Helping Hands

  The twenty minutes it took for our rescue to arrive were mostly a blur of arcana and violence in my mind. The barriers held, but they needed to be recast several times, and we could not allow too much of the monsters to get too close, else they would figure out they could batter the barriers down by battering me down via damage transfer, and so I kept casting combat magic. My mana went down to 24, 22, 20, increments of two as I kept casting my first tier combat spells, and soon enough I was casting from hit-points.

  All the while I was darting my eyes around, expecting to see the glint of silver from Jea’s implements, or some other new terror that would kill us where we sat. Clarence and Anna had no spells or abilities that could pass through the barriers, and so it was up to me to hold them off. Anna did get a major working off when the barriers came down and had to be recast in an exceptional example of perfect timing. Corpses and fire kept building all around us.

  Then a wrecking ball hit the gathering throng of beastfolk. When I recognized that the rapidly moving black and brown blur was screaming metal song lyrics poorly as it killed the enemy, I finally recognized that it was Zack. The air went colder. The monsters looked over their shoulders behind them. Then they began trying to flee and trample over one another, as Hannah approached from behind the treeline with eyes glowing green. But they didn’t get to run away into the woods. Almost as soon as they made it out of the light of our fires, the first white-flash of arcane explosions went off.

  “Get mined, wankers!” Emma’s voice came from the darkness. And the clearing was soon empty of threats. More figures emerged from the direction of Checkpoint, but my mind switched off entirely when I realized that we were saved. I felt a muscular shoulder under me and smelled alcohol and sweat, and then we were running through the woods, myself and Anna as useful as sacks of grain over Zack’s shoulder.

  “Pseudoportal. She’ll hit us once we’re out of anti-magic,” I mumbled.

  “Gotcha, dude. Ey, wizard dudes! We’re gonna need counterspells in a few,” Zack shouted out to the empty darkness in the woods.

  And soon enough spells were flying through the woods as they worked against Xem’s apprentice. Since she was already at a disadvantage casting through the pseudoportal, she gave up after the third time a beefed up dispel hit her portal before she could cast anything through it.

  “Whiteroom ‘em?” Emma said at one point in my semi-conscious journey back to Checkpoint.

  “Get him a box,” Zack said.

  There were sounds of fighting every few steps. Finally we reached the environs of Checkpoint, and I raised my head to see what was up. It was quite the sight. These fortifications would be entirely impossible without all the abilities the Guild had access to. Three rows of deep ditches were filled with both spikes and magical traps glowing subtly in the night. A palisade of great old trees, cut down, sharpened to spikes and turned to hard stone through magic made the walls of the town. Thousands of rotting corpses impales on spikes, torn apart by traps and killed by the defenders on the walls. Even now there was a circle of enemies around the walls, and our group didn’t even slow down as they crashed through it with might and magic alike.

  There were no gates or doors in the wall- those would be weak points, and enough of the fighters we had could go over or through, as they demonstrated now. Zack leaped underneath us, and the force of acceleration was great enough to make me sick. But then we were inside, and I lost consciousness, seeing town lights and friendly faces around me.

  I came awake a few times before we got to our destination. A tower, much like my own had been used up, presumably by the Wizard’s Council. We were being taken there. There was a basement underneath the basement, and in there there was nothing but a large, square white room.

  “This’ll keep the scrying off ya. Let me get you a box and bedrolls,” Emma said, leaving just after leading us here. Anna and I sat there blank-staring at the white walls, leaned against one and looking at another. Clarence stood by in what could have been polite silence or his own understated exhaustion. Even with his better physical stats we’d pushed far beyond healthy human limits this day.

  Emma returned with a couple younger spellcaster looking types, bringing Clarence and Anna bedrolls that looked better than sleeping on the floor. I got a treasure chest. It was a typical treasure chest you might imagine in a video game- dark wood and gilded metalwork with a comically large keyhole in front.

  “It ain’t the biggest, but ‘least it’s padded,” Emma said, as she put it down on the floor. It was just barely large enough, and I flipped it open, curled up inside and heard more than felt the heavy lid drop closed over my back. In this dark and tight space even I had a moment of claustrophobia, despite the conditioning over the past few days that tight, dark spaces were good. But it was not bad enough. For a few minutes my heart began racing again, barely coherent thoughts running through my head, anxiety about not being able to fall asleep nudging in among them. But five minutes later the relief of healing kicking in and restoring my pains, scrapes and bruises felt so nice and calming that I passed out curled up on my elbows and knees.

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  As was usual with my healing ability, the obvious discomfort of my sleeping position influenced me not at all. I awoke next morning and physically felt amazing, even if my first thoughts were of portals opening all around me to send me more pain, which jolted me up, which banged the back of my head against the lid, which flopped it open, which blinded me with bright light. I groaned and set my daily abilities back to the same set-up as last time. It had worked well enough, even if I now knew that there was a vulnerability with overlapping chronomancy spells and contingencies, the likelihood of anybody successfully doing that to me again felt low.

  Finally, I looked around the room and found that we weren’t alone. The Wizard’s Council seemed to be all there, politely sitting by the wall working on their own papers and gizmos, only noticing me now that I noticed them. They had all changed a lot since I last saw them. Ajit was now in green and red robes with gold armbands with runic etchings and several golden rings in his beard. Emma was decked out with magitech nonsense, including a set of goggles that she must have made herself. And a gun on her side. Even the rest of them that I didn’t know or remember that well were clearly advancing past their old Earth clothes and looking more and more like an eclectic collection of fantasy wizards.

  “Fucking finally,” Emma said, looking up from whatever circuit-board looking thing she was working on with a magic wand that fired short bursts of an intense laser beam, “You’ve been out for 14 hours. We don’t need that much sleep with the recovery abilities you know, mate?”

  “Alright, alright, let’s all calm down. We need a vote for reinstating Alex as our senior representative. That’s why we’re all here, after all,” Ajit said, standing up. I could all but sense his relief at being able to set the title aside. And put it back on me.

  “It’s a formality, innit? We already did that last time,” Emma said, standing up, “Why don’t we get started on the anti-scrying enchantments instead?”

  “It’s got to be official. Alex, you still willing to do it?” Ajit said.

  I climbed out of my chest, stretched and yawned.

  “Alright, sure,” I said.

  “First off, any other candidates want to step forward?” Ajit said.

  “I thought I should nominate you, dear, actually,” Brooke said. Her gown was brand new, and reminded me somewhat of Jea, except hers was pristine white instead of Jea’s midnight. Her shaved head now had a silver circlet on it, but otherwise she hadn’t changed much.

  “I refuse, but thank you for the show of faith,” Ajit said.

  “In that case, Alex will do fine while he’s here,” Brooke said.

  “It’s a fair point. I already have plans away from Checkpoint. It might not be the best to have me fuck off regularly and have to leave a new person in charge while I’m gone,” I said.

  “Talk to Artemis after this siege nonsense is over. She has some new interesting abilities for the Guild opening up. Without taking up too much time, we will be franchising soon,” Ajit said.

  “Alright. So, everyone okay with me taking the title back?” I said.

  I didn’t really want the job, but the chorus of ‘aye’ that I heard was still reaffirming.

  Emma then stood, dragged the crate she’d been sitting on, and spilled its contents in the middle of the room.

  “Let’s get to fucking work then, nah? We got a nightmare witch fucking with our shit through scrying, and we’ll need to work on defensive enchanted items for it. Dispel still our best anti-magic spell?” Emma said, already pulling out crystals and aligning them with pieces of what looked somewhere between junk and unsorted wires in the tool drawer in any dad’s kitchen.

  “Well, actually-“ I said and called my spellbook to me.

  And we got to work. The Council was very excited about a shareable 4th tier spell. Even more so when they learned that we could use it to shut down the portals in the woods. Apparently 4th tiers were becoming relatively common as class abilities and individual quest rewards, but it was rare to find ones that could be copied and passed down from caster to caster. So the first hour that morning was spent copying over the spell into other people’s spellbooks and onto scrolls.

  Then we sort of remembered that we were starving and food was brought in, and we talked strategy while we ate our porridge and fruit. The issue that the Guild had been having was that disrupting portals required complex purification rituals, or Anna’s personal intervention with a major purifying fire spell. This meant that the disruption of portals was always a game of cat-and-mouse, where Jea would throw up new portals and harass the spellcasters going out to get them, slowing the Guild down enough that she could create more portals and conjure more enemies than the Guild could kill, even if they never got particularly close to breaking down the walls.

  But with the anti-magic ability that anyone capable of copying spells and casting 4th tiers, the Guild could go on the offensive. If we could gather together 20 spellcasters with Spellrod and send them out on simultaneous strikes, with sufficient support that they could survive it, we could clear out the enemy reinforcements in one decisive if dangerous mission. Then it would only be a question of surviving the siege and removing the enemies.

  Which made getting our amulets of scrying protection (we- which is to say Emma- had decided that amulets would be the most efficient and convenient type of magic item for this and, since none of us came within 10 levels of her Artifice skill we went along with it) a priority. She already knew that I had the spell, but we could not let her know we all could have access to it, or else she would figure out a way to stop us. And so, we went to work.

  Emma guided us, but ended up doing most of the work on the prototype herself. She wasn’t using the same sort of strange magitek that she was using for her abilities- just good old fashioned magic item crafting. She took a platinum medallion and inscribed runes into it, pumped mana and spells in it, and took frequent breaks to swear at her mana pool not being big enough and needing to cast from hitpoints again.

  By lunchtime, there was a simple circular pendant in front of me, with arcane script in tiny writing making the shape of an impossible labyrinth on it.

  “Aight, mate, toss it in your inventory. See what it says,” Emma said, and threw the amulet to me, and I caught it out of the air and opened up my Journal.