Book 2, Chapter 68

I didn’t have it in me to be annoyed about my failure to gain mana from Hyago’s grow room. The unexpected presence of an ember bloom left me too excited to be concerned about that, not to mention I still had other options. If anything, I wished I’d taken the time to properly explore the first time I’d passed through his territory. If I had, that tree would already be a few hundred miles away.

It turned out the hardest part of robbing enforcers was deciding which groups to go after. I left the ones near the inner-city wall alone, if only because they patrolled it so regularly I was sure to end up drawing in more than I wanted to deal with at once, but it was easy to spot other patrols elsewhere. The ones who were low on mana I didn’t bother with. It wasn’t worth the effort to cover my tracks for so little reward.

I found a trio that has storage crystals and mana cores practically topped off strutting around by the east wall. It was one of the poorest districts in Derro, full of squatters with empty bellies and petty thieves hiding out while they waited for the heat to die down so they could venture forth and rob someone else. Why those three enforcers were there, I couldn’t begin to guess.

That did not stop me from pelting all three of them with kinetically enhanced chunks of stone. The group went down without even getting a chance to fight back, and I climbed down from the roof I’d been perched on to go mana drain them and the storage crystals in their batons. It wasn’t a lot of mana, but it was a start.

None of the enforcers were dead, for what it was worth. I left them laying there, groaning in pain or unconscious from taking a big rock to the back of the head. Whether the locals let them live or not was none of my business, nor did I particularly care.

I spent most of the night moving around the city, ambushing patrols. At some point, someone figured out what was going on and extra enforcers started showing up, but that just made things go faster for me. Instead of getting groups of two or three, I started finding them in fours and fives. It was a lot more work than I’d originally planned on doing, but by the time I returned to my hideout sometime late in the night, I’d refilled my mana crystal completely.

In fact, I’d recovered so much mana that I’d be wasting the next few days if I didn’t find something to use it on. So I spent a little making a new scrying mirror, one that was disposable and with a focus on blocking the link back to me from being traced. Tomorrow, I’d go put it face-to-face with the mirror Haze had given me and seal them together in stone. Monarch would look out her mirror and directly into mine, allowing us to communicate without giving away my position.

I would also be observing the area just to see if any of her minions showed up to try to ambush me once they got a lock on the mirror’s location. I gave it even odds whether she really wanted to negotiate an end to hostilities or if it was just a trick to try to kill me again. It would be interesting to see which way she’d go.

Even with the creation of the secondary mirror, my reserves were full again the next morning, and I still had three days left to go. After setting up my relay mirror and preparing the building, I didn’t have much left to occupy my time. Enforcers were swarming the city again, trying to find me and making it much more difficult to move undetected. They weren’t any more competent at it this time around, and even if one had found me, I’d have merely welcomed the additional mana.

Without teleporting back to my crucible, I was limited to making basic gear the hard way, and I spent a bit of time pondering my options. In the end, the problem I’d most consistently run into was that I didn’t have enough mana. My mana crystal had been a hundred times bigger than my core when I made it, though I’d grown enough that it was only about eighty times bigger now. What I needed was a place to store extra mana, not necessarily a second mana crystal, as multiples caused inefficiency issues, but a large storage crystal.

It wasn’t hard to find chunks of rock bigger than I was, and I knew I could craft a receptacle that would dwarf my mana crystal’s capacity easily. There’d be more of a transference loss, but that was better than letting the mana dissipate once I reached my own maximum. I was well past the point where I needed to upgrade my storage capacity, but somehow something more important always came up. Now that I had a few days free, I was going to take care of it.

I dragged the process out by using only my own mana core to avoid even the slightest bit of transference loss. I had the time, and while I was waiting for my own core to refill, I had a side project to work on. Velvet’s journals were a lot easier to decipher now that I had a reference book. It didn’t work for all the sections, but I figured a few things out once I was able to decode his most recent notes.

Velvet had been trying to figure out who Sibilant was and what he was up to. The journals recorded every single order or communication he’d had with the cabal’s secretive spymaster and listed out people who could have known the information Sibilant had used to give his own orders.

After a day or two of working on it, I determined that Velvet had only used three different books with five different sections in each book. That gave me a third of the reference materials needed to decode various passages. Most of my time was spent using more traditional code-breaking methods to slowly sort through the remaining passages. I wouldn’t finish prior to my meeting, but I wasn’t terribly concerned.

The simple fact of it was that I hadn’t bothered to learn much about Derro’s government. They weren’t my target, and I obviously wasn’t concerning myself with their laws. While it would have been nice to know Sibilant’s identity, it was by no means necessary. Besides, from what I could tell, Velvet had been working on it for years, and he hadn’t managed to crack it, either. All he had was a long list of suspects, names he was constantly crossing off and adding back on.

I suspected that either Sibilant wasn’t a single person or, if he was, he was masquerading as several other people. Frequently, Velvet noted seeming disparities between orders, where actions taken would directly benefit a particular noble one time, then hinder that person or benefit a rival the next time. Velvet couldn’t figure out who was consistently coming out ahead with all of Sibilant’s plotting.

I slept in spurts, often dozing for an hour at a time since I couldn’t afford to let my mana core sit full all night. It made it hard to get a full night’s rest, but this body was young, and I was willing to pay that price.

The days came and went while I worked in my hideout, living off of my stash of food from my phantom space and a trickle of mana. I transformed a four-hundred-pound chunk of stone into a storage crystal that had five times the capacity of my mana crystal, albeit at a transference loss of close to thirty percent, and then I shrunk it down and altered its weight so that I could forget it was even in my pocket. It had significantly more upkeep costs to keep it portable like that, but I expected it would prove fairly useful in the near future.

When I finally awoke on the fourth day, I had only a few hours left before my meeting. I spent a bit of mana to activate my scrying mirror and connected to the big one I’d left at home. An image faded into view, that of an empty kitchen, still messy from the morning meal and with no one in sight. That was a bit disappointing, but not unexpected. I could yell into the mirror and hope to get someone’s attention, but that would just be wasting even more mana since I’d had to put up an aura of silence in a shell around me so that I didn’t draw attention on my side.

Just as I was about to let the connection drop, Senica walked in front of the mirror. She gave a casual glance over at it, already reaching one hand up to her hair, then froze when she saw my face staring at her. “Gravin!” she yelped. “Why are you just… there? It’s creepy!”

“Uh… Sorry? I wasn’t trying to be.”

“Well, say something next time.”

“I only just made the connection,” I said. “I didn’t have a chance.”

“Still,” she huffed. Then she dragged one of the kitchen chairs over to the mirror and said, “What are you doing?”

“Preparing for a meeting with the woman who controls the whole cabal that was attacking our village. Noctra’s boss’s boss’s boss, I guess.” I paused and mentally added that up. Noctra, now deceased, had answered to Iskara, also deceased. Presumably she’d answered to Velvet—also deceased—since he was in charge of all their mana farms. Monarch was Velvet’s boss, so I thought I had that right.

If I ended up killing her, too, I’d have done in the entire chain of command.

I brushed that inane thought aside and said, “How are things at the new village? Are the orphans adjusting alright?”

At that, Senica’s mouth worked up into a ferocious scowl. “Juby thinks that he should be in charge of the kids just because he’s older, but I was here first, and I know the most about magic, and about other stuff, too! He’s still a dull. My core is the best core here. You said so yourself.”

“I did,” I acknowledged. It was debatable whether she had the best core. Certainly, it would produce more mana than anyone else’s when she was an adult, but right now she had the same problem I did. With a core barely a third the size of either of our parents’, there was a proportional stepping down in the amount of mana she made. That wasn’t really relevant to determining the pecking order, though. “I don’t think it’s about that. I think it’s that Juby was already used to leading the rest of those kids. He knows them, and they know him. You’re the new kid in their group.”

“But I’m better,” she said, as if that explained it all.

“No, you’re not. You’re farther along, but only because you had advantages they didn’t. That doesn’t make you better than them, just luckier. They could all work just as hard and catch up to you. We don’t know yet.”

Senica frowned, then shook her head. “Maybe when they do, but for now, I should be in charge.”

“What does Mother have to say about that?”

“Who cares what grown-ups think? This is about us kids.”

“Oh?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “In that case, shouldn’t I be the one in charge?”

“You don’t count,” she told me. “Mom says you’re an adult in a kid’s body. Besides, you’re not here.”

Well, she had me there. Outwitted by a seven-year-old. How low I’d fallen.

“Listen,” I said. “Juby and the others have had it rough. A lot of their friends died. Imagine how you’d feel if those people who attacked the village had made it to the school and killed everyone. That’s what they’re going through. Cut them a bit of slack, okay?”

I didn’t know if Senica really got death as a concept, yet. Children rarely did, and as they grew older, most of them only got it in an abstract sense. It was something that happened to others, not to them, and not to people they knew and cared about. Juby’s group, they knew it firsthand, but Senica didn’t, not really.

“I guess,” she said reluctantly. “Doesn’t seem very fair to me.”

“Senica? What are you doing?” Mother asked, her voice coming from outside where I could see. I could have amplified the amount of mana I was burning to see all around the mirror instead of just through it, but it was best to save it. I was already using too much as it was.

“Hello, Mother,” I called, drawing her to the mirror.

She appeared and smiled at me. “Gravin! I wasn’t expecting you to contact us so soon.”

“I had a bit of downtime today,” I said. I eyed up my remaining mana and did a quick calculation on how long it would take to regenerate it. There was still enough time. “Let me tell you about the most amazing thing I found…”