My eyes flashed open as I felt a flicker of mana in the middle of the night. It was a familiar sensation, growing more common recently. I staggered my way to the bathroom, avoiding turning on any lights. Most likely whoever it was could already see in the dark, either naturally or with an infusion of magic. However, I felt there was no point in making things easier for anyone.
As for my location, it was revealed already. It was problematic that someone could Scry me even there, as the apartment complex was supposed to be power resistant. No, I knew it was as I’d tested it myself. But of course, resistant wasn’t immune.
I could have blamed my current actions on being woken up suddenly, but in truth I would have made the same choices when fully cognizant of my surroundings. That was just the kind of person I was.
Mana gathered inside of me, released into the bathroom mirror. I bet if I were a normal mage, I would have gotten experience for learning something. Two things, really. First, that it was possible to follow the signature of a Scrying spell back to its source. Not that I saw who it was, because of the other thing. Specifically, the aggressive defenses said individual had.
I was lying on the bathroom floor bleeding from my nose when Midnight got my attention. “Turlough! What happened?”
“... I need to learn that spell,” I said as my mind cleared. “Could you, uh…” My head was still fuzzy, and I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to cast magic at the moment. I managed to come up with the right word. “Nondetection?”
That went on both of us, of course. There was literally no reason for either of us to cast a spell on ourselves individually instead of sharing. Even if we wanted to practice a language, it was actually helpful to have Translation active. Sure, it wouldn’t result in natural learning but as long as it persisted without magic it hardly mattered what people might call it.
But I had drifted. “Don’t worry,” I assured Midnight. “This…” I gestured to myself and my head in general. “Was not the result of a direct assault.” I could feel the individual watching slip away as Nondetection took its form. Yet somehow… I felt that whoever it was let it fade, instead of being prevented by the spell and the building’s restrictions. Maybe that was just my imagination though.
Midnight just looked at me, his tail swishing. He had on his Celmothian battle suit. He could literally jump into it if he needed to, though it was also possible he slept in it. It was quite adaptable, after all. “You know that doesn’t make me worry less, right?”
“I’m pretty sure this was a… friendly warning. Not the blood and stuff. That was an automatic retaliation. But waking me up. It’s a reminder to keep Nondetection active at all hours instead of just when out on patrol or the like.”
“A reminder from who?” Midnight asked.
“Well…” I frowned. “I can think of maybe four people I’ve had contact with who might fit. First is Master Uvithar. Second, there was some sort of diviner lady that helped Izzy find me. Third might be Zenfer Cloudfound. That gnome mage from the capital. Lastly it could be Comhghall. I’d say we might be able to find it out by Scrying them individually, but I doubt we’d want to provoke the same reaction again.” I straightened up. “Plus, without the link we might not even get that far. Also, there’s some chance it’s someone else I’ve never met. Pretty sure it’s someone using magic, though. It felt more like that than a power.”
“So what do we do about it?”
“Keep Nondetection active all the time,” I said. “I think that’s the point. Maybe try to figure out what caused that backlash, but I don’t know what spell that could be. And I don’t think that was the point.”
“It could just be someone Scrying on you,” Midnight pointed out. “Maybe a member of Dark Star’s goons.”
I shook my head. “Nope, there’s no way they’re this good yet. Even if they focused entirely on Scrying… it would have come up earlier. I guess theoretically it’s possible that someone would have dumped a huge amount of points into Scrying but they would have had to get to Jerome’s level or so for it to make sense. My bet’s on my old world.”
With that, I got up and went to HQ. Because it was easier to just go when someone would complain about not getting myself checked out later, even if I was sure I’d be fine. As long as I didn’t do the same thing again in the near future. If I couldn’t figure out how to do that myself… could I at least protect against it? Was it some form of mental damage? Mental Freedom might help. Too bad it was risky to test. I didn’t want to actually annoy whoever it was.
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Jerome was in my Scrying room, but Midnight and I were out in the city. Calculator had picked out a highly probably location of the Mod Squad’s base given various factors from my Scrying of Iron Shell and Jerome Scrying on Rob. Relatedly, when I tried to Scry that other guy, I got pulled over to Iron Shell. That was the whole purpose of her having built in Scrying anchors, I imagined. All we got was her body and nothing beyond it… but that told us more than she’d likely realized possible. Just because I couldn’t make anything from the reflections off her body didn’t mean others couldn’t. Rob was an exception because of the Familiar Bond, so the pull to him would be stronger.
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Midnight and I remained with the same squad, since our cohesion was decent enough and there were risks to changing things up right before an assault. Because that was the plan, after all. We couldn’t guarantee capturing all of the Mod Squad- even with additional assistance from the Power Brigade- but this raid needed to happen. Because Rob was there.
Also, they had a new teleporty guy who was a problem. So I learned something to fix that, potentially. Speaking of which, our cool information people had managed to get the lieutenant guy’s moniker. Flasher… or something. Because he could teleport in a flash? Yeah, that all sounded right.
Zeb was still remotely commanding Fluffy, though apparently that wouldn’t be necessary forever. He’d been doing a good job of gathering experience for her and she rocketed through the low levels. That wasn’t a huge surprise, given how easy it was. It didn’t take much experience and experience was easier to get. Since Fluffy had fought against people with something like powers, she was already level 10 or something. Which wasn’t massive, but it seemed there were some things to unlock to give her similar abilities to her bonded beast?
Too bad we only had names and not a proper Beastmaster to talk to. Or, say, an encyclopedia of class abilities. Even though everyone of a class had access to the same abilities, it would have been really easy to write it. They wouldn’t even have had to mention the secret stuff like the ability to train abilities instead of just using points after going extradimensional!
I wasn’t going to accept dumb answers like it being for the safety of the public or whatever. All the bad guys probably had extradimensional hideouts anyway, and would have stumbled into it on their own easily enough. Plus I was fed propaganda about the biggest threats being neutralized, and that sure didn’t make me safer. Once I figured out who was responsible, they’d be getting a knuckle sandwich. Like the idiots who kidnapped Rob.
A recognizable voice came through our comms as we approached. “Thanks for the shrinking spell, Mage. It will help with the infiltration.”
“No problem,” I replied. I hadn’t actually met up with her for this mission yet, but even I understood a few things. Like her not wanting her new shrinking abilities to be publicly known. I didn’t say anything more, because unnecessary chatter on the comms was disruptive to the flow of a mission.
“You have a shrinking spell?” Zeb’s voice came excitedly from Fluffy’s headset/collar contraption. “Can you make Fluffy tiny?” Fluffy perked up first at Zeb’s voice, then his name. “Tur- Mage, can you do that, huh?” Fluffy, go see if he can do that!”
Fluffy waddled over to me. This might be his last mission as a bear. I heard good things were happening on the Martian issue. He looked kind of excited, but he didn’t quite know what to be excited for. I rubbed his head. “That’s not a good idea for this mission, Zeb,” I spoke aloud. At least this wasn’t flooding the comms. “Him being a different size might be a weakness. It’s also temporary, of course, but I can possibly show you after the mission.”
Fluffy leaned into my hand. I didn’t really know what I had expected mole fur to feel like, but I could say for sure my initial thought wasn’t this soft. Then again, Zeb had used basically an entire shampoo bottle once she’d gotten the chance, cleaning out dirt and grime. He was a wild animal, after all. Or had been.
“Alright, so let’s go over the plan,” Sorority said. “We’re tasked with taking out Flash Circuit, if possible. He has too much Bunvorixian tech integrated into his system.”
“He shouldn’t be able to teleport that much stuff!” Zeb explained. “Especially not without proper infrastructure. So we should also look for something like that.”
“Right. His extreme reaction speed is also problematic,” Sorority continued. “The plan is to boost our own team with Haste and Slow him, if possible. Alternatively, Fluffy might just be able to tear him apart?”
“Probably only if he holds still,” Zeb clarified. “It would take him a few seconds to chew through any sort of armor plating.”
That didn’t sound like long, but a few seconds was kind of a lot in battle. I knew that I wouldn’t let anything chew on my leg for multiple seconds without kicking it away or something. In theory, Fluffy was vulnerable to just… being smashed or stabbed or whatever.
“Our other objective is to reach the parts storage facility,” Sorority added. “We want to retrieve any Bunvorixian tech and… Rob.”
Nobody said anything stupid like ‘it’s just a cleaning robot’. Maybe they’d thought it briefly when it first came up, but Kick had cut off any possibility. I remembered clearly what he’d said. “That kid must be mad. If someone stole my leg? I’d kick the hell out of them with the other to get it back. And my legs don’t do any of their own thinking.”
Zeb had some similar thoughts on bonding with technology, and it seemed she quite missed her personal computer. Human tech just couldn’t replace it.
Rob was cuter than both things, though. And he was way closer to a pet than an actual robot. Even if he wasn’t going to be on the same level of intelligence like Midnight, he was smarter than a normal pet. And obviously more than a normal cleaning robot because they were… extremely foolish. I’d seen Rob get trapped in simple places many times before he became Jerome’s familiar.
We came to our entrance point. A manhole, obviously. Most of the best secret bases were hidden under the city, as people were quite particular about the architecture above ground. Some people had scouted ahead to confirm secret entrances in the area, we were just going to do one final confirmation to ensure it would be the Mod Squad. Better not to run into trouble with some other group instead, though it was unlikely as villains were fairly territorial.