Book 2, Chapter 42

Author's Note: I incorrectly labeled yesterday's chapter as "42" when it was supposed to say "41." I've fixed the title and here is the real chapter 42.

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I spent the next few hours slowly circling the entire city, doing my best to stay within a block or two of the wall. I ran into some problems on the west side of the city, which was apparently the richest outer-wall area. It was more heavily patrolled by enforcers and even had quite a few regular, non-baton-holding guards. People were cleaner and dressed in better clothes, and the number of abandoned and ruined buildings cut drastically the farther west I went.

I stood out starkly on that side of the city. My own clothes were clean, but they were old, worn out, thread-bare, and torn in places. I was also a small child, unattended and wandering the streets alone. That didn’t fly in the more affluent neighborhoods, and it drew enough unwanted attention to me that I ended up diverting my course back out of the district and circling the long way around near the edge of the city where I drew less attention.

I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did have plenty of time to think. When I’d first come to Derro, I’d felt a lot of pressure to act quickly and decisively, but with my family finally out of harm’s way, I could reevaluate my timetable. I’d been acting as if I were in a race to tie up the Wolf Pack’s attention in an attempt to keep them from dispatching more of their agents to Alkerist. That would be a shame if it happened now, but I wasn’t quite so willing to risk my own life rushing forward to save those of the village.

I’d allowed myself a month to prepare for my trip to Derro, and while I felt I’d done well, I’d taken some risks that could have been mitigated with another few weeks of preparation and a bit more selfishness with my mana. For one thing, I needed a significantly larger mana crystal so that I could properly harvest the spoils of my battles. If I’d had that, I could have banked far more of the mana I’d taken from Freak’s lab instead of feeding it into that mana battery. It was incredibly inefficient to use it the way I had, and I’d barely left enough mana behind to keep the enchantments in the house going for a few weeks without being recharged.

I also needed to focus more on my plan to raid the Repositories to speed up my own growth. It was less necessary now since I’d already begun my probe into the inner city, but the mana stored in those buildings would still be useful to me. Besides, it was always a good idea to deny an enemy their resources.

It was tempting to just hunker down, spend a week or two generating the mana I needed to bring myself back to maximum capacity, and fly over the top of the wall. It would almost certainly trigger some sort of defense, but if I was completely topped off, I thought I had a good chance of fighting my way through and dispelling any tracers that might latch onto me. If I could have guaranteed myself a good hiding place in the inner city, I would have already begun preparations.

Instead, I did my slow circuit around the city, ending it on the south side near the grow room Hyago’s gang had created. It looked like that was going to be my only way in after all, unless those trapped tunnels actually went where they were supposed to. Since that seemed unlikely to be the case, I’d just need to be careful of any traps Freak’s cabal-mates had left behind for me. On the bright side, going in that way would likely allow me to top my own reserves off with a little fishing trip, and then I could recover my monitoring enchantment along the way.

Before I descended back underground, I took the time to work some magic on the mask I’d taken from Yano. It was an interesting piece, carved from a single piece of wood and painted black. Two eye holes and a single slit under the nose were the only holes in it. It was far too big for me to wear, not that I had much reason to try since I’d already stripped the enchantment for mana.

Object reading gave me very little in the way of useful information since I was fighting to get past the Yano layer of ownership. Whoever he’d gotten it from hadn’t had it for very long. I got some vague impressions of a tall, handsome man with long hair styled in some elaborate braids who was dressed in something that wouldn’t have been out of place in a noble court. Yano had met him at a castle in the inner city, one I was confident I could find once I found my way past the wall again.

That nobleman, presumably Velvet, only had possession of the mask for a few days. He’d gotten it from someone else, another mage. Things got muddled from there as the mask broke down into the individual components that mage used to create the item. He was a stocky man with a thick beard and burn scars from metal splatter all over one arm. The only vision I was able to pull from the mask was the crafter hunched over a workbench, painting over the plain wood of the mask with a thick brush.

Once I’d extracted everything useful from the mask, I destroyed it with a burst of fire, then finished my circuit. It ended in an abandoned shop in the southern district, a two-story building with far too many shelves built into the walls to be anything but a place designed to display goods and wares. That, coupled with the stone framework for a counter that had probably once been mostly glass, told me I was settling in the ruins of a store for the night.

I set up the bare minimum detection and obfuscation wards, enough to let me know if anyone entered the building and to protect me from any sort of scrying. I stepped outside my wards and had a brief conversation with my father on my mirror, just long enough to assure him that everything was fine and that I was still working diligently on a solution to the problem.

I dreamed of summoning meteors from the sky to pummel the wall, then cleaving my enemies in two with a single flick of my wrist. Such spells existed; I knew the secrets to casting them. In my dreams, I had all the mana I could need.

* * *

I woke up feeling vaguely annoyed. My lack of mana was like an abscess in a bad tooth. I couldn’t help but be aware of it at all times, couldn’t stop myself from continually prodding at my mana core for signs of growth. The ointment of aging I used every morning was only going to last another week or so, and so far, I couldn’t tell if it was making any difference.

I’d need about six days to bring my mana reserves to maximum if I did it myself, but only about an hour or two if I went down to that lake and hunted that other big fish monster. It was a bit of a gamble, but I suspected no one wanted to tangle with the things living in that lake if they didn’t have to, which meant that any mages from the inner wall probably wouldn’t have crossed over to the other side to trap the outer wall portion of the sewers.

I could be wrong, of course. They might have known where the other end came out and just walked out one of the gates connecting the inner and outer city, laid their traps, and then went home to wait for me to stumble into them like an idiot. But I had a suspicion that Freak’s secret smuggling tunnel might have been so secret that not even the rest of the cabal knew about it. The things he’d been making in his labs were considered indecent, even back in my time.

I didn’t need to go through that grow room again to access it. Instead, I found a nearby sewer tunnel that only had about twenty feet of dirt to dig through and made my own connecting passage. No doubt someone would discover it eventually, but with their weird rules about bringing light into the sewers, I didn’t think it would happen anytime soon.

Once I was in the sewers, I kept my own light down to almost nothing, and made use of a pair of ward scanner spells to sweep the tunnels for traps. Everything came back clear, and my own sense for mana let me know that there was nobody down in the sewers with me. With nothing but my own memory to guide me, I made my way back to the lake.

I could feel the monsters in the water, deep down near the edge of my perception. None of them were the big one I was looking for, but I knew how to bring it to the surface. I sent my orb of light skimming across the black, opaque surface of the water and waited.

Smaller monsters showed up to investigate, but none of them breached the water, and my light was left to dangle uselessly, failed bait. I wondered if the fish monster had learned from the death of its companion. It hadn’t struck me as particularly intelligent, so perhaps there was a simpler solution. Maybe it was asleep. Or maybe someone else had beaten me to the harvest.

I released three more orbs and set them to rotating in a slow circle, hundreds of feet wide, while I considered what to do next. I could cross the lake anyway, but I’d planned on refilling my mana crystal to its maximum before moving forward. If I had to fight someone on Freak’s level again with my current reserves, well, I’d still win, but it would be a much more difficult fight. If two mages came at me at the same time, however, I’d be forced to retreat.

I cut my deliberations short when something appeared at the edge of my mana sense in the water. It was big, and it was full of mana. I smiled. It appeared I’d just been a bit too impatient. I’d never been much of a fisherman in my past life, and that quality had carried over.

My reserves were just large enough to cast rupture core with a bit of mana left over to keep me in the air, though I’d be relying on levitation and momentum to carry me out into the open water. If things didn’t go according to plan, I’d be swimming back to shore.

The fish monster breached the surface in an explosion of water that echoed across the lake and snapped at one of my light orbs. It danced away and, predictably, the monster gave chase. As soon as I could get it to come, I led it closer to my side of the lake, then took a running start and leaped into the air while casting levitation to float up and out thirty feet past the edge of the water.

“Come on up,” I muttered. “Get close so I can catch you.”

Without my mana sense, I wouldn’t have known it was coming and likely, I would have been eaten then and there. That would have been a pain to get free from, but it didn’t come to that. Just as the colossal fish monster started its leap out of the water, my spell hit it and split its core apart.

I hummed happily to myself as I got to work collecting the mana spilling uncontrolled from its broken core while the fish convulsed in pain. It was hardly a humane death, but I’d hit my quota for those this year already, and I recalled how hard it had been to seriously injure the first one of these I’d killed.

While I worked, I wondered if there might be a third one in the lake I could come back for when I needed another refill, but if so, it didn’t make itself known. A few minutes later, I touched down on the far side of the lake, my mana crystal and all of my various trinkets completely charged with mana. Idly, I noted that the boat on the north side of the lake was missing from its dock, most likely a sign that someone had come through here after all.

There was a time for haste, and there was a time for caution. This was the latter. Carefully, I started making my way toward the underground lab where I’d left my monitoring spell.