Julia frowned at the earth mage. “You’re not helping.”
Kyyle lolled his head toward her. “Well, I did notice that the ants had trouble picking up our location after we set off the explosives – much like how we’ve been using the crystals to conceal ourselves. Those antennae are definitely able to detect mana, but my guess is that they’re limited to fire and earth. You know, what with all the crystals and minerals down here.”
“Not the most helpful observation,” Julia said tiredly, her fingers running through her hair and pulling out clumps of mud and dirt. “We’ve got an earth and a fire mage. So, you’re basically saying we’re going to paint a target on our back every time we cast?”
“Well, sort of,” Kyyle replied, unperturbed by her tone. “But that information does seem potentially useful. My guess is that the explosions created an ambient cloud of mana that blinded them—”
“That doesn’t really help us kill them, though,” Finn interjected in a gruff voice, pushing himself to his feet. “What would help is to get moving again. We can prepare some additional explosives and find a different section of the tunnels to explore.”
They both stared at him incredulously.
“I think we need to take a break and regroup,” Julia offered gently. “We’re all in pretty rough shape, and we’ve been at it for days in-game. Maybe we’ll get some clarity by putting some distance on the problem.”
Finn shook his head. “We don’t have time,” he snapped. “You’re right, we’ve already been down here for days. How close are Malik and Kalisha to the vault by now? There’s too much hanging in the balance…”
“Like rulership of a fake videogame city?” Julia shot back, her eyes flaring with irritation. “Seriously? This is a game. Why are you pushing so hard?”
“I—” Finn hesitated. He still wasn’t sure he wanted to tell her his real reason for winning this competition. “I just need to do this,” he offered weakly.
“No. You need a damn break,” she snapped. “We all do.”
He tried to bite back at his irritation – the feeling not helped by the confused glances he was receiving from both Kyyle and Julia. “Fine, then log off. I’ll go handle the preparations myself,” he replied, frustration still tinging his voice.
Julia snorted in disbelief, throwing up her hands. “You know what? We will! Maybe by the time we log back in, your grumpy, stubborn ass will have cooled off.”
His daughter didn’t wait for a reply, her hands flicking at the air to bring up her UI. Only seconds later, she vanished in a flash of multi-colored light.
Finn just stared at the space she had occupied a moment ago, frustration, anger, and regret warring for dominance. He knew he was being unreasonable, but that just made him feel more irritated. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to will away those unhelpful emotions. Yet they didn’t budge, instead simmering in his mind.
“I’m not sure how anything could cool off in here… but she does sort of have a point. I could use a short breather,” Kyyle offered more gently, rising from the floor, and settling a hand on Finn’s shoulder. “We need to back off for a second and get some perspective. We can’t keep butting our heads against this problem like those ants. If we leave right now – like this – we’ll probably just get ourselves killed.”
Grimacing, Finn didn’t say anything. A moment later, he felt the hand disappear and heard a faint pop indicating that Kyyle had left him as well. He slumped back onto the boulder, resting his face in his hands.
“Damn it,” Finn muttered.
“If it’s any consolation, I haven’t left,” Daniel chirped from nearby. A brief pause. “Although, I suppose I also can’t leave.”
Glancing up sharply, Finn asked, “Was that supposed to be a joke?”
The AI bobbed in place for a moment. “An attempt. I’ve been studying humor by watching you and your companions. It seems to primarily involve making uncomfortable factual observations.”
Finn shook his head, an inadvertent smile tugging at his lips. “I suppose it does.”
“What will you do now?” Daniel asked.
“Figure out a path forward on my own, I guess.” His good humor was fading as quickly as it had appeared. The AI’s movements slowed, and he gave off a single weak pulse but remained silent – as though he disapproved of Finn’s method but didn’t wish to speak up.
Fantastic, now even Daniel is taking their side.
Finn shoved down his frustration. Self-pity and anger weren’t going to help him right now. He needed to think through a strategy for tackling the ants. Although, as a first step, he supposed he should review where he stood right now. He hadn’t checked his notifications in a long time – the windows often more irritating and distracting than helpful.
With a flick of his wrist, Finn pulled up his notifications.
x5 Level Up!
You have (25) undistributed stat points.
x2 Spell Rank Up: Imbue Fire
Skill Level: Intermediate Level 5
Cost: 200 Mana
Effect 1: Imbues a weapon with fire mana, increasing the weapon’s base damage by INT x 12%. Can only be used on unenchanted metal weapons.
Effect 2: While channeling, allows the caster to increase the heat in ranks, up to a current max heat rank of [4]. Each heat rank increases damage by INT x 5% while increasing the channel cost by 50%.
Channel Effect: Allows user to control the weapon within his control range at a cost of 25 mana/sec.
x3 Spell Rank Up: Mana Sight
Skill Level: Beginner Level 9
Cost: 50 mana and stamina per second.
Effect: Ability to view ambient mana. Current vision is [average].
x6 Skill Rank Up: Flameworking
Skill Level: Beginner Level 7
Effect 1: 22% increased power when shaping objects subject to Imbue Fire.
Finn frowned as he surveyed the notices. He didn’t know what he expected, but he was a bit underwhelmed with the results. Although he supposed they made sense. The workers supplied good experience, but it was a slow process to hunt and kill them one at a time. To make matters worse, Finn was primarily using his Imbue Fire, Mana Sight, and Flameworking down here, so only those skills had leveled up.
This was indeed a marathon, and the leveling benefits would accumulate over time, but a measly 25 stat points probably wasn’t going to make or break these fights right now. With a frustrated sigh, Finn allocated all the points to Intelligence. At this stage, he just needed more mana in order to maintain the higher heat ranks on the sawblades and keep more of the weapons up simultaneously.
When he was finished, he pulled up his full character status.
Character Status
Name:
Finn
Gender:
Male
Level:
71
Class:
Fire Mage
Race:
Human
Alignment:
Lawful-Neutral
Fame:
1800
Infamy:
0
Health:
1350
H-Regen/Sec:
4.80
Mana:
2320
M-Regen/Sec:
52.10
Stamina:
1350
S-Regen/Sec:
10.00
Strength:
47
Dexterity:
100
Vitality:
100
Endurance:
100
Intelligence:
344
Willpower:
30
Affinities
Dark:
2%
Light:
8%
Fire:
44%
Water:
5%
Air:
3%
Earth:
10%
Finn stared at the screen wearily. He had grown stronger, but the proc
ess was still slow. If they weren’t working against a time limit, the Abyss might have been a great place to level. Hell, most players would probably have killed for their leveling speed. However, these small incremental increases just weren’t enough – not with the clock ticking.
They needed a game-changer. Literally.
Or maybe two or three…
Finn swept the notifications aside, his eyes coming to rest on the corpse of the first worker ant they had killed, its body now pushed against a nearby wall. It wasn’t that long ago that the workers had seemed like unstoppable metal juggernauts, but compared to their enhanced cousins, they were rather flimsy. The shielding on their heads and covering their body was much smaller, allowing Finn to cut at their weak points with his sawblades.
Oh, and they didn’t explode or toss around Fireballs.
“Daniel, please pull up the designs for the soldiers and exploders and show their weak points,” Finn directed.
“Of course, sir,” the AI replied.
Only a moment later, the models of the two new variants floated in front of Finn, smaller ghostly blue doppelgangers of the real thing. The joints at the base of their neck and along each leg were highlighted in a darker blue.
Finn just didn’t see how he was going to take out the soldiers and exploders. His group only had one attack that could reliably kill the ants – his sawblades. However, if the soldiers were facing him from the front, the extended shielding around their heads made it difficult to hit the weak point at the base of their neck. He’d have to launch the blades below the armor, then force them to stop and carve upward at a roughly 60-degree angle. That was an impossible move mid-battle.
Alternatively, he could take out their legs like he had done during the fight, but that didn’t put them out of action, not since they had a ranged attack. He’d still need to follow up with a killing blow. And even then, using multiple sawblades cut into his resources and took time – time they often didn’t have in the middle of a fight. That was especially true now that they were discovering the larger hub caverns and facing multiple ants at once.
The exploders were even worse. One wrong move meant he could end up igniting the mana crystals along their back and cave in a whole tunnel. That might not be a bad plan if he could catch them at a distance or densely packed together with the other ants. He could quite possibly use the crystals against them in that case. But up close or in tight quarters? That was a recipe for disaster. He was going to need to slice their spinal column at the base of their head without damaging anything else, or he’d blow them all sky high.
He might be able to pre-place his blades in a tunnel like he’d done on several occasions with the players back in the Mage Guild. He could then lure the ants into the kill zone and attack from behind. However, the problem was still time. He required precious seconds to wind up his blades and ratchet up the heat ranks, making it difficult to leave them lying in wait. The ants would likely notice and destroy them before Finn could fire.
No, he needed a way to kill the ants at a distance.
And, ideally, a way to kill them quickly while conserving ammunition.
Unfortunately, the two new ant variants effectively had the same problem. They both required Finn to control the blades with a level of precision and speed that he just didn’t have. Pushing up the heat ranks might give him the necessary control, but he would still only have fractions of a second to pivot and rotate the blades after they were launched.
If only there was a way to make himself faster…
Finn hesitated at that thought.
That didn’t seem impossible, did it? The game already had different ways of speeding up his perception of time and his reaction speed. For example, the way his Dodge skill triggered during moments of intense battle. So perhaps there might be a way to intentionally increase his action and perception speed.
Finn’s eyes darted to the familiar tome that lingered atop his pack. He had been continuing to read Bilel’s writing in his downtime – typically those moments when Julia and Kyyle needed to log off or they were waiting on the earth mage to set up the next group of traps. One of Bilel’s earliest entries came to mind. The mage had proposed that there were a static number of spells in the world, which would go a long way toward explaining some of the limitations of Spellcrafting that Finn had experienced.
The mage’s early successes had been largely trial and error, but over time, Bilel had developed a semi-successful system for approaching the spell creation process. He had first identified what he wanted the spell to do and then asked himself which affinity could support that goal – with each affinity limited by the nature of its own magic. For example, light mana wasn’t ever going to produce an Ice Bolt. Similarly, a fire mage was never going to turn invisible.
Bilel had used an example of air magic, showing that Blink operated in a manner consistent with that mana type. The spell actually converted the caster’s body to lightning for a short period of time – which helped explain the sometimes-erratic nature of the teleport.
What sort of effects could fire mana have then?
Finn chewed on his lip, racing down this new line of thought.
If fire mana represented control of heat, then did that also apply at a molecular level? Finn still remembered his basic chemistry classes. Heat caused molecules and atoms to vibrate faster – which might translate directly to an increase in speed. Similarly, from a biological standpoint, heat also had a large influence on the body’s metabolic rate. Even if Finn couldn’t directly speed himself up, could he speed up his body’s natural processes?
“Could I create a spell that makes me faster?” Finn murmured to himself.
He supposed there was only one way to find out.
With a brief command, Finn brought up his mod interface, rows of glowing grids suddenly appearing in the left-hand side of his vision. It was safe to assume that the spell would be journeyman rank or higher, and he was already beginning to think through the keywords he might need.
“Daniel, pull up all of the Veridian characters related to ‘speed.’ Then pull up the symbols related to ‘metabolism’ and run a cross-comparison,” he directed.
As Finn watched the symbols stream across his UI and snap into place, he could already see a pattern beginning to emerge. Despite his fatigue, an excited grin crept across his face. His anger, fear, and doubt began to burn away as his fire mana rippled through his body, automatically responding to his excitement.
He was going to create something new.
Or, at least, he was going to try.
Chapter 24 - Hasty
Bilel’s Journal – Entry 101
Over the last few days, I have undertaken an examination of how my own body processes mana. However, I immediately realized that this process was more difficult than anticipated since I cannot easily view my own body while the sight is active.
I was forced to conscript one of the crafters to form a simple mirror, and I have taken to sitting alone in my lab, the mirror leaning against a nearby wall and pointing at my arm. I will squeeze my eyes shut, conjure the sight, and then channel the entirety of my mana into the air around me, letting it dissipate harmlessly against the room’s wards. I then watch carefully as my arm replenishes its mana – only to repeat the process again.
I have not yet noticed anything that would give me pause or greater insight into this process, but I will not be deterred. I have a sense that there is still something more to be discovered. Besides, I have found over my years of study that while inspiration is often mercurial and elusive, persistence is often the best way to conjure it.
***
Even with a rough goal for his new spell, the number of possible permutations was still mind-boggling. It would clearly be a fire-based spell and a personal buff, but there were quite a few keywords related to both speed and metabolism. Those keywords also gave him no insight into how they should be arranged among the couplets of the incantation.
It was like trying to find a
needle in a haystack. Except that the haystack was the size of a football stadium, the hay was piled up into the bleachers, and it wasn’t at all clear whether someone had remembered to hide the needle.
Also, the whole thing was on fire.
Finn had whittled down the options by directing Daniel to eliminate possible incantations that created nonsensical rhyming couplets – a feature he might need to hardcode into the Spellcrafting mod at some point when he had more time. That had narrowed the possibilities to a few hundred options using the keywords he had selected. Which wasn’t bad, actually. Not when the initial pool of potential combinations had that number in the millions.
He’d then sorted those selections by removing incantations that weren’t directly related to his goal, but still included all the relevant keywords and were intelligible. It seemed safe to assume that a rhyming couplet about ‘excitable soup’ probably wasn’t going to get the job done. Although, the thought of running into battle reciting nonsense rhymes about food did seem like it would be distracting for his enemies…
That brought him down to ten possible options.
Now that was a number Finn could work with.
Except… each spell required specific hand gestures, and there wasn’t really any rulebook for that either. So, when an incantation failed, Finn didn’t know whether it had failed because the incantation was wrong, or because he hadn’t channeled the mana properly. As a result, he’d been forced to try every incantation multiple times before setting it aside – making even a list of ten spells take hours to test.
Finn sighed, looking at the next potential spell on the list. The text seemed promising. It was on point, describing both an increase in his body’s innate speed and metabolization.
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