Chương 24: Dasten Dagwel (1)

"A mana core is not empty when it stops working. It is merely offended by our lack of imagination." – Stakkro Sottel, Head of the RAM Division of Korsivir ~ Dasten Dagwel ~ ~ Firza Town, Sovereign Duchy of Sartrene ~ Firza was a small town on the western bank of the Rubarin River, surrounded by a strong palisade wall. The Rubarin ran southwards through the Duchy of Sartrene, a small independent country caught between larger powers, and the mighty river was the reason a town like Firza existed at all.

The farms around the town grew plenty of rice, helped by small canals that carried river water into the fields on both banks, which was then shipped up north for profit.

But its primary source of income was the riverine tolls charged by the Baron of Firza. Every grain barge coming from the seaport in Sartrene City, far down on the southern coast, had to pass this town as it traveled north to supply the northern kingdoms, and every one of them paid for the privilege. Right now, Dasten was crouched on an upper branch of a particularly large tree located some distance away from the eastern bank of the river, observing the town through a small monocular he had bought recently.

Even from this distance, the lenses gave him a remarkably clear view of the town gate and the small dock on the western bank. The Research and Applied Manaworks Division of Korsivir— or the RAM Division —had only recently started selling these new monoculars for a hefty price to anyone with the clearance to buy one. Unlike ordinary civilian monoculars, these used lenses cut from depleted mana cores, their empty husks polished until they were almost perfectly clear.

With a small but consistent push of mana, the lenses sharpened distant shapes far beyond what common glass could manage. After realizing how useful they would be in the field, Dasten had been among the first to purchase one despite the steep cost. The clarity of the view offered by the lenses was high enough to justify every gilen he had spent on it. Autumn had already reached this region, though the trees had only recently begun shedding their leaves.

The dense reddish-yellow foliage around him still did a good enough job of hiding him from anyone passing nearby. The air here was warmer too, this close to the Great Vamiri Desert, while Korsivir had already started turning a little chilly. Not that the weather would matter for long. If everything went according to plan, he would be out of this duchy within a few days at most. He focused on his task again.

Firza lay far across the broad stretch of water, but through the core-lensed monocular, he could still make out the movements near the gate clearly enough—without its help, the guards, farmers and the dock workers would have been little more than silhouettes in the fading light. It was the peak of the harvest season here, and with sunset approaching, the town guards would soon close Firza's gates for the night.

Dasten had kept watch from this same perch for over three days now, long enough to get a feel for the place and the habits of the people moving in and out of the town. He had studied the farmers, the guards, the bargemen, and the pattern of the evening crowds until he was satisfied. Plans rarely went cleanly in his line of work, but he had survived enough missions that went awry during his years in SABLE to know the difference between caution and needless delay.

Today, he decided he had gathered enough intel to enter the town without raising suspicion. A narrow dirt path ran not far from the tree, cutting between paddy fields that still had not been harvested. That would be his route in. He checked the area once more. There was no one nearby. No farmers working late in the fields, no children wandering where they shouldn't, no guard patrol moving along the riverbank. Good.

Still seated on the branch, hidden among the leaves, Dasten brought both hands together and began forming a series of hand signs. Zarn. Koru. Fura. Trae. Lumi. Lumi. Ryn. Veka... For a simpler mission, he could have done this one-handed, but today was not a day for carelessness. He used both hands, moving through the lengthy sequence for the A-rank technique while holding the image of a farmer in his mind. Not a specific man from Firza, but close enough to the men he had spent the last two days observing.

He had already used this appearance a few times to speak with the farmers who worked the eastern bank, building just enough familiarity that some of them would remember him later. That was the point. He had made sure to grumble about the low wages and the long hours while doing it, and some of the farmers had agreed readily enough to make it clear the complaint was nothing unusual here. Now for the final phase of the mission. His hands kept moving swiftly, each sign following the last with practiced ease.

The image had to hold under inspection, and the posture had to match. The clothes. The mud. The exhaustion. The look of a man who belonged here after a full day spent in the fields. At the hundred and twenty-seventh hand sign, the sequence ended with Dro. Dasten rarely needed to name a technique aloud anymore; years in SABLE had burned most sequences deep enough into his mind that thought and motion were usually enough. But this was not a standard mana technique, and tonight he could not risk weaving it in silence.

He kept his voice barely above a whisper.

"Mirage." Mana left his body in copious amounts. This was a pure-mana technique, shaped without turning the mana into earth, water, nature, air, or fire. That made it rare, expensive, and unforgiving. Even a small mistake in the final structure could turn the disguise thin, uneven, or unstable under scrutiny. There was barely any shimmer as his appearance began to morph.

Before long, the man crouched on the branch retained no resemblance to blond-haired Dasten Dagwel, veteran Siurim of Korsivir and former squad captain in SABLE. Now he looked like a black-haired, dark-skinned farmer in his forties, with the kind of complexion common among people living in the deserts of Vamir. His work trousers, the loose tunic, and even his calloused hands appeared muddy from a long day spent harvesting paddy, while his shoulders seemed to carry the tiring weight of field work.

It was only an illusion, of course. It would not survive a simple touch test. But as long as no one came close enough to grab him, it would serve its purpose. As darkness began settling over the fields, the last few stragglers were still making their way back into Firza.

No civilian wanted to be left outside the walls after sunset, not in a remote farming town surrounded by fields, riverbanks, and enough wilderness for all kinds of dangerous creatures—including the occasional mutated beast—to wander too close at night. That didn't even include any foes who walked on two feet. A man who slept outside the wall might not wake up in one piece. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

By now, the sun had already dipped behind the low mountain range in the west. Time to move. Dasten dropped from the branch, keeping the thick trunk of the tree between himself and the town gate. His feet touched the ground without making a sound. He bent his back slightly, let his shoulders sag, and took on the slower walk of a man tired from a full day in the fields.

After clearing his throat a few times to adjust his voice to the rougher pitch he wanted, he walked toward the muddy path and turned right, heading for the bridge. More farmers emerged from the fields as he drew closer, joining the same path before the gates closed. Dasten watched them carefully without seeming to. Their steps were slow, their clothes were dirty, and most of them walked with the same tired slump he had copied. A few carried farming tools.

Others had empty baskets or sacks slung over their shoulders, but most had nothing with them except mud, sweat, and the day's exhaustion. Good. Dasten looked like just another ordinary farmer. As he reached the bridge, he saw a barge pulling away from the town dock and turning north along the river. Numerous sacks and crates—likely holding grain and other food items—were stacked across its deck, though not nearly as high as they should have been during harvest season.

A few workers stood near the side, glancing towards the oil lamps of the town as they passed Firza, while another man near the center spoke to the others with the easy authority of someone used to being obeyed. Dasten's attention stayed on that man a moment longer than the others. Usually he would have simply ignored a barge going on a routine task of transporting grain up the river, but someone on that barge was circulating mana, faintly but unmistakably. A manaweaver.

The familiar prickling sensation came from the man near the center. Inside the walls of a vast manaweaver city like Korsivir, or in an active dimensional rift, that feeling would have been lost in the overwhelming torrent of mana all around him. But out here, away from the noise of thousands of mana users, it was much easier to tell where it came from. Dasten was not a sensor, not in the way true sensors were.

But after more than a decade spent in SABLE, he had learned to read enough from posture, breathing, awareness, and the faint pressure in the air a trained manaweaver applied without meaning to. It was hardly comparable to the skills of a real mana sensor, but it was enough for him to make a rough estimate of an enemy's strength. That man on the barge had a trained mana network for sure. Dasten gauged him to be a D-rank manaweaver. An experienced Nourim, then, not some fresh E-rank academy graduate.

Maybe even a newly promoted Tarim. That was strange though... An ordinary grain barge didn't usually need to be protected by a D-rank manaweaver, especially one traveling through the Rubarin River at this time of the year. And shouldn't the barge have been fully loaded? Was Arkazaan short on coin these days, unable to buy enough grain? Or was the grain transport only a front this time, with something more valuable hidden under those sacks?

Usually, Dasten might have taken a detour and investigated it further, but he couldn't afford to postpone his current mission. Rumors said the Baron of Firza could leave for Sartrene City to the south any day now, so Dasten had to finish his work before that. He would just have to include the barge in his mission report when he returned to Korsivir. For now, he had a different task. Putting the thought of the peculiar barge aside, he continued across the bridge.

The structure was not new, but it had been maintained well enough. Its planks had been worn smooth by years of boots, carts, hooves, and wagon wheels, yet nothing creaked underfoot in a way that suggested real neglect. Perfect. It would make his secondary task easier later tonight. Before long, he reached the line of farmers waiting outside Firza's gate. Nearly all of them were on foot, with tunics and trousers just as muddy as his own. A few were leading wagons piled with paddy, pulled by pairs of tired oxen.

While they waited, Dasten checked those around him again and found no noticeable mana networks, no reserves worth mentioning. Civilians, all of them. Infiltrating Firza wouldn't be a problem tonight, not if he kept every detail of the disguise in place. His rank-marker remained unlit beneath his left sleeve, as it had since he left Korsivir. Keeping it unlit hardly took a thought for someone of his training, but one careless flare of red on his wrist would ruin a week of work faster than any guard's question.

Ahead, the line slowed as it neared the gate. One of the two gate guards was lazily asking the name and purpose of everyone wanting to enter the town, while his partner sat nearby on a chair and scribbled the answers into an entry log resting on his knees. It was weak security, just as Dasten had expected from a small town in a minor country. They were organized enough to keep records, but not watchful enough to make them useful. That would make his task easier.

As the line moved, Dasten's mind drifted briefly to his last meeting with the Vazaag. The parameters of this A-rank mission hadn't been unusual by themselves—a false identity, a target in a riverside town far from Korsivir, although without an assault team under his command—but occasional solo missions like this were nothing new to a veteran SABLE captain. What had surprised him was what came after it.

Once this mission was over, he would be transferred out of SABLE and assigned as the instructor of a newly graduated Nourim squad. At first, Dasten had thought the old man was joking. A SABLE captain did not spend more than a decade leading covert operations only to be handed a group of academy children with freshly inked rank-markers and untested nerves. He had protested, of course. SABLE was where he belonged. Where he was useful. Where he was needed. The Vazaag had listened to every word.

Then he said it was an order. That had ended the argument. But it didn't mean Dasten had any idea how he was supposed to train children. He had led heavy assault teams into active dimensional rifts in the past, regularly cleared mutated beasts from the dormant rifts, and handled countless missions that did not get written down in ordinary reports. But instructing fresh Nourim? Training SABLE recruits was one thing. They were usually Tarim or Siurim already, with enough experience to survive being pushed hard.

Fresh academy graduates were different. These days, they were just children with rank-marker runes on their wrists. What was the Vazaag even thinking, sending him as their instructor? It wasn't boastful to say that assigning him to a fresh Nourim squad would be a terrible waste of Korsivir's limited resources.

To be fair, Dasten had graduated from the Mana Academy at ten during the last year of the Second Great Continental War, and had reached Siurim rank at fourteen—when he was still young enough that most people would have considered him a kid in these days of peace. So it wasn't the age of Nourims he had a problem with. With proper training, kids able to weave mana could do far more damage than most people expected. The problem was the academy itself.

He had heard some wild rumors about how low the standards had fallen since the war ended. It sounded bad enough that it wasn't even laughable anymore. He understood why the standards had first been lowered. Korsivir had needed revenue to rebuild after the war, and new manaweavers to replace the ones it had lost. Fortunately for Korsivir, the King of Varrenia had been willing to fund almost anything that promised more of them within his kingdom.

Relaxing the academy's graduation criteria so more children from civilian and merchant families could pass, and giving students more years to meet even the lowered standards, had been one of the easiest ways to increase the number of graduates. Each new graduate meant another manaweaver for Korsivir's reserve force, on the belief that the weaker ones could be brought up to standard there before they were truly needed. The civilian families, in turn, got to boast that one of their own had become a manaweaver.

A win for everyone, supposedly. Of course, not everyone had agreed with that decision. But every known rift across the continent had somehow gone dormant soon after the war ended. And after six years of brutal conflict, all the kingdoms and manaweaver cities had buried too many of their own to march into another war immediately. At the time, lowering the academy's standards to replenish the reserve force had probably seemed safe enough. But now? What if those rumors were true?

What if the newly graduating Nourim really were little more than children? Not even teaching them proper mana techniques in the academy was... absurd. He understood the concern, of course. It was hard to judge the loyalty of merchants' children when their families traveled all across the kingdom and into other countries all the time. But what was the point of calling them graduates of the Mana Academy if they were being sent into the field without even that much? He still hoped the rumors were exaggerated.

If the kids at least had the basics of manaweaving drilled into them properly, he could build from there, even if they didn't know any real mana techniques yet. The alternative was worse than he wanted to consider. Before long, the farmer in front of him was allowed through the gate, pulling Dasten's attention back to the present. My turn.