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Chapter 141

A gout of fire flashed down the tunnel in front of Nym, strong enough to drive him back a few steps. It was followed by a barrier sealing the mouth and blocking the ghouls from getting in. There were three more possible entrances though, and adding to that was the fact that a portion of the south wall crumbled as ghouls finished digging their way through.

A new hole opened up to the right of where Archmage Veran and Zerek were working. Nym had just enough time to notice it before arcana...

Chapter 140

The next few minutes of Nym’s life were pure chaos. Leaf, Blanchet, and Tiramaya all went for their assigned cores as quickly as possible. Tiramaya even managed to crack hers open before a bunch of meat and bones piled onto it. None of them were able to actually break the core prior to the bone behemoths animating.

His first impression was that the names were a bit of a misnomer. They were actually made of a lot of stinking, rotting meat slapped together and strung through with a wire...

Chapter 139

Ghouls were more industrious than Nym had given them credit for. Three times now, he’d dropped tunnels behind them to slow them down, and each time they dug through it in under a minute. It wasn’t until Sakaro started working with him that they got defense under control.

She put up some barriers and obfuscation to give Nym time to work, and he built a shell of stone a foot thick around them. It had a hole in the back where the tunnel went, but it did force the ghouls to come around ...

Chapter 138

Their team of eight was standing in together on the roof of the keep near where Ebalsan used to be. There wasn’t much left of the town at this point, unfortunately, but the keep itself had held against the undead. There were a few familiar faces in their little group. Leaf and Tiramaya were there. Archmage Varen, of course, was at their head. Nym himself rounded out the half he was familiar with. The other four were new to him.

One thing he knew for sure was that none of them were mil...

Chapter 137

Nym stood in the air above the archmage’s camouflage screen. Below them, the mausoleum was crawling with undead, far more than there’d been the first time. Now, however, there were thirty other mages up there with him, all of them working jointly to hold the ritual spell that was keeping the tear held closed and thousands of new ghouls from spilling out into the world.

Archmage Veran was among them, was in fact sitting on a cushion of air right next to Nym. His presence alone was th...

Chapter 136

Nym and Stelton stood in the air above the tree tops while he continued to scour the tunnels below for wights. Tiramaya still wasn’t showing to his scry, which was annoying, but he’d gotten used to it. Babkin was their reference point, and she seemed to be able to compensate easily enough for directions that were based off his location instead of hers.

The easiest way he had to track her was to watch things die. It appeared that there was a sphere maybe six or seven feet wide that h...

Chapter 135

Originally, they’d planned for Nym to help with ghoul disposal only if needed, but Babkin was showing no signs of slowing down and they already couldn’t keep up with him. Nym was spending all his time scrying to find wights and relaying locations as best he could through the communication link. That assassin woman, whose full name was Tiramaya, was working overtime to take out wights as fast as he could locate them.

“Babkin could slow down a bit and make this a bit easier on every...

Chapter 134

The only thing they were waiting for was the army to finish getting soldiers in place. They’d lost a lot of their earth mages, their combat mages, and just all-around soldiers in general, so there wouldn’t be any fortifications set up. It was going to be nasty up on the surface if the push into the tunnels was successful. Nym did not envy them that job.

Of course, it was going to be just as bad underground, if not worse. For one, Archmage Veran was not going with them. There’d bee...

Chapter 133

There was some argument about Nym’s participation, particularly from Ophelia. She got into a heated debate with Bildar off to one side of the room while the other four sat at the table and discussed what was going on.

“Wait,” Monick said at one point in the story. “You’re a necromancer now?”

“Uh, in that I know three spells that involve dead bodies, I guess. I don’t plan on making it an area of focus.”

“That’s gross,” Nomick said. “You should have j...

Chapter 132

The thrill of watching the land go by so fast that it was just a blur wore off after the first ten minutes of flight. Nym streaked through the sky about a quarter mile above the ground, going south so fast that he soon left Delvros behind completely. His destination was a town called Valderbough, where supposedly it didn’t get that cold even in the deep winter months.

Nym had a mental image of Cold Paw napping on the beach, snuggled up next to Analia while Monick and Nomick built elab...

Chapter 131

The magic invaded the corpse and spread through its limbs. It was a slow, steady progression that spiraled out from the construct imbued into its chest, taking a solid minute to reach the hands and feet and then sweeping back up to the construct. Each time the arcana cycled, more of more of it was left behind and the body regenerated closer to pristine condition.

Once the corpse was fully infused with arcana, Nym activated the second step. He twisted the construct, pulling on it in cert...

Chapter 130

Chapter 130

Nym was flipping through a book on necromancy when Archmage Veran appeared in the library. The old man glanced at him casually, did a double take when he saw what was in Nym’s hands, and cleared his throat meaningfully.

“So I met a wight who could talk today,” Nym said without looking up. “Never saw one of those before. Seemed like it might be important. It was leading a group of ghouls in an attack so that it could steal that book over there.”

Nym gest...

Chapter 129

Nym flew over to the manor house overlooking the fields and immediately saw what had happened. A pack of ghouls had broken through a window on the ground floor, and further tore the wall apart around it when the window proved insufficient access. The room they’d come into was covered in blood and had several dead bodies tossed to the side. There was a trail of bloody footprints leading deeper into the manor.

He was a bit hesitant to go inside. Nym would lose most of his mobility and r...

Chapter 128

The problem with learning from an archmage was that he was a very, very busy man. He generally spared only twenty minutes a day to answer any questions Nym had and point him in the right direction to explore and investigate. It wasn’t exactly what Nym had in mind when he’d requested help forging a fifth layer conduit, but it was what he got.

On the other hand, Nym did get access to a rather extensive library once he’d successfully managed to reforge a conduit that reached the Astr...

Chapter 127

They got a private room for dinner at Nym’s request. Everyone made small talk until the food had arrived, then Nym empowered four papers with different rune sequences designed to block scrying, keep sound from traveling outside the room, sever connections to remote sensors like Analia’s air golems, and reveal invisible or transformed mages.

The others watched him silently while he worked magic after magic. He’d been preparing for this meeting for a few days in between his practice...

Chapter 126

“You’re not funny.”

“I don’t think anyone else would agree with you,” Nym argued.

“Fine, if you’re so funny, you can row the boat.”

Nym considered that for a second. “I don’t see the connection here,” he told Ciana.

“The connection is I’m all wet now!”

“Well, I’m a big shot mage now, so I could just fix that. Like… this.”

A twist of elemental water magic dried her clothes and hair out. She gawked a little bit as it form...

Chapter 125

Nym felt off. All week, he’d felt like he couldn’t make up his mind about anything. That cold, cynical part of him that belonged to his past life, that only cared about himself and saw other people for what they were worth to him instead of as friends was constantly intruding in his thoughts. Normally it was easy to shut that part away. Normally, he didn’t think those kind of thoughts in the first place.

That had changed after the day the undead broke loose. Perhaps it was a resul...

Chapter 124

The next two hours of Nym’s life were extremely stressful. Archmage Veran did laps around the forest, sometimes detonating spells so close that it threatened to unravel the planar lock spell Nym was holding onto for him. Other times he’d travel far enough away from the center that his attacks were nothing more than flashes of light and rolling booms that sent flocks of traumatized birds up into the air.

The strain of holding the spell wasn’t too bad at first. By the time the half ...

Chapter 123

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t bow,” the archmage said.

Nym had been fighting to keep from reverting too much back to his child-personality. He needed to be sharp and ruthless right now. It had been a strain though as that part of his mind kept trying to push back to the forefront. When a literal archmage, one of the strongest humans in existence, grabbed him with a teleport and pulled him to the heart of the undead scourge, everything froze back over. There were no more argument...

Chapter 122

Message was an undeniably useful spell, but it was also relatively difficult to cast and had a whole host of restrictions and limitations. The caster had to have at least a rough idea of where the recipient would be, and had to know them well enough to form an accurate mental image of them for the spell to latch onto. There was no feedback in the spell to actually let the mage sending the message know if it had been received, and the magic couldn’t just linger until it successfully found th...

Chapter 121

Nym took his time setting up the teleportation spell. He’d only done it twice himself, and never with an extra person, let alone four. The amount of arcana it needed scaled up quite heavily with the base spell, but he thought he might be able to modify it to a version that had a static arcana cost and just grabbed everything in a set area. If he was right, that was how the teleportation platforms worked.

The spell took hold, and the world pinched around them. Everything was dark for a...

Chapter 120

“You have got to be kidding me,” Nym growled. He shifted his passengers to the side and flung his mage blades out to slice through the ghouls. Fortunately, all three were still in the process of putting themselves back together and weren’t all that mobile yet.

The blades hacked the ghouls back apart without any trouble beyond the fact that he was already holding five people in the air and his arcana was spread thin. He brought the Earth Shapers up to the surface and set them down,...

Chapter 119

Nym looked down the chimney and yelled into it, “You can come out now. The undead are all, um, dead.”

He’d dug a narrow pit about five feet straight down with elemental earth magic and tossed all the chopped up ghouls into it. They weren’t burning very well and he suspected if he didn’t take a more active role in their disposal, they’d eventually work their way free one way or another, but he didn’t plan on sticking around to wait for it to happen.

The earth rumbled ...

Chapter 118

Uh... trigger warning I guess. This one gets a bit gory.

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There were six of them on the wall, wrapped around a small unit of soldiers like wet blankets. The man who’d caught Nym’s attention made eye contact with him for one brief moment, and Nym saw pain and desperation in that look. Then the geist enveloped him completely and the yell was cut off.

Nym could still see his open mouth screaming beneath the geist, but the man’s wild scrambling to escape slowed, then st...

Chapter 117

Ghouls streamed out of the forest and threw themselves at the walls. They clawed at the rough magic-shaped stone, hurling themselves upwards in an unthinking frenzy while dozens of soldiers armed with spears or pikes did their best to pry them off. The tactic met with only mixed success, as the time it took and the number of ghouls assaulting the wall were more than enough to overwhelm the defenders.

Within a minute of the ghouls attacking, hundreds of them were on the wall, though than...

Chapter 116

A loud warbling screech woke Nym from a dead sleep. He flailed in place, trying to free himself from the tangle of his blanket, before falling out of the bed completely. Arcana filled his soul well and he immediately cast several scrying spells with a focus on anything dangerous in his immediate surroundings.

His door burst open and Jharn came through. “Get ready,” he said sharply. “Undead have breached the walls and will hit us in high numbers. Every mage who can fight needs to r...

Chapter 115

Nym stood in the middle of Analia’s room. She had thoroughly redecorated her space, unlike him. His room looked almost exactly as it had when they’d first moved in, save his closet had some spare clothes in it and he’d filled the empty shelves with books. Hers had new curtains over the window, three different light orbs made out of what appeared to be quartz, bedding that was considerably more vibrant than the dull-coloring his room enjoyed, a new work table that was filled odd little b...

Chapter 114

A man stood in front of Nym in an endless white void. His entire outfit reminded Nym of some of the more ridiculously expensive ensembles nobles wore, just layer after layer of lavish fabrics with gold and silver threaded through them and gemstones woven into the design. The metals were stitched into runes all across the clothing, with gemstone buttons carved that had their own runes.

He had long hair the same color as Nym’s, and was clean-shaven. The man’s face was eerily familiar,...

Chapter 113

Viewed through any type of magical sense, the cube did not exist. Scrying didn’t reveal it. Using night vision or far sight to enhance his senses made it disappear. Even groping around blindly with telekinesis did nothing. The magic simply passed through it. If he tried to form a cushion of air to lift it up, nothing happened.

To every single test Nym could come up with except looking at it with his own eyes and holding it with his own hands, the cube did not exist. He had no idea wha...

Chapter 112

Nym picked a day when Jharn was doing the overnight shift. He was younger than Navarim, not nearly as clever, and displayed considerably less institutional loyalty. Nym waited for hours in his room under the pretense of performing one of the many, many exercises Doliar had prescribed to work on his matrix. He scried every ten minutes or so until he noted Jharn sleeping, then continued to check up on him regularly for the next hour.

That was as good an opening as Nym was going to get. He...