I didn’t even keep track of how many places I destroyed, let alone how many people I killed. All I knew was that it was a lot, and that I’d almost certainly ended the lives of a significant number of people who didn’t deserve it. That did not stop me from moving on to the next base, encampment, or fortification to repeat the process.

Ammun was going to return eventually. I needed to cut away any and all support I could, even if the cost was an ocean of blood. These people had already threatened me and mine too many times already.

While I went about my gruesome work, part of me wondered why I was bothered at all. The old Keiran had broken armies multiple times, and he’d never paused to consider the fates of those unfortunate soldiers. Why was I? It couldn’t just be the Gravin part of me. I’d long ago determined that Gravin’s defining contribution to my new personality was affection for my immediate family, and that was it. It was a small circle, and even my new little brother was only loosely connected to it.

Maybe it was how closely I’d been working with others for the last decade making me go soft and sentimental. I’d spent more hours around other people since being reincarnated than I had in the past two centuries of my old life, and as it turned out, they weren’t really all that bad. Sure, they could be annoying and selfish and greedy, but I wasn’t any better. And usually, the things they wanted were so trivial that it took almost no effort on my part to fulfill those desires.

But I wasn’t a charity, and thus was under no obligation to actually help anyone just because they wanted something. Besides, my time was too valuable to be spent on random engineering projects or putting up newer, better homes for people who honestly didn’t like me that much and hadn’t treated me that well anyway.

Shel was on my mind more than I cared to admit. She was hardly the first person to show up and want something, and I supposed I understood her thinking since I’d initially made contact with the village, but it was a lot harder to give her the brush off than I’d expected. Shel was one of my first apprentices since I woke back up in Gravin’s body, even if she was incredibly annoying. I hadn’t technically abandoned her, but only by virtue of the fact that I’d been banished from the village.

Damn it. Did I owe her some help like I would any other apprentice? If so, what form did that help take? It definitely wasn’t helping out her whole village, but it might be teaching her the spells needed so that she could do it herself.

My musings were interrupted by a squad of artillery mages who’d somehow shielded themselves from detection long enough to get a ritual spell up and running. A pillar of stone thirty feet tall and ten feet wide came flying up through the air with enough momentum to kill me on impact. Something that big and heavy had no right to move that fast, especially not moving straight up, but there it was all the same.

It was too big to swat aside with telekinesis, even with master-tier grand telekinesis. Instead, I layered force walls in front of it, stressing the rock structure and bleeding off its speed as it blasted through each one. By the time it reached my altitude, I was already a hundred feet away and it was shedding small chunks of stone to rain down on the mages below.

I quickly located the artillery squad hiding beneath an anti-divination ward with some attention redirection qualities woven into it. My earlier distraction had made it easy for the magic to keep me focused on killing everyone else, but now that I was focused on them, I ripped through the ward easily. Javelins of force rained down, dozens falling to spear through the artillery mages.

Personal shield wards popped and shattered as they were bombarded with more damage than they could stop. Mages were shunted in every direction, often slamming into each other, and three seconds later, they were dead. What had been a potentially lethal threat was now a tangle of bodies leaking blood from punctured torsos and severed limbs.

It did serve to drag my attention firmly back to the task at hand, though. Mages died or fled by the dozens until all two hundred or so that had been stationed here were disposed of. None of them had possessed the ability to teleport, or if they had, they hadn’t found the time to actually cast the spell. Six had ‘escaped’ by flying away, only to be shot down by mana beams from the defensive embankments I’d built and seeded around the camp in a large circle. The rest had died where they stood.

I collected my equipment back into my phantom space through the simple expedient of triggering an enchantment on them that caused them to all fly toward me, then headed off for the next spot.

* * *

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

A few other times, artillery squads managed to protect or hide themselves long enough to take a shot at me. Usually, it was a combination of hiding and sacrificing other mages as a distraction, since it was rather difficult to go hunting mages down while fending off a few dozen of their fellows hurling fire, ice, lightning, force, mind probes, and hexes at me all at once.

The usual cycle for these things was to thin as much as half their numbers in my opening attack, whittle down another quarter or so over the next few minutes, then mop up the survivors once they broke and fled. That time I spent whittling was the only dangerous part, and a bunch of mages at stages one or two just weren’t that threatening. Even the occasional stage three officers were more of a nuisance than anything else.

That’s how it went for the first eight hours or so. After that, all the isolated camps where gone and I had to start taking risks. I’d already worked out my strategy, which was to change my priority targets to any communications centers first, then to prevent escape second. Taking out mages specializing in offense was the third most important part of the job, and I focused on it just heavily enough to ensure I didn’t need to retreat.

Even now, it was still a chore to be handled, the butchering of larger groups of mage soldiers that took slightly longer to murder than my original targets. I was still killing more people faster when I accounted for my travel time, especially since my mana had completely recovered and I’d started opening up my assaults with devastating master-tier spells, just one or two for each base I destroyed.

That worked for another hour or so, but then someone managed to get a message out and the whole plan unraveled. Once the soldiers were forewarned and had time to prepare, it got a lot tougher to devastate their forces with surprise attacks. That in turn reduced my effectiveness, drastically increased my mana costs, and left me facing considerably more danger.

I hadn’t gotten them all. I’d killed maybe a third, and probably the worst third at that. Important and competent soldiers didn’t get sent to isolated outposts that guarded nothing. But still, single-handedly destroying a third of an army several thousand strong in a single day was nothing to turn my nose up at.

They weren’t just going to take it lying down, however. Not only did I fail to take the next spot by surprise, but they actually ambushed me first. I was still setting up for my attack when my shield ward flared with mana, blocking some sort of overpowered mind crush spell. At the same time, a giant ball of force appeared around me and started trying to constrict on me, to crush me into paste.

A few more attacks targeting my mind came my way, probably as a distraction, while I reached into the mana matrix of the force spell and broke it apart. By the time I freed myself, thirty mages were flying up to attack me, various spells already forming around them.

A wave of dispelling magic rolled out from me, wide enough to catch all of them even if it was a bit wasteful. Conjurations designed to burn, tear, or bludgeon me to death fizzled out, and no small number of mages found their weight suddenly unsupported when they failed to protect their ongoing flight spells, too.

More mages were coming out of everywhere to attack me, including no less than six artillery squads. It was somewhat flattering to know they were taking me seriously, but it was also making my job considerably harder. In fact, with so many enemy mages arrayed against me, all of them organized and with a plan to kill me in mind, this was looking like the point in my campaign of genocide where I needed to retreat.

That was my plan until someone two miles north of the camp fired off a massive beam of heat and fire at me. It struck me squarely, breaking through my shield ward and turning my skin an angry red as it blistered. I was only in the edge of the beam for half a second before gravity pulled me clear, but that was enough to do some real damage. I’d need to magically heal myself if I didn’t want a face full of burn scars for the rest of my life.

A simple intermediate-tier invocation killed my sensation of pain, allowing me to ignore the burnt skin for now. The deadly fire beam swept the sky, catching a few of the enemy mages in its path as it chased me around, but I’d seen this spell a few times already and I knew how to handle it.

It belonged to a mage who’d gone by the moniker of Seven back when he’d been in the Breakers. I’d watched him use it to assassinate his own grandmother when I’d first met him, and he’d tried to kill me with it more than once. I hadn’t exactly expected to run into him here and now, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t ready to deal with him.

First, I had to rebuild my shield ward. It couldn’t stand up to the fire beam, but he wasn’t the only mage trying to kill me right now. A few dozen other conjurations were heading my way, all of them weak enough that my shield ward could defend me from them, but only if I could pump enough mana into it to get it back up fast enough.

Two force bolts slammed into my back, rattling me and stealing my breath. My instinct was to spin in place and return fire, but I didn’t have the time, not if I wanted to avoid becoming a charred corpse. Instead, I let myself keep falling for the second it took to get my shield ward back up, then jerked myself sideways with a short-range instant teleport.

Blood seeped down my back and I definitely had a broken rib or two. I wrapped a band of force around my chest to hold everything mostly in place, but I needed to be careful for the rest of this fight or else I’d end up with a punctured lung on top of everything else.

Fortunately, flight didn’t require me to actually move any part of my body, so the injury didn’t slow me down. It did make dodging a bit riskier since sudden changes in direction were a problem, but I only had one goal left before I retreated from this battle.

I flew toward the source of that fiery death beam that had scorched me. For as many times as I’d seen Seven, this was the day I made sure he died.