by Tao Wong
Light Ball Cast
89% Synchronicity
I was quite proud of how good I had gotten at casting the spell. Not only had I gained a better physical understanding of the motions, mentally I understood why each portion of the spell interacted the way it did. I could, with some difficulty, even cast a Light Ball without the aid of the system. Not that I was going to fool around with that right now.
“Rat droppings,” Alexa said, gesturing with her spear as we checked out another empty office. This was our first visual clue that the Devil Rats were here, though the pervasive odor of rat urine assaulted our noses constantly.
“Recent?”
“What do I look like to you? A vet?” Alexa said grumpily before she strode out of the room. Before I could answer, a flash of red in the corner had me flicking my hand out. The already half-formed Force Missile flew directly at the charging rat, spearing it even as it rushed out of the hole it had hidden in. The upgraded spell speared through the monster, maiming it before disappearing.
“Trouble!” I called out hurriedly as I began forming another Force Missile. Behind the maimed rat that was still attempting to reach me, another whiskered offender was crawling out.
“I’m busy!” Alexa shouted back. It was then I realized that squeaks and the familiar swoosh of her spear could be heard from behind me. Had the damn rats tried to ambush us?
“Shit!” I snarled as my next missile missed. The Devil Rat had scrambled out of the way of my cast. It jumped, soaring toward me before it bounced off the Force Shield I swung in its way. Of course, since the Force Shield was an actual shield, I had to carefully control its size. After some experimenting, I had decided to just go with a traditional shield option most of the time and attached it to my left arm. Unfortunately, the jacket’s wards just weren’t powerful enough for me to rely on solely. Even as I readied another Force Missile, my fingers flying through the complicated motions, I watched the rat before me intently.
“Eat this,” I snarled as I bounced the rat off my shield again and tossed my readied spell when it landed. This attack hit, tearing through its body and leaving the monster seriously wounded. Rather than finish it or its brethren off, I stepped backward quickly to check on Alexa.
I might as well not have bothered. Rats, even Devil Rats, were no danger to my Templar friend. While she might have complained about her lack of desire to be a warrior, there was no doubt she had the training and skill to be one. The bloody pieces that littered the hallway were testament to that fact.
“Did they just try to ambush us?” Alexa asked, echoing my earlier thoughts.
“Come on, rats aren’t that smart,” I said, though my voice was filled with doubt. After all, they were Devil Rats, and even normal wild animals knew how to hunt in packs.
“You ready?” Alexa asked after a moment, and I had to nod. A part of me wondered if these Devil Rats had spread here from the earlier group because I had never exterminated the pack. Then again, how did you exterminate rats? Poison and pesticides, I guessed, neither of which I had access to. Of course, I was once again comparing these rats to their normal counterparts, which might have been a mistake. Sometimes, knowing only a little bit about a subject could be just as hazardous, I realized. I hadn’t even taken the time to learn about the Devil Rats from Lily like I had gotten used to doing, so confident that I knew what I was up against.
By the third ambush, there was definitely no longer any doubt what the rats were doing. As we advanced up the office floors, the attacks grew in frequency. That was until we reached the third, and second-to-last, floor.
“We done?” I asked as we finished our walkthrough.
“That should be it,” Alexa confirmed as she led us back toward the stairs.
“We weren’t attacked,” I said, and Alexa nodded again. If they weren’t attacking us now, that could mean one of two things: Firstly, we’d killed all the rats there were. The second, more likely option, was that they were reserving their forces. “Perhaps we should talk about how we’re going to do this.”
Alexa paused, hand on the exit bar, before she turned to me, nodding for me to go ahead. While the fights so far had not been difficult, a little caution made sense.
***
“This is absolutely disgusting,” I said as I stuck my finger into the lukewarm flesh of a Devil Rat. I grimaced at the slimy stickiness, the residual heat flowing and wrapping around my finger. “I’m so going to catch something from this.”
“This was your idea,” Alexa said, shooting one last disgusted look at me before she returned to watching for trouble.
“Don’t remind me,” I said and then shut up. Fingers shifted and moved, my mind stretching down familiar routes.
Link Cast
75% Synchronicity
Scry Cast
64% Synchronicity
Scry link is established.
I felt my senses expand, the link between each Devil Rat letting my mind flow down arcane routes. I frowned almost immediately and pointed to the right. Without hesitation, Alexa’s spear flashed out and struck through the drywall, pinning and killing the furry spy. For precious seconds, I struggled with my spell, the split attention almost pulling it apart before I managed to reassert the necessary control. Behind my eyes, a throbbing headache exploded, a pain that at least I was used to by now.
Again, my mind rushed along the link. Above us, on the top floor. Connections. So many connections. I bounced from one to another, keeping count with each skip, the headache pulsing in time. Seconds seemed like minutes, and then I released the spell, slumping against the dirty and bloody wall unconcernedly.
“You okay?” Alexa asked, concern in her voice.
“Mmmmppphhfff,” I replied—or tried to at least. I hung my head low and then blinked as I noted another drop of blood drip from my nose. Shit. I wiped it away and then leaned the other way.
“Here,” Alexa said, holding a torn tissue for me. I nodded thanks as I stuffed it into my nose, thinking how silly I looked.
“I counted just over twenty before I lost the connection,” I said to Alexa minutes later, when the headache had subsided.
“Are you going to be able to continue?” Alexa asked worriedly.
“Yes. We need to deal with these guys now. I’m pretty sure there’s a big nest up there. If we don’t do this now, they’ll just spread,” I said and pushed myself up.
“Too bad we can’t just burn the place down,” Alexa said, and I snorted. That would have definitely gotten us blacklisted. “I don’t think we can take on that many, not the way we’ve been fighting.”
“No. But these floors are all laid out the same, right?” I got a nod from Alexa. “Right then, I’ve got a plan.”
***
The office building was laid out relatively simplistically—the main staircase was behind a fire door which led to a single corridor. Down either side of the corridor were doorways leading to smaller office spaces. From previous experience and the Scry spell, we knew the doorways on the right harbored the majority of the rats. After all, it was along that back wall that the pipes and ventilation shafts ran downward, allowing the rats to move from floor to floor with ease.
When Alexa opened the doorway, I proceeded to toss out the wooden blocks that I had pre-carved the light wards on, having activated them before we stepped in. The wards slid and bounced along the floor, lighting up the hallway even as Alexa dropped another pair of warded blocks in front of the doorway. We then waited, letting our eyes adjust to the brightened room.
As we strained our ears and breathed through our mouths, the light chittering of Devil Rats and the acrid stench of their urine and feces assaulted us. I made a mental note to look into a cleaning spell, or at least a disinfecting one, when I got back before I made myself focus. It seemed the rats refused to come out even with the provocation of the light.
Alexa stepped forward, hands tight around her spear as she edged along the hallway carefull
y. I followed her, my Force Shield fully cast and extended before me as we eyed the ground for gnawed-through holes in the drywall.
“There,” Alexa hissed and gestured with her spear as she spotted the first hole. I nodded grimly, bending down and shifting my Shield aside as I tossed a warded block into it. I followed with a couple more rather quickly, each bearing a simple Alter Temperature spell. Each block was activated to lower the temperature around itself. After a little experimenting, I’d worked out that a single block could lower the temperature of my apartment by a good ten degrees. Putting four in there would start making the entire room entirely too chilly. In time.
Once we had dropped the blocks, both Alexa and I fell back to our prepared line of wards and waited. And waited. And waited. Did I mention that while the wards did lower the temperature, they did so only from the blocks themselves? They basically radiated the cooling effect from their present locations, which in this case meant the entire process would take quite a bit of time.
A half hour later, the rats finally rushed out of the room, obviously done with being frozen. The only concern had been if the monsters had decided to continue retreating rather than launch their attacks early. Fire of course would have been more certain, but again, we weren’t about to burn down the damn building. So cold was our chosen weapon of annoyance.
The rats charged us, and the first rat hit the blocks Alexa had laid down, triggering a simple activation sequence. Like the rest of my blocks, the wards had been placed as more of an experiment than with any plan for usefulness. It was only after I had accidentally activated one—destroying the toaster in the process—that I’d decided my blocks might be useful weapons. It had taken a bit of work to get these wards right. Chaining the spell with a touch activation was simple. The tricky part was adding an on/off switch so that the wards weren’t active all the time.
Now, as the Devil Rat ran right across the ward, a Force Missile formed underneath it and jutted straight out. The Devil Rat behind it was unlucky enough to cross the ward just as it finished forming, the missile spearing it in the neck. That was perhaps the biggest flaw of the wards—how long it took to form each missile. As it stood, the three warded glyphs scattered ahead of us only managed to kill one and mildly inconvenience another.
“Die!” Alexa snarled, whirling her spear around and cutting in a line as the first Devil Rats reached us. The attack knocked one aside and tore open another. Behind her, I shifted my Force Shield to lie across the floor and grow high, creating an impromptu wall. The leading rats rammed into the Force Shield with a hiss and shake of their heads, momentarily stunned. Above them, Alexa proceeded to stab at the trapped rats mercilessly.
The initial confusion and surprise lasted for a brief second, enough time for Alexa to kill a pair before the rats backed away. The first Devil Rat to jump the Shield wall was battered aside, the second took a Force Missile to the face, and then there was only one charging us, sailing through the air to land on Alexa. The initiate threw herself sideways and sent the rat flying before it could injure her through her armor. Even as the rat scrambled to its feet, Alexa’s spear lashed out. I finished off the last injured monster while Alexa was dealing with hers, and then, it was over. A few minutes later, we were all set up for the next room, the cold blocks moved into it after retrieval. Even in the corridor, the chill from the first room could be felt as it slowly dissipated.
The subsequent rooms and fights followed much the same lines—a lot of waiting and a few brief moments of struggle. As my headache grew worse, I made a mental note to create some Force Shield wards for next time. I quickly added a twist to our attacks, setting up a Force Shield just in front of the Force Missile wards. That allowed the wards enough time to form and trigger, adding to the carnage. In turn, Alexa focused on batting the monsters aside as they jumped and otherwise attempted to attack us.
When we finally cleared the building, I was desperately breathing through my nose and attempting not to retch. Blood, guts, and other unmentionables littered the floor, and even Alexa only stayed long enough to ascertain no additional rats had survived before she left. As we breathed in the fresh air outside, I left a message with the building owner about the successful cleaning operation. Of course, a few of the younger rats had escaped into the wall, but those could be dealt with using mundane pesticides and traps.
“Yes, four dozen full grown. That’s right. Yes. Okay,” Alexa said, finishing her conversation on her phone before she turned to me. Green eyes unreadable as she stared at me, the initiate gestured toward her car.
“Can we do the other quest tomorrow?” I asked as I slid into the car, careful of where I placed my feet. Another throb and my vision narrowed again.
“Headache?” Alexa asked, and I nodded. Carefully. “Tomorrow then.”
“Thanks,” I whispered, my eyes shut while I dry-swallowed a pair of painkillers. Definitely tomorrow.
***
The headache from overuse of my magic subsided after a night’s rest. Rather than go to class the next day, I spent the morning working on more warding blocks. The blocks themselves were simple enough to acquire. While I knew that the better material I worked with, the more powerful I could make the wards, I still went with natural hardwood rather than metal or stone. For one thing, I had no idea how I’d carve metal or stone. Art class in school had at least given me some experience with woodcarving, even if it had been ages ago. More importantly though, I just didn’t have the magical oomph to need better material anyway.
Wards were simple enough in theory. A ward could be made of anything from words, characters, glyphs, or runes. So long as the mage focused and provided the underlying magical structure to the ward, you could even use stick figures. Of course, using common magical variations was simple, like walking down a well-beaten path in a forest rather than trailblazing yourself.
Bent over the block with woodcarving tools in hand, I slowly worked the first step into the block. This was the basic empowerment ward which allowed you to input mana into the entire structure. In this case, I was going with a mana storage ward, one of two types that I knew. The other was a constant channeling empowerment ward but, in this case, was much less useful. There were other more complicated empowerment wards, including ones that allowed you to passively collect mana, but I had yet to progress to that level.
Once that was finally carved into the wooden block, and the magical channels layered in, I moved onto the next step. This required me to join the empowerment ward with the spell that it was to power. Of course, to do that, you needed to carve the spell at the same time, which meant setting the parameters of the spell in the ward itself. At the most basic level, I could fix the spell with not-unalterable channels, but it was theoretically possible to create flexible wards. Many protective arrays were actually flexible spells built into the wards.
A ward was closer to a computer program in the way it worked. When creating a ward, you “wrote” the program, allowing for options while writing it. In many ways, wards were like the spells in my mind—they were set constructs that only required initiation. Of course, unlike my spells, which I could alter as I casted them, wards were unalterable except for their premade options. In this case, I was layering a Force Shield onto the wooden block.
It was this analogue that I believed Lily wanted me to experience. Being forced to consider each portion of the spells I had in my mind, and the way they interacted with my wards, developed my understanding of both warding and the spells themselves.
After layering the spell on the ward, I then had to carve in triggers. It was not enough to just have the ward. I needed to be able to control how and when they were turned on, unless I wanted them on all the time. In this case, a simple on/off switch that was manipulated by mana flow was sufficient. All that said, it took me nearly three quarters of an hour to finish creating a single ward. Thankfully, while I was channeling mana throughout the process, the amount I needed to channel was actually quite low, a tenth of
what actually casting the spell would require.
It was nearly time for Alexa to get back before I was done with my experimenting, and a series of warded blocks were laid out on the floor next to me. With a flick of my hand, I activated the first and stared at it intently.
“Well, that’s a failure,” I muttered as I kicked at the Force Shield. While the shield itself held, physics unfortunately took a hand and sent the block skidding backward before it bounced off the wall. The small, curved shield continued to flicker as it ran the stored mana down for another thirty seconds before it died silently. “I need to figure out how to lock the shield and the block down. Though, maybe I could make a bunch of those blocks and link them together? Make a portable Shield?”
“That’s a really annoying habit,” Lily said from her seat.
“Huh?” I turned to Lily, frowning.
“You’re talking to yourself again.”
“I know,” I said, refusing to apologize. Partly because it was my home. And partly because, occasionally, my mutterings actually made Lily provide a hint or two. In this case, I didn’t expect any help. I was pretty certain the required spell formulas to lock the shield in place were too complicated for my current level, especially if I needed to transfer them to a ward.
“Next,” I said and carefully reached for experiment number two. This one contained an altered Force Missile. Before I activated it, I cast a Force Shield around the ward, leaving just a little space for me to sneak my hand under it so I could activate the block. A moment later, the block shuddered, and a small Force Missile formed. Rather than actually flying outward, it just sat there, jutting out of the block. A few moments later, I removed the Force Shield and prodded the block, noting it had the same problem. After a moment, I decided to name this block a Force Spike block. It was a mild success; I could create the Force Spike, but like my Force Shield, it could easily be knocked sideways.