Chương 42: 42 loop 1 Part 22

My mana was blinking red, and I made my golems stop as an idea came to me. Flag hadn't followed after us and was still staring out the window. Just staring out there, cradling the battery in both stone hands like he'd forgotten it was there.

"Flag, buddy," I said.

"You okay?"

"Mhm."

"I need you to do something for me." He turned from the window.

"Of course."

"Sit down." He looked at the floor, thought for a second, and then lowered himself down, as if he had never sat down before. He plopped onto his butt, rolled onto one hip, and propped himself up on his arms before settling with his stone legs stretched out in front of him.

"Now, close your eyes." He touched his face as if realizing he had one for the first time, despite the fact he'd done it about ten minutes before.

"I have eyes! Oh, I've always wanted eyes."

"Yes, Flag. Your golem body has eyes."

"Oh." He found them and closed them.

"Okay, they're closed. Now what?" He was bobbing his head from side to side, clearly enjoying whatever it was we were doing. It was taking him a minute to get it, but I was patient. I had given lectures to people less attentive than Flag on harder things. And it wasn't that Flag was slow—he seemed pretty smart for what he was. Besides, it was obvious the reason Flag was struggling: He had only had a body for approximately twenty minutes.

"I want you to breathe slowly. And think about nothing."

"Oh. But golems don't breathe. And if I'm thinking about nothing, then how am I thinking?"

"Just pretend that you're thinking about nothing." Flag was quiet for a second, and then said, "Oh. Oh, this is nice. I like this."

"Flag, you need to not talk, otherwise you're still thinking." He went quiet again, and then I felt something shift between us. Instead of the [Soul Tether] pulling me toward him, the pulse reversed, pulling toward me. And then I got an alert. [Soul Tether] has increased ambient mana regeneration by 4%. I stared at it. Well, that was fucking cool. Sure, I'd lost 8% of my mana to get there, but now my regeneration had increased just because I had a golem. Fuck, this was awesome. All right. I sat back in my chair.

It was time to do some meditating of my own. If I was about to fight a dragon, I needed as much mana as possible. The dragon could wait an hour or so. Probably. An hour and a half later, Flag, my golems, and I made our way around the Green, trying to find any sign of survivors. I had to find Finn and confirm he was okay. I couldn't deal with seeing his corpse twice in one week. We looked in a couple of the larger buildings and the mostly intact Crucible before heading to the dining hall.

It should have been the first place we checked. The dining hall had been a grand cathedral once. Vaulted stone pillars, a ceiling that disappeared into shadow, enchanted glass overhead. I'd eaten breakfast under that ceiling a hundred times. Eirkedross had come down through it. The glass was gone. The ceiling was open to the sky, and morning light fell wrong through the gap. It was pale and flat, landing on rubble where the serving line had been.

The enchanted brickwork was still trying to repair itself, however, there was too much damage and not enough material left to work with. The room was empty, but there was an obvious ward in place over the only exit not destroyed. The doors led down to a storage basement. With nothing better to do, I knocked on the door and said, "Hello? Is anybody in there?" Bain's voice came back through the door, flat and unhurried.

"Mr. Yarrow? Go away."

"Open the door."

"Opening this door is how people die."

"Staying in a storage room under a dining hall is also how people die. Eirkedross can't get to us in the library's restricted floors. You'll be dead before dusk if you stay here."

"The dragon may be asleep, but it won't remain that way."

"Yes, that's why it's safest to move now before it wakes up." I only received silence. So I gave my golem friends a thought. Flag beat the rest to it. He put one stone hand flat against the door and pushed. The hinges gave first, then the frame, and the whole thing leaned inward and settled against the floor with a dull thud. There wasn't even a ward on the door. What the hell? Forty-odd faces looked up at me from between overturned shelving units and stacked supply crates.

Finn was in the back, sitting on a box with his hands on his knees. Alive. Something in my chest unknotted without my permission. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. Bain stood in the center of the room. He looked at the door on the floor. And then at me.

"You've doomed us all," he said.

"No I haven't," I said.

"If we go now, we're fine." In a blink, he'd crossed the distance between us and pressed his wand against my throat. I raised my hands, kind of shocked at the display of power I had never seen from him. From the doorway, Thane stepped forward over the broken door.

"Aldrick." He put both hands up in a placating mirror of me.

"What's done is done. If we move now, we can sort out the rest later." Bain let go of me and turned toward him. Dark veins spread from around his eyes tracking up toward his temple but they were gone almost immediately. If [Wideview] hadn't been active, I doubt I could have seen them at all. He raised his wand and blasted Thane back across the doorway. He waved again, and ice sealed the entrance from floor to ceiling in one flat sheet. Thane was on the other side of it. Bain turned back towards me.

Whatever procedural calm usually sat behind his eyes was gone. He'd been put in this job to dismantle my family, and there was something truly fucked up about how he was going to finish that job. He attacked. The deadly ice spike came at my head. An [Ice Shot], conjured in the air and sent forward on a column of compressed wind. He aimed straight at my face. I sent my golems the order to drop the chair. The spike buried itself in the wall behind me as I fell below. I had my wand out in an instant.

I was already casting [Trip] before I noticed he had laceless shoes. His wand swept low across the ruined stone between us, and ice crept outward from where it landed. The temperature dropped around us and my breath appeared in front of my face. I sent a thought to my golems, and they picked me up. They started moving me, circling around Bain as quickly as they could while his ice was still spreading. I hit him with [Bang] while he was watching his spell.

A crack of light and sound went off a handspan from his face. His head jerked back. The spike he'd been shaping came apart in a spray of sleet. For about a second, I felt like a genius. I pressed my advantage and cast [Shrink] before he'd blinked the spots out. His robes pulled tight across both shoulders, and his casting arm lost range at the elbow. But he realized what was happening and cast his own spell in response: [Grow]. His robes expanded back to normal and stopped.

He sent another spike at my chair, and one of the golems twisted into the path. The ice punched through his forearm and came out the other side in a spray of stone dust. The armchair held, but wobbled. I must have looked ridiculous. Bain stared at my damaged golem. Then he grinned a feral smile and started building up a heavy cast. He began forming ice walls that curved inward from three directions. The temperature dropped another ten degrees, and I shivered.

He was trying to close the room around me and freeze me to death. I threw [Slick] at the end of his ice, where the surface had no friction yet. In response, he pointed his wand at the puddle and cast [Freeze]. The water went instantly opaque and white. Then he cast [Lift]. The slab peeled off the floor in one piece, slowly and deliberately—the size of a dining table. He flicked his wand, and it came rushing toward me. I dived left, but I wasn't as fast as I should have been.

The edge of the slab almost clipped me, but I shrugged my shoulder clear. The momentum still caught me, and I slipped on the ice he'd laid across the floor. I hit the ground on my side and skidded. My elbow made a sound it had no business making, and then the arm stopped working. I bit my lip and fought the pain. Bain finished constructing his igloo and sent the whole thing curving inward toward me. It sealed on top. The ice was mostly opaque, but I could still make out his figure on the other side.

And then I finally did what I should have done at the start of the fight. Hey, Flag, I sent through the [Soul Tether]. Yeah? he answered back, thankfully. Can you tackle the guy with the ice, please? And then Flag was moving. Six steps across the frozen ground, and he hit Bain at the waist with the full weight of a stone golem. They went down hard. Bain's wand spun free across the ice and came to rest against my igloo. Quick, I directed one of the other golems, grab that little piece of wood.

Unceremoniously, one of the three golems dropped the chair, and it clattered to the ground. He waddled toward the wand and picked it up. Is this the right person to sit on? Flag asked. That's it. You did good, buddy. Bain was still under Flag, flat on his stomach with a quarter ton of golem parked between his shoulder blades. He seemed to have been knocked out by the fall. All right, I'm going to meditate some more. And he started meditating. I got the 4% regeneration notification and had to stifle a laugh.

Thank you, Flag. I directed the golem nearest to me to pull the ice away from the igloo. It took him a moment, but he broke a piece free. I crawled through the gap, careful not to jostle my clearly damaged elbow. I wasn't sure if it was broken or dislocated, but it was excruciating. I sent a thought to the golem by the door before I'd even fully cleared the igloo. The ice came down in pieces. Thane walked through and said nothing. I respected that about him.

And then Finn was already moving, navigating across the space. He jumped over an overturned table, and then he was next to me.

"Hi, Finn. When did you get here? Where have you been?"

"I've been here a minute. Long enough to redecorate." He closed the distance.

"Give me your arm."

"My arm is fine. It's been a wonderful help tonight, and it just wants to take a nap."

"Give me your fucking arm." I gave him my arm. He took my elbow in both hands and cast [Scan]. His expression went through three different emotions and landed on anger. Then he cast [Heal]. Without further preamble, the joint popped back into place. I made a noise I was going to need everyone to immediately forget.

"It was just dislocated," he said in a tone that was clearly angry. He cast [Scan] again, and this time, it wasn't the elbow he was reading. He was looking at my mana, my pulse, whatever healer-specific misery index he ran when he thought I wasn't watching. His expression did the thing where it went very still, and he couldn't process his emotions.

"You didn't tell me where you were." I decided not to acknowledge it. I had noticed something was off. Yes. I had been planning to address it after the dragon situation and before the end of the world. I felt that was a reasonable triage order.

"How long have you been like that?"

"My pool's been low since before the dining hall," I said.

"I've been managing it." I had not been managing it.

"I have so many questions," he said. I could tell I wasn't going to get out of this. But I tried anyway.

"You can ask them on the way. We need to leave. Now."