by Adam Elliott
“You make that sound far more simple than I imagine it is going to be." Cayden said dryly.
“I'm trying to build you up.” Aaron said with a roguish smile.
“Enough." Vincent snapped, interrupting any further banter from the pair. He was still not entirely over Cayden's earlier slight. "We will all learn more from your attempt than any further prattling."
Cayden opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it as sharp eyes bit into him. Instead, he turned his attention to the book, reading down to the description of the rune itself, and its proper pronunciation. Eos. He thought, repeating the word over and over in his head. Speak and invoke, that was what Aaron had said. Simple, right?
He stretched his hands, opening and closing them a few times before holding them out in front of him as if grasping a basketball. Then he began to focus his attention on an invisible point just between the two, drilling that empty air into his psyche as the point where he would create his rock. Speak and invoke, invest with mana and shape the expression. "Eos."
The table exploded into splinters as an enormous stalagmite ripped through it in an instant. Both mages were sent sprawling as the erupting stone threw their chairs aside, though Cayden himself was spared the brunt of the attack as he stared bewildered at what he had wrought. The point of the stone had halted at the exact point he had been visualizing, his hands shaking on either side of it as he glanced at his display. A thousand mana, nearly his entire bar, had been spent to create the violent attack.
Behind him, Aaron laughed. "Well, that was certainly... unexpected."
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Oh for-" Cayden shouted, profanity on the tip of his tongue as the torso sized boulder slipped from his control and slammed into the floor. The stone just narrowly missed his bare feet as it fell, bits of it still peppering him all the same as the stone crumbled into a hundred different pieces.
The intervening week had not gone well.
After his little incident in the mess hall, his teachers had returned him to the anti-magic field for further training. When even that proved incapable of fully restraining the extent of the damage, they had transferred him to an empty cellar surrounded by newly empowered wards. It was that cellar that had taken the brunt of his failure over the previous few days; its floor ripped apart in a dozen places, one wall splintered clean through to the stone beneath.
His abilities were improving, but progress was slow. After the first two days, he'd learned how to restrain the flow of his mana, turning what was an uncontrollable fire-hose of MP down to a merely broken tap. He was still spraying everywhere, but he didn't dump near the entirety of his manapool on each casting. This had doubled the speed at which he practiced, leading to further improvements in restraint and control.
He could create earth from nothing now, rather than summoning the nearest source of it. The boulder he had been trying to manipulate had been his most recent attempt, elemental earth created solely by runic power. It was still an imperfect facsimile, the earth created by his ability existed so long as he kept MP invested in it, but began to decay quite quickly once he released it. Cayden was certain that, in time, he could create earth that was more than a mere temporary figment.
But considering he was still having difficulty with any level of control beyond 'Summon Enormous Rock,' that time would be long in coming.
Cayden slumped back against a nearby wall, gesturing to the stone to summon what mana remained in it, removing the penalty to his maximum MP that was caused by imbuing an item with his power. Currently, it cost him roughly 8% of his total MP just to hold the rock together. Considering Silver had managed to put a powerful anti-divination ward onto him at the cost of 0.05% of hers, he suspected he had quite a ways to go.
Despite being a language-based skill, somatic components, physical motions, were very much a part of runic casting. That was something Cayden had learned the hard way after nearly taking his head off with an erupting spike. Drawing the runes in the air or on a nearby surface could help to focus the magic, while gestures could direct the targeting and flow of his mana once he had invoked the rune. He'd been surprised to find just how much control he retained over the mana, enough that he could draw it out with nothing more than a thought and a gesture.
Yet despite all he'd learned, he didn't feel all that much closer to accomplishing the goal that Vincent and Aaron had set out for him. He had narrowed his output and gained some measure of control over his mana, but delicate control of the sort that he'd need to create a small rock seemed fully beyond him.
Cayden had tried a half dozen clever tricks, but none had proven any more effective than simply beating his head against the skill over and over in incremental improvements. He didn't like that, it felt far too much like school, and it lacked any cleverness. It felt as though he were building a jigsaw puzzle by picking a single piece and trying every other piece randomly against it, rather than building out from the corners or trying to find some unique area of the image to match existing pieces.
Nor had Vincent or Aaron proved to be of any help whatsoever. At least one of the two checked in on him every few hours, inquiring about his progress and proposing cryptic, or simply useless tips. They knew quite a lot about his ability, that much was apparent, but it was all technician knowledge, not practical. They could tell him about how things worked in general, but they were ill-equipped to give him pointers on how to get them to function when it mattered.
More than anything, Cayden felt out of his element. So much of him was tied up in the idea of crunch. He knew the HP regeneration of his original build at this level back to forward. He knew how many monsters of a certain level it would take, on average, to hit his next level up. He'd memorized tables of spells and skills, weapon statistics and monster data. But none of that helped him here. This wasn't crunch; there were no mechanics here that he could find, no easy way to measure his progress save by the amount of MP spent on each failed attempt. This was an art more than science, and Cayden had failed his art classes.
Cayden's head thumped back against the cellar wall as he reached into his pocket to retrieve his glasses. He had spent the day without them, dressed in Axfell initiate robes in the hope that a more simplistic approach might put him in the right mindset. It wasn't working.
A few messages awaited him as he logged into his display. Two from Celia, which wasn't surprising. She'd been panicked by the time he'd finally been released from captivity, and since then she'd inundated him with messages, wanting to be certain he was still alright. He'd gotten lucky there, another day and Celia might very well have sent Silver looking for him, which would have been a headache he did not need.
Further down was a message from Sarah. He caught himself smiling at the sight of it, and he could feel a slight blush creeping up his neck as he clicked on it.
The two of them had been trading messages back and forth for the better part of a month, ever since the night the four of them had spent at the Dizzy Sheep in the aftermath of the attempts on his life. The first message had come from out of the blue, just a pleasant little hello that he couldn't look away from. Since then they'd been corresponding usually a few times each day, sharing funny gifs they found online, talking about their days or interests. In a world where nearly every waking moment was devoted to the game, Cayden was glad to have at least one friend who had zero interest in talking about it. Bands, movies, video games, all of these things were on the table, but never the day to day grind, never planning about the next dungeon or talking about builds.
Today she was on a tangent about the Simpsons, though he had himself to blame for that. Sarah was a Simpsons die hard, and he had made the brutal, unforgivable mistake of suggesting that recent episodes were getting back to par with what the show had managed in its heyday. She had responded with nearly a dozen laugh out loud classic Simpsons gags, from episodes such as "You Only Move Twice" and "King-Sized Homer."
Sarah was right; they didn't make them like they used to.
There were hundreds of other messages blocked behind his spam filter, messages from fans wishing he would get back to streaming, or concerned that they hadn't heard from him in so long. Cayden knew he would have to update his blog sooner rather than later, if only for proof of life, but he had a different destination in mind as he opened his browser and tapped away at invisible keys.
“Still a wanted man..." He sighed. The Google result was nothing new. The bounty was still on his head. Police were still looking for information that could lead to the arrest of David Veda, though at a much lower reward than the one on Cayden's head. Vitalita stock had finally finished it's crash, having been de-listed from the Washington Stock Exchange earlier in the day. From one of the largest, most expensive bio-medical and Babel Resource tech firms on the face of the planet to a penny stock in just under a month. Amazing what having your lunatic majority shareholder on the run for attempted murder could do to your stock price.
Still nice to see Immolatus get what was coming to him.
Cayden realized that his mana was long since fully recharged, so he copied the top result and pasted it into a return message to Sarah, along with a mixture of humility and some unseemly gloating of his own. She'd thought the stock was going to bounce back now that the corporate board had voted to strip David of his position as CEO in absentia. He wondered if it was odd to be a sore winner and a magnanimous loser in the same message.
He pocketed his glasses and stood, pacing his way back to the center of the room. He could already feel his inner doubt and self-recrimination boiling up, so he focused inward before looking outward. In his mind's eye, he examined the hesitation, seeing it for the frustration it was before putting it aside. One thing he had learned was that his magic functioned best when he had a clear head and steady emotions. Whether that was a facet of the system itself, or whether he simply made more mistakes when he was emotional hardly mattered, what he needed was a clear head.
His chest rose and fell in slow, easy breaths. The measured counting of breaths helped to steady him, helped to hold his focus as he opened his eyes and fixated on an empty point in space. In and out he breathed until at last; he drew a deep breath to speak the word. "Eos."
It was wrong from the start; he could tell that the instant the word left his mouth. Mana swelled within him, rolling to an uncontrollable pitch before it at last overflowed. The floor ahead of him cracked, and Cayden watched in dismay as another spire of stone erupted, and nearly nine hundred MP vanished.
“Goddamnit!” Cayden shouted. It was impossible. Creating a stone the size of a fist, it felt as though he were being asked to dial a phone number with hands three sizes too large.
Something clicked in Cayden's head, a bark of laughter slipping past his lips despite the rage welling within him. “The fingers you have used to dial, are too fat.” He laughed again, harder this time as the answer came to him all at once. He needed a dialing wand, something he could use with more precision.
If he couldn't control how much MP he used, he could at least control how much MP he had. Draw the reservoir down to near empty, and the pressure would diminish, which would give him the ability to practice his fine control.
It proved slightly more challenging in practice than Cayden had intended. Working off a low MP pool by itself didn't help. The 'pressure' stayed the same whether he had one thousand or one hundred MP remaining. But investing MP into objects, reducing the total size of his pool? That helped.
Ultimately he had to reduce his overall pool down below 200 to get a firm control on his mana. Once he did, however, the results were nothing short of outstanding. He made a functional, permanent stone on his first attempt, then made three more back to back with little to no effort. Even better, with the reduced pressure, it soon became clear precisely what he'd been doing wrong in the first place.
Invoking a rune caused a sort of reverberation among his mana, like shaking a can of soda. He'd been trying to keep the soda in the bottle, with predictable results, when his goal should have been to seek to calm it so that it didn't erupt at all. That knowledge made all the difference.
Over the next eight hours, he continued to refine his techniques. He allowed the training wheels to come off one stone at a time, slowly increasing his maximum MP while still struggling to maintain his fine control.
By the time Aaron arrived for an evening check in he found Cayden lounging on a pile of nearly a thousand fist sized rocks. The young player was oblivious to his arrival, speaking to empty air as he tossed a fist-sized stone from hand to hand. “What's this? 'Extremely high voltage.' Well, I don't need safety gloves, 'cause I'm Homer Simp-!”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Time passed slowly in Axfell.
It didn't actually pass slowly, at least, not like the Room of Spirit and Time (or the Hypersonic Lion Tamer as fans of the dub might know it). It was that every day felt slower. Cayden was no stranger to time spent on research, but after his fifth day in the stacks, he was ready to pull his hair out by its roots if it would let him feel something other than tedium.
Following his successful mastery of Eos Vincent and Aaron had put Cayden through a rigorous test of his vocabulary, forming a similar test for each of the remaining nouns in his vocabulary. He had conjured a statue of the Great Emperor with the use of Kira, started a campfire with Natha and summoned a specific chess piece from a nearby room with Serra. Each test had proven easier than the last, and by the end of their examination, he was completing the assigned task on the first or second try.
His magic was still far from perfect. Even with the leaps and bounds he'd progressed, Cayden was still using far, far too much mana for it to be combat effective. Moreover, the whole process did still involve learning an entirely new language. It was all well and good to be able to ignite a target by invoking Natha against a strawman target, it was quite another to string together complicated spell names in the middle of combat.
In the evenings they had him studying, memorizing Runic symbols so that he could regurgitate them for tests in the morning. In the afternoons he traveled the stacks, searching among tens of thousands of manuscripts for tomes that Vincent assumed would be of use. It was a task made all the more difficult by the confounding method Vincent had used to organize the library of Axfell. The books were not ordered by type, title or subject. There were no Dewey decimals here. Instead, books were arranged by the date in which the library, or rather, Vincent, had received them.
Vincent had him hunting down tomes related to runic knowledge, which could be anything from a book containing a detailed history of the language of the Great Emperor, to a single off-hand mention in a footnote. The mage didn't seem able to prioritize books by value, instead of giving Cayden the task to hunt down another whenever inspiration struck him.
Most were useless for their endeavor, but perhaps one in ten contained a perfect rubbing of a series of glyphs, or a had the symbols magically etched onto its parchment. These few were invaluable because when properly deciphered, they added to Cayden's vocabulary.
That had been their catching point these last few days. No doubt when the quest had been designed, the developer had intended that a player would have been collecting runes for months as he ascended the tower, rather that rushing ahead as Cayden had. Vincent and Aaron were adamant that he would need at least two hundred words in his vocabulary to be able to attempt their trial, enough to unlock the ability to string together two words at a time.
They couldn't let him leave Axfell, not in the least because the cost to teleport back up to the floor would be positively ruinous, nor did they care to act as bodyguards by taking him to a set of available runes on the floor. That left the library and its books as his only source in the tedious grind to two hundred.
The good news was that it looked like his long personal nightmare was soon to be over. He'd spent the last several days adding rune after rune to his vocabulary. Indeed, he'd literally added the word Rune to his lexicon only an hour past, which h
ad brought him to 192/200. He could practically taste the freedom, even though he knew in his heart of hearts that the result of his success here would no doubt be a new and even more absurd set of tasks.
“The newest books.” Cayden announced as he wheeled a small cart loaded with weathered knowledge up the aisle towards Vincent.
“Yes, yes.” The man said impatiently, not even bothering to look up from his transcription, waving his hand in the direction of the nearby tables. “See if there is anything worth having inside them, then return the books to their rightful place.”
He nodded. He'd learned fairly early on when he should and should not bother trying to talk to Vincent. The man was a fount of knowledge, able and often eager to showcase his knowledge on an enormous variety of subjects. When he could be bothered to. When he was engaged in a book, either transcribing another new spell into is repertoire or digging up some bit of esoteric knowledge, he was only slightly more useful than a brick.
Today was the latter.
Cayden wheeled the trolley up to a nearby table and carefully shifted the books, one after the other, onto the table. Early on in his library work, Aaron had stopped by to impress upon him the danger of damaging any of the books, and to fess up immediately if he did. Vincent would know. He might not find out immediately, but a decade down the line he would find a missing page and bring his vast magical power to bear to find and punish him for his temerity.
“So, where to start?” Cayden murmured under his breath, though even that small noise brought a grunt of annoyance from nearby Vincent.
The books had a variety of titles and subjects, some more appealing than others. Mating Habits of Dark Kobolds, for example, was relatively low on the list, alongside The Complete Histories of Four-Thousand Petty Kings. Others were more intriguing, some of the books written on the subjects of arcane or divine magic, while still others were books on fables or legends of the tower, which might have proven interesting, had they been written in a language he could understand. He was surprised how often that seemed to occur, despite the fact that the Elan all shared a common language.
