Whether it was a coincidence or deliberate, the attacking mages couldn’t have picked a better time to launch their assault. Whoever was in charge was better about keeping their forces safely hidden than the last bunch, too. Even now, with the sky burning above my wards, my divinations didn’t detect anyone out there. That was going to make it hard to counterattack, but there was some small consolation in knowing that they were likely expending a great deal of excess mana to fire at such a long range.
The mysteel pillars lit up in my mind, thankfully only because I was connected to them and not because of the amount of mana they were pulling. Any defensive system that highlighted its weakness wouldn’t be very good, after all. Unfortunately, without an enemy nearby, they couldn’t do much besides defend against the next attack.
More explosive conjurations painted the sky, but those were just a distraction. I was sure the enemy was prepared to take advantage of the situation if something managed to shatter my wards, but the true danger was the sappers trying to subvert or undermine the ward schema so that it would unravel on its own. Failing that, they would try to weaken my defenses enough to smash through.
It was too bad for them that in an effort to dodge my divination wards, they’d given themselves a huge handicap with the distance they’d launched their assault from. While my valley did have twenty ward stones spread across it to help regulate and power my defenses, all of them funneled feedback through my genius loci and back to me. As long as I was in my demesne, I could feel every probing attempt the enemy made, and it was no strain at all to capture the mana they tried to inject into my wards to break them.
It also revealed close to thirty mages working on just ward-breaking, plus however many more were slamming conjurations against the wards directly or using counter-divinations to block my attempts to find their group. “Querit, can you focus on locating the enemy mages while I block their attempts to undermine the wards?”
Golems didn’t get tired like people did, and despite what we’d just gone through creating the resonance point, all Querit really needed was to pull in more mana to get back into fighting shape. He might not be at full strength, but he’d be a lot closer than I could get in the next few minutes.
“I’m already searching for them,” he replied. “The conjurations are originating from a location two miles west of us on the slope of the mountain, but I can’t find anyone there. It’s possible they’re even farther back and using remote casting techniques to place the origin points of their spells away from their actual position.”
“The simple fact that those conjurations are traveling over a mile to reach the barrier and still have that much strength behind them means the enemy is using master-tier quality spells,” I said.
“Or ritual conjurations to compensate for the lack of power.”
I nodded. That was a possibility as well. Most likely, it was a mixture of both. They’d have one or two heavy hitters to anchor their offense while the rest operated in groups of five to ten. They’d probably timed their ritual conjurations to keep up a steady pressure against the wards.
Ammun’s forces weren’t the only ones who’d been preparing, though. The mysteel pillars would hold for hours, even with the loss of all the mana that had gone into the resonance point project. That was plenty of time for us to find and eliminate our attackers, as long as I could stop the saboteurs from subverting my wards enough to allow anyone through.
On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t the worst idea to deliberately let a few mages in. If they were stupid enough to walk into an archmage’s demesne, they deserved their fates. But no, tempting as it was to see if they’d take the bait, giving them a foothold in the wards could result in them spreading their reach to the more sensitive portions where they could do real damage. That would just be a waste of mana refreshing them when I could easily prevent that damage in the first place.
I wanted to leave the valley’s defenses to the mysteel pillars and fly out there to take the fight to the enemy. Sitting here letting them wear me down was no way to win, and even if they gave up, it did nothing to stop them from attacking villages and towns all over the island instead.
But leaving my demesne would be the worst strategy right now, simply because I lacked the strength to scour the mountains trying to find them. Once Querit got a fix on their location, it’d be a different story, but even then, I had enough energy in me for one good strike. I needed to make sure I caught as many enemies as possible in it, since anyone who survived and fled was almost certain to get away.
Minutes rolled by while I waited for Querit to finish his search and did my best to recover my spent strength. Lightning bolts, fiery explosions, spears of stone and steel, and more crashed into the barrier my wards wove over the valley in hundreds of different locations, all hunting for a weakness to exploit.
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There was a pause in the bombardment, followed by a sound of satisfaction from Querit. “They’re trying to block me,” he announced through the mirror. “I’ve got their position narrowed down, and their divination blockers can’t do more than scatter the signal a little bit to keep me from getting an exact read.”
The enemy force must have pulled their artillery team off of the attack to help shore up their divination wards – that or whatever master mages they had among their ranks had switched tasks and had been doing far more of the heavy lifting than I’d given them credit for.
My mana core was full now; it was just a matter of mustering the willpower to wield it. I teleported across my demesne to the platform and waited for Querit’s word, or rather for the image he was projecting into the scrying mirror to tighten down from the thousand-foot stretch it was searching through.
“Their ward breakers must be getting tired,” I said. “Attacks against the ward schema directly are starting to fall off, too. If this is their big offensive push after months of gathering resources, I’m not impressed.”
The problem was that I didn’t think either of us believed they were throwing everything they had at us. This was a probing strike, or maybe at best an opening blitz to see if they could overwhelm us before we solidified the valley’s defenses. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that such a huge tract of land couldn’t be warded from end to end, however wrong that assumption happened to be.
“Found them,” Querit reported. A spot on the map flashed red for a moment, then the scene shifted to an unassuming stretch of sky a few thousand feet up above the slope of the mountain. “Think you can hit it from here?”
“No,” I said.
“What? I thought—”
I missed whatever Querit was about to say as my teleportation magic took hold, bringing me to a spot a few hundred feet above our attackers. I was invisible and warded against divinations, which did not mean they wouldn’t be able to see me, just that it would hopefully take a few more seconds before they noticed I was there.
I only needed one to unleash the master-tier spell I’d been holding.
I’d created a great many of the spells in my repertoire myself, either researching them from scratch or by adapting inferior versions I’d found throughout my many years. Occasionally, though, I had raided some lost trove or found a forgotten research lab and came across something so good that all I needed to do was learn how to cast it.
Falling stars was one such spell. It wasn’t terribly useful because it had an extremely long cast time, was prohibitively expensive, and had a limited range, making situations where I could effectively use it fairly rare. In this case, however, it was perfect.
Brilliant orbs of fiery white liquid appeared out of nowhere and began raining down through the sky. Any single one was close to ten feet wide, and I dropped eight of them down on the enemy mages.
As soon as the first one popped into existence, they noticed it, of course. Panicked defenses were quickly raised in the first second, only to be abandoned in the next when they realized their wards and force walls wouldn’t be strong enough. The third second was spent trying to use instant-cast short range teleportation to escape, and the fourth was when the first orb reached them and exploded.
Liquid fire coated everything within a hundred feet of its detonation point and started dribbling out of the sky. The wards already in place took the brunt of the impact, but even that was enough to drain a massive amount of their reserves.
Their resistance collapsed completely when the second and then third orbs hit their ward screen. Dozens of mages died in that instant, their bodies vaporized under a deluge of liquid fire, but thirty more scattered in every direction. Any attempt at remaining hidden was forgotten as they flew off, teleported away, and in the case of one particularly heartless mage, spatial-swapped positions with someone else who’d already fled the splash radius.
Exhaustion swept through me as I unleashed the spell. Even keeping my flight spell going was straining my mind, so much so that I didn’t think I had it in me to teleport back to my demesne. I started flying back at a fraction of my normal speed while I watched those few mages who’d managed to survive my surprise counterattack flee. No doubt they’d regroup miles from here to plan their next strategy.
I regretted that I wasn’t in any condition to chase them down, but breaking their attack would have to suffice for today. If Querit was a bit more bloodthirsty, he could probably pick off at least a few more of them using his aerial skirmisher frame, but the golem’s taste for battle had died when he’d been ambushed near Ammun’s tower.
As soon as I crossed the ward threshold back into my demesne, I pulled myself through space to the teleportation platform where I’d left the scrying mirror. “How many got away?” I asked wearily.
“Twenty-two,” he said. “I’m tracking all but four of them right now, but only because they’re grouping back up at a rendezvous point deeper into the mountains. What do you want to do about it?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Two hours ago, I would have gone out there and hunted them down. Right now, I just want to sleep.”
“Is there any backup you can call in to help?” Querit asked. “I know you haven’t been too keen on introducing me to your social circle, but—”
“No. It’s not that. I don’t really have a social circle, and nobody that does any work for me is above stage three. Most of them aren’t even at stage two. It’s just you and me, unless you’d like to cut your losses and escape. I won’t hold it against you.”
“That would be supremely ungrateful of me after everything you’ve done to help me acclimate to this new world.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time someone decided to look out for themselves,” I said. “Won’t be the last. That’s just how people are.”
A portal unfolded in the sky above my demesne, drawing my attention immediately. “Now what are they planning with that?” I asked.
“Initial divinations are putting the origin point at what I believe to be the lich’s tower,” Querit said.
“Reinforcements? Their timing is a bit off.”
But it wasn’t a stream of fresh mages ready to continue the fight that poured out. No, it was one mage wearing a dark purple robe and holding a staff made out of bleached bone. His hood flapped back in the wind, revealing the grinning skull of his face.
Ammun had taken to the field.