The timing of this attack was too perfect to be a coincidence. It had come mere moments after we’d finished stabilizing the resonance point. I was the weakest I’d been in years right now, weaker than when I’d fought Ammun personally back when my core was still stage five. Somehow, they were watching through all my divination-blocking wards. It shouldn’t have been possible, especially not from three thousand miles away.

Unless they had a mole on the inside.

I didn’t have time to figure out if that made sense right now. Querit had helped hunt down the first wave of attackers, but it wasn’t that unheard of a strategy to kill off some pawns in order to get the victim to trust someone – all the better to betray them later when it really counted. I’d sort through things after I addressed the immediate problems.

There were fourteen enemy mages still inside my demesne, and probably something like sixty or seventy outside the barrier. As much as I would have liked to get rid of them, I’d settle for killing the ones trying to destroy the valley and letting the rest flee for now.

The pylons that formed the corners of the ritual were no longer necessary, nor were they recyclable. They’d been carved to specific patterns to match conditions that had only existed for a handful of minutes, and even if the ritual had failed, I’d have had to make new ones anyway. Since they were essentially just fancy stone poles now, I might as well get some use out of them.

Grand telekinesis ripped one out of the ground and flung it at the approaching mages while I leaned on my staff and tried not to show any weakness. The stone shattered against shield wards, but the sheer mass and speed of it was enough that two of the mages took solid hits and lost control of their magic.

Two down, twelve more to go. Five were in front of me, and seven were wreaking havoc elsewhere, slowed only by my demesne’s automated defenses.

Despite my best efforts, the invaders knew I was tired. They had some sort of telepathic network up to help them coordinate their assault, which was probably how they were managing to keep ahead of the mysteel pillar system well enough to attack it. Fortunately, it was mysteel, and practically indestructible. I was more worried about one of the pillars being shifted out of place than I was about actual damage to it.

The five mages attacking me circled me like hungry sharks, all of them firing off weak spells from various angles. None of them were dangerous on their own, but that wasn’t the point. They were wearing me down, draining my reserves, pushing me to the brink. Sooner or later my shield ward would fail, and they’d close in for the kill.

And they weren’t in a hurry to do it. The initial exchanges had been frantic, them trying to find a weakness to exploit or to overwhelm me with numbers and speed. Now that they’d failed, they were adjusting their tactics. Normally, I enjoyed a smart opponent. Right now, I wasn’t in the mood.

I ripped a second pylon out of the ground and swatted at the flyers with it. One of them fired off some sort of force beam that struck it in the middle, breaking it apart and causing pieces to go flying in every direction as my telekinesis spell lost control of them. I quickly snatched a few of the larger stone fragments out of the air and flung them in the general direction of my enemies, but not quickly enough to hit any of them.

One of the mages started some sort of transmutation spell, probably something along the lines of earth to mud in hopes of affecting me in a way my shield ward couldn’t block. I let the spell build to its crescendo over the next thirty seconds, then reached out and broke apart the mana just before she could complete it. It was rare to see anyone casting anything so slow that I had the option to simply counterspell it, but everyone made mistakes.

I realized a moment later that the person who’d made the mistake was me. The transmutation had been a distraction while the rest of the group lined up their shots, and suddenly I had four ultra-hot beams of white fire pouring onto me from every angle. My shield ward kept the heat off me for the moment, but I needed to move before I got cooked.

Reaching through my demesne was a strain now. Even trying was enough to make my vision blur, but I pushed past that and pulled myself through a teleportation to appear in the air behind the mage I’d mentally marked as the most competent of the bunch. Then I slammed two panes of force magic into him like a pair of giant hands clapping and broke his shield ward. Before he could react, my staff descended on his skull and bashed it in.

Humans, despite the powerful magic we sometimes wielded, were ultimately very fragile creatures. Whether from a bolt of lightning or a heavy piece of metal to the back of the head, dead was dead.

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Something stabbed into my mind at that moment, not a spell from one of the enemy mages, but feedback from my defense system. One of the mages I wasn’t directly engaged with had done something to a pillar. It had responded by detonating a huge chunk of mana into pure kinetic energy, flattening the nearby trees and ripping that mage to shreds, but the damage was already done. The pillars were out of sync now.

There were still ten mages alive and I’d just lost the bulk of my support. The valley itself was safe, for now, since many of my wards operated independent of my stolen security system. That would serve to keep out the other mages for the time being, more than long enough to fix the positioning on a single pillar.

I just needed to live long enough to get the job done.

A swarm of mana bolts came at me, all from one mage who was generating them six at a time. It was an odd choice of attack to use against anyone with better than basic mana control, since each individual bolt had such a low investiture of mana in it that it was easy to take control of them. At first, I thought it was another distraction, but I quickly realized that it was actually an error made because of an emotional reaction.

The tipping point was the strong resemblance between this mage and the one I’d just killed. It was an easy assumption to make that they were related somehow, perhaps siblings given their apparent ages. Rage or grief had caused the surviving mage to lash out, but he hadn’t chosen a smart attack, just one that he could cast rapidly. I easily suborned the mana bolts and unraveled them.

It didn’t take me long to realize the rest of the group had lost a lot of their coordination as well, which led me to believe the dead mage had been the one who was running the show. It was even possible they’d lost their mental connection when he’d died.

Regardless of the reason, it was the break I needed to finally turn this battle around. Without them covering each other and moving in sync, I was quickly able to swat down two more of the mages with the remaining pylons, including the enraged one who hadn’t been smart enough to use a spell that had a prayer of working. The last two broke and ran – not that there was anywhere for them to flee to. They’d quickly learn that my barrier was just as good at holding things in as it was at keeping them out.

I wanted to start hunting them down immediately, but once the enemy mages broke and fled, I just didn’t have it in me to chase after them. I sat down on a busted chunk of rock and leaned my head against the smooth ember bloom wood of my staff for a few minutes while I tried to think things through.

Even that was too much effort for me right now. My body was running on almost pure mana and nothing else. I had no energy left to do anything, which I rationally knew was a problem since there were still eight hostile mages in the valley and part of my defense system was down. I couldn’t waste my time just sitting around.

Slowly, I pushed myself back to my feet and cast my senses out through the genius loci that made up my demesne to figure out where the mages had run off to. Three of them were at the northwest edge, trying and failing to figure out how to escape. I still needed to kill them first, though. They were dangerously close to the ember blooms that anchored the mana containment enchantment I’d cast over the whole valley. Without that, all the mana the petrified forest—and now the buried moon core—emitted would be lost.

The remaining five were scattered, two trying to dislodge another mysteel pillar and the last three, surprisingly, fighting. It took me a moment to realize that Querit had climbed into one of his combat frames and left the safety of his underground workshop. More than that, he appeared to actually be winning. The frame was practically unharmed, and it was clear that all three mages were desperate to keep themselves away from his spells.

Did Querit need help? It certainly wouldn’t hurt, but it looked like he had things under control. It would be interesting to see how he handled his opponents once he beat them, too. Would he kill or capture them? Was there any chance this was all part of his cover and he was going to betray me? Even if he wasn’t working for Ammun, I still couldn’t rule out that our interests were only temporarily aligned.

In the interest of fairness, there was also the possibility that he was completely sincere and had been since the moment we’d met. Some people actually were that way. And even if I couldn’t actually see what he was thinking, I’d spent enough time poking at his golem core to have a good idea of what kind of personality he’d been built with.

For the moment, I’d trust Querit to handle those mages. My efforts needed to go toward the group trying to break out of the barrier before they turned their attention to the ember blooms. I’d taken enough of a breather to be ready for the next round, anyway.

I teleported across my demesne to appear behind the three mages. They were so focused on their work that they didn’t even notice me. Only one of them had a shield ward up, probably because the pillars had drained the ones held by the other two. That would make this easy, then. Twin force lances shattered their spines and ripped through their chests, painting the otherwise-invisible barrier wall red.

I conjured up a lethal barrage of spells to quickly overpower the third mage, killing him almost before he could even spin around to face me, let alone fight back. Even that much magic was enough to make me long to sit down and take another break, but the work wasn’t done yet. This last part was going to be difficult, though.

Querit could kill the trio he was fighting – of that, I was sure. That meant if I wanted anyone to question, it would have to be the two would-be saboteurs working to dislodge another pillar. Hopefully they’d be just as tired as I was, because ‘capture’ was always harder than ‘kill.’

I gave myself another minute to gather my strength, then teleported to the branch of a tree near the pillar the pair was working on. Unlike the three I’d just killed, these ones noticed my arrival. I deflected a pair of force spells and got to work subduing them.