The next three weeks were some of the most restful I’d had in months despite all the extra work I had to do. The first order of business was to expand the garden, which thankfully was handled by the adults. Then we got it seeded and I used a spell called mass plant growth to speed everything up...
2024-03-25 14:05:48 +0000 UTC View PostFixing broken bones earned me a bit of goodwill, but street kids didn’t dismiss suspicion easily, so other than some muttered thanks from the kids I’d actually healed, I didn’t get much in the way of gratitude. Mostly, what changed was that no one tried to throw me out, and the kids didn’...
2024-03-22 14:26:32 +0000 UTC View PostRouri, as it turned out, wasn’t a great source of information. She knew where her fellow cabal-mates lived and worked, and she was willing to point them out when I used Swarm’s scrying orb to scan the inner city—now that I knew what kinds of wards the walls had on them, I was able to slip p...
2024-03-21 13:12:19 +0000 UTC View Post“Everyone who knows about Sibilant doesn’t seem to want to talk about him,” I said. “So I’m thinking he’s either the power behind the throne, or he’s your spymaster. And since you’re obviously the cabal’s hatchet man—one of them, at least—you seem like the kind of person who...
2024-03-20 14:38:58 +0000 UTC View PostAs soon as I felt my wards split to let something through, I cast a force wave to throw everything around me back. The assassin mage was hurled into the wall, losing whatever tool she was using to bypass my wards. That tool struck me on the shoulder, splitting open my shirt and drawing a hot, pai...
2024-03-19 14:07:41 +0000 UTC View PostI didn’t get much done that day, not after I finished reading that book. Details were light after that one passage, mostly speculation since it appeared that nobody quite knew exactly what had happened after Ammun had blown an entire moon out of the sky and sent it raining down on Manoch in a t...
2024-03-18 14:09:55 +0000 UTC View PostI settled into my new hideout on the north side of the city, ironically only a block away from an enforcer tower. The whole quadrant was far more heavily trafficked for some reason, but this was only a temporary base for me, so I didn’t worry about finding something perfect for my needs. It jus...
2024-03-11 15:37:33 +0000 UTC View PostThere was no way I was going to catch up to Juby on foot, but fortunately for me, I didn’t have to. Shadow leap had some sharp limitations, one of which was being able to see where I wanted to jump to. Normally, that would limit me to line of sight jumps only, but it was possible to combine it ...
2024-03-11 15:37:16 +0000 UTC View PostAs amusing as it was to watch Blue Rat squirm, I did have other problems to take care of. We waited in silence a moment to confirm that no one was going to pop up in response to his kill signal, then I said, “Look, I’m not here to kill you. I just have a message for the Wolf Pack. I’m sure ...
2024-03-11 15:36:55 +0000 UTC View PostI walked into a building about a mile away from Blue Rat’s office. It was on an otherwise unoccupied street that looked like it had been the site of a battle between two equally matched mages of middling skill, which was to say that a lot of explosive magic had gone off over a wide area. For ex...
2024-03-11 15:36:42 +0000 UTC View PostAfter 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, a...
2024-03-11 15:36:13 +0000 UTC View PostUPDATE: Apparently, in its infinite wisdom, Patreon has decided that pauses can only be scheduled in month-long blocks. Since I don't want a month off, but I also don't want to charge everybody for a week I'm not producing content, I've decided to dump a week's backlog all at once so I do...
2024-03-08 12:45:57 +0000 UTC View PostSwarm 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 limb...
2024-03-08 12:41:47 +0000 UTC View PostI gave myself a moment to take it all in. There was a ring on his finger with a Wolf Pack signet. He was more than twice my height and probably weighed eight or nine times as much as me, all of it muscle. His head was shaved, and he was bare-chested. Most importantly, his skin shimmered with mana...
2024-03-07 12:37:28 +0000 UTC View PostI stepped into the room at the top of the castle. There had been two guards outside the door, both dead now. I dragged the bodies in with me using greater telekinesis and deposited them in the corner. Unlike the noble girl, these ones had been armed with simple weapons and no magic. If they hadn...
2024-03-06 13:09:38 +0000 UTC View PostI studied the woman’s sullen expression for a moment. Whatever was going through her head, she still wasn’t afraid for her life. Probably the fact that the person menacing her was a four-year-old contributed heavily to that lack of fear. My staff was so tall that I had to stand on my toes to ...
2024-03-05 12:37:11 +0000 UTC View PostThe archives hadn’t held all the answers I’d hoped to find, but I had learned enough interesting information from them that it had been worth the effort to break in. There was a private library a few floors up attached to a suite of rooms I also planned to investigate, and if possible, I was ...
2024-03-04 12:36:12 +0000 UTC View PostI made a detour back down into the sewer tunnels to drain away more mana from the traps left behind. There wasn’t a lot left, but I had time to kill while I waited for night so I could begin navigating toward the building I’d decided was most likely the home of Velvet. There were only so many...
2024-03-01 12:39:48 +0000 UTC View PostWhoever set the traps around Freak’s lair wasn’t very good at it. They were enthusiastic, though – I’d give them that. After disarming the twelfth trap in the same tunnel, I had to wonder if it wasn’t some sort of strategy designed to waste an intruder’s time and try their patience. 2024-02-29 12:35:15 +0000 UTC View Post
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.
* * *
I spent the next few hours slowly circling the entire city, doing my best to stay within a b...
2024-02-28 12:31:13 +0000 UTC View PostIt took the masked man a fraction of a second to realize the enchantment wasn’t working on me, and he immediately responded with violence. His leg snapped up in a roundhouse kick heading directly for my face, not a stretch to reach that height when I was so short. It was so fast that there was ...
2024-02-27 12:33:26 +0000 UTC View PostBlue Rat snapped a finger and pointed at the couch. “Map,” he said.
The book-reader, Myumi, sighed and stood up. I glanced at the book she left behind on a couch just to see the title, The Restless Duchess and the Errant Knight, and blinked. That… wasn’t a sword on the cove...
2024-02-26 12:32:48 +0000 UTC View PostI wasn’t terribly surprised to see a familiar face waiting for me with the group that hadn’t left the house. There wasn’t a lot of detail to be gleaned about a person based just on my sense of their mana, but one of those things was relative size. Mana was in the chest, and based on where e...
2024-02-23 12:34:59 +0000 UTC View PostThe wards shielding my hideout from detection were still active. I was almost certainly safe here, but I couldn’t see any good reason to risk hanging around. Other than the mana I’d invested in the place, I had no connection or attachment to this particular building.
I gathered the leec...
2024-02-22 12:38:51 +0000 UTC View PostI didn’t sleep well that night, partially because my mind was consumed with thoughts of my return to Derro, something that I was both eager for and dreaded. I wanted that business closed as soon as possible and I hoped to find some clues about what exactly had happened to the world and the miss...
2024-02-21 12:35:49 +0000 UTC View PostI had three goals to accomplish in the next few hours. First, we needed to get the garden planted back in the ground. Second, we needed to raise some kind of shelter. Third, we needed a ward stone to protect us while we slept. That third one, at least, I’d been able to work on before we telepor...
2024-02-20 12:24:35 +0000 UTC View PostTeleporting multiple people was harder than teleporting one person, but not by much. The easiest way to do it was to inscribe a runic construct commonly referred to as a teleportation circle, though it was more accurate to call it a modifier that changed how spells with individual targets worked....
2024-02-19 12:31:44 +0000 UTC View PostI had two spots in mind for our new home. The first was a crescent-shaped plateau on the side of a mountain about a quarter mile wide. It didn’t have any trails leading up to it that I’d found, and if I did discover one later on, it’d be easy enough to collapse. As far as defensibility went...
2024-02-16 12:48:31 +0000 UTC View PostFather’s hesitation upon entering the hut was not lost on me. He wasn’t surprised to see me, but he had the air of a man dreading a task he knew he couldn’t put off any longer. After glancing at the row of potted plants I’d left lined up by the wall to be moved to the arbor, he slumped do...
2024-02-15 12:35:43 +0000 UTC View PostI received three visitors over the next hour while I finished up my preparations. None of them were as bad off as Karad had been, but each one resulted in another ten-minute break. Karad himself came to the manor with the third one, and not just because the man had needed someone to help him make...
2024-02-14 12:36:03 +0000 UTC View Post