Keiran

I’d stumbled upon lossless casting a few years ago when I’d encountered a flock of gigantic sapient birds. It hadn’t been a skill I’d needed in my old life, but now that I was living in a world without ambient mana, it was perhaps the greatest technique in my repertoire. Unfortunately, I’d struggled to bring my skill with it up to the level needed to use it in conjunction with master-tier spells.

Even now, after more than three years of practice, the best I was able to do was a slight efficiency increase. I knew this was a ‘me’ problem, not a limit of the technique, mostly because I’d seen the brakvaw leader, an enormous and ancient bird they called Grandfather, use their equivalent to master-tier spells seamlessly. Despite that, I’d gotten stuck at advanced-tier.

On the bright side, anything short of a master-tier spell was basically no longer a cost for me. That meant I could fly indefinitely at the fastest possible speeds while invisible the whole time, which was exactly what I did when I left. I’d drained as much mana as possible from my demesne and stored it in huge mana batteries designed to feed the enchantments in my home and workshop, which I estimated would give me about three weeks before the valley was at maximum capacity again.

My journey started from the new teleportation platform I’d dropped at Beacon. It was as far west as it was possible to get while still on the island, and my other teleportation beacons I’d dropped in my previous journey had all long since unraveled or been discovered and destroyed. From there, I spent the next three days flying and scrying, to use an old military reconnaissance term from my past life.

For the most part, it was a boring job. I considered that a good thing, since it meant I wasn’t fighting for my life against a group of mage hunters or, worse, Ammun himself. That was expected, though; I was still well over a thousand miles away from the Sanctum of Light and I doubted an army, even one composed entirely of mages, had pushed that far in less than a year.

On the fourth day, things got interesting. It was only a few hours after dawn when my scrying spells showed me a group of six people, all adults around the age of twenty, attempting to bring down what appeared to be some sort of bull-like monster that had three pairs of curving horns coming from its head, chitinous plates on its chest and flanks, and an extra thousand pounds of muscle.

It quickly became apparent that the human side of this fight was operating on pure muscle and presumably some subconscious invocations. Four of them had spears, well-made with straight hafts and leaf-shaped steel heads. The other two wielded bows with half-empty quivers. The bull itself already had a few dozen arrows sticking out of it, including one jutting straight up from a ruined eye socket. That didn’t seem to be slowing the monster down.

Even as I approached the scene, the bull charged forward. Two of the spear-holders managed to plant their weapons and hold them steady against the bull so that it would impale itself, but one was unlucky enough for the tip of his spear to catch on the chitinous chest plate and ended up getting trampled. The other sunk his weapon in somewhere around the monster’s shoulder and dove out of the way in time.

Then the bull was past the hunter it had downed and rampaging through the backlines, sending both archers fleeing in opposite directions. The unfortunate fellow that caught the bull’s eye fled toward a copse of trees, perhaps thinking to climb to safety or that he could shelter behind trees too tightly packed together for it to fit between.

I was pretty sure what would actually happen was that the bull would knock those trees right over, probably crushing the young man in the process. This seemed like a good time to interfere, however, so it never got that far. A bolt of lightning dropped out of a clear sky, striking the bull on its horns and arcing down into its skull. I expected it to die just from that, but this monster was made of tougher stuff and all I accomplished was to momentarily stun it.

There was nothing to do but play it off like that was part of the plan. I followed my lightning bolt down, a phantasmal sword held in my hand like a length of clear, blue-glowing glass. The blade passed cleanly through the bull’s neck with no resistance, beheading the monster in a single strike.

I let my invisibility fade away to reveal me standing on top of it, then hopped off before it could fully topple over. The group stared at me with various expressions of shock, all except the one who’d been trampled and his friend trying to stem the flow of blood. I strode past the stone-still hunters, none of whom managed to process what had just happened fast enough to jump in front of me.

The injured hunter was on his back, bleeding from a cracked skull with a few crushed ribs, a broken leg, and a full body’s worth of lacerations from the hooves kicking him. His companion was trying desperately to stop the bleeding, but there was far too much of it for the shirt he’d pulled from a pack to handle. Even if there’d been time to rip it into bandages, the injured man would have needed three or four shirts’ worth of materials.

“Step back,” I said softly.

The wild-eyed hunter glanced up at me, surprise in his expression. He’d been so intent on his wounded companion, I doubted he’d even realized the fight was over. It was admirable, I supposed, but also foolish. If I hadn’t stepped in, they’d have been down two warriors instead of one. Though, truth be told, I doubted any of them would have walked away.

Healing was an interesting category of magic, one part conjuration, one part transmutation. It had a host of diagnostic divinations that accompanied it, most of which had to be maintained in the background so that the mage could tell what their healing spells were doing. It was also a relatively slow process, not something even the greatest healers could do mid-battle.

For this man, I started with the crushed ribs. Those were the greatest danger, since several of them were poking against his lungs and if I ended up having to heal a few perforated organs, that would make everything much harder. The head wound was serious, as well, but he wasn’t going to die of blood loss now that I was here.

Everything else was secondary beyond those two injuries. I focused my efforts there first while his companions gathered around, silently watching. One of them started to speak, to ask some question about who I was or if their friend was going to be alright, only to be shushed by their leader, a young woman who’d been the luckier of the two fleeing archers.

About five minutes after I’d started, the trampled hunter groaned and opened his eyes. “Wha-” he started to say as he tried to rise, only to halt when my hand pressed down on his chest and firmly laid him back out on the ground.

“Don’t move yet,” I said. “You’ve still got internal bleeding I’m dealing with and a broken leg.”

“I feel okay?” he asked as much as said.

“I’m blocking the pain,” I explained. “Otherwise you’d be screaming and writhing around on the ground, making everything harder for me.”

“Just do what he says, Gaerg,” his leader told him.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t talk while I worked on the young man, but I was busy snooping through their minds first. All of them had dormant cores, which eliminated almost all the risk of being caught. I was liberal in my use of mind reading, which I had to be since most of their surface thoughts revolved around the question of who I was and their concern for their friend.

Below that, though, was the kind of information I was looking for: who they were, why they were here, and what they knew about military forces pushing out from the west. The last two were tied together. Mages had shown up in their home village, a place called Jaeska, and started commandeering not just food and water, but other trade goods the locals produced. Jaeska was primarily a hunting community with a strong leatherworking economy, and the army saw the appeal of extra boots, belts, and harnesses.

The villagers didn’t see it that way, of course. As far as they were concerned, they’d been robbed of everything valuable and were now scrounging just to survive, which was an entirely accurate viewpoint. That was why these six novices were out here trying to bring down something they had nowhere near the skill to actually kill: for the meat and the hide.

I allowed Gaerg to get to his feet a few minutes later. Other than the torn and blood-stained outfit he was wearing, he looked as whole as he’d ever been. That led to a round of relieved hugs as the dam of silence burst and the whole group launched into high-spirited babbling. Only their leader kept to some level of decorum as she approached me.

“Thank you,” she said, sincerity dripping from her voice. “We’d have lost at least Gaerg if you hadn’t arrived. My name is Miribel. Might I have yours?”

“No,” I said. “As far as you six are concerned, I was never here. You killed the monster on your own and suffered no injuries. I recommend burning those clothes if you’ve got some fresh ones to replace them with.”

Miribel took a second to process that, then nodded. “You are on some sort of mission, one that relies on secrecy,” she said. “You risked it to save us.”

“Something like that,” I said. “If you want to pay me back, tell me everything you can about the mages that are making trouble around here, then forget you ever met me.”

“They are your enemies, too?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.

Nodding to herself, Mirabel said, “I understand. They appeared about a month ago, at first just three, but after we drove them off, they came back with fifty more, killed a few people, burned a few houses down, and looted the whole town.”

It was a slightly different story than I’d gotten from Baviru, but it mostly differed in the mechanics of how Ammun’s mages had gone about their business, not the end result. Jaeska as a town was already outside the radius of the tower’s former business and had never been the destination of a pilgrimage. It seemed the soldiers were just raiding any towns or villages they could find for supplies, regardless of their affiliation with the Sanctum of Light.

“You have no mages of your own,” I noted.

“No,” she shook her head. “Not for many, many years.”

That wasn’t surprising. We were still well outside the radius of the tower’s ambient mana cloud and these people spent their mana surviving. The brief look I’d gotten at their battle revealed only rudimentary mana manipulation skills, but then again, this group was young. The more experienced hunters might be better prepared to ignite their cores.

I could help, start spreading the knowledge here as I’d done back home. It might even cause a problem for Ammun in the short-term, though the more likely result was that if they proved to be any sort of threat, stronger mages would just come through and raze the village down to its foundations.

More importantly, if I left behind a storage crystal and written instructions, it would be evidence that I’d been here. Ammun would know I was moving through his territory, spying on him. The more people I talked to, the more likely it was that someone would give up information about me. No, I couldn’t leave any hard evidence behind. Some basic knowledge, on the other hand, could come from anywhere.

“The secret to creating a mage is to put more mana into a core than it can hold,” I said. “Practice your mana control, then pull in mana and make it spin, like water sloshing in a bucket. It will take up to ten times as much mana as your core can hold, but expect to only get seven times as much actually in your core. The rest will be wasted as part of the process.”

Miribel’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. Before she could say anything, I added, “I was never here,” and cast an invisibility spell on myself and flew away.