“Mana Bolt
With my new sight, I could see how the tendrils of mana moved. Two spiralled and compressed until they turned into a dense barrel of mana. A third tendril squeezed in on itself until it was a tiny capsule. Then a tendril bound them together until the mana construct was trembling violently. I couldn't exactly tell what happened next but somehow an entire smaller construct overlayed itself on the thing. Finally the combination turned into a visible arrow of light that shot forward while leaving behind a trail of frayed mana strands. I didn't expect a simple attack spell to be this complex but magic was supposed to be complicated, wasn't it?
The bolt impacted the trunk of a tree and a shallow fist sized crater appeared on it. Not bad for my first projectile spell. I kept casting it and refilling my mana until I was sure I understood the second construct. It was just what gave the primary construct the trigger it needed to fire. Further testing showed me that without it, the entire construct destabilized and blew up in my face. It was not that dangerous thankfully, just a light punch or something. Absolutely worth it to figure out how magic even worked.
\\[ARCANIST PUPIL] is now level 2!
Awesome. But now I was confused, if it was all shapes then how come mana wasn't creating spells naturally? And what about using all that free mana whirling in the air to cast? Questions, so many questions that I couldn't answer.
I wanted to see if I could modify Induce BleedingMana Bolt
We did not encounter another wave that day. And the next was only slightly better.
At night, a gigantic wooden platform was raised atop the canopy of the forest. The thing had to have weighed a ton but the trees of the great forests ranged from small trees that could fall to retchroot tides to near impervious old growths. At least I assumed they were old growths. And on this platform we made tents and a fire. A fire in a wooden platform on trees didn't sound wise to me but hey, I was dealing with literal magic, wasn't I?
Retchroot couldn't climb and the platform was high enough that the only thing we had to really watch out for was the cold. And the occasional Nightwraith, whatever that was.
The first day I was too tired but now, on day 2, I just couldn't sleep. I tried to distract myself from the fact that Jijik knew one of my secrets but I was not just worried, no, I was not even terrified but I had a constant feeling of dread. Like I had messed up and it was only a matter of time until it all came crashing down. The moment when the cartoon realizes that it has run off the cliff and will fall, the moment it looks down but before gravity catches up. I was like that, stuck in that moment like a fly in amber. And then came the rationalizations.
He might know secret but I was hoping (coping?) that he didn't. The Red Powder thing was known to a lot of the guild, my Godtouched nature was not. But was I willing to bet on that? Did I trust the guild? No.
Did I trust Valdima, Tiamim, Rev or the rest? No.
Then what? I couldn't exactly confront them. They would have me defeated and restrained before I could finish a sentence if any of them was the leaker.
Do I go about my life hoping that no one betrayed me? When a Godtouched was so valuable. When the guild contracts were coming up not too far in the future?
If not, what could I do? If my involvement was made public then I might be turned into an example by any drug lord. The guild had not made the story sound like the accident it was but rather the result of a concerted effort to crack down on the drug market. I would become a target, I was a target. And I hadn't seen Jijik since my episode with Mana Sight
Maybe I? No. I squeezed Minidea again. The only one I know wouldn't betray me. The only thing keeping the poor creature from becoming a plushie was that its body was not soft. I giggled at the mental image of a Medea plushie.
Laying awake, I tried to think of a solution for an earth hour or so before giving up walking out of my tent and siding up against a wooden wall made of an extended tree trunk. And then I looked up.
I felt too energized to sleep, filled with nervous energy and existential dread. But all that was for later, I didn't care for them now, no, not when what I saw took my breath away.
I had never actually seen the stars and the moon, in this life or my old one. I had never seen the tiny pinpricks of light or the pale almost circle except in photos and videos.
When I first arrived in the forest, I had mostly spent my nights in caves and in roofed carriages and the thick foliage hid almost everything anyways. The parts of New Delport I was familiar with were choked by smog during the night. And the less I spoke about my old world, the better. A very misguided attempt at controlling atmospheric albedo had left the sky unrecognizable before I was even born.
The stars shone like distant pins of radiance, dwarfed in brilliance by the cold light of the almost full moon. The moon shone gently and yet there was an almost scrutinizing sense to it, like it was watching and it was studying me. I wondered if the moon was a god and they recognized my nature. A bright red dot flitted high across the sky, occasionally transforming into narrow straight lines of crimson by its sheer speed. The Great Red Dragon, Rubis, locked in his eternal war against a spatial rupture to the Unformed Chaos itself. And the horrors that dwelt within. I tore my gaze away from the dragon. He would keep fighting, he had been fighting for so long.
I remembered someone from my old world. An older technician named Curt who had once worked on one of the commercial ships that went to and from one of many lunar bases. He eventually quit work in disgust when it became obvious that the moon was just going to be a luxury retreat apart from the teeming smelly masses for the rich and not the promised expansion of humanity that the brochures had claimed. Curt had been, at one point, a part of a refugee caravan before settling in my town, back when I was not one myself.
I remembered that he spent his time just repairing things for the town residents and that I did occasionally hang out at the repair shop with my friends, back when I had them. We wouldn't bother each other, the kids would occasionally ask about the workings of some mechanical contraption, be it smaller bots or half a century old vehicles. None of the new cars was repairable by anyone who wasn't affiliated with the actual manufacturer and that was exorbitant for anyone not rich. But when it wasn't cars or robots, it was old shortwave radios. And the amateur stations that inhabited the frequencies. The radios that blasted copyrighted music and the news channels that weren't entirely bought. Curt’s shop was, for little old me, the only place that was an escape from the corporations. The only place where you'd hear things like war crimes halfway across the world.
And it was during one of those transmissions, something about a resort in the Kuiper Belt that he had lost his composure and closed his shop early. But Curt didn't kick us out, he spoke to us for the first time about something other than the intricacies of car repair.
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“You know, when you look at the stars, they aren't being looked at by scrawny brats. They are so far away that it doesn't matter, it wouldn't matter if you are a refugee without a home or own a country. In space, everything is put into its proper perspective.” His eyes had grown misty then. “At cosmic distances like that, it is all just granular patterns. The stars put it all into perspective, how small we are, how small our planet is. Even the richest of us are just tiny insects scrabbling over dirt before creation and that's why those bastards made sure that you can never see the fucking sky again. If the stars are gone, the brightest and the loftiest thing you'll know is the towers of those assholes. That's why they took it all away from us. The sky, the stars, the moon so all that lights our nights are billboards and those towers.” The great celestial equalizer, he had called it afterwards.
I didn't get it then and right now, I didn't feel it that much either but I knew that I liked the sky when it was free like this. Free, vast and open.
A simple spell to commemorate seeing the sky for the first time. A simple spell that did nothing but provide light.
Almost on autopilot, I raised an arm and tried to visualize the flows and currents of mana. They came. I had an idea, instead of a projectile, why not start with something much simpler?
I attempted to coalesce them into a denser cloud. The strings shone brightly for a moment with the outline of pale curves before they simply went through each other. I tried again and once again they phased through one another. And even worse, they looked dimmer than before. I had wasted my limited mana!
But it gave me another idea. If I couldn't condense mana in the air because they interfered with each other, what if they latched on to a small surface? My control lessened the further I went from the mana so it had to be something close to me. My palm maybe? No, that was way too risky, even for what I was trying. My knife!
I held one of my knives, one that was entirely depleted of mana and turned the blade’s point into a narrow stick. Strands of mana whirled around it. One, then another. And then half a dozen at once. More and more strands squeezed themselves into a point at the end of the stick until it was a thick dot of pale white. And then the pale dot lifted off the stick and started to burn brighter. Until the brightness of the moon above and the dot below matched each other perfectly. As above, so below.
“Let there be light.”
\\Spell Pale Moon’s Light created. 10 mana per cast. Lasts 6 minutes.
\\Mana Magic spell list expanded
I jerked back into awareness. I had spent over 90 mana to create a 10 mana spell. I hadn't entirely been in control of myself near the end there, when I created the spell but I somehow knew that I had been in no danger. I looked at Medea, silently watching me, the Light spell reflecting off its eyes. Perhaps ‘somehow’ was being too ungrateful.
Lilim agreed to show the earth golem spell to me again once I tracked her down in exchange for examining how Medea’s legs worked, namely the bladed tips with a bulb that held its curled fingers. Apparently that articulation was something Lilim could use for a creation of hers.
“Wow, that joint there is fascinating. How does your pet not break its fingers when stabbing with those legs?”
“Uhh, I think there's an extra hidden joint inside. That one folds it in and the tapering edge there acts as armor.” Fauna Archive
A commotion distracted us then as three massive boar corpses tied up into a net were dragged in by the Hunting Guild’s Guildmistress. We would eat well.
The constructs for the golem/mech/armor were so layered and complex that I couldn't tell anything apart. Some parts worked to make the earth malleable, others then hardened that earth, yet another dynamically turned those two parts on or off and more. The system didn't have intelligence as a stat and the closest was acuity but no wonder intelligence was needed to be a good wizard in stories. Wait, was that another universal bleedover? Nope, I'm still not going down that rabbit hole.
But regardless of implications about creativity and originality, I was satisfied with my magical autodidactism, even though Jijik’s existence hung over me like a sword of damocles. I had tried to find him but Jijik seemed to have disappeared from the camp and even the expeditionary party itself. Was he there just to threaten me?
“Am I overthinking it?” I wondered out loud.
“Not really miss. I don't think so but let's focus on these damnable pests first, eh?” Gres, or was it Tres? Whatever, one of the brothers grumbled. I sighed and cast a Mana Bolt
The rats were not smart and relied on overwhelming numbers to fight. This set up negated that entirely. The whole thing had to be prohibitively expensive but hey, Neevom had to have the mana to spare. Maybe not a lot considering that this was the first time he had used the thing. I haven't seen the Hunting Guild’s Guildmistress yet after the boars but the rumors were that the guild people were letting us grunts kill the rats for experience and would help directly if we found something too dangerous.
A rat almost had my nose for dinner but I managed to position a knife so that it was instead sheared in twain. One of the two halves still slapped me on the face and I sputtered as blood seeped into my face. Note to self, get eye protection.
Another frontliner, a girl named Mirin, laughed. Not a mean laugh, at least I hoped it wasn't. I made a gesture that might have been rude and grinned back for a moment. I didn't really care for or even get the battle camaraderie thing going on here but something told me that not playing along was idiotic.
Medea was doing something weird. It had planted itself before the mouth of one rat tunnel, expanded it a bit with its legs and then dislodged its jaw wide. The rats raced into its mouth in a stream and just… died. It hadn't moved since the start of the battle and yet it kept eating, its shell straining against a fattened stomach.
With the tiny stream of rats and ample backup, Cold BloodedBig Knife User
By the time the stream slowed down and eventually stopped, I was panting with exhaustion and had started draining my knives for mana for the occasional spell. The brothers seemed fine, Lilim too. Mirin too. The hammer guy was nursing a bubbled toe. And Medea didn't even look like it had been in a fight.
We found no more waves that day. Or the next one after that. On the fifth day, we encountered another two massive waves and one death. No one I knew. Once again with the barrier rats. I also finished my class and moved on to a level 15 one. One presumably unlocked because of how many retchroot I had killed with a bone weapon.
\\BONEWARRIOR SQUIRE (0/15)
The Unaugured God has ordained that reality will submit to his will and you will see that His dream is fulfilled. Bones are among the first materials in existence to be shaped towards the means of violence and that legacy lives in you A BONEWARRIOR SQUIRE uses bone armaments. Weapons and armaments made of bones are hardier in her hands than usual and their bite grows deeper as her strength rises.
A BONEWARRIOR can eventually learn to summon an armor of bone that is nigh impervious to all but all the greatest of attacks in the shattered eternities as her weapons mow down armies in a single swing. A BONEWARRIOR who has truly mastered the bone can replace her body with rapidly regrowing bone that grows sturdier with each blow she endures.
MASTERY BONUSES:
+2 to STRENGTH, VITALITY, CELERITY and PERCEPTION
It had a skill that further increased the damage of bone weapons based on my own stats. I hoped it would eventually merge with my mana storage and weapon skill but I would have to free up passive slots first. And as was usual with bone stuff, I mastered it instantly and moved on to greener and more organic pastures.
I didn't think too much about what class to pick next. I had been thinking and there was one answer, I needed to think long term. Medea grew by eating so my best bet was getting it the best food possible. [MAGICAL BEAST REARER TRAINEE]Fauna Archive
