Keiran

The connection to Querit’s scrying mirror snapped abruptly, meaning he’d either cut the mana feed or the mirror itself had been broken. I quickly cast my own scrying spell on the area I’d dropped him in, some seventy miles southwest of Ammun’s tower in a thick copse of trees.

The first thing I saw was a bunch of corpses all over the place – not people, but monsters of various flavors. A pack of them must have stumbled upon him, but Querit had killed them without even bothering to mention it. In all likelihood, though, that was what had drawn the diviners’ attention to him. As fast as we’d been, it hadn’t been quick enough to complete the job before they caught up to him.

What I didn’t see was the golem himself or any of his attackers. Either they’d struck like lightning and captured him, or the fight had moved away from the area. Neither would surprise me, and finding out wasn’t my priority. I needed to determine if the golems that Querit was in charge of had successfully detonated Ammun’s machines before anything else, but they were too far out of range to check.

Three minutes later, my teleportation spell took hold and whisked me away to Querit’s operation site. I spent a few precious seconds sweeping the nearby area and spotted Querit fighting a group of five mages about a mile away. He was holding his own for the moment, mostly thanks to the fact that his body was practically immune to injury. Any damage done to him was instantly regenerated, and all he needed to keep that up was enough mana. I’d given him a generous supply, and we were close enough to Ammun’s tower that he could pull even more from the environment.

He’d be fine.

I turned my attention to the golems he was supposed to be controlling. All four of them were still active, waiting for their final inputs. Three of them were still in place, and I triggered them immediately. The final one had been discovered by some technician onsite and was being hauled off for containment. Without Querit to control it, it offered no resistance and sat docilely in the man’s hands.

My goal was all but accomplished at this point. I’d confirmed seven of eight sites sabotaged, which had probably set Ammun back by at least a year. Unfortunately, since I’d never been able to get a good look at what exactly he was doing, I couldn’t know for sure whether all eight sites were necessary or if they’d been a set of massive redundancies whose loss would only slow him down, not stop him.

Finishing the job was the highest priority, especially since it was entirely possible that reinforcements would be swarming the one intact site any moment now. Unlike the machine components, there was nothing stopping enemy mages from teleporting themselves in. I needed my bomber golem back in position and ready to scrap that machine out.

It thrashed in place, startling the man holding it and causing him to drop it to the floor. Immediately, it scrambled to the nearest wall and scurried up it. The mage yelled out a warning to draw attention, bringing two other people running. Even as they sprinted down the hallway, the mage started chanting the words to a spell, then unleashed a bolt of fire on the golem.

He’d need to do better than a basic-tier conjuration to hurt it, but unfortunately for me, he and his two companions would have plenty of time. With the golem already discovered, most of its camouflaging enchantments weren’t available, and even turning it invisible wouldn’t allow it to escape if the mages had any sort of aptitude for sensing mana.

Thankfully, I didn’t need stealth, just speed. The golem skittered up the wall and onto the ceiling, where it ran at full tilt back to the main hall while being pursued by a storm of fire and ice. It wasn’t until one of the mages cast a greater telekinesis spell to snatch the fleeing golem that I ran into a problem.

The spell slid off the golem’s body, but it caught well enough that even if my creation wasn’t captured by the magic, it still loosened it enough that it lost its grip and plummeted to the floor below. The golem bounced off the stone, unharmed, but now within physical reach of the pursuing mages.

I sent it charging away at top speed. The mages pounded down the hallway after it, one of them easily outstripping the other two as he empowered himself with an invocation. My mobile bomb was still thirty feet away from its target when the mage pounced on it.

That wasn’t ideal, but it didn’t look like I was going to get any closer. The spell had a radius of twenty feet, but I could remotely reconfigure it to project outward in one direction, amplifying the distance it could encompass at the cost of losing the effect behind it. The switch took me two seconds to complete. Then I detonated the bomb.

The mage holding my golem down was immediately crushed. Spatial distortions ripped through his body, snapping bones and sending fountains of blood gushing out into the air, where they twisted and writhed as they were caught in the effect of a master-tier conjuration. The golem itself was also crushed, but the scrying spell held on just long enough for me to see pieces of the machine rip themselves apart.

I didn’t get the whole thing – not even close. The bottom half was trashed, and I’d have to hope that the proximity of the spatial distortions would render the remaining pieces unusable. That was as much as I could do, and it would just have to be enough. I stopped fighting to hold the scry connection open against the failing beacon enchantment and devoted my full attention to Querit’s fight.

It had moved another mile away from me, closer to Ammun’s tower. Querit was starting to look desperate now as he fended off repeated force spells from one mage and dodged creeping ice trying to ensnare him from another. I took a moment to examine my new ally’s defensive spells and shook my head. It was pathetically obvious that he was completely reliant on his combat frames to see him through a fight.

I started flying to the battle while I studied the mage hunter team. Much like the one I’d encountered, there was a pair devoted to helping keep track of Querit while hiding their group from his senses, but instead of having a heavy hitter like Seven leading the charge, they had three mages who looked to be around stage three coordinating to keep the pressure on with a salvo of intermediate-tier spells. Maybe if there’d only been two, the golem might have been able to counter, but he was barely holding himself together against the full group.

I swooped in from above and unleashed killing blasts of razor-sharp force-cleave spells, killing both the reserve mages. If the situation hadn’t been so desperate, I would have gone for a capture technique, but this fight had gone on for far too long already and if reinforcements weren’t already on their way, they would be now that I’d shown up.

Of the three conjuration specialists, I targeted the one who was all offense, no defense. A spike of pure force penetrated the back of his skull, killing him instantly and sending his body careening into the ground as his flight magic was left uncontrolled and quickly ran out of mana. The other two started panicking and shrieking about the loss of their support. Their lack of coordination told me that neither were the brains of the group.

Querit switched to offense immediately, but his spell selection was too weak to do any real damage. That was irrelevant, since it distracted one of the two remaining mages long enough for me to conjure up four shimmering spikes of ice that slammed into the other one’s chest, a poetic end to a mage who had been wielding ice magic herself.

With only one mage left and no reinforcements in sight, I reconsidered my decision to kill them all. None of them were strong, but they were all risking their lives out here, which meant they were unimportant. The final living mage probably wouldn’t know anything useful, and I’d need to relocate him somewhere else to interrogate him. That ran the risk of Ammun’s diviners scrying him directly unless I spent even more mana to shield our location, unlikely as that was, or following in his temporal wake, which was slightly more possible.

It wasn’t worth the risk. I wove a force spell around the mage, one that clamped down on his skull and squeezed until bone cracked and brain matter burst out. The mage’s corpse hung limp in the air for a few seconds, then my spell ended and he fell away to the ground. Querit cursed and leaped to the side to avoid the gory missile, then scowled up at me.

“Thank you,” he said. “I wasn’t able to finish destroying the machines. If you can keep watch for a minute, I’ll take care of that.”

“I already did it,” I said. “It’s probably best if we flee now, just in case more of them show up.”

“Agreed,” Querit replied. “Should I use this recall charm you gave me?”

“Just keep some divinations running while I manually cast a teleport spell. We’ll be out of here in a few minutes,” I ordered.

With my companion watching skyward for any mages about to attack us, I got to work building a two-person teleportation spell.

* * *

“That was more excitement than I generally prefer in my life,” Querit said once we’d hopped a few more beacons and arrived back at my demesne. “But the job got done. I’m sorry I was not able to accomplish my half of the work.”

“It happens. I should have provided you with one of your combat frames, but I thought we’d be able to get in and out without anyone noticing us.”

I’d had too much faith in Querit’s ability to avoid divinations. Even with the extra precautions I’d taken on our return trip, I was concerned that Ammun would follow the trail back. He certainly could, if he was willing to leave his tower to do it. Against any of the weaker mages he commanded, I was confident we’d escaped, but the old lich himself was a different matter.

“I need to reinforce the valley’s defenses,” I said.

“Do you have any thoughts on how you’ll go about doing that?” Querit asked.

“I do, in fact.” He wanted me to trust him. I supposed letting him know that I’d looted his former home’s city-wide defensive system was a good way to do that. “Actually, it’s something that I think you’re quite familiar with. I’ve been repurposing it, but I haven’t had a chance to test it out yet. Come with me. We’ll turn it on together.”

“Something that I’m familiar with?” he echoed. “What could… Oh! You didn’t! No. That’s impossible.”

“Extract those pillars from the underground network I found you in? You bet I did.”

The golem shook his head. “It won’t work. There are runes etched into the inner layers of the pillars that would need to be changed if you wanted to move them. It’d be nearly impossible to even get to them, and the pillars themselves are made of mysteel. You’d practically destroy them just trying to adjust them.”

“I don’t mind admitting that it was a tricky piece of work, but I did all that already.”

I walked away, leaving Querit’s jaw gaping open at my back. He sputtered something unintelligible, then hurried after me. “Wait, wait! You can’t just… I need to inspect these first. What if they malfunction and destroy the whole valley?”

“Why do you think I want you to come with me?” I asked. “Let’s hurry. I have a feeling we’re going to need these things operational sooner rather than later. If Ammun was only half-heartedly searching for me before, I’m sure he’ll be spending a lot more time on it now.”