It's not enough, no.

Figures.

He runs, then, and they don't try very hard to chase him. Seems like they're content to be alone in their tower.

He's back the next morning, before the sun is up, with a minor illusion muffling any sounds he's making and a major illusion turning him transparent. He's not great at illusions, this one doesn't even disguise his magical signature and a single hit will dispel it, but he's counting on most of the mages either being asleep or not being actively looking for magic.

He finds one of the mages who are asleep, casts a muffling spell and a disorienting illusion, ties them up, then grabs them and runs like hell.

The mage doesn't resist the illusion, and even half-convinces herself that it's a nightmare before she realises that she's too awake for it to be a nightmare.

She's too far from the camp by then, though, and by the time she thinks to use magic she's tied to a tree, surrounded by a silencing illusion, and there are floating conjured blades pressed against her throat, her stomach, and her inner thigh.

"If you try to cast any spells or call for help I'm going to kill you," Ruby says, presenting a calm front he does not feel.

He's... never actually killed anyone.

He doesn't want to.

"I will feast on your heart," she growls.

"Wow, that's, uh. Graphic."

"You are not of us, so you are against us."

"Can I instead be neutral?"

"No. No such thing. Not safe. Never safe. All outsiders want us dead, so we want them dead."

"...that's... false, but at least a coherent enough world model that explains why you just attacked me."

"Kill outsiders."

"Seriously, I just want to talk. Actually not even that, I just want to figure out why I was sent to Morvunskar without being instantly mobbed."

"You will not survive. You are weak. We will kill you and you will become our servant."

"Man, hanging out in your tower must be fun."

Rather than responding she leans forward and starts casting—

...he really, really hoped he wouldn't have to do this.

She has Oakflesh up, so the blades don't pierce her immediately—but they're relentless and Ruby can couple them with disorienting illusions and she's not, actually, that strong after all. She starts to bleed, and she doesn't cast a heal on herself.

Okay, okay, actually he needs to go get some air and not be near the smell of blood, his stomach is rolling and he thinks probably if he'd had the benefit of adrenaline in a fight he wouldn't be feeling so bad but that was not a fight, that was an execution, plain and simple.

He doesn't throw up but it's a near thing, and he needs time to recover his mental bearings.

That conversation was... upsetting. It gave him no clarity, but most of all it felt broken, it felt like the mage's responses were only vaguely related to what he was saying, like...

...Faralda said that the most popular theory about why mages go crazy so often was abuse of magic beyond their means damaging their soul. Ruby thinks that... this could, actually, be what a damaged soul looks like. Whole pieces of cognition missing, an inability to change one's mind, strong emotional dysregulation. It's not a normal kind of going crazy (so to speak), it's literal pieces missing in their ability to reason about the world.

Holy crap that's depressing.

What's extra depressing is that it might just... not... be fixable? At all? How do you fix someone's soul, if they die do they just go wherever it was they'd go afterwards but damaged? Can he use this reasoning to convince himself that this is a mercy and he's preventing them from getting even more damaged?

Apparently he cannot.

He does not want to kill a dozen mages.

...he could, in fact, just decide to not kill a dozen mages. That's a thing he could do. He could move on with his life, never solve the mystery of Sam Guevenne, and...

...he couldn't. Not really. Not because of the mystery, he'd be upset about the mystery but that by itself would not motivate him to kill a dozen mages.

What motivates him to kill a dozen mages is that they attacked him without giving him a chance to say anything, their souls are damaged beyond repair, and anyone else who comes to this fort will probably also be attacked. Now, he could go to Windhelm and inform the jarl of this issue but—something tells him the jarl is not prioritising mages taking over any forts, if the Valtheim Towers are anything to go by. Even if this one is much closer to the capital, it's out of the way enough that Ruby fully expects it to just be ignored.

It's still early and the sun is only just starting to rise, but there's no point in delaying another day; it'll just give them a chance to notice their missing comrade and prepare for him. He goes invisible again and walks back to Morvunskar.

What follows is not, exactly, an massacre, but it's not much of a fight either. After he's inside the camp and has killed a few sleeping mages he summons a Flame Atronach and sends it to wreak merry hell on them. He's still invisible—transparent, really, but you do need to know to look—and although now the mages are sufficiently on their guard to in fact be looking for whoever summoned the Atronach, it's not enough. By the time he's been revealed there are only two mages left, and he can in fact straightforwardly overpower them.

The lack of tactics is uncanny and very unsettling. From the perspective of someone trying to kill them, the fact that they basically throw themselves at him with little to no concern for their own safety means that they're very recklessly dangerous, but it also means they're just straightforwardly reckless and not that hard to kill. And in the end it just feels like a hot knife cutting through butter.