Hello, this might be fun and/or interesting.
An answer someone in the book gave was not to fight him, instead give the news of his presence to someone who could fight him more effectively.
Here’s another idea. Zapping him with gamma rays. Maybe get an artificer to make some folded space that makes light travel in a circle so that you can build up a lot of it before shooting.
Or transmute a lot of uranium-235 to make a nuclear bomb.
I may be out of good-seeming ideas already.
Me, personally?
Assuming I’m not face to face with him, have the Air Force do a drone strike on him. Or get a special forces sniper to blow his head off from half a mile away.
The dude was at least at Archmage. You kill someone like that in one of two ways - total surprise, or subterfuge to disguise the strike. Anything that doesn’t kill him instantly gives him a chance to protect himself, heal, and strike back against you.
Hmm yes. A drone strike… Wings for gliding are within their technology ability. A spell can maintain altitude like in the crown family room with the safe. Magic could be used to propel it. The weapon itself could be a disintegration mine in a folded space bag, or something.
The blood emperor might be warded against physical attacks. The projectile would move slower than light, so if a ward’s detection ability is limited in speed it might be able to react in time to redirect it. But a huge wide-area explosion might get past a personal warding artefact. And the drone might be spotted on its approach and attacked by a person. Maybe there could be distractions or invisibility. I don’t know what stealth magic there is. Or it could move underground. If the blood emperor’s inside his palace then he will probably be more strongly warded than if he was visiting a lake.
A special forces sniper shooting him from a mile away. Then it raises the question of what weapon to use. If it’s a bullet, he could have a medallion that deflects it and makes it miss. I thought gamma rays might be harder to ward against. I don’t know if it’s true though. Maybe a huge sniper shot like a cannon ball, or multiple shots at once.
Hmm so maybe my real answer for how I’d fight the blood emperor is I’d gain knowledge to be able to fight him.
This question seems to boil down to, “What do you think the capabilities of the Blood Emporer were?” And that makes me wonder whether the question was a test to determine whether or not a potential student knew just a little too much about blood magic.
He was an archmage with a lifespan (and thus potential for power accumulation) centuries beyond any modern archmage like Zard, he was one the foremost if not the foremost expert in blood magic, had few, if any, ethics, and a large population of sacrifices to draw from.
From that I’m going to assume that trying to break through his wards with hundreds of thousands of thaums behind them would be useless, and also that he had some kind of healing factor that would allow him to recover from almost any injury, drawn from thousands of people’s natural healing abilities.
I feel like the only real options are trying something completely new, somehow hitting him with a devastating attack when he has no artifacts on or around him, or by breaking the rules of magic by using an aberrant against him.
The last of those options seems like the most plausible to me, albeit tricky. For the right type of aberrant you can probably even take him out with an aberrant that isn’t all that powerful. If you just arranged for what Newton became to suddenly drop on him, that might even do it And that’s only an apprentice level aberrant to kill a mega-archmage.
…Of course saying that in an entrance exam would be suicidal…
Hit him with a rock. It’s the last thing he’d expect.
The minute his head is in view, hit it with a rock?
That’s not very sportsmanlike.
We have some new members, and this is fun, so I’m bumping it…
I don’t think I would fight the Blood Emperor. Or report him to any government. Who would believe me? I wouldn’t pledge loyalty to him and bring him innocent children, but I’d be pretty likely to hop in my car and drive off. Quickly. If possible.
Also, I hope Fekten won’t be reading this, but do we know for a fact that he was as brutal as the stories say? The rumor mill in Gilbratha is so utterly absurd that it seems distantly plausible that the atrocities and bloodletting have been exaggerated over the years, and he was no more than a typical conqueror. (If he was truly only one person who reigned for three hundred years.)
I’m not exactly pro-blood emperor, but I am highly critical of the historical accuracy of Gilbrathans, when they are more like a group of children playing telephone.
Is it just Gilbratha thay has such a negative view of the Blood Emperor? The history we’re told is that every country rose up in rebellion against his empire, and while that probably is an incomplete history, the empire wasnt doing that well for everyone to rise up against it.
Then again, the Roman Empire rarely went more than a generation without a new civil war or faction trying to break off. Maybe the Emperor just got a little lax in his subjugation, and all the factions happened to team up.
As far as I know, Siobhan hasn’t mentioned hearing that in any other country or from her Grandfather. Grandfather claims the BE just disappeared. Lenore claims it was a mass uprising and one of their assassins killed him.
Maybe the BE was killed. It seems unlikely, for someone so powerful. Maybe he is still alive - or was still alive, up until recently. You have to wonder what would make an entire regime suddenly disappear, though. Did they get what they came for?
So, my take is that the Blood Emporer most likely simply stepped down to pursue his own goals after growing tired of holding an empire that hates him together, dealing with court intrigues, etc. without any real progress to whatever his true goals were.
Subjugating the entire empire does seem like it was a means to an end to him, and if it stopped advancing those ends… Well, I could see him just stepping away with no succession plan and letting that chaos play out. When in doubt, seize power, but power sometimes comes with it’s own restrictions.
As for whether the Blood Emporer was as brutal as Gilbrathans say… I would say, yes, probably even worse in some ways. Blood magic itself isn’t inherently as bad as the Crown families pretend, but those same Crown families are also inclined to suppress knowledge that might threaten them in some way, and knowledge of certain horrors might give people ideas.
Siobhan notes that the Blood Empire kept rigorous records of everything they did, some of the data from which still seems to be in use, and from her wider perspective her thoughts seem to agree that they committed many atrocities.
If the Blood Empire was only 300 years ago, it would be entirely possible (given the long life of sorcerers) that now living sorcerers had grandparents or even potentially parents alive at the time. Thus, some people definitely know what happened.
But knowing, and sharing isn’t the same thing. People in power don’t like reminding their kids that their grandparents were probably just as much a part of the Blood Emperor’s atrocities as he was.
If you don’t mind me mentioning a real world (and slightly personal) example: In a 1920s American History textbook I’ve read, the explanation of why there was no “modern” black representatives in the American South was explained by writing that post-war reconstruction was corrupt. The story (a single paragraph) went that, in the 1870s, a crackdown on corruption ended black political aspirations, and all those black politicians saw their political power fade.
That book published a lie.
Terrorism blocked black voters from the polls, and Jim Crow kept them away for generations. Former African slaves were the majority in many places in the South, so there’s no way that they should have had no representatives at all in the southern states in the 1920s: not local, not state, not federal. Not without purposefully keeping them from voting.
Similar propaganda lasted; my HS textbook (a 1980s publication) showed the picture of the all-black reconstruction legislature. It acknowledged the Jim Crow laws and various systematic methods for keeping black people from the polls. But, the book didn’t even bother to explain how white politicians passed Jim Crow in a black majority South. Again, the book left out the terrorism entirely. As a kid, it seemed fishy, but who was I to argue? Its not like they put it on a test.
It wasn’t until I visited the Smithsonian’s new African American Museum that I saw a complete explanation that included the terrorism. Now, some of that ignorance was my fault - I could have looked for a proper book on the subject - but, the reality is that generations of Americans have gotten a badly distorted idea of how Jim Crow happened from the “approved” textbooks. And that’s just one example.
Out of curiosity, where were these textbooks encountered?
Growing up in Canada, I learned only a tiny bit about US history. But when I first got curious about it, I got a roughly correct version of how organizations like the KKK suppressed black votes.
This is not to say that everything was correct. For example the Tulsa Race Massacre was not reported anywhere for about 70 years. How the Tulsa Race Massacre Was Covered Up | HISTORY
And that is not to say that everything reported accurately now, either. How many people know that without illegal Florida voter suppression of blacks, “W” Bush would have never been elected? See Executive Summary for the basic facts.
And that’s not to say that most Americans understand their own history at all. For example the Tulsa Massacre was part of a resurgence of the KKK. But how many of us realize that the KKK were also behind the right of women to vote, income tax, and Prohibition? The purpose of the first two was to support Prohibition. Women would vote for it. Income tax was needed to for the government to replace alcohol excise taxes. And the purpose of Prohibition was to target Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants - all of whom the Protestant KKK hated. Sounds bizarre? All documented history! https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=constructing
Politics makes strange bedfellows. And few of us realize how artificial the political coalitions that make up our current parties are. But Democrats include both environmentalists, and labor unions whose jobs are sometimes shut down by environmental regulations. Republicans include both small government conservatives, and the strongest supporters of having a large military. They hold together on the principle that, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. But they are not truly aligned, and sometimes they will realign.
Bringing it back to the book, I’m sure that the same is true of history there. I’ll be fascinated to learn more about how the Blood Empire and Red Guard are related. My suspicion is that the Red Guard is a remnant of the Blood Empire. And there are a lot of alliances of convenience that are going to split and realign.
The older book was literally on my bookshelf; my mom collected it. It was a textbook written for Virginia public schools. If I recall correctly, it may even be the book that has a nice foreword on how carefully put together it was by leading educators.
My High School textbook, unless I’m mistaken, was a Prentice Hall “American” history textbook (A U.S. History book in truth. Canada and Mexico don’t count as American History 
) But then, that book had lots of history that was only half true in retrospect. I mean, Reagan was hardly that far in the past, and there were entries on his elections.
Oh, and its not like I’m the only one to observe this ridiculous disconnect from reality: https://news.gsu.edu/research-magazine/rewriting-history-civil-war-textbooks
Ah. Well. Virginia.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they called it “The War of Northern Aggression.”
And yes, Canada is left out of US history. Do you have any idea how Canadians felt about the US policy of Manifest Destiny? Or what they did about it? (Hint: that’s why there’s now one country instead of many to your north.)
I agree with everything you’ve just said, as it pertains to our real world.
And as someone who was subject to the Virginia “We’re south of the mason-dixie, but we’re not really the south, we’re reformed” school system back in the 90 and early 00s, I can concur that it was no better.
I can’t recall if that was in our history books, but it was taught to my dad, who is now in his 70s, who went to school in New Jersey and Maryland - two states just to the north of us.
I can also verify that Virginia battlefield and historical parks have some outright false and blatantly racist signage describing the battles, but if you travel an hour north, to Maryland, they are much more accurate, and lack the blatant racism. I’m in an area surrounded by parks and monuments to the war, and while they vow to foster understanding and appreciation of the significance of our history, but most of them don’t actually say what the war was about, and heavily glorify the losers.
Anyway, back to the topic: thinking about our very real, and very recent rewriting of history without the aid of anything more magical than money and power, I still do think it’s likely that the picture of the BE we’re getting from S and the University is quite different than what actually happened. Not necessarily in the ways I have assumed - maybe in other, even more sinister ways.
Indeed. 
I love the speculation about revisionist history. I grew up in Texas, where we spent so much time on local history we got even less than the average amount of semi-truthful information about the rest of the U.S. and basically nothing about the rest of the world.
King of the Hill’s “Bobby! Your grandfather lost his knees defending Texas in World War II” is funny because it’s too true.
I also love the speculation about what to do with the Blood Emperor, but due to having written him I will leave continued idea-generation to you guys.
I’m going to take this as permission to rag on Texas.
First with a joke.
A Frenchman, an Englishman, a Texan and a Mexican were on a plane. Suddenly the pilot came running back and said, “We’re going down and there is only one more parachute!” Then jumps with his parachute.
The four begin to argue about how to choose who would live.
After a bit the Frenchman said, “Someone must break ze impasse. Vive le France!” And jumps.
The Englishman says, “I will not be upstaged by a Frenchman. For jolly old England!” And jumps.
The last two look at each other. Then the Texan throws the Mexican out while yelling, “Remember the Alamo!”
Secondly, with a funny fact. By the terms under which Texas joined the USA, it is allowed to split into 4 states at any time it wishes. This will increase its political power. Several times, there have been serious proposals to actually split it. But a key sticking point was that they couldn’t agree on who would give up the Texas flag!