emergencycomplaints

Book 2, Chapter 60

The next three weeks were some of the most restful I’d had in months despite all the extra work I had to do. The first order of business was to expand the garden, which thankfully was handled by the adults. Then we got it seeded and I used a spell called mass plant growth to speed everything up so we could increase our food reserves to accommodate the extra mouths.

That cost me my entire first days’ worth of mana, but I considered it worth the cost. The next day, I went beyond the b...

Book 2, Chapter 59

Fixing broken bones earned me a bit of goodwill, but street kids didn’t dismiss suspicion easily, so other than some muttered thanks from the kids I’d actually healed, I didn’t get much in the way of gratitude. Mostly, what changed was that no one tried to throw me out, and the kids didn’t slowly empty out of the room to go hide elsewhere. It was a start.

It took an hour for Juby to come back, during which time I mostly just sat and observed. Orphans weren’t ever a happy-go-lu...

Book 2, Chapter 58

Rouri, as it turned out, wasn’t a great source of information. She knew where her fellow cabal-mates lived and worked, and she was willing to point them out when I used Swarm’s scrying orb to scan the inner city—now that I knew what kinds of wards the walls had on them, I was able to slip past them without triggering anything—but her working knowledge of their mastery of the various magical disciplines was sparse, as were her reports of what kind of artifacts of power they might be wi...

Book 2, Chapter 57

“Everyone who knows about Sibilant doesn’t seem to want to talk about him,” I said. “So I’m thinking he’s either the power behind the throne, or he’s your spymaster. And since you’re obviously the cabal’s hatchet man—one of them, at least—you seem like the kind of person who’d know a thing or two about this guy.”

“I don’t know anything about him,” she said.

“Well now that’s just an obvious lie.”

The assassin tried to shake her head, but ...

Book 2, Chapter 56

As soon as I felt my wards split to let something through, I cast a force wave to throw everything around me back. The assassin mage was hurled into the wall, losing whatever tool she was using to bypass my wards. That tool struck me on the shoulder, splitting open my shirt and drawing a hot, painful line of blood across my skin.

“A vanishing knife?” I asked, glancing at the weapon as it became visible. Without the assassin holding it, the enchantment stopped concealing it. Vanishin...

Book 2, Chapter 55

I didn’t get much done that day, not after I finished reading that book. Details were light after that one passage, mostly speculation since it appeared that nobody quite knew exactly what had happened after Ammun had blown an entire moon out of the sky and sent it raining down on Manoch in a thousand-thousand pieces.

There was the immediate aftermath to the kingdom of Ralvost itself, which the historian who’d penned the book had personally lived through and was able to give an anec...

Book 2, Chapter 54

I settled into my new hideout on the north side of the city, ironically only a block away from an enforcer tower. The whole quadrant was far more heavily trafficked for some reason, but this was only a temporary base for me, so I didn’t worry about finding something perfect for my needs. It just felt pointless after how much care I’d taken with my original spots in the eastern district, only to end up abandoning them in the end.

Once I’d raised a short-duration set of privacy ward...

Book 2, Chapter 53

There was no way I was going to catch up to Juby on foot, but fortunately for me, I didn’t have to. Shadow leap had some sharp limitations, one of which was being able to see where I wanted to jump to. Normally, that would limit me to line of sight jumps only, but it was possible to combine it with a scrying spell to pick out destinations outside of the spell’s normal reach.

I was already scrying on Juby anyway, so it was a simple task to walk into the shadows in the dormitory and p...

Book 2, Chapter 52

As amusing as it was to watch Blue Rat squirm, I did have other problems to take care of. We waited in silence a moment to confirm that no one was going to pop up in response to his kill signal, then I said, “Look, I’m not here to kill you. I just have a message for the Wolf Pack. I’m sure they’re going to track me from my fight with Monolith and Swarm, and that trail is going to lead straight to you. So when somebody shows up, you’re going to give them my message. And, well, if you...

Book 2, Chapter 51

I walked into a building about a mile away from Blue Rat’s office. It was on an otherwise unoccupied street that looked like it had been the site of a battle between two equally matched mages of middling skill, which was to say that a lot of explosive magic had gone off over a wide area. For experienced mages, victory or defeat usually came within a handful of spells, and collateral damage tended to be measured in number of acres leveled, but novices could go on and on punching holes in bui...

Book 2, Chapter 50

After that highly public battle, I needed a new place to lay low. Flying through the air was a good way to get followed since not only would there be hundreds of witnesses, it would be easy for wide-area scrying to pick me up. Counter scry worked best to block out spells focused directly on me, and using it on one that was viewing an area I just happened to be in would do little more than draw extra attention to my presence there.

There was one place I didn’t mind the Wolf Pack knowin...

Vacation Week

UPDATE: Apparently, in its infinite wisdom, Patreon has decided that pauses can only be scheduled in month-long blocks. Since I don't want a month off, but I also don't want to charge everybody for a week I'm not producing content, I've decided to dump a week's backlog all at once so I don't have to think about it until my vacation is over. Stay tuned for an incoming chapter dump in the next few minutes.

Hello,

I was planning on going on vacation next m...

Book 2, Chapter 49

Swarm shrieked, literally shrieked, and flung himself away from me. That coming from a man bordering on middle-aged, saying I was surprised would be an understatement. I actually lost a second just trying to process what I was seeing, which was a lanky man tripping over his own uncoordinated limbs in his haste to get away from a small child.

“Well, not exactly the reaction I was expecting, but I suppose…”

This would have been an excellent opportunity to kill him outright, bu...

Book 2, Chapter 48

I gave myself a moment to take it all in. There was a ring on his finger with a Wolf Pack signet. He was more than twice my height and probably weighed eight or nine times as much as me, all of it muscle. His head was shaved, and he was bare-chested. Most importantly, his skin shimmered with mana, some sort of strengthening invocation. It actually repelled the dust clogging up the room, leaving him spotless. I suspected it probably worked on blood stains, too.

There were twelve children...

Book 2, Chapter 47

I stepped into the room at the top of the castle. There had been two guards outside the door, both dead now. I dragged the bodies in with me using greater telekinesis and deposited them in the corner. Unlike the noble girl, these ones had been armed with simple weapons and no magic. If they hadn’t been directly in my way, I’d have gone around them and let them live.

As soon as I walked through the door, I understood the security. There was a writing desk off to one side with a small...

Book 2, Chapter 46

I studied the woman’s sullen expression for a moment. Whatever was going through her head, she still wasn’t afraid for her life. Probably the fact that the person menacing her was a four-year-old contributed heavily to that lack of fear. My staff was so tall that I had to stand on my toes to touch the silver crook at the top. I wasn’t exactly intimidating.

Still, I would have thought the abduction, confiscation of her enchanted trinkets, and draining of her mana core would have dr...

Book 2, Chapter 45

The archives hadn’t held all the answers I’d hoped to find, but I had learned enough interesting information from them that it had been worth the effort to break in. There was a private library a few floors up attached to a suite of rooms I also planned to investigate, and if possible, I was going to drain the ward stone dry on my way out. That would most likely break it beyond repair, but that was just a bonus in my mind.

There was one other spot I was interested in checking out. I...

Book 2, Chapter 44

I made a detour back down into the sewer tunnels to drain away more mana from the traps left behind. There wasn’t a lot left, but I had time to kill while I waited for night so I could begin navigating toward the building I’d decided was most likely the home of Velvet. There were only so many that were large enough to be suitably castle-like, after all.

Moving across the inner city would have been easier if I’d had a mask like the one I’d destroyed, but it also would have been p...

Book 2, Chapter 43

Whoever set the traps around Freak’s lair wasn’t very good at it. They were enthusiastic, though – I’d give them that. After disarming the twelfth trap in the same tunnel, I had to wonder if it wasn’t some sort of strategy designed to waste an intruder’s time and try their patience.

Eventually, I made my way back to the former menagerie and collected my surveillance monitoring enchantment. It showed me two women crawling all over the place and apparently arguing with each ot...

Book 2, Chapter 42

Author's Note: I incorrectly labeled yesterday's chapter as "42" when it was supposed to say "41." I've fixed the title and here is the real chapter 42.

* * *

I spent the next few hours slowly circling the entire city, doing my best to stay within a block or two of the wall. I ran into some problems on the west side of the city, which was apparently the richest outer-wall area. It was more heavily patrolled by enforcers and even had quite a few re...

Book 2, Chapter 41

It took the masked man a fraction of a second to realize the enchantment wasn’t working on me, and he immediately responded with violence. His leg snapped up in a roundhouse kick heading directly for my face, not a stretch to reach that height when I was so short. It was so fast that there was no way I could have dodged it either. I barely even recognized the movement before it reached me.

My shield ward knocked him back, throwing him off balance from the unexpected resistance. I chas...

Book 2, Chapter 40

Blue Rat snapped a finger and pointed at the couch. “Map,” he said.

The book-reader, Myumi, sighed and stood up. I glanced at the book she left behind on a couch just to see the title, The Restless Duchess and the Errant Knight, and blinked. That… wasn’t a sword on the cover. Why would she be reading something like that in a room full of other people?!

Myumi opened up a cabinet to the side of the couch and rifled through for a moment before withdrawing a scroll. S...

Book 2, Chapter 39

I wasn’t terribly surprised to see a familiar face waiting for me with the group that hadn’t left the house. There wasn’t a lot of detail to be gleaned about a person based just on my sense of their mana, but one of those things was relative size. Mana was in the chest, and based on where exactly I could feel it, I knew that one of the people waiting for me wasn’t an adult.

He was the boy I’d met with Tanner a few days ago, the one who’d been worried about being abducted and...

Book 2, Chapter 38

The wards shielding my hideout from detection were still active. I was almost certainly safe here, but I couldn’t see any good reason to risk hanging around. Other than the mana I’d invested in the place, I had no connection or attachment to this particular building.

I gathered the leech stones, only because they had a bit of mana in them and it wasn’t enough to justify the effort to pulling it all back out, and placed them in my satchel. On the off chance I needed to make some mo...

Book 2, Chapter 37

I didn’t sleep well that night, partially because my mind was consumed with thoughts of my return to Derro, something that I was both eager for and dreaded. I wanted that business closed as soon as possible and I hoped to find some clues about what exactly had happened to the world and the missing moon in the night sky. My spells should have ensured I’d been reincarnated almost immediately, but it was obvious something had gone wrong there.

How much time exactly I’d lost was diffi...

Book 2, Chapter 36

I had three goals to accomplish in the next few hours. First, we needed to get the garden planted back in the ground. Second, we needed to raise some kind of shelter. Third, we needed a ward stone to protect us while we slept. That third one, at least, I’d been able to work on before we teleported to the valley. The runes were carved, but I hadn’t had a chance to give them a final inspection or actually channel mana into them yet.

I’d placed us on a flat piece of ground in the mid...

Book 2, Chapter 35

Teleporting multiple people was harder than teleporting one person, but not by much. The easiest way to do it was to inscribe a runic construct commonly referred to as a teleportation circle, though it was more accurate to call it a modifier that changed how spells with individual targets worked. Instead of affecting just myself, the magic would grab hold of everybody in the circle.

There was an increased mana cost, of course, but it was more like a tenth more mana for each person. I es...

Book 2, Chapter 34

I had two spots in mind for our new home. The first was a crescent-shaped plateau on the side of a mountain about a quarter mile wide. It didn’t have any trails leading up to it that I’d found, and if I did discover one later on, it’d be easy enough to collapse. As far as defensibility went, things didn’t get much better than that. On the other hand, it was a lot of bare rock with no convenient source of water, so a lot of mana was going to go into making it livable.

The second ...

Book 2, Chapter 33

Father’s hesitation upon entering the hut was not lost on me. He wasn’t surprised to see me, but he had the air of a man dreading a task he knew he couldn’t put off any longer. After glancing at the row of potted plants I’d left lined up by the wall to be moved to the arbor, he slumped down at the table with a sigh and asked, “Did you do this?”

“The headaches certain people are getting?” I asked. “No. Nothing to do with me, well… other than killing the guy who was fe...

Book 2, Chapter 32

I received three visitors over the next hour while I finished up my preparations. None of them were as bad off as Karad had been, but each one resulted in another ten-minute break. Karad himself came to the manor with the third one, and not just because the man had needed someone to help him make the walk.

“The Council agrees to your proposal,” he said.

“Obviously they do. You’re sending people to me to treat.”

“On the condition that the rest of the afflicted Gar...