Book 2, Chapter 49

Swarm shrieked, literally shrieked, and flung himself away from me. That coming from a man bordering on middle-aged, saying I was surprised would be an understatement. I actually lost a second just trying to process what I was seeing, which was a lanky man tripping over his own uncoordinated limbs in his haste to get away from a small child.

“Well, not exactly the reaction I was expecting, but I suppose…”

This would have been an excellent opportunity to kill him outright, but I’d already slain Monolith without asking a single question, and I wasn’t planning on letting Swarm go so easily. If nothing else, I really needed to know where to find the rest of the Wolf Pack, and this guy was the least threatening of any of them so far.

It would be a mistake to underestimate him, though, despite his current predicament. His constructs would have ripped me to pieces while he hid and watched if I’d let them, and he still had plenty of mana crystals in a sack held in his hand to work his magic on. This man was probably one of the most dangerous people in the city.

The first thing to do was separate him from his weapons, and not just by a little bit. If he could control his constructs from thousands of feet away, just taking the sack from him wasn’t going to be good enough. Storing them in my phantom space would do the trick, however. Now I just need to disarm the man, preferably before he knocked himself unconscious swinging the sack around wildly.

Greater telekinesis snatched the sack out of Swarm’s hand, ruining his precarious balance and sending him crashing to the floor where a smooth, clear ball that I hadn’t noticed when I’d arrived rolled away. I grabbed that up, confirmed it was a scryer’s orb, and sent that into my phantom space as well.

Just judging from the amount of mana in Swarm’s core, he was likely stage one or two. If he was any higher than that, then he was exceptionally low on mana, but I’d need time and some cooperation to probe his core thoroughly enough to determine if that was the case. I didn’t expect he’d give that to me, not with the whole us-trying-to-kill-each-other thing we had going on.

“Stay back!” Swarm screeched. “Arit tul amna sois!”

I recognized the words and mana formation as some sort of wind-based attack, probably a whip or slash designed to cut the target. If Swarm had been faster about casting it, it could have bounced off my shield ward. Instead, I reached out with my own mana and cracked the structure apart before he could finish building it.

He had his own shield ward that would prevent me from touching him with a mana drain, but I was betting I could overpower it easily enough with something like stone jaws. That was great for putting kinetic pressure on a ward. Unfortunately, I had some concerns about the quality of Swarm’s defenses and accidentally killing him before I got the chance to question him.

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to drop your wards and let me mana drain you?” I asked, already knowing the answer. The expression on Swarm’s face confirmed it for me. I sighed and added, “I didn’t think so. Okay, well, start screaming when the ward drains so I know to stop.”

Stone jaws snapped up around Swarm, crushing him between the teeth and stressing his defenses while I tried to gauge how fast the mana was draining out of his shield ward. It was one of those belts, similar to what I’d seen on the two mages who’d attacked my home village a few months back. At maximum capacity, it would hold against a stone jaws spell for the entire duration, but if Swarm hadn’t been doing the proper maintenance on his gear, things were about to get interesting for him.

About four seconds into the jaws grinding against his ward, he started screaming. I was about to dismiss the spell before it shredded him, but then I realized it was fear, not pain, that was setting him off. The ward hadn’t given way yet. In fact, it seemed to be holding up even better than I’d suspected. Apparently, he had been doing the maintenance, and his gear was better than what I’d already seen.

“You know, this is a really easy spell to dodge,” I said. “I don’t think I would have even tried it on you, but you seem really uncoordinated. Then again, the last guy I used this on got caught in it, too, but I guess he had some other defenses in place and wasn’t really trying to avoid it anyway.”

Swarm’s only response was to keep screaming.

“I’m going to need you to stop doing that,” I said. “It’s counterproductive to the questions I’d like to ask.”

Swarm did not stop screaming, and with a sigh, I enacted another aura of silence around us. I hadn’t even gotten to the torture part yet.

Suddenly, something cracked inside the jaws. It sounded like stone, almost as if Swarm had managed to sheer one of the teeth off the spell. That couldn’t be the case, though. The whole spell would have started to collapse if the structure was damaged like that. It was one of the bigger drawbacks to using conjurations instead of transmutations, balanced out by the speed of casting and lower mana costs.

I hadn’t imagined that sound, though, and if it wasn’t the stone, it was something Swarm was doing to try to escape. Light welled up between the teeth, giving me just enough warning to step back before the whole spell fractured and something huge and hunched over broke loose.

It was a goblinoid, but unlike the ones I’d left behind, it was probably fourteen feet tall and held Swarm cradled in one arm. The other was swinging at me with enough force to turn me to paste if it connected. It wouldn’t, of course, not with my shield ward there to prevent exactly this scenario. That was more of a reactive defense, though, designed especially to take a handful of unexpected hits until I could establish stronger defenses.

A mana shield would be the most efficient way to deflect an attack, but with my core as small as it was and the mechanics of how the shield drained mana in response to the amount of damage it took, a large enough hit could bottom out my core and break the shield before I had the chance to pull in more mana from my crystal to replace it.

Instead, I opted for the more expensive force wall to block the hand closing in on me. Yellow nails scratched against the thin pane of magic, but it held until the construct drew back its enormous fist and punched it. Tremors shook the floor as it advanced on me a single step, all the space there was in the now-cramped building.

There was no time to form a strategy. I either needed to attack or flee, and if I was going to flee, it would be best to do it before the huge goblinoid construct managed to block my retreat. It had more than enough mass and reach to get between me and the roof, which would force me to use a different, more expensive method of egress to escape. For the moment, it was easiest to just levitate straight up fifty feet into the air.

The constructs weren’t real monsters, but they acted like it to sell the illusion that they’d been summoned. As I slipped through the giant’s grasp, it howled in fury and jumped after me. Stone cracked and the roof exploded upward, peppering my shield ward with shrapnel and debris.

I was forced to go even higher to avoid the giant, which had planted its feet on the walls briefly before launching itself after me again. In response, I hurled a flame lance down at it, targeting Swarm. Somehow, he appeared to be asleep. My best guess was that he was so immersed in controlling his construct that he’d completely abandoned the senses of his true body. The giant hunched defensively over him, protecting him from the attack and receiving a long burn across its shoulders and back for its trouble. I doubted it felt anything like pain.

Rather than press the attack, once it became obvious that I was out of reach, the giant goblinoid turned to flee across the city to the east. The choice of direction surprised me for a moment, and I wondered if Swarm had gotten confused. I would have expected him to retreat to the inner city where he could get help from his cabal-mates. Then I realized that he wasn’t running. He was reconnecting with the rest of the constructs we’d left behind.

None of those constructs were individually strong. None of them had much mana. But a spell like this had a way of resonating with its counterparts, and it was entirely possible that having the big one there would empower the rest of them. If Swarm was any good at shaping their physical forms, he might use it to grow wings on them and create an entire platoon of aerial combatants I’d then have to deal with.

That wasn’t as big a problem as it sounded since arc lightning would likely work just as well on them as it had on the rats, but still, it wasn’t ideal to let Swarm reconnect with the rest of his forces. I swapped levitate for flight and shot off after him, peppering his giant construct with flame lances and lightning bolts. Unfortunately, the construct was too stable to be broken down that easily.

I didn’t want to dip into my staff’s reserves so soon after just having used a master tier spell to kill Monolith. At this point, I barely even had enough mana left to do so, and if I did, it would leave me extremely vulnerable to anyone else attacking me. What I needed was a spell that would crack that construct’s outer shell, but fighting something like that was like trying to disrupt a ward while an enemy did their best to kill me. The elegant solution required a ludicrous amount of finesse to pull it off.

It was time to admit defeat. I wasn’t going to hit Swarm with any of the intermediate level conjurations I was using, not with that giant construct protecting him. The only way I was going to stop him was to kill him, which meant I wasn’t going to be able to ask him any of my questions.

Greater telekinesis required me to have a line of sight on Swarm to use it. Once I’d gotten far enough ahead to get an angle on the body still cradled close to the giant’s chest, I grabbed hold of it with my magic. The giant didn’t want to let go, which was fine. I expected that. However, the soft, fleshy body caught in the middle of that tug-o-war couldn’t withstand the forces pulling on it. Swarm’s eyes snapped open, wide with panic and pain.

If he’d been thinking clearly, he might have commanded his construct to let him go. Even better, he would have had it spin in place to block my view of him. Either of those actions would have saved his life in that moment. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t that quick on his feet, and I’d focused all of greater telekinesis’s strength on grabbing hold of his head.

It was hard to blame him. His shield ward failed, he’d woken back up to an immense amount of pressure, and he was already involved in a high-stakes running battle across the city. Anyone could make a mistake. It was just that his mistake allowed me to rip his head clean off his body and send it flying several hundred feet into the air.

The construct didn’t disappear or fall over, but without its creator to give it new baseline commands, it wound down to a stop in the middle of the street. Blood splashed across its chest and ran down its legs to pool in the dirt as the corpse it was holding went limp.

“Damn,” I said. “That didn’t go to plan at all.”