emergencycomplaints

Book 2, Chapter 31

We walked for about two minutes before I got tired of my mother’s silent judgment. “Just say what’s on your mind,” I told her.

“You should help the rest of them too,” she said after a moment.

“I will, provided the village agrees to my terms.”

Mother shook her hea...

Book 2, Chapter 30

This time of day, the villagers were busy in the fields or gardens. The children were in school, and only a few of the older generation who’d grown too weak to continue working were relaxing. Of course, that included our nosy neighbor, Malra. She spotted us as soon as we left the hut. I knew be...

Book 2, Chapter 29

Even with a teleportation beacon, the spell was not cheap. If Father hadn’t been the one supplying the mana to keep it active on the scrying mirror I’d left him, it wouldn’t have been worth the effort. Keeping it active for over a month had cost him far more mana than it saved me.

I a...

Book 2, Chapter 28

Under normal circumstances, a mana battery’s job was to provide a source of redundancy to the ambient mana in the air. Most enchantments, at least the ones I’d made or interacted with in my previous life, were designed to keep themselves powered indefinitely, but experiments could have uninte...

Book 2, Chapter 27

The only good news was that the aura around Freak faded away as his regrown top-half solidified. My best guess was that it was some sort of life shell that was powered by the souls of victims. He’d probably used it on that cat monster right before he’d cast incendiary organs and blew it to pi...

Book 2, Chapter 26

The chimeric aberrations were nothing but a distraction at this point. Fighting them was a waste of time, one that I couldn’t afford unless I wanted to let my opponent unleash the entire menagerie on me. I had better uses for my mana, and killing them all now would prevent me from harvesting th...

Book 2, Chapter 25

I’d been studying Freak since he’d revealed himself to me, mostly to determine how best to kill him when he made his move. He had a shield ward of some type built into his robe, probably a very basic one. Flexible cloth rarely made for good material for inscription, though I’d seen some mag...

Book 2, Chapter 24

Whoever had set up this operation had devoted a lot of mana to keeping it hidden. I breached the mana shielding enchantment right as I passed from the hallway into the main grow chamber. Between one step and the next, I went from being unable to sense any mana at all to it practically exploding i...

Book 2, Chapter 23

I had to be overthinking things. For the past five minutes, I’d been poking at this door, trying to figure out what the trick was. It wasn’t warded at all. There were no magical traps. I’d even gone so far as to waste mana on a second ward scanner spell to confirm there weren’t any sort o...

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 th...

Book 2, Chapter 21

I curved sharply to the left, but even as I altered my flight trajectory, I suspected it was a useless gesture. The gigantic monster that was already chasing my light orb continued to do so, but its friend appeared to be much smarter. It ascended through the water at an angle altered to match my ...

Book 2, Chapter 20

Even blinded, I could feel the mana swimming around under the surface of the lake. And it was fast, far faster than I’d be able to move that row boat even if I were a grown man enhancing my muscles with an invocation. The light orb the monster had snatched out of the air had been high up, close...

Book 2, Chapter 19

Almost the entirety of the roof was made of glass. I hadn’t seen a single piece since arriving in Derro, so finding a skylight over a hundred feet wide was unexpected, to say the least. It wasn’t all one piece, of course, but each pane was big enough that I could have used it as a bed, and th...

Book 2, Chapter 18

It was a five-minute walk through the dark to reach the first intersection. I’d have probably broken my neck tripping over rubble if not for my light spell. Tanner sucked in a breath when he saw it, but otherwise just nodded and started walking. I noticed he kept one hand on the wall anyway. Ma...

Book 2, Chapter 17

Knocking the last enforcer out was easy. Doing so in a way that allowed the prisoners to go free was not. In fact, it was downright impossible. I’d initially assumed he would have the keys to the large shared cell and the individual cells on him, but that turned out to not be the case. I’d th...

Book 2, Chapter 16

Unlike the Repository, the enforcers tower had nothing in the way of wards. Perhaps no one thought it was necessary when the place was filled with adepts who specialized in violence. I’d initially mistaken them for true mages, but the more I studied them, the more convinced I became that each k...

Book 2, Chapter 15

I was not particularly surprised to find the street kids’ home abandoned. They’d left all their possessions behind, presumably because they planned to return later, but with the enforcers out in number, the best way to keep their home from being discovered was not to be there. I didn’t know...

Book 2, Chapter 14

I was up early the next day. It had taken a bit, but I was finally starting to pull my schedule back around to sleeping at night. My first act of the day was to go over my progress, especially important since I planned on invading enemy territory soon.

My phantom space was once more whole a...

Book 2, Chapter 13

My sister was a rare talent when it came to magic, and my father wasn’t that far behind her. I’d tutored four villagers and they’d all performed with varying degrees of competency in different fields. None of them had stuck out to me, but all of them had been able to grasp the basics. To so...

Book 2, Chapter 12

The mage wasn’t what I was expecting. For one thing, he was at most seventeen years old. He had a thin, lanky frame and fine brown hair that was in disarray from the wind generated by his own spells. In one hand, he held a baton with a storage crystal capping it. It was relatively big, as far a...

Book 2, Chapter 11

There was a big rock in the corner of my hideout, about two and a half times the size of the one I’d used for my first mana crystal. If I were in an adult body with an adult-sized mana core, it would have been no problem to start converting it over. But even though my core had grown bigger over...

Book 2, Chapter 10

The odds of Tanner actually coming through with a shard seemed long to me. If he managed it, then fantastic. I’d give him a few remedial lessons, he’d show me how to bypass the wall, and everyone would be happy. In the meantime, I planned to keep looking into alternate ways to sneak into the ...

Book 2, Chapter 9

The plan was simple. I’d go a block or two over and let myself get spotted, run from them for another few blocks, then ambush them and find out what they wanted. I’d only been inside my hideout for a few minutes, so with any luck, they would think I’d just temporarily evaded them and not li...

Book 2, Chapter 8

I waited on my rooftop hiding spot until the guards had finished sweeping the area. They were thorough and I had no doubt that if I hadn’t been able to fully shield my mana core, they would have found me. In the end, though, there were just too many potential hiding spots and they didn’t have...

Book 2, Chapter 7

Now that I knew to look for it, it wasn’t hard to spot the leech stones filled with mana all over the city. People kept them in bags or purses regularly, and my biggest issue was in identifying them. They weren’t always full, so a halfshard that was almost empty and a tenner that was almost f...

Book 2, Chapter 6

Draw stones stole mana out of the environment around it, not that there was any here to take. It also took it from people or animals who came into contact with it, and it did it quickly. If that were the end of it, draw stones would quickly fill up and become inert. Every draw stone would just be...

Book 2, Chapter 5

I landed in what appeared to be some sort of child-sized nest of ragged cloth scraps. It made my own clothes seem clean by comparison, and I quickly disentangled myself from what I assumed was some homeless kid’s bed. Thankfully, Derro didn’t seem to believe in one-room buildings like my birt...

Book 2, Chapter 4

I did most of my walking at night when it was far cooler out in the wastelands. There was the added danger of nocturnal predators, but it was outweighed by the mana savings from not having my stamina drained faster from walking in the heat. For the next few days, I’d start out in the evenings, ...

Book 2, Chapter 3

Monster hunting was boring. At least, it was for me. There was a lot of tedious and time-consuming work finding the monster, a brief moment of action killing it, and then more tedium removing whatever parts of it were useful. Worse, I didn’t actually know what was worth the effort to harvest. P...

Book 2, Chapter 2

Since my reincarnation in the village of Alkerist, I’d been forced to make do with almost no mana and no equipment. My workshops were a world away in the Night Vale, a place I couldn’t even point in the right direction to right now. I’d made some rudimentary devices by making liberal use of...