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Book 5, Chapter 52
🕑 Added 2024-12-20 12:18:22 +0000 UTCAmmun’s shadow fled the battle immediately. I let it go; there was no point in chasing after it. Destroying it would have done nothing but allowed him to reform it at his side once more. That might have cost him more mana than simply letting it return, but it wasn’t likely that he was going to run out.
Instead, I powdered the skeleton nearby and sent my shadow after the one we’d left a mile back. Without needing to use master-tier spells to destroy them, it was a quick, easy, efficient job that only took a minute. Normally, I’d have been pleased to make that trade off, but I was acutely aware that every second that passed was one that brought Ammun closer to finishing his control console to use a moon as a weapons platform.
I had no doubt there’d be other distractions between me and my goal, but I couldn’t take the time to weave my way through all of Ammun’s wards to properly scout them out. So, with his trio of undead dragons fully destroyed, I flew onward and hoped the next challenge would be easier to defeat.
The first ward wall showed up two miles later. It appeared as a solid sphere of repellent force, specifically designed to push back equally against anything brought to bear. Ammun had been thorough in its creation, even going so far as to form it underground. He’d probably carved the ward stone up on Yulitar and brought it with him, else he wouldn’t have had time to develop such a thorough defense.
Normally, my strategy for something like this would be to brute force it open. A handful of high-powered conjurations would quickly drain such a barrier, and with lossless casting, I’d lose nothing but some time. It was worth trying, but I didn’t expect it to succeed. While I considered how best to circumvent the ward, I hammered it with force lances, lightning bolts, explosions, and huge blocks of conjured ice and stone. Light played across the ward’s surface as it reflected the attacks back out, none of them even close to hitting me.
Against a normal mage, it was a potent defense, but anyone with the ability to remotely cast a spell even fifty feet away from their body could bypass the deflection completely. Once upon a time, that would have slowed me down, but these days, I sometimes needed a specially crafted staff to deliberately hinder the flow of mana in my spells when I was setting up something big. Remote casting wasn’t an issue, especially not with my shadow assisting me.
As I’d suspected, the ward held strong with no signs of stuttering mana flows that would indicate it was taking damage. Ammun had built the ward stone to hold an enormous amount of mana, far more than was practical, but which was perfect for his needs right now. I might break through in five minutes, or it might take me an hour. I had no way to tell.
The problem with these kinds of wards was that they functioned similarly to how I’d set my shield ward up, and that had a weakness intrinsic to the design: phantasmal spells. The solution to that was a simple one. Savvy mages simply placed a second layer to their ward, a phantasmal shell that only activated if the divinations detected an intruder trying to use something like phantasmal step to bypass the first layer.
An archmage, on the other hand, wouldn’t be content simply to repel the would-be intruder. If it were me, I would trap the second layer, cause it to invert the phantasmal step spell the intruder used, and shred them on the ward they got stuck in. It would be a particularly gruesome death, all that inverted kinetic energy being kicked back through a human body – quick, but gruesome.
That was exactly what Ammun had done. I couldn’t scry far past the ward, but I’d gone deep enough to see the trap for what it was. Seeing it and defeating it were two different things, but I had a good idea of how to do that. It wasn’t anything clever, either. Maybe I could have picked apart the ward, teased open the strands of mana woven through it, and slipped through, but Ammun already knew I was here. Why bother with subtlety? It was far easier to just set the trap off in a way that it wouldn’t catch me, then fly through right after.
To that end, I used the most direct and quickest solution: I sent my shadow in first. It didn’t have a physical body, not one that would be shredded by this trap, at least. It phantasmal stepped right through the kinetic ward with some assistance from me holding open the parts that would have interacted with its body, then got twisted and wrung out like a dirty rag by the phantasmal trap.
The instant the spell was done mauling my shadow, it snapped right back into shape, utterly unharmed. A moment later, we were both flying free past the outer ward. Spatial locking was still in effect, and I was now cut off from my divinations on the outside world, including my line to the gestalt entity, but Ammun himself was in sight.
His machine was a fifty-foot-tall spire built of interlocking metal bars covered in runes. The internal structure was complete, and he was busy fusing outer plates to it. It resembled a grain silo in the process of being constructed, except with a far more robust skeleton than was necessary for such a structure.
He was floating in the air above it, a few divinations swirling around him and inspecting it from various angles while three airborne golems attached the plates. The whole thing had an air of being a slapdash construction, something that could easily be knocked over and destroyed beyond repair. All of Ammun’s defenses felt like that, despite his obviously extensive preparations.
Those three weren’t the only golems, but the rest were obviously combat units. They locked in on me immediately, and my eyes narrowed as I studied them. If I wasn’t mistaken, those were the exact same golems I’d been dealing with beneath Ammun’s tower. I thought I’d taken care of those. Apparently, he’d had a few spares lying around.
That, or… Now that I was looking for it, I could feel a pinprick in the spatial lock. Someone had opened a portal in the area recently and the lock hadn’t quite smoothed it over. Had Ammun fetched the golems I’d dumped into the ocean? It was certainly possible, despite my efforts to erase all evidence of the baited portal I’d left at the ruins of his tower before he came back.
I didn’t think it was likely, however. A better explanation was that Ammun simply had more of the golems in storage offsite. He’d certainly had enough of them, and I hadn’t done more than a cursory inspection of his facilities and research sites that I knew of. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that he had a golem storage bunker buried somewhere underground where I’d never find it.
The important thing to focus on was that he’d portaled a large number of them here, and that I might need to deal with them. I knew there were two different ward stones based on how the wards were set up, both of which I wanted to destroy if the opportunity presented itself. This spatial lock only applied to me, and being pinned down while Ammun could teleport unhindered was not a good way to conduct a battle.
My shadow disappeared to take care of that problem while I came to a stop a few hundred feet from Ammun. He glanced up at me and gave an exaggerated sigh, then turned in place and floated up to my level.
“Master Keiran,” he greeted, his voice booming across the distance. “I see you’ve fully recovered from that scuffle with my excavation golem.”
“And you’ve got a soul tether thousands of miles long now,” I replied. “How… wasteful.”
“It’s not like I’ll run out of mana,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve ensured my immortality, despite whatever fate this planet might suffer in the future.”
“I suppose that’s what’s important to you.”
“Selfish, isn’t it?” He snorted and shook his head. “I’m sure you see it that way. The reality is that I had to take care of myself before I could start fixing everything else that’s gone wrong on Manoch. You’re not the only one who disappeared and wasn’t pleased with the mess you came back to.”
“And rebuilding the weapon that started the last mess helps how, exactly?”
“You and I both know that the only true measure of success is power. This is power, enough to destroy whole cities, anywhere, any time. I will rebuild this planet, and I’ll do it right. We could have worked together to achieve that, but you were so busy seeing me as a threat to your own power that you couldn’t even conceive of a world where we collaborated, could you?”
“I was more concerned about your tower than you. You had it wedged in the shell around the world core. Removing it was necessary to start the healing process, but you never would have allowed it,” I argued.
“Wouldn’t I? I told you there were other ways. And, despite all your efforts to stop me, here we are. The tower is gone. I remain. Let the healing commence, and I will be here to witness it.”
“Just you,” I said. “Does one single other person get to benefit from your work, or is the rest of the world a prize to be won and controlled?”
Ammun let out a dry, raspy laugh and shook his head. “I know you far, far too well to think you’re taking the moral high road. You don’t care about those people any more than I do.”
Well, he wasn’t exactly wrong. I’d committed my fair share of slaughter and wouldn’t hesitate to do it again if I felt it was necessary. That didn’t change how much of a threat Ammun was, though I’m sure there were many mages who’d argue I was just as much of one. I wondered if the Global Order of the Arcane had found some way to watch this, and, if so, who they were hoping would win.
If they were smart, they’d back me. Ammun no longer needed to fix Manoch’s core. Without his own survival being dependent on it, I didn’t suspect he’d even try, which left the rest of the world in shambles. I also doubted he’d be keen to share his knowledge with future disciples, at least not ones he couldn’t exert absolute authority over.
“Besides,” the lich went on, “I see what you’re wearing. Milduran battle robes, aren’t they? Those were out of style when I was a child thirteen centuries ago, Master.”
“I’m not trying to be fashionable.”
“No. You’re here to fight, to keep fighting, really. You do understand dragon skeletons are a precious, irreplaceable resource now, don’t you?”
“Manoch is better off without them,” I said. “Just like it’ll be better off without you.”
“Yes, yes, I’m a blight upon humanity and all that garbage,” Ammun said. “You’re going to smite me, destroy my body, and send me back to my phylactery. I suppose you’ll teleport back up to the moon and hunt it down to prevent me from ever resurfacing.”
“Something like that.”
“Consider this, then. You’re here. But who’s helping all those weak, pathetic mortals you call friends?”
He raised one bony hand and snapped his fingers, a sound that should have been impossible but which he managed nonetheless. Instantly, a hundred panes of glass faded into existence. Each one displayed a different scene. Querit fought against a zombie horde outside Hyago’s grove in one. The brakvaw were being slowly overwhelmed by the colony of wyverns in another. Other undead stalked through the villages outside Derro, hunting those with ignited cores.
There were places I hadn’t thought he’d known about displayed as well. That little town the survivors of his army’s initial push had founded was visible through one of the mirrors. Some sort of sea serpent, a gaping bloody hole in its head, was destroying their boats and ignoring their feeble attempts to drive it off. I had no doubt it had killed dozens of people already.
Derro was being assaulted by its own legion of zombies, including an entire swarm of giant wasps. Most of those were missing legs or had other obvious wounds, but as long as they still had two wings, it didn’t slow them down. The walls around the city weren’t doing much to hold them back, and they didn’t have near the numbers needed to hold the entire length. Refugees were already streaming through the streets and flooding the inner district.
“What will you do, Master Keiran? Would you like to teleport away and save them? I’ll let you run, if you want.”
“You know I won’t,” I said shortly.
“No, I didn’t expect you would. You know where the only thing that can threaten you is. So what if everyone else dies, so long as you’re safe, right? It’s funny. I feel the exact same way.”
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Sandipan Mukherjee
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