Bakir dragged me through two more teleportation jumps over the next few hours before he finally left the safety of the Order’s warded fortresses. I’d used the time to explore the new cities he’d been taken to, mostly in an attempt to establish some baseline of the continent’s geography. If all I could figure out was where I was, I’d still count it as a win.
Once Bakir left the city itself, it was time to move on. Sadly, it was an obvious trap. Whoever was in charge stuck him in a wagon, had another archmage pretend to be the teamster driving it, and apparently thought I wasn’t going to notice the divinations watching its progress, or trace them back to the four mages following along a mile or so back.
I was, frankly, a little bit insulted.
What I needed was the location of the Order’s so-called Elder Council. I was tired of screwing around over here, and I was out of time and patience. Searching an entire continent wasn’t feasible by myself, but I could probably temporarily relocate the gestalt here and have a map of every warded building within a thousand miles by the end of the day. If I couldn’t get a straight answer out of this group of idiots, that was my backup plan.
As for how best to trigger the trap without getting my hand caught in it, I opted for a simple counter-ambush. I ignored Bakir and his driver and tracked down the four archmages waiting for me to make a move. They were competent, I’d give them that. Just in the half an hour I shadowed them, I confirmed that each of them had a flexible repertoire of spells spanning multiple disciplines. At the very least, they were master mages.
As to whether they were true archmages, I still had my doubts. It was certainly possible, but it wasn’t like they were going to casually start casting multiple master-tier spells so I could confirm their abilities, and nothing I’d seen from anyone in the Order I’d spied on so far suggested that any of them had that level of skill. It looked like, for them, ‘archmage’ meant proficient in all disciplines, but not able to cast master-tier spells from them.
Normally, my biggest issue with attacking four highly competent mages who were expecting trouble would be breaking through overlapping defenses while dodging a constant stream of attacks. Fortunately for me, this group was trying to be sneaky. Their defense was that they didn’t think I’d notice their presence.
It would have been impossible to remain unnoticed with a bunch of magical barriers swirling around them, so they weren’t using them. At best, they had personal shield wards like any other mage, and even those were muted to reduce their mana signature to the low levels their obscurement could actually cover.
Hitting them wasn’t a problem. Doing it hard enough to overwhelm them without killing them was. I had to judge exactly how much pressure I needed to exert to break their defenses without also breaking them in the process, and each of them required a different level of finesse.
Doing that with a single spell was impossible, even for me. However, doing it with six different spells at the same time was well within my capabilities. The first two spells dropped out of the sky where I was invisibly perched above them, striking the group simultaneously and releasing a vortex of kinetic pressure that pulled the four together, stressing their shield wards and hindering their movements when they tried to escape.
The second spell was a detonation of fire designed to soften up their defenses. That by itself was enough to overwhelm one shield ward, specifically the one belonging to the man in the middle who’d gotten slammed by all three of his colleagues when my first spell forced them together, but he wasn’t seriously injured and I simply compensated with my follow up attack to reduce the power I sent through the force bolt that smacked into him.
The other three got far harsher spells aimed at them, mostly in the form of crushing blows or piercing lances. Somewhere between the third and fourth wave of spells beating them down, one managed to counter with a beam of mana flung from an outstretched hand. I casually batted it aside, then knocked him out with a concussive orb of force that smacked into his face and crushed his nose.
Soon after, all four of them were subdued and pinned in the air with greater telekinesis. The scuffle had taken less than twenty seconds, but I had no doubt that the two remaining archmages down in the wagon had noticed it.
The driver might get away, but I could always chase Bakir down. For the moment, I ignored them to focus on securing my new prisoners. Without the extensive setup I’d built to pin Bakir down back home, I was going to have to be a lot rougher with these mages, especially since they outnumbered me. The first thing I needed to do was drain their mana reserves, something that was very difficult to do to a conscious mage.
Well, it wasn’t hard to fix the ‘conscious’ part with an application of blunt force trauma followed by a stabilizing round of healing to make sure none of them were dead or brain damaged. After that, I siphoned all the mana they had out of them and used it to replace what I’d wasted on that chain of teleports that had taken me across the ocean.
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Then I stripped away every last enchanted or inscribed trinket they had, including busting open the phantom spaces two of them had tied directly to their mana core and looting those. I followed it up with a few hexes to encourage lethargy and a sense of hopelessness. Those wouldn’t last long, but only someone with an exceptionally strong will would be able to fight their way free before I came back to check on them in the next few minutes.
My final act of security was to bury all four of them up to their necks in the ground. I built a small dome of rock around them to keep any local wildlife from stopping by for a snack, then flew off to where my shadow had been keeping an eye on the wagon. Bakir and his friend had abandoned it, but only far enough to try to hide while they waited for me to show up.
It hadn’t worked for their friends. I couldn’t fathom why they thought the exact same spells would help them, but for some reason, they were trying it anyway. I quickly dismantled their defenses and both of them received the same treatment as the ambush team.
Then I gathered my group of would-be attackers up, flew off in a random direction away from civilization, and debated how best to get the information I wanted out of them. With a sigh, I glanced down at the clump of bodies telekinetically bundled together.
“Why couldn’t you guys have just been reasonable? If you hadn’t tried to screw with me, we could have had a fruitful partnership,” I said, though none of them were awake to hear me.
* * *
The process of extracting information from all of them individually was tedious and tiresome, but by the time the sun came back up, I had a solid idea of the Order’s main bases, who was in charge of what, and where to find the Elder Council.
I had also confirmed that this little group had orders to ambush and capture me, then drag me back to the nearby city, a place named Feldirin. The abduction served a simple purpose: to do essentially what I’d done to Bakir. The Order wanted my knowledge, and my willingness to participate wasn’t a factor in how they planned to get it.
Their ambassador team was really more of a spy group, with Bakir being the only member who actually had any experience in the fine art of diplomacy. Adilar had the clearest idea of his boss’s objectives and wants. Nevlac was the muscle, and Bakir was their scout. He was the one who’d visited most of my allies and snooped around. He was the one who pointed the way for the others.
He was the one who’d suggested their bunker be built near my family.
In the end, none of this was that surprising. The Order probably did believe itself to be a bastion against the chaos Ammun’s return represented, but they weren’t interested in helping me stop him. They only wanted my knowledge and resources to leverage more power for themselves. Even the lower-ranking members of their cabal knew the truth of things.
“You were a surprisingly good actor,” I told Bakir after I was done interrogating everyone. “I really, honestly believed you had good intentions, that you were willing to work with me and were just a bit too naïve to realize that the people in the true positions of power inside your cabal were using you.”
He glared at me, but remained silent. There was no point in lying now, not after I’d gotten into his head and pried out the truth of things. It was a dirty, distasteful task, but seeing exactly how far the Order’s influence extended across an entire continent had convinced me that I needed to take them seriously.
I had five different locations to hit in rapid succession if I wanted to round up the entire Elder Council before they figured out what was happening. To do that, I couldn’t afford distractions. If I let the ambush squad live, they’d send messages and warn people that I was coming. Getting a surprise attack off probably wasn’t in the cards anyway, since this group was supposed to report back hours ago regardless of whether I’d taken the bait, but there was no reason to announce my plans.
“Such a waste, though. Your cabal could have been quite useful to me if you’d been willing to cooperate. I wonder what the other group said to Ammun’s generals. Do you suppose it’s any different over there, or just more lies and angling to get what you want?”
“Spare me,” Bakir said. “Just get it over with.”
“As you wish.”
A blade of force severed his head from his neck, sending it spinning through the air and soaking the grass with blood. Bakir’s body remained upright, still locked in the grip of my magic, and I tossed it onto a pile with the other corpses.
“I’m not trying to take some moral high ground,” I told the mound of dead bodies. “I’m every bit as big a monster as your leaders. This was simply a case of your group picking a fight with the wrong target. Believe me, Ammun would have done worse. Well, it’s too late for you to worry about that now.”
Then I burned the bodies to ash and scoured the area down to the dirt. In seconds, there was nothing but a large, barren patch of black earth in the middle of the field, with no evidence that anyone had died here beyond a wisp of smoke curling away into the night sky. I sighed again and shook my head.
Letting this group of idiots run around causing problems for me was just asking for them to pop up at precisely the wrong moment, probably when Ammun made his return. To that end, I had a few more stops to make before the sun came up, then I’d see if I could salvage something useful out of this whole fiasco.
The first city I needed to reach was Ibasha. Surprisingly, Bakir hadn’t been lying about that. I suspected he’d been thinking the archmage there might have stood up to me if he failed in his own escape attempt. Either way, the rest of my victims had confirmed Tredor of the Elder Council’s labs were based in that city, and now that I knew where it was, it was simple to find the teleportation beacon tied to the platform there.
And with that, my long night of work began in earnest.