Book 3, Chapter 41

With a firm direction in mind and Senica’s endurance steadily increasing, we stopped moving randomly across the landscape. Miles rolled away beneath us as we flew without stop. When night finally fell and, more importantly, Senica couldn’t go any farther, we landed and made camp for a few hours. She scarfed down the first thing I pulled out of my phantom space that didn’t require any sort of cooking, then rolled over and passed out.

I felt a little bad about pushing her so hard, but I wanted a glimpse at this Sanctum of Light before other problems took over my life. Senica could have gone back at any time, but she was determined to see it with me. Tempting as it was to take her to safety and resume my journey on my own, I’d promised her she could come. In the worst case, we simply wouldn’t make it there in time and I’d have to pick up where I left off after I solved the brakvaw issue.

While my sister rested, I set up some basic wards to hide our presence and notify me if anything got too close, not that we’d had a lot of problems in that regard so far. Monsters seemed to be far less frequent nowadays, which wasn’t really much of a coincidence. Things that couldn’t survive without mana simply died off in this environment, and even the magical animals that I would have expected to take their place as the apex predators of an area were strangely absent.

Perhaps they’d all been hunted to extinction by the monsters feeding on them. I doubted anyone could say for sure now, not considering how difficult it must have been for humans to survive the immediate aftermaths of losing the bulk of their magic. What records I’d managed to find of that time had been concerned only with the world stage, not local ecology.

What was strange about the whole thing, though, was that I thought I was starting to sense faint traces of mana in the air now. It was so minute that at first, I’d been sure I was imagining it. As the evening turned into true dark and we got closer to the tower, I’d become more and more sure of it, but Senica had exhausted herself too quickly to explore farther.

With her safety assured behind my wards, I left her to sleep and flew northwest for an hour before landing and taking a deep breath. “Mana,” I said, my eyes closed. It was thin, but there was no doubt about it; the farther we went in this direction, the stronger it got. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence that it was stronger in the same direction as the Sanctum of Light.

My landing had not gone unnoticed, despite the fact that I had my own core completely shielded. Perhaps it was simply that I was meat, moving or otherwise, that attracted their attention, or perhaps I’d unknowingly landed in the middle of their nest. Either way, I was on the ground for bare seconds before a wide, paddle-like claw burst out of the dirt.

Dozens more popped up, all of them intent on clearing the ground away for some burrowing creatures to exit their subterranean lairs. The creatures had thick arms and smooth heads covered in rough yellow fur streaked with dirt and grime. Their hind legs were thin and scraggly, presumably not often used since the creatures spent most of their time digging.

Noses twitching and scoop-claws pounding against the ground, the monsters dragged themselves fully into the night air and turned to orient themselves in my direction. I watched them surround me from every direction and examined what little mana they had. For creatures their size—the largest being about four feet long from snout to stubby little tail—their cores seemed underdeveloped, but I suspected they used mana only to help speed their digging anyway – either by softening the dirt or increasing their own strength and stamina.

Whatever else they might be, it was clear they were pack hunters that relied on their ability to pop out of the ground and surround a target. None of them moved that quickly, certainly not fast enough to chase down fleeing prey. The problem with their tactics was that it was rendered completely ineffective just by being able to fly, which, despite its expensive mana cost, wasn’t even that difficult of a spell to cast.

I rose twenty feet up and looked down at the creatures. Something about leaving the ground had confused them, possibly because their sensory organs revolved around sensing vibrations through the dirt. I took a moment to decide whether to kill them and examine the corpses closer, but the truth was my time was more valuable than that and the only thing I really cared about right now was testing the mana density in the air.

That was until the first one opened its mouth, revealing a set of aggressively-curved needle-like teeth, then hacked out a glob of what looked like saliva and phlegm mixed together. It splashed against my shield ward, where it clung to the magic while hissing and steaming. The mana in my shield ward dropped alarmingly fast, especially when three more of the beasts shot their own acid balls at me.

Nothing should have stuck to the ward; it didn’t have physical form! It was a repelling force that deflected kinetic energy off at an angle, but these creatures didn’t seem to care about the mechanics of my defenses. Their acidic spittle somehow clung to the mana structure directly and ate away at it.

I flickered the shield ward off for an instant and watched the acid fall to the ground. Fortunately, without some mana to bond with, it wasn’t able to maintain its perch on my wards. Unfortunately, more acid splashed against the ward as soon as I reactivated it. There were too many of them to just let their attacks eat away at my mana, so I fly another thirty feet up before cycling the shield ward again.

It would be petty to attack them. I knew that. They were unthinking creatures, driven by instincts to subdue a potential meal, no real threat to me. Besides, I was the one who’d landed in their territory. I would have attacked anything that did the same to my home if I couldn’t be sure it was safe.

Lightning stretched down from my outstretched hands to strike the monsters, arcing from body to body. The stink of burnt flesh and hair drifted through the air to reach my nose, and those lucky monsters that had been at the tail end of the spell squealed in pain while desperately retreating back underground.

My vengeance complete, I cast one last disgusted glance at the bodies and flew off to find somewhere else where I could test the quality of mana density in the air undisturbed.

  *

Senica was still asleep when I returned an hour later. The wards I’d set were undisturbed, but with that random encounter with some surprisingly deadly monsters fresh in my mind, I decided that I wouldn’t be leaving her unsupervised without a proper base camp set up from now on. It would need reinforced stone and metal walls and a full set of wards, including communication and teleportation beacons.

The simple truth of it was that back when mana suffused the whole world, there were a dizzying number of monster species. It was practically impossible to counter everything with a casual set of wards constructed over twenty minutes. Truly impregnable defenses could take weeks to set up, depending on the skill of the mage doing the work and the availability of various raw materials often used as foci to help the wards identify specific threats.

I doubted I needed to go that far, but I couldn’t be satisfied with what I’d considered a standard set of defenses prior to tonight’s encounter. For now, I’d settle with staying close to Senica and alert enough to react to any danger, but I mentally added the construction of a defensible, permanent camp to my list once we found a place that required more than a few hours to explore.

The night passed slowly, but peacefully. A tendril of mana twisted into an invocation was all it took to keep me awake and alert, and I used the time to focus on building up my mana reserves. I’d be burning two master-tier spells’ worth just getting us home and I wasn’t sure how much I’d need to deal with the brakvaw when I got there.

When the sky started brightening, I used a small fire to cook breakfast and woke Senica up. “We’ve got to get into the air early,” I told her once she’d finished rubbing her eyes and stretching. “There are monsters in the area.”

“What kind of monsters?” she asked, perking up immediately. Of course my sister would take that news as an opportunity rather than a warning.

“The ones I saw were some sort of ground burrowers that could spit out globs of acid. The acid could cling to mana constructs and dissolve them, which means they could eat through shield wards if you’re not careful.”

“I didn’t know that was possible,” she said.

“It’s… unusual,” I replied. “It’s not a great tactic, since it just becomes a competition to see who has the most mana to spend, and it’s generally cheaper to defend than to attack. Of course, if there are twenty or thirty attackers working together, the equation tends to fall on the attackers’ side anyway.”

Senica eyed me up for a second and said, “You don’t look burned.”

“I flew out of their range and fried them with arc lightning spells.”

She considered that, probably figuring out the mana costs. Senica could fly unaided now, but not for very long, and she didn’t know how to throw even a simple lightning bolt, let alone one that could chain to extra targets. “How worried should I be if I encounter one?” she asked.

“If it’s just one, I imagine you could probably kill it. I doubt it’ll be one, though. They looked like pack hunters to me. Besides, where there’s one type of monster, there could be others.”

“Strange that there’d be so many monsters at all,” Senica said. “Is it related to the mana in the air?”

“Noticed that, did you?” I grinned. “Yes, I think so. I poked around a bit last night and it keeps getting thicker the closer we get to the Sanctum. If that trend continues, we can expect more dangerous monsters in greater numbers the farther we go, things that would starve anywhere else. That means unusual abilities, so it comes down to a fight, you’ll need to be careful and react quickly to magic you don’t recognize.”

I hadn’t expected her to be too worried. Senica knew I’d protect her, and with no risk of dying, that left only the thrill of the challenge. That was a bad habit I’d need to break her of. Sooner or later, she was going to find herself in a deadly situation with no one to rely on but herself. Getting her prepared to come out of something like that in one piece was a large part of my job as her teacher.

Sadly, my knowledge of monsters and their habitats was a few thousand years out of date, which made teaching her what specifically to look out for a non-starter. But this was what we were here to learn, and I’d keep watch over her for now. All-purpose defenses would keep us safe long enough for me to take care of any big threats before they could cause problems, even if it wasn’t the most efficient way to go about things.

I could live with inefficiencies. I just didn’t like them.

“Did you sleep at all last night?” Senica asked.

“No,” I said. “Our wards weren’t good enough for me to trust them after that fight. There are too many unknowns.”

“Maybe it would be better to retreat now,” she said, surprising me.

“No, I want to see this Sanctum before we go. Once we find it, we can decide what to do.”

We finished up our morning routine quickly after that, and within twenty minutes, we were once again flying away from the sun and toward a source of mana so strong that it lingered in the air.