Specifically, the Necrologist had high hopes for unlocking the non-Class Skill, Spell Design. From what Daisy had already told him, he knew it would allow him to combine two spells into one new spell that had attributes of each of its parent spells. Garath salivated at even the thought of being able to unleash a Blight without having to close to melee range. If he were to combine it with something like Felfire Bolt or Haunt, then he could land a Blight from a much safer distance. Sitting cross-legged between Athios and Sharon, Garath knew he was putting the cart before the horse. First, he'd have to pay attention in class.
Class is exactly what it felt like, too. After pushing their few belongings into the corners of the old classroom, Daisy and Athios opened their living quarters on the second floor of the Guild Hall to the others so they could gather and learn whatever she could teach them. With five adults sitting in a half-circle before her, Daisy nervously drew into herself, hiding behind a curtain of blond curls.
"Daisy," Athios said, her tone comforting. "Why don't you start by telling us what it is you were doing when you got the first non-Class Skill?"
"Alright," Daisy replied. She told them how she had found the brick wall outside the forest to practice her spell casting. Though nervous at first, her regaling of her own triumph bolstered Daisy's confidence. She went on to explain how she unlocked Manual Targeting.
"Wait," Garath interrupted. "The Elementalist Class didn't come with a staff or a wand or anything?"
Daisy shook her head.
"So you've been casting spells without any targeting assistance this whole time?" Garath asked, impressed. If he hadn't had his staff to guide his spells, he probably would have died during The Culling and he knew it.
"I don't really know what that is, so… probably? And until my tryout yesterday, I never used my spells on any monsters," Daisy said.
"Huh." Garath figured that the system gave any caster-type Class some way to aim their spells.
"Wouldn't you call what I do Manual Targeting?" Athios asked, curious. “I usually target an area rather than an enemy. I’ve never used spell-targeting assistance, even after getting the staff from Aquawood.”
"That's a good point," Garath replied, turning to face Athios. "Why haven't you unlocked Manual Targeting?"
"Are you two done?" Daisy asked with her hands placed authoritatively on her hips.
All five adults in the room burst into raucous laughter. Daisy, firmly playing the role of teacher only seconds before, blushed wildly because she knew they were laughing at her. It took a second to collect herself, but then Daisy adopted an overly serious expression, tucked her hair behind one ear, and raised her eyebrows in wait for an answer to her question.
"Yes," Garath said, still grinning. "Sorry for interrupting, ma'am."
Daisy nodded her acceptance of his apology and turned to Athios.
"Yes, please go on," Athios agreed, wiping tears from her eyes. "We're sorry."
As it turned out, Garath was actually the only member of the Dungeon team that would even potentially benefit from unlocking Manual Targeting. Daisy gave him a quick rundown of how to push and pull on the Mana pooled between his hands to achieve spin, then told him he'd have to practice to get the hang of how much spin to put on it. After Manual Targeting, Daisy moved on to explain how she'd unlocked Mana Manipulation and then told them what she could do with it.
"You're telling me you can make Mana Batteries?" Maimon asked, now with his full attention on their little teacher. "And use them any time?"
Daisy nodded and went on to explain that, with higher Ranks, Mana Manipulation allowed the user to make more Mana Batteries and increase the amount of Mana they can contain. Unlocking Mana Manipulation, Daisy told them, was brought on by the feeling she got from beginning a spell cast, then canceling it without allowing the Mana to return to her center. By focusing on the Mana moving through her body, she was able to replicate the process without a spell. After Daisy explained the similarities and differences between canceling a premade spell and simply pooling directionless Mana, everyone took a minute to attempt the same.
Garath decided to attempt this process by starting the cast of his most familiar spell, Death Bolt. He remembered the first time he’d used the spell, after a lifetime of fantasizing about using magic. Standing in the rain on his roof with Tarzan, the calm before the storm that was The Culling. It seemed like so long ago now, though in reality only eleven days had passed since that night. In those eleven days, he’d probably cast Death Bolt a thousand times.
The one-second cast time of Death Bolt came and went too quickly for Garath to really wrap his mind around the sensations he was supposed to be searching for. With the black orb of magic struggling wildly between his hands, Garath canceled the spell. The vibrating orb shrank, then quickly disappeared. That’s when Garath felt the Mana move back up his arms and into his center. The Necrologist closed his eyes, focusing with everything he had to better observe the internal movements of his Mana. Then, a Floral Bomb shattered the west-facing window of Athios and Daisy’s room.
Everyone immediately jumped to high alert, and weapons appeared in hands out of nowhere. When it became clear what had happened, everyone turned to look at Sharon. Garath had never seen the taciturn old woman look embarrassed about anything in their entire relationship, but, red-faced and wide-eyed, Sharon looked downright bashful standing next to the broken window. Her eyes found Garath, then her shamed expression turned suddenly wicked.
“Remember that IOU you owe me?” Sharon asked him. “Get this place cleaned up, young man.”
Garath laughed and got to his feet. Cleaning up a full-sized window’s worth of shattered glass wouldn’t exactly be a picnic, but if he could pay off the unspecified IOU with something as trivial as this, he’d take it happily. “Yeah, alright. Maybe we should take this lesson outside, though.”
“We really should have thought about this,” Obawon said with a boyish grin. “First lesson of D&D, always take the room size into account when casting magic.”
“Let’s finish up in Gary’s outdoor dining area,” Garath suggested. “I’ll get this picked up and meet you down there.”
Everyone agreed and left Garath in the old classroom to pay off his debt. Athios hovered at her door for a second as the others made their way down the stairs. Garath looked at the her questioningly. Athios smiled sweetly, leaning against the doorway and motioned for him to move away from the window. He did so.
A second later, Athios sent a white disk to appear between the floor below the wreckage. A second after that and nearly the entire mess had vanished entirely, leaving only a few shards of glass that had slid across the white-tiled floor for Garath to pick up. Garath was going to thank Athios for her help, but then furrowed his brow as she remained standing by the door.
“Don’t you have to unload that somewhere?” he asked. Every time he’d seen her use one of her space-time disks in the past, Athios had needed to send a second disk to dump out the contents of whatever she had pulled into the first.
Athios smiled. “I got a new Skill at Level 27,” she explained. “I can store things in a pocket dimension to be dispersed at my discretion now.”
“I’ll have to remember that,” Garath said nervously. The two of them still hadn’t discussed what had put Garath in the doghouse, and he wasn’t sure if she was just explaining how the Skill worked to him, or if her explanation was actually a threat. “Listen, about the other day…”
“Let’s just forget about it,” Athios said. Her right hand started twisting a lock of black hair below her ear. “It’s nothing. Come on, let’s head downstairs. Everyone will be waiting for us.”
“It’s definitely something, Athios. I know I can be thick sometimes, but you are important to me. If I did something to upset you, I’d like to know what it is so that I don’t do it again. Please?” Garath asked. He surprised himself with his forwardness, but the nerdy gamer didn’t feel self-conscious or nervous about how she’d respond. His confidence was running at a
n all-time high, and he felt as pretty as a dew-glistened tulip.
Athios took on a sheepish expression and quickly covered her embarrassment by letting her hair fall to cover her face as she bent to pick up a rogue shard of glass. The Dimensionalist took a deep breath and firmly reminded herself why she was upset, then took another deep breath and reminded herself that she had the right to be upset. Keeping it to herself or ‘forgetting about it’ wouldn’t help anyone, she told herself. Athios stood up and looked Garath in his glowing eyes.
“You are important to me too,” she started, right hand again twirling a stray lock. Athios took another deep breath and just went for it. “The last guy I dated was a real jealous type. At first, I felt, I don’t know, flattered? I guess? Flattered that he was just so enamored by me that he’d get all macho tough guy if another guy even looked at me for too long. Two weeks after we started dating, I had to bail him out of jail for getting in a bar fight over me. It got worse after that, and I let it go on for too long. I finally broke up with him a few months ago.”
A tear rolled down her left cheek. Then she smiled a cute, wicked little smile. “He’s probably dead now. Anyway, long story short, I’m not going to do that again. We aren’t even an item or anything and, I’m not saying for sure that your fisticuffs with Maimon had anything to do with me, but it sure felt like it did, and I just. . .”
Now Garath got it. The understanding sweeping his features must have been apparent to Athios, who started laughing again. Garath felt like an idiot. She was absolutely right, they weren’t an item and, still, he got into a fist fight over another man just checking her out. Athios was a beautiful woman and he had no right to act that way, antagonizing the guy with verbal lows until it came to actual blows. He realized how moronic he must have looked to her, and the blush of embarrassment tinting his cheeks said more to Athios than any words could have.
“You really are pretty thick sometimes,” Athios said. The Dimensionalist took a few steps in his direction, stopping a foot away. Her dark eyes met his, then moved down his face to land on his lips.
Garath’s heart was pounding so loud he was sure she could hear it. Sweat beaded on his forehead, the breeze coming in from the now fully open window did nothing to help. Garath had spent his entire life before the apocalypse locked away from the real world, real girls. And now this beautiful, intelligent, strong woman was waiting for him to kiss her. If put in this exact scenario only a few weeks before, Garath likely would have made a bad joke and then retreated from the room with an excuse so poorly thought-out that it would have made the bad joke seem clever. Now though, he wasn’t the same person he used to be.
He closed his eyes, leaned forward, and pressed his lips against hers.
The kiss was short and sweet. When Garath pulled away, Athios reached up with both hands and pulled him in for another. Hands on her waist, head in the clouds, Garath kissed her again. A few of the best minutes of his life passed all too quickly as they explored each other’s mouths. Then, light-headed and sweating a little too much, Garath finally pulled away from the unexpected intimacy.
“We aren’t an item?” Garath asked, gaze shifting between Athios’ dark eyes and trembling lips.
She shook her head playfully.
“Can we be?” he asked hopefully.
Athios beamed, looking satisfied and perhaps a little smug. She nodded and pulled him in for another kiss. “I think I would like that,” she said, her lips brushing his with each syllable.
Worry made a sudden appearance in the way Athios was looking at the Necrologist. Garath cocked his head in question.
“But?” he asked.
“But nothing,” she replied. “Just don’t start anymore fist fights, alright? You hit like a girl.”
A throat being cleared at the door caught their attention. Garath and Athios, arms still wrapped around one another, turned to see Maimon standing in the doorway. The Rabbi’s poorly concealed grin broke into open laughter. Garath glared.
“What?” Maimon asked, hands up in mock-surrender. “She isn’t wrong there, man. Stick to your Skills. Anyway, I didn’t mean to interrupt, whatever, but we were all waiting outside for you guys…”
They joined the rest of the group just outside the Guild Hall a few minutes later. Apparently, while Garath was otherwise occupied, Maimon and Obawon had both succeeded in unlocking Mana Manipulation. Garath, not wanting to be left behind, sat down on the grass and once again attempted to focus on feeling the Mana move through his body as he pooled it into the one-second cast of Death Bolt.
With a black magical orb pulsing between his outstretched hands, Garath found it difficult to focus. He couldn’t rip his thoughts away from the twitterpated feeling of a budding relationship, and lost control of the spell. The Death Bolt sailed into the growing forest. Unlike Sharon’s muffed Floral Bomb, Garath’s misfire didn’t do any real harm, apart from draining the life from the oversized fern it impacted and scaring the hell out of a white-tailed rabbit that had been hiding nearby. Sheepish, but still determined not to be outdone by Maimon, Garath tried again. He pooled the Mana into the one-second cast, but canceled the process when he saw Daisy approaching.
“Struggling?” she asked the Necrologist.
“A little,” Garath admitted. “I know you said to feel the Mana moving down my arms with a regular Skill, and I think I do feel that, but I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
“What does it feel like when you use that spell?” Daisy asked. “Does it make you feel hot or cold or scared or mad or anything?”
Garath frowned as he thought about it. “I… I don’t know. I’m going to try again.”
Daisy watched curiously as Garath once again began to cast Death Bolt. He felt the Mana leave his center, moving up to his shoulders and down through his arms to his hands. Then he noticed another feeling, a darkening as the sapphire Mana was converted into a pitch-black orb of Death magic. He canceled the casting and turned to look at Daisy as the blackness dimmed and then sapphire Mana moved effortlessly back to his center.
“There was something, but I don’t really know how to explain it,” he told her.
“Try,” Daisy encouraged.
Garath’s brows knitted together as he tried to find the words. “Well, Mana is blue. Or feels blue, I guess? But just then, I felt it getting darker, black like my Death Bolt, while it moved down my arms. It was like a part of me was getting darker. But isn’t darkness just the absence of light? Getting darker isn’t really a feeling, is it? Am I making any sense at all?”
“What? No, not really,” Daisy told him seriously. “Maybe you’re thinking about it too hard. Just do the same thing you just did, but don’t let the Mana get darker this time.”
Garath stared blankly at the little girl as he tried to wrap his mind around her suggestion. As much as he didn’t like children, Garath had to admit that sometimes the innocent, untarnished logic the little humans employed to make sense of the world was amazing. He didn’t know if he could keep the Mana from darkening to form a Death Bolt, but it was worth a shot. It was when Daisy slowly started backing away from him that he realized his deep-thought blank-stare was directed right at her and he quickly looked away.
Garath tried time and again to keep the Mana moving down his arms from darkening but, try as he may, the result was always a standard Death Bolt. More than a half-hour later, Garath decided he’d have to practice more on his own time as the group anxiously awaited Daisy’s instructions on unlocking Spell Design.
“This one is kind of like Mana Manipulation,” Daisy started.
Garath frowned, figuring he’d have about as much luck with Spell Design as he had with Mana Manipulation.
“Except, like, I guess if Mana Manipulation was like addition and subtraction in math, Spell Design is more like multiplication and division,” Daisy continued.
Garath’s frown deepened.
“With fractions,” Daisy finished.
Garath slumped, defeated.
&
nbsp; Daisy went on to explain the different feelings she’d felt while casting individual spells and followed that by instructing her students to create a directed reversal of those feelings. She gave them the example of hot and cold for her fire and ice spells, directing them to purposefully use the wrong feeling. Garath’s hopes of unlocking Spell Design dropped rapidly as she explained the process.
Still, Garath was determined to try. He attempted to ‘feel’ a Felfire Bolt next and began by pouring Mana into casting it. Garath was blown away by the sensations carried from his core to his shoulders and through his arms with the Demonology spell. If the understanding he had of the ‘darkening’ feeling from Death Bolt was like a light breeze, the overwhelming sensation he was getting from Felfire Bolt was Hurricane Katrina.
Instead of a subtle, almost incomprehensible and definitely indescribable feeling of his Mana ‘darkening’ to form a Death Bolt, pooling his Mana into a Felfire Bolt burned like hot acid through his veins. Instead of the sapphire Mana growing darker as it moved through his arms, Garath felt like his core as a whole turned briefly to a neon green when he began to cast. By the time the necessary 282 Mana was taken from his core to move through his body and create the spell, his Mana pool returned to a brilliant sapphire, yet at the same time, it was changed. His Mana pool still ‘felt’ blue, just like it had when he’d first felt it upon choosing his Class, but now it felt somehow… dirty. Tainted.
Garath canceled his cast of Felfire Bolt and was shocked to feel the Mana rush back up his arms and then, somehow filtered by a pure white presence in the upper part of his chest, returned to his core an untarnished sapphire. After explaining what the experience of casting Felfire Bolt had been like to Daisy, the little Archmage gave the Necrologist her two cents.
“You could feel it in your veins?” she asked curiously. “Like blood?”
“That’s what it felt like, yeah. It wasn’t like that with Death Bolt though,” Garath told her.
“Then I think you should either try to push Mana through your veins while casting Death Bolt, or maybe try to make your Mana pool turn green before casting Death Bolt,” Daisy suggested. Garath could see her gears turning as she considered her own advice, she didn’t look entirely convinced, but nodded assuringly. “Yeah. Try that and see what happens.”
The Tree of Ascension: A LitRPG Apocalypse (Peril's Prodigy Book 2) Page 23