Book 2, Chapter 71

It wasn’t so much the eight guards surrounding me that were the problem, but the hundred more in the palace that might find us before I took care of this group. The best option was to flee, and I could get away easily, but I needed to go deeper in. Every enemy I left behind was one who might stab me in the back later.

This wasn’t quite a frontal assault, but it definitely wasn’t an infiltration. I’d known going in that I wasn’t going to be doing things the easy way and that I’d be leaving a trail of bodies in my wake. As unfortunate as it was for these guards who were only trying to do their job, I was going to hunt down Monarch, and I was going to do it quickly before she had a chance to flee.

Lightning ripped through the air to rake across both groups in twin bolts originating from my staff. Most of it was burnt up in the guards’ own defensive wards, but their gear could only take so much. It was far superior to a common enforcer’s, which meant I needed to cast the spell twice on each group for the lightning to be effective. Once the wards dissolved, six of the eight guards died on the spot. The remaining two, the lucky ones who’d been at the tail end of the arc and received the least amount of damage, were either smart enough to pretend to be down so they could attack me from behind when I passed by, or cowardly enough that it wasn’t an act.

Either way, a pair of force bolts took care of them.

I spent a minute harvesting mana from the rest of their gear. The enchantments and inscriptions seemed basic to me, something quick and easy to produce. That wasn’t surprising, considering each guard had an identical kit. If I’d had to produce a few hundred of the same piece, I’d do something similar. Their gear wasn’t even low quality, even compared to the cabal mages I’d fought. They just lacked that extra punch wielding an antiquated weapon from a thousand years ago brought to the table.

Now that I was inside the palace itself, the wards were far less restrictive on my scrying spells. That wasn’t to say there weren’t portions of the interior still blocked off, just that I was finally getting a decent look at the layout and where to go.

As expected, the strongest sources of mana were deeper inside the palace. I left the corpses behind and followed the path my magic had laid out.

*

Once I’d gotten away from the outer walls, it became both harder and easier to navigate the palace. The guards lost track of me quickly, especially without the attention-drawing enchantments the wards had tried to saddle me with. But they were also everywhere, and my desire to remain unfound meant that digging in deeper was an exercise in patience, and I didn’t know how much time I had to spare. With every potential encounter, I had to weigh how much time I’d save now by fighting my way through against how much time it might cost me if I let myself get bogged down.

There were a few instances where I didn’t have a choice – places like checkpoints where the guards weren’t going to leave no matter how long I waited. I killed those guards as quietly and efficiently as possible, drained them of what mana I could, and pushed deeper into the palace before anyone else could show up to raise the alarm.

Inevitably, guards started getting in front of me. There was only so much I could do to disguise the general direction I was heading in and despite my scrying spells feeding me information, I was the interloper here. They knew the layout far better than I did, and while I was only guessing at where I needed to go, the captains and other officers had no doubt figured out exactly what I was trying to find and adjusted their troops accordingly.

That was why, forty minutes after I entered the palace, I found myself in the middle of a ballroom of some sort, surrounded on all sides by more than two dozen of the normal guards being led by eight armored elites holding huge tower shields studded with draw stones.

Those shields looked impossibly heavy to lift to me, and using an invocation to gain the strength to lift them while simultaneously holding them must have been devilishly tricky. The lesser guards were easily dealt with, at least they would be if I could go on the offensive, but it was going to be a mountain of work to take out the elites.

“Kill him,” one of them bellowed from behind his visored helmet. He pointed up at me with a sword that had runes carved down the length of the blade, and as he yelled out his order, a beam of kinetic energy lanced from the tip of the sword to strike me.

My shield ward absorbed the energy, though since I was already levitating in the air to stay out of range of the regular guards’ spears, I let the beam push me backwards thirty feet to reduce the impact to my mana. Before I could counter, more beams rushed up at me from the other elites. Taking all seven at once would have been foolish, but the extra space the first beam had given me allowed me enough time to let my levitation drop for an instant.

The beams passed overhead, and I unleashed a force wave spell of my own. It picked up the closest palace guards and threw them backward into their comrades, but then the spell broke on the draw stone shields. No one was killed or even seriously harmed, but that hadn’t been the point.

The force wave gave me the space and time I needed to cast a spell I hadn’t yet had an occasion to use in my new body. I needed something capable of affecting many targets at once in an extremely precise manner, and those two qualities rarely went hand-in-hand in any spell. Searing orb was one such exception.

One part conjuration and one part divination, it took me five seconds to create the orb. As soon as the spell came together, a sphere of scintillating black, red, and violet rose into the air above my outstretched hand. The orb was an attack in two parts. First, it was designed to draw attention. Anybody near it would find themselves looking at it against their will, and only those with strong, disciplined minds who recognized the spell for the trap it was would be able to stop themselves.

These guards didn’t meet that standard, not even the elites. Practically everyone besides myself stared up at the spell, and that’s when the divination component hit them. Merely looking at the orb for even a second was enough to forge a link between the spell and a subject’s mind. As soon as that link was formed, the orb transmitted intense, searing pain directly into their brains.

It was akin to getting hit with a mind spike spell, except several times a second over the next five seconds. Almost anyone who failed to resist the searing orb’s fascination component was guaranteed to black out from overwhelming pain, and these guards were no exception.

All but two of my enemies collapsed to the ground. There was some screaming, but not nearly as much as there would have been if the majority of the guards had remained conscious. The two who remained standing did so more by luck than anything, I expected. One was an elite who happened to have his shield positioned perfectly to block line of sight on the orb, and the other was a guard standing next to him who’d been dragged to safety behind that draw stone barricade as soon as the attack had started.

 The biggest threats in the room were the draw stone shields. Those took a special kind of training and physical conditioning to use effectively, and with all but one of their wielders temporarily incapacitated, the best move was to kill the elites before they could recover. Their armor would defend them from my weaker force spells, but I had plenty of other spells in my arsenal.

Fire-based conjurations could heat the armor to the point where it cooked the person trapped inside, but that was neither quick nor cheap. Spells like acid ball could target the head directly and might melt through the skull to destroy the brain if I could get enough through those visors, but wouldn’t be efficient.

The silver lining was that none of the elites were using wards thanks to those shields of theirs. That meant that I was able to use a spell from the phantasmal line. Much like how phantasmal step allowed me to walk through walls, phantasmal sword created a weapon that would ignore armor to cut through the flesh hidden beneath it.

The sword sparked to life in my hand as I swooped through the air on a string of flight magic. One could argue about the waste of mana, but right now I needed speed more than anything else. The more of these elites I killed before the one who’d avoided my searing orb realized what I was doing, the better.

I’d sized the blade for my stature, which meant it wasn’t even a full two feet long. It appeared somewhat similar to a sword made out of glass, more visible as an outline than a solid object. As I flew past the first elite, I swung it in an arc through the man’s neck, decapitating him inside his armor. By the time the blood started spurting out, I was already onto the next one.

Four kills later, I met unexpected resistance. Fire burst into existence right on top of me, washing over me with a heat so intense that my shield ward flickered and would have died if I hadn’t reinforced it with a steady stream of mana from my staff. The fire went on and on for ten full seconds, but during that time, I cast a quick scrying spell to view the room from an outside angle so I could locate the source.

Almost the entire ballroom was on fire, though not for any apparent reason. Since the palace was made entirely of stone, the fire would only last as long as the mage conjuring it kept pouring mana in. Whoever it was, they’d killed all of the guards except for the lone conscious elite, who was huddled under his shield.

That draw stone bulwark was the safest place to be right now, but I doubted he’d be happy to share it with me. I could do a short-range teleport out using my scrying spell to give me line of sight on an exit from the ballroom—an expensive option since I wouldn’t be able to use shadow leap in these conditions—or I could attack the mage conjuring the spell. I spotted her at one of the far doors, the dark-haired investigator from Freak’s lab who’d almost cooked me when I was teleporting the orphans out of Derro.

Ash was her name, and it took only a moment to spot the wand she was using to direct the fire. It was some red metal studded with rubies, probably more for style than substance. I recognized it immediately. Back when such things were common, it was called a flashfire wand, and its purpose was to streamline fire-based conjurations and increase their power. With that in hand, Ash could throw flames like a master mage, though it would do nothing to help shield her from her own attacks.

That was why amateurs who used tools like that commonly paired them with some sort of accessory imbued with a heat ward. It took me only a moment to spot the amulet hanging around her neck and peg that as her defense. Without that, she’d be vulnerable to her own magic.

The fires cleared for a moment, revealing a room full of blackened, charred bodies and a single elite whose skin was probably red and blistered under his armor. His shield had kept him alive for now, but the sheer heat would kill him if Ash unleashed another attack like that.

She flashed a wicked grin at me and raised the wand to channel another spell through it. At the same time, I felt the flicker in my awareness that signified Haze’s vanishing knife was coming my way.

Two at once was going to take a lot of mana from me, but at least it would save me the trouble of hunting them down. I began casting my first spell of this new fight.