“GET BACK INTO THE HOUSE!” A soldier shouted at them from a tank rolling down the street just as they stepped out onto the front porch. “It’s not safe out here for civvies. Get back inside!”
“We can help,” Brent shouted back.
”Like hell you can!” The soldier said, pointing a finger at them, then at the house. “Back. Inside. Don’t get in our way!”
Mia had to suppress the sudden urge to prove him wrong by blowing a hole into the side of his tank. A Blast should have done it too, if not one, then two of them would anyway.
Whatever answer they had for him, the man with only his upper body out of the tank’s machine gun pit didn’t care. He pulled back inside to the belly of the metal beast without another word, which left Mia’s group standing awkwardly on the sidewalk.
Brent shrugged, then stepped forward. Motioning for the rest of them to follow. Mark went behind him as usual, with Lina next to Mia and both Carmilla and Helene taking up the rear.
“Mom, if you’re a mage shouldn’t you be protected and not the one doing the protecting?” Mia asked, whispering over her shoulder.
“Don’t worry honey,” Helene said. “I’m plenty fast, I’m in no danger.”
“Right, what’s that about?” Mia asked, thinking back on the way her mom just shot off into the sky like gravity was nothing more than a suggestion. “Your way of flying doesn’t seem too … physics compliant.”
“It’s not,” Helene snorted, smiling at her daughter. “One of my racial traits lets me reduce my weight to the tenth of what it is. I weigh as much as an eagle.”
“You have something like ‘Featherweight Constitution’?” Mia asked, eyes widening.
“Yes,” Helene said, a smidge of surprise entering her voice. “Superior Featherweight Constitution it’s called. It’s … pretty good, but I’m glad it’s toggleable.”
“Mine’s not,” Mia huffed. “Though it only reduces my weight by 30%, not 90%.”
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING OUT HERE?” Mia turned to glare at the soldier leaning out from the window of a humvee that just rolled to a stop next to them. The man was an older soldier type with a short scruffy beard that couldn’t decide whether to be grey or white. “It’s danger- Wait a second! You’re the lot that cunt Herman told me about, aren’t you?”
“Herman?” Brent asked, stepping forward to take the soldier’s attention.
Mia just watched on and noticed the man had a whole lot of fancy stripes and golden stars on his uniform’s sleeve.
“Sergeant Herman, the one with the moustache,” the man said. “Yes. No one else would wear a damned knight getup of all things. I’m Colonel Zeigler, if the lot of you want to fight, you’ll be rewarded handsomely should we all survive this. What about it?”
“We were going to do just that,” Brent said evenly, his face twitching a little at the Colonel's words about his armour.
“Good! Ground rules: you shoot one of my men, you get shot in the head,” the man said with a glare that let up a second after. “You shoot the monsters, you get rewarded. Easy enough to remember, right? Now get in the back!”
With his words, the door to the back of the large humvee popped open and after a collective shrug, the group streamed inside. It was a bit packed with the five of them, but the vehicle was large enough to fit them all on the back seat.
“Step on it Kelvin!” The Colonel ordered, and his driver stepped on the gas, driving everyone into their seats as the car sped up.
Not even a minute later, the drowsy-looking driver rounded a corner and pulled onto the sidewalk. Outside, Mia could hear the sound of shouts and the repetitive thrumming of gunshots firing in full auto.
The soldiers were already fighting, putting their lives on the line to halt the advance of the approaching monsters.
Down the street, she could feel the revolting wrongness of dozens of monsters rushing towards them before their lives got snuffed out, only for new ones to enter the range of her perception.
Strangely enough, the air didn’t have that ambient wrongness she felt whenever she was closer to a Rift. These monsters must have come pretty far from home.
Mia felt her palms clam up, fingers trembling as she heard an agonised shriek from close by. People were dying out there, and so could she if she stepped out of the vehicle.
The Colonel kicked the door open and jumped out, orders flying out of his mouth even before his feet hit the ground and Mia’s group hurried to follow after him.
Mia did so too, there was no going back now. There were monsters to kill. At least she should be safe, with Mark, Brent and Carmilla to stand between her and the monsters
That’s right. All she had to do was keep the monsters off of them in return and everything would be fine.
The tank they saw rolling by previously sat in the middle of the road behind some haphazardly built barricade. Its barrel aimed down the street at an advancing horde of green monsters.
Mia squinted, taking in the creatures her mother spoke about for the first time. They looked like wolves on steroids, but only from afar.
They didn’t have eyes for one, only a gigantic gaping maw filled with rows of serrated teeth. Vines curled around their necks, sinking into their bodies around the shoulders and with little crimson flowers growing across them.
Mia gulped, her eyes widening as she noticed something. Nothing was flesh or skin coloured on those things, everything was either green or brown as bark, even the teeth and the claws were brown like the thorns of a rose instead of looking like real claws.
Then there was the fur, slick green fur swaying in the wind as the monsters raced down the street. It looked like long grass, the kind of grass with sharp edges that could even cut your fingers like paper if you weren’t careful.
The tank’s cannon spoke with a deafening explosion and the monsters burst to shreds in a line. The rest continued forward, a few falling over every second as the continuous rain of bullets from the regular soldiers kneeling behind the barricades overwhelmed them.
“Mia, Lina,” Brent said. “I think only the two of you can help while the monsters are still further away. The rest of us will settle down and make sure none of these monsters can break through to eat the soldiers. That good?”
“I can handle ranged combat too,” Helene said, a hand squeezing Mia’s shoulder. “And you should prioritise keeping the girls safe, not the strangers.”
“I doubt they’ll be in much danger with little miss Dracula hovering over them,” Brent said, mouth curling into a smirk as he glanced at Carmilla. The redhead being practically connected to Mia by the hip. Although Mia only knew the man for a few days by this point, his teasing had become normal to her. It calmed her nerves a bit, to hear him be so carefree as to be making jokes. “But we’ll be close by. We’ll come to help if shit hits the fan and we’ll get out of here together.”
“That’s good,” Helene said, then patted Mia on the shoulder. “Let us go then. I’ll be right behind you.”
“As will I,” Carmilla whispered, her crimson gaze warily taking in the surroundings and not just the monsters either. The girl clearly didn’t trust the soldiers all that much.
“Come on, we have monsters to kill!” Lina shouted over the loud gunfire, grabbing Mia by the wrist and dragging her over to an empty barricade pressed up to a concrete wall.
Mia chewed on her cheek, doing her best not to look at where a group of soldiers were dragging away the gory remains of one of their comrades. A slightly larger monster’s corpse laid on its side not far away, its teeth still spotting chunks of flesh and dripping fresh blood.
Mia returned her gaze to the incoming monsters. It was a veritable horde, a tide of green that didn’t seem to end as far as the eye could see.
At least they were dumb enough to rush down the street in a straight line without flanking or jumping over the top of the suburban houses.
Lina didn’t wait a moment, mana already streaming out of her fingers and shooting down the street in a straight line. Soon enough, she had a clump of mana collected about fifty metres down the street right above where the monsters were dropping dead.
The blonde’s face was set in a serious frown, probably having to focus hard to keep her mana stable that far away from her body. Still, a pulse of mana rushed down the thread and a few seconds later a pair of the plant-monsters were splattered across the pavement, coating it in greenish yellow ichor.
Just like the goblins. Mia knew goblins, she could kill goblins. Latching onto that vague sense of familiarity in this chaotic and alien situation, Mia forced herself to keep calm.
Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“They aren’t too tough,” Lina said, her voice tight and focused. “Level 5's. Could be better, but it’ll do for now. Yes.”
Mia just shrugged, deciding that this was the perfect opportunity to try out her new Bolt variants. After all, even with just Lina joining in the swarm of monsters started thinning out. It’d tell her which variation was most mana efficient.
This fight was going to be a marathon, not a sprint, so efficiency would mean everything.
“Carmilla, you don’t want to join in?” Mia asked, glancing back at the redhead over her shoulder. “You have some ranged spells too, right?”
“I won’t waste your lifeforce on this,” the girl said, smiling at Mia with a sincere look. “And I don’t need it anyway. I’m level 10.”
“You are?” Mia asked, eyes widening even as she finished assembling the spell circle for the first variant: the piercing one.
“Yes,” Carmilla said, shrugging. “I … did say I went on a rampage after waking up. I was 10 by the time you found me, which is the level cap for Rank 0.”
“Huh, so that’s it?” Mia mused, a part of her mind going over the spell circle a second time to make sure she remembered and recreated it perfectly. Multitasking and her increased Mind stats were doing some good work, even though Mia barely noticed how effortlessly she did two things at once. “What comes after that? How do you rank up?”
“For now? Nothing,” Carmilla said sourly, her eyes flickering between the closest monsters and the nearby soldiers looking at their group. “We’ll need a System Obelisk to rank up. I have a quest for it, a regional quest, but it needs us to destroy every Rift in the city and its immediate surroundings, then hope that we still have fifty thousand survivors living here.”
“Why?” Mia asked, nodding to herself in satisfaction as she concluded that the spell circle was perfect. “Why do we need the survivors?”
The feeling of mana surging through her channels made her hum, shoulders relaxing. She got this. Cast spells, kill monsters, get stronger. Easy. Simple. Just how she liked it.
“That’s apparently the minimum number of residents a settlement needs to have for the System to create an Obelisk for it.”
“I guess it doesn’t work with those remote Obelisk tokens?” Mia asked, mana dancing at her fingertips as she selected a target and then cast her spell.
The spell circle flashed, and with her increased Cognity Mia could actually take it in for a moment before her created arcane construct sped off.
Unlike the regular Bolt, this one was shaped like a spike, had a more powerful momentum component giving it increased speed and even a component which made the construct spin as it flew.
Overall, that increased the number of runes needed from eight to twenty, and almost tripled the runic weight of the circle. That meant the circle needed some remodelling afterwards, but it was still a rather simple spell compared to, for example, Mage Hand.
The arcane projectile was faster than the eye could track, and Mia only saw a hole as wide as two fingers appearing in the middle of one monster’s forehead. It stumbled, green ichor flowing freely from the wound, it got in three more wobbly steps before it finally fell limp.
“‘Not too tough’ my ass,” Mia huffed. “That thing took three steps after I sent a spike right through its head.”
“Try blunter stuff,” Lina said, not taking her eyes off of her foes. Blades of wind and crushing hammers made of air were falling down on the green monsters one after the other. The girl was slaughtering them at a pace that had nearby soldiers gawking like idiots before Zeigler berated them and slapped a few over the head.
“Sure,” Mia said, taking the circle in her runic-model apart and rebuilding the blunt variant next.
It was … fun. She had all the pieces ready, floating around in her runic-model like building blocks. All she had to do now was select what she needed then assemble the spell circle by following either her memory or her Spell Tome as a blueprint. It reminded her of those building toys Gabe liked so much.
She went with using her memory for a preliminary check, then checked it over with the Tome to make sure. She fixed a rune she accidentally switched out with another one, checked again, then sent the spell flying.
It was a large blob, as big as a beach ball and as it smacked into the targeted plant-wolf, it was sent rolling heels up like a ragdoll, crashing into the monsters behind it.
After some snarling and growling, it got back to its feet and came running again, looking largely unharmed aside from stumbling every now and then.
A bolt of blue lightning curling around another bright yellow one shot at it, blowing its head apart and scorching the remaining parts of its body as the two coloured arcs of lightning flowed over its body.
Mia looked back, mouth hanging open as she saw her mother smirking with a finger pointed at the monster. A finger that was still slightly smoking.
The spellcasting had been so quick she barely even felt it, her mind only catching up by the time the twin bolts of lightning were passing her by.
“How was that so fast?” Mia asked, her voice trembling a little. She was confident in her mana sensing ability and in that she could feel anyone trying to cast magic at her well before they could actually cast it.
That was how she survived her early fight with the hobgoblin, she felt it gathering mana for a spell and she ducked behind cover.
If there were people like her mother who could cast magic that fast … Mia gulped nervously.
“It’s one of my Subskills,” the woman said, smiling as little arcs of lightning played between her fingers. “Pretty neat, isn’t it? Storm Lightning.”
“Uhuh,” Mia bobbed her head, eyes locked on her mother’s fingers. “Do it again please?”
“Sure,” Helene gave her daughter an indulgent smile, her index finger once again pointed at a monster.
Mia stiffened up, her eyes dilating as she felt the mana dart to the tip of that outstretched finger. It didn’t wait a moment, the mana instantly transforming into the two-coloured bolts of lightning that shot off without halting for such frivolities as spell circles or something of the like.
Mia frowned, thoughtfully scratching at her cheek as she ignored everything around her for a moment. How did she do it?
Well, by using the Skill, was the obvious answer, but even Skills had activation times usually. Was this just one of the unique properties of the Storm element? It’d certainly explain why it was one of the predominant elements for War Magic alongside Arcane, Fire and Silver Magic.
It feels like it was … just her mana, in its natural state. Mia mused, feeling like she might have hit the nail in the head with that one. Perhaps Storm elemental mana discharged through the fingers was exactly those bolts of lightning. Just like with her Arcane attributed mana for which its an angry ball of crackling pink energy. Or maybe it’s that skill, it transforms her mana into that state and natural Storm mana is something else entirely. Practically pre-loading those lightning bolts so she always has a new set of them ‘chambered’.
“How would simple Storm mana look if you just shot it out from your fingers without any Skills?” Mia asked, but sadly received only a shrug.
“I don’t know honey,” Helene said. “I let my Skills do most of the work for me, but I can try doing that once we aren’t fighting off a horde of angry monsters, hmmmm?”
Mia flushed a little at the reproachful look her mother sent her way. She turned around and stared at the growing pile of dead monsters Lina was busy making. Mia rolled her shoulders once, then went back to ‘monster killing’ mode without another word.
The third variant Bolt spell circle she knew built up in her runic-model. This one needed three revisions before she was satisfied with it, maybe because she felt the need to up her monster killing speed with Lina having killed more than a dozen already.
Still, when it was done she huffed and sent the spell flying. It looked like a regular Arcane Bolt, if one ignored that the spell circle was twice as large and held three times the runes on it. Or how the Bolt self-corrected its trajectory mid-flight to burst apart a monster’s head instead of the pavement next to it Mia had been aiming it at.
She grinned, feeling satisfied by the success, even though the damned spell ate up three times the mana a regular Bolt did. At least it was better than the piercing variant, which took five times the regular mana to cast.
Mia had the urge to test the limits of the spell’s homing capability, to check what would happen if she aimed the spell up into the sky, away from anything else.
Thankfully, she remembered in time the book describing how the spell’s homing component worked. Which was, by targeting the largest clump of active mana near the target.
Meaning, if she shot the thing up into the sky, there was a very real chance that it would turn right around and land on her head.
Seeing what a Bolt to the head did to a two metre tall ravenous plant monster, she didn’t feel particularly thrilled about getting the same treatment. She quite liked her head, well, head shaped and not like a burst watermelon.
She switched back to regular Bolts after that, satisfied with her testing for now. Arcane Bolt was so deeply ingrained in her Spell Tome that she could cast it almost without thinking.
She just had to point and want for the spell to be cast, and it would happen. Then monsters would fall over with bits of their bodies crushed. It was simple, repetitive, easy.
Point. Pop. Point. Pop. Point. Pop. Repeat.
“FIRE!” The Colonel’s shout broke Mia out of her daze, and after popping one more monster she turned to the man standing a few dozen metres away.
Around him were tens of soldiers, surrounding a handful of metallic pipes facing the sky. They dropped something in all the pipes and then with a low thrum, the charges shot up into the sky.
“Correct course,” Zeigler ordered, his hand grasping a walkie-talkie in his hand to relay his orders to other groups. “FIRE! I want the first hundred metres of that forest burning yesterday!”
Mia heard the thrums of what she then recognised as mortars from the next street over and the street after that one too. A few seconds later, she heard them land at the foot of the hill, just a short distance away from the last of the suburban homes before the forest began.
She gulped, realising what the Colonel was doing. True, he was cutting off the path of more monsters coming down from the hill, but he was also locking the ones already in the city inside of it by setting the forest behind them aflame.
This is going to be a pretty long fight still, I can feel hundreds of them.
Lina took that moment to unceremoniously collapse with her eyes rolling back. The girl twitched, a long pained groan escaping her lips.
Carmilla caught her mid-fall before she could hurt herself, but Mia knew the girl was hurting plenty enough already. Mana deprivation. Guess she failed to notice it. Well, that certainly won’t happen again.
With how openhanded she’d been with her mana, letting a whole boulder-sized clump of it just float there as she shot Air bursts at monsters without pause, Mia had expected the blonde to run out much sooner.
She probably levelled up a bunch since the first time we went goblin hunting. I guess she allocated almost all of her stat points to boost her Spirit stats, that'd certainly increase her mana reserves tremendously.
Mia returned her gaze onto the horde of monsters closing in. She shared a quick glance with Carmilla and Helene, each giving her a nod.
Soon enough, Mia was firing off Bolts one after the other and her mother turned into a human shaped tesla tower with how her fingers practically never stopped spewing forth those deadly arcs of lightning.
A bit later, Brent and Mark came over and took up position before the women with their weapons at the ready, though Brent quickly carried Lina off to the medical tent so the girl could rest more easily.
Mia checked her mana pool, then shrugged. She still had around 75% remaining. Should be plenty enough for the remaining monsters.
Thankfully, the basic Arcane Bolt was ridiculously cheap mana wise.