Chương 36: Chapter 35: The Benefits of Preparation

++A good lesson to learn for any young magician is this; everyone will always want something from you. The ones who claim not to are who you should watch the most. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E"Get behind me, mother," I ordered, raising my hands as I stepped forward. I was not eager to fight unknown men—almost certainly magicians—without time to prepare my defenses and ensure that I would perform at my best, but I was at least not helpless now either.

I was at least old and trained enough that it would not be too suspicious if I mounted resistance. However I did not get the chance to test my power against them, because my mother stepped in front of me.

"Behind me Isabel!" she demanded, raising her hands and glaring at the men.

"If you want my daughter, you're going to have to go through me." It was among the bravest things I had ever seen, considering her powerlessness, but not especially helpful. The men walked deeper in through the clearing debris and sneered up at her. Clearly they had done their research, and knew this was just an unpowered woman shouting down at them, because they were not even remotely wary. What did frighten them was when one of the men's heads exploded in gore and he fell down heavily at the feet of his allies.

All of them snapped into motion at that, whipping around, throwing up shields of aether or force, doing all they could to avoid being the victim of another gunshot. And they did, decently enough. What they did not do, however, was manage to avoid being victims when another shot struck something high in the ceiling over their heads, setting off an explosive charge which dumped what had to be several tonnes of marble onto them. Dust shot up and outwards, rushing around the whole hall in vast, choking clouds.

I threw up a minor shield around myself and my mother to filter out the worst of it, enjoying the chance to test a new spell matrix I had acquired for separating substances from the air. It let us keep breathing cleanly while the debris surrounded us, but did not do anything for our sight. With so much dust swirling around so violently, the concepts of visual range and melee range had suddenly become one and the same. That was not good, not at all.

When you have the body of an eleven year-old girl, melee range is your worst nightmare.

"We need to leave," I whispered to my mother.

"Do you know an alternative route?"

"Yes," she nodded with hard eyes.

"This way." I did not ask how she was navigating, simply followed her as she led me flawlessly through the dust. We paused only as it started to clear, revealing several surviving men coughing and screaming beside a pile of shattered stone. They saw us quickly and began their pursuit. I readied myself to fight them, building all the magic I had at my disposal.

I could certainly dispatch one, if only thanks to the surprise he would feel at seeing so much strength from a mere child, which would leave my mysterious benefactor to slay the rest. But it did not even come to that. The door behind my mother and myself burst in, and my father stormed into the chamber. In his hands was the single largest gun I had ever encountered, seen or even heard about.

Its barrel was hidden inside a much larger, closed cylinder, and a long belt of finger-sized bullets trailed from its side and dangled with every movement. The whole thing must have weighed so much that a normal man would struggle to carry it, but of course he hauled it around one-handed like it weighed nothing. It is difficult to describe the utter dread I saw on the magicians' faces as they laid eyes upon that weapon, or the glee I saw on my father's as he laid eyes on their dread.

"We're ready for you this time, you little lumps of fuck!" He opened fire, and the gun's roaring left a sting in my ears even from over a dozen paces away. Fortunately I was well to the side of its field of fire, but I threw up a shield anyway just to make sure. With how powerful this weapon was, I felt certain a rebounding bullet would still have enough energy to kill me. The directly-impacting ones definitely had enough to kill our enemies.

They shielded themselves too, and their walls of aether overlapped to actually hold up against the sustained fire. For a few moments. But cracks quickly started appearing in the material, aether pitting as it suffered from impacts far greater than any man-powered weapon could possibly produce. In a few seconds, holes began to appearing, and the bullets flew through them to leave even more holes in the men they were aimed at.

I struggled to even see the magicians after a moment, the insides of their own shields filled with so much bloody mist that it obscured them from my sight. The gunfire finally stopped, and by the time it did my father was surrounded by enough smoke to choke half a classroom. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"How did you like that, eh?" he spat, fiddling with his gun and causing its now-empty belt of ammunition to detach. Then he drew out and loaded another one, then began firing all over again, emptying the second round of what had to be several hundred bullets directly into the magicians' corpses. By the time he was done, they did not really resemble corpses anymore. More like pieces of disconnected meat scattered across the ground. The smell of gunpowder made my eyes water.

"Elizabeth?" he growled, "are you and Isabel okay?"

"Y—yes, Agrian," my mother croaked. I thought she was frightened for a moment, but then I saw the look on her face and how she was biting her lip…I quickly looked away. Being fully conscious while she pushed me out of her was one thing, but I did not wish to picture her and my father copulating.

"Good," the Baron declared.

"Agrian is being watched over by several of my men, but I left him with them when I saw their main force circling around here." Another distant rumble ran through the building, shaking a few splinters of not-yet-fallen stone from the damaged ceiling far overhead. My father saw our questioning looks and grinned.

"Mortar," he explained.

"Borrowed it from an old army friend, bloody good noisemaker isn't it?" It did not take long for us to clear out of the room following that. The rest of the mansion was nowhere near as badly damaged, though I noticed a lot more bullet holes in various walls as we went. My mother noticed it too.

"Did you have to be so…destructive?" she asked my father. He just laughed and hefted his ridiculous firearm again.

"I remember how frightened you were last time, love, I wanted to show these bastards what for. Besides, I've been prepared for this for ages and I was rather excited to see all the set-up go to use." After accidentally stepping in a bit of brain matter as we turned a corner, I decided that my father's excitement was something I had best steer clear of in the future. Agrian the Younger, of course, was fine, he had been one of the best-defended in the house simply thanks to his own magic.

He had managed to overcome his inability to use it caused by stress and fear from our last kidnapping, though even if he had not, he had been with our father when the assault began and, as a result, likely the safest person within several hundred square miles. Certainly safer than the foolish souls who had tried to step into this set of traps to kidnap him. He rushed over and hugged our mother when we reached him, and I saw both Victoria and Qaigor had been hiding behind our elder brother.

The boy looked to be entirely at peace, but the girl, older and clearly more aware of her surroundings, knew enough to be frightened.

"Are you okay?" Agrian asked, holding our mother tight against him.

"Father went off to get you, but I had to stay here for Victoria and Qaigor." A wise decision of course, but our father seemed to disapprove. His lip curled somewhat.

"Yes, that's why you did it, of course." Was he accusing my brother of cowardice for protecting small children? And here I thought his idiocy could no longer surprise me. I considered whether or not I ought to explain to my father the folly of his ways when something unexpected and horrible distracted me. Victoria rushed over to hug me.

"You're okay!" she yelled, as I stumbled back in disgust.

"Unhand me!" she just giggled, and hugged even harder. Her face was leaking again, and she smeared the discharge all down my new dress. I had taken a liking to dresses, recently. I enjoyed dressing well and being seen to dress well. I would now be burning this piece of clothing, because I did not trust any cleaning agent made by mortal or immortal hands to properly cleanse it after such a contamination.

"It's good to see you two are getting along," my mother observed idly. I shot her a glare, which she seemed to find terribly amusing. Our father was nowhere to be seen, apparently having left again during my distraction.

"I love Isabel!" Victoria exclaimed as she hugged me again.

"And I…like you," I told her gently, "but I would like you even more if you stopped congealing on my clothes." She giggled again.

"She reminds me of you when you were her age," Agrian chuckled.

"No she does not," I snapped.

"Take that back or I will set you on fire." He did not take it back, and responded simply by showing me how straight his middle finger could get. The levity did not last long however, we were still, after all, standing in a badly damaged, shot-up and bombed-out mansion. The magicians may have done some damage to it in their attack, as well. Fortunately for my father, he had two half-trained magicians to aid him with repairs. Unfortunately for me, I was one of them.

I had made a great deal of progress in evocation and illusion, but not quite as much in the other fields of magic. Conjuration was still beyond me, I had only just started to begin practical work with it and Professor Bogern announced his class would be learning our first actual summoning rituals only once the summer was over. Transfiguration, however, was in-between these two levels of mastery for me. The alteration and reshaping of matter in, usually non-destructive ways. A natural extension of aether.

All magic is real, and it is not real. The effect of intelligent minds imprinting on the world around them. Most magic seeks to simply change the impressions, but transfiguration did the opposite—it directly altered already-existent targets from one form to another. Fiendishly complex, but endlessly versatile. I had once used it to break down matter as a means of attack, and since my time a lot had been learned about using it to recreate things instead.

It was rather obvious why this would prove to be the most useful tool in my arsenal for this particular work. Agrian was actually better than me in this area, too. We had begun learning at around the same time, and though I was clearly the greater talent in general there were specific fields where he surpassed me. This was one of them. I could use transfiguration to slightly warp and re-meld broken edges, melting solid material together provided it was not too badly shattered.

Agrian could do this too, but with far less even breaks and making up for far more lost matter. Between the two of us we were making steady but slow progress in remaking fallen walls and cracked floors. What he could not do was multitask his powers over as large an area of with as much intensity as me, I had surpassed him in raw magical strength quite some time ago, and was always his superior in control. Between the two of us, we were fixing the house almost as thoroughly as our father had broken it.

We worked for the remainder of the day, which did not bother me as much as it might have since I was able to turn it all into an exercise for my magical abilities. By the time night was falling, and our father called Agrian away on some business between them, we had almost covered one twentieth of the estate. Almost.