Keiran

It was a matter of efficiency that I had to leave the orb tracker in the area. If it were only a single connection, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference, but with hundreds of links between the tank of liquid mana and all the orbs being ferried around by sand worms, it just wasn’t feasible to scry all of that from hundreds of miles away.

My workaround was to leave the tracker in Velder’s old rooms and scry that area so I could physically see the tank. It wasn’t as good as being there to experience the full breadth of the divinations I’d built into it, but it was good enough to leave up on my scrying mirror while I worked on other projects.

I’d known this was a bit of a longshot to begin with, that there was almost no chance of it leading me to the moon core, but I was hoping that it would at least point me in the right direction. If I assumed the prize was buried somewhere within three miles of Derro, and that tracking the sand worms could eliminate all but a sliver of that area, I’d have a much better chance of finding it when I started digging.

So far, that did not appear to be the case. I knew the worms weren’t surviving on the mana they could find digging through the sand a mile under the city. They had to go back to the source sooner or later. The problem was that I’d put too much mana into the bait, and now the scrying beacons were going to break before their unwitting carriers got hungry enough to go back home.

I was almost certainly going to have to repeat this experiment with less enticing bait and hope that I struck the right balance between putting in enough mana to attract a worm but not so much that it could subsist off it for a long period of time. I was already building a small test batch that kept the beacon active for a week while having only the slightest hint of mana. The plan was to toss them out for sand worms to snatch up while using myself as bait to draw them in.

If it worked, the worms that survived would ingest the scrying orbs immediately while gaining next to no mana from them. The downside was that they cost almost twenty times as much mana to make, so I was only doing fifteen in this batch. If Querit was able to fully crack lossless enchanting and inscription, then this would all be a moot concern, and I’d have beacons that lasted practically forever at no real cost.

That hadn’t happened yet, and I couldn’t afford to delay my plans indefinitely in the hopes that he figured it out eventually. If things went so poorly that I still hadn’t found the moon core by the time he finished his research, I’d have bigger problems to worry about.

Something flickered across the divination ward surrounding the valley, so brief that I couldn’t tell what it was. I turned my attention away from the steel I’d been shaping in my crucible to focus fully on my wards and quickly spotted what had gotten my attention.

It was a large group of people, the exact number hidden from me by their own defensive spells. Someone had screwed up and gotten too far out of formation, just for a second, but that was all it took for my wards to recognize that there was a mana source up in the sky a few miles northwest of my demesne. It also told me that whoever was up there was competent enough to study my own wards and figure out exactly how close they could get with the defenses they had before I noticed.

Unfortunately for them, now that I had noticed them, they were well inside my range. I just needed to start looking manually to lock onto their position. My mysteel pillar defense was a mere thought away from activation, but I wanted them to get just a little bit closer so I could prevent them from escaping once I counter-ambushed them.

“Querit,” I said as I opened a new scrying channel to the workshop he’d taken over. “We have uninvited guests. I sincerely doubt they’re here for any good reason, so now would be a good time to climb into one of your combat frames.”

“You know that I don’t really have any experience actually using those, right?” he asked with a slight quaver. Apparently, that scuffle with those mages outside of Ammun’s tower had killed any confidence he had in his own abilities.

“I’m not expecting you to fight. The frame is just to protect you from any stray shots that might go in your direction. You should get as deep underground as you can. Take anything valuable and portable with you.”

While we were talking, I finished my own scrying and located a distortion in the light near where my wards had detected the clumsy mage. “Found them,” I muttered. At that range, it would be difficult to pull them all in, but it looked like they were taking their time up there, possibly setting up some sort of massive ritualized group attack.

One of the nice things about defending a demesne was that it was very easy and somewhat cheap to teleport around inside of it. In a blink, I was gone from my crucible and standing at the very edge of the valley, now invisible and undetectable. The genius loci that had formed when I’d bonded the stretch of land to me could only rise so far from the ground, but it was more than enough to get me close to the interlopers.

Though they themselves remained outside my demesne, they’d made too many mistakes that I could capitalize on, the biggest one being not repositioning themselves after one of their number had slipped up. By the same token, keeping a master-tier spell hidden until it was finished was almost impossible to do under normal conditions.

This particular spell, however, was very quick to cast. It took only three seconds to put it together, and another five to select the location to detonate it, then a mass dispel went off in the middle of their formation. Their camouflaging barrier was stripped away instantly, along with their levitation spells. As one, they started falling from the sky.

Some of them panicked. They accomplished nothing productive for the first few seconds of their unanticipated dive, flailing their arms and legs wildly as the wind streamed past them. Others were smarter, reflexively casting the spells they’d need to save their lives almost before they started to fall. And three of them were so powerful that they didn’t budge from their positions in the sky, their spells so strong that the mass dispel wasn’t able to break them.

The ones that fell below were immediately trapped as I mentally activated my defense pillars. The magic pulled them the rest of the way down to the ground, where my demesne was waiting for them. Twelve of my attackers were instantly transported to prison cells I’d made, boxes of solid draw stone that would fight their occupants to take every last scrap of mana. They wouldn’t be very effective against a good mage, but they’d hinder an amateur enough to hold them for at least a few minutes.

Five mages managed to save themselves from my ambush by casting flying spells and keeping out of range of my demesne, but I ignored those for the moment. The mysteel pillars were completely visible now, and their automated defensive spells were busy shooting blasts of elemental energy with surprising accuracy given how fast their targets were moving.

The three remaining mages ignored the fight going on below them to focus on me. None of them were fooled by my own invisibility or divination blockers, which was no real surprise at the distance we were working at. It was nearly impossible to hide from a competent diviner who knew I was there at such a short range.

The same was true for them, and now that the battle was starting, I got my first good look at the trio. I vaguely recognized one of them as an elite who’d fought against me when Ammun first woke up, the one with the strong defensive magic. The other two were unknown, but presumably were equally powerful. One or both of the remaining mages were probably specialized into conjurations. It seemed to be how their cells operated.

This fight wasn’t like the last one. I was in my demesne here. I’d had plenty of time to prepare, so much so that almost their entire group was losing just to my automated defenses. When the barrier specialist raised a hand to create a sphere of force magic around the trio, sneering the whole time, I simply smiled back and summoned a hundred force lances to surround the sphere from every angle.

The lances launched themselves with outrageous speed all at the same time. Within moments, the barrier shattered, and if it took eighty or ninety lances to do that, it didn’t matter. There were plenty left to skewer the mages who’d thought they could shelter inside. The barrier mage managed to raise a secondary defense that flashed in and out of existence in less than a second, but it stopped all but two of the remaining lances. Those sliced through flesh, ripping out skin and muscle while trailing streamers of blood.

The one who’d gotten lucky and avoided being skewered, a tall, skinny man whose head was wrapped in some kind of scarf that left only his eyes visible, started loudly chanting as he waved his hands dramatically. I couldn’t help but gawk in surprise as he audibly called out the runes he was putting together to make his spell. That was just asking to be countered.

Was it some kind of diversion? Did he need me focused on him so that someone else could pull something off? Surely, he couldn’t be this incompetent? Nothing I was seeing suggested this was anything other than what it appeared to be: a clumsy attempt to harm me while his companions did their best to recover from the wounds they’d just taken.

I sent a tendril of mana out to break the spell anyway, then followed it with multiple blasts of fire. The barrier mage saw what I was doing and fought through the pain of his injury to put up new defenses, a heat ward to keep their whole group safe and a kinetic shield to block the concussive force of my spells.

While he was doing that, I started casting a master-tier spell, one I hadn’t had occasion to use in years. Fancifully named Chill of the Infinite Void, it was the opposite of a fireball. Its primary effect was to pull every last scrap of heat out of an area, which could flash freeze anyone caught inside it. Given the properties of the heat ward my enemies were surrounded in, it would be even more effective than usual.

Ice formed in the air in great clumps and started raining down below, where a stray projectile caught one of the mages busy dodging my mysteel pillars’ energy attacks. The mage was caught completely unaware and started spinning out of control as he spiraled down to the ground. That was a nice little bonus to my attack, but not something I had intended.

Up above me, the three master mages—or possibly just two, all things considered—were fully caught in the attack. Blabbermouth succumbed to it immediately, but the barrier mage had some reactive measures on his person that were fighting to keep him alive. Instead of being a person-shaped ice sculpture, he was merely entombed in a huge block of it, one which was perhaps too heavy for his flight spell to hold up.

The third mage was probably the smartest of the group. Whether it was the surge of mana as I built the spell that tipped him off or something else, he fled using a short distance instant teleport that took him about a mile away from the fight. Rather than stop there, he continued flying north as fast as his magic could carry him.

Part of me wanted to chase him down, but I had far too many captives that, given sufficient time, could break free of their prisons. Fortunately, I had a solution. I cast a simple divination spell and reached out a few hundred miles to the north.

“Grandfather,” I spoke through my magic, “I was wondering if I could get you to send one of your people out on an errand for me.”