For the first time in a while, Hugo was genuinely scared. He had prepared for almost anything and had a bag full of tricks for the unknown. That wasn’t going to be enough. He didn’t know how he was going to escape the light mage. He twisted the cart to the side in panic.

Another beam of light shot through the air, putting another hole in his mana cart. Swerving to the side hadn’t helped at all. The light mage’s attack could hit anything the mage could see. And perception was his highest stat.

Hugo raced towards the estate gates, frantically trying to think of a solution. There was a handcart going through the gates, it wasn’t going to clear them in time. Hugo gave his mana cart a long blue scoop which flung the handcart to the side as he passed. He recycled the barrier and gave the mana cart a few shields behind itself.

A moment later both shields were pierced and the mana cart gained another hole. Hugo cursed himself. He knew that light mages could easily pierce barriers. He hadn’t been thinking. This time the beam hit something vital. His rear passenger wheel started bumping up and down as he raced through the city streets.

Hugo poked his head up briefly to see how far away the light mage was. The man wasn’t alone. He was standing in the back of a mana cart, along with four other guards. As he looked back, two guards loosed an arrow at him. The first one was deflected by the barrier Hugo threw up. The second one pierced the shield and thudded into the control rod below his hand. Hugo started having trouble steering. He ducked down and yanked the arrow out.

It was lead.

Not only did they have a light mage, they had an archer with lead arrows. This day kept getting worse and worse. He tossed it into his satchel.

Hugo skidded around the corner, heading towards the train station. He reached into his bag and tossed out one of Mia’s runed cubes. The slime cube should activate just as they came around the corner.

The light mage stymied his efforts, destroying the cube before it had a chance to activate. That was his last one of those cubes, the remaining six were different kinds.

Hugo had noticed something though. The light mage seemed to need to charge up his attacks. There was always a delay in between beams of light. He could use this to his advantage. Hugo screeched around another corner and pulled out three more of Mia’s cubes. He activated all three and tossed them behind himself. He had to quickly reach down and grab the control stick, so he wouldn’t crash. Driving a mana cart required two hands, and that made attacking and defending difficult.

One of the cubes disintegrated before it hit the ground, but the other two cubes activated. A fireball formed around one of them big enough that the guards had to swerve around it. The other cube activated and shot out thin spikes of stone.

Their mana cart crashed through the spikes, only scraping the front up a bit. It slowed them down further, letting Hugo’s lead grow.

Hugo spun around the next corner, almost going up on two wheels. Then he made another turn, right into a nearby alley. He slammed on the breaks and jumped up into the bed of the mana cart. He activated the rest of his cubes and tossed them high into the air just as the guards came around the corner.

The first cube disintegrated before it went very far. The light mage must have seen him through the building so he knew what was coming. He was shouting and pointing at the other two cubes. One of the archers shot at the cubes flying through the air and actually hit it, knocking it out of the way.

Hugo would have been impressed, but he wasn’t looking up. He was focused on the ground in front of their cart. He solidified a single ramp right in front of the farthest wheel. The ramp knocked their mana cart up on its side, spilling them all onto the cobblestones right in front of Hugo.

Before any of them could stand back up, Hugo solidified a barrier around the light mage and yanked him closer. Hugo reached into his satchel for one of his potions. The thin potions were slid into the inner pocket of his bag, the last of his preparations. He threw the potion down at the light mage that was just getting to his feet. The glass shattered and a red mist puffed up.

Shit.

That was a health potion. The light mage was helped by Hugo’s mistake and quickly got up. He pointed a hand at Hugo from ten feet away and shot out a beam of light. Hugo had been fumbling with his bag and noticed the attack too late. It pierced right through his armor, his lung, and out the back.

Hugo coughed up blood as he threw down another potion vial at the light mage. The mage ducked to the side and shot the vial with his magic. The vial exploded into a green mist. This time it was the right vial. The light mage fell to his knees and soon passed out from the sleeping potion.

While Hugo had been dealing with the light mage, two of the other guards had gotten back up and were stalking towards Hugo. The third was an archer, and he loosed a lead arrow right at Hugo. The arrow hit him in the chest and ricocheted off. Thankfully lead was terrible for piercing the armor he wore under his tunic.

Hugo coughed blood again and fell to his knees. He pushed all of his health points into the wound. At the same time, he activated the runes on his armor.

“Where did he go?” one of the guards said and looked around.

“Doesn’t matter. The cores are still in the cart. Secure them and we will get it back to the warehouse. Mr. Koppel will kill us if we return without them,” the archer guard said.

Hugo stumbled towards the front of the mana cart and activated the runes he had carved in there. That disregard rune activated as well, hiding the whole cart. The guards swore and raced away, trying to find Hugo.

He wanted to stay here and recover from the pierced lung, but he didn’t have the time. The runes on the mana cart wouldn’t last long. He had put a hundred points of mana into the array, but that would only give him minutes with something this large. With tears rolling down his face and blood on his lips, Hugo slowly drove away.

He had been heading towards the train station this whole time. Now that no one was paying attention to him, he turned and drove towards the airship dock. He had parked his stolen airship there early this morning.

The disregard runes on his armor and the cart wore off before he got there. A few people stared at him as he bumped along the stone roads. That one wheel was still giving him problems. Thankfully, mana carts weren’t rare in Paarl, and he made his way to the dock unmolested. He left it there with the keys in it. He had been planning on carrying the lead lined boxed up to the airship, but he couldn’t do that now. He was having trouble staying upright with his injury. His health points had slowed his bleeding, but that was only enough to keep him alive.

He stared at the back of the mana cart for a moment. Eventually he shook himself into action. He solidified a set of blue platforms anchored to his waist. Then he carefully slid the four boxes onto his platforms and walked into the building.

Thankfully, the airship dock had an elevator and he didn’t have to use the stairs. He hit the rune on the wall and slowly ascended up through the center of the tower. He slowly plodded towards his airship.

“What happened to you?” a nox airship attendant said.

Hugo looked over to him with a scowl. He kept walking and said, “I’m fine, don’t worry about it.”

“You are bleeding,” the attendant said and gestured to his chest.

“I was, it’s healed now,” Hugo said, “Excuse me, I got to deliver these right away.”

The attendant stepped into Hugo’s path and said, “I’m sorry. I am going to have to ask you to wait here for a moment. I am sure you can understand that this all looks suspicious.”

Hugo frowned. This guy hadn’t been on duty when Hugo arrived this morning. He just saw a bleeding human trying to get on a grandmaster’s airship alone. Hugo sighed and said, “Alright, fine. But then you have to come with me to see Grandmaster Langa. You are explaining why I was late, not me. I got this when I mouthed off to him earlier. I am not getting shot again just because you think I look ‘suspicious’.”

“Grandmaster Langa?” the nox said and stepped back.

“Yes, he sent me here in his airship to quickly pick up these boxes for him. You recognize his ship right? If you are going to delay me, you are taking the fall for it, not me,” Hugo said. He put one of the smaller boxes down on the ground and moved to the next one.

“Uh, no, that won’t be necessary,” the attendant said and stepped out of the way, “I know how impatient he gets. Don’t let me hold you up.”

Hugo picked up the box, hiding the fact that he was still bleeding into his lung. He nodded to the nox and walked over to the airship. He coughed into his hand, and then hid it in his pocket. He walked down the thin gangway without looking back. He had to use his barrier domain to unmoor the ship because he didn’t trust himself to do it by hand. Once on the airship, he dropped the boxes and waved to the attendant.

He slowly drifted away, and then engaged the engines. He immediately ramped up the speed. It was faster than most people flew when over cities, but he had told the attendant he was in a hurry. He kept glancing back as he flew. Fifteen minutes passed and no one was following him. He pointed the airship directly at shimmer mountain and sat down to rest.

He was still screwed.

He had killed a hydra, stolen from shimmer corps, outsmarted Lenna’s dad, and it was all for naught. He didn’t have enough mana cores. For some reason, the Koppel warehouse only held five mana cores, not the six he remembered. Hugo didn’t know if he remembered wrong or if he had simply stolen the cores before they acquired the sixth one. It didn’t matter. Seven mana cores wouldn’t be enough. The ritualist grandmaster had been clear. He needed to power up all eight ritual nodes if this was going to work.

One core.

He was one mana core short. All that work, all that risk, for nothing. He didn’t even know where he could get another core, let alone how to avoid capture for the other two heists long enough. They would be scouring the wheel for him now. It wouldn’t be long before the Koppel estate connected him with this airship and went after him. They probably wouldn’t ask for help from the corps or sentinels though.

Maybe he had time?

He had intentionally avoided killing in his heists so that they couldn’t bring in outside help to track him down. Both the shimmer corps and the Koppel family weren’t supposed to have the mana cores there. They couldn’t go to the wider authorities without admitting their mistakes.

So perhaps he had a narrow window to act in. Where could he get a core? Mana cores were used throughout the cities. Shimmer batteries powered the water, sewer, and lights most of the city, but mana cores were used in places where power couldn’t get interrupted. They were valuable enough that even their location was a tightly guarded secret. The only other mana core he knew the location of was the one for Blue Lion Academy.

He only knew about the location of that one because someone died trying to steal it. A mundane thief had snuck in and gotten himself killed on the defenses while Hugo was attending school there. He had visited the room a few times with Oskar because they had been convinced it was related to the wider conspiracy. It wasn’t, of course, but Hugo did know exactly where the mana core was now. He even knew his lockpicking skills were up to the challenge. He had picked a few locks on campus during his Cristian life. Maybe he could do this.

He shook his head.

Perhaps it was his wisdom stat, but he stopped planning a Blue Lion heist. That would be a horrifically bad idea. He wouldn’t have a chance of escaping the campus after he took their power source. Every teacher was a master of their domain, and they would all be after him as soon as their lights went out.

He needed to come up with a heist that wouldn’t result in instant death.

There weren’t any mana cores that would be easy to steal. They would have already been stolen if that were the case. There would be mana cores that would be easier than the other ones. It would have to be one of the cities on the wheel, mages were too high level elsewhere. It would have to be in a city without a heavy gang presence. Those cities would be on higher alert for theft. That meant Reval and Tembisa were out. Hugo knew that the riese cities of Ettel and Fontein didn’t use mana cores for their infrastructure. Deva was a military state, so that city was out too. He didn’t want to go back to Tallinn, they were probably still looking for him and his parents.

That only left Mthatha. He had never actually been. It was on the opposite side of the wheel, just north of Fontein and west of Deva. He didn’t know much about it, other than the fact that it was a major farming town. There were almost no other industries in the city. Even though the rest of the world thought of the wheel as the breadbasket, the cities on the wheel considered Mthatha a hick town.

There was even a joke about how the city got its name. A noble nox came to oversee the fields and asked a local human worker what the name of this town was. The stuttering farmer said Mtha-tha. Afterwards the human’s friend asked what that was all about, and the farmer said, “I don’t know. They talk too fast. I could only say ‘mister’ before he walked away.”

Since Hugo was already facing that direction, he decided to fly to Mthatha. It couldn’t hurt to check out the city for a day or two. They would have shimmer processing plants like any other city if he gave up and wanted to restart.