The Archmage: Chapter Five

As the force thundered down on me, I realized why Edward was considered to be a good candidate for becoming the next archmage.

But so was I. 

I swept the power of my cloak out around me, running the divination spells on full blast until… There! With a surge of power, I engaged my abjuration functions. 

The spell shattered, reforming under my power, and the hallway exploded as force ripped outwards at Edward. I cut the spell off quickly – Tara was still holding off the wards, keeping them from being able to be closed in on us, and if I let the spell get too out of control, it might hit her. 

I took a breath as I looked at Edward, hoping the blow had killed him.

Instead, he was wrapped in force armor, but… not. It wasn’t the ordinary force armor spell, but instead, it looked like an elaborately carved suit of plate mail. It glowed green with the color of his aura, and I could see that it was a truly absurd spell in terms of complexity. More than that, it seemed to use his body rune to do… something. 

It mixed the force and his body together, but I couldn’t tell what, because he was engulfed in bright blue fire from Osheen’s hands. The flames spun in a cyclone around the armored figure, but the armor just slowly grew larger and larger. 

I began running my divination spells over it, hoping I’d be able to cut it off, but it seemed to have some sort of counter-divination principle. I hadn’t even been aware that was possible, but then again, the King had somehow managed to infuse the Ghost Plate spell into his force shields, so I assumed this armor used a similar principle. 

Edward’s armor grew until it stood nearly nine feet tall, but it just stood there, so I snapped my wands off my belt and fired off attacking spells. They didn’t do much, even when I slammed the overcharging orb onto one of them, but I had to do something as my cloak worked, worming away at the counter-divination. 

Osheen released a force beam, then several force beams, and a crashing pillar of fire, but the armor just stood there. I thought I saw the flickering of runes inside – he was casting something, probably trying to desperately maintain the armor against our assault.

“He’s got to run dry on Aura soon,” I muttered. 

As if to prove me wrong, the armor finally moved. It exploded forwards with a speed that something of that size shouldn’t have been able to muster, and threw itself at Osheen.

Even as his contingency arch-star activated his armor, I used a surge of force enhancement to throw myself in the way of the armor. My defenses were stronger, and when the fist came down on me, I activated my modular ward. 

The armor hammered blows down on my head, and then it finally clicked what was going on, the divination defenses. 

They weren’t defenses. The spell itself was changing. 

Sorcerers always changed their spells, of course, making on the fly modifications to grow or shrink a spell size, to pump more power in, or let their attacks not harm their allies. 

This wasn’t that. 

The spell was changing radically, shifting between three different spell languages, each of which had been designed for this armor in exactly the same way, but using radically different arrays. 

It made it fiendishly complex to break, just like how the rotating wards on the house required active work from Tara to maintain, but with the new knowledge, I measured out in quick breaths how long it took the spell to change, then… 

I thrust my hand out and shattered the armor spell, expecting to see Edward Elide fall to the floor.

Osheen punched out a fireball, hoping to hit Edward in the moments between the spell’s breaking and putting up new armor. 

But the armor was empty, and the fireball whistled through the air to splash harmlessly against one of the walls. 

“What?” Osheen asked. 

I whipped my head around, looking for any signs of runes, of magic of any sort. If he’d used a veiling artifact, then I should be able to see the runes that made it up. If it was a mental spell, then it may be a bit trickier, but the mere fact I was thinking about the fact I might be influenced by a mental spell was enough to help decrease any power it would hold over me. 

Besides, I hadn’t felt my mind bubble breaking. While it was possible a skilled mind mage could slip around it, it shouldn’t be easy. Between my cloak’s mind bubble, my own awareness, and my third eye, I should have been able to stand against any mental spells. 

Then I had a horrible thought. My third eye didn’t let me see through walls, so one of the best ways to hide magic from me was inside a solid object. I’d tricked the King by running my aura under the floor and activating his summoning circle. 

What if the flickers of runes that I’d seen hadn’t been Edward trying to maintain the armor, but the activation of a veil. 

Osheen and I shared a glance. 

“He’s deeper in the manor,” Osheen said, having reached a similar conclusion. “He’s retreated to a sanctum, or is calling guards in. It’s the only thing that makes sense.” 

We turned and sprinted down the hallway, looking for Edward… 

Only for wards to start blaring and going off all throughout the house. The end of the hallway closed off with a projected force ward, and I slammed right into it. 

We whipped around. Had Tara’s spells slipped? 

I reached out to Oracle, asking him how his side of things was going. 

From one of the hills behind the manor, I got a view of Tara, her armor fully activated, whipping and whirling through a group of almost a dozen guards. She was holding her own, but she was still outnumbered so badly that it was obvious she would lose eventually. 

“Activate it,” I whispered to Oracle, and both Osheen and my Aura’s lit up as our familiars drained them. 

Bridgettte was a combat familiar, but she was too distinctive for Osheen to have felt comfortable bringing her in to fight Edward. 

Oracle wasn’t directly useful in combat, but his own skills as a ritualist had grown considerable. 

So while Osheen and I had been in the house, our familiars had been making a backup plan – a sprawling siege magic array that would unleash a blast of fire at the house, hopefully draining or breaking the wards entirely. 

The spell hadn’t been given its full charging time, but Osheen provided the power. My own power was rather less considerable, but I added what I could. 

I watched as a ball of fire, easily large enough to have entirely filled my old bedroom in Aldvarri’s house, launched from the array and launched towards the manor house. The display was impressive enough that the guards that Tara was fighting froze for a second. 

And Tara used that second, whipping her bad luck into several of them. She hadn’t built up enough of a luck differential for that to immediately be fatal, but it was still enough to leave causality-injures, and I saw several of their faces light up with pain. 

The fireball slammed into the house, and I saw bright blue wards flare up all around it.

For a long moment, it seemed like it was an even contest. The wards were on mid-power, which meant they were intended to fend off medium level threats, but the fireball we’d launched was a well built one, calling on the power of three realms, using my realm-reaching archstar, and mixing together phoenix magic, late autumnal bonfire magic, and human fire magic. 

Then the wards got brighter, and golden power began to unspool through them. Spellbottles all throughout the house, carefully placed and optimized, activated, their stored spells and wards springing to life around the manor.

Three giant circles of power, blazing with light, each one formed from dozens of stored fragments, all clicked together. From Oracle’s vantage point at the top of the hill, he could make it out clearly. 

The first circle intersected with the wards, overpowering them and making the defenses and alarms all the more powerful. 

The second circle was a grand healing array, one connected by blood to a specific person… Someone I had no doubt would be Edward, and maybe his wife. 

The third circle projected a force dome over the entire multi-acre estate, locking us in. 

With the full powered defenses of the house activated, the fireball snuffed out in a second. 

That was all I was able to figure out before I had a vision: I was being thrown backwards through the air, force armor cracking.

My future sight spell. 

With a second of warning, I brought my vision back into my body and used the force enhancement spell to bolt out of the way of an attack thundering through the hallway. Osheen let out a cry and smashed a ball of flame into the ward in front of us. but it didn’t even crack. 

It wouldn’t, I knew.

As I landed, I grabbed Osheen’s hand. 

“It’s gone. We need to go.” 

“Okay,” he said. 

Edward and his wife launched force spears at us, and I broke them apart, tucking seven into my storage bottle-pockets as Osheen and I dashed down the hall, to the door we’d entered through. 

I frantically ran my cloak over the defenses, absorbing all the knowledge I could from them while Osheen played defense, tanking the blows and sending them off to the side whenever he could. 

It was no good, though. Under the supercharging effect, I wasn’t going to be able to break it. 

So I focused on the second abjuration spell, spell alteration. It wasn’t something I’d had much opportunity to make use out of – most of the time, it was easier to just break the spell as a whole. 

This time, however, I rerouted the power of the ward, just two feet behind us. My cloak’s power drained at an absurd rate, trying to keep up with power sustained by the sacrifice of dozens, maybe hundreds of people. 

The ward sprung into place, and I grabbed Osheen’s hand, pulling him outside. The moment we were outside, I stopped altering the ward, instead releasing my stolen force spears at Tara’s opponents. 

They hadn’t been expecting or ready for us, but each of their armor spells was strong. They were knocked into a disarray, but that was plenty for Tara. 

She sailed through the air, her whip flashing, and I saw a soldier convulse as it unloaded a massive amount of bad luck into him. A knife flew from her fingers into the throat of another. 

Then Edward and his wife emerged from the house. I could see spells building around both of their hands, some sort of joint spell that required two people to be able to cast. They thrust their hands out, and force erupted from the earth underneath us. I dashed out of the way, barely keeping myself from being smashed into paste, and Osheen spread wings of fire to get out of the way. I would have flown too, but I needed to preserve every bit of power I had. 

Tara’s own temporal acceleration and future sight was more advanced than mine, and she was able to slip out of the way with a gracefulness I wasn’t able to imitate. 

“Flee!” I shouted, and she nodded, turning to join me in running, while Osheen flew away overhead.