As was typical, Father was out of the house when I got there. More unusually, Mother and Nailu were also gone. Then again, with the town grown significantly from what Old Alkerist had boasted at its peak, and with the advent of magical knowledge making everyone’s lives easier, people found themselves with a lot more free time. Mother used hers to socialize with a far wider circle of friends, especially those who also had young children.
As for Senica, she could be anywhere. Much to our parents’ dismay, she was no longer limiting herself to staying in New Alkerist. Our successful troll hunt had given her enough confidence to push back against their desire to shelter her, not that she’d had much trouble fighting them on that in the first place. Besides, she was closing in on sixteen now, which was the point where she was considered an adult in this culture.
I could think of a few others I’d found over the years that had much younger ages of majority. It was probably for the best that we hadn’t been born in any of those places, however. Societies that acknowledged ten-year-olds as adults usually only did so in order to prey upon them in various unsavory ways.
I’d hoped to catch up with my whole family, but I wasn’t surprised that I’d missed everyone by popping up unannounced in the middle of the day. On the other hand, the only person I actually needed to talk to was Father, so I searched him out. Unsurprisingly, he was out in the fields. That was where he spent most of his time when not being swamped with his duties on the town’s council.
Good. It was far easier to get a chance to talk to him when he was working the fields than it was when he was busy talking to everyone else. I flew across town, skimming the roof tops both to shorten my journey and to avoid anyone on the streets who might try to flag me down. That didn’t mean people didn’t see me, just that I was gone over the next building before they could say anything.
Father waved up at me as I approached, then turned and said something to the two men standing nearby. One of them nodded, and he handed off the shovel he’d been holding before stepping away to meet me.
“Gravin,” he said. “Finally feeling better?”
“Yes and no. Lot of work to catch up on,” I told him. “I’m refilling my mana core before I tackle the next problem and thought I’d use the time to see what you need.”
“What’s the next problem?” Father asked curiously.
“Boring experimentation and lab work,” I lied. It wasn’t that my parents would try to stop me from going into dangerous situations, but they worried, sometimes over nothing. My next job would only become dangerous if Ammun happened to teleport on top of me while I was doing it. Admittedly, the likelihood of that actually happening seemed to be on the rise.
However, it would seem dangerous if I explained it to Father, plus a lot of people were probably going to die today, so it was easier to just… not tell him. Part of me thought I should feel bad about that, but that part was only whining because it was my parents I was keeping things from. Besides, I was technically a teenager now, probably. Hiding things from my parents was practically a rite of passage.
“I heard you were delivering a message from Shel?” I prompted in a bid to change the subject before Father could ask any follow up questions.
A flicker of annoyance crossed his face, but he’d spent enough time arbitrating disputes on the council to smother it immediately. “Yes… Shel. Thanks so much for bringing her back into my life,” he said.
“She can’t possibly be that annoying when she lives hundreds of miles away.”
“For the two days she was here, yes, she could. Very insistent on seeing you again. She only gave up and went home after I got back from the valley and told her that not even I could get to you at the time.”
“Okay, but what did she want?” I asked. I assumed it was for me to help with something, but that didn’t really narrow it down.
“To know what you wanted them to start growing next, I think.”
“Uh… nothing? That was a one-time deal. I’ve got my supplier sorted out and we’ve invested a lot into his operation. Shel and the village got a harvest at a premium price because I needed it right then, but I’m all set now.”
Father snorted. “Of course. All this time pestering me, and the answer is just, ‘No thanks.’ You think she’ll accept that next time she comes around?”
“Does she have much choice? What would you do with anyone else if someone refused to accept an answer?”
“Warn them to get over it before they spent the night in the jail.”
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“So do that,” I suggested.
We had sound wards on the cells. She couldn’t annoy whoever was on duty too much that way. It seemed like a simple solution to me.
“Might be better to hear it from you, just so there’s no ambiguity and you can address any other problems she has,” Father said.
I squinted at him suspiciously. “That sounds a lot like trying to foist a problem off on me.”
“It was your problem in the first place!” he protested. “If anyone foisted anything, you did it to me!”
There was a fair amount of truth in that statement, much as I hated to admit it. “Fine, fine. I’m up and about now. Next time she shows up, just let me know. I’ll come back and deal with her.”
Damn it, that was exactly what I didn’t want to do. Why did I like having a family again?
* * *
I spent a few more minutes catching up with my father, then flew myself back to the town’s teleportation platform. I hadn’t nearly filled my mana core to full, but time was more valuable to me right now. I drew on my personal mana crystal to power a series of teleportation spells that ended with me in the old empire of Ralvost, now a mostly deserted land thanks to Ammun’s predations.
He’d gotten a legion of zombies in exchange for killing almost everyone who’d lived here, one that Querit had been remarkably thorough in killing when they’d been sent through portals to besiege the various villages and towns located on my home island. He’d also taken out a few dozen necromancers as well.
That did not mean things were pacified over in this corner of the world – far from it, in fact. Ammun had left an army of mages behind when he’d teleported himself and a few dozen diviners up to Yulitar. I’d sent those diviners back, stranding him up there with no one to help him work the ritual to get back, and most of them had had the good sense to run for the hills upon returning to Manoch.
The rest of his army was a mixed bag. Some had deserted. A lot of them had gone running back to the tower, though I expected the ones who’d disappeared into the wilderness had only done so because they were afraid of Ammun returning, easily finding them, and punishing them.
I wasn’t terribly worried about the deserters. The tower was getting weaker by the day, the mana needed to support the gargantuan building being siphoned away by my mysteel generators. Once the wards and enchantments holding it together started to fail, it would be crushed under its own weight.
No, the problem was the rest of the army. There were still a few thousand hostile mages loyal to Ammun’s cause that I’d been ignoring for the last few months simply because there were so many other, more important problems demanding my attention. Collecting enough mysteel to repair the shell around the world core was one of my top priorities, right up there with destroying Ammun’s demesne and figuring out how to return my mana core to stage nine.
But now that I had to worry about my former apprentice showing back up, it was time to do something about them. The gestalt had helped me out by using my network of scrying beacons to do a lot of the busywork, even if their method of transferring that information left something to be desired. If I’d had more time, I would have insisted it be delivered the normal way, but there was too much and I didn’t have a few days to go through it all.
Instead, I got a brain full of troop locations, defensive systems, supply lines, and identified officers. The gestalt had even found a lot of the deserters who’d opted to flee instead of returning to the tower, and marked a hundred or so spots with anti-scrying wards that probably held the more competent mages, including Ammun’s diviners.
While I’d been taking care of other business, I’d been reviewing everything the gestalt had sent me. There were too many sites to just start raining destruction down on them randomly. I needed a strategy. At the very least, I needed to identify the most important places to destroy and plan the most efficient route to hit them all.
That had been on my mind for the last half an hour or so, and I’d slowly settled into a definitive plan of action. The most important aspect was preventing my victims from alerting other parts of the army. I’d cut off the more isolated camps first, the ones that wouldn’t be missed for days or even weeks. Then I’d go after the high priority targets. They’d be missed in a matter of hours, maybe less.
After I hit the first one, it’d be a race to take advantage of the information for as long as it remained accurate. At some point, the army would start to collapse back on its main base and there’d be too many of them for me to do more than strafing runs. I didn’t have the time to whittle them down, so the goal was to break them before they figured out what was happening.
I considered bringing Querit in on this, but if I was being honest, I didn’t need him and the work he was doing was probably more important. Or maybe I just didn’t want him to have to kill thousands of people. I was already a monster; there was no need to turn anyone else into one.
I flew above the clouds, trusting in my divinations to lead me to the first site I was going to attack. It was a small encampment fortified with transmuted earthworks and staffed by about fifty mages. Its only purpose, as far as I could tell, was to keep an eye on the northeast border of Ammun’s empire. Considering they’d killed or driven off all their neighbors, I wasn’t sure why the fort hadn’t been abandoned already.
The first order of business was to place a divination lock on the fort, just in case anyone inside was decent enough to scry out for help. After that, a few carefully placed ward buster spells blew the defenses wide open, leaving the ward stone vulnerable to a mana surge that cracked it in half.
That was when the soldiers started making noise. Some of it was panicked, but most of it was impressively disciplined. Discipline only got a soldier so far, however. Without the skill to back it up, they had no chance of spotting me before I was ready to reveal myself.
Mindful of my reserves, I opted to send ropes of lightning down into the fort, killing its defenders one by one as it chained between bodies. It wasn’t the fastest way to wipe everyone out, but it got the job done. Once I’d ensured there was no one left alive, I flew to the next outlying encampment.
It was a butcher’s work, killing those soldiers loyal enough that they were still serving their absent emperor, but I was determined that by the time Ammun got back, he wouldn’t have an army left.