The next day arrived with an overcast sky. Stretching his body out a bit while he looked over the little clearing around the fort, he mentally went over his itinerary.

First, clear out the rest of the little ones. Second, make sure to begin preparing the hides. Third, work on the garden a bit and plant the seeds and such from the storage room. Fourth… begin checking the wards.

Richard moaned in weary resignation. The ward checking was important, but it just took so much time. It was his least favorite part of each cycle.

Looking at the sky he wasn’t sure if it looked like some light flurries from the mountains, a drizzle, or just grey clouds for today. It was always hard to tell what the weather would do this close to the mountains, especially in early spring. In an hour it could be sunny and bright for all he knew.

His day went as planned for the most part. There were certainly more monsters inside the wards than usual, but that situation itself was becoming more usual as the years passed. It was worrying, but not unexpected.

Perhaps I should try to make a door again. If more wards fall than the inner wards around the keep might not keep anything out. Wouldn’t want something to get into the stores or the stasis room. Richard pondered idly, tapping his fingers on his chin. It’s just really hard to make stuff out of wood with no hammer or chisels or anything.

He kept working until all of the monsters he could sense were dealt with and there was a nice big fire going to burn them all down to ash. After a quick wash to get the smell of dead things off, he got to work tracing all of the wards.

He started as he always did; from the inside out.

The metal door was obviously fine, so he started to trace the hallways to check the runes written on the stone and the conduit lines that sent energy outwards along the walls.

He noticed a few areas that were getting a little worn, and some of the conduits needed to be dug a little deeper. The cracks he had noticed yesterday had slightly misaligned some energy in a few places, but it was easy enough to fix. He had barely moved down a full hallway before his stomach reminded him it was food time.

“Man this shit takes forever.” Richard complained as he stretched his back. “It’s too bad I’m not very good at earth manipulation. This stone is hard to move!” He let out a strained and slowly louder over time groan at the end of his stretch then moved back to his room.

He had some of the edible meat outside smoking, and would need to check the fire in a little bit, but for now he had some soup he had made from the leftover rabbit thing and plants he had foraged for during the day on a simmer.

“What I wouldn’t do for some salt.” Richard said as he dug into his meal.

There was a salt lick nearby that he had discovered some time ago, but it was just out of range of where he could reach. Maybe this year? He had gotten better at integrating the Arcstone, so perhaps. Or maybe he could hit the area with a really powerful spell and blow some back towards himself?

Hmm, that’s a future Richard conundrum, he decided.

The week moved steadily onwards, only a few little surprises here and there to break it from a normal cycle start.

One of the ward schemes had totally collapsed. Richard wasn’t positive about what it did, but he was fairly certain that it was tied into the structural reinforcement for the fort in some way. Regardless, he managed to weave it back into the grid with some effort.

The days started to blend together, checking one rune after the next and fixing things as he went along. He had plenty of time to think as he worked, so he reminisced about his own attempts at creating wards. He knew how to make a circle, how to draw the proper runes, how to blend it all together, but they never worked for some reason. Richard was pretty certain it was a power issue.

The wards attached to the fort all were powered through the arcstone chamber using conduit lines to bind them all together and connect them to the ley line. The walls had been a separate construction that wasn’t connected to the rest and with his amateurish attempts in the early days he hadn’t known enough to perform maintenance on them, so the wards had failed. He had attempted to glean what he could before they crumbled, but he just didn’t know enough about the initial stages to make anything work.

Another thing he worked on while he dithered was his connection with the Arcstone.

At first interacting with the energy he could use was jarring and uncomfortable. Most mages could only use their internal reservoirs of magic to fuel spell casting, though sometimes a focus ring or battery in a staff or such could also be used to supplement it. Using the Arcstone felt alien and strange. Through his connection he could interact with the various runes in the fortress by focusing and directing his will, but he could also use it as a sort of battery. It was as if there was a window inside his soul that he could open up and channel energy through his body with.

Using it had been painful and would wear him out quickly. After the final battle, he could barely move for a few days afterwards due to the echoes of pain. It had felt like his veins were on fire, and his energy was sapped.

Over time he managed to integrate his connection more thoroughly into his body. It took a while to figure out how to do it, but just meditating and focusing on the connection allowed him to basically envision his own soul. He wove the strands in gently over time, much like he would fiddle with the seal over the rift.

Nowadays he only needed to actively focus on the arcstone for specific tasks and he could pull the energy from the connection without having to focus on the stone or the connection much, as if he was just flexing a muscle.

He was rather proud of that, in fact. And he was also somewhat skeptical that the stone actually had anything to do with it. The difference in his personal reserves from before bonding to after were.. significant.

Nine days since he awoke, he completed checking the whole fort from bottom to top.

“Finally! Let’s go check the rift and blow some shit up!” Richard loudly declared to the empty corner room at the top of the fort.

The seal on the rift was always in the corner of his thoughts. He could focus on it but it wouldn’t really tell him how well it was doing. He needed to go to the actual rift physically and check everything through magesight.

The rift was two miles north of the fort at the base of one of the smaller mountains - it would only take about a half hour to get there, depending on how many baddies were in the way.

Richard arrived at his room and began to check over his gambeson and mail for any fixable flaws. They were both in fairly rough shape having taken hits over the years. He had a few spares, but they all had some wear and tear to them. The best oils he could use to prevent rust were from the avian monsters, and he only had gut string and bone needles to fix the tears in the gambeson layers.

It was actually a rare cycle now that he actually ended up needing the armor, but it was always better to be safe than sorry. He had monster slaying down to an art at this point, and it was usually when he was just not paying attention that something would get the drop on him, like earlier with that small hound.

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Many times he had attempted layering leather in the same manner and attempting to make new gambeson, but it just didn’t work the same. The padded and layered linen was just stronger on a weight by weight ratio, and if he got the leather thick enough to protect himself, then the mail wouldn’t fit over top of it.

He had found a long while ago that mixing some wax into the fabric slowed down it’s decline, but it made it really awful to wear. It had saved his life too many times to consider not wearing it though.

Every year, he would skin the monsters that had more unusual mutations of scales and such that may make stronger leather, but he hadn’t had much luck working with them yet.

He did have some layered shin and knee guards, and tough leather gloves and boots. Over time he had come up with a set of gear that fit very well, protected well from blunt damage, and he could move easily in.

His ‘monster slaying gear’ was the most important thing he owned. Without it he couldn’t do his primary duty of securing the rift, nor could he clear out the groups of larger and more ferocious monsters within the territory.

The idea was that if he kept sweeping the monsters and destroying them, it would continually create a vacuum of territory for monsters further out. If there was someone still alive, eventually the fact that monsters always migrated in his direction might eventually bring someone to explore why. That was the hope, anyway. At this point he basically just did it for something to do but the original idea was still in the back of his mind.

Grabbing the only steel helm remaining and double checking that all of the straps were nice and tight, he moved towards the edge of the wards. Drawing his trusty and battered battle blade, he began to ‘hang’ the normal array of spells onto it for easy activation as he walked slowly north. There was some official word for what he was doing, but the military grunts always called it hanging spells, so that’s what he went with. He had forgotten the other term forever ago.

He could hang a total of eight spells into the runes of the blade. Originally its capacity had been twelve, but over time damage had reduced some runes to non-function. His other blade still had the full array, but that’s why he didn’t use it. If something ever changed, or one of the amalgamation horrors wiggled out of the rift, he wanted to have a fully functional blade to use.

Speed, shielding, two fire, two ice, two force. It’s the setup he always went with in the beginning. They were larger and flashier spells than he would have been able to use without the Arcstone available to power them. Truthfully he barely needed to pre-hang the artillery spells because he had cast them so many times in the past, but it would save a few precious seconds and that might matter.

Richard stepped out of the relative safety of the warded area and quickly checked his immediate surroundings. It looked clear, so he hunkered down.

He was unable to use his mana sensing to reach outside of the wards while inside of them due to the way they calmed and regulated the flow of mana from one side to the other. That being the case, he stopped just outside and began a large-ranging sweep of everything along the arc he could that wasn’t blocked by the wards behind him.

A mostly typical number of anomalies showed up in his scan. These were much sharper and deeper on the background mana field generally, though there were also some smaller monsters out here as well. The nearest to him was a medium sized pack of the larger felhound variety. They had morphed enough that it looked as if they had begun to have frost mana properties. Chances are they could use a breath attack and that fire would be extra effective in damaging the pack.

Richard was always loath to use fire in the forest because it took a while for him to put it all out again, but this wasn’t a time for more nuanced measures. The swarm of monsters outside was obviously at its largest state on his first foray, and making a big noise and splash usually helped in drawing them all near so he could clear out large groups at the onset.

“Alright. Time to bring the pain.” Richard stated with a grin on his face.

The pleasant morning in the valleys under the mountain was suddenly shattered with a gigantic rolling explosion of fire. Monsters and animals alike all froze in shock as the dim dawn light was transformed with fire and fury.

The monsters only paused for a moment before all pouring in the direction of the blast. When they arrived there was a new clearing in the forest, smoking corpses of felhounds and smoldering trees were around the area where there was a human glowing from within a domed shield of blue.

“COME! Come to die, you fucking monsters!” Richard screamed as he began to put together a large force blade that would travel across the clearing at waist height.

The monsters began to flow towards him, and he unleashed hell.

Richard lost himself in the power and fury of battle for a time. It was his favorite part of the cycle. He could unleash and revisit the moments of glory that he had been a part of at the end of the war.

These monsters weren’t the nightmare amalgamations that had poured forth through the rift, but the number of them and the spells he was using brought back memories of that last great charge.

By the time the monster tide died out and he came back to himself, he was looking at a charnel pit of bodies frozen, melted, hacked apart, and the land itself had new scars.

He was breathing hard, still somewhat high from the adrenaline rush. His body began to work on automatic, quenching the flames and using his senses to find any nearby monster sources.

After a little while, his breathing returned to normal and he took stock.

There were less monsters in the original rush than he usually managed to draw together, but there had still been hundreds of the bastards.

He had cleared the whole area, and the way to the rift was now open. With a shaky sigh, he began to trudge through the corpses towards the rift.

“Well, that always feels awesome. Now it’s time to keep it cool. Let’s check on the damn hole in reality real fast so I can go hunt some more.” Richard grumbled as he walked carefully through the forest at the end of the new clearing.

Richard hiked up one last hill and looked down on the source of his torment.

In a barren rocky field, a small mound of smooth stone rose in the center. No plants or animals could be seen, just bare bedrock. There were strange hills and circular lakes all around the area - scars left over from that long ago battle - but the actual rift was on a clear and smooth hump of stone.

The anomaly that is the rift was something you could see if you knew what to look for. A wavy haze in the air, with a very faint purple-ish glow.

The rift by itself would have been a red tear in reality that if you looked into the center of made you feel nauseous, like you were looking at a flat sphere. It was literally warped space, and wasn’t something that the brain could parse very well.

The seal holding the rift closed would, by itself, have a blue tint to it and it stitched the gaping hole closed. The final combination of the two was just this faint purple wavy haze - it wasn’t very impressive.

Using mana sight, it was a bit of a different story. You could see the rune diagrams that were free floating mana that made up the ward, spiraling on multiple axis in circles around a set point in space. There were some streamers of energy periodically pushing out and disappearing into the air.

Richard noticed the slight wobble of one of the rings, and that there was a bulge of energy on one side of the seal. He walked closer, and accessed the diagram burned into his soul via the Arcstone.

A few tweaks of positioning and some minor adjustments to size brought the diagram back into perfect alignment. The pulses stopped, the wiggle stabilized, and the bulge disappeared. The rift was definitely smaller this year. At first it would have taken maybe ten minutes to walk the circumference of the whole thing, but now it would take less than half that.

As Richard had been focused on adjusting things, some flying monsters had gotten close to check on what had caused such a racket. They saw him standing alone in a barren field, and screamed as they turned to attack.

He barely heard them and reacted in time, so lost in working on the seals as he was. He shouted the activation phrase for his hung shielding spell just in time, as two of the monsters slammed into the new bubble of force around him.

Richard swung around and used his blade to target smaller lances of force to hit the monster’s wings. He missed one, but the other had it’s wing turn into mush and it fell from the sky.

The other monsters had seen the bubble in time, and a few used raw mana attacks of different varieties against it.

Using more targeted bolt spells, it only took a few more minutes to clear up the skies, and he dragged the bodies into a pile after harvesting some of the non-damaged feathers. Lighting the pile on fire, he stood with his hands on his hips and frowned.

“Damn, old man. Keep your head in the game.” He said to himself, chuckling.

The flyers always went for the head and chest. It was how he had lost his other helms and where some of the worst damage to his mail shirt had come from.

“Alright. Rift is good, let’s go huntin’. Might as well work towards the salt.”

As he walked towards the east and the canyons there, he noticed that there was a noticeably smaller population of large monsters this cycle.

“That’s strange. There were more inside the wards, but less outside?” He wondered as he lined up a shot on some sort of bull-bison looking thing with flames licking up it’s horns and hooves.

I wonder how that happened. I’ll need to keep my eyes peeled. Maybe there’s a larger predator in the area or there will be more on the south side of the fort?

Unknown to Richard; monsters and animals weren’t the only ones who heard the explosive opening salvos of this cycle.