Book 4 Chapter 47: Kicking Pebbles

++The tell-tale signs of a battle between ancient liches have rarely changed throughout the ages. The first thing one wants to look for is generally a rather large, typically glowing crater.++

- Kithtani Vagrit, renowned hunter of undead and Godtouched of Maketa.

I travelled fast, alone as I was, to Asyran. The added power I had accumulated since I last came combined with the lightened load let me shave a good five or ten minutes off my journey, and I reached the continent with a few hours of daylight to spare.

My trip over the continent was substantially faster now that I did not need to worry about being detected pre-emptively. I had managed to set up a new shielding amulet for myself over the last six months, and, just as importantly, was not travelling with my younger siblings. If something attacked me here, I could focus on defending myself.

Not that I was attacked by anything. Jungles are nasty and dangerous places for the unfamiliar, but I bypassed the natural hostility of this one by simply flying over it and tracing the path I had memorised my sled taking upon my last visit. Reaching Shuo Meg’s temple took only a scant few minutes from there.

The place did not look any different, so if nothing else I decided it was unlikely that any great disaster had befallen it.

Shuo Meg’s people were undisturbed, too. They certainly seemed frightened as I approached, scattering and barking out warnings to one another—I had taught myself their language based on a few books on Asyran back in Poloira one afternoon, so I understood everything perfectly. None of it was of any particular interest to me, but it would likely be useful one day to speak the language of Shuo Meg’s subjects.

I was not impeded as I entered the temple, and I was met not fifty paces into it by Shuo Meg herself.

“I have come,” I announced redundantly. “Now what is so important that you could not tell me from afar?”

I considered an ambush of course, but I doubted it was anything as blunt as that. And even if it was, I doubted Shuo Meg could have set up procedures that would threaten Lord Dread in a mere six months. Not while hiding them from my eyes of all things.

“You were quicker than I expected,” Shuo Meg frowned. “Do you have some means of transportation in your human form? You cannot possibly have been foolish enough to fly as a lich.”

“I was not,” I assured her. Even with two of us present, we would not have survived the direct attention of Garamon’s Demigods. Had I trusted Sethira enough to bring her here alongside me to meet our fellow Lich, I would still have wagered that the Gods’ servants could overpower all three of us at once. They would not just send a single squad if they sensed Lord Dread. “Now, the mask fragment. Where is it, and what complication did you find?”

Shuo Meg began walking from the temple, and I followed, though kept my eyes peeled just in case she was foolish enough to set a trap.

“I have located its resting place, or hiding place more specifically. It is in a temple some hundred miles from here.”

“That is almost no distance at all,” I noted. I could fly that far myself in minutes, and even if Shuo Meg seemed to lack my own long-distance mobility, any powerful magician ought to have had a dozen ways to travel that span in a day or less at worst.

Apparently, Shuo Meg could travel fast, though not in any way I recognised. Her magic was far more akin to Sethira’s than my own, and yet different from both. Transmuting her body into a sort of cloud of crystalised flakes that flew as a mass, cutting through the air while still gliding thanks to the long, flat planes of their undersections. More than once I caught the sight of them edge-on, and saw how they almost disappeared. Imagining what they might do blurring into a target at speed, what sort of mess they might make of soft tissues, even bone. Transportation by flachettes was certainly a novel idea. I smiled as I hovered to begin flying alongside her, magic was such a beautiful thing.

It was almost a shame when our journey ended as the temple Shuo Meg had described became visible on the horizon. The first thing I noticed was that it was near-identical to hers. Not just built to the same standard, or for a similar purpose, it looked as though it had been made by the same hands. I had to resist the natural, and extremely mortal urge to glance over at the flachettes beside me as I considered that. Was this her own territory too? There were ancient liches there, by her own warning, so Shuo Meg having been displaced from it was far from impossible.

But that would be odd, because liches tend to prefer creating their own homes and equipment. Myself excluded, who was so vastly beyond all others as to make comparison practically ridiculous, each lich had the overwhelming, almost pathological certainty that they were in some way superior to all others. That there was some ineffable greatness possessed by them and them alone. This manifested as an intense focus on doing things oneself, and a natural distrust for the workmanship of anyone else.

And that was to say nothing of the practical details. Liches had a tendency to trap the things we built, if one of us forced another out of our home and squatted in it ourselves, we may spend centuries or more living among hidden devices just waiting for a detonation signal. One could try to search and weed them all out, naturally.

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But that would mean betting a whole lot on the assumption that you would find them all.

There was more to this situation. Unfortunately, at the velocity we approached, I had only a few seconds to work on the problem, and even I was not that quick. We came down before the temple, and Shuo Meg was a lich the moment she stepped over the threshold.

“You will want to be your true self for this,” she advised me.

I took the advice, becoming Lord Dread as I myself stepped over the threshold. As soon as I did I felt magic ahead, though I could tell it was clearly hidden. Were I in the same chamber I could have seen through just about any attempt at foiling my senses—but I was not. My mana sight would go through thick dust clouds and fog, but it would certainly not penetrate a plurality of stone walls.

We drifted down as I felt the weight of my new equipment. It had taken me over a year to enchant even two pieces, a protective amulet first, then a weapon. I was, I had to admit, rather excited to see them both in action. I could only hope these liches waiting for me ahead were somewhat above average.

We turned only a single corner before I was given such an opportunity, though not nearly against an enemy of sufficient power. One wall seemed to come alive with movement as no less than a dozen golems lumbered out of previously hidden crevices both before and behind us.

Iron, of course. I doubted a true lich would have found use from anything else. They were large and thick, practically overflowing with magic. I would have sighed if this body had lungs.

I stashed my weapon back away in my pocket-space, not wanting to let the enemy see it in action should they be watching this, and raised a hand lazily at the nearest set of golems barrelling towards me. A simple jet of flame would normally not suffice against animated constructs of solid iron, though when one had Lord Dread’s mana reserves a ‘jet of flame’ became rather intensified in meaning.

Yes, the stream of incandescent blue plasma proved perfectly serviceable. My only concern was finding myself rather buffeted by the resulting explosion as solids turned to liquids, then gasses all so fast that their resulting change of volume sent an unearthly pressure wave blasting through the tunnel. Enchanted stone held, and there was no cave in, but I could still not see with my physical senses for a good few moments more until the glowing-hot metal vapour had finished dispersing.

Magic vision let me see the next golem approaching rather more easily, however. It swung for me with a speed that belied its size and impacted fist-first exactly like several tons of iron moving with superhuman alacrity. I daresay even the fifteen-foot body of Lord Dread would have been harmed, had my new shielding amulet not flashed into function and intercepted the impact. The golem’s strike was neutralised, then repelled. Repelled violently enough that the offending arm just flew apart into a burst of supersonic shrapnel that embedded itself in several of the other constructs behind this one.

I tilted my head back to see that Shuo Meg was making quick work of her own adversaries as well, though I noted that she was fighting with far less reserve. She ran from one spell to another, flinging her power out in an endless variety of ways; a metal-eating magical net here, a sudden pit in the ground there, a pulse of strange energy that buckled the iron inwards and twisted it like rope to conclude. Was she simply stupid, too dull to realise that we were doubtless being tested?

No. I realised what was happening a moment later, then turned back to my own fight. Only a few of the golems that had attacked me remained. They were just the most annoying sort of opponent, covered with enough inches of enchanted iron that it required actual effort on my part to kill, but not nearly so durable as to give me any satisfaction from the fact. I impulsively considered teleporting them into the upper atmosphere to see if a near-sonic landing would kill them.

Probably, if they struck the equally-enchanted building, and probably not if they landed in the jungle. I opted to throw up a few barriers and compress them inwards anyway, feeling the metal give through my tactile connection to the magic. The resistance was so great that it actually started to heat up with sheer pressure, and was glowing cherry-red by the time the golems stopped twitching.

“THAT WAS MODERATELY INCONVENIENT,” I noted, now rather urged to do away with the masters of this place for its own sake. I turned to Shuo Meg and found she had already finished her enemies. Well no wonder, she was not holding back. “EXPLAIN HOW YOU KNOW THESE LICHES NOW,” I ordered her.

Liches do not have faces, but surprise is one of the many things I had learned to pick up on from posture alone. Hers was not that great however, apparently she had not been truly expecting me to miss the obvious.

The architectural similarities to her own temple, the fact that she did not shy away from using her magic when it was likely we were being watched—whomever these other ancients were, Shuo Meg knew them already, and had once been allied with them. Likely as fellow students given the similarities in their style.

“It is not relevant,” she told me.

I considered making her say more. It is not easy to torture a lich, but certainly possible. What stayed my hand was simply that torture does not work on its own, not without some external means of verifying the answers given. I did not have those means at my disposal right now, so it seemed I would not be finding out more.

“IF YOUR WITHHOLDING KNOWLEDGE CAUSES ME INJURY, OR DESTRUCTION, I WILL MAKE SURE TO OBLITERATE YOU BEFORE IT COMES,” I told her.

She nodded. I decided I would get no better than that, and ventured deeper with her, resigning myself to stay ready. I was confident that no two ancient liches had ever existed that could get the better of myself and Shuo Meg at once, but I was now starting to suspect this may, in fact, turn into a three-on-one.

If it did, I would be a fool not to consider the chance of defeat.

We ventured deeper, and we encountered one more set of defenders—this time clouds of animated, corrosive fog which did not survive my new, modern understanding of biochemical reactions. Shortly after disposing of that, we came to the lowermost parts of the temple.

The corridor opened out into a chamber large enough to fit every student in both Winzorth and Vornholt Institutes, with room to spare. The magic in the walls here was almost stronger than in the rest of the temple combined. Strong enough that I doubted the finest artillery in Garamon could fire enough shots to even scratch the substance before suffering from barrel wear.

But the most significant attraction were the two ancient liches, just as Shuo Meg had described, already descending upon us before I could register anything else.