Book 2, Chapter 22

The far side of the lake led to just as much a mess of sewer tunnels as the first part had been, forcing me to scry the tunnels to find a way out. They didn’t seem to be laid out in any sort of logical pattern, though I was suspected they corresponded with the streets above. Maybe if more of them were intact, it would be easier to see how it was all supposed to fit together.

My scry sensor went up and down tunnels, trying different passages more or less at random while I built my mental map of the place. I’d been at it for about five minutes when my scrying revealed a passage that had been dug out of a wall. It was clearly not part of the original sewer system, meaning somebody had come along after everything had been wrecked and made a modification.

That probably meant that it was the right way to go. I started walking that way while my scrying sensor swept the rest of the tunnels. Halfway there, I paused. I’d found a ladder leading up to the surface, but in the opposite direction of the the hand-dug passage. That was my exit, but if I took it now, I’d be leaving the mystery of what someone, probably a mage, had been doing making modifications underground.

It didn’t escape my notice that the suspicious tunnel went back in the direction of the lake. If it hadn’t warranted further investigation just by virtue of its existence, that would have sealed the deal for me. That having been said, my primary goal at this point was to determine if it was safe to establish a hidden teleportation beacon. By their very nature, they were meant to be eminently visible, and though I’d taken steps to make sure the one I’d set up in the outer city was veiled by wards, that did not make it impossible to find.

I’d simply judged it worth the risk since I didn’t plan on actually staying in that ruined building. If an enforcer managed to find it, it wouldn’t lead to me. I doubted any of those weak excuses for mages could actually see through my wards, but it was technically possible. The inner city, on the other hand, was likely to have a few skilled practitioners of the arcane arts, at least if I was judging them by the two mages they’d sent out to attack my home village a month back.

Then again, calling them ‘skilled’ might be going overboard. I’d tutored literal ten-year-olds who were more capable than the mages I’d fought against, though admittedly they’d all been the scions of wealthy noble houses given access to every resource they could possibly want and trained from the time they could walk. Maybe it wasn’t fair to compare them to the mages here. These mages had been forced to concoct elaborate schemes to harvest mana from thousands of people in order to gain the resources they did have, and that still wasn’t much.

I located a dead-end tunnel that nobody would have any reason to visit, then marched over there to set up the wards that would shield my teleportation beacon from detection. Those were visible by necessity, since they were relying on inscriptions physically carved into the ground. I kept the space as small as possible, a bare three-foot circle. Once they were completed and empowered, I inscribed my teleportation beacon in the center. With any luck, no one would sense anything.

On the off chance that someone did come looking, I used stone shape to raise a dome just a little bit taller than me over the whole circle, then spent twenty minutes and far more mana than I should have telekinetically dragging rubble forward to cover it. From the perspective of anyone using only their eyes, it looked like nothing so much as a dead end that stopped a few feet earlier than it used to. Unless they were intimately familiar with what the collapsed sewer tunnel had looked like before, I couldn’t imagine anyone guessing there was something hidden under the pile of stone.

Idly, I wondered if it would have taken less mana to stone shape the pile itself to allow access to the ground beneath it than it was to move the pile over to cover what I’d done next to it. It was probably a wash, but at least this way I didn’t have to deal with loose stones trying to fall on my head while I worked. No matter how I looked at it, I was still ahead a decent amount of mana thanks to my time at the lake.

With my retreat secured, my options were to leave, explore at street level, or investigate the tunnel that had been added to the sewer network. The third option was the one I was most curious about, so I started making my way back in the direction of the lake while I sent my scrying sensor ahead. In the interest of remaining undetected, I didn’t look past the tunnel itself. I needed to know what the ward situation looked like, if it existed at all.

Once I reached the place where brickwork turned into rough-hewn stone, I paused and placed a hand on the wall. It took me ten seconds and four full cores worth of mana to generate a pulse of ward scanner that swept down the tunnel, a cost I considered well worth it when my spell found a ward line about fifty feet in front of me.

Wards weren’t inviolable. There were ways to get around them or cut through them, and if they weren’t cleverly designed, destroying one might not even alert the mage who’d laid it down. I padded down the tunnel until I reached it, then kneeled down to examine it closer.

Unlike my veiling ward that hid the teleportation beacon or a ward stone with complex inscriptions carved on it, this one was an intangible ward made of pure magic. It had a detection trigger keyed to proximity that circled the entire tunnel like a ring. It would not be possible to avoid setting it off by crawling across the ceiling or flying through the center. Dispelling it would also trigger the ward since it was set up as a dead man’s switch.

Bypassing it was possible, but would probably be expensive. Since it relied on a proximity trigger, the easiest way to get around it would be to use a spell like earth swim to ghost through the ground outside the tunnel and then step back in later. Easy was not the same as cheap, and earth swim used over twice the mana flight did, not to mention that it would be at a literal swim speed, so I’d need to channel it for longer than the flight across the lake took me. The distance I’d need to earth swim to avoid the ward was long enough that teleportation might actually be the cheaper alternative.

The absolute cheapest way to defeat the ward would be to do something similar to what I’d done to Iskara’s paralysis traps, where I worked tendrils of my own mana through the spell and broke it apart. It would even give me a bit of mana if I did it right. This particular ward was far more complicated than anything Iskara had made though, so it would be something of a time investment to do it properly.

Then there was the simplest solution. The ward wasn’t connected in any way to the mage who’d cast it. I could just walk into it, let it trigger whatever it was going to do, and deal with the consequences. As far as I could see from my initial examination, the ward was holding down another spell that had been cast, which was why dispelling it wasn’t an option unless I wanted to deal with that second spell in some way.

Getting a look at that second spell was a bit trickier, but necessary if I was going to unravel the ward and slip my own magical weight into its place. I poked at it for a minute, determined to get a good look at what I was dealing with, then stopped and started laughing.

I should have known it would be something simple. The detection ward’s only purpose was to release a summon shadow construct spell that would, presumably, stalk whoever set off the ward. Shadow constructs weren’t dangerous, nor were they difficult to destroy. I could walk through this ward, spend three seconds destroying the construct it unleashed, and continue on my way.

I took another minute to make sure there wasn’t anything hidden under the shadow construct spell or farther down the tunnel, but as far as I could see, everything had come up clear. It wasn’t really worth the additional ten minutes to pick apart such a low-powered ward for the extra mana, not when I’d generate more in my own core just staring at the wall in that timespan, so I strode through.

The ward flashed out of existence, its purpose spent when it detected my presence. Without it there, the secondary spell collapsed down, completing its own mana pattern and forming the construct. Really, the fact that the spell had been set up to trigger upon the ward collapsing was more impressive than the actual construct itself.

Shadow constructs were essentially invisible in a dark tunnel like this. Even with my light spell illuminating my way, there were still plenty of shadows, and it slunk through them as it watched me. Without knowing that it was there, I might have missed the faint ripple it left in the darkness as it flowed around behind me to take its position.

I scrunched my eyes closed, raised one hand to cover them, and lifted my staff in the air. Mana flowed out from the crystal into the smooth wood, shaped by my will, and a handy little spell called light bomb erupted over my head. Even through my hands, I saw spots in my vision.

I mentally watched the animating enchantment for the shadow construct unravel as I took a blind step toward it. The construct was farther away than I liked, but I managed to capture some of the ambient mana before it could disperse into nothingness. It was probably only half what I would have gotten if I’d been able to capture and drain the construct completely, but that would have required far more work in addition to the mana spent keeping it restrained.

I dismissed my staff back into my phantom space and sighed. It was proving to be a decent work-around tool, but all of my magic was harder to cast because I was essentially using my mana crystal as an external core. Spells were weaker, more difficult, and took more mana, though the staff itself helped mitigate that last issue.

A stage three core would help immensely. My total capacity would be ten times higher than it was now, but if I advanced at such a young age when my core was only a quarter the size of an adults, it would stunt my long-term growth. My original plan had called for some very complicated and expensive rituals to age myself up faster, but I had nowhere near the mana reserves needed for that. I could only hope to find something to help in the Wolf Pack’s coffers after I hunted them down.

Blinking rapidly to help clear my eyes, I finished settling the mana I’d stolen from the shadow construct into my crystal and started walking down the tunnel again. My ward scanner spell hadn’t shown me any other wards ahead, but that didn’t mean it was completely safe. Mechanical traps were my biggest concern, since I’d already confirmed the lack of wards and my ability to feel mana would alert me to anything living coming my way, unless of course they knew how to shield their mana core like I did.

Maybe I would run the occasional pulse of life sense as well, just to be safe. Whatever was down here, someone was protecting it. It would be foolish to assume one pitiful shadow construct was the limits of this area’s defenses, especially considering the giant fish monsters I’d already encountered.

Five minutes of careful exploration later, I stood in front of a barred metal door that practically glowed with mana in my eyes. Unless I missed my guess, I was right above the edge of the underground lake. I wondered if I’d find the owner of that overblown fish tank on the other side.