Chapter 5

Little was heard from the king or the capital over the next several days. Tom expanded the wing of his dungeon that he had filled with mindless monsters and the others delved into it. The enemies were not especially challenging for most of them, but provided a steady trickle of experience that was enough to get them each about a level in the first day alone.

Killing zombies, burrowers, and rock spiders did not take up all of their time, however. They each had side projects.

Antoine drilled Rory and Sevin mercilessly. The teenage warriors were evenly matched, despite Rory having awoken to his class months after Sevin, and the duels they fought were ferocious. They struck each other endlessly on padded armor with blunt weapons, fighting until even their prodigious stamina as Warriors was expended. Then they continued to fight while out of Stamina, because, as Antoine put it, sometimes the fight doesn’t stop just because you’re tired.

Rory had already learned this lesson while serving in a shield wall. He was able to use that experience as a club, which he beat Sevin over the head with repeatedly the first several times they reached that point of mutual exhaustion.

Grant and Rowena were natural training partners as well. While Grant was not a traditional Rogue, his legerdemain skills allowed him a similar fighting style. While he was unclear exactly how the ability worked himself, he had emerged into this world with the ability to shorten the distances between himself and something he was trying to reach. At his maximum range, he was able to reach something about three meters away from his core, allowing him an impressive circle of offense, as he often used the ability to stab things from a safe distance.

His level ten skill added a layer of flexibility to his repertoire, as it allowed him to use his previous ability and change the angles midway through. It was disorienting, even to him, but he was able to stab around shields and obstacles by aiming above, below, or to the sides of them, then bending the angle of attack. He was still perfecting his use of both his level one and his level ten skill.

In his fights with Rowena, he, at first, routinely trounced her whenever he used his skills to keep her at a distance, while she trounced him if they fought without skills. This changed over time as they each became accustomed to their training partner, growing more skilled as time passed until their matches were simply a blur of dull knives being blocked, parried and dodged between them.

In a strange way, Rowena became as familiar with Grant’s legerdemain skills as the man was himself, and they both pushed each other to the limit.

Jessica and Emil were another focus group. As the mages of the party, although of two very different flavors, the pair spent some time in consultation on how to improve the support they were able to give the fighters.

Jessica’s magic was potent. Her fire ability, at least, was extremely lethal, and few enemies her own level could survive a full blast of it. The downside to this magic was that it was also extremely mana inefficient, and the more she fought with magic the faster she ran out of mana. Her Sonic Sovereignty ability, by contrast, was so mana efficient that it took effort to use it faster than her natural mana regeneration rate.

Emil came up with an idea to help Jessica improve her mastery over both abilities. Inspired by the ritual which allowed Aisha to see the lifelines of the subjects of her inquiry into that matter, he researched a ritual which caused mana flows in the air to glow. He got the ritual, perhaps surprisingly, from the books that Vella had brought with her, as this sort of magical aid was a common method in assisting young Mages in perfecting their craft.

Emil was a little disappointed that he wasn’t the first to think of the idea, but also thankful that he wouldn’t be forced to develop a brand new ritual. He was working on developing an X-ray ritual for Aisha, and the task was surprisingly daunting considering that he had the surface life-line version of the spell to work with already.

With permission from Tom, they set up one of the ballrooms to be a magical training area. The training ritual was painted onto the floor, walls and ceilings of the room, requiring only a bit of effort each day to keep it fully charged.

Seeing her magic illuminated, Jessica was astounded at just how much she had been missing. She saw elements to her abilities which she had been unaware of. Or rather, she learned conscious control over what had previously been an unconscious manifestation of her will.

With those new elements, she refined her magic much further than she’d managed on her own. She compared the leap like switching from crayons to colored pencils; the magic that she was able to draw upon the world became much crisper and more controlled than it had before.

Her Napalm skill Evolved itself, or at least its name changed in her system menu to Fire Mastery (Adept). Her fire magic remained mana intensive, but with her new level of control she was able to put more burn in a smaller and more focused location than simply spraying it outward like she’d been doing before.

Likewise, with Sonic Sovereignty, her ability to create auditory illusions increased substantially. While the voices she manifested were uncanny and did not sound as though they came from a human, they were able to convey words. She was hoping that she’d be able to mimic individual voices as her mastery over sound increased.

With both Emil and Jessica’s permission, Vella also used the magical visualization room to practice. Unknown to both of them, the young Mage spent significantly more time observing Jessica perform feats of sorcery than anything else.

Vella was insanely jealous of the teenager from earth. Not only was the red-headed Jessica beautiful, but her magic was easy for her. Vella’s own spellcraft took an immense amount of concentration and study to master each new spell, and her own mana pool was pitiful by comparison. This was somewhat expected; she might be a Mage, but she had the body of a child still. Mage children were expected to go through a magical growth spurt around the same time as their physical one, after which point she should have almost as much mana as an adult. Until then, the tomes she was studying encouraged her to focus on refining skill and fine control over her magic.

She was frustrated, because her pitiful magical spells weren’t even enough to kill the burrowers at the entrance of Tom’s dungeon the few times she had talked the others into allowing her to try. She wasn’t so foolish as to try to sneak into the dungeon on her own, of course, even if Tom didn’t block off the entrance to the mindless monsters’ area every day after the others emerged from their exploits.

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She had been hoping to reach level two or three under the guidance of the party, but without the ability to inflict damage, she would have had to resort to slaying them with the dagger that she’d been given, and she didn’t relish that challenge. So she remained a level one mage, and probably would be for some time, until she was able to generate enough mana for some more damaging magic than what she possessed currently.

While she envied Jessica, however, observing the sorceress practice began to give Vella ideas. She saw patterns in Jessica’s magic that began to make sense to her. Perhaps more sense than the visualization exercises she read in the tomes she was learning from. With her apprenticeship set to begin soon, she spent every moment that she could observing the magic of the sorceress and practicing her self-developed magical exercises.

She startled herself when she created a flame the size of a candle during one such meditation. That … took her a while to realize what she had done.

She had created a new spell.

Oh, there was a Candleflame spell in existence already. It was a simple exercise, one that she had been doing herself. But the visualization exercise, the mana flows, the manifestation itself, everything was completely different. The traditional Candleflame spell was an extremely watered down version of a fireball spell, useful for lighting candles, lanterns, and campfires.

The spell that Vella developed was more like Jessica’s magic. It burned hotter, and it didn’t shoot out from her fingers like the candlelight spell did, but popped into existence in front of her and hovered there until she cut off the mana supply.

Vella’s spell was similar to Candleflame, but it was different at the same time. It was an innovation which should have been far beyond her capabilities. She supposed that new magic had to come from somewhere, but according to the records she was reading creating a new spell was the mark of an archmage.

She didn’t tell anyone of her accomplishment, keeping her new spell close to her heart as she worked to perfect it. She managed to make it larger, and smaller, brighter, hotter, dimmer, cooler. She was able to make it move around once it was manifest, and began using it in her daily life.

Emil likewise made strides in his studies of the arcana. Specifically, he took inspiration from yet another one of Vella’s books, one about simple foci which helped the apprentice Mage channel their magic more effectively.

His own magic didn’t work like a normal Mage. While he was able to empower rituals with his mana, often choosing to supercharge them or modify their range on the fly, his magical abilities were more restrictive than a traditional mage’s. He could manifest lines of light to substitute for drawing out a ritual circle, but that was a Skill. He didn’t have to think too hard to do it, he simply locked the lines into place with his will and they manifested.

But when it came to the exercises in Vella’s books, which he had attempted extensively, he couldn’t do it. When he attempted to make his magic manifest in the patterns described by the beginner level tomes, he found that the mana in his body simply wouldn’t respond.

It was frustrating, but he was a Ritualist, not a Mage.

That said, the difference between ritual magic and spellcasting was like the difference between turning a turbine by hand and having the turbine powered by the wind. Once he snapped a ritual into place, it sucked in the ambient energy and converted that mana into the desired effect like a catalyst.

Emil was uncertain why his rituals were more powerful than normal. He had some degree of control over how powerful they actually became, but he couldn’t go below the base level of what a normal mage would create with a ritual. It was like having a stereo where he could turn the volume up or down, but never too quiet that it couldn’t be heard without powering the entire radio off.

Or, put another way, Emil’s mana functioned as a catalyst that was more potent the more he added to the reaction. While this was true to some extent of all mages who performed rituals, Emil’s mana was especially effective and versatile. But only in regards to rituals.

He found it frustrating that his attack options, small rituals which created fireballs or bolts of lightning, were extremely inefficient compared to the typical spell-craft version of the same effects. It took him more mana to craft the ritual than it would take a mage to cast a similar effect. Of course, this would vary depending upon the density of mana in the environment. Inside of a dungeon mana was abundant and he could cast attack spells as potent as any mage his level. If he were to venture outside of a Core’s territory, he would find his potency dropping precipitously the further away he got.

However, thanks to Vella’s book prompting him, Emil got the idea for flash cards. He about smacked himself upside his own head when he came up with the idea.

He couldn’t find card stock as thick as he wanted, so he used thin pieces of wood instead. He carefully painted his rituals upon them, as well as a number of other valuable rituals that he could think of, such as one which repelled rain, and another which purified water.

Unfortunately, with his current skills, he couldn’t simply will a ritual into existence without a reference to go off of. He wasn’t certain if that would change, but in order to activate his skill to create ritual magic circles out of mana and light, he needed to actually see the ritual, not just picture it in his mind.

The other significant progress that Emil made in regards to his magic was that he finally managed to summon an Ethereal using his level ten skill. Or rather, he finally realized how easy it was and that he’d been doing so since he’d unlocked the skill, but that the spirits he’d been summoning with the skill hadn’t been put to any use.

He didn’t think that they were sentient. They took a ritual in order to see, but he could cause them to manifest as light, or mist, or dust. If there was a flame, he could cause them to manifest inside the fire, shaping the burning gasses, but they weren’t able to burn anything by themselves.

He at first considered the discovery to be a useless addition until he realized that the amorphous spirits could form and power their own rituals, even while invisible. Once he realized this, he understood why this skill was valuable.

He needed to form a ritual, summon an ethereal spirit, then imprint the ritual upon the spirit. Once he did that, however, the ritual would be self-sustaining until the spirit was consumed, which would vary depending upon how much mana Emil used for the summoning itself.

The result was a sudden burst in his lethality. By turning his ethereal spirits into fireballs, he was no longer forced to hold the ritual for his attack spells himself. He could easily hold up to ten spirits at once. Before, he had strained to maintain two rituals at once. While ten was his new limit, the new method did not cause him the same mental strain that the other method had caused.

Emil was the highest level of the summonees from earth thanks to his pest control spell. When he had overcharged the spell previously, he had been able to use it to kill over a hundred giant spiders and, in a separate dungeon, dozens of giant wasps. The resulting experience had pushed him to level eighteen with minimal effort.

As such, he was the first to reach level twenty and earn the skill which that threshold provides.