Book 3, Chapter 62 (Patreon)

Nobody had returned to the safehouse to check up on me by the time I returned. I was not surprised, given the location and the obnoxious amount of work it took to move between floors. Every five floors, there was another checkpoint and a long walk to a different drop shaft. It took hours to get from floor forty-nine to floor one, and I suspected the Breakers’ leadership was based up near floor one hundred or even slightly higher.

That worked out well for me, since it meant I was unlikely to be bothered again tonight. I threw on my borrowed cloak, pulled the hood low over my face, and walked through the slums that made up floor one to the maintenance shaft. There, I opened it, floated down a few feet, and sealed it closed behind me. I was on my own this time, which would make things much easier.

I’d had occasion to use phantasmal spells before. They operated on much the same principles as incorporeal monsters, passing through solid objects as if they weren’t there. They were difficult to cast, relatively expensive, and required a constant stream of mana just to keep them from collapsing the instant they came into being. For the most part, they were rarely worth using.

However, there was one exception: dealing with monsters or hostile mages who were also incorporeal. That meant a phantasmal sword could shred mana wraiths easily, though it wasn’t really any more effective than the core puncturing spell I’d been using earlier. More importantly, it meant that if I shaped the spell into a shield instead of a weapon, I’d have an impenetrable barrier.

The problem there was that if a bar of phantasmal energy was expensive, a full barrier was prohibitively so. Even with my expanded mana core, I’d completely run myself out of mana in about eight to ten seconds. Luckily for me, I had mastered lossless casting to the point where I could turn that into more like three or four minutes, and I had about forty times as much mana stored in my mana crystal as I did in my body, which gave me a solid hour or two of total immunity from the mana wraiths before I exhausted myself.

That wasn’t enough time to thoroughly explore the maintenance sublevels, but I hoped it was long enough to exterminate a few thousand wraiths. I’d be relying heavily on processing the ambient mana to keep my reserves from running dry, but I was confident I could maintain both the phantasmal shell spell and a light spell, cast mana puncture, and process ambient mana at the same time.

Staff in hand, I descended to the maintenance sublevel again. Thankfully, the tower was so heavily warded that I didn’t need to worry about wraiths popping out of the floor, so I didn’t need phantasmal shell all the time. Even if one did sneak up on me, my shield ward would give me a moment to react, though that would be a considerable drain on its mana supply trying to deflect an incorporeal attack.

The first mana wraiths decided to test this about five minutes later. I was keeping an eye on the various connecting passages via scrying spells, so I caught the movement early. It was only a single wraith, but where there was one, there would be more. I shredded it immediately, then cast a wider scrying net out to catch the wave coming up behind it.

There were only thirty of them. The leading wraiths were a hundred feet behind the lone scout I’d dispatched, and its elimination had caught their attention immediately. As one, the whole group charged through the air, their howls preceding them. My phantasmal shell sprang into being, not a perfectly smooth dome, but something sharply ridged and spiked. It was harder to maintain this shape, but it proved its usefulness immediately.

Wraiths slammed into the shell, too mindless to realize that they couldn’t pass through it. I’d been slightly concerned that their time being penned in by the heavily warded stonework of the tower might clue them in, but those fears were unfounded. Like a wave, they fell on me, and one after another, they shredded themselves while I stood and watched. Within moments, they’d all dissipated into pure mana.

That had worked even better than I’d hoped, though it would still be slow going. I dismissed the shell and started pulling in ambient mana to recover what I’d lost. That cycle repeated itself several more times with groups of up to a hundred wraiths, stressing my mana reserves slightly when they came at me in quick succession.

Eventually, I made my way to the shaft leading down to the second sublevel, the spot we’d been driven back from when I’d had those four Breakers with me. This time, no endless stream of wraiths poured out, though I couldn’t be sure if that was because they were already roaming all over the first sublevel, or if I’d simply killed so many of them that there were only a few left. Either way, I was sure to find more the farther down I went.

Mentally shrugging to myself, I jumped into the open hole and levitated down to the next floor.

  *

I was a bit frustrated with my exploration. What I was finding just didn’t make sense. A seemingly infinite number of mana wraiths infested these floors, but I wasn’t sure how they were getting in. The mana itself kept getting heavier, to the point where I was now having to make an active effort to keep it away lest I give myself mana poisoning. Not coincidentally, the wraiths were getting stronger, too.

And the worst part of it was that, as far as I could tell, these sublevels were pointless. The first five had a logic to them. Each one had a conduit that went up five floors ahead, connecting to the wards that managed those floors. So sublevel one connected to floor five, sublevel two connected to floor four, and so on.

But once I reached sublevel six, I’d expected to start finding the layout to be shaped like rune structures, and that wasn’t what I’d found. In fact, I had no idea what I was looking at. They obviously weren’t maintenance floors at this point, and the drop shafts between them had grown to the point where they were thousands of feet long. I had to be at least ten miles below floor one.

Just how far down did this tower go? And what was the point? I had a working theory, one that I really hoped I was wrong about. I’d joked about the tower going all the way down to the core of the planet, but I was starting to worry that it really did. If this was Ammun’s super weapon, and it had resulted in the breaking of the world core when he’d used it, then it was possible that he’d somehow sunk the tower deep enough to actually touch the planet’s physical core. If that was the case, then this was the most impressive feat of magical engineering I’d ever heard of.

It would mean the tower was over a thousand miles tall just to get from the outer core to the surface. The fifty or sixty miles of tower jutting up into the sky would be the very tip of the thing. It was, frankly, an unimaginable size. I almost had to be wrong. It would have taken centuries to build this thing, and even longer with the excavation. Defending it during construction from the many, many monsters that lived underground would have been all but impossible.

Perhaps the tower itself only went down a hundred miles, or even less, and then spread conduits into the stone like the roots of a tree. That was a far more reasonable build, though still daunting even at an archmage’s level of power. It would be the work of decades instead of centuries, but it was theoretically possible.

The timing was off, though. The weapon had supposedly been built in response to a splinter faction who’d managed to take control of a moon core and used it to fire death beams down on Ralvost. That would have put the construction time in weeks, maybe a month or two at most. Of course, that was assuming the history books were correct, and they so very rarely got the small details right.

Maybe Ammun had been building this tower for years beforehand, perhaps setting it up as some sort of ultimate genius loci. Even today, the sheer amount of mana that flowed through it was overwhelming. Back then, it would have made him a god. He might have just refurbished his would-be demesne into a weapon in response to a crisis.

Speculation aside, I still hadn’t found anything to make it worth the effort I’d spent coming down here. The best that could be said was I’d stumbled across a good place to harvest mana from the air, but there were plenty of spots like that with considerably less danger lurking around every corner. I’d been down here for hours, and other than some new flavors of wards and an ever-increasing number of mana wraiths, there was nothing but empty hallways.

Eventually, I was forced to give up my search. My mana was holding steady for the moment, but I’d depleted about half my reserves and I’d been at it for hours and hours. I needed to make sure my escape plan was viable. If not, I had to start going back up before I trapped myself down here with no way to fight off the mana wraiths.

I’d collected a dozen slabs of stone when I visited my sister and taken the time to carve teleportation platforms into them. Unfortunately, due to the wards infused into the stone of the tower itself, it wasn’t possible for me to weave a beacon into the floor here, but with a full circle already prepared, all I needed to do was pull it from my phantom space and set it down. It’d be a dangerous proposition to teleport directly to it, but it would allow me to continue my exploration without retracing my steps.

At least, that was the theory. It remained to be seen exactly how much interference I could expect from the tower wards. Unlike the habitable floors above, there were miles of tower stone between me and my target platform back in the safehouse on floor one. It was entirely possible that I would fail to punch through them.

I made sure the area was clear of any nearby wraiths, stepped up onto the platform, and activated it. Thankfully, using a platform didn’t take nearly as long as casting a manual teleportation spell, and I was able to get the magic up and running quickly. That was good, because it immediately drew the attention of every single wraith for thousands of feet. My scrying spells showed them all turning toward me at the same time when I activated the platform, and they started flying in my direction.

The platform itself chugged, the magic stuttering and threatening to snap as it tried to locate the companion platform I’d left on floor one. Only by reinforcing it with my own mana was I able to keep it stable. Instead of the swift, instantaneous movement the spell would normally provide, the mana grew in intensity as it struggled, and I felt a great amount of pressure bearing down on my body.

Forget the platform, I might crumble under the weight of the spell. Reinforcing myself could only do so much, but just as I was about to cancel the spell and resign myself to a long walk back, something finally caught. The connection was forged, and with seconds to spare before the first wraith reached the platform, I was whisked away.

I appeared on the platform in the safehouse, only to find a group of surprised Breakers drawing weapons and preparing spells in the room with me. “Easy there,” I said, hands held up.

“Keiran,” Averin said, pushing his way through the crowd. “There you are. We have news!”