I kept digging for another hour or so, but then mages started to filter in. Bleary-eyed and shuffling, they resumed their posts as the room slowly started filling up. That meant my time spying on their operation was at its end. We wouldn’t be able to hide that we’d discovered their sympathetic link, or that we’d broken through their defenses, not without letting them continue to spy on us.

Given how little I’d discovered of any use, it wasn’t worth it. Instead, I prepared my final surprise and waited as long as possible to activate it. Every diviner in this room was an asset to Ammun, both to help him keep an eye on his new empire and to assist him with his moon project. My position would be strengthened if he lost those assets.

Unluckily, they all clumped together at the far side of the room, preventing me from moving forward with my plan even as their presence kept me from going through any more of their scrying devices. It looked like they were starting their shift with some sort of meeting, so I’d now have to wait until it ended in order to trigger the kill spell I’d laced into the mirrored walls all over the room.

“Okay, everyone,” one of the diviners said after enough mages had gathered. “Same as yesterday: rank twos are on wide scans, rank threes are searching for active threats, rank fours are on the special project. We’ve got three hours to go over everything recorded in the last half a day, then it’s our shift at the summit. Anyone, and I mean anyone, who misses that portal is going to be reported.

“Lord Ammun is taking security on this very, very seriously. Deadly serious. You want to find out if you’re special? Disobey orders and see if you can survive the next day. In case any of you missed the memo or think we’re joking around, well, go take a peek at Floor 87 where Rhengis used to live.”

What was the summit? Presumably, it was the top of a mountain somewhere, but there was an entire range that circled the northern border of Ralvost, and none of the facilities I’d already located were anywhere near it. Was it possible that the project I’d trashed and this one were unrelated? That didn’t seem likely, given that the whole reason I suspected he was trying to replicate the moon core enslavement weapon was the clues I’d gleaned from the rune structures inscribed into the parts of the machine I’d been able to study.

The diviners had already started to drift away at the fringes of the crowd, something that I could tell annoyed the speaker to no end. The whole group had that weary energy I’d sometimes seen in countries that used slave labor – forced to work far too many hours with nowhere near enough rest, all of it mixed with a thick dose of resentment. Either fewer of these mages were here by choice than Laphlin had led me to believe, or something had happened in between my encounter with him and today.

One mage rounded a pillar, his eyes dark and angry and his movements jerky. He was muttering something under his breath, too quiet for me to hear, and shooting dirty looks over his shoulder. Unfortunately, his course was going to take him right past the rune-inscribed mirror, where he was certain to recognize that I was looking through it. Killing him without alerting anyone else would be difficult, bordering on impossible, but if I activated my kill spells now, I’d accomplish very little beyond destroying the scrying mirrors.

He looked up and froze mid-step, eyes wide, and I started casting the spell. I wouldn’t get what I wanted from it, but I’d do what damage I could. Then, instead of calling out, he glanced around carefully to make sure no one else nearby was watching. Seeing that there was nobody within thirty feet of him, he altered his course to walk by the mirror while I watched, curiously, the final part of my spell at the forefront of my mind.

“You’re the only thing that monster is afraid of,” the diviner said in a whisper. “The lengths he goes to just to prevent you from interfering… He truly believes you can stop him. I hope he’s right. Look northeast from the tower, three hundred twenty-two miles. He had a whole platoon transmuting a hollowed-out mountain.”

I tilted my head to one side and studied the diviner. Betrayal wasn’t exactly unexpected, not the way Ammun had treated his new subjects. Life in the tower was a shadow of its former glory, though I expected the people at the very bottom hadn’t seen much of a reduction in quality. Those who’d been deemed useful probably had it the worst.

The diviner peered back at me as I considered what to do. “Could you… save us? Most of us aren’t here voluntarily. I could tell you which ones would fight against Ammun and which would betray you to him at the first chance.”

I snorted quietly. “What would I even do with you?”

“Just get us out of here. We’ll make our own way.”

“Is Ammun in the tower?” I asked.

The diviner shook his head. “Still at the summit directing his project.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Three hundred miles wasn’t a cheap price to pay, but if this was as important to Ammun as it seemed, that was still within his budget. To oversee it personally and make sure I didn’t interfere again after I’d wrecked his machines before was nowhere near as expensive as walking through a portal three thousand miles to crack my wards, and he’d done that.

If Ammun wasn’t home, that meant I had an incredibly rare opportunity. I already knew how to teleport through his wards, though I expected he’d probably updated his procedures. Even better, I had a cooperative mage on the other side who was willing to help me. I could open a portal under these circumstances, but I’d need a few minutes to make it happen. Portals didn’t just spring out of nothing.

“I can help,” I decided, “but you’ll have to work with me to anchor the portal on your side to let me through. It’ll take a few minutes. Do you have that much time?”

The diviner grunted and cast a dark look behind him. “That blowhard will go on for at least that long.”

“If you get caught and interrupted before we finish, I won’t be able to save you,” I warned, which wasn’t exactly true, but there was no reason to explain all the magic I’d already slipped into the room.

“It’s worth the risk. What do I need to do?”

Serving as the anchor for a portal was a lot easier than actually making it. I just needed to thread the mana across the sympathetic link to connect to him, which actually sped the process up quite a bit. At the same time, I was lacing the room on my side of the portal with all sorts of trap wards. These were Ammun’s people, after all, and there were some fairly obvious risks to letting them inside my demesne. If I needed to kill them all, I wanted it to be quick enough that they couldn’t cause any damage.

I really wasn’t expecting such a half-baked plan to work, but the diviner was right about how much the guy running the meeting liked to talk. He really did just go on and on, oftentimes repeating the same points three or even four times. His captive audience grew visibly annoyed, but all the ones who’d been willing to slink away had already gone, and none of them came near where we were forming the portal. Thankfully, those pillars full of liquid mana provided enough of a visual barrier that no one realized what was happening.

And then the portal solidified and I stepped through. In person, the diviner was smaller than he’d looked. The top of his head barely came up to my chest, and his shoulders were hunched tight. “Stand by the portal,” I said as I extended a telepathic connection to him. “I will be killing anyone you point out. If you’re not sure whether someone is willing to betray Ammun, err on the side of caution.”

“But… I don’t know what everyone’s thinking!”

“Let me be clear,” I told him in a harsh whisper. “If anyone I rescue here now betrays me, I’ll kill all of you. Only the people you’re absolutely sure will side with you should walk through this portal.”

The telepathic link solidified and I sent him a command. ‘Point out who you want to save.’

The nice thing about working with diviners was that they were generally good at divination, which meant that the link between us quickly surpassed the need for words. The diviner scanned the crowd and pointed out who he knew would side against Ammun, then did a second sweep for people he was confident about but would need to be vetted. A third pass gave me the ones who were firmly in Ammun’s camp, people like the speaker who was somehow still lecturing the assembled diviners.

There were a number of people not tagged one way or another. My accomplice wasn’t willing to make the judgment call to end their life, but either didn’t know enough about them or didn’t trust them enough to believe any claims that they’d turn against Ammun. His attempts at a half measure were pointless. Those mages went onto the kill list.

“What the—” a woman said in surprise as she walked around one of the pillars and saw me standing there with an open portal.

‘Ammun supporter!’ the diviner practically screamed in my head, though it wasn’t so much words as an inarticulate bundle of emotions, mostly panic and hatred.

Before she could say or do anything else, a force cleave decapitated her. I caught her severed head and slumping body with telekinesis and lowered them silently to the floor, not that it would make much difference. Unlike when I’d made the portal, the spell had unleashed mana into the room, and of course, the diviners were sensitive to it. Already dozens of heads were turning toward us.

I summoned my staff out of my phantom space and channeled a pair of advanced-tier spells through it. Lightning bolts arced around the pillars and into the crowd, most of whom were ill-prepared to be attacked. Some of them succumbed instantly, but others were either quick enough to raise some form of ward or had prepared them beforehand.

Those that survived the opening strike were targeted by a barrage of force lances or gripped telekinetically and hurled into the walls, where the master-tier shattering spell I’d laced through the room started going off in sections. Their shield wards were immediately overwhelmed, resulting in a second round of mass death only seconds after the lightning.

That was all it took for the screaming to start. Roughly half of my targets were dead and the rest were scattered among a crowd that was now fleeing in every direction. I picked off a few more of the priority targets, then deflected a mental attack from the first diviner brave enough to fight back. My information told me he was one of the few that would absolutely turn against Ammun, so I held off on killing him, but I pushed the thought through my mental link that my new partner needed to calm the man down and get him out of here.

Suddenly, a nine-foot-tall monster of metal and bladed limbs loomed over the scattering diviners. At first glance, it looked like some sort of insectoid golem, though I was fairly certain it was actually a mana construct. It ignored them and charged at me, scythe-arms raised to split me in half.

I flew backwards and fired off a lightning bolt at it, only to watch the magic ground itself out as the scythe slashed deep into the stone. The construct tugged for a moment, then ripped its limb free and advanced on me again. Behind it, two more identical copies flashed into existence.