Chương 100: Chapter 89.5 - Special Operations

++Working in especially cooperative magician units was another novelty for me, the power gap between myself and most of my apprentices in the past had generally been too great to justify such things. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. I was able to spend the rest of that day and part of the night working before sleep took me. I was feeling my unconscious hours more than ever now.

Hating every wasted second as my body lay still and useless while the moments trickled by without any more progress made to overthrowing the Gods. These last few weeks, I knew, had been a luxury. And like all luxuries I had not appreciated it until it was gone. Now I could only wish to once again be given the freedom to work on my studies. Had I not joined the army, I would be enjoying that freedom now. And making no more progress to bolstering my family name. All things in life are trade-offs.

All things, at least until you become powerful enough. I was still getting there. My morning was groggy and irritable, emotions running bitter and strong as I sat around and mostly just waited to be called on for my service. That is not to say that I wasted my time. I had kept up my training in raw magic whenever I had a spare minute, and had not even allowed research to eat into that.

It was novel to finally have a pastime I would rather be doing than growing my own innate strength, but I did not allow that to dissuade me. At this point, my power was growing far slower than it had during early childhood. Perhaps a few dozen vis per day of sustained effort, a tiny proportion of the many thousands I could muster already. And yet I needed every vis I could get, and would use them all.

I had recently passed the benchmark of sixteen thousand at my maximum output, which meant, finally, I could be counted among the most powerful magicians in the world. The few thousand most powerful, at least. I was probably hovering around the three thousandth place mark, or so. Which did not leave me with as much competition as one might imagine.

Magicians as a whole made up a good zero-point-five percent of Garamon's population in total, with the Empire laying claim to perhaps a few billion lives, partly thanks to those very magicians allowing its population density to far surpass the figures of a mundane society. So in Garamon alone, there were likely several thousand magicians now weaker than me for each one who was stronger. Certainly, this army did not boast many who came close to my power.

Agrian, funnily enough, was one of the ones who drew nearest, and even he fell short of me by almost six thousand vis at our maximum output. I got two hours done working on widening that gap before the call came and dragged me from my comfortable quarters and out into the less-than-comfortable street. This made me upset. It was irritating, on the one hand, but potentially disastrous on the other.

I had been careful with my research, making sure to memorize everything important before, regrettably, moving the original contents elsewhere in the city—not willing to destroy such treasures but not being able to safely store them in my own quarters. Even still, the experiments that still lingered there, while not as overtly illegal as the ones in my laboratory back at Winzorth, would be clearly necromantic in nature to an especially astute observer. Fiq was gunning for me now.

I had left precautions in case he tried to search through my room; magical traps of the sort that would impede even a magician as strong as him. I doubted they would be enough to stop a truly determined investigation, however. If he really threw everything he had at breaking into my quarters, he would eventually succeed. Then he may well find the information needed to bury me. Secrets atop secrets, all leaving me vulnerable, but all necessary. It stung me to know that I was so exposed, but I needed the power.

Besides, if I was correct he would not be willing to break into my quarters in a way as obvious as he would need to to bypass the defences. If I was correct. Agonizing over my decisions was not like me, not at all. I mused on this as I made my way through Orapathaqi. Maybe the hormones of this new, meaty body were getting to me once again. Maybe I was just shaken. It had, after all, been a good twenty years before I was this close to exposure against the Gods.

Aeons if one counted my uncountable existence in the Depths. Had I lost my nerve? Ha! Now there was a thought. The task-force I had been conscripted into was not a large one, but its small size made it all the more selective and all the more elite. I was not entirely surprised, and far from pleased, to see the grinning face of Bagran greeting me as I approached.

"Isabel," he cheerfully began.

"Love the dress, and I love the view even more. Did you choose that tight fitting for me?"

"I chose it so that I would not trip on flowing fabrics, or have them ignited mid-battle, while fighting dangerous necromancers to the death, you walking biological-waste-golem." Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. His friendliness evaporated fast.

"Fucking whore," he spat. I was too irritated and too wrapped up in how tedious this whole event was to point out, again, what a limited vocabulary he had, instead I just breezed past him, lingering a moment to give him the chance to grab me and produce an excuse for the response I so very wanted to give. He did not. Apparently, the boy was not that stupid. Our taskforce's meeting place was inside, funnily enough, yet another storehouse.

This one seemed older though, its stonework more weathered and built with less of the modern sleekness. In total, there were another three battlemages within. Each wore the insignia of rank, which made it easy to tell who was in charge. To my surprise it was a fellow woman.

"You're the last one to arrive," she noted as I stepped in.

"Save your brother, but he sent word ahead." I did not reply to that, just stood there and waited for her to say something more substantial. After a moment she did.

"I'm Eliza Huit, sanctioned highmage, third class, and the leader of this little assignment. Mana. Show it." Ah, she wanted a demonstration of my power. I looked around at the others, predictably all men, and found their eyes on me with the usual mix of contempt and amusement. They were curious, too, though. One did not distinguish oneself in the army at the age of sixteen without generating lots of curiosity.

"Very well." This, at least, was something I did not mind doing. I called on my mana and blasted it out, not shaping it into any physical effect. Just letting the raw energy swirl around me and make itself known. If my allies could see the stuff, as I did, they would have found it difficult to actually spot me, my power was now so dense that it had shifted from transparency to translucency. One day, as it had once been when I was Lord Dread in his prime, it would be fully opaque.

For now I would settle for seeing its magnitude demonstrated in how shocked it left all around me.

"You're…you're fresh from the Winzorth Institute?" Huit asked. She was trying to put on a face of stoic indifference, and was not very good at it.

"I paused my studies to enlist," I confirmed. In truth I could have graduated essentially whenever I pleased, but I was not yet better than all of my Professors within their own fields of expertise, so I did not think I had learned enough just yet to do that.

"So you're not a sanctioned mage yet?" another of the men asked, a rough-looking one with a face that appeared to have blocked a great many punches using its nose.

"Technically, no, not yet," I answered.

"But I was permitted to enlist anyway due to being considered a special case." Bagran was silent, and I risked a glance over at him to see…oh dear, he was practically drooling.

"Alright then," Huit seized the conversational threads that had been frayed by my display and did her best to restore order.

"Okay. Good, this is good then. You're… obviously powerful, what skills do you possess in combat?" I gave her an extensive but brief explanation of my specialties and past performance, knowing that she would have already read about my confirmed kills in the opening siege. She was not surprised by this at least. My power was far from off the charts just yet, but it was rapidly getting there.

Of all the Professors of the Winzorth Institute, Bogern was easily the greatest in raw power—excluding the Grandmaster himself. A renowned genius in his youth, he was now over fifty years old and had spent most of his days honing that one-in-a-million talent to its utmost. He was close to, but not quite at, the threshold of becoming an Archmage. Currently he still sat with the distinction of Highmage, first class. I myself most likely fell into this one, though I was certainly closer to second class than Huit was.

Second class Highmages became first class once they exceeded twenty five thousand vis, and remained first class until they exceeded one hundred thousand. After that threshold was passed, something that only a few magicians living at any given time ever managed, a new Archmage was born. There were no classes of Archmage, human magic just did not fluctuate enough at those high levels to justify them. Nobody surpassed the threshold by much.

At least, not according to Garamon's limited definition of 'human' and 'magic'. Granted, assessing where I myself stood in this hierarchy was purelyspeculative on my part. I had not yet been tested and formally assigned a level, but I was hoping to be, at worst, a Highmage of the second class before I turned seventeen, and to reach the first class by twenty. That would be a good time to have my first assessment.

"Okay, everyone listen and make mental notes. Don't write anything down," Huit continued. She seemed to be regaining her rhythm, overcoming the shock of encountering me for the first time rather more quickly than most experienced magicians. Perhaps that was a feature of her combat specialisation.

"We're going to do this quickly, but safely. Nobody ventures out in less than pairs. Can everyone here make aetheric flares?" The two men nodded instantly, Bagran grinning as he confirmed it. For once, I alone was ignorant.

"Aether created imperfectly so that it breaks down into light," Huit explained.

"Good for long-distance—" I put one out, dialling my power back to avoid blinding anyone.

"Like this?" I asked.

"... You knew the technique already?"

"No, but it was not hard to work out," I was enjoying the continued shock everything I did here seemed to invoke. The Winzorth Institute's prodigies were so much harder to impress than the world's other magicians.

"Lovely. Then you've just earned yourself a place with Bagran in a pair." Bagran could not have grinned wider if his facial muscles had begun convulsing, while I did a better job of hiding my own thoughts on the matter.

"Everyone does sweeping patrols," Huit explained.

"There's six of us in all, so we can work in three pairs. The pairs will coordinate and keep from moving more than five hundred feet apart. That's vital. We need to cover ground fast, but we all need to be within sprinting distance of each other come a disaster."

"Is that necessary?" Bagran piped up.

"I know you all know who I am, so—" —"who are you?" Huit cut in. The boy's face went terribly, darkly blank. He did not take kindly to disrespect, and even he must have known how deliberate this one was.

"It doesn't matter whether it's necessary," Huit continued.

"It's your order, and you'll obey it if you want to spend even another second in this unit. Understood, recruit?" She did not speak with any malice, just making the facts known as she decided they needed to be. Bagran did not answer, and she nodded.

"Good. Then here's all of your assignments, you'll have the rest of the day to prepare for them. Use it."