Chapter 187. Never A Day Of Rest

Magic, for practitioners, had a distinct feeling.

It wasn't something you could explain to someone who'd never touched mana. Not really. The words existed—tingling, buzzing, humming, warmth—but they were all approximations. Shadows of the actual sensation cast onto the wall of mundane experience.

The best comparison Adom had ever come up with was heat from a candle.

Move your hand closer to the flame, and you feel it. The warmth increases. Gets more intense. Your skin starts to prickle with it. Move closer still, and it becomes uncomfortable. Then painful. Then you pull away before you burn yourself.

Except with magic, you didn't feel burn.

You felt presence.

A spell being cast two feet away from you had weight. Substance. Like standing next to someone who was humming a song—you could feel the vibration in your chest even if you couldn't hear the tune clearly.

A spell being cast ten feet away was dimmer. Softer. Like that same person had moved into the next room.

A spell being cast a hundred feet away was barely noticeable unless you were paying attention. A distant echo. A ripple on the surface of a pond you were standing beside.

The more accomplished a mage was, the easier it became to detect mana use. The sensitivity increased and sharpened. What had once required conscious effort—reaching out with your magical senses, actively searching—became passive and sutomatic. Like how you didn't have to think about hearing sounds or smelling scents. They just happened.

Adom had reached that prestigious rank years ago.

Which meant he could feel, at exactly less than a mile from here, the use of magic.

And at a mile.

And here.

And there.

And... everywhere, actually.

Because he was in Arkhos.

Mega-city. Population somewhere north of two million. Home to the recently renamed Xerxes Academy of Higher Magical Learning, which was currently floating approximately eight hundred feet above the ground in the form of dozens of interconnected towers and buildings that required constant, massive mana manipulation just to stay airborne.

The magical signature from the academy alone was like standing next to a bonfire. Overwhelming. All-consuming. It dominated every other magical feeling within a several-mile radius.

And that was before you factored in the Magisterium's new towers. Six of them, scattered throughout the city, each one housing dozens of mages who were actively working. Casting spells. Enchanting items. Doing research that involved channeling enough mana to power a small village.

Plus the random practitioners scattered throughout the streets. Shopkeepers maintaining enchantments on their wares. Guards with detection spells running on their armor. Healers at clinics. Artificers in their workshops.

Looking for a specific magical signature in Arkhos without knowing what that signature looked like was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Except the haystack was on fire.

And someone had dumped several thousand other needles into it.

And also the haystack was floating.

Adom rose into the air.

[Flight] was second nature at this point. He didn't think about the mana expenditure or the spell structure. Just willed himself upward, and his body obeyed.

Invisibility was still active. Which was good. No one below would see a magus shooting into the sky above the market district. That would raise questions.

He climbed. Fifty feet. A hundred. Two hundred.

The city spread out beneath him.

From up here, Arkhos looked almost peaceful. The streets formed neat grids. The buildings clustered together in sensible patterns. The river cut through the eastern quarter like a silver ribbon.

From up here, you couldn't see the pickpockets or the arguments or the crying child who'd just been turned into a bomb.

Adom adjusted his glasses, the ones who stored [Riddler's Bane] and [Revealer's Eye].

Wearing them felt like putting on a second set of eyes.

Everything gained an extra layer. A shimmer. Like someone had painted the world with invisible ink that only he could see.

Enchanted items glowed faintly. Active spells burned brighter. Magical constructs—wards, barriers, detection grids—showed up as geometric patterns laid over reality.

Adom had always had a good eye for details. Pattern recognition was one of his strengths. But with [Riddler's Bane], he could make out things that would otherwise be much hader to detect.

Like transportation crystals.

He was looking for transportation crystals.

That was his working theory, anyway. No proof. Just logic.

If you were going to send a kid with a bomb to kill a magus, you'd want an escape plan. Something fast and reliable. One that didn't require you to run through crowded streets while people screamed and city guards converged on your position.

Transportation crystals fit the bill perfectly.

They weren't common. Not like wands or enchanted swords or healing potions. Those were mass-produced. Sold in shops. Available to anyone with coin.

Transportation crystals were expensive. Difficult to make. Required specialized knowledge and rare materials. A surprisingly large part of the world's population went their entire lives without ever seeing one.

They were used for very specific things.

Like when you were in a place you shouldn't be and needed immediate extraction in case of discovery.

Adom knew this because he'd used them for exactly those reasons before.

Transportation crystals came in pairs.

Twin crystals. Crystal A and Crystal B. Two pieces of the same whole, attuned to each other during the creation process.

You kept one—Crystal A—on your person. Left the other—Crystal B—at your destination. Your safe house. Your extraction point. Wherever you needed to go in a hurry.

The attunement between them created a resonance. A frequency. Like two tuning forks that vibrated at exactly the same pitch. That resonance was always on. Always humming. A constant connection between the two crystals that said I am here and I am there and we belong together.

When you activated Crystal A, space folded. Just for a second. Less than a second. Just long enough for you to step through the fold and arrive at Crystal B's location.

Then reality snapped back.

And you were somewhere else.

The resonance frequency was distinctive. Sharp. Precise. A single clear note in a symphony of noise.

Most people couldn't detect it.

But with [Riddler's Bane], Adom could see those frequencies. They showed up as thin lines of light. Threads connecting Crystal A to Crystal B. Stretching across the city. Across miles, sometimes. Invisible to everyone except someone with the right enchantment.

And if someone was using a transportation crystal for a quick getaway after a bombing, they'd have Crystal A with them. On the rooftop where they were watching. Waiting to see if their plan worked.

Which meant Crystal B would be somewhere else. Somewhere safe. Somewhere they could land without drawing attention.

But the resonance would still be there.

The thread would still be visible.

Adom hovered three hundred feet above the market district.

Closed his eyes.

Took a breath.

Let his senses expand.

Magic washed over him. The bonfire of the academy. The smaller fires of the Magisterium towers. The candle flames of individual practitioners. All of it blurred together into white noise.

He filtered.

Pushed the academy's signature to the background. Muted it. Not gone—impossible to ignore something that massive—but dimmed enough that he could focus on other things.

The Magisterium towers next. Same process. Acknowledge them. Categorize them. Move them out of the way.

The individual practitioners were harder. There were so many. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Each one a small flicker of mana use.

But transportation crystal resonances had that sharp, precise signature.

Adom opened his eyes.

Looked down through [Riddler's Bane].

And there—about four hundred feet to the west—a line of light. Thin. Pale gold. Stretching from a rooftop toward the warehouse district.

And there—six hundred feet to the south—another line. Same color. Same thickness. Connecting a narrow alley to somewhere beyond the eastern wall.

And there—two hundred feet to the east—a third line. This one stretched from the roof of an old building toward the docks.

Three resonance frequencies.

Three pairs of transportation crystals.

All within a half-mile radius of Biggins' shop.

Adom felt something cold and satisfied settle in his chest.

Got you.

Or—well. Got three possibilities.

The closest one was to the east. Two hundred feet. The thread of light originated from the roof of an old brick building. Three stories. Faded sign. The kind of place that had been empty long enough that people stopped noticing it.

Perfect spot for watching a shop across the way.

Adom angled himself.

Descended.

The invisibility spell was still holding. Good. He didn't need witnesses for this.

He dropped altitude quickly. Fifty feet per second. The wind rushed past him but didn't pull at his clothes—one of the benefits of a well-constructed flight spell was that it created a minor barrier against air resistance.

One hundred feet above the building.

Fifty feet.

Twenty.

The building was exactly what it looked like from above. Red brick. Narrow windows. A sign that read "Morten's Medicinals" in peeling paint.

The roof was flat.

And standing on it were two people.

Adom slowed his descent. Came to a stop about fifteen feet above them, hovering in midair, invisible, watching.

Through [Riddler's Bane], the resonance thread was brighter now. Stronger. It originated from the man's coat pocket. A small point of golden light. Crystal A. The thread stretched away from him, across the rooftops, toward the docks where Crystal B waited.

A man and a woman.

The man was tall. Very tall. Maybe six and a half feet. Broad shoulders. Dark coat. And across his throat, running from just below his left ear to just below his right—

A scar.

Thick and pale against his tan skin.

The woman was shorter. Five foot six, maybe. Dark hair pulled back into a tight bun. Dark skin. And on her hands were tattoos.

Geometric patterns. Triangles and circles and lines that interlocked in ways that were probably significant if you knew what you were looking at.

Both of them were staring toward Biggins' shop.

Both of them looked tense.

The woman shifted her weight. Said something to the man. Her voice was too quiet for Adom to hear from this distance.

The man nodded.

Reached into his coat pocket.

Pulled out the crystal.

It was small. Maybe the size of a walnut. Pale blue. Even without [Riddler's Bane], Adom would have been able to see the faint glow coming from it.

The man held it up.

Was getting ready to activate it.

They were about to leave.

Adom dropped.

The flight spell released all at once, and gravity took over with the kind of enthusiasm it always had for objects that stopped resisting. Fifteen feet passed in just over a second, which was enough time for Adom to angle his body forward and cushion the impact with a carefully timed burst of mana that spread across his legs right as his boots made contact with the tar-covered roof.

The landing made almost no sound. A soft thump that could have been anything. A bird. A piece of debris falling from somewhere higher up. Nothing worth turning around for.

The man was holding the crystal up to eye level, fingers curled around the pale blue stone, thumb positioned directly over the activation glyph that had been carved into its surface. His mouth was moving.

Adom's hand shot out and closed around the crystal before the man could finish whatever he was saying.

The motion was faster than either of them could process. One moment the crystal was in the man's hand, safely tucked against his palm, ready to activate. The next moment it was gone, and there was an invisible force wrapped around the man's wrist, pulling his arm forward slightly from the momentum of something he couldn't see taking something he'd been holding.

The woman reacted first. Her head snapped toward the man, eyes widening as she registered what had just happened, and her hands came up in a defensive posture that suggested some kind of training even if it wasn't magical in nature. Geometric tattoos shifted across her knuckles and fingers as her muscles tensed, and her mouth opened to shout something that Adom had absolutely no interest in hearing.

He flicked his other hand toward her and weaved [Push].

The spell was simple. Brutally so. It took kinetic force and applied it in a single direction with enough strength to move objects that weighed up to several hundred pounds. Adom used it for opening heavy doors sometimes. For moving furniture when he was rearranging his study. For launching people into the sky when they'd participated in bombing children and he wanted them out of the way for a few seconds.

The woman left the rooftop like she'd been fired from a cannon.

Her scream started about three feet off the ground and continued as she rocketed past the fourth story of the neighboring building, past the fifth story, past the point where Adom could make out individual features on her face. She became a dark speck against the afternoon sky, still rising and screaming, the sound getting fainter and fainter until it disappeared entirely into the general noise of the city below.

The man turned toward where Adom was standing.

His eyes were wide and confused. He couldn't see anything because the invisibility spell was still active, but he knew something was there. Someone had just stolen his transportation crystal and launched his partner into the stratosphere, and that kind of thing didn't happen by accident. His hand moved toward his belt, reaching for something, and Adom decided that whatever the man was reaching for was probably going to complicate things.

So he punched him.

The invisibility dropped as Adom's fist connected with the man's jaw. There were ways to maintain an invisibility spell while performing physical actions, but they required concentration that Adom didn't feel like expending when he could just let the enchantment fail and deal with being visible for a few seconds. His knuckles hit the man's face slightly below and to the left of his mouth, which was the ideal position for this kind of strike if you wanted to rattle someone's brain around inside their skull hard enough to shut down conscious thought without causing permanent damage.

The man's head snapped to the side. His legs buckled. He made a sound that was half grunt, half exhale, and then he was falling backward with all the grace of a sack of potatoes being dropped off a table.

He hit the roof hard.

Didn't move after that.

Adom stood over him for a moment, flexing his fingers. Spells were useful and elegant and often let you accomplish things that would be physically impossible through mundane means. But there was something deeply, viscerally satisfying about a well-placed punch to the jaw of someone who absolutely deserved it.

Someone was shouting.

Multiple someones, actually.

Adom looked down over the edge of the rooftop and saw a crowd forming in the street below. People pointing upward and staring. They'd presumably witnessed either a woman being launched into the sky or a man suddenly appearing on a rooftop where no one had been standing a moment ago, or possibly both if they'd been paying close attention.

One of them, a middle-aged woman in a merchant's apron, was shielding her eyes against the sun and squinting up at him.

Another person, an older gentleman with grey hair and expensive-looking robes, was leaning forward slightly, eyes narrowed, and Adom saw the exact moment recognition settled across the man's features.

"Is that—" the older gentleman started.

"Magus Sylla?" someone else finished.

"The Ghost?"

"What's he doing up there?"

"Did he just throw someone?"

"I saw it! He threw someone straight up!"

"Where did she go?"

"Is she going to come back down?"

The questions were coming faster now, voices overlapping, people who had been walking past or shopping or minding their own business suddenly very interested in what was happening on the roof of Morten's medicinal shop. Adom could see more heads turning in his direction. More people stopping. More fingers pointing.

He raised his voice slightly, projecting it downward with just enough mana enhancement that everyone in the immediate area would be able to hear him clearly without him having to shout. "These were criminals that I just apprehended. Please don't worry. The situation has been managed."

That should have been reassuring. Magus Sylla of the Magisterium tells you that criminals have been caught and everything is under control, you nod and go about your day, confident that the proper authorities are handling things.

Except people were still staring, pointing and asking questions. One of those questions was, "Where's the woman? The one you threw?"

Right. The woman.

Adom tilted his head back and looked up at the sky, tracking the trajectory he'd sent her on. [Push] wasn't a subtle spell, and he'd put enough force behind it to ensure she'd be out of the way for at least fifteen or twenty seconds, which meant she'd gone up quite a ways before gravity started winning the argument. He could see her now, a dark speck against the clouds, and she was definitely coming back down.

She was also screaming again. The sound was getting louder as she got closer, transforming from a faint echo into a full-throated shriek of terror.

The crowd below was panicking now. People backing away from the street directly beneath her, shouting warnings.

Adom stood there and thought.

Homunculi.

That's what these two were. He was certain of it now, even before checking the man lying unconscious at his feet. The woman had moved with a fluidity that wasn't quite natural, and the man's proportions were just slightly off in ways that would be easy to miss if you weren't looking for them. Homunculi, like Thessarian had been. Artificial people created through Farmusian techniques that Adom didn't fully understand and didn't particularly want to learn more about given how thoroughly unpleasant the entire concept was.

But homunculi had mana cores. He'd sensed them when he'd fought with one, five years ago.

These two had nothing.

No mana cores. No magical presence beyond the transportation crystal. No internal reservoir of power that would mark them as practitioners of any kind.

New variants, then. Updated models, perhaps. Improvements on the original design, assuming you considered removing someone's ability to use magic an improvement rather than a limitation.

Farmusian-made, as the man's accent suggested before he was knocked out . The Chancellor of Sundar was involved somehow, though the specifics had been unclear. Thessarian hadn't known the details, or hadn't been willing to share them, but she'd known enough to confirm that homunculi production was happening and that it was connected to people with significant political power.

Which meant this attack wasn't random.

They'd moved against Adom specifically. Targeted him. Used a child as a weapon and positioned themselves for a clean extraction afterward, which suggested planning and resources and organizational backing that went beyond simple criminal opportunism.

The woman was getting closer now. Maybe two hundred feet up. Still screaming and falling. The crowd below had cleared a rough circle in the street, people pressed against building walls and ducking into doorways, everyone watching the sky with expressions that ranged from horrified fascination to morbid curiosity.

At first, Adom had assumed this was about his position as a Magus.

He was one of the ten. A high-value target for anyone with grievances against the Magisterium or political ambitions that involved destabilizing the current power structure. That would have made sense. It would have been logical.

But sadly, experience had taught Adom to assume the worst-case scenario and prepare accordingly.

The Order. The Architect. There were people looking for him actively, and not the kind of people who sent polite letters requesting meetings. People from the Order's corrupted branches, the ones who had twisted the organization's original purpose into something dark and hungry and willing to sacrifice children if it advanced their goals. His identity as a member of the Order had been kept secret by Biggins specifically to filter out intruders and keep only the sincere ones, the people who genuinely wanted to help rather than infiltrate and destroy.

No other Magus had been targeted like this since the war started. Just him.

Which meant someone knew. Someone had connected him to the Order, to the Architect and whatever secrets he was keeping that made him worth killing in a way that would look like collateral damage from a random bombing.

One hundred feet. The woman's scream had taken on a different quality now, more desperate, more certain of the outcome, and Adom could see individual details again. Her face. Her hands clawing at the air as if she could somehow grab onto something and stop her descent.

He needed to advance the plans. Move faster than they'd originally intended. Investigate the identity of his enemies more thoroughly, map out their networks, figure out who knew what and how much danger everyone was actually in.

And as it happened, a good start would be interrogation.

Adom raised his hand and wove the spell for [Gravity Control] in the space in front of him, fingers moving through the necessary gestures while his mind shaped the mana into the proper configuration. Local area manipulation. About twenty feet in diameter. Centered on the woman's trajectory. He waited until she was thirty feet from the ground, close enough that the crowd could see her face clearly, far enough that he had room to work with if the spell didn't catch properly.

Then he activated it.

The woman's scream cut off abruptly as gravity stopped being a thing that applied to her in the normal way. Her descent slowed. Rapidly. From terminal velocity to a gentle drift in the space of about five feet, and then she was just floating there in midair, arms and legs still positioned like she was falling even though she'd stopped moving downward entirely.

She hung there for a moment, suspended, her breath coming in rapid gasps that Adom could hear even from the rooftop.

Then he adjusted the spell slightly, redirecting the gravitational field to pull her horizontally instead of letting her hover, and she drifted sideways through the air like a leaf caught in a very gentle wind. Toward where Adom was standing next to her unconscious partner.

The crowd below was dead silent now.

Adom glanced down at them, then back at the woman, then down at the man at his feet. Both homunculi and involved in an attempt to kill him through the use of a child. They would have to answer some questions about who sent them and why and what else they knew about the current situation.

He adjusted his glasses and waited for the woman to finish her drift toward the rooftop.

Never a day of rest it seemed.