Book 2, Chapter 50

After that highly public battle, I needed a new place to lay low. Flying through the air was a good way to get followed since not only would there be hundreds of witnesses, it would be easy for wide-area scrying to pick me up. Counter scry worked best to block out spells focused directly on me, and using it on one that was viewing an area I just happened to be in would do little more than draw extra attention to my presence there.

There was one place I didn’t mind the Wolf Pack knowing about, and I’d managed to conserve enough mana to handle a building full of dulls without an issue. I took off to the north, trusting my memory to guide me until I found the place I was looking for.

Today had been an exhausting day and I was only twenty minutes into it. On the other hand, I was making good progress killing two Wolf Pack mages already. At this rate, I’d be done by lunch. I just needed to find the rest of them and somehow come up with more mana than the entire city could produce in a day.

I was more annoyed that I’d missed three different opportunities to question members of the Wolf Pack because they were just too competent to capture. It was frustrating specifically because I knew spells that could have done it, but they were out of my reach still, at least in the case of Swarm. Freak’s soul hook had been far too dangerous to risk playing around, and I’d executed Monolith more out of anger than anything. He would have been difficult to keep chained down, but I could have battered him into submission with a slew of targeted mental attacks.

It just would have been, as always, prohibitively expensive. The whole fight made me question if it was really worth it to spend my time in Derro. I’d gotten my family out of danger. Did I care that much about what happened to the rest of the village? And yes, I had questions I was still hoping to have answered here, but it wasn’t like this was the only place in the world I could look for those answers. It might be best if I went to ground for a day or two to refill my reserves and then teleported out of here.

I could spend a year or two in peace with my family while I built the mana crystal I’d need for true long-distance teleportation and flight and used alchemy to rapidly advance my age. The world could wait that long for me to be ready. On the other hand, I loathed leaving business unsettled. Walking away now meant giving enemies time to recover and a chance to strike back at me.

Regardless of what I decided to do, the first step was shaking loose any scries following me. To do that, I needed to get back to ground level and disappear into the city. An excellent spot to do so was the building right below me, one that belonged to Blue Rat, whom I suspected was responsible for Monolith’s presence in the east side of the city. There were plenty of orphan gangs running around Derro; somebody had told them which one to look at.

I swooped down and flew in through a window on the top floor. Almost immediately, a man with a rat tail tattoo put himself in front of me. “Who the hell do you think you—”

Greater telekinesis picked him up and slammed him into the wall hard enough to make him bounce and leave a bloody smear behind. He’d live, but he was out of this fight. A second man froze in place and stared down at his friend, then looked around to make sure there were no witnesses before raising his hands up in front of him and retreating backwards through an open door.

I’d already checked out the inside of this building the first time I’d come through, but just in case there were any surprises waiting for me, I scried ahead looking for Blue Rat. He wasn’t in his office this time, but that woman who’d been reading erotic fiction was. Thankfully, it looked like she was doing some bookkeeping this time instead.

She looked up when I entered the office, and the two guards on either side reacted immediately. They were big, too big to be lifted by greater telekinesis, but not too big to be flung around by a force wave spell. Both of them were slammed into the walls hard enough to crack the stone, and the spell washed over the room far enough that it smacked up against the desk, forcing it to jump a few inches.

The woman… what was her name… Myumi, I thought. Her busty friend had said it when I’d last been in the office. Myumi clicked her tongue in annoyance as the desk jumped and disrupted her writing. “That was unnecessary,” she said.

“I know a good ink manipulation spell for pulling stains out of parchment,” I told her. “I’ll trade it to you if you tell me where Blue Rat is.”

Myumi regarded me silently while she blotted the ink. When she finished, she said, “So my idiot brother’s plan didn’t work. No surprise there.”

“I’m assuming he’s the one who told the Wolf Pack where to find me.”

“Yes and no. When the liaison didn’t report back in, we figured you had to be the one Velvet was looking for. Either he caught you and took you past the walls, or you killed him. Blue decided to use his emergency contact card to send a message to Velvet. Better to report it before things blew up and someone came around to ask why we were sitting on information.”

She sighed and rubbed a hand over her face. “Of course, then you did something to piss them off. You know Velvet himself showed up last night demanding every last scrap of information we had about you. Interviewed every single person who so much as looked in your direction. He wants you dead. Blue’s out in the city right now running the search for you.”

That was as good a confirmation as I was likely to get that I’d killed his kid last night. The irony here was that I was looking for Velvet, too. But letting myself get captured to facilitate that meeting was a terrible idea. I wanted it to happen on my terms, not when he had four of his cabal-mates to back him up.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “I would have expected more loyalty to him.”

Myumi snorted. “All of this? This office. The building. Those people out there doing whatever he tells them. I’ve been trying to tell him for years that this plan of his isn’t going to work. He’s trying to get close to the inner city, thinks they’ll make him a mage if he shows he’s loyal. They’ve been using us the entire time, and what have we gotten for our troubles?”

I shrugged. “A comfortable life, I guess. You look like you’re doing pretty well for yourself sitting here in clean clothes with plenty of entertainment and people who’ll do whatever you tell them to. When’s the last time you had to go work a field or garden? When’s the last time you missed a meal? Found yourself short on cash lately?”

“When’s the last time a farmer had to worry about some mage coming around to kill him because he failed at an impossible task?” she shot back.

“All I’m saying is that for all your complaining, you’re doing just fine here, so it must have been worth something.”

“We could have done this without the mages. All they do is take, take, take. Nothing ever comes back. For what it’s worth, I hope you do find Velvet, and then the two of you can kill each other. Nothing would make me happier. Maybe if my idiot brother manages to survive, he’ll finally listen to me.”

Our conversation was interrupted by one of the guards getting back to his feet. I glanced over my shoulder and shoved him out into the hall with greater telekinesis. He didn’t go very far, not with him being as heavy as he was. The spell was reaching its weight limits to move him at all, but I felt it got the point across.

“Where did you say Blue Rat was again?” I asked.

“Or what, you’ll throw me into the wall a few times?” she retorted.

“To start,” I told her. “I’ve already killed two mages today, and I think I’m up to about forty or fifty people total in the past few weeks. Believe me when I say that I’m not going to lose any sleep over adding you to the list.”

“You’re a little psycho, aren’t you?”

“Let’s just say I never bought into the idea of the intrinsic value of life. I know exactly how little people are worth.”

“Are you going to kill him?” she asked.

“Do you care?”

“A bit, yeah.”

“Depends on his answers to my questions.”

“You can see why that makes me hesitate to give you an answer.”

“What I can see is that you’re trying to stall me while those goons out in the hallway get into position. Yes, I’m aware that they’ve been gathering for the last two minutes. No, I’m not concerned about it. I’ll go through them in seconds on my way out if they try to stop me.” I slammed my staff against the floor for emphasis. “Now, where is your brother?”

Myumi grimaced, but she held her ground. It made sense when I considered it from her perspective. I was an unknown to her, obviously dangerous in some way, but not physically imposing. It was no wonder people didn’t take my threats seriously until the magic came out. She knew Velvet was pissed and he wanted me, and despite me roughing up some thugs, she was probably more scared of him than she was of me.

Force magic was incredibly versatile. Telekinesis was the most delicate application of it, but virtually every type of possible impact had been codified in various spells. It was possible to use raw force directed by pure will, but I’d never really seen a need for it. Force darts could pierce flesh easily, walls could block attacks, and waves could throw enemies away from me.

Force smash was the spell I was looking for right now. It wasn’t great for mage fights, mostly because it was a bit slower to cast and tricky to aim at a moving target. But for making an impression, it worked fantastic. I smiled at her, and her face paled a bit. Then I sent that hammer of force down directly in the middle of her desk.

It exploded, shards of stone and wood going everywhere. They pinged off my shield ward, but she cried out in pain as they lacerated her face, chest, and arms. The guard still collapsed on the ground behind me, the one who’d smartly been pretending to be knocked out so I wouldn’t throw him like I’d done to his companion, yelped in surprise and raised an arm to cover his face.

He need not have bothered. My position standing between him and the desk protected him from the blast. I ignored him for the moment. If he tried to move, I’d sense it and deal with him. Right now, my focus was on Myumi.

She was on her feet, blood dripping from dozens of scrapes and cuts. The book she’d been writing in was shredded from the force smash, and the ink she’d been using was splattered all over the front of her outfit.

Hopefully, this demonstration was enough to make her understand that she could be as scared of Velvet as she wanted. I was here, in this office with her, right now. The cabal mage wasn’t.

“Where. Is. He.”