Book 3, Chapter 72 (Patreon)

It took a week for my scrying mirror to let me know someone was trying to reach me. I’d expected them to try to drag me in much sooner, but apparently, I’d underestimated the Breakers of Chains. When I activated the mirror, it wasn’t Averin on the other side – yet another surprise.

“And who’s this? Another dark child?” The woman looking at me sneered while she spoke. “No, not with skin like that. An outlander then?”

She was old, her face a mass of wrinkles and her hair thin and brittle, with no color but iron-gray left in it. Despite that, her eyes were clear and sharp.  She studied me in an instant, then sniffed and said, “Not that it matters. Tell your degenerate friends to return my grandson, unharmed, or I will personally rip each and every one of them limb from limb, starting with you.”

My eyebrows steadily climbed higher as the old woman threatened me. I could only guess what she was talking about – presumably the Breakers had been active against some high-profile targets in the last few days. I wondered if Averin was even still alive at this point. If he’d been carrying the mirror on his person and gotten caught, the answer was probably not. If it had been in a safehouse that had been raided, then it was entirely possible.

Unfortunately, the woman was a good enough mage that she was blocking the mirror from showing me anything in the background. Considering I was doing the same thing, it was hard to be indignant about her precautions. I was going to need to fish for some information so I could decide what to do about the communications mirror falling into a stranger’s hand.

“Who are you, again?” I asked in a flippant tone, hoping to annoy her into giving something away.

It wasn’t hard to guess that she was an overly-proud woman, that being a condition I suffered from myself. It was hard not to feel superior to the average person after centuries and centuries of being completely untouchable. People like me enforced our will on the world, and the world obeyed. That was enough to swell anyone’s ego.

The woman’s face twisted into a snarl, and she snapped out, “You know damn well who you’re fucking with! I’ve ignored this little stint up to now, but to have the gall to attack my House… You should have known better than to stick your nose in our affairs, you outlander savage.”

“Hmm… Yeah. That doesn’t really answer my question, though, does it? Maybe you’re famous around here, but I don’t have the first clue who you’re supposed to be.”

“Oh you little shit. When I-”

Something flashed brilliant white, bright enough that it would have blinded me if the scrying mirror hadn’t been built to prevent visual attacks from coming through. When the light vanished a moment later, the enchantment preventing the background from being seen had broken, and the mirror was lying face-up on the floor of what appeared to be a burning building.

A shadowy figure came into view at the edge of the mirror and looked down. “Huh,” he said. “What’s this, a scrying mirror? Oh! You’re that guy who helped us with the platforms. Why were you talking to the head of House Adylen?”

“Is that who she was?” I asked. “She didn’t seem to want to tell me, seemed kind of offended that I didn’t already know.”

“She’s yesterday’s news now,” the man said. “Dead as a duruka bird.”

“Anyway, what happened to the man who was supposed to have the mirror you’re looking at?”

“No clue,” the Breaker said. He stepped over the mirror and squatted down, giving me an unasked-for view of his crotch for a moment. “They said it was a ring… Where is it? Damn, I hope that inferno beam didn’t destroy the damn thing.”

“Could you do me a favor and move that mirror somewhere else?” I asked.

“Huh?” The Breaker looked down between his legs. “Oh. Uh… Sorry about that.”

He scooped the mirror up and tucked it into a pocket on the front of his shirt, which obscured about two-thirds of the surface, but did let me look out and see what he saw. The building looked like some sort of warehouse, though I wasn’t sure what was in all the boxes and crates stacked up on the racks lining the wall. Most of the roof was gone, at least as far as I could tell from this angle, and a lot of things were on fire.

The bottom half of the woman who’d been looking for me was laying on the floor, her clothes burning and black soot staining her skin. Both arms were there, though neither was attached to the main body, and her head had rolled away to land next to a support pillar. Of her torso, there was no sign. I assumed it had been turned into the greasy smear of ash near the body.

The Breaker picked up one hand, then tossed it aside. “There’s no ring,” he muttered. “Maybe it flew off when she got hit.”

He turned a complete circle and scanned the floor, but if something as small as a ring had tumbled away from the body, there was every chance it had rolled under a crate or behind a box or barrel. Whoever this Breaker was, he wasn’t using any sort of magic to help him look for it.

I cast a quick scrying spell through the mirror, only possible now that the old woman was no longer blocking me. A single sweep was all it took to locate what the man was looking for. “Pull off her left shoe and check her toes,” I instructed.

“Her what? Are you serious?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?”

Who the hell was this guy? He wasn’t familiar, but it was hard to tell with the cloaks and the masks. I didn’t recognize his voice, at least, and he seemed kind of dumb, but if he was the source of the spell that had killed a woman whom I assumed possessed a stage five core, he was powerful. Somehow, I was having trouble connecting the spell to this guy. More likely, he was just the runner sent to go retrieve the goods after someone else eliminated the target.

The Breaker pulled off the old woman’s shoe and curled his nose. “That’s so gross,” he muttered upon sighting a toe ring. Hesitantly, he slid the band of metal off the offending digit and pocketed it. Then he pulled the mirror out of his pocket and looked at me. “Now, what to do with you?”

“You could give the mirror back to the guy who’s supposed to be hanging onto it,” I suggested.

The Breaker nodded. “That’s a possibility. On the other hand, taking this thing into one of our safehouses could be a mistake. That could let you track us to places you’re not supposed to be.”

“I’ve already been in several of them and I provided your group with access to the floor control rooms and intra-tower teleportation platforms. I hardly need a simple scrying mirror to find you.”

“Sure, that’s all true,” the man said. He paused dramatically, then added, “If you’re really who you look like. For all I know, I could be looking at an illusion or a disguise. Maybe you’re part of House Adylen.”

That actually wasn’t a bad theory. He’d found the mirror on the body of someone who was an enemy and for all he knew, the old woman’s screeching could have all been an act as part of a plan to ‘lose’ the mirror in a fight while she retreated. That was assuming he’d witnessed the conversation at all. It was just as likely that she’d been killed from a mile away and it was sheer coincidence the mirror had survived at all.

“I don’t have any way to prove any of that isn’t true,” I said.

“Exactly, so I think I’ll leave this mirror right here. Not going to be my ass if a safehouse ends up compromised because someone brought an unknown scrying beacon into it.”

Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as he appeared. “Fine. Tell whoever’s in charge of your cell that I’ll leave a new mirror in the floor-one safehouse for them to pick up.”

“That won’t be necessary,” a new voice said. The Breaker holding the mirror whipped around to stare at a man with a slender build and a light cloak. The hood was pulled low to cover the top half of his face, and he glanced down at what was left of the body with a grimace of distaste and muttered, “Never did know when to give up, did you?”

“Sir,” the Breaker said, offering the man my communication mirror.

“Who’re you?” I asked.

“Number Seven,” the man said.

From what little I knew of the Breaker hierarchy, fifty-one through one hundred were cell leaders, and everyone above one hundred were regular members. The first fifty were composed of people who actually knew about what was going on outside individual cells and helped coordinate group actions that required more than ten or twenty people.

At the very top were the single-digit agents, people who were incredibly powerful—compared to the local mages, at least—and operated individually with only occasional support from the other cells. They didn’t take orders so much as collaborated on projects.

He was likely the source of the spell that had killed the head of House Adylen, then. “Progress on the plan is moving along smoothly,” Seven told me. “We’ll let you know if we need any further assistance.”

“I’d like to speak to my contact soon,” I said. “Please ask him to set some time aside for me.”

“I’ll do that,” the man said, his voice pleasant. “Come on, Two-Four-Nine.”

The mirror blinked out, and with its connection lost, my scrying spells snapped. I settled back to lean against the wall and consider the recent developments. The Breakers had at least two of the seals now, and their only communication with me had been accidental. From the sounds of it, they’d kidnapped a scion of the great House they’d assaulted, meaning they were going with the ‘force a blood bond’ route. It was simple, but it worked. I’d have done the same.

It wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on this myself, but I wasn’t overly worried. I’d designed the teleportation platforms they were using, and if they thought I hadn’t included a few safeguards, they were in for a surprise. Just to be thorough, I would need to sweep the area to make sure they hadn’t reverse-engineered the rune structure and placed their own access points.

How annoying.

I didn’t have anything better to do, though. All my time for the past week had been spent gathering more and more mana, enough to build Father’s new town twice over. I’d made a second trip there to drop off another haul of storage crystals and was working on a third set now. There was no reason I couldn’t roam the empty work spaces under the tower with scrying magic while I focused on claiming as much mana as possible, so I took a few minutes to cast a teleportation spell to the platform outside the sealed chamber.

There was no mana there, of course, which forced me to travel up a level and park my physical body there while my scrying spells looked around. That resulted in frequent attacks from mana wraiths, which slowed down my collection to the point where I was starting to question if it was even worth it.

I found no other teleportation beacons besides my own, unsurprisingly. Instead of disabling it outright, I opted to tie a divination ward into it that would let me know if someone arrived at the platform. Then I dusted off some of my old monitoring spells, upgraded versions of the spy eye spell I’d used back in Derro a few years back, and seeded the area with them.

Unlike my old spells, these ones could be accessed remotely via a companion divination to let me watch the area in real time in addition to creating a record of everything they saw for me to review later. If the Breakers tried to cut me out and make a move, I’d know about it. For safe measure, I started teleporting up the tower and placing them in all the safehouses I had access to.

With the work done, sadly, there was nothing to do but go back to waiting.