I spent the next six hours scouring the lands being absorbed into the new Ralvost Empire. My first project was to confirm the locations of the other seven facilities I was guessing existed, which wasn’t something I could complete in a single night. I settled for the nearest two, both of which were inaccessible unless I wanted to make some noise. I’d gotten lucky stumbling across the one that had a hole in the physical defenses I could exploit.

I left hidden teleportation beacons scattered across the landscape behind me. It was a risk, but I needed to be able to move around Ralvost more quickly than flying could let me. Hopefully, I’d placed them in obscure locations that no one would have any reason to stumble across.

Unfortunately, my attempts to trace the supply train’s route backward in hopes that it had multiple stops that would lead me to other facilities wasn’t working out. The wagons themselves didn’t exist as far as any sort of temporal scrying was concerned, and it seemed like the train’s staff and guards were close enough to Ammun that his own wards were bleeding onto them. It wasn’t an unexpected result, but it was frustrating.

That left me with trying to follow the physical trail directly, something I was not well-equipped to do. It went fine for a little while, perhaps a day’s worth of their travel. Their tracks were easy to follow when they went cross country, but once they got back onto an actual road, things got a bit more muddled. I could make some guesses that were probably reasonable, but I was an archmage, not a game warden. Deciphering which particular ruts belonged to the wagon train I was trying to trace wasn’t a game I was likely to win, long term.

Each guess I had to make only increased the likelihood that I’d get it wrong and start following some other set of wagons. The sheer size of the supply train helped somewhat, but even that was far from foolproof. More often than not, every crossroads I came to saw me standing there, casting divination after divination on other tracks, trying to determine which set I needed to follow by process of elimination.

It was ironic that I was spending all my time casting not only divination spells designed to feed me information, but ones specifically focused on peering through time. If my focus hadn’t been so narrow, I might have gotten more than an instant’s warning that I was being attacked.

This far from Ammun’s tower, the ambient mana was basically nonexistent. A sudden surge of mana around me was my only clue that something was wrong before a pillar of white-hot molten fire descended from the sky, erasing the night and smiting me like a vengeful god from on high.

I threw myself away just before it hit, my movement sped up by magic so that I moved twenty feet in an instant. That got me out from directly underneath the attack, but still left me caught up in the radius of its aftereffects. Tendrils of fire thicker around than my waist arced off it, rising into the air and flicking out to dissipate into pure heat as the temperature spiked upwards to lung-scorching and skin-searing levels.

My shield ward made a valiant effort to keep me unbroiled, but it took less than two seconds for it to run through all the mana it held. I desperately pushed more in as I scrambled to put some distance between myself and the outdoor oven I’d gotten caught up in, but all that did was give me another fraction of a second before the ward broke entirely.

That would have been enough. I could go a hundred feet in a second, and easily. The pillar was a bare thirty feet wide. While I wouldn’t have been out of danger completely, I’d have successfully evaded the most dangerous initial strike. All of that would have been true, but the damn thing started moving.

It ripped across the landscape, leaving a trail of fire and scorched earth as it chased me, every bit as fast as I was. It was all I could do to keep ahead of it, but while I couldn’t increase my speed, I could and did throw out my counter attacks at its source, high up above me.

There were four of them up there, lurking just at the bottom edge of the clouds. One of them was a stage four master mage whose name I’d never officially gotten, but who’d been designated as Seven by the organization he worked for. The flaming beam spell was his specialty, though I’d never seen it charged to this extent. Somebody had been taking lessons from Papa Ammun.

Of more concern to me were the other three. One of them was holding the enchantments they were using to try to hide from me, a task he’d failed spectacularly at. I could dismiss him for now other than to make sure his role didn’t shift into something else once they realized their attempts at obfuscating the source of the burning death beam chasing me around had failed.

The other two were more immediate threats. One of them had started launching telepathic attacks at me, nothing serious, but obviously aimed to distract me. I brushed off her attempts to break through my mental defenses easily. The final member of their group was trying to cut off my escape by conjuring up force spells in my way. With my shield ward so thoroughly drained, I was left to manually dodge around them.

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Their jobs were obviously to distract and disorient me so that Seven’s master-tier destructive evocation could finish me off, which made them far more dangerous than the minimal amount of mana they were using would suggest, but at the same time, significantly less important to deal with than Seven. Stopping his spell, or at least outlasting it, all but removed the threat this entire group posed.

I was faster in my elemental form, but casting the spell to shift to it took a minute normally. I could get it down to forty seconds with my staff, which was about thirty-five seconds more than I had before I turned into a greasy smear on the dirt. I had time to get off one good spell, and I needed to make sure I hit the right target with it.

Seven was the obvious choice, but also likely the best protected of the bunch. A better choice would be whichever one of them had divined my presence. I had several active spells to hide my presence, but those obviously were doing me no good. I could cast an aura crash spell on one of them before the death beam caught up to me. But which one?

It wasn’t Seven. I’d dealt with him before and I knew what he was capable of. He was the magical equivalent of a hammer – all force, no finesse. The mind and force attacks coming from the other two were lackluster, the attempts of weak mages who had no business being in a fight with an archmage. They barely qualified as distractions.

That left the one trying to cloak their location, a feat he’d successfully managed right up until Seven had launched his attack. There was some real skill involved with that, which made him the most likely candidate. He was also the least threatening of the possible candidates, and therefore the biggest gamble. If I wasted my one shot on the mage who was doing absolutely nothing to hinder me, I could very well end up dead.

Doing nothing and overthinking it would lead to the same result. I cast aura crash, my mana spilling out of me and weaving itself into an elaborate knot of runes before streaking through the sky in a blink to strike my victim, the mage who was still trying to hide their presence from me.

Instantly, his spells crumbled. Without his magic to hide behind, I could feel the other three mages clearly. Seven was every bit as protected as I’d expected him to be. He was the scion of a Great House, after all, and had clearly been gifted every possible advantage in his life. Just because Ammun had returned and taken over the tower didn’t mean he’d let himself be cast down from his lofty position.

More importantly, I’d been right. Without the other mage’s magic to guide them, the force spells that had so precisely thrown themselves in my way became wild and erratic, more of a random bombardment than anything targeted. Most of them could be outright ignored.

It also meant my evasive maneuvers quickly shook Seven’s death beam. I watched it slice through the ground in the wrong direction and put some more distance between us, just in case it was a ploy to reverse direction and cut me apart as I ascended to cloud level to attack them directly.

The death beam cut off and I caught the faint noise of them panicking as they realized that not only had they lost their ability to discern my location, but that they could no longer hide their own. As a group, they turned to flee. Seven left the other three behind, and they were slowed by the two I hadn’t hit with aura crash struggling to support their comrade between them as they flew off. He’d probably pull himself together in the next few seconds, but by then it’d be too late.

I cast a grand telekinesis spell and grabbed all three of them, then jerked them straight down to plummet to the ground. As a group, they probably could have resisted the spell well enough to allow one of them to get away. Fighting individually to save themselves, they had no chance of making it work. They hit the ground with bone-breaking force and I landed next to them a few seconds later.

The mentalist was unconscious with blood running down the side of her face and her leg fractured in several places. Bits of bone poked out through the skin, visible under the blood and torn fabric of her pants. The force magic user had managed to cushion his fall enough that he was battered, but awake. He groaned in pain and tried to haul himself upright as I approached.

I was still invisible and silent, undetectable to mundane senses, so it was no surprise that he didn’t realize I was there yet. It was the third mage, though, the one I’d struck with aura crash, that impressed me the most. Even now, he was working to fix the damage I’d done to his mana control while he pretended to be dead. A thin veneer of illusion hid his efforts, so subtle that if I hadn’t been looking for it, it was possible that I might have overlooked it.

“Your boss just left you for dead to save his own skin,” I said, dropping my invisibility to hover directly overhead. “And you’re too dangerous to leave as is, so the way I see it, you’ve got two choices. I can drain you of your mana and we can have a conversation, or I can just kill you now.”

The force mage looked up at me. He was a middle-aged man with a thick beard, heavily muscled and wearing simple, practical clothes. I didn’t recognize him, but I didn’t have a hard time picturing him wearing the cloak and mask of a Breaker of Chains, the terrorist group that had woken Ammun up from his millennium-long nap.

He started to cast a spell, some kind of force magic, but I countered it immediately and hit him with my own force lance. It struck him on the chest, slamming him straight into the ground and leaving him insensate to the rest of the world. The woman was truly unconscious and would probably die without intervention, leaving just the clever one of the group.

“What’s it going to be?” I asked, focusing my attention on the one playing dead.

Realizing that his ruse had failed, the man cracked open one eye and grimaced. “Doesn’t seem like I’ve got a lot of options left. I surrender.”