emergencycomplaints
patreon
Book 5, Chapter 39
🕑 Added 2024-12-03 13:20:13 +0000 UTCThis was the riskiest part of my plan. If I called it good here, chances were I’d be dealing with the Order again very soon. They’d probably try to be a lot sneakier the next time, and given that I was going to be entirely focused on a skeleton-shaped problem in the near future, there was every chance that they could take revenge at an opportune moment.
The only way to guarantee my safety was to wipe out the entire Global Order of the Arcane, which was possible, but not really practical. That would be a campaign of weeks at minimum, and more likely months. I didn’t know how much time I had left, or even if I could eradicate the entire cabal before Ammun returned. That plan also carried a high risk of driving everyone who survived the initial slaughter directly to Ralvost to align themselves with my enemies.
My final option was to cut the head off the snake. They were gathered right here in this room with me, all of them defenseless. It would be easy. It was also the least predictable option in terms of fallout. I didn’t know if these five even were the true leaders of the Order. Killing them might just piss off whoever was actually in charge. Or it might inspire the rank-and-file to some sort of revenge quest, which could arguably be easier to handle, depending on the timing and who filled the leadership vacuum.
I’d spent some time considering what I wanted out of the Order in the future. Right now, they weren’t trustworthy. I couldn’t use them for much of anything, if only because I’d have to watch them so closely for treachery that any job I handed off to them would end up consuming more of my time and energy than if I simply did it myself.
I might be able to use them in the future, however. Once I had ample free time, I could reform the cabal into archmages actually worthy of the title, or at least some of them. No doubt there’d be some dead wood to cut out of the program. But honestly, how much time would that save me? Forty or fifty years was more than long enough to establish my own school and raise a class of students to the same level of competency.
That was the trade-off. I was sacrificing some short-term efficiency by alienating the Order today in order to keep them out of my hair while I dealt with Ammun. Unfortunately for them, this cabal was just enough of a threat that they could tip the scales away from me at a pivotal moment, so there really wasn’t much of a choice.
“What more could you ask for?” Domon asked. “Shall we open our coffers for you to raid? Do you want to burn down our libraries and destroy our laboratories to cripple future generations of mages?”
“No, nothing like that. Believe it or not, I applaud the general idea of your organization. Preserving magical knowledge and passing it on is a laudable goal. And if you’d come to me openly and honestly, instead of slithering through the grass like a serpent intending to sink its fangs into my leg, I probably would have helped you.”
I looked around the room, holding each councilman’s gaze in turn. “But you didn’t do that, did you? You’re bandits looking to ransack a town. Your only mistake was picking a target beyond your capabilities.”
“How were we to know?” Kalig objected.
“Isn’t it your job to know? My understanding of your hierarchy is that you, specifically, are in charge of gathering information. But it doesn’t matter. What you could or should have done in the past is irrelevant.”
Decision made, I wrapped bands of force around their skulls and squeezed. All five of them died simultaneously in an explosion of bone and brain matter while hundreds of onlookers watched through the many scrying portals that were still open. Fortunately, the team in Ralvost was not among the observers. They wouldn’t know that their leadership had been killed until someone else told them.
“Let me make one thing clear,” I said to the mirrored wall behind me. The glass sphere still sat in front of Domon’s corpse, which was now slumped over and about to topple out of its chair. I didn’t need the connection to speak to the assembled observers. The sphere was merely a tool for those without the mana and skill to manipulate the ritual manually.
“I do not tolerate interference in my business, not from them, not from you, and not from whoever might be hidden behind your Elder Council’s façade of authority. Keep your mages on Jeshaem and we won’t have any further problems. If I find one of you on Olpahun again, I’ll kill you. And believe me, I’ve got eyes everywhere. I will be watching.”
Unlike Domon’s discussion with the field agents at Ralvost, this was a one-way conversation. I was trusting those archmages who were watching to spread the word to anyone who was absent, though I’d noticed a steady uptick in faces on the other sides of the portals the longer they stayed open. Without an exact count of the Order’s numbers, including support staff, I couldn’t be sure what portion of them had witnessed the execution of their Elder Council.
“I know the secret you wanted – how to break the stage six ceiling. The mana resonance point. Yes, I have access to one. I made it. And yes, I can teach you how to do it, too. I could be persuaded to share this knowledge, but not right now. As you are well aware, I have a lich problem I need to be dealing with. Once that’s taken care of, we can discuss business between the Order and myself. Until then, I do not want to so much as find a loose hair I don’t recognize anywhere within a thousand miles of my home.
“This is a simple request: stay away. If you can manage that, we’ll get along in the future.”
And with that said, I finished the teleportation spell I’d been building up while I spoke and disappeared, leaving behind a rapidly collapsing continental scrying network.
*
Paying the gestalt to continue working for me was rapidly climbing up my priorities list as I kept expanding the scope of their spying. I was starting to feel like I was going a bit wild spying on two continents and a moon, but, well, my enemies were many and varied. That bit of bait I’d tossed out in an attempt to ensure the Order’s good behavior might work, but it might not.
Between the scrying polyhedrons the gestalt already had and the ones I owed them, they’d apparently decided they had enough of that and had turned to requesting a series of psychic relay points embedded for miles and miles in every direction. The colony had been growing steadily with access to nigh unlimited food, and now they wanted to expand without worrying about splinter minds forming as they got too far from the main hub.
Normally, that was done via the ‘roots’ of their home tree, but a discontinuous connection wasn’t feasible using that method. For the distances the gestalt wanted to cover, manual growth didn’t really work, anyway, so they’d turned to me to solve this problem as the next payment. It was hard to turn down the request, considering that they were effectively my entire spy network.
‘How soon do you need it done?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never made something exactly like this before and I’ll need to do a bit of tinkering to get what I have in mind adapted for use by a hive mind entity.’
‘We would prefer sooner rather than later, but given your current constraints, we understand that other projects take priority. Still, three months seems an adequate amount of time.’
I mentally chewed that over. I could probably do it, but without Querit around to help, it would be difficult to keep everything else running. I’d really been taking advantage of him over the last year or so, and I was feeling the hurt now that he was gone. An intelligent golem assistant was an invaluable resource, but they did come with the drawback of needing to be treated like a person instead of a tool.
It was too bad he was still upset with me. Other than asking the gestalt to let me know if he got himself into some sort of trouble, I’d given Querit his space. He’d come back when he was ready. Or he wouldn’t, and he’d find some new life out there, far away from me. Either was acceptable, as long as he didn’t decide to throw in with Ammun.
I gave that low odds of happening. Ammun was directly responsible for the destruction of Querit’s home and the deaths of practically everybody he’d ever known prior to me finding his lifeless body and infusing him with mana. If nothing else, I was reasonably certain that Querit would try to kill Ammun if he ever crossed paths with the lich.
‘I’ll have a prototype to you by then, but it’ll take longer to produce the number needed to cover so many miles,’ I sent.
‘This is an acceptable compromise.’
‘Then we’re agreed. You’ll watch through the network I laced into their teleportation platforms and make sure none of them cross the ocean.’
‘Very well.’
I changed the subject. ‘Any updates on Ammun’s project up on Yulitar?’
‘We cannot pierce the scrying ward, but he does not seem to consider any sort of physical obfuscation to be necessary. The tower is now fully constructed, and we’ve noted a shift in the mana flows across the moon’s surface.’
Images flooded my mind, showing me a four-story tower roughly the same size as the silo he’d used in Ralvost to first cast the ritual that had allowed him to teleport however many thousands of miles it was to a moon in one single jump. It was a square-sided building now, sharp-edged and carved from the face of a small mountain. There were no windows or exterior features, making it nothing more than a blank pillar of stone forty feet high.
Other images showed strands of mana twisting across Yulitar’s surface, flowing seemingly at random as they radiated out of the stone and off into empty space. Around the tower, however, was something like a whirlpool, with all the mana swirling around it for miles as it was slowly dragged into the center.
That was a lot more mana than Ammun should have needed for the ultra-long-range teleportation spell. Either he’d cobbled together something extremely inefficient, or he was planning on doing a whole hell of a lot more than just returning home. I knew he wanted a permanent connection between himself and Yulitar’s core, and that he had his phylactery up there with him. Perhaps the tower was going to serve as the focal point for that connection.
The real problem was that, without being able to see inside, I had no way to know if it was nothing but an empty shell, or if Ammun had carved runes into every single inch of the interior and was even now completing the spell to teleport back. And with so much distance between us, there was no way I was going to get through scrying wards to find out.
Or was I? I watched the mana sweep across Yulitar, more even than Ammun’s tower back in Ralvost pulled from the world core. Ammun wasn’t that creative. Odds were good that he had the same mana intake system up there as he’d used back home. And that meant I had a weak point to attack. I just needed to fool whatever wards he had to filter the mana into thinking my own scrying spell was an unstructured bit of mana floating in with all the rest.
And that was entirely possible to do. The real trick was going to be getting it all the way up into that whirlpool so it could be sucked inside. ‘I think I have an idea, but I’ll need your help,’ I told the gestalt. ‘I’ll be there in a few minutes.’
