Chapter 41: Chapter 41 Can you teach a mage multivariable calculus?

Nathan didn’t think he was being paranoid. Taeol would definitely be looking for him. Nathan wasn’t sure if the Archmage would be able to convince Giantsrest to throw their whole weight behind this maneuver, but he’d definitely seen that one sketchy guy on the day he’d developed [Magic Resistance] into [Magic Absorption].

And here he was, about to walk through Gemore in the dark, begging to get ambushed by people on Giantsrest’s payroll.

He almost turned around and went back to knock on Poppy’s door. He could ask Beatred to walk him back to the guild, since her shop wasn’t far away. But.

Not only was Nathan loath to interrupt what seemed to be turning into a date, but if he was ambushed, how could Beatred help? She had a crafting class, not a combat class. And if Nathan was seen with her too much then Taeol might draw conclusions and order her kidnapped to learn whatever Nathan was teaching her.

He sighed. He was probably overthinking this. If they’d been sticking to his every move then they would have been waiting for him here, outside Poppy’s shop. Nathan glanced around. The street was dark, without many people around. But nobody seemed to be waiting for him. If they were waiting for him, it was probably on the path back to the Adventurer’s guild.

The way you avoided people looking for you was to vary up your schedule and not be predictable. So, Nathan was going to take a very weird path back to the Adventurer’s guild.

He started by moving away from the Adventurer’s Guild, going along one of the streets that cut diagonally across Gemore. Then he climbed a block up the hill before turning around and taking the next cross street back towards the Guild. Gemore wasn’t organized in a very orderly fashion - the steep streets with stairs that climbed the hill weren’t particularly parallel, and the streets that crossed it tended to do so diagonally. That meant it was a mix of various quadrilateral blocks of buildings mixed with some more triangular shapes where roads joined or split.

Nathan kept going across the hill until he was pretty sure he was past the Guild. Only then did he start descending the hill. He kept an eye out carefully for anybody paying attention to him or tailing him, but saw nothing. He spotted the guild below - it had a big flat area cleared not too far from the gates. The main entrance was pretty obvious, so Nathan snuck around the back, entering an alley that dead-ended against the back wall of the Guild. Nathan knew intellectually that there was a pretty big drop on the other side, but from this side it was just an eight-foot wall.

He took a run up and jumped, flaring his Rage to boost his strength for the jump. He’d show these assholes tracking him. Let them wait all night in ambush somewhere, suckers. And it wasn’t like this dumb wall was going to stop him. Who did they think they were keeping out? An eight foot tall wall of stone wouldn’t even keep out people from Earth, much less people who had assistance from Davrar.

Nathan’s momentum brought him over the wall and he noticed two things. First: There was a line of faintly glowing runes carved into the top of the wall, invisible from below. They dimmed slightly around Nathan’s hand.

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Probably an alarm spell. Not a big worry for me.

Second, the drop on the other side was a lot longer than Nathan remembered. The Adventurer's guild was cut deeply into the hill, and Nathan looked down at a roughly seventy foot drop below him. He’d leapt over the wall, not onto it.

Shiiiiit

The wind whistled past Nathan. He’d been cliff jumping. And skydiving. But this was different. It was probably watching the ground coming up at you, and knowing that you were going to hit it. Hard.

Nathan landed on his feet, knees bent. His legs cushioned his fall slightly. Then his ass slammed into the sand of the private training yard he’d spent so many hours in with the Heirs. His rage was still on, and it spiked with the injury. This time, Nathan was angry at himself.

Goddamned yeeting myself off a cliff. Bad Nathan!

Nathan looked up at the curving sky overhead. There were faint clouds that made it harder to make out the blighted blue-green world that arced overhead. But Nathan spent a minute appreciating it as bones clicked back into place. He had a headache, even through [Juggernaut's Wrath]. A pair of blue boxes appeared before him.

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