Chapter 10 - Bill Guide the Fire Guy

Billy raced into the forest, wand at the ready. He had gone over the basics with Farmer Tim and the enchanter, and had practiced. A smidge. He didn’t want to waste his whole mana pool on testing, so he set out as soon as he confirmed that the wand worked. And, oh, did it work. He disregarded the snapping of branches as he crashed through the undergrowth. Today was not a day for stealth. Today, he was going to absolutely merc some wolves.

Now that he had a wand, a shield and a Gift that all drew from his mana pool, he decided that he needed to be more conservative with his mana. Sure, the enhancement potion had grown his pool immensely from what it had been, and the constant usage was growing it as well, but he still had a tiny mana pool in the grand scheme of things. As such, he didn’t run around the woods constantly channeling his Gift. Instead, he would shoot a pulse of mana into his Gift once in a while, getting updates in direction when needed. He tried to send out a pulse every time his mana was full, forcing his mana to constantly be regenerating. Long term, this would tire him out and drain his body, but it would also train his body to produce mana faster. Epic mana regeneration, here we come!

Finally, his directional pulse let him know that he was close to his targets. He slowed, picking his steps more cautiously, even if he undoubtedly alerted every beast for kilometers with his galavanting. He pressed up against a particularly large tree and held his breath. He could hear soft, padding footsteps from up ahead, coming towards him. He gripped his wand and held it at the ready.

The steps grew closer and more numerous, though he couldn’t tell how many there were, exactly. The contract stated that there were four wolves in this particular pack, but contracts often had inaccurate numbers. Anyone brave enough to stick around to count monsters twice was either capable of handling the problem or they wouldn’t live to report their findings.

As the footsteps sounded like they were almost within melee range, Billy popped out from behind the tree, stuck his wand out and channeled a heavy, constant stream of mana into it. His ambush worked wonderfully. A torrent of flames spewed wildly from his wand, bathing three wolves in fire. They all yelped in unison. Two wolves darted to the side in fear while the third tried lunging at Billy, its mouth open. Unfortunately for the wolf, Billy just pointed his flamethrower directly into its open maw, cooking it from the inside. One down!

He stepped around the corpse and pointed his wand at the leftmost wolf. This time, he sent small bursts of mana into his wand. Tiny bolts of fire streaked out of the wand, searing into the wolf and sending it running away.

Then, he channeled what amounted to a colossal amount of mana, when compared to his mana pool, into his wand and shot out a beam of fire towards the wolf on his right. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t amazingly aimed. The beam cut two lines into the wolf before Billy finally steadied his aim, centering it directly onto the wolf. It barbecued the poor thing before it could so much as turn around.

Within moments, his mana pool was down to under half. Then again, he had killed two wolves and sent a third cowering. Billy felt like a badass. He felt immortal. He felt like a god. He felt like his back was seering with pain. He felt his face smash hard into the ground as he was bowled over. He had found the fourth wolf.

Billy rolled onto his back and brought his shield up above him, turtling beneath it as he almost simultaneously sent a pulse to his Gift (which did nothing), sent mana into his shield to reinforce it and swept a line of fire out around 180 degrees to his left. A yelp of pain told him that he had at least shot in the right direction. He pivoted his shield towards the sound of the wolf as he got to one knee, hiding behind it as best he could. It was just in time, too, as the wolf crashed into him again. Its claws didn’t penetrate the enchantment, but the weight of the beast was too much for Billy’s unstable footing. It sent him tumbling backwards, rolling over and then under the beast a few times before finally rolling to a stop.

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The world was still spinning as Billy pointed his wand in the general direction of the wolf. He dumped mana into it in an uncontrolled mess of wasted mana, but fire spewed out of the core at the business end nonetheless. The forest stopped spinning for Billy to focus just enough to lock eyes with the beast as he roasted it alive. Wolf kebabs were on the menu, boys. Boys and girls. Boys, girls and… Wolf kebabs were on the menu, humans! Nope. Wolf kebabs were on the menu, my peeps!

After failing to apply some beetle salve and just rage quitting and eating a dollop, he wiped sweat and tears from his face as he gingerly got up and looted each wolf. He much preferred killing the beetle and even the cat as opposed to wolves. Wolves were just… Cuter. Billy had always been a dog person, so hearing the yelps and seeing the aftermath left a pit in his stomach that he hadn’t felt since the Jared incident. Sure, he wanted to conquer the world and become a godlike being and all that, but not really atop a pile of wolf corpses.

It tugged at his heart strings, but also at his purse strings as he looted the three downed beasts. Claws, teeth and two silver coins were far from the dire wolf’s core, but they were something. He could add the silver to his ever depleting hoard and the rest would sell for enough to feed him for a few days. More, if he kept staying at Farmer Tim’s.

Billy the adventurer looked around, sending a pulse through his Gift out of habit. His mana pool was pitifully low, but it could handle the occasional blip. Instead of giving a vague sense of direction, though, he got a strong pull to his left, in the opposite direction of where he figured the town was.

Figuring the blip wouldn’t just disappear, Billy performed his apparently daily duty of sitting up against a tree and devouring his food stores, trying to replenish his body’s reserves. The fight had taken a lot out of him, but so had the constant mana drain throughout the day. After polishing off a canteen’s worth of water, a stack of jerky and a few handfuls of nuts and dried fruit, he tried meditating again. Farmer Tim had insisted that anyone who wanted to use mana had to meditate. He looked inwards, trying to map out his mana pool, his mana veins and how it all worked together. Eventually, he could apparently use his mana to reinforce his body in different ways. Doing so now, though, was a recipe for disaster. He didn’t have nearly the perception or control necessary to not blow a hole through his body with his own mana.

Maybe it was getting easier with practice, or maybe he was just on a high from taking out a pack of wolves, but Billy thought it was easier to meditate this time. He could feel… something. His body relaxed and he thought that maybe, just maybe, he could see his mana pool filling just a smidge more as he focused on it.

He focused on his mana channels. They were like large roads roughly carved from his mana pool to his hands. That made sense, he thought, as he had mostly only ever channeled mana to his Gift or to his wand and shield. Then, he focused even harder, trying to see his mana veins. He thought he could see thin wisps branching off from his mana channels, but he wasn’t sure.

He kept exploring his mana system for a while, then switched to trying to absorb ambient mana faster. He felt like he was making progress, but maybe not enough to have hard evidence. He kept at it until his mana pool reached approximately 64.377%. Ish. By then, he was so bored that he almost wished the fourth wolf would come back for a rematch just so that he had an excuse to stop.

Thinking of the wolf reminded him of the blip from his Gift. He sent out another pulse and, sure enough, it was just as strong and in the same direction as before. Deciding that it was as good of an excuse as he was going to get, he stopped meditating, packed up his stuff and set off towards whatever glory awaited him.