Chương 102: Chapter 91 - Peace Keeping

++If there was one great benefit to fighting warriors, it is that they actually simulated the experience of fighting Demigods quite well, while being vastly more common. I had never gotten much practice in slaying the most powerful servants of the Gods. The modern age gave me a chance to rectify that. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Bagran was in a good mood, I thought. That much was rather obvious.

I had noticed the boy flirted more when he was in a good mood, and less when in a bad one. Quite like a poorly trained dog that knew no better way to show excitement than by humping a person's leg. Fortunately, he did not go quite that far. As clearly unevolved as he was, he had been raised by fellow humans. Or at least, I was fairly sure he had been raised by fellow humans.

He talked of coming from a magician family, but perhaps the family in question was actually a pack of magically powerful, sex-addicted baboons.

"You know, I'm glad we're able to start again," he told me as we walked.

"Keep your voice down," I instructed him. Maybe he adjusted the volume by a shade, but not by enough.

"I'm glad," he repeated as if I had not spoken.

"Because I can't help but feel like we got off on the wrong foot. You know, you and I have more in common than any other two people alive." I ignored the question, hoping that if I simply remained silent then he would stop assaulting my eardrums with his voice. This did not work.

"We have more in common with each other, because we are the two most talented magicians alive. Perhaps the most talented ever to live." I had to actually focus on resisting the urge to snort with laughter. Bagran was certainly a magical genius, that much was beyond argument. In fact his talent most likely appeared in less than one out of every ten million magician births. But that was all. He was not among the greats of long history, not even unparalleled in the magicians currently alive.

Putting aside myself, for obvious reasons, Agrian was advantaged over him by a reasonable amount, Paula was probably close to his raw potential, though had been weakened irreversibly by the way she had started. Even Nesariyah was not so far behind him. Like Victoria, her own abilities would probably be found in maybe one out of every million magicians. That tenfold difference in rarity led to diminished returns when it came to the raw power they possessed. To hear Bagran compare himself to me was… it was absurd.

I felt rather like someone had presented a parrot to a linguistics professor, declared it his equal and then attempted to prove the fact by having it recite a knock knock joke.

"I think you are overestimating yourself," I said at last, diplomatically I thought. Bagran seemed to disagree.

"Now you're just being a bitch," he snapped.

"Why do you do that? Act like you hate me."

"Because you are annoying, ignore my constant rejections and act as if I am saying exactly what you hoped I would regardless of what my actual words are, like you are not even listening to me." He rolled his eyes.

"You know playing hard to get does get old eventually." I had literally been shot by men I did not want to fireball as much as this dribbling simpleton. Fortunately, I was given another outlet for my rage as we continued our patrol. The strategy was simplicity itself, but that did not make it any less deadly. With Bagran and myself being the strongest pair, rivalled only by Agrian and Huit, we were also more or less completely insulated from danger. Our guards remained up, however, and our magic keen.

Even though it took us hours to actually encounter something, we were ready and alert when we did.

"I'll go first," Bagran told me as we first sighted them. I was the one responsible for that, utilizing a new technique I had been working on since Agrian's capture. Sending out waves of mana through the air was an excellent way to let other magicians locate me by tracing them back. The earth, though… well, they were not nearly as skilled at picking up energies running through solid matter.

By pulsing the ground of Orapathaqi with my power, I could read and follow back the reverberations and, with careful practice, outline the location, and even some physical features, of potential enemies. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. The most useful aspect was that the wave was distorted slightly on contact with the natural mana of a magician's body, allowing me to differentiate them from ordinary people.

"Six men, four magicians," I told Bagran. Then frowned.

"No. Some are warriors, it is…hm." Warriors. I had not considered them when I made the spell, falling into that treacherous habit all truly powerful creatures do and overlooking my inferiors. That was a very good way to die, as the Gods would soon learn. Fortunately I had caught myself before it could come to that.

"This spell is not ideal for identifying warriors, but at least some of the six are. Their locations are…" I rattled out the details, making sure Bagran knew what was certain fact and what was likely guesswork.

"Right then," he nodded.

"I'll go first." I was not fully surprised to hear him repeat the statement. Nor was I about to argue.

"By all means," I nodded, which seemed to inspire some perverse glee on his face.

"You can just sit back and watch me take care of this for you," he added. I decided not to inform him that I was simply practical enough to use a human shield when it so enthusiastically volunteered its services. Bagran swaggered his way over, perhaps attempting to look impressive and manly but succeeding only in looking like a man who was very desperate to appear impressive and manly. Even I had to admit, however, that things became far more notable when his magic came out.

Great disks of aether formed before him, slowly spinning in the air like they were turned on invisible strings. He held them in place for a moment as yet more aether formed through them, lengths of flexible stuff this time binding them in place even as he dragged them back and added strain to the elastic shackles. I realised what he was doing a moment before he loosed them, turning all his backward effort into forward momentum and sending the disks streaking through the air.

They screamed as they flew, like the air itself was putting up a foul resistance and being shorn in two. Then they passed through the walls, the people behind the walls, and the second walls behind those people. I had to wait a few moments for the bodies to fall, when they had my magic echolocation revealed only three men still alive.

"Left!" I barked, informing Bagran of the one magician while turning my own focus to the right and finding it met by two warriors. They burst through the high window of the building and came at me like a pair of sprinting jaguars. Not as fast as my father, not anywhere near as close. The first of them sprinted straight into a risen wall of aether, bolted down into the ground to hold it upright as he smashed against it.

The material did not break, just had its translucent face painted sticky and red where his face mashed it. The second warrior, both stronger and quicker, leapt over the wall. A bad move, he spent long moments falling back down under gravity's touch. Long before he was on me, I sent out a great fist of aether to crunch into him and… hm, it landed awkwardly, losing much of its power as parts of it that ought to have flexed didn't and parts that should have been solid were not.

The warrior was thrown off-course and landed on his head, but simply rolled back to his feet. Falls of a mere ten feet would not threaten him, naturally.

"Missed your chance, whore!" he screamed, throwing himself back at me. I could not help but smile. Miss my chance? Not at all. I was taking full advantage of my chance. My chance to hone this new, anti-warrior technique and ensure that it could stand up to physical abilities far in excess of my own. A second blow struck him, better than the first. Two more followed it, both worse.

Fortunately my enemy now was of a lowly enough calibre that I could afford to take my time and make adjustments to the spell matrix in-between blows, a truly useful, if unwilling, sparring partner. Eventually, he seemed to realise this himself. I saw him wavering, eyes flicking to an alley near us. He wanted to flee.

"Turn your back to me," I told him.

"And you will die." A magic missile punctuated my words, digging into the stone of the city's street and punching feet deep into it. His eyes went wide. He knew I was not bluffing. And he resumed his assault. Bit by bit, I was honing my technique. It essentially involved long coils of aether held stable and lasting around me, forcibly maintained in that semi-formed state where their properties were still changeable, but they did not require all of my focus to keep from dissolving.

Solid or not, they still had mass, and moving so much material would have limited the speed of even my mana. So, like usual, I cheated. I was keeping most of the aether still, and moving only one part of the long coils at a time, moving the centre of rotation along the limbs so that, by the time it reached the end, a tiny fraction of the objects were moving with as much momentum as the rest of them combined. Whip strikes, essentially.

Though vastly more precise thanks to the fact that I was actually manipulating every inch of the whips in question. They tore apart the air and left it screaming in pain as their ends accelerated past the speed of sound. Such was the theory. In practice, they were still clumsy, sluggish and prone to wasting most of their energy. Even with the glancing blows I was managing, my test subject's body gave in long before my will to keep practicing.

He dropped to his knees in front of me, bleeding and wheezing, eyes watering, blood drooling from his lips.

"I…I surrender," he croaked.

"Yes, I suppose you do," I sighed.

"You kept fighting longer than most of Orapathaqi, at least. You are my prisoner now, I suppose." He glared at me, burning hatred.

"Why are you doing this?! Why can't you just leave us alone?"

"Shut up," I sighed. I was in no mood to talk about the irritations of pragmatism. Instead I turned my mind to Bagran's own fight. As I might have thought, his opponent was one of the stronger, dark-robed necromancers, and the two were straining against each other still. Bagran had the advantage, I fancied. Indeed he had matured a lot since stumbling around in Sakhent's ruins, and if his raw power was not much greater his levelheadedness when using that power in combat was night and day.

The necromancer lost an arm to a magic missile, then a foot to an explosion of stone beneath him. He fell back, and his head was removed before I could call out telling Bagran to refrain from it. The boy turned to me with a grin.

"Like blasting fish in a barrel," he grinned. I did not share the sentiment.