Sophia bit her lip. She’d taken the Ability but hadn’t run into anywhere to actually try it out. She really should have asked Samuel for help, so that she’d know exactly how it worked. She hadn’t, so the fact that she was going to be testing the ability when she needed it to work was her fault. “I might be able to disrupt the shield.”
“Can you do it from a distance or do you need to be up close?” Amy didn’t question Sophia’s conclusions; she clearly wanted a plan, not a debate.
Sophia pulled up the limited description she had of Disruptive Magic. It was just as short as she remembered.
Disruptive Magic
Use Arcane magic to disrupt spell structures.
Force Bolt and Force Blast were both Arcane. Force Bolt was cheaper, but without knowing where to hit the spell it would probably not work. She could make an opening with it but unless she hit an important part of the spellform, it would simply reform, and she couldn’t see through the protective shield. She was going to have to use Force Blast.
“Dav, you’ll need to stay a step away from it when I hit it quickly twice, then go for the chest immediately. You can go for the head after that, but I don’t think I can keep it from recasting the shield, and there are vines hidden inside the chest cavity; I think the chest one controls them and I don’t want them to grab you.” Sophia paused and tried to figure out why she knew there were vines hidden inside the creature’s chest. It made sense, with the extra space it built itself behind its neck and the way corpsevines acted, but there was no obvious sign of vines.
Oh. Of course. Collected Knowledge was finally being useful. Sophia hadn’t really noticed any information from it before, but there was no reason she should have; the corpsevines they’d fought so far had been pretty straightforward. The Ability might also be part of the reason she stopped to look for a shield, now that she thought about it; “something seems wrong” could easily have been the Ability prodding her into looking for what the third corpsevine did.
“I can do that,” Dav agreed. “Are you going to go after the one in the belly next, then? I know you don’t like trying to get through bone.”
“If I can,” Sophia agreed. “If not, I’ll let you two handle it.”
Amy nodded sharply, then seemed to shrink as she shifted into her wolf shape. A moment later, Sophia heard an annoyed huff from Taika as greenery appeared on the wolf. Sophia grinned to herself. Taika probably wasn’t as exhausted as he pretended.
Green Wolf [https://i.imgur.com/qlkN6rU.jpeg]
Dav and Amy circled around behind the monster. It didn’t react as they slowly approached. Sophia waited until they were both just outside its easy reach, then triggered the Disruptive Magic ability and threw a pair of Force Blasts at the monster to destabilize its shield. The one that started from her floating Animated Spell Blade reached the monster first; the blast clearly outlined the shield, but Sophia couldn’t tell if it penetrated or not.
The second blast, the one from her aura, hit less than a second later. While the spell once again splashed on the shield, Sophia could see several places where arcane energy slipped through crack in the shield and widened them. There were enough weak spots that Sophia thought her chance of hitting something vital in the spell’s structure was good.
Now if only she hit it hard enough to take the shield down.
Dav’s sword arrived a moment after Sophia’s spell, and Sophia immediately wondered if she’d missed an option. His sword wasn’t Imbued, but should it have been? Was her Imbue Blade Arcane? Could she have given Dav a Disruptive enchantment on his sword?
Dav’s sword flashed through the space where the shield had been and kept going. As it passed, it cleared the way and Sophia could finally see the dissipating spell structure that once supported the shield.
Well, what was left of the spell structure. It was in tatters, and all Sophia managed to see before it completely vanished was that it was crude but powerful. She might have been able to get away with only one Disruptive spell, but her second was so quick on its heels that the spell was still there. She couldn’t cast a different spell with her Animated Spell Blade anyway, so the only thing it cost was mana.
Admittedly, it cost a lot of mana. Disruptive spells seemed to be roughly twice as expensive as a normal spell, and Force Blast was more expensive than Force Bolt to begin with. She still had enough mana to fight, but not if she had to do that too many more times.
Dav’s sword smashed into the corpsevine’s ribcage, shattering bones as it went. It didn’t quite reach the center of the chest, but Sophia could see green ooze from the vines it cut as it passed nearby.
The monster slammed into the ground from the force of Dav’s blow. It seemed stunned or at least momentarily surprised for long enough that Amy leapt for it. Her wolf jaws closed around the creature’s skull, then a crunch revealed that its fake bone was weaker than her jaw strength. The arms stopped trying to move almost immediately.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
Sophia didn’t wait for the creature to recover; she still had mana left and that meant she could shoot it. A pair of Force Bolts lanced out from her aura and her blade, directed at the area of the belly Taika identified, just above the pelvis. For once, Hardened Spell proved its worth as the arcane projectiles cleanly sliced through the stiff leaves and smashed the corpsevine’s control of its legs into nothingness.
Vines from the intact half of the corpsevine’s body tried to grab Dav, but all they reached was his legs. He adjusted his aim and struck again. This time, he hacked through the remainder of the vines that protected the corpsevine’s heart and went straight through it as well.
Most of the vines attempting to restrain Dav fell away immediately. He brushed the remainder off with a frown. “That was easy. I expected more.”
Amy shifted back to her human shape. This time, Taika didn’t replace the vines immediately. “This is a Leveled Challenge. No one’s certain exactly how that works, but only the last monster or two is supposed to be challenging as long as you use everyone well. A lot of people make them harder by trying to avoid using magic or taking them too fast, but I was always taught that you take any Challenge as slow as it will let you. There are hidden things and they reward you for finding them.”
Sophia nodded slowly. She was starting to get the impression that Amy was, if anything, less experienced than Sophia herself but just as well trained. “Your family’s all Called, aren’t they?”
Amy gave a fluid shrug. “Of course. We’re not like the soft people around here.”
Sophia didn’t really know how “soft” the people of Casterville were. She hadn’t been there long enough; a week while the place prepared for what might as well have been war against the corpsevines didn’t really count. “Professions seem important.”
Someone had to grow the food, build the houses, and make the arms and armor. There was more to life than that, a lot more, but even in a heavily militarized society, there were always a lot of people who didn’t fight every day.
“They are,” Amy replied surprisingly. “But everyone should have a level or four in a Called Sphere. Everyone should be able to fight the weakest threats; only children, the injured, and the elderly belong in the Vaults. They don’t even have proper Vaults here!”
Amy clenched her right hand, then shook herself. It reminded Sophia of a dog shaking herself dry, but maybe that was because Sophia knew of her other shape. “Eh, you’ll see when I take you home. It’s completely different; I think you’ll like it there.”
Sophia raised an eyebrow. Amy wanted to take her home? Surely she didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Surely.
Before Sophia could figure out how to ask what Amy meant, the other woman was already kneeling over the woody body of the corpsevine. “There should be something here. Sometimes it’s on the body, sometimes it’s in the area, but Challenges like to give rewards for each fight. Modir says it’s a way to encourage you to fight without requiring it.”
If there was a reward, there was a decent chance it was magical. Sophia concentrated on her MageSight and started to search the area around where they fought the creature while Dav joined Amy at the body. When Sophia glanced at Taika, he seemed to have curled up in Dav’s backpack for a nap. Sophia was certain he was awake at the end of the fight.
It wasn’t long before Sophia found herself staring at a small cluster of magical mushrooms growing between the roots of a tree. They were small and brown and looked exactly like three other clumps of mushrooms she’d examined and discarded in the past few minutes, but this cluster was slightly magical. “Amy? Is this what you meant?”
Amy abandoned the body and came to see what Sophia found. “A mushroom?”
She didn’t sound impressed.
“It’s magical,” Sophia explained, “Or at least more magical than anything else I’ve found.”
“That’s probably it, then.” Amy shook her head. “It’s not what I hoped for, but I guess it makes sense, magical plants as a reward for killing plant monsters.”
“Mushrooms aren’t plants,” Dav contributed unhelpfully.
Sophia gave Dav a look. As far as she was concerned, Amy was correct enough. “They’re thematically similar, it’s close enough. Anyone know how to gather them safely, or which parts to gather?”
“Depends on what they’re used for,” Dav said as he knelt down to look. “It also depends on the mushroom. I don’t know this one, at least not well enough to be safe; there are at least a dozen different kinds of little brown mushrooms, and they’re really hard to tell apart. I’d normally leave these alone; they’re not safe to eat.”
Sophia blinked at Dav. Mushroom identification was not one of the things she’d expected him to know. Maybe it was from his childhood? He had mentioned that he didn’t have much money growing up, maybe his parents took him out to gather food the same way Sophia’s father and uncle taught her how to camp while traveling and how to judge how long travel food should last?
“We should take them anyway,” Amy suggested. “We can sell them to Halven, the Apothecary. He can probably figure out what they are and how to use them. A magical plant here has to be a reward, it should be useful for something.”
“I don’t have a basket to carry them in,” Dav objected mildly. “I don’t want to put them in my pack, not when I don’t know what they might do.”
Sophia shrugged. She didn’t have a good container, either, not for this. She wasn’t even sure what a good container was.
“That’s easy to fix,” Amy stated confidently. “We have vines. Lots of vines. It won’t be a good basket, not with these vines and without water, but I can make something that will hold mushrooms.”
A few minutes later, Amy’s prediction was proved accurate: it was a terrible basket. It wasn’t even and the spaces between the different vines where Amy weaved them together were sometimes a lot wider than Sophia liked. It was still a far better basket than Sophia could have made at all without help, never mind in just a few minutes.
Most importantly, the other half of Amy’s prediction was also true. It would hold the mushrooms.
Bad Basket [https://i.imgur.com/7zViHzC.jpeg]