My already overburdened schedule was suddenly stuffed to the brim. There’d be no sleeping in my future, nor was there time to oversee any non-essential experiments. The only thing I’d be doing that wasn’t furthering my goal of meeting Ammun in open battle and prevailing was helping Senica.

“But why did I spend days working on this if you were just going to do it yourself?” Senica asked, her voice waspish when I showed up to treat her.

“We just got confirmation. Ten weeks is all I’ve got before Ammun gets back. You need to immediately stop using the ointment. In a few months, hopefully you can resume treatment and I can finish teaching you what you need to know. For now, this is the quickest solution. Now, hold still.”

With a sigh, Senica stopped fidgeting and I cast the spells needed to fix the chemical imbalance in her body. It only took about ten minutes, during which I caught my family up on the most recent disasters I was handling.

“The Order should stay away,” I explained, “and if they don’t, I’ve got the one passage I know about across the ocean under surveillance. You should still keep the transmission stones on you, just in case they have other ways to get here.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Mother said. “How much water could there possibly be?”

“In an ocean? I doubt anyone has ever calculated the number.” I tried to mentally figure out the dimensions, but quickly gave it up as a bad job. For one thing, my mental map was a few millennia out of date, and for another, I had almost no knowledge of how deep it went, other than ‘very.’ “It’s not something you can swim across. Even flying… I could do it, but I wouldn’t want to. It’s several thousand miles of open water with no guarantee of finding an island to land on if I need to stop for some reason.”

On the bright side, I was reasonably certain all the sea monsters had died off. Things tended to get a lot bigger in huge bodies of water than they did on land, and with increased size generally came a need for mana just to survive. There were exceptions, of course, but animals that didn’t rely on mana in some way weren’t usually threats to big ships.

“It’s possible they’ve got alternate teleportation chains set up that I don’t know about, but I don’t have time to scry out the whole ocean looking for them, especially not now. I’ve got to finish knocking down a tower and gather some allies for the fight. Then I’ve got to equip them to handle the threat. The portal network needs to be expanded and the wards strengthened. I need to figure out a portable ritual circle for fixed-destination long-range teleportation, and—”

“What about getting back to stage nine?” Senica interrupted.

I cut off my list with a twinge of annoyance. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

A sharp retort came to my lips, but I swallowed it down with a grimace. “It’s just not feasible. I don’t have what I need.”

“What’s that? Maybe we can help?” Father asked.

I bit back a laugh. The special rooms and equipment I’d fabricated prior to my death as part of my experiments in bridging the gap between stage eight and nine without outside assistance were all gone, lost, stolen, or destroyed centuries ago. Even if I still had them, they were experimental. There was no way to know for sure that they’d work without testing them.

“It would take me years to get everything ready,” I said. “And I still might fail.”

“How could you fail?” Senica asked, bewildered. “Weren’t you already stage nine before?”

“I… was, yes. But it’s not that simple. The way I did it the first time isn’t something I can replicate.”

It had taken three of us working together and it had ended in a betrayal that had cost two lives. I’d survived through sheer luck and massive amounts of paranoia. Years of preparations had gone into that ritual, mostly to protect myself from exactly what had ended up happening—one of my cabal mates trying to kill me mid-ascendance—and even then, it had been a near thing. My mind had been cut free to drift in the Astral Realm, to drown in an ocean of mana that I lacked the ability to manipulate.

“Gravin?” Mother said.

“Huh?”

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, just remembering… I had a cabal when I was stage eight last time. There were three of us, Nivir, Daelin, and myself. We figured out how to reach stage nine, but it required all of us collaborating. Daelin tried to kill me in the middle of the ritual. He failed, and Nivir burned out his ability to do magic to bring me back from beyond the brink. He died half an hour later when his age caught up with him.”

As much as I owed Nivir my life, I was under no illusions that he’d done it for any altruistic reasons. He’d been injured in the fight and was already nearing the end of his life anyway. He’d saved me in return for my promise to aid his descendants in their own magical journeys, which I’d done without complaint.

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I’d helped half a dozen archmages reach stage nine over the centuries, but they were all dead now. With no one left to return the favor, my only option was to find a way to advance without help. Or I could trust someone not to kill me when I was in a state of complete and total vulnerability. All they’d have to do is let me go and I’d drift away to my death. The fact that my automatons, traps, and wards would kill my betrayer would be no consolation.

“Why do all of your stories end with someone betraying someone else?” Senica asked.

“Because you don’t get to my level of power by being a good person,” I told her.

“You’re a good person,” Mother said.

“No, I’m not.”

“You are,” she insisted.

“He murdered like thirteen people this week,” Senica said.

“They attacked him! He was defending himself.”

“I love my brother, but he could have gotten what he wanted and still let them live. He chose to kill them.”

She was probably right. I wasn’t in the habit of showing mercy to people who came after me, though, so I hadn’t bothered to try. Admittedly, an argument could have been made that I’d overreacted to the Order snooping into my business, but when I was fighting a war against an entire enemy nation led by a powerful lich, I couldn’t afford half-measures.

“You’re all set for now,” I said. “Don’t use any more of the ointment. I’ll come back in a week to repeat the process. In a few months, we can talk about how to do this yourself if you want to resume treatments.”

“Senica won’t be doing that,” Mother said.

I snorted. “Good luck stopping her. Might as well settle for doing it safely.”

“That’s not—”

I cut her off with an upraised hand. “I don’t have the time to waste on this argument right now. You guys figure out what you want to do and let me know when I come back in a week.”

I strode back into my room, activated the teleportation platform, and jumped halfway across the continent.

* * *

Ammun’s tower was in distressingly good condition. Either I’d grossly underestimated how much mana it was drawing in, his golems had destroyed some of my mysteel generators, or those Order archmages had managed to do an extraordinary job fixing things back up. I was betting on the second, but the first would actually be better news. It would mean the world core was in better shape than I’d originally thought.

I teleported down to the intake vents and shredded a trio of behemoth mana wraiths circling around that locked in on me the moment I appeared. Razor-edged blades of phantasmal force tore them apart in seconds, dissipating them into pure mana and sucking them into the intake. I studied the flow for a few seconds, trying to determine if it was stronger or weaker than before, but I couldn’t find a difference.

The golems were, if anything, even more numerous than the last time I’d been in here. If I hadn’t already mapped out the entire tower, I would have suspected some sort of autonomous manufacturing room that was materializing raw material out of mana and stamping golem cores to be inserted into metal and stone frames. Then again, I never had determined where the original wave had come from. It hadn’t seemed important considering I was planning on tearing the tower down anyway.

I didn’t have time to fight my way through the legion of unthinking constructs before me, so I cheated and teleported directly to the closest mysteel generator. Surprisingly, it was still in one piece and had produced about thirty pounds of mysteel. I collected it into my phantom space, drew in enough mana to power a teleportation spell, and skipped to the next spot to repeat the process.

The mana levels appeared to be stable and all the generators were in one piece, which left just the theory that the Order had interfered. My last stop was the control room for the tower, where I received a nasty surprise: I was completely locked out of the system.

Somehow, it had reset itself back to its state prior to my modifications. It was no wonder the tower was still standing. All the damage I’d done by sabotage had been reverted or repaired. “Clever bastard,” I muttered. I hadn’t expected Ammun to have something like this, but I probably should have.

Spending the evening cracking everything back open wasn’t ideal, but this tower needed to come down, now. This time, I didn’t bother ripping everything open again. I didn’t need access to every facet of the tower, and I didn’t have time to be thorough.

Instead, I manually brought down the wards reinforcing the tower’s walls. By itself, that would have been enough if not for the damned control room resetting everything. This time, I was going to aggravate the problem. With all the wards down, I refocused the mana flows to build up in key locations, essentially forcing them to overload control nodes and add another layer of repairs the magic would need to handle before it could patch up anything.

That would probably be enough to bring the tower down now, but I wasn’t going to risk it. It was better to spend an extra six hours on this today than risk coming back in two weeks to find it was still whole and fully repaired. With the tower’s defenses down, I begin actively damaging it. I had what was for my purposes an unlimited supply of heavy mana gushing up from beneath my feet and I intended to use it.

Explosions rocked the tower, first from my own spells, then from sections of it collapsing. I avoided targeting the residential floors in the beginning, but it was inevitable that they’d take damage. Hopefully the innocent civilians still living in the tower managed to evacuate before it was too late.

It was only after the top two hundred floors had collapsed that I switched to delayed explosive spells. All throughout the night, I worked to add more and more of them, thousands of master-tier destructive conjurations scattered across every sub-level and intake shaft. When my work was finally complete, I teleported myself a few hundred miles straight up into the sky above the wreckage of the upper half of the tower.

Then, with a single mental command, I triggered the destruction of the rest of the tower. Chunks of stone flew in every direction, some even reaching the height I was observing from. The ground shook for a thousand miles, new cracks and fissures opening from shore to shore, breaking the hundreds-miles long islands into even smaller chunks as seas rushed in to fill the new openings.

There was no telling how many people I’d just killed. I wasn’t even sure who’d been left in the tower, let alone who’d been caught in the devastation. But when it was done, the miles-wide crater was half filled with loose stone. I hovered in silence, only the wind to keep me company, and watched trillions of gallons of water pour into the crater to drown what had once, so many centuries ago, been my home, before Ammun had built his monstrosity atop it.

“Are you watching from up there?” I asked as I glanced up into the night sky. “This is just the beginning.”