by Kyle Johnson
I could have stopped and mended their Souls earlier, he silently reasoned. If I had done that, though, I might have been too late getting to the others. Better to have let those Soul Points go, for sure.
The others were staring at him inquisitively. “Once more, he needs to rest his eyes after a battle,” Rhys observed calmly. “If one were more curious, they would certainly wonder about this, Liberator.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you about that,” he snorted. “It’s not a secret; I got a new Skill, is all. I’ll tell you more once we’re set up. For now, what matters is that I’m not sensing anyone left in the next couple floors of the tower, but we should really go check the rest and get rid of the bodies somehow.”
Geltheriel grunted and rose to her feet. Silma padded up and slipped around him, pushing him gently backward with her shoulder. I should go first, as I will sense any survivors before you do, she thought insistently at him. He chuckled and stepped back, hands raised in surrender.
“Okay, girl,” he conceded. “You go first; we’ll follow behind you.”
The wolf huffed and padded up the stairs, her head low as she scented the air. Saphielle followed immediately after, with Aranos behind her. Rhys came next, and Geltheriel took up the rear. The Sorcerer’s Lifesense Skill didn’t cover the whole building, so he couldn’t be certain that it was empty, but he hadn’t felt anything in any of the rooms he’d passed on the way down. It was possible, though, that something was hiding in one of the rooms, out of the range of his senses – it’s not like I methodically swept the floors or anything, he realized – so he moved silently and carefully with his companions.
Fortunately, their caution had been unwarranted. It seemed that the uruks from the top floor had roused the entire tower in their hurry to escape his attack, and as far as he could tell, none of the creatures had escaped. He’d need to check around the outside of the tower for tracks before he was certain, but it seemed like they’d managed to take the place without raising an alarm.
Geltheriel had him collect the bodies of the fallen uruks in his Storage Bag – apparently, all he had to do was touch something and will it into his inventory; it didn’t actually need to fit in the opening to the backpack –and he transported the corpses in what looked like a guardroom near the base of the tower, sealing it shut with a Crystal Wall to ward off the smell a bit. He added another Crystal Wall just inside the doorway to seal the entrance and placed another halfway up the stairs to the first floor.
Anything that really wants to will be able to hack through that, he told himself, but it’ll make a lot of noise doing it, and we’ll definitely hear them. And, because the walls are crystal mana, they’re permanent until they’re destroyed, so I won’t have to spend time maintaining or renewing them.
As he finished sealing the doorway, a notification dot started blinking in his vision, and he curiously pulled it up:
You have cleared High Road Waystation (Eredain)
You may set this area as your spawn point; this will also make it a safe zone to rest in.
Safe Zones: Safe zones are areas that are not subject to casual monster attacks. This will not prevent enemies that are hunting for you from attacking, but it will cause random monsters to avoid the area. Once a safe zone is abandoned, monsters can move back into it freely.
Do you wish to set this as your spawn point? (Yes/No)
Well, that’s useful, he thought happily, selecting ‘Yes’. He felt a twinge in his stomach as his respawn point shifted. Now, we won’t have to worry about keeping as tight a watch. We can still be hunted, but we won’t be randomly attacked.
He rejoined his companions at the top of the tower, in the room he had first attacked the uruks. “This looks like a decent place for a camp,” he observed. “Let’s go ahead and get set up…”
“I do not believe this would be the ideal room for our rest tonight,” Saphielle interrupted him, shaking her head.
“What do you mean?” he asked curiously. “We’ve got plenty of space here, and we can keep watch easily out the window.”
“That is same window that you used to assault the uruks,” she pointed out. “If we can use this vulnerability to gain surprise, surely someone else can do the same. I do not wish to be awakened to find a swarm of qasits filling this room, and I doubt you would, as well.”
He stopped and considered her words. “Are you thinking about the next floor down?” he asked dubiously.
“While certainly we could occupy the lower floor,” Rhys spoke up, “one might wonder if it would not be difficult to keep watch from there, considering that there are fewer windows overlooking the road.”
“And if we posted a sentry here, they’d have trouble calling out to anyone on the floor below,” Aranos agreed. “What about the big central room on this floor? I could seal the other doors, and whoever’s on watch duty can stay in here to keep an eye out. We’d only have a single door between the sentry and the camp, then, so spreading the alarm should be easy.”
Geltheriel nodded. “An agreeable solution,” she replied. “Let us begin our preparations; I would prefer to let you take your time for Meditation first, allowing those of us who require more sleep to rest for the night, if that is acceptable to you.”
“Yeah, I can use the time for training,” he admitted. “Plus, I want to think of a way to make something like this easier without draining my own LP so much.”
“The Spell you cast injured you?” Saphielle questioned curiously. “Why would you use mana that damages you? That seems foolish, as your LP pool cannot be very high.”
“Well, the Spell uses death mana, which is damaging to use, sure. But it also does extra damage to living creatures, so it’s particularly effective against large numbers of low-level creatures like these uruks.”
Rhys was staring at him, his face a bit disbelieving. “I have not heard of a Wizard’s Spell damaging them in the casting, Liberator. One might wonder if, perhaps, that means there is a better way to use this mana.”
Aranos thought for a moment. “It might be a Sorcerer-only issue,” he reasoned slowly. “Most Wizards just use unaspected mana to cast their Spells, after all, and the spell-forms purify the mana into whatever aspects they need. As a Sorcerer, if I want to cast a death mana Spell, I have to channel death mana directly, which you can guess isn’t conducive to living things.”
“As likely indicated by the word ‘death’ in its name,” Geltheriel muttered. “Let us also not forget that you were going to tell us about some new Ability or Perk or godly power you had been granted, correct?”
Aranos grinned. “It’s a Skill, actually,” he corrected her, delving briefly into the story of how he had tried learning Soulbinding but ended up Redeeming it into Soulmending. “So, what I was doing was putting more of my SP and LP into the souls nearby to ease their passage,” he finished. “When I do that, I get bonuses to my mental Stats, plus I can use the energy to empower my other Spells or Abilities.”
She looked at him strangely for a moment before nodding. “I have never heard of the Skill you attempted to learn,” she admitted, “but if any Skill could be considered Corrupted, surely one that torments souls would qualify. I am relieved that you found a way to Redeem it and to harness its power without harming others. And yet, it is odd that such a Skill would find its way into Uncle’s library. He is usually very cautious of such things and has Elder Golloron examine each tome before it is allowed into his collection.”
“One observes that the Liberator did not realize that the Skill was Corrupt until it was too late,” Rhys shrugged. “Perhaps the Elder was equally misled.”
“If he didn’t actually read the Skill book, it’s possible,” Aranos agreed. “I thought it might be about creating soul-bound items, to be honest.”
Geltheriel’s frown hadn’t eased. “That is possible, I suppose,” she allowed slowly. “And yet…”
“How such a thing happened is likely of little importance, save perhaps to your Uncle,” Saphiell
e pointed out. “What matters is that the Redeemer once more did as my name for him implies and has turned a tool of the Darkness into a weapon for the Light.” The woman’s face seemed oddly proud as she spoke, and she looked at Aranos appraisingly as she finished.
“Well, the Redeemed version isn’t quite as powerful,” he told the Avenger with a grimace, “but the mental Stat bonuses are worth it. I got about nine or ten Soul Points from each of the uruks in the staircase, which boosted my Stats by a fair bit.”
Geltheriel grinned. “Well, it is not the power of the gods, as I had hoped, but it will suffice. Now, let us secure this room so that we all may rest this night.”
Safeguarding the room was relatively simple, and in no time, Aranos was seated in his tent, the mana crystal on the floor before him, descending into his mindscape. He sat down in his chair, facing his column of swirling mana, and drew energy from the crystal, cycling it through his spirals. After smoothing and repairing the flows, he called up the mental graph of his system and began nesting more hourglass shapes within the bells of his existing one. With each new layer, he compressed the existing flows, reducing the space between them and forcing him to refine the channels even further to be sure they wouldn’t leak energy into the nearby layers.
Thirty minutes later, he exited his mana spirals, tired but satisfied; he had managed to add two more layers in each hourglass, and the extra power flowing into the system had made it far simpler to spot flaws and enact repairs. He’d even begun the process of adding layers in his secondary spirals, although managing the flows in those was more complex and took a lot more effort on his part.
He still had thirty minutes to go on his Int and Wis training, so he decided to work on crafting some new Spells. First, though, he called up the mental image of his elemental warding Spell. Last time, he’d completed the barrier of air that would physically protect the area within the ward as well as the stone spears that would damage attackers that pierced that wall. Now, he pictured a curtain of fire mana that extended across the warded area, the line of fire a diameter of the circle. He excluded a small, safe zone in the middle – he didn’t want the fire raging through their campsite, after all – and, after a moment’s thought, changed the wall from regular fire mana to radiant mana, which would be harder for enemies to resist. A creature that was immune to fire damage would still take radiant damage, unless it was also immune to air-based effects. That was a huge benefit to using Composite aspects: to resist them, you had to have resistance to all of the Primary aspects involved.
He pictured the radiant curtain rotating, sweeping through the warded space. He imagined uruks being speared by his jagged stone stalagmites, pinned in place as the curtain of white flames washed over them. He could hear their screams as their flesh melted, smell the odor of burning meat, taste the soot of their ashes in the air. Once he had the image firmly in mind, he began pouring SP into it from the crystal, sucking mana in and inundating the image with power. Ten minutes later, he felt that part of the ward coalesce, and he turned his thoughts to the final element.
Originally, he’d imagined a mist of water mana obscuring the central area, but he realized that was a double-edged sword. Sure, it hid those in the safe zone from ranged attacks from the outside, but it equally prevented those within the zone from targeting anyone outside of it. He considered a wall of ice, but unless he could get the ice to be perfectly clear, those within still wouldn’t be able to see anything without, and they definitely wouldn’t be able to target enemies.
Clouds of Deadly Vapors would work, except he had a feeling that casting this Spell would take a huge amount of SP, and if including death mana meant the Spell would drain his LP, it was a realistic possibility that a single casting could kill him. The same limitation kept him from using any sort of void mana. A light mana barrier wouldn’t shield against much, and light mana attacks would be far too visible at night. No point in driving off one set of enemies, he grimaced, if it means drawing in three more. Of course, a curtain of brilliant, white fire isn’t exactly subtle, but pure light mana would have to be really potent to do any significant damage, which means it would be visible for miles.
He supposed he could make crystal spears, but that seemed repetitive when he already had stone ones, plus it would require triple the SP and be permanent, meaning those spears would be a hazard for anyone passing through in the future. A storm of crystal shards was also possible, but suspending shards of solid crystal in the air would require a lot of air mana, meaning the entire Spell would drain way more SP.
That meant his only real choices were lightning or acid. Lightning was a possibility; he could forge a lightning storm that would strike at any creature moving through the area. The issue with that was targeting; lightning mana had a base 50% chance to miss its intended target. While his Expert ranked Mana Mastery reduced that to 0% normally, he wasn’t sure if that would translate over to a Spell like this that he wasn’t actively controlling. He didn’t want to create a lightning storm that would hurt his own party, after all.
Besides, acid mana used water as its base, and he really wanted to use water mana for his final element. He already had the other three basic elements represented, and if he could include water damage in the mix, something would have to be immune to all four damage types to be able to ignore this ward. Technically, acid also contained life mana, but life mana wasn’t very good at damaging things, so that part of the equation didn’t really interest him.
Acid it was. Now, he just needed to figure out exactly how he would include acid in his ward. His first thought was a rain of acid, but he had a feeling that would interfere with his radiant curtain. Clouds of acidic fog probably wouldn’t extinguish the flames, but they might boil away when the curtain swept through them. Making a fog of acid that moved with the fire wall was possible, though; all it would require was a fairly gentle application of air mana to keep the fog moving ahead of the curtain.
He imagined his ward raging at full force; the air barrier shimmered and swirled overhead, the earth groaned and buckled as stone spears jutted up and slid back down, and heat poured up as the wall of white flames began to circle. He imagined two clouds of acid mana swirling into view, looking like harmless, gray fog and nearly filling the two semicircles between the fire curtains. He pushed a slow current of air mana around the inside of the warded area, adjusting the speed until the fog was streaming raggedly along between the fiery curtains.
To his surprise, the fog of acid rushed to the outside edge of the ward, the fog turning into spatters of acid that rained to the ground harmlessly. He restarted the vision and controlled the wind more carefully, thinking that perhaps he had accidentally deflected it outward. He carefully moved the air, being sure to keep it running parallel to the outer edge, but once again, the acid immediately swirled to the edge and fell as a pointless rain.
It took him several more minutes – and no small amount of frustration – to discover the flaw in his design. As it turned out, the air at the edge of the warded area was moving significantly faster than the air closer to the center, since it had to go a much longer distance in the same amount of time. That meant the area at the edge of the circle was at a lower pressure, so it acted like a vacuum and sucked the clouds of acid into it, where they condensed and dropped like rain.
He ended up needing a spiraling pattern of air to get the effect he wanted. The acid fogs were perpetually shifting back and forth, pushed inward by the twisted air currents before being sucked back out by the vacuum effect. He allowed the vision to play out, hearing the screams as the clouds of acid burned into flesh, smelling the chemical scent in the air, tasting the sour tang of the stray wisps of acid that swirled into the center harmlessly. He poured more SP into the image, imagining every aspect of it, throwing himself into the vision as completely as possible.
It took him ten more minutes of dumping mana into the construct with his Mana Vampire Ability – the equivalent of emptying his SP pool almost eight times – befo
re the mist construct finally coalesced in his mind.
That left only one part of the Spell: setting it to activate. That was a simple enough matter; he imagined a hemisphere of life magic wrapped around the ward, linked to the air barrier. He pictured a single balayang brushing the trigger, felt a tiny bit of the life magic drain into the small monster, and instantly the air barrier triggered.
Next, he linked the air barrier to the stone spears. He then imagined a massive ursusz smashing the barrier, entering the warded area. The moment the flow of air was disrupted, the stone spears began erupting from the ground. He saw the ursusz impaled by spears but still pushing forward, and he visualized a second ring of life magic, linking it to the fire curtain and acid fogs.
The moment the ursusz crossed that second, thin line of life mana, the flames and acid roared to life. He watched as the enormous bear was alternately roasted and melted while being spitted on earthen spears. He restarted the vision and watched the ursusz crash through it again, funneling power into the image for three more minutes before the entire Spell finally took shape.
Finishing the Spell had basically completed his Wis and Int training, but he still had more time to kill, and new Spells to fashion. He quickly pulled up the mental list of Spells he’d noted in the Store of the House of Stars and examined them to see which, if any, looked like they would be useful. He supposed he could start on the more complex Elemental Bombardment, but first he wanted to see if he could replicate any of the simpler, more immediately useful Spells on his list.
The first one he turned his gaze to was the armor-strengthening Spell. That was something he was certain he could do, since it wasn’t much different from using his High Mastery Ability to purify the metal mana in someone’s armor. Using High Mastery that way wasn’t practical, though; while the effects were permanent, it was a slow process and wouldn’t be useful in combat. What he needed was a way to instantly reinforce armor that would last just long enough to make it through a battle.