The Bear Mage (The Bear Clan Book 4): A Progression Fantasy

By Vasily Mahanenko

What does it feel like to have the whole world know they owe you their salvation? Is it pride? Basking in self-admiration? A realization of your own greatness against the backdrop of anonymity shared by everyone else? There are lots of possibilities, only none of them describes what actually happened.

Instead of becoming the savior, Leg Ondo was made a mockery. The being governing the planet forbade his totems and chosen people to disclose information about the battle between the demons and dragons. And that left the world confused. What did the Brown Bear clan do to deserve the avalanche of goodies that came pouring down on it? Should they be knocked off the pedestal they so recently climbed atop?

But even that would be manageable if it weren’t for one thing: the multilevel competition designed to bring the three empires closer together. How did Leg Ondo possibly get himself involved this time?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Magic Dome Books
• Release date: Feb 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9788076196865

Book preview

Summary of book one

Thirteen-year-old high mage Ishar-Mor was a valg, a lizard that walked upright, who was sentenced to death. After plotting to overthrow the emperor, the memory of his previous lives was stripped from him, and he was banished from his home world to one where they’d never even heard of magic. But sheer luck played a cruel trick on the executioners. Just as the high mage was being banished, a ritual was performed in a different world to summon a soul. The Brown Bear clan leader’s only son had fallen from a tree and was teetering between life and death. Knowing full well what they were doing, the clan leaders beseeched their spirit protector for help, and he pulled the most powerful soul he could find out of the universe. The valg became fifteen-year-old Leg Ondo. There was magic, after all, in his new world, though he couldn’t use it—humans only gained magic abilities when they were initiated at age sixteen. When it came to magic itself, it was animal spirits called totems that gave their clans strength and two or three magic abilities. The planet also had force stones, or special rocks that could share magic power.

Six months later, Leg and his team were participating in an interclan competition when they were ambushed by goblins, the planet’s true inhabitants. His friends were all killed, though he managed to survive. He then figured out how to control the magic lines force stones gave off, using them to defeat the commander of the goblin squad. But it was as he prepared to do battle for his life that help arrived. Lando Slick, the sixth son of the emperor, happened for some reason to be on the outskirts of the empire, and he gave Leg a launcher, a forbidden weapon for the outcast clan. In return, the representative of the imperial Viper clan demanded a year of service from Leg. And the boy couldn’t say no. For reasons only he knew, Lando sent the son of his sworn enemy to one of the most expensive and privileged educational institutions in the empire: the Imperial Academy. Leg quickly realized how far the Brown Bears lagged behind the rest of the world. Cars running on force stones, clothing, learning, trains—even an ordinary provincial city made a deep impression on him. One downside to urban life, however, was the stench that hung in the city air, almost as if the city sewers didn’t work. The residents themselves were so used to it that they didn’t notice a thing, but it was an unpleasant surprise for Leg.

The train Leg was traveling on was attacked. The bandits were hunting Ulma Reloit, leader of the Panthers, the second clan in the empire, though Leg was able to leverage his new ability to control magic lines and save the old woman. That ruined the plans of a secret organization called the Crimson Ribbon.

Once at the academy, Leg met two boys his age named Elrin and Had. The work they put into training together forged a bond, though they were subsequently punished with a trip to the sewers, a special area for testing abilities and coming back with resources the academy needed, after breaking the rules. Two girls named Liara and Belis also headed in with them. Joining forces, the group made their way down to the third level below ground, as Belis had a map of the sewers she was counting on to get them all plenty of loot. But nobody knew that level was packed with enormous octopus-like beasts. The group found themselves in an uneven battle, and it was only Leg’s ability to work with force lines that helped him save his friends.

While still down in the sewers, Leg was able to find a statuette made of a blood-red material that turned out to be one of seven Bogush crystals. His find was quickly taken away—students weren’t permitted to have valuables in their possession. But that was when the emperor showed up at the academy to personally reward the student who had saved his niece. Leg had no other choice but to gift the crystal to the emperor, the latter responding by lifting the moratorium on trading with the Brown Bears and giving them room to resume their development. Not only that, but Lando Slick handed the boy a waystone. Working something like a teleport, it gave the sixth heir a way to show up when he was needed. Leg availed himself of it almost immediately. Had, one of his friends, had been kidnapped. The dark-skinned southerner was the only surviving heir of the Gray Elephant clan that had once ruled the Southern Empire. His plan had been to hide at Mirax, the Northern Empire’s Imperial Academy, only his pursuers were able to get to him even there. But while Leg was able to find where Had was being held, he found himself facing a new enemy: infernos. They were people who had chosen the path of absorbing mithril, losing their human appearance but gaining unheard-of strength. Lando and his people were able to neutralize the threat. Once he returned, Had joined Leg’s family, becoming one of the Brown Bears.

That calm lasted all of a few minutes, however. The bandits that had tried to eliminate Ulma Reloit, leader of the Panther clan, attacked him. Happily, he was able to fight them off, take one prisoner, and deliver him to the Panther residence. Ulma told the boy how things in the empire really stood and how their assailants worked for a mysterious organization called the Crimson Ribbon that was out to destabilize the empire. As thanks for saving her, the woman set off with Leg to his village and signed a mining agreement with the Brown Bears. That let Leg’s clan shaman take him to another spot where a Bogush crystal had been stored and destroy the spot. Whoever could combine all seven parts of the statuette would get a map showing them all mithril deposits while also being able to control infernos as well as angels. The latter were the next level of modified people.

For his entry exam to the academy, Leg wrote down a few chapters from a book that had been popular in his previous world. The text thrilled his supervisors to the point that they asked him to write the whole thing. Not only did Leg write it, however; he won a contest with it. After reaching the imperial palace, he and Liara found the seventh and final Bogush crystal, though it was taken from them on their return to Mirax. The head of security there, Lando Slick’s older brother, had no wish to strengthen the empire with such a treasure. Instead, the seventh crystal was hidden far away from both the Bears and the Crimson Ribbon.

Leg successfully completed his studies and earned his due reward, after which he and his friends set off for his village to go through initiation. In addition to Leg, there were Had and Elrin, the latter also deciding to join the Brown Bear clan. They were attacked by a Crimson Ribbon fighter on the way. But Leg was able to summon Lando Slick, and their combined strength was enough to defeat the adversary. The battle showed, however, that there was someone in the empire who could use magic. And something had to be done about that.

After initiation, Had became a powerful warrior with the ability to use the totem’s magic gifts. Elrin became a knight—they could mimic any ability used against them. For his turn, Leg was made a wizard, a legendary and long-forgotten class of beings that could create magic using nothing but their will. The gift wasn’t given lightly, however. To use it, Leg was going to have to take a long trip into goblin territory.

Summary of book two

The new wizard’s entry into the world didn’t go unnoticed. The organization fighting for control of the entire planet, not to mention the empire, began its hunt, though Leg Ondo was warned and able to avoid the machine set up at the academy to identify him. When he arrived, however, what he found was that his girlfriend, Liara Slick, had also been made a wizard. She refused to be tested and hid within the Mirax walls, knowing full well she would be identified sooner or later. But the Black Ravens, the clan running the academy, helped Leg and Liara get out of the academy so they could make it to Zul’var’s altar and become full-fledged wizards. The teenagers hid in the sewers that spread out underneath the entire city. Down there, Leg came across a device spewing poison into the air and water by pulling energy from a black crystal. He destroyed it even without knowing exactly how it worked and earned himself a set of memories from one of his previous lives.

He earned a second set in the Panther dungeons. As part of their plan to get out of the city, the wizards decided to ask Ulma Reloit, the clan leader, for help. She had them taken out of the city in one of her clan’s cars while simultaneously sending in the opposite direction her train with her bodyguard, an angel named the Shadow, and two decoy children.

Two events occurred at nearly the same time. First, the train was attacked by representatives of the mysterious global organization led by one of their highest-ranking officers. Second, Leg and Liara reached the Northern Empire’s border and realized they couldn’t go any further by car. The pair stopped at a roadside café where they heard strange news: Lestar, a province on the border with the Western Empire, had been handed over to the Westerners with no explanation, while the local population was being hunted by strange, werewolf-like creatures. Everyone who could leave was on their way out. All their belongings in tow, they and their remaining totems were heading deep into the Northern Empire to escape the horrors besetting them. But that was when those who couldn’t get out began to have nightmares that left them injured or even dead. They hadn’t slept in a week.

Leg decided to help the poor people and headed out to hunt at night. A pack of twenty modified dogs found him, some bastards having pumped them full of mithril to turn them into monsters. And while the boy was able to kill them, he sustained serious injuries. The Boar clan leader showed up to give Leg his loot from the dogs: sixty kilograms of mithril. Remembering how the dogs had been able to block his mana, he ran some experiments with the metal and accidentally turned it into Blood of the Beast, a dangerous substance goblins hunted for some reason. The café had to be abandoned with the blood inside it.

Leg demanded total vassalage from the clans needing help with the modified dogs. His motive was simple: after joining the Western Empire, a portion of the materials and devices they received would be handed over to the Brown Bears. After the local totems agreed to the terms, the brown bear named a duke responsible for all the clans in the province. It was Had Ondo, pulled suddenly from the academy to the Boar city of Fasorg.

Finally, Leg figured out why the locals were having nightmares. Someone had poisoned the water. Heading underground into the water supply system, Leg was nearly killed by an assassin. The source of the poison was yet another black crystal—the same as the ones poisoning the air in all the big cities. He destroyed the device to restore another portion of his memories before heading back up to the surface and finding out that Liara had been kidnapped. The girl’s father used the Viper clan’s ability to jump between clan halls, showing up to ask Leg for help. As it turned out, Liara had gotten away from her kidnapper and returned to the capital, where the emperor’s servants had grabbed her.

Leg agreed to help, though he first had to strike back at the enemy. Sneaking into their camp, he killed most of the remaining modified dogs, took their mithril, and used his own ability to return to the Brown Bear city of Turo. The clan leader and shaman helped him come up with a plan: he was going to buy Liara’s freedom with a counterfeit Bogush crystal made by an Ondo ancestor. On his way to the capital, Leg figured out how the crystal was made and came up with another of his own to make sure they grabbed the enemy’s attention.

Lando Slick announced that his older brother Oswald was a member of the Crimson Ribbon, the secret organization, and invited him to a meeting that ended in a fight between Oswald, who turned out to be an excellent mage, and Leg. The boy won the battle and learned that the leader of the Crimson Ribbon was a teacher named Rikon responsible for training many Slick generations. With the help of Liara’s father, who lured Rikon out of his lair, Leg broke into the teacher’s mansion and found Liara as well as the Shadow. The latter had gone over to the other side. She was serving Bashorg, a terrifying demon who had destroyed many a world, though Leg was able to nullify the oath she had taken to the demon. That done, he took her on as his protector. Leg then fled the capital and headed to Fasorg with the Shadow, Liara, and five Bogush crystals.

But surprises were in store for everyone when they arrived in the Boar city. It was under siege by the Western Empire. After pulling one over on the enemy, Leg was able to grab most of their supplies, kill the army’s high command, make it into Fasorg, and find Farg, one of the leaders of the mysterious organization vying for world power. He was the one who had kidnapped Liara. In fact, he’d been looking to sacrifice her to Bashorg in an effort to gain power and overthrow his own teacher. A battle ensued that Leg won. However, Farg got away, and the boy learned that there were barely more than a hundred people left alive in the city.

Realizing he had no other choice, Leg headed into the enemy camp to take the fight to them. His magic and the Shadow’s skills made for an excellent diversion, though that was when the balance of power shifted drastically. A demon had been summoned to the city by Farg to take possession of the Blood of the Beast. While Leg was able to kill the demon with the help of some goblins who had also shown up in search of the blood, he could only look on as the goblins then destroyed the dangerous substance by absorbing it themselves. They then attacked Leg, assuming he was a follower of both that world’s main enemies: the demon Bashorg and a dragon called the Beast. Leg was able to kill the goblins, though a new enemy in the form of Farg showed up almost immediately to show that he, too, was a mage. Farg blocked Leg and put Liara through her initiation as a wizard, planning on sacrificing her immediately afterward. But the old mage hadn’t been counting on the wizard’s newfound power. He was defeated.

An unknown being the world’s totems all followed pulled Liara away for training and named Leg a hero, someone with no will of their own whose only responsibility was to follow orders. The bear stood up for Leg, reminding the being that the boy still had almost an entire year to become a wizard and avoid eternal servitude. The being agreed. Still, Leg was given a crown, the symbol of a hero, and the ability to identify anyone following Bashorg or the Beast.

Leg was painfully aware of how little time he had left before turning seventeen. And there was so much work to do. But one thing was certain: he had no intention of ever becoming someone else’s errand boy.

Summary of book three

Leg Ondo, the sixteen-year-old son of the Brown Bear clan chief, had a new ability: he could sense nearby mithril and demon essence. But that didn’t do him much good since he earned it when he was named a hero. That made him the slave of something he called the red mist. While Leg didn’t know the name of the creature that ruled the world, he was starting to work through how to rid himself of the unexpected gift.

The boy uncovered a mithril deposit followed by a mansion where an unknown group was growing a draconid, a creature of the Beast. Taking them on, Leg won, grabbed a few prisoners, and discovered that it was southern goblins growing draconids. But the battle took its toll. The boy sustained a fearsome injury leaving him unable to walk. His spine was shattered. Using his homeward bound ability, he jumped back to the Brown Bears’ ancestral home, where the doctors gave him the bad news: it was going to be two months before he was back on his feet. That, however, didn’t bother the Viper clan. Lando Slick, the fourth heir to the throne, learned that a horde of western goblins was advancing on the capital and realized they were after Blood of the Beast. With the help of the Brown Terror, as Lando called Leg, the heir hoped to find the dangerous substance before the goblins arrived, securing the capital in the process.

Leg had to clear the capital of polluters, devices generating an unpleasant smell, before he could begin hunting the Blood of the Beast. That left him with eight crystals capable of boosting his internal mana reserves, only Lando Slick seized them for his own use. But the cleansing process benefitted the boy by gifting him memories from his previous lives, many of which came with new spells and abilities.

Eliminating the polluting system didn’t go unnoticed, however. A secret organization led by an old mage, a student of the planet’s last living wizard, decided to strike back. After they pressured the emperor, he banished the Brown Bear clan and sentenced the clan leadership to death. The official reason was that information about the mithril deposits Leg had discovered hadn’t been disclosed. Ulma Reloit, head of the Panther clan, showed up at Lando Slick’s residence to warn him and Leg of the coming danger. Not satisfied by striking with the help of the emperor, the enemy prohibited all relations, financial and social, with the outcast clan. While Ulma agreed to help Leg flee the capital, the boy figured out where the Blood of the Beast might be hidden. He was delivered to an abandoned boiler and found the dangerous substance in the furnace.

Still confined to his wheelchair, Leg gained independence by using what he learned about magic in a previous life to create a flying machine. He grabbed the Blood of the Beast and flew off to meet and stop the goblins. The western goblins recognized Leg as a hero—a warrior fighting on the side of the same mysterious being they served. Leg told the leader of the goblin army about the strange draconid experiments, and the latter decided to help him find the rest of them. As they traveled across the empire, the shaman taught the boy construction, the ability to create complex magic shapes out of smaller elements. But the education went both ways. Leg taught the shaman skills he learned from his old world. That gave the goblins protection and a powerful weapon, changing the balance of power in the Western Empire.

At the same time, a leader of the mysterious organization far in the south made a breakthrough: he was able to open a portal to the primal demon world. It was ruled by their leader, the great Bashorg. A greater demon and several lesser demons made their way through the portal.

Leg was hard at work constructing. Using what he learned from the goblin shaman, he created fifty protective amulets, fifty attack wands, and a few flying vehicles for lookouts. He eventually came up against a problem, however, so he and the Shadow, his protector, headed off to see the goblins cleansing the province of draconids. But their encounter with the brown creatures went awry. The goblins were fleeing the province, their badly injured shaman carried with them. It had taken just three red assassins, the planet’s best killers, to route their entire army. Armed with a new strategy, Leg was able to eliminate two of them, though the third proved too much for him. The boy nearly met his end, though something pulled the assassin away before he could end the fight. A little while later, Leg found the strength to get up and find the aftermath of a battle the assassin had fought with demons. The assassin had killed two lesser demons. He had then met his end, however. A search of the body revealed that the red assassin resembled the valgs in Leg’s previous lives. It turned out that valgs had descended from the Beast’s children, creatures that had conquered Leg’s old planet.

The battle brought with it a new problem: the Shadow was hovering between life and death. She was beginning to transform into something resembling the red assassin. Unwilling to let that happen, Leg begged the red mist to save his protector. In return, he received a magic construction the planet’s ruler made just for the Shadow, and the boy was able to cleanse the Shadow and turn her into a knight completely bare of mithril. That let her return to the Brown Bear clan. The totem rewarded Leg by telling him about a place where he could rid himself of his status as hero, unwilling as he was to have a slave to a different master in his clan.

But Leg had no time to relax. After returning to Fasorg, he learned that while the economic embargo was taking a serious toll on the citizenry, a solution had been found: the Southern Empire was prepared to help them in exchange for a hundred flying machines. That prompted Lando Slick to show up and prohibit them from working with the other empires, though he soon collapsed senseless. As an angel, he couldn’t tolerate demonic essence. The demons who had killed the red assassin had arrived in Fasorg to feast on human souls. Leg was able to take out all the lesser demons, and he even did serious damage to a middling demon. Unfortunately, the latter escaped.

Following the battle, the boy finally had time for some creativity. What he’d been learning was enough for him to make a reinforcer, a device that made whatever it touched nearly invincible. He also updated his gliders, as he had taken to calling his flying machines. Churning out a hundred of them in a day was no longer a problem. The red mist gave the boy a structure for cleansing Lando Slick of mithril, which he did to turn Lando into a knight in exchange for hefty bonuses for the clan.

Just as it seemed like everything was falling into place, a daughter of the Beast, a perfectly embodied dragon, appeared in the world. Leg learned that there was already one on the planet, having completely occupied the second continent by destroying the humans who had lived on it. Hoping to find a weapon he could use against the creature, Leg dove into his memories. But what he found was the reason he’d turned on the great archmage. The archmage had betrayed his students, fleeing the field of battle and leaving the valgs who had believed in him to be devoured by the demons in a fate that robbed them of subsequent rebirths. Leg was able to lock the daughter of the Beast in a ravine, though it wasn’t for long. It took the dragon mere days to break out. Still, that was enough time for the red mist to launch mass evacuations, pulling all of the planet’s most important people to an uninhabited island where they could build a new civilization. And that was when the servants of Bashorg discovered that a fearsome monster was in the world. The secret organization did everything they could to neutralize the threat—they were planning to open a portal for greater demons. Nobody was going down without a fight.

Leg returned to Fasorg and discovered that his relatives had all been evacuated. Assuming leadership of the clan, he signed a lucrative agreement with the other empires to sell gliders to them. He wasn’t about to panic before the desperate situation absolutely demanded it. After creating three thousand flying machines, enough to save as many people from the slow daughter of the Beast, he went off to hunt the remaining middling demon. He needed a new batch of memories. But everything went haywire. The boy came across multiple middling demons before eventually finding the daughter of the Beast herself. After barely escaping, he discovered the place of power the bear had told him about. It was enveloped in an enormous structure: the portal demons were using to break into the world. Leg fought a leader of the mysterious organization and beat him only to have him summon a true monster in his dying seconds. It was a demon just one tier lower than Bashorg.

Leg began a pointless battle against the immortal creature. Soon, the daughter of the Beast showed up to stand up for her own interests. The titans went to war, and the dragon lost. The daughter of the Beast was devoured. Leg made one last attempt to attack, cleansing the ground of demon essence and destroying the demon with the power of the Beast pouring out of a crystal embedded in the ground. The red mist canceled the evacuation and gifted Leg the victor’s right to free will. No longer was he a hero. He was a mage with an education waiting for him.

The Brown Bear clan earned mountains of bonuses, and Leg Ondo was named savior of the world. But