Book 3, Chapter 77 (Patreon)

The reaction was immediate and violent. Ammun whipped both hands straight up and hurled mana out in a tightly controlled burst. Telekinetic force ripped down the hallway, hitting me and everyone else nearby in an ingenious, albeit expensive, attack.

Most shield wards, mine included, handled kinetic force by redirecting it, but if there was too much, it could also shove me off to one side. If I was pinned against a solid surface by it, the shield ward would hold steady until it ran out of mana rather than let me be crushed, but by design, the magic sought to minimize the amount of force it had to absorb via reshaping of the ward to deflect said force away at an angle.

In this case, Ammun’s spell slipped across the floor, just high enough to skim over the top of his phylactery, then shoved everyone straight up to slam into the ceiling. It was so widespread that there was no possible angle my shield ward could slew the force off from, which meant me and six other people were all pinned to the top of the hall for about a second and a half, just long enough for Ammun to cast another telekinesis spell that sent his phylactery zipping into his outstretched hand.

I wasn’t idle while I was being tossed around, of course. Failing to hold onto Ammun’s phylactery was a disappointing but expected result. I’d only really done it to distract him, though if I could have managed to escape with it myself, I absolutely would have. Really, what I’d been after was a few seconds to sabotage the teleportation platform.

Thankfully, I could do that remotely. It wouldn’t stop him from getting around under his own power, but those spells took time to craft properly, and the extreme distance between floors would only make it more difficult. While Ammun was busy recovering the black cube, I launched a series of divination spell instructions to the platform to cut off its connection to the installed mana battery. It would take me seconds to repair, but made it functionally impossible for anyone else to teleport out.

I dropped lightly to the floor when Ammun’s spell ended, a pair of invocations to increase my strength and balance already active. I sped down the hall, twin bolts of lightning leading the way and a hail of razor-edged ice following behind. With no shield wards of his own, Ammun had to manually dispel or defend against the elemental conjurations, a task he was more than up to.

Both lightning bolts slammed into a six-foot-tall needle of stone that appeared and disappeared in less than a second, and the ice storm plinked off an invisible wall to fall in deformed and cracked lumps to the floor at Ammun’s feet. While he was blocking those, though, he wasn’t advancing to the teleportation platform.

My scrying spell caught sight of a second stone needle descending from the ceiling behind me just in time for it to spew my own lightning bolts back at me. Unlike my opponent, my shield ward was fully charged and drawing directly from my immense mana crystal’s reservoir to keep itself that way. The lightning skittered across the ward’s surface before harmlessly dissipating.

That was all the time we had for slinging spells before I closed the physical distance and conjured up a gleaming silvery blade mounted from the top of my staff to run the lich through with. His free hand rose to catch the magical blade, itself covered in the exact same silvery material. A horrid, wailing screech filled the hallway as metal scraped across metal, but in the end, even my strength-enhancing invocations couldn’t compete with Ammun’s sheer physical prowess as a lich.

Undead often had the advantage there, but I’d been hoping to catch him off guard with the quick attack. It hadn’t worked, but all I had to do to reclaim my staff was dismiss the spell-conjured metal blade. I switched tactics, casting an endless stream of force cleaves at him from all directions to hold his attention while I worked on piercing his defenses to snatch the phylactery back out of his hand.

Or, more accurately, to sever that hand at the wrist and take the whole thing. It was easier than trying to pry his fingers open. Ammun’s mana reserves had to be almost gone, despite him using mostly weak and cheap spells. Most of it had gone into animating his body, leaving him with little to fight. My strategy of overwhelming him until he had nothing left to fight back with was quickly wearing him down.

Then, somehow, the teleportation platform flared to life. Ammun gave me a cheeky grin, deflected one last bit of force magic, and vanished. Had he managed to interface with the mana battery and reconnect it, or had he taken in far, far more mana than I’d thought and brute-forced the activation?

I mentally ran through who’d been in the hall during the siphon. Averin had freely given his entire core’s worth to Ammun, which had been half a teleportation spell by himself. Seven and the other elites would have had similar amounts to give, minus the mana they’d burned fighting me. The siphon had probably made that back and more just from eating my petrification and crystalline prison spells.

The numbers didn’t add up. I knew how much mana it cost to make a body like that. I knew how much mana Ammun had used during our own fight. Had he been deliberately underselling himself with weak spells to make me think he needed to conserve his reserves? Maybe he’d had some sort of emergency reserve storage crystal hidden in his robes?

A moment later I realized that no, it was neither of those things. He’d simply bypassed the security on the mana battery while we were fighting somehow and drained the damn thing dry. How exactly he’d done that was a mystery, but not one I had time to unravel, especially since I could see the Breakers still on their feet behind me coordinating to send a volley of spells in my direction. Regardless of their loyalty to Ammun, they were all in agreement that I was still an enemy, even after I’d gone through the trouble of not killing any of them.

That had been a wasted gesture. With Ammun alive and active, there was no chance I’d destroy this tower peacefully. I was almost certainly going to be committing genocide against an entire civilization in the near future, and even if not, it would be no thanks to the Breakers. These people were useless to me now.

I waved a hand behind me and cast a master-tier spell called shrapnel storm. Thousands of pieces of jagged stone filled the hallway, all flying at high speed. For about six seconds, everything besides me was shredded into bloody piles of meat, then the stone vanished. I sighed and shook my head. It would have been nice to be able to use that spell on Ammun, but it took a few seconds to cast, and there was no way he wouldn’t counter it before it could get going.

For these mages, it worked just fine. The only ones to survive were the elites in the back hiding behind the ugly one’s force wall, and even they were considerably worse for the wear. The wall must have buckled at the very last moment, exposing them all to a second or so of the spell before it ended.

Tempting as it was to pull the platform into my phantom space and leave the remaining Breakers stranded down here, it would cost me a few minutes to teleport manually. I’d already located Ammun; giving him those minutes to take in mana would only make the fight harder.

I needed to decide what to do. I could confront him directly and continue our battle, or I could teleport down to the real master control room and begin the sequence of events that would destroy the entire tower. That option would kill a few hundred thousand innocent people, but it would deprive Ammun of his demesne and possibly even starve him out in the long run.

If only I could be in two places at once, but without my mage’s shadow, it was impossible. So I made my decision.

  *

I flew into the control room a few minutes later and immediately approached the nearest interface. While there was no big flashing self-destruct option, there were ways to shift the tower’s mana flows to starve out the wards that reinforced it. At that point, physics would take over, and it would crumble under its own weight. If I did that, then destroyed the master controls, Ammun would be stuck fixing everything manually, and that was far, far too much work for a single person to do. Even an archmage would need a small army of assistants.

Before I could get into the interface, a rope of shadows dropped from the ceiling and looped around my throat. My shield ward flared, but the rope simply tightened around that invisible barrier and refused to be dislodged. I found myself flung from my feet to slam into a wall on the opposite side of the room.

Ammun’s shadow stood on the wall across from me, already working its next spell while I recovered from the surprise attack. Now that it had caught me off guard, there was no need for it to hide its presence like it had been doing when I came in.

“You know, it’s almost refreshing to have an opponent I can’t predict and outmaneuver at every turn,” I said. Ammun would be able to hear the words through his shadow. “You would not believe how boring it’s been in this world going up against the sorry excuses for mages I keep finding around here.”

“Nobody ever really measured up to your standards,” Ammun projected back. “Not even the best of your students was good enough for you.”

“Please. You were far from my best. Plenty of students easily mastered the concepts you spent your time struggling with.”

“Then where are they now?” the lich asked. “If I was such a failure of a student, then how come I’m the only one here?”

“Well, it has been a few thousand years. That tends to put even the best and brightest in the ground, unless they do something stupid like turn themselves into an undead creature whose body requires massive amounts of mana to maintain, only to then destroy the biggest source of mana on the planet.”

“What was I to do? Let that insolent cabal rain destruction down on my homeland, on the whole world? No one was safe as long as they had that moon under their control.”

I hadn’t been there, so I couldn’t say with any certainty that I would have come up with a better response, but… I would have come up with a better response. Ammun’s screwup had caused worldwide problems, and what made it worse was that he’d obviously been playing with things he didn’t understand, otherwise he never would have chosen the course of action he had.

“It’s too late to change, either way,” I told the shadow. While we’d been chatting, I’d been running through the controls on the interface remotely, something that Ammun apparently hadn’t caught onto. Perhaps he simply wasn’t aware that I’d already been here and corrected my lack of access to the systems, or perhaps he was simply too distracted by whatever he was doing to pay attention to what his shadow could sense.

Either way, I finished making the necessary adjustments to the mana flow right about the time we got to that point in the conversation, then I promptly unleashed a massive wave of force into the whole control structure, shattering much of it to useless pieces.

“Now that that’s finished, I’ll be coming for you next,” I told the shadow. It tried to chase me out of the room, but my flight spell gave me too much speed for it to keep up without magic of its own. By the time it ran me down, I’d already reached my teleportation platform and locked onto my next destination.

The world disappeared, and I was bathed in light. The only thing I could see amidst the brilliant flow of mana around me was a lone shadow a few hundred feet below, floating in the center of the mana column that made up the core of the tower.