Book 2, Chapter 62

I couldn’t walk directly through the wall into the office Velvet was using for two reasons. First, it didn’t have an exterior wall, so the closest I would have been able to get was a closet nearby. Second, it was part of one of the few spaces that was still warded. I probably could have gotten through those wards and popped into the part of Velvet’s suite of rooms that did touch an exterior wall, but I preferred to spend that time hidden indoors.

I passed through the wall and took a second to orient myself. I’d entered through some sort of receiving room, close enough to Velvet’s own suite that it wouldn’t inconvenience him to meet someone there, but separate and far enough away that he could maintain his privacy and keep hold of any secrets he’d hidden there. The furniture was expensive, all made of that vanishingly rare resource out in the wastes: wood. More than that, it was carved by a true master instead of rough-hewn like the furnishings Noctra’s own manor house had held back in my birth village.

More importantly, it shared a wall with Velvet’s private bathroom. That meant I could access his wards from here and, once I confirmed a way to pass through them, sneak into his suite. Things would get bloody after that. With any luck, it would be quick and silent.

Just as I was about to touch the wall and get started, something twinged against my mind. I stopped moving and frowned. That was a familiar sensation, but not one I’d experienced very often. It was something magical, but not a ward, and so faint that I almost missed the feel of it brushing across me. I pulled my hand back and spent a minute analyzing what I’d felt.

It was the feel of mana starting to move in the floors beneath me while I was thinking that gave me the clue I needed to figure it out. All of a sudden, there was a lot of movement from people who had very full mana cores, almost like they were waiting for some signal. But how had I been detected? If someone on the wall had seen me, the alarm would have gone up. They’d have either magically communicated with the guards inside the house and already have been on alert before I passed through the wall, or they’d be sending a runner that I would have detected.

That didn’t explain the odd sensation I’d felt, either. Somehow, someone had detected me magically, but not in a way I’d been prepared to hide myself from. I would have said it was impossible if I couldn’t feel the mages two floors below me mobilizing.

Then I remembered what I’d seen in my surveillance enchantment. Echo had been wearing a gold chain around her head with an eye in the middle of her forehead, just above her two real eyes. She’d cast a powerful divination to peer backwards through time using that piece of equipment. If it could look backwards, albeit with a great deal of effort that led to only limited success, it was entirely possible that it could see into the future, too.

Scrying the future was complicated, to put it mildly. The big problem was that there wasn’t a set future to look at. The past was immutable, even for someone with the skills, knowledge, and resources I’d possessed prior to my reincarnation. That made it difficult to view, but not impossible. With the future, an almost equivalent amount of effort and mana went into seeing one possible outcome, then even more resources had to be spent divining the likelihood of that future coming to pass. No matter how much skill the diviner had, no matter how much mana they threw into their predictions, no future was ever guaranteed.

Velvet must have wanted to catch me very, very badly if he’d been willing to pay the price to have Echo use that artifact to search for futures where we confronted each other. She must have determined the most likely moment I would confront Velvet and set that as the signal to go. What I’d felt was an echo of her spell reaching out from the past to find me. The timing was remarkably close, too. Either she was more skilled than I’d given her credit for, or she’d just gotten lucky.

The moment for a silent victory and escape had passed me by, probably before I’d ever even gotten back into the city. That was the problem with retreating: it gave the enemy time to recover and leverage their assets against me. Sure, it had also given me the time I needed to regain my own strength, but I was outnumbered, and the Wolf Pack had far more resources than Ime in almost every way.

The method by which they had detected me was somewhat surprising, but I hadn’t honestly been expecting them to sit on their hands waiting for me to show back up, and there was no reason not to continue with my plans. There was just going to be a lot more blood painting the walls than I’d initially expected.

There was no need for subtlety now, not when I knew Velvet was expecting me. I pulled my staff out of my phantom space, reached out for the wards, skimmed them until I found the artificial core of mana powering the enchantments, and drained it dry. It took me, at most, thirty seconds. Then I used some of my stolen mana to cast phantasmal step and phased into Velvet’s bathroom.

Apparently, laying down the enchantments that kept the place smelling fresh and clean after I’d broken the ward stone wasn’t high priority. My nose crinkled slightly, but I’d smelled worse. Still keeping track of Velvet’s position with my mana sense, I crossed the stone floor and paused at the door.

He was sitting in his office, presumably as bait to draw me in. If I hadn’t already figured out what was going on, that would have been a sign that something was off. There was no way he hadn’t felt me draining his wards dry, not while he was sitting inside them. Even my new students, average age of seven, would have felt that.

If I hadn’t confirmed with my own scrying that Velvet was here, I would have thought he was a decoy. Then again, all I’d had to go on was Rouri’s description, and while the man in that room matched it, there were plenty of people who could fit the bill of “six feet, lean build, long black hair, blue eyes.”

There was nothing to be done about it at this point. I’d just have to kill the man in the other room, hope he was Velvet, assume he wasn’t, and spend some time figuring out the truth. If he really was writing in code in that journal, and it matched the patterns in the ones I’d stolen, I’d consider that strong evidence that I’d gotten the right man.

The door squeaked a bit when I pushed it open. The mana I felt from Velvet shifted slightly, but that was it as far as a reaction went. If he was going to make it this easy for me, I’d oblige him. With my senses sharpened for traps, I took a few seconds to cast a spell called bar passage. Essentially, it created a more expensive, weaker version of force wall that I could place across the door leading out of the suite to hinder anyone getting in.

It wasn’t as strong as using something like stone shape, and it cost close to three times as much mana for a temporary effect, but it had the benefit of being able to be cast with only a few seconds of work. It didn’t matter much here, but it was also effectively invisible to anyone who couldn’t sense mana.

One of the main reasons I didn’t use the spell very often was that it was incredibly vulnerable to having the mana drained out of it, thus rendering it pointless or, worse, empowering an enemy, but I only wanted it to give me a few seconds of delay for when someone inevitably burst in. By my estimates, I had maybe a minute and a half before I could expect company.

With that in mind and a spell ready to go, I strode into Velvet’s office.

He looked up as I entered, then set aside his pen. “Took you long enough,” he said.

Practicality demanded I kill him on the spot, but I held myself back. I was hoping he’d cast some spell strong enough to confirm his identity and save me a lot of work over the next few days. Balancing that against the time I had left to me, I decided to egg him on a bit.

“In my defense, I already stopped by to visit once. You weren’t home, but I left you a present in your bedroom.”

His eyes flashed and he surged to his feet. I noticed an amulet shining in the mage light on his chest, one inscribed with a rune structure designed to negate divinations that would read his thoughts. Interesting. I wondered if he regularly wore that, or if someone had tipped him off about me somehow. “You insolent little bastard,” he snarled.

That amulet wasn’t the only thing reflecting light. When Velvet spoke, I spotted a tooth that looked like it was made of silver in his mouth. That had been part of Rouri’s information. The tempter’s tooth, they called it. It was some sort of enchanting object, designed to invade a target’s mind and befuddle it, making them susceptible to manipulation. I could feel the magic reaching out from it just from that one glimpse, trying to worm its way past my defenses.

A prolonged conversation with Velvet would be dangerous. The longer we spoke, the more that tooth would work against me. No wonder he was in charge of so much of the cabal’s organization. Getting proud and arrogant mages to do his bidding would be easy as long as he had the mana to feed to that tool.

“Your side started it,” I said. “I’m just giving you back the same crap you dished out to me. Whole villages practically enslaved to provide your little group with mana. People kidnapped and sold to you. All the lies and fearmongering. And for what? Your piddling little scraps of power here. They’re not that impressive. Was it worth it?”

“What would a child like you know about power?” Velvet demanded. He held up a hand, delaying my answer. “No, I don’t care about what you think you know about anything. That’s not why you’re here.”

Mana started draining out of Velvet’s core, subtle at first. If I hadn’t been watching, I might not have noticed it. A mana shroud around a person’s core could extend past their body, allowing them to sneak small spells undetected. It was exactly what I did with most of my own magic, though there were limits to just exactly how much mana I could keep shielded outside my own body. Velvet was doing the exact same thing, except his shroud wasn’t perfect to begin with.

I recognized the spell, an intermediate tier curse that would cause the victim to feel weak and tired. In a battle, getting hit with it could easily be a prelude to death. Curse of lethargy didn’t take long to cast, but it did generally require direct contact to pass the artificial mana core to the victim.

I reached out tendrils of my own mana to break it, only to meet unexpected resistance as Velvet’s hand came up with a flourish, revealing a thin, straight wand free of adornments. With a wicked grin, he flicked it in my general direction and sent the curse skimming across the room to strike me.

“Hah. Not so smart after all. For all your strength, you have the wits of a child, still. Only idiots like Monolith would succumb to your tricks,” Velvet crowed, secure in his victory.

I just stared at him for a moment, then I started laughing.