emergencycomplaints
patreon
Book 5, Chapter 56
🕑 Added 2024-12-26 15:12:26 +0000 UTCAmmun’s shadow rejoined the fight about twenty seconds later, which, while entirely expected, didn’t make things any easier for me to deal with. Suddenly, I had twice as many spells coming at me, with a disproportionate number of them being attacks on my mind. That was a losing strategy on Ammun’s part, and I knew that he knew better. More attempts at distracting me the same way wouldn’t make it more difficult to shrug them off, so I had to assume he was trying something else.
Were the mind spikes a screen for a different spell, and if so, what could Ammun possibly think would actually take hold on me? All mages were resistant to mental attacks to some degree, and I was an archmage. Not only that, I had wards designed specifically to prevent these kinds of spells from affecting me.
After that one mage of his had trapped me in an illusory world spell for a few seconds, I’d made sure to strengthen my defenses against that kind of magic. Even if I hadn’t, this was an entirely different situation where I was on my guard instead of walking into a friendly encampment. I couldn’t see any plan that started with a barrage of mental probes ending in success.
With the mines more or less cleared out, I activated the first layer of my trap. The soul tether between lich and phylactery was generally considered inviolable, and for good reason. Even the most powerful archmage would struggle to sever it with a cooperative victim. A lich who was fighting back took that proposition completely off the table.
In this case, however, I was reasonably certain that the mana flow coming from the moon was something grafted on to that tether, and it was a lot more vulnerable to being modified. That was why, when I gave the mental command to the ring of ward stones I’d planted around our battlefield, a shimmering dome appeared that acted as a mana filter.
Ammun stopped for a moment to scan what had just happened. “That’s it? That’s your big plan?” He laughed and gestured up at the moon. “You have no idea how much mana is up there, do you? Your attempt at slowing down my mana feed was entirely successful. I’d estimate I have, oh, I don’t know, three percent less mana coming into me each second while I’m inside the field. If you made it thirty times stronger, then I’d have to worry about conserving my resources.”
I was sure he was exaggerating the numbers a bit, but he was right in general terms. The filter didn’t limit him in any practical way, but that wasn’t the point. Still, I gritted my teeth and put on an annoyed expression for half a second. It was in my best interest to let him think I’d played my hand and failed to have any appreciable impact.
At the same time he was gloating, my shadow reached the wave of golems besieging my family and tore into them like a shark through a school of minnow. I’d had a lot of practice against this particular style of golem already, and I’d taken several apart to get a better idea of exactly how they worked.
My shadow ripped them apart at far greater speeds than I’d managed the first time I’d encountered Ammun’s golem legion. In less than a minute, five of them were nothing but piles of rubble on the ground with their golem cores completely shredded to prevent them from reforming. At the same time, Senica was screaming and trying to blast my shadow with great gouts of fire.
That was the moment I realized I’d never actually explained the concept of a mage’s shadow to her, let alone shown her mine. Fortunately for both of us, she didn’t actually have the ability to hurt it or even slow it down. My shadow ignored her and continued its work. After a few more seconds of panicked casting, she seemed to realize it wasn’t there to hurt her and got back to her own work defending the small refuge from the invaders.
Ammun must have been keeping an eye on the situation as well, because his face fell the instant my shadow arrived. He’d probably been hoping to kidnap my family in a bid to keep me pliable if he failed to overwhelm me outright, but that was off the table now.
“All your plans are falling apart now,” I told him as I deflected a burst of necrotic energy that would have chewed the flesh right off my bones if I’d let it connect. “Your invasion failed. The targeted attacks failed. That deal your generals tried to broker in your absence? I’m not even sure how involved you were with that one, but it failed, too.”
“Minor victories, of no consequence in the grand scheme of things,” he said dismissively. “The only real obstacle here is you, and you can’t stop me. Even if, by some miracle, you manage to defeat me on the field today, I’ll be back. And if you beat me next time, I’ll come back again, and again, and again. I am immortal, a feat you were too cowardly to reach for.”
What an idiot.
“Your allies are being whittled down, but my forces are eternal,” he went on. “Break their bodies. It doesn’t matter. I’ll put them back together or build new ones. Where will you be when you have no one to help you? No supplier for your alchemical experiments, no subcontractor for your enchanting work, no lab assistant to help you carry the load?”
It was embarrassing that this guy was my most successful apprentice. I’d always thought of myself as a good teacher, but really, if he was the only student still left, and none of my other, brighter, more successful apprentices had managed to stop him, what did that say about me?
I supposed it said that I hadn’t felt a great need to step up and right global wrongs that didn’t affect me, and I’d imparted that attitude into my apprentices. Probably none of them had felt the slightest inkling of a desire to interfere with Ammun and the cabal he was battling it out with until it was already too late.
Or maybe he’d murdered them all before things had gotten to that point. I hadn’t found any mention of any of them in the history books, so that was certainly a possibility. Honestly, my specialty was teaching magic, not ethics. I probably should have hired somebody else to do that part.
The whole time he was monologuing at me, his shadow was bombarding me with more mental intrusions and my shadow was successfully fending off the attacking golems. They’d broken down the earthen bulwark blocking the portal after just a few minutes, but that had bought Senica enough time for reinforcements to arrive, despite her not knowing any such thing would happen.
Now the shadow had finished destroying the last of the golems on the island and was flying straight through the portal, where it planned to close it from the other side. With any luck, it would lead us to one of Ammun’s hidden facilities and not just some random staging point. As much as the gestalt had been watching the entire country of Ralvost, I had to believe that portal originated from some place warded and probably underground.
That place, apparently, had thousands and thousands of golems yet to be activated. My shadow entered an enormous underground bunker, probably a mile long, stuffed to the gills with rack after rack of inert golems. An open floor in the middle had enough space to hold a few hundred golems and the wall the portal was mounted on, which was an intricate piece of clockwork made to shift the rune sequence around.
That was an interesting design, and more complicated than I was willing to give Ammun credit for coming up with. I’d made something similar once, but it turned out to be too delicate and not worth the effort just to save some space. It had ended up in a storage vault somewhere, where…
Where Ammun had probably looted it and repurposed it. That bastard. That was my modular portal!
With firm orders to shut that portal down and rip the whole facility apart, my shadow got to work. Immediately, new golems started waking up, likely at a remote command from Ammun, but the portal went down first. After that, it didn’t much matter whether the golems were awake or not. It would be a lengthy job, but every last one of them was going to be destroyed unless Ammun managed to get there personally in time to defend them.
That wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t leaving our battle alive, not without killing me.
By now, the mana filter had been up for a good thirty seconds. Ammun had reacted to it, dismissed it, and renewed his assault on me. We circled each other, hurling massive conjurations at each other and warding off cataclysmic spells while the ground below ruptured and broke under the strain. This particular area would be scarred for decades, maybe longer, unless I bothered to come clean it up later.
If he was ignoring the mana filter, that meant he hadn’t realized what else I’d snuck into it. Perfect. That was the opening stages of my plan successfully completed. Only three more steps to go. With a thought, I expanded the next field from my warding ring. It was considerably wider than the mana filter, and for good reason. Ammun would definitely notice it, and with any luck, he’d think all he needed to do was escape the bounds of the mana filter to get free of this one as well.
At the same instant I activated the warding ring, he vanished. My eyes widened and flicked around, trying to locate him by sight when my divinations failed to get a lock on him. There’d been no flare of teleportation magic, nothing to indicate that he’d relocated himself, but both him and his shadow had completely disappeared.
It had to be some sort of trick. Of course it was. It took me all of three seconds to realize what he’d done. This was the purpose behind the constant bombardment of my mind, to do the same thing I was doing to him: give me too much background noise to pick out the real threat when it finally hit. Ammun wasn’t gone; he was forcing my mind to ignore him. He was probably right in front of me, but he’d successfully forced an attention redirection spell on me.
It'd last for seconds at most, but maybe that was all he needed. I immediately poured all my energy into defense, reinforcing my shield ward and pulling a full aegis of force magic around my body. I layered a phantasmal shell over that, then pulled two palm-sized ward stones out of my phantom space and poured mana into them. New wards popped up around me, one that locked out all forms of teleportation, and one that countered all mind-influencing effects.
Ammun snapped back in focus, directly in front of me. A flat disc, a foot wide and made of platinum, floated between his two hands, concentric circles of runes carved into its surface. Mana crackled as it surged through the runes, gathering at the center point and ready to lance out.
I had at most a fraction of a second to respond, not enough time to cast a single spell, but enough to cancel my flight magic and start falling. Then a beam the width of my finger struck my force aegis and sliced through it like it wasn’t there. The beam tracked my descent as Ammun angled the disc, quickly overpowering my shield ward.
I twisted in place, my spell almost complete, when it struck me. The beam lanced cleanly through my stomach, disintegrating flesh, organs, and a chunk of my spine all before I could blink, and suddenly all I could feel was burning pain with nothing below it.
My teleport spell took hold, just strong enough to move me a thousand feet behind Ammun. I reappeared, my legs limp below me and my hands strangely numb. Blood poured out of my stomach down both the front and back, but my flight magic caught me and held me stable. I didn’t need my legs to keep fighting.
In a way, this was a good thing. It looked like Ammun had been so intent on his surprise attack that he hadn’t realized the second field had activated. I honestly couldn’t have asked for more.
It was time to bring it all together and end this before I passed out from blood loss in the next few minutes.
Comments
Anne
Wow, Kieran gets a major injury but is unfazed!
lenkite
I feel he really should have prepared more anti-undead offenses. He has ignored them too much. The one anti-undead spell that he tried against him was the most critical one and had the most effectiveness.
M
dammn, doing good, keep going. Can't believe Ammun keeps copying him and still manages to last this long.
