Chương 137: Chapter 83 - Dissent

++I learned long ago that open tyranny tends to inspire resistance like nothing else. Garamon, apparently, did not. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Agrian Vornholt the Younger, second greatest magical prodigy in the history of Garamon and heir to the Vornholt family, had done an awful lot of shitwork recently. Including, quite literally, moving shit around.

Apparently the insular nature of battlemages within the army, and the amount of pull they had over Garamon's military as a collective, did not spare them from the unpleasant work. What did spare them, somewhat, was the ability to do it all magically and avoid getting one's own hands dirty. To an extent. Apparently nothing short of an actual, battle-strength shield would keep you from being splattered if you tried to remove excrement with a blasting spell.

Agrian really wished his mouth had been closed when he learned that. Nonetheless, despite a few early mishaps, Agrian fancied that he was adjusting to army life quite well. It would have been strange if he was not. Because, in the army, a man's value was distilled down to the most basic of facts. He fought and killed, survived and defended his allies. He ordered around his subordinates and obeyed his superiors and made sure that he was keeping all around him in order.

And if the man happened to be a magician, for once, everyone was pleased to see him. The men of Garamon's army didn't care how dirty and common a career in magic was, nor even did their officers. They just wanted whatever danger was in their vicinity to disappear, and if someone on hand could make that happen with a flick of his wrist then that someone would find himself popular indeed. Unfortunately, despite their victory in besieging Orapathaqi, the need for battlemagic had remained steady of late.

Several forces among the natives continued to resist, all spread out and thinly distributed across the city's million-or-so people, but all terribly well organised. Most in command of Garamon's battlemages suspected that one or more of the city's original leadership had survived the initial fighting. If that was the case, they were clearly not happy about that fighting either. They'd been coordinating a relentless campaign to assault the men of Garamon's army at all times and all places.

More than once, Agrian had heard report of men stumbling back from a tavern being set upon by natives in civilian attire. Most of those poor sods were shot or stabbed to death before they could so much as defend themselves. Sometimes, even magicians were the targets. And several of those magicians had died. It was all a sobering reminder, both to Agrian and his new comrades, that magic did not make them invulnerable.

Far from it; if a magician was caught with his powers inactive, he was no more durable than the common man. This state of affairs had done two things; first, ensured that all battlemages were constantly escorted by at least a few warriors. Second, see to it that Agrian was making quite a name for himself from being good in a crisis. Because out of all the battlemages, except perhaps Isabel counting her devastating initial push through the city during its actual siege, he had killed more rebels than any other.

Today Agrian wasn't venturing out on a mission as exciting as head-hunting, just a simple pickup that someone higher in the chain of command had decided warranted a bit of magical power as insurance. He felt pride at that. In general Agrian was liking the army more than he'd ever liked the Institute. He was more useful here by far, and even Isabel, shying away in her quarters as she had been, didn't outshine him.

He headed out with his escort and moved through the city, well used to its oddly formed streets by now and navigating them without issue. A smile burned on his face. But it didn't last long. Agrian moved past a pair of other Garamon magicians, neither of whom saw him due to how heavily focused they were on what they were doing to the native girl caught between them, pinned by one and— … Agrian looked away.

He couldn't stop this; the official order had been given against such treatment, but official orders reached only as far as the disciplinarian core of the army, which simply lacked the numbers to cover most of Orapathaqi. There was always a district not overseen enough to be properly free of such things. By now, Agrian had started to think that was intentional. Some grotesque way of keeping up morale among the men by giving them free toys elsewhere, far from sight and out of mind.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. People, Agrian was increasingly learning, did not tend to care about something that they could not see. They might know about it, might know for a fact it was happening because of their own actions, but if it was not occurring right before their eyes, it was easily ignored.

He thought back to how Bagran tended to treat Isabel at that, but his mind was leading somewhere unpleasant and uncomfortable so he quickly shut it down as he kept walking. His sister would be fine. That much he didn't need convincing of, from either himself or anyone else. A fucking volcano could randomly erupt under their feet and Isabel would probably emerge from it with nothing more than a complaint about her dress being ruined. Agrian wasn't that formidable, himself. Not nearly so ineffably… immune.

If he wanted to escape horrid danger without serious injury, he needed to work for it with a high guard and quick reflexes. As soon as he was more than a block from the unofficially named Safe-Zone, where the army's presence was strong enough to deter any and all attacks, he quickly threw up a personal shield around himself. It shimmered and popped against the air, and Agrian caught his escort looking at it. He winced.

"I…can't make one big enough for us all," he explained.

"Sorry lads." They did not seem surprised by this, but were clearly not pleased. Truth be told, Agrian might've been able to fit another man in the shield, but no more. The limits of how far he could project mana beyond his skin were only half of the equation, the other was basic geometry. Take two spheres; one measuring a metre across and the other two. The one-metre sphere would have a total surface area of just over three point one square metres. The two-metre sphere's would be more like twelve point six.

Double diameter, and you quadrupled area. Inversely, if you projected power over a given area then at a distance of one metre from the epicentre it would be four times as concentrated as it was at a distance of two metres. The inverse-square law. Agrian's brain wasn't good with the esoteric theory of magic, and worse for the hard study of other things, but this was one rule of thumb the Winzorth Institute had been sure to drill into each and every one of its students.

Because it was very likely to be the difference between life and death. Agrian could make a shield twice as big as his current one, and maybe he could even get one of the men with him to walk in time so that he didn't trip or bash against the edges. But with only one-quarter of its energy density, that shield may well fall to small-arms fire. It was by far the most unpleasant and ubiquitously-felt fact of magic.

For each amazing feat you may be able to think of, there were a dozen cold, practical facts ensuring that it would remain in your imagination. Could Isabel have shielded several people? Agrian did wonder, by now she seemed to have as much power as Agrian would if he had half an Agrian helping him out, maybe more. The gap was growing rather than shrinking over time. His mood sank lower as he kept walking after that thought.

The resupply mission was a simple one, simple enough that Agrian felt his involvement was almost superfluous. There were four cardinal points to Orapathaqi's walls and, following the news of Sakhent brought by himself and the rest of Aryqatan's team after their disastrous mission, they knew that there was a very big fucking threat to the northwest. The south, though, was near-impassable desert that even a magician would've found difficult or dangerous to get through.

The thought of Estalia marching a whole army through it was no thought at all. The thought of an undead army, even, getting past, was one that would bring them enough warning to shore up their defences in preparation anyway. Which made the southern wall a point of low strategic urgency. In short, they could afford to strip munitions and such from there to make certain the more usefully placed guns elsewhere didn't run out of ammo mid-assault.

The only danger here was getting ambushed by rebels on their way, but with a dozen men, three of them warriors, and himself, Agrian wasn't feeling too worried. He kept his guard up anyway, right until he came to the tower he'd been told to strip bare. Identical to all the others, he thought. Big and old and affixed to the towering walls, looking like it had been made long ago to stave off an assault from something a good deal bigger than humanity. Now there was a thought, it kept Agrian busy as he got to work.

Between the help and the urgency, it didn't take them long. But half an hour into the work, when they were almost ready to leave, Agrian felt a change in the wind. He sensed magic.

"Everyone stay calm," he said slowly.

"But I think we're about to be attacked." He'd been anticipating blind panic, but of course these were veterans he was with and not a one of the men did anything they shouldn't have. All went rigid and ready, unslinging rifles from their shoulders and squatting low, ready to act. Eyes turned to Agrian and he realised he'd become the de facto leader. Fuck that.

"Bronly, suggestion?" he asked the senior-most man present, on account of knowing that he'd actually been in multiple firefights before and was properly trained for them. The man paused before answering.

"I say we make a rapid push for it, sir," he whispered after a moment.

"If we're being moved on, it'll be by a force confident it can take us out, right?"

"Right." That was how the rebels operated; weaker than the army as a whole, they nonetheless inflicted savage casualties by ensuring they concentrated their limited manpower into those smaller Garamon forces that could be most easily taken apart. So far, it had worked very well for them. Agrian had been the wild card in the ambushes he'd seen simply because the enemy consistently underestimated what he was capable of, likely judging by youth. But he wasn't going to bank on that this time.

Not when he'd already taken out a few ambushes himself over the past weeks, and certainly not when he'd approached this place with a shield crackling around him practically advertising his magical power to the whole world. It'd seemed smart at the time, assurance he wouldn't be killed by some sniper and a warning to anyone who might attack. Didn't feel smart now.

"We move out all at once," Agrian told the group.

"Drop the supplies and just focus on speed, right?" Nobody answered, and he nodded just to himself.

"Right." Agrian had to resist the urge to start channeling more mana, that would only tip off any caster-priests, which he was almost certain would be among the enemy, of what was about to happen.

"Okay," he croaked.

"Alright…Go." His legs didn't obey him at first, then instinct took over and he was sprinting out of the building with his men. Everything descended into chaos as they burst from it.