Book 3, Chapter 61 (Patreon)

The good news was that I was completely right about the incorporeal monsters in the tunnels being mana fiends. The bad news was that there were already fifty of them flooding into the maintenance passages and coming our way. As a final bit of good news, it looked like their ability to pass through solid objects was sharply limited by the makeup of the tower. Having been equally frustrated by my magic’s inability to penetrate the tower’s walls and floors, I found the irony that it was now helping me to be slightly amusing.

Attacking a mana core directly was far more complicated than creating a burst of heat and flame, but that was what we’d need to do to win this fight. My staff materialized in my hand the moment the first mana fiends burst up from the maintenance shaft, and by the time they started closing in, I’d already finished the spell I needed.

Mana puncture wouldn’t outright rip out a mana core, but with my staff in hand, I could cast it over and over in quick succession. Invisible needles of magic went out, aimed on threads of pure divination magic, to strike the mana fiends and tear holes in their cores. Even a single one was enough to kill a fiend eventually, though it generally took three or four to put one down immediately.

I had the mana and the speed to kill a lot of them very quickly, but they had the numbers to ignore those losses. Worse, mana fiends weren’t rational, reasoning creatures. They’d fight to the very last of them, and that one would be every bit as ferocious as the first. With even more of them coming up the maintenance hatch, we had no choice but to make a fighting retreat of it.

“Get a few force walls between us and those mana fiends,” I ordered. “It won’t stop them, but it’ll slow them down.”

Dutifully, my crew of Breakers leaped into action. I was too busy blasting any fiend that got near us with repeated mana puncture spells to critique their own spellcraft, but two force walls popped up in quick succession, fully anchored and blocking the length of the hallway.

That gave me a four second reprieve as the mana fiends phased through the force wall. As I’d told the Breakers, it only slowed them down for a moment, but it allowed us to get another hundred feet down the hallway. Even better, it gave me a few seconds of being able to shoot them down one or two at a time until the main mass burst through all at once.

“New force walls and retreat again,” I ordered. A few of the leading mana fiends got close to us before I put them down, but then the next set of walls appeared and we repeated our strategy. Three of them rotated throwing up walls to help stall, but there were never more than two layered at a time.

“I’m tapped out,” one of the Breakers said a few minutes later.

“Can you switch in?” I asked their leader, who hadn’t been making force walls.

“I don’t know the spell!”

That didn’t mean he’d been idle. From somewhere, he’d produced a storage crystal and was busy pumping it full of mana. Unfortunately, with only a few minutes to work on it, he hadn’t gotten very far and it wasn’t going to do much more than give someone maybe a single force wall before it was empty again.

We were a thousand feet back from the maintenance shaft now, a fact that I’d hoped would slow the deluge of mana wraiths. That did not seem to be happening, probably because they could sense all the mana we were using to fight back. There didn’t seem to be any sort of end to them, and even with lossless casting, I couldn’t keep fighting forever.

This fight looked like a lost cause. We’d either need to come down here in force, probably repeatedly, to clean out the nest of mana wraiths, or I’d have to come back alone and use some magic I wasn’t comfortable with the Breakers knowing about. For now, the best solution was to retreat.

I stopped firing mana punctures at the incoming wraiths and threw up a triple barrier of force walls between us. “Run for it,” I commanded, an order that I didn’t need to repeat.

I kept throwing up more force walls as we sprinted down the halls. Gradually, after a few minutes, the wraiths started to die down in numbers and I switched back to offense. By the time the last one was gone, we were over halfway back to the entrance.

“This was a disaster” the Breaker’s leader said. “I can’t believe there are thousands of those things just lurking under floor one. They’d tear the place apart if they ever got up there.”

“We’d better get out of here and reseal up the entrance,” the sentinel-Breaker said.

“I thought you guys were all about chaos and destruction and bringing down the government,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but down here? What’s the point? There’s basically no governmental oversight anyway. If everyone on this floor dropped dead right now, I doubt the nobles up past floor one hundred would even notice.”

It was nice to know that they were at least focused on the disruption of the government part and not just randomly causing property damage wherever they thought they could get away with it. Hopefully they wouldn’t hold it against me if I decided it was worth sacrificing a floor of people to get to the bottom of this tower and learn its secrets.

Even if they did, I wasn’t sure what all they could do to stop me. None of these four had made an impressive showing back there. I was almost certain Senica could have at least rivaled their efforts, and she was barely a teenager. Though, I suspected that one who was probably a sentinel during the day had been deliberately underperforming with the intent of burning the mana he was hoarding if he needed to abandon the rest of us and run.

If that was the case, the others either didn’t notice or didn’t say anything. We hustled back to the entrance and I stayed behind to make sure no mana wraiths were going to show up at the last second while they climbed the ladder. All four of them took it this time, and once they were to the top, I flew straight up and sealed the entrance closed behind me.

“We’ll take you back to the safehouse before we go make our report,” the Breaker leader offered while I tried not to roll my eyes. It wasn’t like they were doing me much of a favor.

  *

I put the finishing touches on the teleportation circle I’d scribed into the floor of the safe house—thankfully raised from the stone of the tower itself—and took a step back. Hands on my hips, I stared down on it for a moment, my eyes tracing each rune to confirm it was correct. The collection array wasn’t part of my normal circles, but here in the tower, I figured I could siphon enough mana to power a teleport or two.

I wouldn’t be waiting that long, of course. No, for tonight, I’d power it myself. Since my destination had a teleportation beacon tied to it, it would be relatively cheap to jump there and back, and it was past time to check in.

There was a letter on the table, just in case someone came to check up on me while I was gone, but I figured that the four Breakers were busy scurrying up the tower to report the mana wraith infestation to their leader, which probably meant I had the rest of the night to myself. I’d destroy the letter when I returned, assuming nobody showed up before then.

This particular teleportation circle was big enough to hold at most three people, which was two more than I needed right now, but I suspected I’d be utilizing it more often in the near future once I started exploring the upper floors. I didn’t want to rely on the Breakers to bypass the innumerable checkpoints all over the place, so I’d be seeding platforms on as many floors as possible once I had some raw material to craft them.

I powered it up and let it whisk me away. Immediately, there was a shriek of surprise followed by what looked like a hairbrush being chucked at my head. My shield ward deflected it for me, and I looked over at Senica with a raised eyebrow.

“Are you using the scrying mirror to do your hair?” I asked.

“So what if I am? There’s no rule saying I can’t. Anyway, what are you doing here?” she snapped.

“Mostly checking up on you. You know, making sure you’re doing your training exercises, that you aren’t wandering around outside at night, that a brakvaw didn’t eat you.”

“Why… Why would a brakvaw eat me?” she asked.

“I made them a permanent portal to the area to use as hunting grounds. It’s fifty or so miles that way,” I told her as I pointed west.

“Ancestors save me,” she muttered almost under her breath. “You didn’t think to tell me that before you brought us back here?”

“Well, I did actually tell you that already,” I said. “It’s not my fault you were too busy making kissy faces at Juby when you thought no one was looking.”

“That didn’t happen!”

“The kissy faces thing? No. The not listening to me thing, yes.”

Senica huffed and crossed her arms. “Ugh. Is there anything else I should know?”

“Nothing that I haven’t already told you,” I said, leaving out the implied, Assuming you were paying attention.

She gave me a look that she’d inherited from our mother, that look I got whenever I did or said something that they were sure wasn’t as funny as it actually was. I just gave her a cheeky grin back, not at all intimidated by my big sister that I was now a foot and a half taller than.

Sighing, she gave up and switched the topic. “How are things going in the tower? I assume you made it in since you didn’t come back from your meeting.”

“Yeah, I did. This organization is shady, though. Most of the people I meet there won’t give me a name. They usually go by number, so I’ve given up asking. The few people I have gotten a name from are probably using some sort of alias.”

“Anyone strong enough to be a threat?”

“No, no. You could probably beat the group I was working with an hour ago. Pathetic skills all the way around. Though… I am pretty sure their leader is a stage four mage, and I have my suspicions based on some of what I’ve picked up that the people at the very top of the tower’s hierarchy might be stage five. I can’t confirm it, not yet, but my hunches are usually right.”

 For the first time I could recall, Senica actually looked worried. I would have laughed if it wasn’t so touching. “I’ll be fine,” I told her. “Even if I get into a fight with a stage five, I’ll still win. There’s more to a mage duel than just who has the most magic.”

Though, to be fair, having a stage five core made the entire body significantly more resistant to mana intrusions, which did complicate things. Still, I was an archmage with a repertoire of literally thousands of spells. I’d fought hundreds of mages over the centuries that were far beyond a measly stage five in power. I was not concerned about battling one of the patriarchs of the four Great Houses ruling the Sanctum of Light.

“Of course you would,” Senica said. “Like my brother would let himself get beaten by anything.”

“Well… There was this swarm of mana wraiths today,” I admitted. “Though to be fair, it wasn’t my fault we had to retreat.”

Senica let out a scandalized gasp. “Retreat?! You?!”

“Oh, shut up. Let me tell you what happened…”