Book 2, Chapter 72

My first problem was the sole remaining elite. He wasn’t terribly close to me, but his draw stone tower shield represented a variable to all spell work that could trip me up if he was quick or clever. I couldn’t rely on Ash to kill him for me, either. I was the interloper here and far, far closer to the man than she was. Then again, I wasn’t the one who’d killed thirty of his friends.

I revised my assessment then. My first problem was Ash. She was chanting something under her breath, the amateur’s version of silent casting where they still benefited from the cadence and rhythm helping them time the construction of their spells without actually giving away what runes they were saying. I didn’t need to hear her to guess what her next attack would be.

The thing about specialists was that they were predictable. Whether it was a fireball, flame lance, fire bolt, inferno, or fire lash spell, the standard defense was all the same: a heat ward. It was already built into my amulet, and the only variable was exactly how much mana it would take to block the spell. The other thing about specialists was that they were generally very good at what they did, which meant the answer to the question about mana consumption was, unfortunately, a lot.

It would be better in the long run to disrupt her spell than to defend against it, which was why I sent three force bolts spiraling around each other and streaking through the air to strike her. I didn’t have high hopes for that, but as a probing strike, it would accomplish my objective. I needed to see how well defended she was, and whether she was able to keep a spell going under pressure.

The bolts shattered against a shield ward, and Ash’s chant continued uninterrupted. She managed to somehow smirk at me while still mouthing the names of runes, then fire bloomed from the tip of the wand and engulfed me. My own shield ward drew hard on my staff to keep itself stable, and I fled through the flame-filled air to angle myself near the draw stone shields of a fallen elite. It was propped up on its side, leaning against a corpse, and for once, I was grateful for my small stature.

I couldn’t get too close to the shield, of course. That would cause more harm than good if it started interfering with my shield ward. But, by crouching down behind it, I was able to reduce the amount of heat I was repelling significantly.

In all of this, I could feel Haze repositioning herself until she finally landed near Ash. Perhaps it was the light of the fire washing away any and all shadows in the ballroom, but she didn’t get any closer than that. Maybe it wasn’t that she couldn’t, but that Haze was smart enough not to put herself in a position where she’d get burned. It was entirely possible she was acting as a back up to kill me if I managed to defeat Ash.

Like before, there was only so long Ash could channel her flames. The difference this time was that they were centered around me in a much smaller area. The woman would run herself dry eventually, but I doubted it would happen in the next thirty seconds unless I stopped her. Direct attacks were out unless I wanted to brute force that shield ward. Escape was a possibility, but that only delayed the problem instead of solving it. I could probe her for weaknesses with an enchantment or divination-based attack, but those seemed unlikely to work.

There was no way I was moving the draw stone shield I was hiding behind. Sadly, the best course of action at this point seemed to be to fortify my position and wait for Ash to run herself out of mana. It would take a bit of time, but it would be the least mana-intensive option unless I could get that wand away from her, which wasn’t likely to happen unless I overwhelmed her shield wards.

Through my scrying spell, I saw Haze appear out of Ash’s shadow. She rose up to her full height, easily head and shoulders over the smaller woman, and drove her vanishing knife directly into Ash’s back. The flames cut off rather abruptly at that point, and I stood up, unscathed. That hadn’t exactly been how I’d expected the encounter to play out, but I wasn’t going to complain about it.

Haze looked over at me, saw that I was uninjured, and nodded. “I never liked her. You’d better win.”

The flashfire wand flipped through the air, carried on my telekinesis spell, and vanished into my phantom space. I’d give it a more thorough examination later, but it appeared to be crafted in a fairly standard way for my time. Of course, that meant it was amazing by modern-day sensibilities.

“Thanks for the assist. You saved me wasting some mana on her.”

“Just hedging my bets,” Haze said. “I was never here.”

Then she vanished into the darkness, shadow leaping out of the room. I caught her emergence somewhere out in the hall, then she disappeared again, carrying the vanishing knife out of range of my senses. At the rate she’d burned through mana jumping around, I suspected she was out of the rest of this fight, no matter which side she wanted to throw in with.

I glanced over at that last remaining elite guard. He’d succumbed to the flames and had collapsed, either dead or soon to be. This whole encounter had been weird. Was Ash so bad at her specialty that she wasn’t able to attack me without hurting everyone around me? No, that didn’t make sense. Maybe she just didn’t care. Maybe she enjoyed watching people burn. She certainly wouldn’t be the first pyromaniac mage I’d encountered.

Whatever the reason, she was dead now. I’d probably never know for sure why she’d chosen those particular spells. All I could do was ghoulishly loot the bodies to replenish my own spent mana and move on.

*

One of the greatest advantages of being the intruder was that the enemy was forced to react to me. This was countered by the fact that they’d had years to build up their defenses, but that advantage was negated almost entirely because said defenses weren’t good enough to stop me from going anywhere I wanted.

What that meant in practice was that the defenders chased along behind me, often arriving at places I’d already passed through and finding nothing there. Occasionally, I’d cut my way through a few guards, but I never got bogged down by numbers again.

The whole time, I moved through the palace in pursuit of my goal: a mass of stationary mana I could feel near the center of the building. I wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but it was so large I could sense it from the outer areas of the palace, way beyond my normal range. I was certain it would lead me closer to the Wolf Pack.

As I got closer, the mana started to separate into individual clumps in my mind. It wasn’t that it had actually moved, just that my accuracy was going up with the reduced distance. The fact that I could sense so much mana from so far away at all likely meant that I’d stumbled across some huge battery of it, and given how many smaller sources of mana I was starting to feel as I got closer, I had a pretty good idea of what I was walking into.

Unlike Freak’s workshop, whoever was here in the palace hadn’t concerned themselves with shielding their suppliesy of mana. Perhaps they thought it was too wasteful to justify it. Whatever the reason, it led me right to them.

I didn’t bother with the doors. Phantasmal step got me through the wall quicker here and I knew I’d be recovering all of that lost energy and then some in moments. As expected, I stepped into a veritable armory of magical equipment. All sorts of enchanted weapons were stockpiled on the walls. Dozens of ward belts hung lined up in a row off pegs. Various amulets, rings, and other trinkets filled boxes, and there wasn’t an inch of free space across any of the tables scattered throughout the room.

Everywhere I looked, I saw chisels and knives of all sizes and shapes, augers, drills, clamps, lathes… all the tools of a master of half a dozen different crafts were scattered around me. Shelves stuffed to bursting with books and loose sheets of paper towered next to desks that were covered in their own layers of detritus. It was all wildly disorganized, but somehow had a homey feel to it. Whoever owned this workshop obviously loved their craft.

They were going to be upset to find out that the giant storage crystal they were using to enchant all of this stuff was missing. I wound my way through the piles of half-finished projects littering the floor and stopped before a pillar of stone ten feet tall and so wide I’d need three of me holding hands to circle all the way around it. It was easily twice the size of Freak’s mana battery, and even better, it was a storage crystal, so it had none of the associated difficulties extracting mana from a battery carried.

That did make it a lot trickier to shrink down, but I could still manage. It would just take a little while to cast the appropriate enchantments, but in the next ten minutes, I’d have a storage crystal that was more than half full and could hold eight times as much as my staff’s mana crystal, albeit at a far greater transference loss.

I practically had to stop to wipe the drool off my chin while I worked.

I would have never made something like this myself. It was wildly inefficient, and I couldn’t even see a time when I would use it outside of today. But I’d happily steal it, repurpose all the mana inside, and discard the massive obelisk once I’d extracted all the value from it.

One of the sources of mana I could feel scattered around me started moving, and a second later, a door in the far wall opened. A man walked through, then stopped and blinked in surprise when he noticed me. He was average height, but with thick muscles across his chest, shoulders, and arms. I spotted burn scars across his exposed skin, the kind smiths got from the spatter of molten metal on their flesh. If I’d had to guess at his age, I’d have said he was closer to Karad than my father, but still somewhere in the middle, perhaps mid-thirties.

It was a pointless guess. Magic let people live far longer than they should and look far younger than they were while they did it. I’d know. To the best of my knowledge, I was the world record holder in that category, at least in the mortal division. Undead abominations did not count, of course.

“You’re him?” the man asked. “The one going around killing people and causing problems?”

I considered that for a moment. I was a person doing that, but not necessarily the one he meant. “Are you associated with the Wolf Pack?” I asked.

“I am.”

“Then yes, I’m probably the one you’re thinking of.”

“What’re you doing to my mana bank?” he asked.

“Shrinking it for transport.”

The man scratched the back of his head and looked around the workshop. “I don’t suppose you’d stop if I asked nicely?”

“I… No, I don’t think so,” I said. “Are we going to fight over it?”

“Nah. I’m a handyman, not a warrior. Feels weird getting robbed by a little kid, but if you beat all the other guys, I don’t have a chance.”

“That’s surprisingly sensible of you,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Tetrin. They call me Weaver, though. Stupid name. I don’t even make anything out of cloth here. I just ‘weave the flows of mana,’ or some such nonsense.”

“And you’re not mad that I killed the rest of your cabal?”

“All of them, huh? Last I heard, most of us were still alive. But no, I don’t care. I do care about that mana you’re taking, but I’m not going to get my blood turned to mist over it. I can always make more mana.”

That was interesting, assuming this wasn’t some sort of trap to lull me into a false sense of security. But I’d met people like him before. If I was right, an opportunity had just fallen into my lap. “If that’s how you feel about things,” I said, “perhaps you’d be interested in striking a deal.”