Book 3, Chapter 76 (Patreon)

“I can assure you, you’ve missed a lot while you were sleeping,” I told Ammun. “And I’m not even close to the age this body appears.”

That wasn’t even a lie. I just didn’t clarify and tell him that I was less than half my apparent age. Hopefully he’d think I was significantly older, but it probably wouldn’t make a difference anyway. I might be at stage six to casual observation; it was impossible to confirm I didn’t have a demesne while I was in the middle of Ammun’s. What he could confirm was that I didn’t have my mage’s shadow yet, meaning I hadn’t reached stage eight.

Ammun knew he was stronger than me right now. If he decided to get rid of me, now would be an excellent time to make the attempt. On the other hand, he was weakened from having just woken up, and even with all the mana his stasis box had pulled in, I doubted he had much in reserve. Most of that had gone toward constructing him a body.

There was also the matter of the little black cube in his hands. Unless I missed my guess entirely, that was his phylactery, something he’d be quite keen to protect. Losing a body was one thing, but if that cube got broken, he’d actually die. It was no wonder he’d taken it with him when he’d sealed himself up to prevent himself from ending up mana-starved.

If we fought now, he risked his phylactery being destroyed, something every lich avoided at all costs. I might just make it out of here alive if I was careful. But while this was Ammun’s best chance to kill me, it was also my best chance to destroy him. And there was no doubt in my mind: I had to destroy Ammun. He’d bound the entire tower as his genius loci and there was no chance he’d ever let me tear it down, not even to salvage the world core. It would mean his own death.

“Calm, Master,” he said, raising a hand. The black cube vanished as he did so, no doubt tucked away into his own phantom space. “Through all the centuries, I’ve never lost my respect for your knowledge and skills. It is a privilege to see you walking the world again. I was merely surprised to see you fallen so far from your former power.”

I didn’t buy that for a second. Of all my many, many apprentices, Ammun stuck out in my mind as one of the most conniving ones, more than willing to get his hands dirty to accomplish his goals and never concerned about the morality of his actions – not that I was one to cast judgment for that. But I knew he wouldn’t hesitate for a second to kill me if he thought it would get him what he wanted.

“A temporary setback,” I assured him. “Part of the reason I even came here was the abundance of mana being produced by your creation. Unfortunately for me, your awakening has made me aware of your claim on it.”

“Indeed,” Ammun said with a chuckle. He glanced fondly at the wall. “The work of many mortal generations. We had to twist its purpose at the end, with some regrettable side effects.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” I told him. Part of me wanted to press him, to see what efforts he’d made toward fixing the problem he’d caused. I knew he’d be every bit as motivated as me, maybe even more so, to restore mana to the world, but he’d probably realized he couldn’t accomplish that while his tower was wedged into the mysteel shell that surrounded the world core.

That was a dangerous topic. I was reasonably sure the only thing keeping Ammun from doing his best to kill me was that he didn’t know I’d discovered what exactly he’d done, or what was needed to reverse it.

“Yes.” His expression appeared pained now. Ammun always had been a good actor. “I was unable to devise a solution to that before I was forced to seclude myself here for what was supposed to be a brief stay while things stabilized.”

He cast his gaze over the various Breakers filling the hall, then to Averin, who was still kneeling in place. The elites who’d tried to stop me, including Seven, were still lined up in formation at my back, but with the loss of the majority of their mana and Ammun’s subsequent appearance, they hadn’t made any moves.

“Still, for all that went wrong, it appears I do still command some loyalty in my own home,” Ammun said.

I didn’t know about that. The Breakers of Chains had been billed as a terrorist faction intent on overthrowing the long-standing ruling families. One could make an argument that a return of their old emperor was the final step of that mission, but if so, I seriously doubted the rank-and-file members were aware of it. No one besides Averin seemed to have known what they were going to find here.

“Yes, Emperor,” Averin said. “Our lives for your cause.”

“That will not be necessary,” Ammun said. “I merely require enough mana to sustain myself, something that I’m sure the tower is amply capable of providing if it has truly been a thousand years.”

His red pin-prick eyes returned to me, watchful and measuring. “But you, my master, this is truly unexpected. You, too, are seeking to repair the damage I inadvertently caused saving my homeland?”

“I wouldn’t say I was here specifically for that,” I lied. “It was more an investigation of a powerful source of mana than anything.”

“Ah.” The old lich shook his head. “Whatever the reason for your arrival, you are far too clever not to have realized what happened.”

I nodded silently and did my best not to tense up.

“I have no doubt you’ve devised the simplest solution already,” he said.

It looked like he wasn’t buying my lie. I started weaving my mana in my core, hidden behind my shield and ready to be unleashed as a surprise attack. If I was lucky, Ammun wouldn’t notice. “I have.”

“I believe I can find an alternative solution,” the lich told me, as if it were that easy. Just let the world ride it out. It had already been a thousand years. It could wait a few more centuries.

The thing was, if I really believed he could, I might have been inclined to work with him on it. But I’d seen the damage, and I knew how indestructible this tower was. Even if we transmuted the mysteel back into shape and left the tower as a plug, it would continue to drain mana directly from the core. Everything would be unbalanced, even in the best-case scenario.

“How long did you work on it before you ended up in here?” I asked.

“Forty years or so. Maybe fifty.”

“And did you make any progress?”

“It wasn’t a very long time for such a complex project. I’m sure we could speed it up drastically by working together.”

That was my out. I could agree now and make a hasty exit. With the world completely drained of mana outside this tower, there was no way Ammun could follow me. All I needed to do was get a single teleportation off and I’d be safe. I had the mana. The platform was fifty feet away.

But if I ran now, I gave Ammun time to consolidate his new lease on life. I’d never see that phylactery again. Everyone else here was drained to practically nothing. This was as fair a fight as I was ever likely to get.

“I think we both know there’s only one solution,” I said just as I unleashed the spell I’d been building while we talked.

Phantom spaces were difficult to target. They existed as a sort of pocket in the astral realm where time and the laws of nature were considered mere suggestions. The only real weak point was where they anchored to our world, and those were protected by the people who owned them.

Despite the name, phantom spaces had nothing in common with the phantasmal line of spells. They would have been much less secure if the connection could be severed with a simple intermediate-tier spell. Just because it wasn’t easy didn’t mean it was impossible, however. My attack was composed heavily of divination magic designed to hunt down that intangible anchor, followed by a powerful enchantment that latched onto and drained the anchor dry.

It struck Ammun before he had a chance to react, but he wasn’t an archmage for nothing. Even with no defensive tools and barely enough mana to hold his new body together, he broke the spell before it could finish its work.

There was no response beyond a flash of anger in his red eyes and a powerful master-tier conjuration of pure force. It was designed to stress test my wards, to force its victim to deal with an overwhelming amount of raw kinetic power. I would know; I’d taught it to Ammun a few thousand years back.

Instead of getting caught by the battering ram of magic, I reshaped my shield ward to deflect the spell to one side while the momentum pushed me the other way. It took less than a tenth of the mana it would have to stop it head-on, and when the spell crashed into the wall behind me, it did nothing more than shake the hall slightly.

Averin bellowed in outrage and sprang to his feet, but having only had a few minutes to regenerate his own mana, he barely had enough for two or three master-tier spells. Lucky for me, the line of elites behind me was not only dealing with the same issue, they also weren’t nearly as sure of whose side they were on. They held back and didn’t try to interfere.

Averin’s ward-splitting attempts were pitiful, the result of a lack of resources, not skill. I could basically ignore them to focus my attention on the lich and his shadow. With the first exchange completed, Ammun’s shadow sprang to life.

A mage’s shadow could act completely independently from its owner, up to and including casting spells. Effectively, that meant I needed to defend myself from two Ammuns at the same time, with the sole saving grace here being that the lich was fresh out of the crypt and didn’t have much mana. Undead, unlike living people, couldn’t generate their own. I could outlast him and batter him to nothing, then shatter the phylactery.

I sent a salvo of elemental attacks his way – not out of any expectation of hitting him, but just to force him to waste even more mana defending against them. His shadow, meanwhile, had jumped free of his body and was now sprinting across the wall to my left. It sent a series of cheap hostile divinations at me, each one slamming painfully against the barriers surrounding my mind.

If even one got through, I was finished. I’d be crippled at least temporarily, but in a fight like this, even a few seconds meant death. Since this was far from the first spell duel I’d been involved in, I was well aware of how lethal a crippled psyche was, and I’d ensured my defenses were top-notch long before I’d set foot in the tower.

The spells were barely a distraction from Ammun’s barrage of force spells, everything from a hail of needles to a cutting wave that blew past me and tore into the people in the hallway behind me. Unsurprisingly, Ammun didn’t seem to care about the collateral damage.

Affecting an undead’s mind with divinations was a fool’s errand, so I didn’t try. Instead, I kept hacking at his connection to his phantom space while throwing an endless barrage of spells at both him and his shadow. It was entirely possible to destroy that shadow. Though it could regenerate quickly enough, unless Ammun took the time to speed up the process, it would be out of the fight.

Shadows were hard to pin down, though, and it easily danced along the wall, avoiding anything and everything I threw at it. I didn’t consider that a waste, not when every moment it spent dodging was a moment it couldn’t cast its own spells at me.

I could sense Ammun slowing down, conserving his remaining mana, trying to find a way out of this fight. He set off a light bomb in my face, only for it to be smothered as I wrapped it in darkness before it could fully detonate. It still provided a visual barrier, but I’d gotten used to processing multiple viewpoints from my ever-present scrying spells thousands of years ago. One flashy attack wasn’t going to blind me, even if it had gone off.

That was how I knew he was running. I turned to give chase, ready to sunder the teleportation platform if I needed to. Seven and the other elites were in my way, but I burned the mana to slip past them and crashed into Ammun just before he reached the platform.

At the same moment, his phantom space tore open, and that little black cube spilled out onto the ground to land right at my feet. I stomped down on it, looked directly into Ammun’s panicked eyes, and said, “Got you.”