“This is not how I imagined this going.”

“Is that because you’re not a wizard?”

“No, it’s because the nestizens are apparently magic-blind, or some shit? I didn’t expect that.” Wek leaned on her maul, glowering at the structure they were about to bring down. “No movement, no signs of life, even when you were sealing the doors and windows. You took an hour, and it’s not like you were subtle about it. What are they doing?”

“They’re not magic blind, but they are asleep,” Nathan said absently. “They can detect lethal intent, but nothing I’ve done has been with the direct intent of killing them, and I’m incredibly good at compartmentalization. So I just haven’t thought about anything but the next step, and then the step after that one.”

“Why are they asleep, though?”

“Nitrogen,” he answered as he carefully continued to feed mana into the glyph-stencil. “I pumped it into the building. Most of the money I spent on our behalf was for gas-producing glyphs, actually, because I had to get enough output that it would suffuse the building at the right concentration even before I sealed the doors and windows.”

“Huh.” Wek’s hands twisted on her maul. She lifted one hand to scratch the back of her neck, muscles visibly rippling under her unadorned chainmail as she did so. Her helmet was hanging from her belt beside one of her gloves, as it had been for an hour—she had expected a quick fight and gone in ready for it, and in somewhat medium order divested herself of those two items in order to have some semblance of comfort. “Neat,” she said agreeably after some thought. “So what now? That was your last demolition glyph.”

“You can recognize them?”

“I’m not illiterate, jackass. I can read Common Arcane just fine.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Nathan said with an apologetic smile. “Like I said, I’m not from here. Where I come from, almost nobody would be able to read this.”

“I believe you, but that’s fucked up. What, does a secret cabal of demihumans with hooked noses and a penchant to keep their hands on the levers of power behind the scenes control everything by a mixture of subliminal messages and double-talk?”

“Some people say so,” he said distractedly, checking over the glyph to make sure everything was correct, just as he had for every other glyph that the equipment he’d bought had impressed onto the ground, the walls, the doors, the windows, and every other surface around. They had all been perfect, but that hadn’t stopped him from checking. “Personally, I think it’s ludicrous and just an excuse to otherize a specific generally marginalized group of people, but given that extremely popular pieces of media adopt the imagery without anyone really giving a shit I think that ship sailed well before I got abduct-rescued from my imminent death and sent on a bizarre and twisting meta-quest. You should gear up now.”

Not having anything of substance to say to that, Wek gave an uncomfortable shrug—she was starting to develop an itch under her right shoulderblade, which was impossible to scratch without removing her chainmail entirely—and fastened first her helmet back on and then her second gauntlet. Nodding at Nathan to indicate her readiness, she took up her maul with both hands, sliding and twisting her hands as she secured her grip around the five-and-a-half-foot-long shaft of wood. “What flavor of nestizen are you expecting?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Hm.” Nathan looked at the building they were expected to clear, giving it some thought. “You already know, don’t you,” he said eventually.

“Guilty as charged.”

He took in her smirk, smiling faintly. “It’s a three-story faux-brick facade, and the outside isn’t alive, so it’s not a fleshghoul variant or a mimic. The surface is actually transmuted earth, which means it’s either some variant of lesser elemental-spawn hybrid caused by a mana rift or it’s a demibeast infestation? Though obviously there’s a dozen kinds of demibeast. But I’d expect some kind of non-burrowing rodent, judging by the fact that there’s no subsurface.”

“Not bad,” she said with a nod.

“And it’s elemental-spawn hybrid,” Nathan finished. “Because if it were demibeast, you’d be holding the maul ready to hit them with the spike side, not the blunt side.”

Wek spun the maul in her hands, shaking her head. Reaching up, she spun the polearm in a circle over her head, bringing it back around into a guard position without any apparent strain. “Too many leaps of logic,” she pointed out, “especially since you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about with weapons-work, that’s obvious enough.” She paused a moment, then grinned. “You’re right, though. It’s spawn.”

“And how can you tell?”

She shrugged, testing the footing, sliding her rear foot a little bit to the side. “Kill enough of something, and you get a resonance. I can just feel ‘em.”

Nathan sighed. “I thought the answer might be something like that. Alright. Here’s the plan.”

“Oh goody, I get to know something before it happens!”

“By the time I finish explaining the plan, they’ll be awake. Groggy, but awake. I’ve reinforced the walls and infused them with just enough lunar and munar mana to prevent it from being still earth, so they’ll be pouring out the front door.” He looked at it unhappily. “Eight feet wide, so they can get at you at least two at a time. Hold them there as long as you can, and once you step off the porch, the glyphs will fire.”

“And you’ll be?”

“Charging the glyphs. Body Boost before you go in?”

“Don’t mind if you do,” she said with a flicker of a savage grin. “Don’t mind at all.”

Nathan pulled out a perfectly spheroid stone with a set of glyphs inscribed in it, inlaid in a mixture of gold and titanium that was guaranteed to hold up to tens of thousands of spellcasts at his best-effort output. Pouring mana into the input rune for the Body Boost spell, he linked its output node with Wek’s metaphysical Self and tied it off after the returns on its concentration started to diminish.

“Fifteen seconds of real motion,” he said firmly, tucking the stone into his pocket. “Ready?”

“Start the music, cee-jay.”

Nathan placed his hand over the crystal with the glyph that would feed his mana into the various parallelized input runes for the demolition glyphs and smiled. Pouring his mana into the crystal, he nodded to his heartbeat, accepted the inevitable truth of incipient violence, and brought into being a particular kind of music.

Battle.