“Impossible,” I breathed out. “The mana costs…”

I couldn’t even calculate how much mana Ammun was burning every second to be that far away from his phylactery. Had he brought it with him? No, that would be the height of foolishness. There was no reason to take that kind of risk, not even to kill me. What, then?

A brilliant orb of white light appeared in front of him and fell to crash into my wards, where it splattered into liquid fire. A second and third followed it, each one putting an unbelievable amount of strain on the mysteel pillar network.

By the time the falling stars were striking my wards, Ammun had already stepped back through the portal, then a hundred new mages flowed out. They spread out overhead and watched their boss’s spell devastate my mana reserves while I silently seethed.

“Isn’t that the same spell you just used?” Querit asked.

“Yes,” I said shortly. “Why bother to be original when you can just copy the master?”

The sixth orb was the one that finally broke the wards, leaving the seventh and eighth to land unimpeded in the petrified forest. Stone didn’t burn, but it could melt. I scowled at the sight of the damaged trees, but there was nothing I could do to counteract the magic, not when all my resources were tied up in manually repairing the wards.

Mages swept down in formation, spread out enough to avoid being taken out by a single spell but still close enough to share overlapping defenses. “Querit, it’s time for you to go into hiding,” I said. “They’re inside the valley now.”

Before he could reply, I stuffed the mirror into my phantom space and summoned my staff. Bursts of force magic streamed through the sky, striking the invading mages and breaking on their wards, or, in some cases, cutting through to slice open my targets. The attack did little to slow them down, especially since I was focused on the ones in the middle of the pack.

The leading mages were going to get in; there was no question of that. Even as the wards wove themselves back together, I knew it wouldn’t be fast enough to keep them out. The ones at the back of the line were too far out and too slow to matter. They wouldn’t be a factor in the next stage of this battle. It was the ones in the middle who’d get past the wards before they could reestablish themselves if I didn’t act to slow them down.

Force magic was just the start. My next spell was a huge elemental blast of air to counteract their flight spells and throw them away from the valley. The magic only caught and blew three of them off course, but it slowed down another dozen or so. The ones who had wards strong enough to keep their flight paths stable were my next targets.

Waves of dispelling magic rippled up through the air, the first ones splashing uselessly against the mages leading the charge, but more and more magic passed through the group, and the weaker mages with fragile or partially-drained wards couldn’t compensate for my spells. A few more lost their focus and tumbled from the sky, their controlled descents transforming into panicked, screaming free falls.

It wasn’t enough. I had time for one more spell, but there was nothing I could do right now that would stop nearly thirty mages from making it through. I’d already used force walls, popping them up directly in front of mages. Some of them weren’t quick enough to prevent an impact, but even the ones who’d gotten hit rolled away and shook off the crash to resume flying moments later. Creating a bigger one as my final, desperate act wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

If I couldn’t stop them from entering, maybe I could deter them from trying. I waved my staff from left to right, and a massive rubbery black ball appeared in the air. Tendrils thicker around than my waist stretched out hundreds of feet to grab at the approaching mages, most of whom had the basic sense to swerve away. Those that were too stubborn or too slow were quickly snared in my construct’s grasp.

Their wards were enough to stop the tendrils from crushing them, but not enough to keep them from being caught in the first place. A few of them got clever with force spells—and in one case, conjuring up a stone egg to force the tendril out, then squeezing through an opening in the top before the stone could be crushed—that allowed them to escape, but my only goal was to stall them.

The construct broke apart, its physical matter decaying into mana over the span of a second and releasing all of the mages it had snared, but by then it didn’t matter. The wards finished knitting themselves back together, blocking out the majority of the mages who’d come through Ammun’s portal but still leaving twenty inside the barrier for me to contend with.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

They were, unfortunately, the twenty fastest, smartest, and best equipped to cause problems. Whatever their plan was, they’d obviously laid it out well before the attack started, because they immediately scattered to start hurling various conjurations at the petrified trees. Six of them banded together to come straight at me, a storm of force blades, fire blasts, and stone spears leading the way. Less obvious, one of them sent mind spikes at me in an attempt to shake my concentration and even tried to slip in some sort of blinding hex in the wake of his attacks.

“Now this is just insulting,” I said. Sure, I was tired, but to just come at me head-on like that was either unbridled arrogance or unfathomable stupidity.

If they wanted to give me easy targets, I wouldn’t waste any more time complaining. Targeted dispels were so much more powerful than area magics, and they were making it easy to aim. The first dispel ray shot out of the tip of my staff and stripped the lead mage of both his protections and his flight magic. The impact of him hitting the ground at such high speed was probably enough to kill him by itself, but just to be safe, I cast a stone jaws spell where he landed, causing the earth to rise up around him and snap shut.

The second mage dodged my next dispel ray, but the one right behind him didn’t. He met a similar fate to the lead mage, but that still left four more of them close enough to begin a new round of their own attacks now. They scattered to circle around me, all of them sending out a barrage of conjurations, offensive divinations, and, surprisingly, one bottle of silver liquid that shattered when it got near me and filled the area with choking white smoke.

A simple gust of air would clear that away, but if the attackers thought taking away my sight was going to help them, I was eager to show them how mistaken they were. My shield ward was keeping me safe from inhaling the smoke, and my mana sense told me exactly where they were. I was more than used to dealing with the background mana from my forest, and it was especially low right now after so much mana had been used anyway.

A beam of light pierced the smoke and turned into a diffuse cloud before it struck me. I snorted as the spell fizzled. These idiots weren’t so coordinated after all, not if their attacks were going to trip over each other like that.

Then I realized that my shield ward was draining rapidly and pumped some more mana into it. What was causing – Oh, I saw it. It wasn’t a mistake. The light was a form of mana drain, and scattering it like that had caused it to attack a significantly wider swath of my shield ward.

I dismissed the shield ward for a fraction of a second and resummoned it, causing the mana drain to lose purchase and fizzle out. Damn, I really was too tired right now to be dealing with this. It was embarrassing that I’d missed that.

With a sigh, I shook my head and sent out a retaliatory explosive blast, purposely targeting it off course so that the mage flying into it could dodge to the left. The spell was all flash and no substance, so weak that it wouldn’t have done more than redden the mage’s skin even if she’d flown right through it unprotected.

What it did do was get the woman to skim the outer layer of the smoke cloud, which then contorted into solid ropes that tangled her up and dragged her to the ground. If my enemies wanted to leave the smoke uncontested, I was happy to send my own mana through it and animate it.

Ammun had timed this attack perfectly, but he’d given his minions too much credit. They never would have breached the outer wards without his intervention—and I was still boggling at the absolutely massive mana expenditure he’d paid to move his physical body close to three thousand miles from his phylactery—and now that they were inside, they were cut off from any sort of reinforcements.

The defensive pillars were wreaking havoc on the saboteurs who hadn’t engaged me directly. I’d still need to hunt them down to put an early stop to their rampage across the forest, but they weren’t inflicting even a fraction of the damage they could if they didn’t have to contend with my wards.

Gravity twisted around me, slamming me down to one knee. The smoke flattened with me, leaving me revealed in a circle of open air and showing me two new mages who’d worked together a few hundred feet overhead to create a ritual spell.

“Good try,” I grunted as mana flooded my limbs in the shape of a strengthening invocation. At the same time, I reached out to my genius loci and let it pull me through my demesne to appear in the sky next to the two mages.

“Light protect us!” one of them yelped in terror, right before I sent twin bolts of black lightning raking across his shield ward. The spell easily overloaded the mage’s meager protection and proceeded to rip through his body, leaving him floating in the air, dead. His partner screamed and hurled an enormous force cleave spell at me from point-blank range.

I countered with my own force spell, an angled wall that caught the cleave spell and redirected it to slide past me, then repeated my twin lightning spell on her. Then I looked down and frowned. Where had the other four mages I was fighting gotten off to? None of them were circling the smoke cloud, nor were they flying up to meet me in the sky.

My gaze snapped up to the mana resonance point still floating in the air at the south edge of the valley. It was an obvious target, one that had only been spared so far because it was so far away from the center of my demesne where Ammun had shattered my barrier ward.

Sure enough, the four of them were flying that way. They’d even picked up three more mages who were focusing on deflecting the mana beams the defense pillars were firing at them and cutting through the snare spells. They were seconds away from getting in range of their target.

I slid through my demesne again and appeared next to the resonance. Apparently, these interlopers still hadn’t learned their lesson. But as I raised my staff again to channel more mana through it, my arms quivered with unexpected weakness.

“No,” I growled. I wasn’t done, not yet. I still had plenty of mana.

With my hand clamped down so hard on my staff that my knuckles were white, I forced another spell to form.