Chương 75: Chapter 73: The Guardians

++Necromancy is not a single line of knowledge to be progressed. There are alternative ways of achieving any given thing, some better, some worse. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Now that I was alone, and free of the tedious conversation I had been beset by earlier, my mind was free to do far more academic study of my surroundings. It is not that I was unduly bothered by my fellow novices' presence, of course. No, not at all. It simply made concentration difficult for me.

Like trying to solve a differential equation while in the presence of a pack of rabid animals barking at each other and rutting mere feet from my head. Terribly inconvenient and irksome, and I was glad to be rid of them now. Yes, I was glad to be rid of them, and more glad still to be where I was. A city made out of printed academia would have contained less knowledge than I saw around me now. I soaked it all in with the same obsessive hunger that lingers in the mind of all great magicians.

The ruins themselves had already been dated by others to some four thousand years before the modern age, which was an assessment I found myself agreeing with as I moved through them now. I could tell it had been quite some time since they were last investigated, however. Dust buried any foot-markings on the floors from where clumsy scientists had last made their way through. A breeze ran through the structure, though I was now inside.

Perforated walls were giving the Estalian winds ample opportunity to blow through it all. I saw precious few relics, those were all probably lingering in some Garamon museum to be gawped at by morons behind glass planes. My own creations may have ended up there, too. If they had not been destroyed outright. The truth was that very few things I ever bothered to make were not steeped in 'black magic', and Garamon's Gods found that sort of thing offensive enough to burn it rather than display it.

But a thought did occur to me now. Not all of my laboratories had been easily found. Some I had buried at the bottom of oceans, in the heavens themselves. Not exactly hostile environments for a God, or even a modestly powerful Demigod, but certainly out-of-the-way enough that actually finding them with even a prolonged search was not guaranteed. If they had spent the past few millennia actively hunting my legacy down, they may well have discovered it all. But I doubted that.

What was that feeling in my gut now, hope or sexual arousal? They were irritatingly hard to differentiate sometimes. I ventured deeper. More sandstone walls and floor tiles met my every step, and the air this low was starting to smell… of something. Human life, I thought, rather than just ancient fumes trapped in a dead city. I had noticed my path beginning to slope notably downwards some minutes ago, and begun enthusiastically picking up my pace.

As an evil magician myself, I knew that building one's dwellings below-ground was simply the done thing. I may have inspired that trend myself, but I had also lived to see countless other Dread Overlords mimic it over the generations and millennia. Annoying that I had experienced my Great Setback just a few brief centuries before the rise of Sakhent, I would have enjoyed having more direct and personal experience of the Priest-King now. As things were, I could only go off of history books.

Sakhent was an egomaniacal idiot who constantly soiled himself and died crying when a single Demigod was dispatched to crush his reign of terror. Despite this, he was a terrible force who subjugated the better part of a continent and single-handedly advanced necromancy by centuries over his life. Something about that made me suspect that the history books had been flubbed somewhat, which meant that my knowledge was of limited reliability. Except for the direct observations I was making now.

This was a powerful place. Old and angry, drenched in necromantic energies of the sort I had once found only in my own lurkings. Sakhent. It was a name I would have remembered forever, even if it were not for my memory. It was a name worthy of remembrance. And these ruins were going on a lot longer than I had expected.

I found myself passing statues as I went, ones fixed directly to the ground, likely the sole reason they had not been looted by the Empire along with everything else when their first expedition first found this place. Most depicted animals; cats, I thought, or other carnivores. Some men and women. A few depicted men and women with the heads of animals. There was a cultural story there, and this place was magically powerful enough to make me interested in hearing it.

My pondering was interrupted a brief few moments later when I detected two things; movement in the dark, and magic to go along with it. Quick reflexes are not the luxury of a magician, our bodies just do not reach the superhuman realms of a Godtouched or warrior. So by the time my hands came up in a defensive stance, my first attacker had already cleared the ten yards between us and lashed out with a strange, curved blade that struck the barrier of my amulet and sent sparks spitting into the air.

I flew back, tumbled along the ground and felt myself slide frictionlessly as my shield failed to give the rough floor purchase. Disorientation followed. By the time my enemy was on me again, though, I had already mastered my trajectory and prepared a defence. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. The magic missile struck it square in the chest and sent it hurtling back across the room. More emerged, giving me a good look at them.

Each was clearly undead, but of a kind I had never seen before. Their bodies were not desiccated as much as… shrunken. Skin pulled taut, innards withered or gone entirely. I had read about Estalian mummification enough to recognise the results of it on them. Now I was recognising the results of it on necromancy, because whatever spellwork had animated these corpses, it had left them not only with speed undiminished, but actually enhanced compared to a living man.

I threw up a wall of aether and saw the half-dozen attackers thunder against it, sending deep cracks along its face and making the chamber shiver around us with the force of their impact. My will strained against their strength and barely proved superior. That simply would not do, I was not going to remain standing here and pinned down in a contest by random undead. I reached out tendrils of necromantic energy to try and seize them, but found the mana bouncing off.

Forcibly taking control of another necromancer's undead was difficult at the best of times, the art is very much first-come-first-served, but this was even harder. Something about how these servitors had been made left them… almost insulated against my magic. The barrier cracked, and the time for study ended. Before the first of them could burst through I was already preparing my next counter; a secondary barrier, pinched in place between the first and yet another one.

The central stretch was not aether, instead being a modified version of the force-wall I had learned from Doctor Brown all those years ago. Except rather than force, it was pure heat. Heat enough to make the air glow, to make my fragile human eyes throb just looking at it. And certainly heat enough to damage these undead as they finally broke past my first barrier only to begin cooking and charring. Ordinary undead, or humans, would have been cremated within a minute, but these beings seemed more sturdy than that.

No, by the first minute they had only started sloughing off great stretches of skin and meat, falling to the ground in a twitching mess and cooking without any further incident. I kept watching for another minute or two to make sure, and lowered my barriers only once they had started to resemble an especially poor attempt at roast lamb more than anything humanoid. Even with the relatively easy victory… I was still panting for breath. Human meat.

That I still considered myself human did not mean I enjoyed the trappings of our natural bodies, sometimes it seemed like my new form would begin shutting down if someone so much as looked at it the wrong way. I had bigger concerns than that, however. Poking around in what was left of my enemies lasted me only a few moments before an interruption came in the form of more magic on the air. My barrier was up just fast enough to block a magic missile that lashed out with the force of a small cannon.

The room shook around us as explosive energy dissipated, sent cracks along the floor and scattered dust across the whole chamber. I had not been given chance to anchor myself in place, and so I went flying. I managed to forcibly control my flight to halt before hitting a wall, then quickly raised a new barrier as a second blast shot out. It struck my magic with a force like cannon fire striking a fort, sending another shiver through the room around us.

Only then, through the glaring light and swirling dust, did I get a good look at my attacker. Another undead, naturally. This one in more flamboyant robes with a hat that looked to have been created to serve as a makeshift parachute in case of emergencies.

"ALL WILL SERVE." Its voice surprised me, more for existing than by how it sounded. I was used to the perpetual death-rattle tone of a reanimated corpse, but had still not fully expected necromancy advanced enough to raise a speaking servant.

"All will serve," I agreed, though I had the sneaking suspicion that we were speaking about different things. Its magic flew out, energy melting into liquid. I took no time at all to decide that I did not want this liquid to touch me. Aether raised up to block it, then quickly melted through as yet more came.

My next counter took the form of a more primitive wind current, its spell matrix sent to gently shift forwards at a few miles per hour so that all of the deadly acid was snatched up in the vortex and carried back to where it had come from. My enemy reacted swiftly. I heard words barked and saw sand rise up off the ground to rush into the vortex, scything through it in the form of a million imperceptibly small breaks that saw the acid scattering around as corrosive sludge.

My next attack was already prepared by the time the enemy had dealt with that however; a magic missile hurtling towards it and glowing an intense blue to match the searing heat of a lightning bolt. The air seemed to become desaturated between it and my enemy, heat leached out of it.

Then the magic missile struck home, and the spell matrix, which I had set up to chill my projectile to almost absolute-zero while simultaneously outputting a glow that gave off the illusion of great heat, left half of the undead's torso frozen. The freeze came so quickly that matter expanded and contracted much too fast. It broke apart, messily. I watched the undead fall, and was moderately amused to see its remaining arm raise in the attempt at casting against me once more.

I promptly removed the offending limb with another magic missile before stepping closer to study it/ Some dim part of me had been worried that Agrian may perish in these ruins and waste all my time invested in training him for my purposes. Now, seeing the quality of protector awaiting us down here, I was confident he would make his way through.

Agrian screamed as he ran, his lungs burning and eyes streaming. He was alone, it was dark. The walls were closing in. He was going to fucking die. Oh Gods, he was going to die.