The summoner raised her plant-focus again, but this time only to eye level. A gray-green cloud seemed to pour from the plant. It washed over Dav first and blocked him from view. When it reached Sophia, she coughed. It smelled and tasted absolutely vile, almost like rot. It was nearly impossible to see any distance; she could barely see her hands and definitely couldn’t see her feet, much less the summoner.
That was probably the point of the cloud, though Sophia was certain it was supposed to do more. Her necklace agreed with her; she could feel it as it warmed and counteracted whatever effect the cloud was supposed to have. She hoped Dav would be fine.
The entire cloud reeked of mana as well as its natural horrible scent. To her ManaSight, it was a webwork of complicated magic, a three dimensional construct that managed whatever the cloud was supposed to do as well as the area it covered. A significant portion of its power was actually spent on keeping whatever the cloud was made of dispersed; unlike a proper fog, the atmospheric conditions definitely weren’t right for it.
That made it the perfect thing to attack. If the spell had to keep it from clumping to keep whatever it was in the air, it would probably fall to the ground and stop spreading if that was broken.
Alternatively, Sophia could try to dispel the entire spell. That looked more difficult, this time, because there was no active link back to the spellcaster. She probably couldn’t control where the cloud went or what it did; Sophia would have to find and destabilize the central core of the spell structure itself. That ought to be far easier than with the summoned monster, because it wasn’t hidden inside a solid body, but Sophia couldn’t see far enough in the haze to make out where it was.
Well, there was a third option. If she used Disruptive Magic with a Force Blast, she could hit the entire spell at once. With as decentralized as the spell was, it would almost certainly dismiss it. Unfortunately, it would also have to his Dav and Sophia, as well as costing far more mana than a more precise application. Either of those problems put that option out of the running.
No, she definitely needed to start by damaging the spell. The question was which magic she should use as a carrier, Force Bolt or her Imbued knife? Neither was perfect, since there was a wide area she needed to cut through. Imbuing a knife would take less mana, since she’d already done it, but she’d have to re-Imbue it afterwards. That was still a little cheaper, but it wasn’t enough of a difference to really be worthwhile. The true value in a Disruptive Magic Imbuement was that it let someone else actually manage the attack. Yes, she could use it to reach anywhere in her aura, but she could do that with a Force Bolt as well and a Force Bolt could be sent outside her aura as well.
She really needed to cut several places in the spell. Three would be enough if she just wanted it to stop expanding and dispersing and supporting itself, but more would be needed to actually get rid of it. Could she do all of that with a single disruption other than a Force Blast?
She couldn’t control a Force Blast well enough. She could probably shape it a little, but “a little” was all she could manage and that wouldn’t work, especially not when she wasn’t certain where Dav was. She needed more control than that.
She ought to be able to control a Force Bolt as long as it was still inside her aura. So far, she’d only cast and released it as an attack spell, but there was no reason she had to do that; it was a pretty basic arcane spellform and she knew how to modify that to make it follow a pattern or even be aura-controlled. She’d just have to override the Guide’s guidance on how to create the spell. It might be a little slower, but it would work.
Probably.
She’d done it before, but that was back home where there were people around to help if she failed and hurt herself or her surroundings. She hadn’t failed in years, but she definitely had failed back when she was originally learning how to modify the Voice’s spells. She just had to hope that that was similar enough to modifying the Guide’s spells.
Sophia carefully cast Force Bolt with Disruptive Magic, but instead of the quick push she usually used to send it on its way, she grabbed the spell and sent it on a looping path through the cloud, starting close to her and working her way out. She still couldn’t see where it was going, unfortunately, but she was pretty sure she could adequately destabilize the spell without getting too close to Dav or Amy.
As the Disruptive Force Bolt smashed through the delicate spell structure, it lost bits and pieces of its own structure. Sophia was quickly able to tell that it wouldn’t make it through everything she wanted to get, so she slowed it down even more. She was already starting to get a better picture of how the actual supporting structure of the spell was built, and it was both flimsier than and slightly different from her initial guess.
Sophia’s spell was more than half gone when the cloud near her started to dissipate. She held the spell tightly and guided it to the specific places it needed to hit and watched the rest of it unravel. She was glad she waited, too, because the battlefield changed while she couldn’t see.
The vines around Dav’s legs were gone, as were the thorns. He stood a few steps higher than his original position, more or less at the plant monster’s original place. While Sophia watched, he battered his way through a quickly-growing thorned hedge that had appeared on the stairs and gained another step forward. The hedge withered for several inches around him as he took that step.
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Amy was also closer to the summoner than before the cloud. She lay on the ground in her wolf form, coughing and gasping for breath. Sophia could guess what happened; she must have shifted and charged towards the summoner, only to be caught by the cloud. Taika was with her; Sophia hoped that the colorful chinchilla could help her.
There was no sign of the summoner anywhere. Instead, Sophia could see light from the archway that led off to the right at the top of the stairs. “Did she really run while we couldn’t see?”
“Seems like it,” Dav said as he slowly chopped his way up another level. “I think we scared her. Not sure why she didn’t summon another monster.”
“She probably couldn’t,” Sophia suggested. That was the only reason she could think of. Sophia certainly hadn’t been managing to destroy the woman’s spells as fast as she could cast them. On the other hand, Sophia had probably used a lot less mana. “Maybe she was out of mana?”
“Unlikely.” Amy’s voice was hoarse from her coughing. Sophia recognized it only because there wasn’t anyone else who could possibly be speaking. A look back showed that Amy had returned to her human shape as she slowly crawled back to where she left her bag.
Sophia hurried over to Amy’s bag, grabbed it, and carried it to Amy so that she could stop crawling. She didn’t know what Amy needed, but she could manage that much.
“Thanks.” Amy reached into a small pocket of her backpack and pulled out a tiny bottle filled with a purple liquid. She tugged the miniscule cork out of the top, then swallowed the mouthful of liquid.
Tiny Vial [https://i.imgur.com/BGVImI6.jpeg]
Amy coughed again, then continued. “I think that was a corpsevine that killed a Gardener-Mage. Anywhere else, they’d just be a Head Gardener, but here you have to be a mage too.” Her damaged voice didn’t make her words any less bitter. “We wouldn’t have a chance against a real Gardener-Mage, so I bet the Registry Master killed the real one and we’re a lesser version. That’s probably true of everything here.”
That was probably true of everything here, which was something Sophia was going to have to think about later. She didn’t like the idea of being relegated to fighting the kiddie versions of monsters, but at the same time she knew she was no match for the real thing. “So why does that mean she didn’t run out of mana? If she’s been nerfed, maybe her mana was too?”
“Nerfed?” Amy sounded puzzled for a moment, but she didn’t wait for Sophia to explain. “No, no, I get it. Weird word. No, that’s not why. Gardeners are Professionals, and production Professionals don’t fight with Abilities, that’s not how those Professions work. Everything she threw at us was something she prepared ahead of time. That’s why she could put them out so fast. I bet she ran away to get something she wasn’t carrying.”
Amy hunched over with a coughing fit the moment she stopped talking.
“We’ll see her again,” Dav agreed. “How are you doing?”
“Get out your healing beacon,” Taika answered for Amy. “Whatever was in that cloud ripped up her throat and lungs.”
Amy coughed, then retched. Her next cough produced an unsettlingly huge quantity of purple mucus, which she coughed onto the floor near Taika. “Wouldn’t hurt,” she choked out before she dissolved into another coughing fit.
Dav hurried to Amy’s side and summoned his beacon. Usually, it appeared on the surface. This time, it seemed to grow from a crack in the ground instead. It appeared as a simple purple bud, but over about twenty seconds that bud rose and opened, turning into a surprisingly realistic purple flower with an almost glowing orange center. It was clearly influenced by what they’d just fought. That made sense; it was on Dav’s mind.
Purple Flower [https://i.imgur.com/XrtQ8mw.jpeg]
Sophia wondered if the purple color was because of the vial Amy drank; if Dav thought of that as medicine, the color could easily get mixed in with his Intent when he summoned the beacon. That was something Sophia would have to warn him against. In this case it didn’t matter, but clarity of Intent was very important if you wanted to modify an Ability or cast your own spells.
Amy coughed up mucus several more times before she seemed to breathe easily. During that time, Sophia kept one eye on her and another towards the top of the stairs; she didn’t want the summoner to catch them off guard.
“So what was the purple vial?” It hadn’t disappeared from Sophia’s thoughts, but she waited to ask until Amy seemed more capable of speaking.
Amy shrugged. “Alchemical purge. It’s enchanted to help anything that doesn’t belong in the body leave, but it’s pretty unpleasant. Like most alchemicals, you don’t want to take too many of them too close together; that’s why Essia was so helpful, and probably a lot of why most groups wouldn’t be in here more than once a week even if they could be. I thought about getting some for you two, but I didn’t think you’d need them.”
Amy looked at Sophia, then Dav, then back at Sophia. “Which is completely unfair, you know? I’m sitting over here coughing my lungs out and you two are acting like it was a normal mist!”
I’m still not sure why it doesn’t affect me,” Dav admitted. “I haven’t really wanted to look into it, either. Not when I think it’s the same thing that made my blood purple.”
Amy looked towards Dav and tilted her head. “I wonder if your blood would be a good alchemical component? I’m sure you can recover quickly with your healing beacon.”
“We’re not checking!” Dav sounded a little panicked.
“No, we’re not,” Sophia agreed with a hard look at Amy. “Right, Amy?”
Amy flushed and looked down. “I, uh, no. Not if you don’t want to.”