The Global Order of the Arcane was, if nothing else, thorough. I’d already broken down the exterior wards of Tredor’s research lab and destroyed the ward stone. I’d been expecting the remaining wards to collapse at that point, but instead, the interior defenses were holding strong. For such a comparatively small building, having multiple ward stones was a ridiculous amount of over-engineering.
A roar shook a nearby door so hard it nearly rattled off its hinges. Sparks of mana flashed through my senses as something huge and angry tried to break down the wall. “Huh, well, maybe it’s an appropriate amount of warding after all,” I told the dazed mage struggling to get back to his feet in front of me.
“Who… are you?” he slurred, his eyes not quite focusing properly as he peered in my direction.
“Don’t worry about that right now,” I said. “What’s behind that door?”
Another deafening roar washed over us. Wards popped and sizzled as they failed to contain what I assumed was a rather large and angry specimen. I was willing to take the blame for that, considering that my own rampage through the facility had probably been the direct cause of the monster getting free of its confinement and into an area that wasn’t designed to stop it.
The mage might have been too concussed to hold an intelligent conversation, but he wasn’t so out of it that he didn’t recognize an enemy. A flame lance flashed through the air, cast directly from his outstretched hand to splash harmlessly against my shield ward. If he’d been in his right mind, the mage probably would have realized the smartest thing to do was turn around and run away. Instead, he followed his first spell with a net made of lightning.
It settled on my shield ward and started pulsing, discharging the magic repeatedly in an attempt to drain the mana powering my defenses. It was an interesting take, somewhat similar to a monster I’d once encountered that spat clinging acid at me, but even if I hadn’t been able to dispel the attack, it had no chance of ever doing enough damage to weaken my shield ward.
This was getting me nowhere. I wasn’t here to beat down every random mage that stumbled into my path or kill monsters that had slipped out of their pens. I had one goal and one goal only: find and capture the archmage of the Elder Council known as Tredor.
I crushed the man in an orb of force and left his crumpled body on the floor so that I could get back to what I’d been doing before he’d attacked me. Despite my best efforts, a significant portion of the lab’s wards were still functioning. That was severely hindering my ability to scry the area, a problem I was eager to resolve.
I ignored the roaring and slamming coming from the adjoining room while I worked, even going so far as to move down the hallway to get some distance. That didn’t do much to stop the noise, but I suspected that when I ripped out the next section of wards, whatever it was behind that door was going to burst free and I didn’t want to be in its way when it did.
Two minutes later, I finished tracing the ward lines back to a hidden ward stone. It was far enough away that I was going to have to break stuff to get there, but that wasn’t really my problem. Being quiet about this had never been in the battle plan. I only cared about being quick, and I was already annoyed that I’d been here for ten minutes without finding Tredor.
The wards went down and the roaring monster burst free, taking not just the door, but a whole section of the wall with it. It was about ten feet tall, had six huge, shaggy legs, and no head. Instead, its face was in its torso, though that was mostly mouth. If there were any eyes, they were hidden under its fur. It didn’t seem to need them, though.
The monster homed in on me immediately and let loose another floor-shaking bellow as it started its charge. I flicked a series of three phantasmal needles into its face, striking what passed for a brain, and disorienting it so much that it crashed into a wall. Blades of force sliced through its limbs, dismembering the monster in the span of a few seconds and leaving a bloody mess behind and beneath it.
With that problem taken care of, I turned my attention back to locating my target. Now that the wards were fully down—I hoped—it would be much easier to find him.
* * *
“Look, will you just stop running?” I yelled at Tredor’s fleeing back.
His response was a vial of some glowing green liquid telekinetically flung at me just before he turned a corner. The instant he was out of sight, the vial crushed itself and noxious gas whirled out to fill the hallway. Everything inside the cloud started melting, but that wasn’t the true danger. The cloud was actually pulling on my mana, trying to drain me like some sort of overpowered draw stone in order to fuel its propagation.
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That was interesting, and under other circumstances, I’d be keen to get a sample and do some experiments. Right now, however, I was too busy to be messing around with it. I cast a simple spell to send a gust of wind out in front of me that split the cloud in two. Reclaiming the mana spent proved difficult, but I managed to snag a portion of it before the green gas ate the rest.
Even the metal in the floor was half-melted after only a few seconds of exposure, so I flew over the ground instead of trying to walk it. Idly, I wondered if this concoction might be useful in dissolving mysteel without me having to brute force things, but I suspected it would have no effect at all. Mysteel was just too resilient for something like this to break it down.
If I could find a sample, though, I’d take it home with me to experiment with. Maybe I’d get lucky and Tredor would have another vial or two I could claim once I caught up with him. I’d have to keep an eye out and make sure to catch the next one he tried to throw at me before he could shatter the glass.
Tredor was nowhere in sight when I rounded the corner, but he hadn’t been able to stop me from scrying on him while he ran. I knew exactly which door he’d gone through. The man was running for the teleportation platform, as far as I could tell. The only reason I hadn’t caught him yet was that there’d been a third ward stone deep in the inner core of the research lab, and the wards were hindering me just enough for Tredor to keep ahead.
Unfortunately, now that I’d found the man, detouring to rip apart a third set of wards would cost me too much time. I was left with no choice but to fight my way through them over and over again as Tredor wove a path through as many blocked-off doors as possible. The worst part was that I couldn’t even jump ahead to cut him off, despite knowing his destination, because his own divinations would tell him what I’d done and he’d change course.
I blasted my way through the door, shattering the line of wards with overwhelming force. Tredor was two rooms ahead of me, but I was quick to catch up. This time, we were in some sort of specimen holding area. It was a long hallway with six huge tanks set into the floors, three on either side. Reinforced steel grates capped each tank, thick enough that no amount of muscle was getting through them. The monsters held inside were going berserk without whatever magic that kept them calm functioning.
Two more mages were flanking Tredor, who flashed me a grin and threw his hands up. Tendrils of magic streamed out of him to the grates, probably in an effort to unlock them. My own magic slashed through them, cutting the spells before they could cause problems. At the same time, I deflected a pair of conjurations from Tredor’s assistants.
“Keep him busy,” the archmage snapped at them while he prepared another spell.
A barrage of magic flew down the hall, half of it not even really aimed at me. I blocked what I needed to and ignored the rest as I advanced. At the halfway point, Tredor finished what he was working on, only for it to immediately shatter when I countered it.
“Really, I can’t fathom why you thought such a complicated spell was the right choice for a battle,” I said while he gaped at me. “Now, I feel like I’ve killed more than enough of your people. Come with me, and we can leave the rest of them out of it.”
“You… Why are you doing this?” he demanded in an attempt to stall for time while he stealthily started casting his next spell.
He should have gone for something smaller, something that he could have put together inside his mana core where I wouldn’t be able to see it. It probably wouldn’t have worked, but he might have at least completed it before I broke it down.
“Because your cabal was causing me problems, and I decided to lodge a complaint with the leadership,” I told him. “As I understand it, that’s the Elder Council, on which you sit.”
Stymied again and with his assistants’ less-than-impressive attempts to slow me down utterly failing, Tredor snapped open his coat and produced two more of those glowing green vials. Perfect. It looked like I was getting my wish, there.
I snatched them out of the air, dispelling his telekinesis before he could break them and stowed them away. For the moment, I placed them in a pocket instead of my phantom space. Tredor had been storing them physically for a reason, and until I had a chance to better examine exactly what the liquid was, I’d follow his example.
“Damn you!” the archmage snapped. Abruptly, he turned to run again, but I’d had enough of this game and there was no way I was letting him start up another round.
I teleported forward fifty feet and landed directly in front of him, then unleashed a force wave that threw both him and his two assistants to the floor. “That’s enough of that,” I said.
It wasn’t a quick process to batter down an archmage’s defenses, but I’d been working him over for the last few minutes while I chased him around, and he hadn’t had a chance to recover. I cast a master-tier spell I didn’t get much chance to use, not because it wasn’t useful, but because it was so damn expensive. It was almost always overkill and even now, I had to dip into my mana crystal to gather enough mana to pull it off.
Aura Crash wasn’t a spell I’d normally use in combat anyway, not with it taking several seconds to put together. It was vulnerable to enemy tampering. Against someone like Ammun, it would be a massive waste of mana that he could easily counter. But Tredor wasn’t that good of a mage, and if I was being honest with myself, I mostly wanted to do it because he’d annoyed the hell out of me making me chase him.
The spell slammed down on him, crippling his ability to control his mana. His core immediately spasmed, losing its shielding and revealing itself fully to me. His attempts to draw mana from it ended in failure, leaving him once again gaping at me.
“It’s only temporary,” I said. “Unfortunately. Now, let’s go. I’ve got four more of you to collect and I’m already sick of being on this continent.”
My magic seized the councilman and hauled him upright. His two assistants hadn’t even managed to regain their feet when I blew a hole off the roof and flew straight up with my hostage. I took a moment to orient myself, then flew off toward my next destination, only a few hundred miles away.