The problem with setting traps was that they’d be less and less effective each time the army stumbled into one of them. They were already on their guard for another fly-by from me, which greatly increased the likelihood that someone’s divinations would notice anything I left in their way.

With that in mind, my plan was to get one good trap in front of each unit of mage soldiers before they all converged back into one full-sized army, then supplement that with a personal appearance. Coordinating that would have been a monumental effort on my own, but the gestalt was more than capable of keeping track of each discrete platoon and apprising me of how close they were to another.

Querit and I worked feverishly through the night—well, I did; he worked at a steady and sustained pace as golems were wont to do—to build all the enchantments needed to power the traps, which were themselves placed onto flat discs. I then burned through the early hours of pre-dawn placing them in the paths of the larger groups I wanted to thin down. By the time Ammun’s legions got moving, I’d already placed forty of my enchanted discs in their way.

I hid myself in the sky, camouflaged by magic and distance, and watched what I could with multiple divinations pointed in various directions. Not being a mind made up of millions of individual entities, that amounted to only a small fraction of my total targets, so I prioritized the groups that I planned on personally hitting after the traps softened them up.

If everything went well, I’d have staggered the attacks well enough to let me attend to at least six of the larger groups before any of them started meeting up. If I was really lucky, my work would slow all of them down enough to give me an extra day to work with. After that, the numbers would be too much in their favor for even an archmage. Attacking a small platoon of fifty mages was one thing; taking on three thousand all by myself was an entirely different prospect.

The largest of the enemy groups hit my line of traps, all of which triggered at once. Shield wards absorbed some of the magic let loose, but there was too much for that to be enough to save everyone. Fire, lightning, and force ripped through their ranks and the ground split open, dropping hundreds more to their deaths. I watched as a handful managed to save themselves and escape the yawning chasms, but most were, if not outright killed in the fall, at least injured badly enough that they were out of the fight.

If I’d timed everything right, I had about thirty minutes to do as much damage as I could before I needed to move onto the second-largest unit. I dropped out of the sky, already preparing my opening salvo of spells while the mages below screamed and their officers tried to restore order to the chaos I’d caused.

And I wasn’t about to let them succeed. I picked my first target and adjusted the angle of my descent.

* * *

The gestalt was the only one who knew for sure exactly how effective my second run at Ammun’s army had been, but I had a suspicion that I’d achieved far less despite spending significantly more mana this time. I’d held them off as long as I could, but once they’d realized they were under attack again, communication had increased between units and most of my traps had been discovered before they could go off.

Now, fully two-thirds of the mages had managed to link up into one endless line of humanity, flowing toward the tower as fast as it could. There was no stopping them, so my new goal became ensuring that their home offered no real protection. To that end, I returned to the mana vents deep below the planet’s surface and made my way back inside the tower.

It seemed my mysteel generators were doing good work. The amount of mana flowing upwards was noticeably thinner, though not so much that I couldn’t have placed another twenty generators to drain the excess. Even with the world core shattered like it was, it still put out a ridiculous amount of mana here. Ammun’s tower even cleverly managed to cycle it into heavy mana by repeatedly pulling it up and sending it streaming back down the outside of the tower. Any mage below stage five wouldn’t survive even approaching the place.

I’d already mapped this out once, but when Ammun had woken back up, he’d taken steps to reinforce his demesne against me. It was only after his exile to a moon that I’d managed to breach the vents again, and I was still working my way through the new defenses to reach the tower’s master control room again. That was a project that had been on the backburner since I’d decided to use the tower’s mana draw to help me produce the needed mysteel.

With the armies retreating back to the tower, it was time to turn their home against them. To that end, I spent the next two days worming my way deeper and deeper in until I finally found my goal. Various wards blocked my passage, backed by many, many golems, elemental constructs, alarms, and a surprising amount of solid walls.

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Those were new, but by necessity, they had to be permeable to mana, which meant they were nothing more than a stall against a mage of my caliber. If mana could flow through it, so could I. Even more surprising, Ammun had decided to put pockets of superheated air between some of them, no doubt hoping to kill me when I broke through.

My divinations warned me well in advance and I took appropriate steps, often using the tower’s own mana to fuel my countermeasures. It was one more stall, which would have made perfect sense if Ammun had been around. It would have given him time to assess what was attacking him, allowed the intruders to weaken themselves fighting through defenses, and given the lich innumerable opportunities to ambush them at the perfect moment.

Without Ammun here, though, that whole plan fell apart. It just became a tedious thirty hours of work that eventually ended with me thoroughly annoyed when I walked into the master control room. That led me to another eight hours of finagling with the controls to regain access since Ammun had devoted considerable amount of time to updating all of his systems against me.

That made sense. He’d used my old designs back when I’d been dead, and, in a bid for efficiency, hadn’t bothered to update them. Why would he when the only exploitable vulnerability was that they were tied to a man who’d died centuries earlier? It was perfectly reasonable that he hadn’t expected me to come back, but here I was. I’d had my way with the tower prior to him waking up, and I had no doubt that the lion’s share of his efforts had gone toward making sure I couldn’t repeat that feat now.

It was wasted time on his part. Ammun had either been unwilling or unable to change the underlying architecture of the spells that controlled the tower, and his hack job of manually altering each and every single component part wasn’t hard to undo. It just took a while because I had to fix every single change he made, but once that was done, I was back in.

“Now,” I murmured. “What should we change?”

I could start starving out the tower now. That would collapse the whole thing in a matter of months as the wards reinforcing the physical structure died and it literally broke under its own weight. If nothing else, it would force the remnants of Ammun’s army back into the open. It would also hinder my collection of mysteel, but that might just be worth the price.

Really, it was a question of when exactly Ammun would return. I wanted this tower broken down before he got back. That was my first priority. So with that in mind, the best thing to do would be to reverse the mana flow coming in from the vents, purge as much mana as possible, and begin manually draining the wards laced into the tower itself. It would be a slow process, and honestly, my contributions would be miniscule compared to how much of the tower would just plain starve without the massive intakes at the base working.

It would slow down the world’s recovery by as much as a decade, but the gestalt had found evidence that Ammun was building up on Yulitar. He could return tomorrow, or in a year. Or never. It was a gamble, and as much as I wanted to use the tower’s mana to help restore Manoch’s world core, it just wasn’t worth the risk of letting Ammun reclaim his demesne.

So I started the process of pulling it all apart. It would still take a few months, and if I was lucky, I’d have that time. I’d get a decent chunk of mysteel out of my generators before it all fell apart, and most annoyingly, I’d eventually have to excavate the ruins just to get access to the mysteel wrapped around the world core so I could fix it.

But with the land so completely altered, Ammun’s genius loci would wither and die. More importantly, without the tower to serve as a conduit and recycler, the mana would start to spread out across Ralvost. It wouldn’t be an overnight change, but in the coming years, this would be the most magically charged country on the planet.

And it would still be a faded shadow of what Manoch used to be like. Too much of the world core was cold, dead stone for there to be any other outcome. I could fix that, though. I knew how. It was just a matter of finding the mana and time to do it.

I sighed as I began dismantling the tower’s wards. This wasn’t the plan. I was supposed to have more time, and a large part of me wondered if I was being too timid, too risk averse. I probably had six months or more before I even had to worry about Ammun returning. That was enough time to make a massive amount of mysteel completely passively.

Committing to this course of action meant imposing years of extra work on myself, possibly pushing back repairing the world core by far longer than a mere decade if I couldn’t get everything together fast enough. It could mean consigning another generation or two of mages to living on a dead planet.

No, I’d find another way. My original timeline hadn’t included biometal processing. That could pick up some of the slack I’d lose from the mysteel I wasn’t getting out of the tower’s mana intakes. This was the right course of action, to hedge my bets against Ammun and deprive him of his place of power. There was no telling how strong he’d be when he returned. That was what I needed to prepare for.

With my course set and the work done, there was nothing left to do but wait. The tower would fall on its own, probably in the next two months, and I could speed that up by a day or two at most if I devoted myself to the task. That was time better spent elsewhere, but I did leave myself a teleportation platform to come back if I needed to. It wasn’t connected to anything, being just a beacon to guide me here in the future.

It probably wasn’t even necessary. The wards that blocked those kinds of spells were going to starve inside a week anyway. Then anyone capable of casting master-tier spells would be able to move around the tower freely. Those mana wraiths would probably start coming up through the floors, too. That was going to be a disaster for the first floor, and maybe a few more above that. Hopefully those weren’t occupied anymore.

I didn’t like genocide as a general rule, but really, anyone who was still living here at this point was either loyal to Ammun or simply too afraid to leave. One way or another, this was the push that was going to change everything about their lives.