by Kyle Johnson
“Not even a little bit,” Phil said feelingly. “Embrace it, dude. You’ve always been the guy with the plans, but you’ve always needed me to make them happen. If you can do it yourself, it’ll be way easier, and a lot better for all of us.”
That plan had gone swimmingly, as far as Aranos was concerned. He took one group in the morning and the other in the afternoon, which gave each group hours to train together and get stronger but also an equal chance to get XP. He did his training at night, while the others slept, since he only needed a couple hours of meditation and had lots of time to kill when darkness reigned. No one had suggested that either party – or even the combined group – grind or patrol at night. While Aranos was certain they could do that and survive, if they had to, there was no point to risking anyone in the undead rampage that sundown brought to the forest if it wasn’t necessary.
While the undead near the tower were generally weaker – at least during the day – as they drew nearer to the city, the undead they encountered grew more powerful. The blue-skinned, mouthless draegs and shadowy nurhuins were two such, but they’d encountered others. They’d run into towering, 8’ tall creatures called ravants that looked like slime-covered skeletons with their internal organs intact and visible within. These were immune to fire but took extra damage from ice and earth attacks, as well as the piercing damage of Saphielle’s spear and Longfellow’s bolts. Their slime was mildly acidic and toxic, and Aranos had gotten some use from his Herbalism Skill removing that toxin from everyone’s system.
Most disconcertingly, they’d been attacked by a swarm of what looked like white-skinned, hairless children. The creatures moved almost bonelessly, swarming on the ground like spiders and slithering through the trees overhead. They were silent but had sharp claws, needle-pointed teeth, and rubbery skin that shrugged off sword blades and crossbow bolts with equal efficiency. Geltheriel had been forced to resort to her staff to deal with the creatures, and Phil had relied primarily on his shield as a weapon. While Silma’s teeth wouldn’t penetrate the creatures’ hides, the light damage she added to her bite did, so she and Geltheriel did most of the damage to them while Aranos focused on slowing them down with his Energy Web and keeping them from flanking the party with Energy Walls.
That night went similarly; Aranos meditated first while Saphielle and McBane kept watch. He spent the time working on his Spells, practicing empowering them with soul mana and leveling some of the ones he hadn’t worked on in a while. His Forge Mana Spell, for example, had once been his most vital, but he hadn’t used it much since he’d gained the High Mastery Ability. He spent some time with it, crafting more complex items using various types of mana, including metal mana. To his delight, he’d found that he could use the Spell to create any specific form of metal he was familiar with, although it took a significant amount of mana to make deepsteel, and attempting to use a mana-forged sword required most of his concentration and was both clumsy and inefficient. That was fine; he was more interested in being able to create something like an auril chain to capture an enemy spellcaster or a deepsteel athame for etching runes. He also thought that if he had to, he could probably temporarily place a layer of deepsteel on a weapon or shield for a battle.
He practiced more with his Radiant Blast, trying to replace the radiant mana with other types. Light and darkness mana were both simple, since he’d used light before this way; the hardest part was focusing the resultant cone of energy into a narrower beam similar to a spotlight rather than a cone of flashing strobes. It still wasn’t exactly a laser – or whatever you would call a laser made from pure darkness, he supposed – but it did give him a focused beam of energy that would pass through transparent barriers and do decent damage to undead creatures. Lava and ooze mana, he decided, simply weren’t going to work. At best, he could create a pressurized spray that would shoot about five feet before splattering to the ground. Earth mana gave him a spray of stone chips, as did crystal mana. Vacuum did nothing, and air created a gust of wind. Really, only acid proved to be useful, and even then, he had to mix air mana into the spray to give it any distance – the last time he’d tried to make an Acid Blast, when he was avenging Silma’s death, he’d had to swoop over his target and spray down at it for it to be effective. What he ended up with was a sort of acidic slush that used three aspects at once – air, water, and life – but that shot a good 40’ and clung to whatever it hit for a bit before melting.
He didn’t even try using death or pure void mana; channeling that would hurt him even more than the Deadly Vapors Spell did and, while death mana would damage the undead, it seemed that most undead casters used barriers of void and death mana frequently. Trying to break through death mana with death mana wouldn’t be very fruitful.
Instead, he practiced making bullets that were pure life or light mana rather than composites of the four elemental aspects, thinking these might be useful for dealing with the seeming prevalence of void and death barriers he’d seen among the undead. It wasn’t hard to make a bullet-shaped form out of unaspected mana and fill it with either life or light, but it didn’t exactly do what he’d wanted. The bullet itself was coated with unaspected mana, and that’s what would be striking a barrier, not the life or light mana that might eat through it. He pondered the issue for some time before creating a bullet that had a flattened tip with a thinner coat of mana on it. When he called up a vision of the bullet striking a grey barrier of death magic, rather punching through, the bullet sort of splattered onto it. Life mana spread out across the barrier, eating through it almost like acid and leaving a hole that his next shot could easily pass through.
He also experimented a bit with his new spirit aspect. He couldn’t use very much of it – right now, he could cast about a hundred SP of spirit mana per hour safely – but even a little of it could go a long way. As an Enhanced aspect, it was naturally 50% better at breaking through magical barriers, and its chaotic nature added another 100% to that bonus. Actually, Aranos wasn’t sure about that; did the 150% barrier penetration that all Enhanced mana had get doubled to 300%? Or was it 50% plus 100% more effective, making it 150% better at penetrating shields? It could also mean that the 50% bonus was doubled, making it only 100% more effective. He didn’t know and wouldn’t until he’d played with it a bit.
He decided that his Composite Bullet was the best candidate for a spirit upgrade, since it didn’t use much SP naturally. He could probably upgrade his Energy Barrage into a barrier-annihilating machine, but that Spell would probably use up his entire hour’s worth of spirit mana in a few seconds. He called up his Composite Bullet once more and reached into it, altering the patterns of compressed mana within so that they swirled into an inward spiral. Before, he’d been forced to layer them to keep the opposing mana types from interacting, but that wasn’t an issue anymore. Doing that slimmed the bullet down and lengthened it a bit, creating a sharper point at the end. Aranos sent a single thread of spirit mana flowing into it, and the bullet was suddenly awash in swirling, prismatic colors. Aranos imagined giving it a twist and hurling it at one of the air-void barriers the Void Mages liked to create, and the bullet struck the barrier with a crack – and punched clean through as the spirit mana burst from it in a flash of rainbow light.
Finally, he spent some time practicing his two main void-based Spells, Void Paralysis and Deadly Vapors. Both were almost ready to level up, and he was interested to see how the boost would improve them. When he was done, he pulled up his notifications:
Spell Boost!
The following Spells have gained a level:
Deadly Vapors
New Rank: Student 2
Create a cloud of death mana that consumes all living things within it.
Effect: Create a 2’5 x 25’ x 7' cloud of death mana that resembles a swirling, gray cloud. This cloud is heavier than air and sinks into the lowest possible crevices it can find. The caster can move the cloud 15’ / s. All creatures in the cloud take 14 – 20 LP damage / s (44 – 64). This Spell
does double damage to plant life. Damage and duration increased by 2% per Spell level.
Duration: 1 minute
Cost: 185 SP / 93 LP
Channeled Spell: The caster can channel this spell for 15 SP and 8 LP/ s to add an extra 5’ x 5’ x 5’ cube to the cloud’s volume.
I do believe you’ve got the vapors…
Void Paralysis
New Rank: Student 1
Bind an enemy in a shroud of void mana, stealing their ability to move.
Effect: Choose an enemy within 45’. That enemy is paralyzed, held motionless within a cocoon of void mana that negates any attempts at movement. Note that this Spell does not prevent a target from attempting to move, so especially large or powerful creatures may be able to overcome this restraint.
Duration: 2 min, +2% per Spell level
Cost: 300 SP, 75 LP
When I say freeze, you freeze, every time!
Spell Evolution!
Spell Radiant Blast has become Channeled Blast!
Rank: Student 3
Channel a blast of aspected mana at an enemy, doing continual damage.
Effect: Fire a line of any primary or composite mana type at a target for 10-15 LP damage of that mana type per second (50 – 75). Maximum range varies by mana type:
Aspect Max Range
Vacuum, Void 0’
Ash, Dust, Death 3’
Magma, Ooze 5’
Crystal, Earth, Ice, Metal 10’
Fire, Air, Lightning 15’
Acid, Radiant, Water 30’
Darkness, Life, Light, Healing Sight
Channeled: Once cast, continues to do full damage per second for 50% of SP cost.
Cost: 60 SP
When I play with fire, you’ll get burned…
Spell Evolution!
Spell Composite Bullet* has become Piercing Bullet*
Rank: Adept 9
Hurl a compacted bullet of spirit-enhanced mana at an enemy, doing elemental and piercing damage to the target.
Effect: Does 12-36 LP damage to a single target within sight range (201-605), +7.5% per Spell level. This is a combination of piercing, air, earth, fire, and water damage and is boosted by spirit mana; immunity to any of these types will reduce damage by 10% (cumulative per immunity type)
Evolved: Ignores 125% of armor or defenses, reduces magical defense strength by 75%, increases Critical Hit chance by 2% per Spell level.
Hollow Point: Add damage of one additional mana type. This does 50% of base damage and increases the SP cost by 50%
Cost: 90 SP + 3 spirit SP
I am Death, Destroyer of anthills…
His Deadly Vapors Spell now created a larger cloud that he could move 50% faster, which was certainly useful. Void Paralysis worked at a greater range and cost a bit less, which meant it damaged him less to use it. And his Composite Bullet had Evolved once again, although he wouldn’t be using the newest version unless he had a barrier he really wanted to get through. He could only cast about 35 of the new bullets per hour before he ran out of spirit mana, and he wasn’t about to cannibalize his already low Perception.
The big change, though, was his Radiant Blast Spell. It had become a Channeled Blast and let him fire almost any type of mana he wanted, albeit with vastly different levels of effectiveness. He guessed that spraying a cloud of ash out to 3’ could be useful to block a fire attack or to take down a Fire Wall, but he couldn’t see using it as an attack. Darkness, life, and light mana could be fired at any target he could see, but they also tended to do lower amounts of damage. It looked like acid, radiant, and water mana were his best bets for hitting anything at any real range and doing significant damage.
His Int and Wis training hadn’t given him any points that night, although he’d be getting two points the next night. The Physical Stat training, though, boosted all his Physical Stats by 4 and his Per by 2. That pushed his Dex up over 50, which gave him a 25% boost to the results of any Dexterity-based crafting Skills and a bump to his ranged attacks and damage. If he kept training daily, his Agil would cross that barrier the next night, while Str and End would need two more days. He was getting stronger, there was no doubt, and he was feeling fairly confident about the battles ahead.
They’d continued to push closer to the city the next day, with Aranos then spending the night in Stat and Skill training, then reading up on Elven Lore and studying more with the crafting items Ilmadia had given him. His Lore study focused on a group called the Order of Moonlight, a veritable army of adventurers led by four female elves who had apparently become so powerful that they journeyed to the Bottomless Pit – Ka’s version of Hell, as far as Aranos could tell – and had faced the god Morx in his temple. Most had died in the process, but in so doing, they’d wounded him, something that was supposed to be impossible for a god, and that wound would never heal. Now, the legend read, the heroes of the Order of Moonlight dwelled on the Mountain of Light as the highest and most trusted servants of their gods. Aranos filed the story away in his mind and resolved to look into it more deeply later. If the Order had wounded a god – did that mean there was a way to kill one? Or to recall those heroes to undo the Feast? It was worth looking into.
His training that night had led to some good bonuses, as well:
Skill Boosts!
Lore (Elven History, T) has gained a Level!
New Rank: Student 2
Student Level Ability: Identify Uncommon elements of elven history. Add your Skill level as a bonus to any Int or Cha-based Skill checks with elves.
Lore (Metallurgy, T) has gained a Level!
New Rank: Student 3
Student Level Ability: Identify Uncommon metals with no check needed. All other metals are considered one level of Rarity lower when making checks to identify them. Thus, Rare metals are treated as Uncommon, Exotic as Rare, etc.
You have increased your Agil Stat to more than 50 points! By surpassing this threshold, you have advanced this Stat to a new level and gain a bonus based on your playstyle:
Dodge: You gain a bonus to your Dodge Skill equal to half your Agil (rounded down)
Movement Speed: Your base movement speed is increased by 25%
This morning, he’d set out with Phil’s group and had encountered the draegs and nurhuins for the first time. It had been a tough battle, but he’d been able to use his fire mana to offset the draeg’s freezing auras, and the nurhuins were very susceptible to Geltheriel’s shadow-based attacks. This afternoon was the first time he’d encountered one of the void mages since that first encounter, though, and they’d presented a new level of difficulty.
Really, Aranos had been expecting this. According to Geltheriel’s maps, he and his party were within shouting distance of the city walls, and the patrols had become much more dangerous. It was only going to be a matter of time before they faced a force with a stronger caster than the vangolors. They moved as stealthily as they could, but the undead’s Ability to sense them inevitably drew attacks such as these.
This last battle had been the most difficult one yet, since McBane simply wasn’t as lethal to the nurhuins as Geltheriel was, but they’d managed. Now, they continued their patrol, dropping back into Stealth and heading toward the city that Aranos knew had to be just ahead. They slipped through the forest, Aranos still guiding them around the wards littering the area, and finally pushed through the edge of the trees within sight of the city of Antas.
The first thing Aranos noticed was that the ground between the forest and the city wasn’t just bare of trees; it was completely denuded of all plant life. When he touched the soil with his One with Nature Ability, it felt dead and sterile; nothing would grow there, no matter how much time passed. The earth was gray, ashen, and compacted into a hard surface. Fine, gritty dust blew across the ground and swirled into Aranos’ face. His Composite Armor kept the particles out of his eyes but didn’t protect his mouth and nose, and he snorted to clear the sudden tickle from his nostrils.
The walls of Antas rose in the d
istance, their dark, grey surface a grim boundary to the barren ground before the party. Distant figures moved atop the wall, indistinct through the haze of dust but clearly patrolling the wall regularly. That was one advantage to using the undead for your guards; they didn’t get tired or bored but would pace their section of wall eternally if ordered to. Towers rose starkly beyond the wall, clearly crumbled and broken despite how blurred and hazy their image was at this distance.
Antas, he had learned in his studies, was something of a rarity in the Elven Realms: rather than being strung across the tops of an ancient forest, as most other elven cities were, the city had been built of stone and steel by three races working together. Most of the surface structures had been erected by human hands, while the dwarves tunneled into the stone below the city and crafted a massive underground stronghold. The elves had fashioned the great towers aboveground and the Library and Vault below, then Enchanted the entire city with their magic. That the wall still stood, unbroken and grim, was a testament to the skills of those ancient peoples working together.
And yet, none of that held Aranos’ attention. His gaze was drawn to the air above and the ground beneath the wall, where his Mana Sight blazed brilliantly no matter what aspect he chose to view. The entire city radiated magical power, but surrounding it was a haze of necrotic energy that shrouded everything in a dome that started less than a hundred feet from where they stood. The moment he took a step forward, a notification flashed in his vision:
New Region Discovered: Fallen Realm of Antas
Corruption Level: High (6 CP / day)
Necrotic Zone: This region is filled with necrotic mana, sapping the life and vitality of all living creatures. Any living creature entering this zone loses 1 point from each of their Physical Stats, plus an additional point per hour within. Spells, Abilities, or Perks that prevent Corruption do not prevent necrotic damage. This damage can only be healed by restorative mana and cannot be healed within the Necrotic Zone.