I had far too much to do, and not nearly enough time to get it all done. I’d made my modifications to the mysteel pillars I’d relocated from beneath Derro, but I still hadn’t gotten a chance to test them. With Querit here, my demesne’s mana reserves were under immense strain, and I wasn’t eager to tax them any further.
I also needed to confirm the location of Ammun’s remaining facilities and, if possible, make sure there weren’t any other locations outside the ring I’d already discovered. I needed to finish seeding Ralvost with teleportation and scrying beacons, and hide them well enough to keep the legion of diviners constantly scrying the entire empire from locating them. I had eight golems to build, all of which needed to be sturdy enough to survive a fight with mages capable of casting advanced spells.
There were other ongoing concerns, like the hunters searching for me, constructing an artificial mana resonance point, and locating Querit’s remaining frames. At least Querit himself was handling his introduction into lossless casting with minimal supervision. I only wished I could say the same for Senica and Juby. They were doing their best, but neither were druids.
I mentally added figuring out where Hyago had gotten off to back to my list again. That was a task that continued to get pushed down as more urgent problems kept cropping up, but one I wanted to take care of soon. My sister’s reagents weren’t really of the quality that I’d grown accustomed to, and I just didn’t have time to educate her in proper greenhouse tending.
Ideally, I’d make the golems while Querit figured out how to sustain himself indefinitely without needing far more mana than he could reasonably carry around with him. Then I’d seed the beacons so as to reduce the risk of discovery before use, and then we’d go ruin all of Ammun’s plans. Unfortunately, I had no way to keep track of their progress building whatever it was they were building thousands of miles away, and for all I knew, the mages there could be slotting the very last piece into place at this very moment.
So I shuffled my plans around and teleported myself several times to return to Ralvost, where I immediately shrouded myself in every reasonable divination countermeasure I could think of and flew to the facility I’d already explored once. Thankfully, the hole in its defenses hadn’t been fixed. I infiltrated it a second time in air elemental form and made my way to the main floor.
The device the mages here were building floated in the same place it had been last time I’d seen it, but it was significantly larger now. Either a second caravan had come through to drop off materials while I was busy elsewhere, or they’d had a much larger store of parts on-site than I’d expected and had been very busy indeed.
Neither possibility was good for me. This thing was practically completed, as far as I could tell. Without that stage five master mage overseeing the work this time, I was able to more freely examine it, which finally allowed me to confirm the answer to another question I’d been wondering about: why hadn’t Ammun just used portals to bring the supplies here? It couldn’t only be a security concern.
The simple answer was that he couldn’t – not for this cargo. Even in its incomplete form, the device was emitting some spatial warping properties, and the enchantments on them were so sensitive that being teleported or passed through a portal would twist them to uselessness. I marked that down as a potential method to wrecking Ammun’s plans, though just corrupting the enchantments would be a temporary setback at best.
If that was the case, then I was missing something about how they got transported down from the warehouses up on the surface. I hadn’t seen it in action before, only skimmed part of the process from someone else’s memory, but now I was guessing it wasn’t a teleportation effect after all. Instead, it had to be some sort of massive version of phantasmal step literally pulling the wagons through the ground. That might actually be even more expensive than a teleportation spell to cover an area that size.
While I was there, I took some time to map out the site’s layout so I could determine the best way to sneak a golem in. I’d be making something small, no larger than a cat, but I’d need a different way inside in order to make it work. That meant getting a better handle on the wards and defenses, but with my new understanding of how supplies were making it in, I had a few ideas on where to exploit weaknesses in the wards. I just needed to do some testing to confirm them.
I made my way over to the unloading bay, ironically not that far from where I’d originally entered the facility. As I’d suspected, the wards were thinner here. They were still present, of course, and if I attempted to pass through, they’d sound the alarm, though I didn’t think they’d stop me from exiting. However, it was obvious this spot was meant to be exempted on command, that it hadn’t been possible for them to figure out the exact composition of everything that would enter the unloading bay, which meant that my original plan to sneak in with the supplies would have actually worked so long as I could have avoided being spotted.
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It didn’t give me an easy way into the facility, but it did give me a point of attack. The whole ward structure was designed to not need this portion. If something were to disrupt it in such a way that the rest of the ward couldn’t detect it, nothing else would feel the effect. In short, I could be aggressive about pushing through it, and as long as the damage was kept localized and I avoided any sort of tattler wards, I could punch through undetected.
As long as the rest of the facilities were set up the same way, I’d found my infiltration point.
* * *
“You’re in a good mood,” Querit commented through the scrying mirror during our daily check in.
“I’ve been doing some reconnaissance and finalizing some plans,” I said. “I just need to build the golems and get us both out there. Everything else is ready to go.”
“Then soon you’ll just be waiting on me,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have an estimate on how long it’ll take me to adapt lossless mana usage to powering my golem core.”
“If we have to, I’ll eat the loss in mana and load you with a huge storage crystal. It’s better than delaying.”
“That could work for a temporary outing,” Querit conceded, but I could tell he was uneasy about it. If something went wrong, he’d be stranded out there until I could rescue him, and he wasn’t sure that I’d do that. His usefulness would curtail sharply once we’d completed this mission.
“Even if there’s a problem, you’ll be in the best possible place to handle it. Ralvost is the only place on the planet with ambient mana. It might be too thin to keep you fully operational outside of the tower itself, but you should maintain limited capabilities if the storage crystal is completely drained.”
“That’s a relief to hear, but I would still prefer not to be stranded in the demesne of a hostile lich.”
“That’s an entirely reasonable stance to take,” I agreed. “I could put together a recall device for you, something to pull you back here if there’s an emergency.”
Such safeguards weren’t foolproof, of course. If Ammun confronted Querit directly, it was entirely possible that he’d recognize the device and take steps to block it from working. But the offer did dispel the golem’s fears, or at least alleviate them.
“I’ll keep working on adapting lossless casting while you create the golems,” he said. “How are you planning on having them work?”
“They’ll be small and spider-like,” I said. “The internal power reservoir is only going to be good for an hour’s operation time, less with invisibility and attention-deflecting spells active, but that should be more than enough time to get them into position. I’m thinking a spatial annihilation field is the best way to attack. The machines we’re targeting are vulnerable to spatial warping, so even if the spell fails to completely destroy them, it should at least corrupt the enchantments enough that Ammun will need to have the parts sent back to him to be reworked.”
“Have you mapped out the local wards for possible interference?”
“Partially. I focused most heavily on the area around the machines and the infiltration point. There are some spatial suppression fields near the machines, but I’m confident I can overpower them with a quick burst using a dual-layer explosion to disrupt the wards before releasing the spatial annihilation field.”
“That’s a lot of mana,” Querit said. “And you want to do this for eight different locations? Are you sure that’s necessary?”
“No, but I’d rather waste the mana than let Ammun pull off whatever he’s trying to do.”
“You hate the man that much?”
I frowned and looked up from the outer shell plate I was shaping. “I don’t hate Ammun,” I said. “Where’d you get that idea?”
“Oh. I just thought… You’re enemies, and all…”
“We’re only enemies because he’s standing in the way of me fixing the damage he did to the world core,” I said. “Which I get. I need to remove his tower, which would likely result in his almost immediate demise without that source of mana. I don’t begrudge him trying to save his own existence.”
“Why not try to reach a compromise? Perhaps there’s some way to fix the world core that doesn’t involve breaking apart his demesne?”
I shook my head. “He already tried, for decades. He’d rather let the world exist as a wasteland so long as he survives. We both know it’s not possible. He’s an obstacle to my goal. That’s why I’m going to destroy him.”
Querit shook his head and laughed. “I don’t think I could be so casual about confronting what is probably the most powerful creature on the planet.”
“I beat him in a fight once already back when I was stage five. I have no doubt I’ll do it again.” I paused. “Though I’ll admit, I haven’t made much progress in finding a mana resonance point. They probably don’t exist anymore.”
“You’ll make an artificial one?” Querit asked.
“As soon as I have time to figure out how,” I said. I gestured to the golem parts I was shaping. “There’s always something else keeping me busy.”
The golem regarded me silently for a second, then said, “I know how.”
I whipped around to face the mirror fully. “What was that?”
“I know how to manufacture a mana resonance point. It’s not easy, and definitely not cheap, but I can show you how to do it.”
For a golem that consumed several master-tier spell’s worth of mana a day, if he was saying it wasn’t cheap, the expenditure had to be massive. Even if his method wasn’t the most efficient, it would probably still cost less in the long run if I didn’t have to waste a bunch of resources experimenting.
“And… what would you want in return?” I asked.
“That’s simple,” he said. “I understand why you’re doing all this – the caution, the secrets. It’s smart. It’s safe. It keeps you insulated from me and cuts down the chances of me causing you any problems. That’s why you’ve got three combat frames stowed away where I can’t access them.”
“And you want them back,” I reasoned.
“No. It’s not that. What I want is for you to trust me. I’m not a schemer. I’m not a master manipulator. I’m a research assistant, and even though I’m not human, my core is complicated enough that I feel like one. I don’t want to be isolated and kept in a box for the rest of my life, wondering if and when I’ll be starved back into shutting down.
“Keiran, I want to help you. I want your help, too. I want us to be friends, or at least colleagues.”