Following the feelings from my charm lead me to a small pile of bodies, luckily there was only one set of heavy plated armor to be had among the corpses so they were easy enough to move. At the bottom of the pile I found a robed figure that still had some life in it. The man’s right arm was ruined paste, half his chest was, for lack of a better word, melted in, and he looked as dead as any other corpse around here. Still I felt the life within him and could sense his mana inside him working furiously to fix his body.

I doubted the man was actually conscious, so I reached out with my own mana and tried to make contact with him spiritually. The sharp burning sting that I felt as my mana entered the man’s body was just a minor hint compared to the seething fury and violation that was transmitted back to me through the link before it was severed. This mage was pissed, and he was furious at me for what he felt was a violation of his spirit. He was not a despite soul, just an angry one. Not pet material.

I tipped my staff down towards his head and focused on earth and rock, the crushing might of stone and the steady nature of soil. Earth wasn’t my best elemental affinity, but it was still an element I was comfortable with. All it took was imagining his head incased in rock for the ground to rise up around the caster’s head and begin to harden. A second casual thought about the earth crushing in his skull and a trickle more of my mana was enough to end the casters life.

Because he was rude I decided to add insult to homicide, taking a page out of Carter’s book I wrapped some of my mana around what was left of the dying caster’s mana pool. His mana felt hot and heavy, but there was a feint hint of shadow to be found there too. He definitely had an affinity for fire, a smaller affinity for air, and a slight affinity for darkness. The fire was useless to me, and the air wasn’t much better, but darkness was my major elemental affinity and I sucked up all he had to give of it. The rest would probably be ground out into neutral mana inside of my pool, otherwise it would just dissipate so there was no real loss.

I left the empty corpse and followed the feelings of my charm as it lead me to another source of living mana. When the feelings grew strongest I found myself looking down at a man with no face. It was a grisly sight, but I had long since grown used to such things. There was very little horror in the world that could truly turn me away anymore, at least the man still had most of his jaw intact.

Sending out my mana I came in contact with a cool and damp wind inside the man, my own affinity for water rejoiced at finding a like source and my darkness moved to consume the man’s mana before I reigned it in. Simply having our mana make contact and merge was a simple and inefficient form of communication, but I doubted this man was capable of much else. Through our mana we sent feelings consciously or not, so by touching his I could gain a sort of empathic understanding of the dying caster.

He felt hopeless. He feared the journey to the great beyond, but he was in so much pain. Everything hurt, everything burned. They had betrayed him. It was hopeless. Hurt so much. Pain. Fear. Betrayal. Loss.

The feelings were a jumbled mess, but they were a mess of things I recognized. He had the mindset I was looking for, but without a better way to communicate I wouldn’t be able to determine anything about the man’s personality. Ultimately it didn’t matter, but I usually liked to have a better idea of who my pets were before they became my pets. It served to give me a reference and point of comparison for a pet’s behavior if I knew what they were like before. Still nothing about this situation was usual, so I would simply have to judge the man on how he behaved as my pet and correct any faults or defects in personality after the fact.

Nodding my head I sent feelings of calm and reassurance to the man through my own mana before withdrawing from the contact. I had found my first pet, but I couldn’t work on him now. I would need time to do this right, and time was something I didn’t have a surplus of at the moment. What I did have was an incapacitated pet candidate who would probably be unconscious for the next day or so if I could keep him from dying. All I needed to do was take his body with me and work on his conversion after I broke free of my crest.

The downside of that was I’d have to waste mana carrying the man along, and that mana cost would only grow with every new pet candidate I picked up. Time constraints and mana constraints, this was not at all ideal. Still I am a trained battle mage as well as an adept healer, I knew that things often conspired to go wrong in the worst ways at the worst times. I knew how to deal with it, adapt and overcome.

Three. I could manage to lug along three people without it being a problem. If I did more than that it would start to eat away at my mana faster than I could passively regain what I was expending, and having a drain on your mana pool while on the run and planning to carry out an intense summoning sounded like an awfully stupid idea. Yes three would be ideal, I could work with three.

I pulled on shadows and called on the darkness of the world and shaped it into a sort of stretcher, I willed it to follow along behind me in the air and support its load carefully. Then I tried to lift the man without a face, then I tried again and wondered why the fuck he was so heavy. With a grunt of frustration I managed to man handle the casters body into my darkness stretcher and vowed to form the next stretcher under the body of my next potential pet. That caster had to have weighed well over two hundred pounds, but somehow the man looked fit and healthy. Well healthy besides the missing muscle and skin…

Wiping the blood and puss off my hands and onto my pants I set off to follow the next of my guiding feelings. I walked for a while and really took in the damage that this army had suffered. It was like a bizarre tapestry of death here, and few bodies were damaged in the same way. I saw corpses that were melted, burned, frozen, rotting, discolored, torn apart, and some that appeared to be peacefully sleeping. There was a body that looked to have been turned inside out, a body that looked like it had been crushed into a sphere, and a body that had simply looked to have aged itself to death. As I walked towards the next source of living mana I saw all this and I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of spell could do this. Oh, it was simple to kill with a spell. It was even simple to kill in creative and disturbing ways with a spell. Killing thousands in a variety of unique and separate ways with a single cast of a single spell was not simple. I hadn’t even thought it was possible, even with the aid of a hundred other casters, yet here I was walking through the aftermath of such a spell.

I really did hate seeing stuff like this, it reminded me that while I might be a pretty big fish in my pond there was a vast and endless ocean out there were I barely qualified as a minnow. Stuff like this unnerved the hell out of me, and made me want to hide away from the world and all the dangerous shit that lived there. My mind kept trying to think of ways I could cope with a spell like this being aimed at me, my rational side told me I couldn’t. At best I might survive, much as my pet candidates have, and might be able to heal myself back to normal.

It was never good to be confronted with a force beyond your comprehension or ability, it typically served as a precursor to a gruesome end. My strategy had always been to avoid such things, to hide away from the big dangerous things in the world and hope they didn’t come looking for me. Honestly I think it’s how most people survive on Eden, hell it might be the only way to survive on Eden.

On Earth you had to look out for raiders and gangs, there was the occasional caster to worry about too. The big thing on Earth to watch out for were enchanters who had managed to make a gun that actually functioned or maybe a healer who worked out a way to magic up diseases. Earth was dangerous with its mana storms and magic plagues, but it at least made a sort of sense. Hell even Gaia made a sort of sense, and that world had as much magic and ambient mana as Eden. What made Eden so fucking terrifying to me was that there was no real peaking order, at least there wasn’t for mortals. Eden was the playground of the gods, and we mere mortals were simply allowed to live here. At any given moment a bolt of lightning could be dropped on you from the sky, or a demigod on some obscure quest could be coming to kill you. Or someone could cast a spell that simply killed thousands of mortals without any forewarning or signal.

In a lot of ways I hated this world, but I also sort of loved it. I spent a good portion of my life on Eden, and I made a life here. Granted it was a life I was currently abandoning, but still.

Maybe once I was free of my slave crest I’d find a rift and try heading back to Earth, or maybe I might like Gaia.

I chuckled at that thought as I walked up to the blackened body of a woman. She looked like a few dragon fire victims I’d seen in the past, and if I couldn’t sense the mana inside alive and well I would have pegged here as long dead. I was actually pretty impressed she was alive at all, I doubted I could manage to survive such severe burns myself.

Leaning down I reached out for her mana and felt a dark and blazing presence brush up against my mana immediately. This woman was just alive, she was awake, or at least spiritually aware. To say I was impressed would be an understatement, I was amazed. Maybe a little flabbergasted. Definitely shocked.

I felt her then. Anger. Regret. Hatred. Resignation. Despair. Hope. Caution. Desperation. Fear. Helplessness. Resolve.

She could feel me, and it brought forth a whole surge of emotions within her. It was easy enough to imagine what she thought, I would probably be thinking the same things if I were in her position. She wanted to be saved, but she feared what meeting me would entail. In many ways she was justified in that fear.

I decided she would make for a good pet, though I suspected her conversion would be a long and difficult process. She was a powerful caster, and must be clever as well as resourceful to be not only alive but even aware after what had been done to her. She’d be a good ally to have, but she’d be an even greater pet if I could manage it.

I cast my dark stretcher under her and moved on to the next candidate, now with two near corpses following in my wake.

***

It was sort of sad to feel one of the presences of living mana die away as I walked through the field of death. Not because I felt sorry for them, and not even because I pitied them, but because it meant I had one less chance to pick up a pet.

The last caster I found had been a very spiteful and cunning woman, her spirit had tried to attack me when I tried to make contact with her. She wanted to consume my earth and water to speed up her own recovery, instead I took her mana and used it to directly expand my mana pool. I think I grew my total pool by about a hundredth with that alone, so I wasn’t to upset about it. Honestly it was pretty rare to get the chance to absorb another mage’s mana like this, outside of very battlefields and deathbeds I couldn’t think of another opportunity where it would be possible. Even if I managed to kill a mage, I still wouldn’t be able to wrangle much mana away from their dying body as their souls would fight to keep it with them. Only when casters are so incapacitated that they can do nothing else but focus on recovery is it possible to steal their mana, and even then only when they have fully committed to their recovery and it is now longer possible for them to pull back can it be done. Carter has said there’s a trick to getting mana out of a live caster, but if that’s even true I sure as hell don’t know it. And speaking of Carter…

I was running out of time to search for another pet, and I could almost feel the goddess of fate watching me and laughing. I had two sources left, and I might have time to grab one on my way out of the field. No real time to do even a cursory inspection of their spirit, it would be a case of grab and go. I wasn’t happy about that, but some deep part of me was screaming that I had best leave now if I wanted to make a clean escape. As a magic caster I have a deep and incomprehensible connection to the flow of mana around me, and sometimes that meant my hunches and gut feelings were more than just instinct. As a mage, you have to trust yourself when these feelings come up as sometimes they’ll end up being ethereal premonitions.

Like any good mage would, I trusted in my gut feeling and started sprinting for the mana source that felt the closest. It was time to go, and I was damn sure going to be gone before whatever it was that I felt was after me got here.

I dropped my staff and let its smart-float enchantment take hold. Pumping my arms I tried to kick my stride into a higher gear as my gut feeling turned into dreadful certainty. In a split second I weighed my options and as it turns out I didn’t need another pet after all. I was more than happy with the two I found thank you oh so very much.

Spell, I needed a spell! Something to hide me, or confuse them, or something! I just needed to buy a bit more time, time for me to escape and slip out from under this slave crest.

I ran, I was a fast runner, but I knew sooner rather than later I’d be caught like this. I had to do something to get away, but my mind was drawing a blank. I had no place set up to teleport or gate to, and trying to fuck with space like that without prep work was a good way to kill yourself. There wasn’t much I could do to buff up my speed that Josh or Sarah couldn’t match or outdo. I didn’t have the time to struggle with bending the light around me, and it wasn’t dark enough out to fade away. And none of that mattered anyway because Rainer could have me rushing back against my will with just a word.

Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck FUCK! I took too long, risked too much…

I fell as a piece of torn ringmail caught my foot. As I tumbled to the ground I had a thought, it was a simple and brilliant thought. Rainer couldn’t call me back if he was too distracted to notice I was gone, and my siblings couldn’t chase me down if they had to protect Rainer and the camp.

There are few things more distracting than a horde of undead coming towards you, and undead are relatively cheap to make magically speaking. It also doesn’t take long if you don’t want your undead to last very long, just expend some mana to animate the bodies and give them a goal. Easy peasy.

Picking myself up I wore a crazy grin as I dumped half of my mana pool and all of my newfound hatred for Rainer and the pain he had caused me into the surroundings. I willed everything to rise up, to find Rainer and to hurt him as much as they hurt. I wanted them to charge the camp, and ordered them through willpower and mana to make my desire a reality. Then I started running again, with only the occasional glance behind me to see if my slapdash spell was working.

Looking beyond my two floating pieces of cargo I saw corpses begin to pick themselves up off the ground and grab their weapons.

“That should buy me a bit of time.”

I felt the wild grin on my face grow. This was my first step on the path of freedom, and already the hunt was on. I wonder if the fox ever felt more alive than when it was being hunted, I wondered if it was crazy for a part of me to be enjoying this, but most of all I wondered if Lum would laugh at my piss poor excuse of an undead horde. He’d probably find my slapdash undead as amusing as I found his attempt at demon conjuring, maybe that would earn me some points with the kid.

I had a feeling I’d need all the points I could get with my family fairly soon…