company. I¡¯d expected him to disappear once he¡¯d said his piece, but it appeared there was more on his mind.


    ¡°You¡¯ve wronged them,¡± he said at last.


    ¡°I know. They wronged me first, and I¡¯m not sure I¡¯ve completely excised those responsible from their organization. It¡¯s not fair to them, but it¡¯s also a risk. Just letting them live is a risk. It makes me appear weak, gives the impression that they can test my word to see how far it can be pushed before I break.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t think that mercy is a weakness.¡±


    ¡°Then you¡¯ve had a kinder life than I have,¡± I told him bluntly. ¡°Some people are good. They¡¯re rarely the ones who rise to power. It¡¯s the evil, self-serving bastards like me who end up at the top, the ones who aren¡¯t fit to rule.¡±


    ¡°You always said you had no interest in ruling,¡± Grandfather pointed out.


    ¡°I don¡¯t, but the world doesn¡¯t leave me alone just because I want nothing to do with it.¡±


    The old bird started laughing then, a strange avian cawing note to his voice even in his assumed human shape. ¡°When have you ever wanted nothing to do with the world, Keiran? Since the day you were reborn, you¡¯ve done nothing but meddle in things that were none of your business. You could have walked off into the desert and built yourself a home where none but the monsters would ever find you.¡±


    ¡°I¡ª¡±


    Well, he wasn¡¯t wrong. I had meddled quite a bit, first to protect myself from the Wolf Pack, then to find answers in an attempt to fix the broken world, and finally to stop Ammun from fulfilling his mad dreams of conquest. It wasn¡¯t like I¡¯d set out to end up in the position I was in, though. That was just a natural consequence of power. There was no point in having it if I wasn¡¯t going to use it for something.


    ¡°Go see to what business remains, then rest and recover. We¡¯ve all taken injuries this day, but the wounds will heal and the scars will fade,¡± Grandfather told me. ¡°And our insectoid friends will come calling soon enough, demanding payment for all their services.¡±


    I grimaced at that. I owed the gestalt a lot of work for keeping so many eyes on so many things. But then, I had time to do that now. With the threat dealt with, I had all the time I could ever need. I could finish my alchemical experiments with biometal. I could craft as many relays as the gestalt wanted. I could help Senica with her ointment of aging treatments and be more hands-on with her training. Nailu would see a lot more of me, especially if he decided to focus on his magical talents.


    First, I needed to return to New Alkerist and ensure everything was as it should be, as well as pour some more mana into its defenses. I was expecting to find a few gaps where enchantments had bled out that would need to be repaired, but none of that was a big deal now that Ammun was gone. I was mostly stopping by to make sure the town was secured for my family to return to it.


    I chuckled and shook my head. ¡°I don¡¯t know how much rest I¡¯ll be getting for the next few months. I¡¯ve had a whole life I put on hold for years now. There¡¯s a lot of catching up to do.¡±


    ¡°But you have time,¡± Grandfather said.


    ¡°I do.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s good, because we still have a mountain to lift into the sky.¡±


    I groaned. ¡°You¡¯re still intent on doing that? You know how wasteful that is, right? I know you do. You¡¯ve already got a floating island.¡±


    ¡°Who better than us to pull it off, then? Our magic is as efficient as it gets!¡± Grandfather told me. ¡°Though we wouldn¡¯t say no to some consulting on a few technical aspects that escape us. It turns out scaling the magic up is¡­ more difficult than we expected.¡±


    ¡°Who would have guessed? Alright, no promises as to when, but I¡¯ll add it to my list. It might be a year or two.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re not in any hurry,¡± Grandfather assured me. ¡°Although, if it¡¯s not too much of a bother, before you leave¡­¡±


    He trailed off and gestured toward the portal wall, where only a handful of portals had been reactivated.


    ¡°Not today,¡± I said. ¡°Too much to do, but within a week or two, I¡¯ll come back and get things moving again.¡±


    ¡°More than fair,¡± Grandfather agreed.


    ¡°What I really should do is take a brakvaw apprentice so that you don¡¯t need me to keep doing all this for you.¡±


    Grandfather let out a soft grunt and scratched at his chin. ¡°That¡¯s not a bad idea, if you¡¯re serious.¡±


    I shrugged. ¡°I can¡¯t promise I¡¯d teach them directly. The whole point of disseminating this knowledge was so that it could spread without my personal effort, but there are plenty of people who know the basics of human magic. I would be willing to teach a class of brakvaw what they¡¯d need to know to adapt your style of casting to it.¡±


    ¡°An interesting suggestion, but one to be pursued in the future. For now, I believe it is time for you to go home and see to your own family¡¯s well-being while I tend to mine.¡±


    ¡°That sounds like a good idea.¡±

 Book 5, Chapter 63

    ¡°You know, you could have saved us a whole lot of work if you¡¯d just¡­ not knocked the damned tower down,¡± Querit told me.


    ¡°You¡¯re not even doing the digging. Why are you whining about this?¡± I asked.


    I¡¯d found a use for Ammun¡¯s legion of golems after all. There were several thousand of them below us, slowly digging through and transmuting the remains of Ammun¡¯s tower as we burrowed to Manoch¡¯s core. They¡¯d been at it for about four years now and had made a good thirty miles of progress, which was greatly hindered by the fact that they were now all completely underwater. The ocean had poured in and turned the crater into a massive inland sea years ago, long before I¡¯d even launched this project.


    We¡¯d considered other locations, even going out into one of the ocean trenches directly to skip the excavation portion. That provided a quick route down to the planet¡¯s crust, but left us digging sideways thousands of miles to reach the spot we needed to patch. In the end, it didn¡¯t save us any work, so we¡¯d opted to head right to the center of the damage.


    ¡°Because I¡¯m the one who has to redo the rune structures on all those golem cores,¡± Querit said.


    ¡°You would be doing that either way.¡±


    ¡°Not this many!¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m doing all the modifications for underwater digging to their frames. You don¡¯t hear me complaining about it,¡± I told him.


    ¡°At this rate, it¡¯s going to take decades to finish.¡±


    ¡°We always knew that was likely to be the case. Even if we blocked off the incoming water and drained trillions of gallons out of this hole, it wouldn¡¯t save us any time.¡±


    ¡°I still don¡¯t know how you expect to keep the whole ocean from flooding into the core once we get there,¡± Querit said. ¡°The amount of mana needed to hold that much pressure back¡­¡±


    ¡°Trust me, I know what I¡¯m doing. The spell will work.¡±


    We stood in the air, silently staring down at the massive sea of blue stretching out in every direction. Below us, out of sight, a small army of mechanical soldiers slowly took us one more step into the future.


    ¡°Might have been less work to kill Ammun with the tower intact,¡± Querit muttered.


    ¡°If you¡¯re so sure, you can take care of the next insane lich that comes along,¡± I offered.


    * * *


    It was Nailu¡¯s sixteenth birthday, making him officially an adult. True to our word, Senica and I had never breathed even a hint of the existence of ointment of aging to him ¨C not that I thought he¡¯d have taken us up on it. But it kept Mother happy.


    Naillu was less interested in magic than I¡¯d expected. He was good at it, unsurprisingly, but he seemed to treat it as more of a fun hobby than something he wanted to devote his life to mastering. Despite that, his core was stage two and as robustly developed as possible. Whether he¡¯d ever go past that remained to be seen.


    ¡°You¡¯re thinking about it again, aren¡¯t you?¡± Father asked me while we stood off to the side and watched my baby brother tear into his presents. Considering how rich the family was now, and not through much effort of my own, it was a haul fit for a merchant prince. There was a lot of gold, ivory, richly colored clothes, some sort of instrument that he favored that I couldn¡¯t recall the name of, and of course, a few enchanted pieces from me.


    ¡°No, it¡¯s fine,¡± I said. ¡°It¡¯s his life and his choice. If he doesn¡¯t want to be a mage, well¡­¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s going to look older than you and your sister in another few years,¡± Father said. ¡°At the rate we¡¯re going, people are going to think the two of you are our grandchildren.¡±


    ¡°I could¡ª¡± I started to say, but Father cut me off.


    ¡°Maybe in another decade or two when the aches and pains start to set in, we¡¯ll change our minds,¡± he told me.


    It would be better to start them on alchemical treatments now to prolong their youth rather than try to regain it, but we¡¯d had that conversation too many times already. They weren¡¯t interested in immortality or anything close to it, though I suspected they¡¯d both age with grace. I also had enough firsthand experience with creaking joints and the indignities of an aging bladder to know I¡¯d choose to spare them that for as long as possible if they¡¯d let me.


    ¡°How¡¯s your world core project coming along?¡± he asked, changing the subject.


    ¡°Slow, but steady,¡± I replied. ¡°We¡¯re still digging. Getting close to the bottom now, I think. And I¡¯ve got all the mysteel we¡¯ll need ready to go. All that¡¯s left is to reach the core and start the process.¡±


    Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.


    ¡°So it¡¯ll happen in our lifetime after all,¡± Father said. ¡°What a strange world it¡¯ll be.¡±


    ¡°Better in practically every way. Well, except for the monsters. There will be new monsters taking advantage of things, but trust me, there were always going to be monsters either way, and we¡¯ll be better prepared to deal with them.¡±


    ¡°Senica did say she opened another branch of her school a few weeks ago.¡±


    I watched a steady stream of people heading for the food now that Nailu¡¯s presents had all been revealed. He stood there next to Mother, grinning from ear to ear and clutching something with a long neck and too many strings on it. I still wasn¡¯t sure what it was, and I¡¯d etched the runes into it myself. As long as it had mana, he could smash it into anything he wanted and it would never take so much as a scratch.


    ¡°I told her she was moving too fast, that she needs to get more professors up to standard before she started a fourth location, but you know how well she likes to listen,¡± I said.


    ¡°Wonder where she got that from,¡± Father muttered, but there was a smile on his lips as he said it.


    ¡°At least she finally gave up on that ridiculous idea of hers.¡±


    ¡°No, she didn¡¯t. She just isn¡¯t talking to you about it. She¡¯s been over at Eyrie Peak every other day talking to them instead.¡±


    I groaned softly and tried to cover the noise by taking a sip of my drink. If that particular project ever got off the ground, I just knew I¡¯d be the one doing all the work. Wasn¡¯t one impossible dream at a time enough?


    ¡°Whatever. Just leave me out of it,¡± I said. ¡°How¡¯s the farm doing?¡±


    It wasn¡¯t a farm in a traditional sense. They grew things there, but not food. Father had decided to branch out from basic crops years ago and started a distillery, mostly on Senica¡¯s advice. She¡¯d shown him the process, including a few alchemical twists that really changed the whole experience of getting drunk, and he¡¯d decided it was a product worth chasing after. Their biggest challenge had been keeping up with demand, even after three other competitors had sprung up.


    ¡°Fantastic! I¡¯ve actually run out of room and had to expand out into the desert again. Tetrin charged me a fortune to extend the wards after Hyago finished the terraforming, but I¡¯ll make it all back again inside a few years.¡±


    Before I could respond, Senica appeared in the door and rushed over. ¡°Gravin! There you are.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s that supposed to mean? I¡¯ve been here the whole time watching the party. Where have you been?¡±


    Senica¡¯s cheeks flushed and she glanced over at Mother and Nailu, only to flinch when she saw the expression on Mother¡¯s face. She¡¯d been less than impressed at my older sister¡¯s tardiness. Senica quickly rallied, though, and said, ¡°Never mind that! I need to talk to you about something.¡±


    ¡°Is it this stupid idea you have for your demesne again?¡± I asked.


    ¡°It¡¯s not stupid! It¡¯s brilliant.¡±


    ¡°You could have reached stage six five years ago if you¡¯d just give this notion up and pick a place to start working on.¡±


    ¡°But this way is better,¡± she said. ¡°You have to see how much better it is once we figure out how to make it work.¡±


    If it actually worked, she¡¯d have a point. I just didn¡¯t think it would, which was exactly what I¡¯d told her the last three times she¡¯d tried to rope me in on it. Senica was nothing if not persistent, however. Ignoring my protests, she pulled out a large sheaf of papers and spread them out over the nearest table.


    ¡°Look, here, this was the problem before,¡± she told me as she jabbed her finger down on a particular chunk of the runic script. ¡°We couldn¡¯t find a way to support the weight without the mana costs cascading into failure, but what if we did this instead?¡±


    ¡°Already considered it. It won¡¯t work. In a vacuum, it would do what you think, but you didn¡¯t consider how it would affect the linking to the next section. Then multiply that problem a hundred times as it chains through the entire structure.¡±


    ¡°Aha! You¡¯re right, except I did think of that, and look what I came up with!¡±


    I peered at the next sheet in the stack she presented to me, then chuckled. ¡°Clever, except it¡¯ll be fifty years or more until there¡¯s enough ambient mana to support that, and then you¡¯re still locked to high density zones.¡±


    ¡°Think long term,¡± Senica said. ¡°No, it won¡¯t be anything special for the next century, but once that passes¡ª¡±


    ¡°It still won¡¯t be viable. I know you understand how mana propagation works. We¡¯ve gone over the theory.¡±


    ¡°Not on its own, but what if we installed collection arrays to create sort of¡­ refueling points for it to coast between?¡±


    I considered that for a second. It could work, in theory. It would be a massive undertaking, but then again, that was nothing new. I¡¯d literally linked up five moon cores and was digging a hole down to the very center of the planet. Compared to that, this was maybe a decade of infrastructure, then some hefty maintenance and upkeep forever.


    ¡°Okay, fine. Technically, that could work,¡± I said begrudgingly. ¡°But it¡¯s still a stupid idea.¡±


    ¡°Hah!¡± she said, a bit too loud. Everyone looked over at us, but she was too excited to notice.


    ¡°Alright, you two, whatever you¡¯re doing can wait until later. Don¡¯t ruin your brother¡¯s day,¡± Mother scolded us.


    ¡°No, it¡¯s fine, Mom,¡± Nailu said. ¡°Really, no big deal. We¡¯re all here to have a good time. If they want to do their magic thing, that¡¯s what makes them happy.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, Mom,¡± Senica said. ¡°Don¡¯t be such a grouch.¡±


    ¡°She¡¯s going to make you pay for that,¡± Father muttered softly.


    ¡°I think¡­ I¡¯m going to head out soon,¡± I replied. ¡°I¡¯d just as soon miss that conversation. I¡¯ll just go have a few words with Nailu, then I¡¯m gone.¡±


    Chuckling, Father pulled me into a one-armed hug. ¡°You always were the smartest of my kids,¡± he said. ¡°Go on, do what you¡¯ve got to do and then run for the hills.¡±


    Mother was already on her way over, and she¡¯d reach us long before Senica finished gathering her papers back up. Leaving her to her fate, I cast a quick short-range teleport spell and reappeared behind Nailu. Senica glared murder at me from across the room, but by then it was too late.


    ¡°She¡¯s kind of tightly wound these days,¡± Nailu said. ¡°I try to keep her level, but she¡¯s not having it.¡±


    ¡°I think it bothers her that Senica and I stopped growing older,¡± I said.


    ¡°Don¡¯t know why. It¡¯s not a big deal or anything.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll tell you in a few years. She made us promise not to until you were done growing.¡±


    Nailu shrugged, unconcerned, and I once again felt a pang at my little brother¡¯s lack of interest in all things magical. That was his choice, though, however much I wished he felt otherwise. ¡°Happy birthday, Nailu,¡± I said. ¡°Show me what this instrument sounds like before I go?¡±


    ¡°Sure. I wanted to try it out anyway.¡±


    Despite my intentions to cut and run before Mother could turn her vengeful wrath on me, I ended up staying for a few more hours. Everything else could wait.