My feet stabbing into the dead leaves and branches that line the forest sound like the hammering of nails in my ears. Lucky for me, I had stored my original boots in my ring when I found the enchanted ones stolen from me by Kendon. Not so lucky was the pack of dozens of bramble wolves chasing after me.
The monsters made of twigs and flame turn out to be completely immune to my dragonfire, at least the orange version. Without my staff, I have no way to keep my fire green and corrosive for repeated attacks, and having to stand still with wherever I set down the Bane Crystal would be far too much of a handicap. So, I run East through the forest, picking up stragglers of the bramble wolves as I run.
The short trees surrounding the cliffside I woke up at the bottom of give way to the looming towers of bark and shadow that I have come to expect inside the forest. Galea glides along next to my head, calling out the monsters that she finds as I sprint through the forest. The pack of monsters on my heels grows by the second, snapping maws dripping an odd burning fluid as the group of rank one monsters manage to keep up with me.
They aren’t as fast as I am, my investment in Speed has done that much for me, but their claws grip the ground far better than my traveling boots. Every time that I think I lose them around a bend, I find them a minute later, sprinting at me from the sides and sometimes the front, having used some shortcut through the bush that I am unaware of. I hold my arm as I run, blood slipping slowly through my fingers from a nasty bite. A strange sensation beneath my hand distracts me as I feel my skin knitting in real time.
A bite across my arm wasn’t so bad; the worst thing had been that the monster set my clothes on fire as it lunged at me. Superficial burns across my torso and arms still healed, and I was practically wearing rags now.
Ahead, the path opened a bit, enough to send a shiver down my spine. I slide as a bramble wolf leaps out of the leaves ahead of me, sailing through the spot I had been just before. Two more of the monsters rush out of the woods at my side, but I am already running again. One manages to snag a thread of my pantleg before I leave it in the dust behind me. I spare a glance back at the pack behind me, Galea being helpful enough to let me know that fifty-three of the monsters are chasing me at the moment.
When I turn back ahead, I see a lizardkin man stepping out from a bush, his head turned away, speaking to a short woman that walks at his side. Two more in the unexpected party stop just as they enter the clearing I sprint through, a look of shock on all of their faces as I race past.
“Sorry,” I call to them through panting inhales. I don’t know who these people are, and just an hour ago I confirmed to myself that I wasn’t going to be joining any more groups. Still, it felt bad to lead this many monsters right to them.
The air reverses as I sprint past the four, a whirlwind of energy being sucked past me, straight towards the unknown group. An explosion booms out into the air, followed swiftly by the cry of a warrior running into battle, but I am already past the clearing and back into the trees.
“Left,” Galea says, sounding almost bored.
Without hesitating a second, I jump right and escape the ambush of three bramble wolves exploding out of the detritus of the forest floor. I bounce off a tree, not so fun without a proper shirt to protect me from the bark and continue running. That little lizard told me that she can only see what I do, but at this point, that lie feels laughable.
My lungs work like furnace bellows, sucking in sweet cool air as my feet carry me through the forest shade. When I can really press myself on the straightaways, I feel like I can almost take off and soar into the air with how fast I am going. The longer I run, the more freeing the sensation that spread through my limbs is, and the more the fear of the monsters behind me recedes. Twenty one of the monsters still chase me, but the gap between us is widening. They yip, growl, and snarl, the fire sparking between their thorn-like teeth distorting the sounds, but I pay them less and less mind.
More than an hour has passed since I began this run, and they have managed to keep up with me this whole time. My body exalts in the chase, exhaustion the furthest thing from my mind. Sparing a glance to the bar indicating my reserves of stamina, it really looks as if I could keep running for hours more. Perhaps this too was part of my high Recovery.
A roar up ahead lets me know that the chase will soon be over, at least I hope so. No matter how freeing it feels to dodge and dash between the ambushes of deadly beasts, only becoming better at it each time, I understand that if I keep pressing my luck I will eventually lose.
My foot splashes onto a beach of river stones, scattering the rocks into the air as I dig out whatever speed I can find. Ahead of me, a river more than two hundred feet wide rushes North with a speed that could match my own. Something that sounds like hesitation enters the growls and barks coming from the monsters behind me, and I am certain that my guess is correct. If the monsters are immune to my fire, they will probably do less well in the water.
I am across the pebbly shore of the river in the blink of an eye, my booted foot splashing into surface of the river, the shallows. The solidness of the riverbed doesn’t come, my speed carrying me forward before I can even touch the bottom of the river. Surprise and elation flood through me as my second step lands on the surface of the water, barely sinking a few inches before my momentum propels me further.
“I can–” My mouth fills with rough river water as my third step sinks through the broken water and foam ahead of me. I roll head over heels for several feet out into the river, knocking my head on a big, smooth rock before I flounder to the surface. A mouthful of the sour water–yes, actually sour water–drips from my lips as I spin on the surface of the river.
Already more than a hundred feet away, a gathering of twenty or more bramble wolves sit at the shore, all staring at my bruised body drifting away. The water rushing over me is cool and like a tonic to the fire in my muscles despite its weird taste and smell. I float for a time, the idea that there might be dangerous things in the water not even occurring to me.
Through several bends, the river begins to slow somewhat, though the smell coming off the water only grows more pungent. I decide to leave the water when I see the river split around a large island in its center. Dry land and hopefully a good place to rest ahead of me.
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The bird is strange, even as far as monsters go. Not overly powerful, it sits alone in the center of the island, the nest it built on the floor of the island filled with bones and shiny trinkets it has collected over the years. While it may not be the strongest of creatures, the webbed wings it possesses instead of feathers hint at an aquatic lifestyle, and judging by the mountain of fishbones littering the island, it is at least successful at hunting.
It never spots the ball of fire descending out of a tree towards it until it is already too late. An explosion of orange fire consumes the monster in its entirety, roasting it with tongues of dragonfire before it can even stand. I sit on a branch in one of the small birches that grow all over the island, looking down at the creature as it fails to even get enough air to let out a death rattle.
“Sorry, but this is my island now.” I watch the fiery spectacle below me for a bit too long, realizing after a few seconds that bird nests tend to be flammable. I spotted the glint of treasure down there before blowing up the beast. “Tits and honey.”
After three minutes of beating the smoldering fires with the scabbard of a sword I salvaged back at the battlefield, I fall on my ass in the middle of the nest, watching black smoke snake up around me. At my feet, a leather chest piece studded with gold lay. Too bad that half of the armor piece was burned and unusable. I kick the corpse of the monster, turning it into pink smoke, and wrap myself in a bearskin as I take a seat in the middle of the nest.
Galea is able to determine a semblance of where I am from the river and the looming mountains in the East. With the speed the river moves, it will take me North pretty fast. That is something for later. Firstly, the odd smell from the water still lingers on me; I’ll have to use some of my fresh water to get the smell off. Secondly, I need a real plan before I try to go anywhere.
Stolen story; please report.
I look up at the sky, specs of stars standing out against the darkening orange. This island is one of the few places in the forest that has a good view of the heavens. The stars fade into view, coming out of the velvet darkness overhead. I think, looking up at those untouchable lights overhead, trying to figure out a trajectory for myself.
I have already decided that I am going to finish this competition. I never heard anything about dropping out, but I have to assume that doing so is possible, somehow. Adrius seemed to think that it was possible. I throw the idea aside. For the first time in my life I have a goal, a real goal that I want. Pushing through this Passage is the only way to reach it. Still, a plan is impossible.
A window appears in front of my hand, and with a tap of my fingers, a bookshelf falls out of nothingness to land unevenly on the sticks and twigs of the nest. Three thick tomes piled on top of the bookshelf fall to the ground in a heap, some last minute additions that I nabbed leaving Arabella’s mansion. The books were the most expensive things I took from Arabella’s mansion, a clear risk to smuggle into the competition, but I am certain that is what she wanted me to do with the ring. The proctors of this Passage never searched my ring, or they had and found the things that I brought into the Passage to not be noteworthy.
To me, the books represented what I lacked most in the world, understanding. It only really strikes me now how flippant I have been about this whole agreement I made with Arabella Willian. I agreed, I signed a contract, promising that I would become a rank three magician within three years, something that was unheard of where I come from. Despite that, despite my brother telling me how hard I needed to work, I lived for weeks in Arabella’s mansion without exploiting her for what I would need.
It seems like the actions of a child as I reflect upon it. Had I just expected her to hand me everything, to tell me everything I needed to know, without putting any work in? She had even given me some books to read, but when I had, did I bother to cultivate an interest? That apathy almost got me killed. Not because I hadn’t learned about my new profession properly, but because I hadn’t bothered to learn about anything. Despite knowing, despite being explicitly told, that the others in the group had artifacts, I never bothered to find out what they were or what they did. If I knew that, there is no way I would have let Kendon get that close to me. My ignorance almost killed me.
As I light torches made from dried stick, hanging them from the boughs of the trees around me, I stare at the books on the bookshelf. No plan, nor any idea of how to properly make one, I know that I need to cleanse myself of this deadly ignorance.
I read until dawn, my eyes having no difficulty with the night. The tomes are immense volumes, some not even meant to be read through.
The first one that I find truly interesting is one such tome: Glossary of Basic Affix Interaction. The book captures my interest for most of the night, explaining some of the basics about magic that I never even could have guessed at. There exists, apparently, two major categories of magical expression outside of the innate abilities of magicians, monsters, and magical beasts. Enchantment, the brief subject that the book covers, is the first of these.
The entire purpose of enchantment is the creation of magical constructs, permanent or consumable fixtures of magical expression meant to create a replicable magical outcome. All of the magical equipment that I have picked up so far, the rings I still wear and even the Eye of Volaash, are products of enchantment. It isn’t so much the fact that enchantment exists which captures my interest, I have known about that for quite some time, but the fact that a major point of enchantment deals with affix interactions.
The majority of the glossary is devoted to denoting the interactions between different magical affixes, and with the book covering one hundred and sixty six affixes, there are a lot of interactions to know, hence, the need for a glossary. Pages upon pages of itemized and sorted interactions detailing how Fire mana and Ice mana interact under specific circumstances, weakness and reinforcement fusions, useful and destructive combinations, it all sparks my curiosity. It reminds me of what Arabella told me about how my dragonfire would have poor matchups against certain elements. That had certainly proven true with the rank two catfish, and it happened again today with the bramble wolves.
On a lark, I flip through, finding the section devoted to Acid affixed mana in the middle of the book. “Explosive interactions with Fire Mana,” I read aloud, finding the entry. “So that would have worked on the wolves.” Then, thinking again, I skip through the book, eventually finding that a fusion between Fire mana and Thorn mana exists, named Cinder mana, that has an extreme interaction with Acid mana. “Why didn’t I already have this?”
I find the answer to that particular question in another one of the books. Arabella had mentioned it to me before when I first integrated all of my essentia for the first time but rank one and two are considered by many to be the same rank really. In “An Introductory Guide to the Magician’s Profession,” a book I will never forgive my so called mentor for not having given to me on my first day as a magician, the similarity is expounded upon in length.
According to the information, being an essentia magician is just one of a plethora of paths towards magical power and might. In simple terms, the book explains that what attaching essentia to your soul does is call a splinter of your true soul out of the divine plane, the Horizon Lands. The soul takes a long time to reach the new rank one essentia magician, years even, but the process can be accelerated through the reinforcing of the soul. The book gave a couple of explanations for this, making it seem as if the writer didn’t actually understand why testing your will against monsters helped to speed up this process. When the soul splinter reached the magician, and after the magician captured the splinter within their body inside of a soul cage, they would reach rank two, where apparently all the good stuff started.
The largest difference that gaining rank two brought along was the ability to project a soul presence. The ability to do so was always guaranteed for essentia magicians at this stage, and in almost all cases the projection was colored by their conflux, though sometimes it took on the aspect of one of their essentia. There was a lot about soul presences, but what I found most relevant to myself, was that this was when most magicians started to bother with affixes.
A basic ability of the soul presence was its ability to allow magicians to project their mana more easily, increasing their control of their magic and its power inside of the aura the soul presence created. It was this aura that was necessary for a magician to be able to manipulate their own magic deftly enough to examine its affixes and even attempt to change them. Small wonder everyone told me not to bother with affixes.
For me, however, this does not seem to be the case. Likely because of my Emperor’s Prerogative ability, I have been able to change the affix of Fire in my dragonfire to Acid. I am not able to do so spontaneously like the book describes incredibly skilled magicians as being able to do, but I am able to do it. Finding this pushes me to read every line of this book like my life depends on it, and I am not surprised when I find some more interesting information.
Also in rank two, the book’s entry for this rank is more than five times longer than its entry for rank one, magicians are more easily able to reinforce their souls by outside means and not by just fighting monsters or training their bodies. Oddly, these means are narrowly defined and delineated upon the lineage of the individual magician. The introductory book goes to great lengths to justify this through some philosophic babble about theology that does not square at all with all of the church learning my head has been filled up with. The diatribe is almost boring enough to make me close the tome all together, but with my new purpose found, I somehow manage to read the entire monotonous entry. At the end, I am rewarded with real information.
Since the time that essentia magicians first came into the world, something I am surprised to find out was not always the case, the different races of the world have been able to reinforce their souls through different means. The Celenials, for instance, are able to absorb mana from the ephemeral concept of novelty. By experiencing new and exciting things, they can actually make themselves stronger. Of course, I immediately look for elves, finding that they are able to absorb ambient mana from the world around them through meditation, the denser the mana around them, the better. I believe Dovik mentioned to me something about elves gathering in highly populated cities, the mere fact that there were so many of them in one place increasing the density of the magic around them.
The entry for humans is…well it is a bit odd. While other races might be able to meditate, travel, or even find power through expressing themselves, humans can help reinforce their souls by eating things. I find the entry a bit of a letdown after reading about elves and celenials, but I keep reading on anyway. By eating the flesh of magical beasts or harvesting magical plants, humans are able to siphon some of the mana invested into their food into their souls, strengthening themselves. The book even mentions briefly how affixed food interacts with this process, increasing the power of an individual magician’s own affixes by prolonged exposure. In fact, all of these methods are closely related to affixing mana and increasing affix affinities.
I notice that the sun has come up by the time that I finish reading through the introductory book, earmarking the sections that I find most pertinent to myself. I munch on some more jerky as I think over the contents of the book, trying to feel for mana or mana affixes in the meat, but utterly failing. The information is interesting, but nothing all that actionable for me at the moment.
I continue working my way through the books well into the morning, feeling no need for sleep. It is sometime around midmorning, while I am reading a history text that would have been considered heretical back home, that an offhanded question to my spirit companion stops me dead in my tracks.
“I can do that,” Galea tells me. “In fact, it is one of my prime functionalities.”