I’d done my best to keep this conversation going now that I was here, not because I wanted to talk to my former apprentice, but to give my shadow time to break the first ward stone. As soon as that happened, the fight was guaranteed to kick off, and I’d have to hold my own against Ammun, his shadow, and his squadron of golems while my shadow went after the second ward stone.
I was hoping the defenses wouldn’t be radically different at the second location, but there wasn’t enough time to check both before breaking one. I’d just have to wing it until I gained full freedom of movement. The spatial lock needed to be destroyed if my plan was going to work. Everything hinged on me having control over the local area. If I failed there, then I was wasting my time doing anything but breaking Ammun’s construction project, which he could simply rebuild elsewhere.
“Nothing to say to that?” Ammun asked with a sneer.
“I think you’re forgetting who I am,” I told him. “Let me remind you that I am a bigger monster than you could ever hope to be. The difference between us is that you’re thoughtlessly destructive, even self-destructive, though that seems to be more of a consequence of your inability to predict how your actions will affect the world. If you think you’ve rattled me by comparing how evil we both are, you are quite mistaken.”
It was hard to read the expression of an animated skull, but he had enough humanity left in him that his body radiated anger. Whatever he’d been hoping to get out of taunting me, I hadn’t given it to him. Really, though, all I’d done was point out the obvious. Ammun’s actions over the last few years, particularly the way he’d gone after soft targets on the off chance that I’d have some connection with them, revealed that he had indeed forgotten what kind of person his master was.
I supposed the thousand or so years of subjective time between my death and us both being alive and active today were enough to dull his memory, but I wondered what kind of stories people had told about me that he’d thought I’d succumb to naïve idealism like some storybook knight rushing out to save the world. I wasn’t trying to save anyone. I just wanted the mana back the way it was supposed to be.
My shadow located both ward stones and was just starting to work on the first one. I figured I had about thirty seconds left before Ammun realized what was happening and attacked. For now, he was quite happy to stall. His golems hadn’t ceased construction, and every second he kept me talking was another panel they could attach to the delicate framework. He probably thought I wasn’t aware of the separate barrier surrounding the silo, but I’d spotted that the instant he’d flown through it in an attempt to make sure my opening salvo was directed at him instead of his fragile project.
“No, I haven’t forgotten,” Ammun said sourly. “You never did appreciate my capabilities. I’m simply pointing out the hypocrisy of the persona you’ve crafted for yourself in this day and age. I’ve seen the towns. You put teleportation platforms in them. You’ve helped Dherevo recover. That druid grove you’re sponsoring is coming along nicely, isn’t it?”
“So what? Do you have something against an honest trade of resources and knowledge?”
“Since when did you ever do anything but take what you want, Master Keiran? Are you just growing soft in your old age, or did your reincarnation alter some fundamental part of your personality?”
Considering the whole reason I’d taken Ammun on as an apprentice in the first place was to appease his family as part of a trade deal, I wasn’t really sure where he’d gotten this idea of me from. Even in my younger, blood-soaked days as a necromancer, I’d never had a problem with a fair deal. I’d just been unwilling to accept that what I wanted was out of reach at any price. Come to think of it, that part of me hadn’t really changed that much.
I spotted the exact moment Ammun realized I’d been stalling him as much as he’d been stalling me. His mouth hung open, more meaningless drivel about to spew out, when he froze in place. The flickering red beads nestled in his eye sockets slid off toward his ward stone for just an instant before he mastered his expression and turned a shrewd, cunning gaze on me.
“So that’s how it is, huh?” was all he said.
Ammun might have taken a shot at my choice of attire, but it hadn’t escaped my notice that his own robes, tattered as they might be, were similarly fortified. Inscriptions didn’t really play well with flexible materials since the position of a rune in relation to the others was so important, but that didn’t mean enchantments couldn’t be laid down on a shirt or robe. Ammun’s in particular were closer to rags than anything else, but in all fairness, I had left him stranded on a moon for the better part of a year.
The whole time we’d been speaking, I’d been sizing him up, and like just about everything else I’d seen from him, he lacked the ability to craft something original. His methodology came directly from me, something I’d expect from a recently graduated apprentice, not someone who’d had centuries to iterate and come up with his own style. The techniques I didn’t recognize had probably been stolen from someone else, but the defensive enchantments were definitely mine.
Stolen novel; please report.
Unfortunately, copying me did mean that his battle robes were well-crafted and would be difficult to get past. For the moment, that was fine. I wasn’t ready to push the fight to the point where I destroyed his mortal body just yet.
Ammun made the first move. Of all the possible ways he could have started the fight, he went with the most obvious one. His primary advantages were that he wasn’t bound by his own spatial lock and that he had effectively unlimited mana. So it was no surprise that he leaned into that and cast an instant teleport to try and get the cheap shot off.
Even with his wards putting a damper on what my divinations could pick up, it wasn’t hard to predict his opener. I was already moving as soon as I felt his mana start to flex into a spell, straight down to put his silo in the line of fire. Ammun came out of his teleportation with his hand raised, a wand made of some sort of wood and studded with tiny iron spikes up and down its length held in it. A spiraling beam of mana lanced out, cutting through the air where I’d just been floating.
It was made of a thousand individual threads, and the farther it went, the more it unraveled until the beam was ten times thicker than it started. If Ammun had teleported fifty feet behind me instead of ten, it might have hit me. Of course, the diffusion of the beam’s structure meant that even if it had, it wouldn’t have hurt.
He started to swing the wand around, realized what he’d be putting in the line of fire if he did, and jerked his hand back up before cutting the spell off. At the same time, I sent a volley of probing, conjured metal needles to dimple his shield ward. The purpose wasn’t to get through, though I certainly wouldn’t have complained if they had, but to test the properties of the ward.
Would it push him away or absorb the kinetic energy? How quickly would the ward refresh itself up to full strength? Could it selectively let through attacks that were weak enough that Ammun could safely ignore them, or would it waste mana deflecting anything and everything I threw at it? That one simple spell told me the answers to all those questions, and I immediately used that information to formulate a new strategy.
Shield wards were extremely useful, but I’d noticed people of this era tended to use them as their first, last, and only level of personal protection. In all fairness, I’d often relied on them that way myself, especially once I’d reached the point where my magic was overpowering to everyone I met. But that wasn’t what they were meant for. Their primary purpose was to prevent a mage from being killed by a sneak attack. They were designed to take one good, solid hit before breaking, and the mage was supposed to take over their own defense at that point.
My own shield ward was so powerful that no one I’d fought outside of Ammun himself had been able to break through. The only exception was that one mage who knew a single destructive master-tier conjuration, and he’d needed a full cadre of support mages to even use it. Not even any of the so-called archmages of the Global Order had been able to do much more than force me to actively push mana into the shield ward to hold it against their attempts to break through.
There was a weakness to them, though, and that weakness was that they could only protect against what their designer could predict. My wards were very thorough, and that meant Ammun’s were as well, but I’d sacrificed durability to achieve flexibility. His shield ward had the same weakness.
I didn’t need to find a clever hole in his defenses, though there were undoubtedly a few. I just needed to exploit the facts I’d already determined. His shield ward drained quickly and was refreshed manually, just like mine. It would protect him from anything of any potency, and was probably tuned more strongly against typical undead weaknesses than it was to deal with kinetic force.
I tore through it like paper in less than two seconds by hitting it from six different angles with continuous streams of pure heavy mana while Ammun gaped at me in shock.
“Wha—” he started to say, but I interrupted him with a shot of force magic to the chest, knocking him end over end.
I’d timed that shot specifically to coincide with my shadow breaking the first of his ward stones. He might notice anyway, but my hope was that he’d be too focused on the fight in front of him to pay attention. With one of his ward stones down, the spatial lock in the area loosened and the divination wards fell completely. Abruptly, I could see everything around me in all the ways I was used to looking at them, with so much detail that all my earlier observational guesswork felt pointless.
It was gratifying to know exactly how much I’d correctly deduced, and slightly annoying to spot the things I’d gotten wrong, but overall, this was progress. There was no time to gloat, however. Ammun had already recovered from what had basically amounted to a slap in the face.
“You’re as sloppy as ever,” I said. “Let’s see how well you fight when your opponent isn’t stage five and has air to breathe.”
“You think I need those advantages to beat you? I have a thousand years of magical advancements in my head that occurred after your death. You haven’t even begun to catch up to me.”
My shadow skimmed across the forest and settled on the second ward stone, then started viciously tearing into it. Ammun’s cheekbone twitched slightly in facsimile to a real face, and I gave him a cold smile. “That’s right. None of your tricks are amounting to anything at all. At the end of the day, all the preparations and all the distractions are worthless.”
“Not all,” he growled, lifting his hands up to send dual master-tier flame conjurations directly into my face.
At the same time, his shadow slipped free and transmuted the air around me into solid form to hold me in place for my immolation. The funny thing about it was that a few minutes ago, that strategy would have been extremely draining to defend against. Now, without a full spatial lock in place, it was trivial to avoid.
Phantasmal step let me slide backwards through the hardened air like it wasn’t there, and a simple heat sink cast upward drew the majority of the flames away from me. I shot backwards to escape the rest of the thermal bloom, then fired off my own flame lance in retaliation.
It was time to test just how well he’d woven the enchantments into his tattered robe while my shadow brought down the second ward stone. Then I could enact my real plan.