emergencycomplaints

Book 3, Chapter 67

Everyone at the table was staring at me. I stood in the doorway, nonplussed, and stared back. After a few moments of silence, Senica said, “Go on, then. Let’s see it this time.”

“See what?” I asked.

“How crazy powerful you are now compared to yesterday.”

“There’s nothing to see,” I told her. That was technically true, but only because while my entire body could hold mana now, it currently wasn’t. All of my liquid mana had been used up in t...

Book 3, Chapter 66

If I’d been limited to a single workstation, it would have taken me months to make all the potions and elixirs I needed to transition to stage five. As it was, I’d been doing the prep work on these transitions for years. I’d already made everything I needed that I could trust to remain stable for more than a few months. Unfortunately, that was a minority of the project. There’d been plenty left to do.

My original plan had called for another year of scrounging up mana to devote t...

Book 3, Chapter 65

“This… is incredible,” Averin said. “How did you ever find this?”

“A lot of patience and scrying magic,” I told him, somewhat grumpily. I’d only gotten a few hours’ sleep before his courier had arrived with those books. I’d passed the message back up that I’d discovered something I wanted his opinion on, and he’d shown up an hour later.

We’d taken the teleportation platform straight down, so Averin wasn’t exactly aware of how far I’d gone past the mai...

Book 3, Chapter 64

Averin was faster than I’d given him credit for. Barely eight hours had passed before one of his messengers arrived at the safehouse to let me know that the connecting platform was in place and ready for use. We both stepped onto the one at our location, I activated it, and a moment later, we were on what I presumed was floor ninety-nine.

The leader of the Breakers of Chains was there, along with four other masked individuals. “Hah, it worked!” Averin crowed. “You must tell me h...

Book 3, Chapter 63

Nobody bothered to ask what I’d been up to, and I didn’t go out of my way to volunteer. They were more interested in the teleportation circle I’d built in their safehouse. Specifically, they wanted to know about how it cut through the tower’s interference and allowed for inter-floor teleportation. I left them to study that while Averin dragged me off to another room.

“What’s this news you’re so excited about?” I asked after I’d settled back into my familiar ruined-upho...

Book 3, Chapter 62

Nobody had returned to the safehouse to check up on me by the time I returned. I was not surprised, given the location and the obnoxious amount of work it took to move between floors. Every five floors, there was another checkpoint and a long walk to a different drop shaft. It took hours to get from floor forty-nine to floor one, and I suspected the Breakers’ leadership was based up near floor one hundred or even slightly higher.

That worked out well for me, since it meant I was unlik...

Book 3, Chapter 61

The good news was that I was completely right about the incorporeal monsters in the tunnels being mana fiends. The bad news was that there were already fifty of them flooding into the maintenance passages and coming our way. As a final bit of good news, it looked like their ability to pass through solid objects was sharply limited by the makeup of the tower. Having been equally frustrated by my magic’s inability to penetrate the tower’s walls and floors, I found the irony that it was now ...

Book 3, Chapter 60

The safehouse on floor one was sparsely furnished and in what I supposed they probably thought of as a bad neighborhood. Everyone had an ignited core, at least everyone who walked within a few hundred feet of where I sat in an old chair with torn upholstery, hidden away from view. I couldn’t begin to guess what the average mana generation rates were for these people, but I was willing to bet none of them had anything close to a perfect ignition.

I didn’t see much in the way of magic...

Book 3, Chapter 59

Averin sped through the options on the interface, growing more and more excited as he went. “This is fantastic,” he muttered. “There are so many possibilities here the normal interfaces are missing.”

“Care to share?” I asked.

“Huh?” He looked up and blinked in surprise. Apparently, he’d forgotten I was here. “Just looking at the floor connection options. If we can find these on every floor, we could have the run of the tower – bypass every checkpoint and stri...

Book 3, Chapter 58

The tunnel was short, barely ten feet long before ending with a locked door. I examined it thoroughly to confirm there were no magical traps, then stepped aside to let Averin do the same. Our third wheel just lurked in the back, mostly peering out into the tower to make sure no one had noticed us.

“Looks clean to me,” Averin said.

“Same, but when I try to scry the other side, something is blocking me. I’m thinking this is a double-walled vault. This door is here to block t...

Book 3, Chapter 57

We didn’t go to the platform that had the Breaker spy stationed there for the simple reason that the rest of the crew wouldn’t be so willing to overlook a strange group appearing. The operator, if no one else, was likely to realize that someone had appeared on the platform. Then there were all manner of sentinels and workers in the facility for various reasons, any of whom might stumble across our little group.

With my staff in hand, I reshaped the ground we stood on into stone, the...

Book 3, Chapter 56

Senica looked at the glass orb I’d handed her. A little ring of brass floated inside, its surface covered in tiny runes. “What does it do?” she asked.

“It’s your emergency escape tool,” I said. “Three temporarily accelerated teleportation spells that will cast instantly if you inject mana into the orb, pulling you from wherever you’re currently standing back to Sanctuary. Keep it with you at all times. I mean that, Senica. Don’t bury it in the bottom of your backpack. ...

Book 3, Chapter 55

The sentinel manning the interface for the ward system probably wasn’t supposed to have a chair—none of the other facilities I’d been to did—but that hadn’t stopped her. I wondered where she hid it when important people came through who’d disapprove of a lowly platform operator having a measure of comfort.

On the other hand, she was asleep, and that was through no effort of my own. I’d placed an enchantment on her to make sure she stayed that way until after ...

Book 3, Chapter 54

The dims might not have understood what it meant to be rendered invisible and silent, but Nelgith and his partner mage were both giving me disconcerted looks. The mass versions of those two spells were significantly more expensive to maintain—though less so than casting ten individual invisibility spells, even ignoring the difficulty inherent to channeling that many spells at once—and I wasn’t pulling in ambient mana to power them. It was too expensive to hold indefinitely, so I must be...

Book 3, Chapter 53

The reaction was immediate and violent. Spells exploded into the air from both mages, one casting some form of force restraint designed to latch onto me and hold me still, the other a long, spinning shard of ice with enough speed behind it to punch through armor and skewer a man.

The dims weren’t slow to attack either. They already had naked steel in their hands, and they waded in behind the spells, ready and willing to finish me off if I managed to survive the first attack. Two of th...

Book 3, Chapter 52

The cave I’d excavated and warded for use as our base camp had gone undisturbed the entire time we were gone. As soon as we teleported in, I started going through the wards to ensure they hadn’t degraded or been tampered with. Senica didn’t appreciate me roping her into an impromptu lesson, but learning how to safely interact with strange wards was a necessary skill for any mage, so I overruled her objections.

 “But it’s boooooring,” she said. “And I’ve got better s...

Book 3, Chapter 51

Understandably, the silver-feathered brakvaw didn’t trust me to just randomly teleport her across several islands to the mana-rich environment outside the Sanctum of Light. I couldn’t even hold it against her for not believing me when I described it. The old kingdom of Ralvost was so far away, the countries it had shattered into following its fall were beyond the reach of the brakvaw waypoint network.

That necessitated a spell I hadn’t yet had occasion to use in my new life. Telep...

Book 3, Chapter 50

Magic could do a lot of interesting things, including grafting properties from one type of material onto another. But I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to make Hyago’s idea work. Living stone made mana and draw stone ate it; merging them together didn’t seem feasible to me. Of course, what I was after wasn’t actually the quality of pulling in mana. It was draw stone’s ability to grow like an organic substance using the mana it consumed. If I could isolate that, I might be able to...

Book 3, Chapter 49

I found Hyago down in the valley floor taking mana measurements off our sample trees a few hours later. He glanced up at me as I flew down through a gap in the canopy and said, “Hey, boss. I didn’t know you were back.”

I’d literally dropped in on Hyago too many times for him to be surprised at the sight of it by this point, and we’d never grown past polite acquaintances, so there was little to distract us from business. “I just got in around noon. Short stay, I’m afraid. T...

Book 3, Chapter 48

Father looked up from the kitchen table in surprise when I opened the door to our house and walked through. “Gravin! I wasn’t expecting you back so soon. Did everything go well?”

“A bit of a stand-still, for the moment,” I told him. “Grandfather wants one more chance to convince the rest of the brakvaw to return to Eyrie Peak now that the rebellion’s leadership has been removed. I told him he could have a few days while I tended to my projects back home.”

“Is Gha...

Book 3, Chapter 47

I watched six brakvaw wheel around the village up in the sky. They were too far away to hear, not that I could have understood their strange screeching language anyway. There was no doubt in my mind they were arguing over their next move, with the scorched, still burning corpse of their leader in a nearby field.

Twenty mages working in unison had brought the brakvaw down when they’d first shown up to attack the village. Though they lacked the skill to combine their magic into one powe...

Book 3, Chapter 46

It only took me an hour to fly to the meeting point. We were using the same empty peak we’d used the last time we talked, though we hadn’t set a meeting time. I trusted Grandfather to sense when I arrived and respond accordingly.

After ten minutes of waiting, his projection appeared in front of me. The old bird’s small human shape looked haggard, probably an unconscious reflection of how Grandfather felt. I hadn’t been expecting the projection’s appearance to change, and it fo...

Book 3, Chapter 45

We stepped off the teleportation platform at Sanctuary and were met by a small crowd of people. Our father was there, along with Ryla and a dozen of her traveling merchants. I spotted Juby lurking in the background, but I was sure it wasn’t me he was waiting there for.

Senica froze beside me for a second before saying, “Oh. Uh… That’s a lot of people.”

“Finally!” Ryla said. “We’ve been waiting on you all morning.”

“You… have? Why?”

“So we ca...

Book 3, Chapter 44

With limited time left before we hit our self-imposed deadline, I roughed out a cave with a series of transmutation spells focused strongly on compressing the earth and stone or reshaping it into metal. That part of the process only took about half an hour, but I spent another three hours properly warding the place. These weren’t the simple protections against scrying that I’d used in the past, either, though a strong scrying ward was part of the set up.

The best-case scenario was t...

Book 3, Chapter 43

As we got closer to the Sanctum of Light, I got a better look at the landscape. It sloped upward like a puckered wound in the planet itself, rising in height to over a mile as it curled up around a hole that was easily thirty miles wide. That hole had no bottom, not that I could see, at least. Instead, it went straight down for endless miles until darkness shrouded its depths. For all I knew, it might pass through the planet and have a matching exit on the other side.

In the middle of t...

Book 3, Chapter 42

We flew relatively low, only a few hundred feet over the ground. It didn’t make a lot of difference to our overall speed, but this way, we could scout out everything living in the area. I managed this primarily through my ability to sense mana and the various monsters and animals not caring at all to hide theirs. I’d probably missed any number of ambush predators or savvy prey animals that were able to mask their mana cores one way or another, but this expedition wasn’t about cataloging...

Book 3, Chapter 41

With a firm direction in mind and Senica’s endurance steadily increasing, we stopped moving randomly across the landscape. Miles rolled away beneath us as we flew without stop. When night finally fell and, more importantly, Senica couldn’t go any farther, we landed and made camp for a few hours. She scarfed down the first thing I pulled out of my phantom space that didn’t require any sort of cooking, then rolled over and passed out.

I felt a little bad about pushing her so hard, b...

Book 3, Chapter 40

Our projections stared at each other, neither speaking while we gathered our thoughts. There was no fight to be had here, not as far removed as we were from each other. My own preparations kept my real body safe from the projection being used as any sort of conduit, and my limited mana budget prevented me from casting any sort of spell that would do more than mildly inconvenience Grandfather.

Besides, if it was at all possible, I wanted to preserve our alliance. Grandfather was indisput...

Book 3, Chapter 39

I wasn’t exactly sure what the normal sleeping hours were for a giant, magical bird, but most of the work I’d done with Grandfather had been in the evening. Since it was already evening right now, that meant I didn’t have much time to put things together if I wanted to be sure he was still awake when I projected my consciousness a few thousand miles to talk to him.

Stone shape was one of the most useful spells in my repertoire when it came to inscribing runes, at least as long as ...

Book 3, Chapter 38

Our typical pattern of flying around looking for interesting places, had served us well for months, but now we were starting to see small towns popping up all over. Even though I deliberately steered us away from the roads, there were enough isolated villages that only ever got news of the outside world from the mouths of peddlers with donkeys and overstuffed backpacks that it quickly became impossible to thread our way through them without risking being seen.

I very much did not want t...