There was a backpack sitting just inside my bedroom door, presumably packed by my sister. It was the first thing I saw when I teleported to my parents’ home. I chuckled softly; Senica had probably been obnoxiously impatient all evening while she waited for me to finish up everything else on my agenda. Truthfully, the most efficient way to organize my tasks would be to delay this outing until I finished setting all the mysteel generators in the mana intakes of Ammun’s tower, but in the end, a few extra days without them in place wouldn’t make a real difference.
New Alkerist’s population had swollen to almost double its original size after Ammun sent a few thousand zombies through portals all over the island to attack random villages in an attempt to distract me. I hadn’t taken the bait, with the end result being that a dozen different settlements were destroyed, their populations scattered into the wastes to live or die depending on how well they could fend off the local monsters.
Querit had done an admirable job rescuing many of the survivors, and the island’s only city had absorbed most of the displaced villagers easily. For those that weren’t interested in city life and had no family elsewhere to take them in, New Alkerist had become their new home. The council had been trying to get me to help them build more housing for months now, or rather to get me to do the standard set of housing enchantments in them. I’d been too busy and had ignored their requests.
It was for exactly that reason that I’d teleported directly to my family’s house and would be leaving the same way. No one on the council—excluding my father—would ever know that I’d been here. And he wasn’t going to tell on me.
Annoyingly, it seemed only one of the two people coming with me on this trip was actually here. Senica was sitting at the table, watching Nailu run around chattering and my parents worked together in the kitchen preparing food. Senica’s boyfriend was nowhere to be found. I stood in the doorway, as of yet unnoticed, and sent scrying spells out to sweep the town.
“You’re late,” Nailu announced in a high-pitched voice as he jabbed a finger at me. That caught everyone else’s attention, causing them to stop what they were doing and look up.
“I know,” I said. “It was a very busy day.”
“Told you he’d show up just in time to eat the food,” Father said out of the corner of his mouth to Mother. I rolled my eyes and pretended not to hear while I kneeled down and readied myself for my little brother’s charge across the room.
Just before he could hit me, I swept us both up into the air to spin around in circles while he giggled. I stayed in place, but the arc of his rotation got bigger and bigger until he was flying around the entire room with each pass. Slowly, I settled back onto the floor. Nailu, however, kept kicking his legs and flailing his arms in an attempt to speed up.
“Hey, not in the house,” Mother scolded us after one of his feet clipped a clay jar set on a shelf halfway up the wall. I caught and steadied the jar with telekinesis before it could do more than wobble, but that was the end of the game for my little brother.
“So, what was the problem?” Senica asked as I claimed the chair opposite of her.
“Ammun left an unexpectedly high amount of security behind,” I grumbled. “Thousands and thousands of golems. I only got three of the generators placed and I stayed for almost double my allotted time. The stuff at Eyrie Peak went smoothly, but getting Hyago on board also took far longer than I expected.”
“He agreed, though. That’s something.”
“He did,” I said. “But I need to send Querit out there to do probably a whole day’s worth of work now. That crazy druid is trying to reforest the entire island.”
“Reforest?” Father asked. “Was it ever forested in the first place?”
“Not to my knowledge, but I guess the basin used to be mostly prairies prior to Ammun’s mistake.”
“Can he actually do it?” Mother asked. When I shook my head, she added, “Not even with your help?”
“Not before you’re dead and dust,” I told her. “Not the way he’s currently going, at least. Even with a hundred druids to help, they won’t have the time and the mana to cover more than the smallest fraction of the island. The only way this works is if I get the world core fixed, and even then, it’ll probably be another fifty years before ambient mana levels rise to the point where trees could support themselves naturally in this environment.”
My scrying spells finally found Juby, out on the far edges of the south fields. He was staring off into the desert, perched on a rather large rock that marked the boundary of the town. Just judging by how the farmers completely ignored him, I was guessing he’d been there a while.
It wasn’t hard to put the pieces together. There was only one backpack. Juby was sitting off by himself, sulking—or maybe it was angry brooding—at the edge of town. Senica hadn’t mentioned his name once, even though he was supposed to be going on this trip with us.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“So, what was the fight about?” I asked my sister.
She let out an exasperated sigh and said, “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about it. He’s not coming, if you haven’t already figured that out.”
“I assumed as much. I just wanted to know if this is going to be something that distracts you from doing your job?”
“No, I’m fine. He’s the one being a—” she cut herself off glared out the window.
“Right. Well, if you’re sure…”
“I’m fine,” she said again. “Let’s just eat and then we can go.”
“Speaking of eating, dinner’s ready,” Mother said. Four metal pots floated off the stove to the table and spaced themselves out in the center on a thin slab of thin stone placed there for the purpose of holding them.
It was a far cry from the cauldron they’d boiled every meal in when I’d first awakened in my new body, but my family had taken to using an enchanted stove with gusto and learned quite a few ways to prepare dishes besides ‘raw’ or ‘boiled,’ not that I had anything against stew in all of its infinite variations.
“Gravin,” Nailu said, demanding my attention. “Up.”
“No magic during din—”
But it was too late for Mother’s admonishment. Nailu was already floating through the air in a graceful hop to land on his chair. He even did a flip halfway through, much to Mother’s consternation and everyone else’s amusement.
“Tada!” he announced, holding his arms up and looking about expectantly.
“Did you…?” Senica looked at me.
“Nope, that was all him.”
* * *
We appeared on a rocky overlook above a few-mile long stretch of old forest sometime later. I was pleased to see that the instant we arrived, Senica spun up a divination spell to sweep the area for threats. It took her six seconds to fully cast it, but the fact that she was using it at all was a massive improvement over her capabilities even a few years ago.
“Well?” I asked.
“I don’t see anything that could be a threat to us,” she said. “Not that I expected to.”
“You never know.”
“I might not, but you do. I don’t believe for a second that you teleported us here without scrying the area first.”
“Oh, I did. But what I consider a threat and what you consider a threat aren’t necessarily the same thing.”
Senica rolled her eyes and stepped off the edge of the overlook. Flight magic took hold of her body and sped her off over the trees to the north. Our destination was only a mile or two away, easily close enough for her to fly at her top speed without getting tired. If she thought that was going to be enough to beat me, though, she was sadly mistaken.
Ten seconds later, I caught up to her and slowed down to match her speed. ‘How long can you keep this up now?’ I asked telepathically.
‘Depends how I cast it,’ she replied.
That was honestly a fair answer. We’d spent some time working on lossless casting, but the truth was that in exchange for reclaiming spent mana, spells were significantly more difficult to cast. For something channeled like flight, that added a considerable burden to the process. Unfortunately, as a stage two mage, mana was in short supply and Senica needed to save as much as she could.
‘Lossless style,’ I sent.
‘At full speed? Fifteen minutes? Maybe twenty. At half speed, I’m good for an hour or so.’
I mentally translated that to half the spell’s actual maximum speed, which wasn’t bad for a mage who was only technically past the apprentice stage by the strictest definition of what a full mage actually was. Senica met the actual requirements to be a mage—proficiency in intermediate spells in at least three different disciplines—but it was generally expected that apprentices would also have a grasp on the basic spells in all the other disciplines as well.
Her education had been… spotty. It wasn’t her fault. Mana was a precious resource now and we’d had to focus on giving her the tools she needed. Even with my recent advancements up to stage seven over the last few years, my own mana was tied up so heavily in fighting Ammun that I hadn’t had much to spare for her.
This outing was a step toward changing that. I’d done the best I could teaching my sister magic under the circumstances, but the fact of it was that my best wasn’t very good. I couldn’t really afford the time or resources she needed, despite her clear talent. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anybody else around who was really qualified, so Senica had done her best with a part-time tutor and no help with training.
‘Where are we landing?’ Senica asked thirty seconds later when the ruins of an old city started poking through the trees.
I’d already picked out a spot, a large, three-story building that was missing most of the roof and was near the center of the city. We landed on the moss-covered stone and peered around at the streets below. Old cobblestones had been busted up practically everywhere either by tree roots or by the city’s new occupants, several of which were going about their business under the canopy of green leaves.
“You didn’t mention how bad they’d smell,” Senica said.
I shrugged. “You’ll get used to it.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Think of it as a good training opportunity to practice filtering harmful fumes out of the air.”
“Wait, are you not smelling this, too?” she demanded.
“I am not,” I confirmed.
“That is completely unfair.”
“You’d better figure it out quick. They smell worse up close, and the stink is basically weaponized once you start cutting them up.”
“I regret agreeing to this,” she muttered.
“Too late for regrets. Some of them noticed us.”
Down below, a group of six of trolls were looking up at the roof and pointing. Each of them was over eight feet tall and probably weighed six hundred pounds at minimum. Their skin was mottled green and brown, surprisingly good at blending in with the forest growing up through the ruined city.
And they were strong, as one of them demonstrated by hauling up a loose hunk of stone and throwing it fifty feet into the air. It flew unerringly at me, only to be deflected at the last moment by my shield ward. “Good arm on that one,” I said.
“Are you going to help?” Senica asked.
“What? Why would I do that. This is why you’re here. You’ve got practically unlimited mana to use and you specialize in fire conjurations. I have every confidence that you’ll defeat these monsters.”
Four more stones, each the size of my head, sailed up from the ground to pelt us. Senica shot me a dirty look and produced her wand. “Yeah, if they don’t split my skull open first,” she said.
Then she got to work setting the trolls on fire.