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Book 5, Chapter 50
🕑 Added 2024-12-18 14:31:25 +0000 UTCHistory books weren’t entirely clear on whether it was the moon beam firing down on Manoch or the mana draw from Ammun’s reprisal that had caused the death of the world core. The only one who knew for sure was Ammun himself, and even then, I wasn’t willing to bet that he’d ever bothered to figure it out.
It would be a stupid, short-sighted decision to ignore researching that, but then again, that sounded exactly like the apprentice I remembered, so I was quite willing to believe it had played out exactly that way. As far as I could tell from my own digging, it had been Ammun pulling so much mana out of the world core all at once that had started the chain reaction of it dying.
The only pertinent question was whether or not the cabal controlling Amodir had done the same thing to the moon. It was impossible to tell, since Ammun’s counterstroke had destroyed it and most of the core fragments I’d discovered had been inert. I had one that still generated mana, but whether that was because the moon hadn’t suffered a core collapse like Manoch or because everything had fractured to pieces before that particular part could die would forever remain a mystery.
Unless, of course, Ammun repeated history and used his link to Yulitar to repeat the ancient cabal’s actions. Then I’d be able to see what kind of backlash such a magic had on the moon it used first-hand, provided I lived through the attack. My demesne seemed like a logical place to destroy, but there was no telling exactly how precise Ammun would be. He might shoot me down from a few thousand miles away if I stood here and did nothing.
The fact that the very act of smiting me out of existence had the potential to fracture the moon he was relying on to power his body and phylactery would be small comfort. Him dying immediately after me would be best for the world at large, but I preferred to prioritize my own survival. That meant the control device he was assembling needed to be destroyed right now.
‘I have to go. Ammun can’t be allowed to complete construction or he’ll be able to destroy any place on this side of the planet.’
‘The brakvaw still need your help. Grandfather won’t approve of you abandoning the battlefield,’ the gestalt warned.
‘You explain it to him. I don’t have time.’
Part of me wanted to destroy the remaining wyverns here in one explosive burst. I could do it, but between that and three teleports, I’d be cutting deeply into my reserves. There’d be no time to pull in more mana, not even if the brakvaw had a convenient storage crystal sitting here for me to drain, and I couldn’t risk going into a battle with one of the most powerful beings on the planet at anything less than my best.
My shadow met me on the teleportation platform, some forty or so wyverns slain between the two of us. It would have to be enough. I activated the platform, pumping mana into it to get it to cycle. Whoever was supposed to be keeping it maintained had been slacking, apparently. What a terrible time to catch that bit of laziness.
It finished charging—enough to be used, at least—at almost the exact same time I heard the outraged shriek of a brakvaw heading my way. “Coward!” it called out to me. “Stay and fight!”
We were all fighting the same battle, in the end. Hopefully when it was all over, there’d still be brakvaw left who understood that. I cast the spell and allowed the magic to pull me a thousand miles northwest, leaving the giant birds and the undead wyverns to their struggles.
*
The first two jumps were straightforward, one platform to the next, quick and easy. The final one was a bit harder. I hadn’t personally scried out Ammun’s location, which meant I had to collaborate with the gestalt in order to actually teleport there. That was further complicated by the fact that Ammun had plenty of mana to spare now, and he’d used some of it to heavily ward the area. Even with help, the closest I could get to him was a few miles away.
Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem. At the speed I moved, a few miles was a minute or so of flight. I launched myself out of the field I’d teleported to, fully prepared to swoop down on Ammun and blast his nightmare machine to pieces. That was the plan, until the boughs of the trees up ahead started swaying. A moment later, a monster of bone and magic burst forth.
It was nowhere near the size of the dragon that had assaulted New Alkerist, but it was a dragon, nonetheless. I could kill it if I was willing to devote the time and mana to the effort. I took a split second to weigh the likelihood that I could reach Ammun, destroy his machine, and drag the fight far enough away from where it started that his undead minion wouldn’t be able to interfere.
The odds weren’t good. Better to go through it now than to have it sneak up behind me later. Just as I started to spin out the mana needed to obliterate it, a second dragon clawed its way out of the trees and joined it in the air. That complicated things, but it was still nothing I couldn’t handle, providing a third dragon didn’t appear.
I didn’t even need to look behind me to know what was happening. The swaying of the trees and snapping of the branches was enough. “Is that all of you?” I asked in exasperation. Damn Ammun and his wards blocking us from being able to properly scout the battlefield.
All three dragons roared in unison, then attacked.
Like living dragons, they boasted a breath weapon. In their case, it was a deep purple beam of necrotic energy, deadly to living creatures. A normal human struck by it would find their flesh melting off their body and their organs sloughing out of their exposed abdominal cavity in a matter of seconds. Against a mage at stage five, the delicate mana structures that made up their reforged body would start to collapse, causing great pain and reducing the amount of mana they could hold.
Against me, I simply redirected the beams with a subversive target spell. All three of them arced off their straight paths to chase after the decoy I shot out. It danced through the air in a pattern too complicated to follow, leading the breath shots on a brief chase that ended with all three beams crashing into each other and destabilizing.
Even if I had let them hit me, I doubted there was enough power in them to get through my shield ward. These were the skeletons of lesser dragons, prepared long ago and hastily reanimated in the last few hours. They were nothing like the monster I’d destroyed prior to my trip to Yulitar. What they lacked in individual prowess, however, they attempted to make up for with numbers.
As a stalling tactic, it wasn’t half bad. I could outrun them, but they’d catch up when I reached Ammun. Fighting three of them would take longer than fighting one, and it would give Ammun more time to prepare additional surprises for me. How had he known I’d be coming from this direction, though? It couldn’t just be rotten luck.
Maybe he’d ringed the whole area with minions, dozens upon dozens of dragon skeletons reanimated and slaved to his will. The mana costs would be exorbitant, but if there was anyone who could afford to waste it, it was the old lich. I had no choice but to deal with them now, else I’d be fighting them later. Either way, Ammun won.
The closest dragon was the one behind me. I didn’t need to be touching it, but I did need to be within a thousand feet of it, so I zipped backwards, not bothering to turn as I prepared the massive dispelling wave that would hopefully overpower the core of necrotic energy holding it together. The dragon reacted immediately, breathing out another beam of energy that got sucked up into my decoy. The mana drain on my core catching it was a slight strain, but not so much that I couldn’t tolerate it. Heavy mana was good that way. The more of it there was, the more it reinforced itself and remained stable.
At the same time, it flared its wings and lunged through the air, powered not by muscle and flesh but by webs of necrotic energy tangled through the boney fingers where membranes should have been. I was sure it was just as fast now as it had been in life, and easily cleared its half of the distance between us before we came in contact. No doubt it planned to shred me with teeth longer than I was tall, but its plans were abruptly foiled when I unleashed the one-two punch of my dispel and a master-tier force spell directly in its face.
Temporarily stripped of its protecting magic, the skull fractured into six different pieces, not counting the dozens of teeth that went flying across the treetops. That wasn’t enough to destroy the undead dragon by itself, but a follow up force lance shredded its spine and dropped ribs into the forest below. An undead didn’t feel pain, and lopping off a limb wouldn’t slow it down, but breaking it into enough pieces was a good way to overwhelm the animating magic and shut it down.
With the necrotic web shrouding its bones in tatters, it was a lot easier to attack its limbs, and I had it in pieces well before either of the other two dragons could interfere. I didn’t even bother to spin around to face it while I worked. My scrying spells were enough to guide me, and that meant I had a good view of its siblings closing in.
All said and done, the first dragon had cost me maybe five or six seconds of time and far, far too much mana. I’d need to be more frugal with the other two. They split up in an attempt to hit me from both sides at once, or to at least keep from being caught in the same spell. Their timing was perfect; if I did nothing, they’d reach me at exactly the same time. That was easy enough to manipulate though. I just had to pick one and fly toward it.
Still determined to succeed in their plan, the one on the right slowed down when I started moving its way and the one on the left sped up. The on-the-spot adjustment was too impressive to credit the undead with, especially considering how new they were. There was no way Ammun had built them well enough to make those kinds of decisions.
He was controlling them directly, which meant even fighting out here, a few miles away, I was still slowing him down. That was only a minor victory and would ultimately cost me the battle if I let him have his way, so I repeated my tactic of opening with a point-blank dispelling wave to disrupt its necrotic coating, then slammed it with a few dozen staccato blasts of pure force before it could recover.
It didn’t shatter under the pressure like the first one, but then, I hadn’t expected it to. It also didn’t cost me any appreciable amount of mana, since I was able to cleanly recover just about every last bit that went into the spells. The dragon stayed in enough of one piece that the animation spell didn’t fail outright like it had with the first one.
That was all I had time to do in terms of offense. Now both dragons were within a hundred feet of me, and even with their death beams neutralized, they had plenty of other weapons. I couldn’t trust my shield ward to hold up to the sheer kinetic power behind their claws or teeth, so letting myself get caught in close range between them was a bad idea.
It galled me to do it, but I burned the mana on an expensive combat teleport to escape the pincer. I’d taken a gamble on being able to break the second dragon using a barrage of cheaper spells, and it hadn’t paid off. The difference was clear, of course. With Ammun taking active control of the remaining two dragons, I couldn’t afford half-measures. I needed to commit to ending the fight immediately, even if that meant exposing my true level of power.
With an annoyed huff, I started casting my next spell.
