Grandfather stared doubtfully at the chain. It was six feet long, each link an inch thick and covered in runes. Thirty more exactly like it hung from a rack standing nearby. “Why would we need such a thing?”
“Because you have an entire wall of portals connecting Eyrie Peak to the rest of the continent,” I said. “You may need to defend it.”
“I’m not arguing that point. I simply fail to see why any threat should be so powerful that we could not destroy it with our own magic.”
“And maybe that will be the case,” I said. “Something might come through that you can easily defeat. Then again, whatever finds you might be strong enough to challenge an adult brakvaw, in which case, you’ll be glad your warriors have these.”
They weren’t anything that complicated – just a shield ward specialized in deflecting ranged projectiles and mana. My thought process was that any fight a brakvaw got involved in would be high speed and aerial, with little chance of things devolving into a brawl. By focusing on ranged defense, I sacrificed flexibility for efficiency. They also had a single-use recall enchantment anchored to them, independently powered from the shield ward, that would return the user to the top of Eyrie Peak.
“The gestalt should be able to warn you if and when Ammun sends his forces through any of the portals,” I said. “Hopefully, that will be enough warning to gather your strongest to defend yourselves.”
It would be better to just close the portals, but the brakvaw had become too reliant on easy access to hunting grounds. That, combined with their complete lack of knowledge on how to preserve food, meant that the portals had to stay open unless I wanted giant birds descending on human settlements looking for lunch.
“If it comes down to the worst-case scenario and the enemy is too overwhelming, this will close the portals permanently,” I told Grandfather. In my hand was a large red rock, speckled with gold and stuffed with mana. “It’s a spatial disruption bomb. Using this will collapse any nearby portals and disrupt all sorts of spatial effects, including teleportation. It doesn’t lock the area down in any way, but it will break all ongoing effects.”
“Do you really think this will be necessary?”
“I honestly don’t know what Ammun is planning. You might never see a single one of his soldiers, but on the other hand, an army of golems could come marching through those portals the second he gets back. I could have wasted my time and a great deal of mysteel making these, but I’d rather you have them and not need them.”
It wasn’t like I had anything better to do with all the mysteel I’d collected. It wasn’t nearly enough to patch the shell around the world core, and I could recycle it later once this threat was dealt with. Nigh-indestructible inscribed battle gear seemed like a good use for it. I’d been sitting on the chains for months now, anyway, just waiting until it was time to start equipping my allies.
“I appreciate that you spent the time to make these, but I hope we don’t need them,” Grandfather said. “I also hope you don’t think this will buy you a wing of brakvaw to fight for you elsewhere.”
“I would hope that you would come to an ally’s defense, regardless of whether exorbitant bribes were paid to you beforehand.”
“That will depend entirely on what the trouble is and how much we can afford to spare anyone from defending our own home,” Grandfather told me.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. I hadn’t exactly been keeping score, but I was pretty sure that in the grand scheme of things, I’d helped the brakvaw out far more than they’d helped me. Most of what I’d needed from them was for them to stop eating humans and a donation of mana. Admittedly, lossless casting wouldn’t exist without their techniques and instruction to show me how to adapt it to my own magic, so maybe we were even after all.
I spent another ten minutes instructing Grandfather in how to use the chains and portal breaker, not that there was much to them. Then I excused myself to continue my circuit around the island, while noting that Grandfather seemed almost relieved to see me leave.
I couldn’t blame him, not really. I was about to bring a whole heap of trouble down on the island, and anyone associated with me was probably going to get caught in the crossfire. I wouldn’t be surprised if, by the time Ammun returned, the entire brakvaw civilization had flown off through one of the portals and closed the way behind them.
* * *
I dropped off more equipment all over. Hyago and his druids got a few pieces, as did Keeper and the Hierophant. I even left a pile of wands for their mage enforcers to help guard the city with. Senica had already been equipped with a mixture of my left-overs and a few pieces I’d made specifically for her for a few years now, but I updated everything I could to use stronger material and have larger mana reserves.
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I also equipped my parents and several of the stronger mages in New Alkerist with their own wands, shield wards, and flight charms. I didn’t bother to let my family know that the shield wards had hidden enchantments that would pull them to a safehouse I’d prepared ahead of time if I needed to evacuate them, but I caught Senica peering at the enchantments closely and I had no doubt she’d noticed that hidden effect.
I even went so far as to find Tetrin and warn him about the potential upcoming attack, though I doubted he’d be in the direct line of fire. I hadn’t had much interaction with the man since Ammun had woken back up, so he probably wasn’t in danger, but on the off-chance that the Order’s fumbling around had revealed his existence to Ammun’s generals, I felt it was worth the ten-minute conversation.
The only person who didn’t receive a king’s ransom in magical gear from me was Querit, and it wasn’t because I hadn’t invested in making him the strongest combat frame I could manage. I’d pulled apart every one of his frames over the last year to study their designs, and while they were quite ingenious, I’d streamlined a few efficiency issues and fixed a handful of flaws, then scaled the whole thing up for my own version.
Standing at nine feet tall, the combat frame was an amalgamation of mysteel and mana-reflective plates, eight individual layers of runework that made up over a hundred different combat spells, including six master-tier spells that Querit himself couldn’t even power. I’d included fourteen super-dense storage crystals, each capable of holding enough mana to fire a single master-tier spell before running itself dry, just to activate those spells.
And I had nobody to wear it, not unless I could find a six-year-old prodigy or another shapeshifter. It had been designed specifically for Querit, and without him, it was useless. I was still holding out hope that he’d show back up at some point; I’d let enough people know about Ammun’s upcoming return that he’d definitely hear about it. Whether or not that was enough to get him to come back to work was another matter.
With all the gear I’d been stockpiling over the last few months handed out, I was ready to return to my goal of crippling Ammun’s support network. Thus far, I’d been chipping away at his standing army. Chasing them off the field and back into the tower had slowed down their resource gathering and might even starve them out in the long-term, but that strategy was only ever going to work if it took Ammun long enough to get back. I was going to have to be more-proactive in killing the remaining thousands of mage-soldiers over the next week or two.
That would be easier now that they had no safe haven to retreat to. In fact, I expected a rash of deserters in the next few days once the dust settled. The collapse of the tower had literally thrown up a screen so thick that it was making scrying in the area difficult. If I was really lucky, the gestalt would soon be telling me that they’d learned most of the army had been lost in the tower, and that everyone still in the area were civilians.
I doubted I was lucky.
More likely, the innocents had all been trapped in the tower while the military monopolized access to every single teleportation platform to evacuate as many of themselves as possible. Much as I’d have preferred it to be the other way around, chances were good that I’d killed off a not-insignificant portion of the Sanctum of Light’s population, and that the civilians had taken the brunt of that. I’d know in a day or two.
All I could do in the meantime was keep preparing. To that end, I visited the hidden room buried five hundred feet below the surface in the center of my valley. No one knew about this room – not Querit, not my family, not the gestalt. No one. The only way in was to be the master of the demesne to bypass the teleportation wards, or to physically dig to it. Even then, I doubted anyone besides me could actually crack it open.
It was a vault, a solid fifteen-foot diameter orb of mysteel, the walls six inches thick. Inside it was the thing I’d poured a lot of effort into when I wasn’t busy conducting experiments or creating weapons for my allies in my crucible. The entire room was layer upon layer of rune-inscribed diamond sheets sandwiched between living stone.
It was, in short, a golem core, one big enough to power a titan and hidden in every way I could think of. Hovering in the very center of the orb was a chunk of obsidian I’d fetched from a volcano, two-hundred-feet tall at full size and under heavy spatial compression to shrink it down to the mere eight feet it stood at right now. It could hold enough mana to destroy the entire island if something were to happen to it.
And it was only a quarter of the way full, despite my best efforts. Oh, I could have diverted all of my mana production into it, but that wouldn’t have been enough to complete it, and it might have drawn undue attention from Querit, who I definitely didn’t want to discover that I’d made a larger-than-life scale replica of his own core, albeit with some alterations.
Querit was too human-like, but this golem would be perfectly obedient. It would be trust-worthy. If I was right, it would be able to perform the outer portion of the ritual to advance to stage nine. I’d based it on one of my original designs from my past life, modified with what I’d learned from studying Querit himself.
Unfortunately, it would need far more than ten weeks to finish filling. Even if I diverted everything I had access to, I might be able to fill it in eight, but that wouldn’t leave me enough time to test it before I tried it out. I’d be risking everything on an unproven design that no doubt needed a great deal of iteration before it was ready to be used.
It was still my one great hope for reaching stage nine again, but it had taken too long to get to this point. Accidentally releasing Ammun from stasis had started a clock I’d been struggling against, and unless I could find another way to stall him from escaping Yulitar, I wasn’t even going to come close to beating it.
Still, I was stage eight, and I had time to finish cutting away his support. When Ammun did show back up, it wasn’t going to be a hopeless battle. It just wouldn’t be as easy as it could have been. I’d beat him, somehow, and then I’d continue to think toward the future, to fixing the world core and reaching stage nine unassisted.
It was just the part in the middle that I still needed to figure out. No problem.