Cooper sprinted through the jungle back toward Harvey's barrier ritual. The massive Greater Storm Serpent destroyed trees as it pursued, knocking them over with little effort. Hair began to rise on Cooper's back, and he felt the power of the storm building behind him. Just when he felt it reach its peak, he dodged to the side. Lightning blasted the ground beside him.
Need to go faster!
He pushed himself, clearing the last of the jungle. While the open terrain allowed him to speed up, it left him with no cover, and the bolts of lightning came more quickly as the obstructions blocking the serpent's view fell away.
The island's storm continued raging, as it had for much of the last week. A gust of wind pushed up behind Cooper, and he allowed it to carry him forward. He dug into the last of his stamina reserve as the visible ritual circle drew closer.
Power spiked once more, and he didn't know which way to dodge. He skidded to a halt and turned left, hoping to spoil the beast’s aim. He didn't completely avoid the blast. Muscles seized on his right side, and he fell over, the serpent howling in victory.
Cooper prepared his own spell. He was, unfortunately, not just playing dead and really couldn't move. Numbness gave way to tingling, and he could just barely move his right side, but it was agonizing. He didn't dare check his health.
Once he was sure he could move, he jumped up and spun on the serpent.
It was massive, fourteen feet long and as thick as any palm tree. Looking at the beast made him feel like he would never have a hope of overcoming one. Without second guessing himself, lightning arced from his nose and struck the beast in the eyes. Cooper turned and ran, hoping the momentary stunning effect would let him get to safety.
The serpent roared, and quickly — too quickly — power began building in the air again. He focused on the feeling of the building lighting. His developing storm affinitity pulled his senses to the right. He couldn’t be sure it would go that direction, but if he stayed on target, he would surely be hit. Cooper wasn’t sure he would survive another hit. Snarling, he rolled to the left at the last moment. The lightning missed, glassing the sand to his right.
Back on his feet in no time, he covered the last dozen yards before another blast could come for him. He skidded to a halt inside the protective ritual and spun. Pure panic, elation, adrenaline, and fear mixed like the storm inside him as he looked to see if death would follow him into the ritual circle.
The serpent paused in mid air. It looked around for a few moments, long sensory whiskers drifting through the air, trying to figure out what it had just been doing. Then it just flew off.
This was the first time he'd used Harvey's circle for protection from anything but the elements. So far Cooper had only fought small serpents that he could easily overcome, and slightly bigger ones that he could surprise and win without getting too injured. This was the first greater serpent he had seen since Harvey drove them off, and unfortunately, the serpent had spotted him the same time he had spotted it.
He had tried to fight, but his lightning barely affected the beast, and its power was far greater than he could endure. Relief flooded him as he acknowledged safety and slumped to the ground, tipping over onto his unburned half.
Cooper, as a dog with an excellent sense of smell, had no problems smelling his burned hair and skin. He thought this might be the single worst wound he had ever received. Mostly because he didn't have a healer nearby, but it was still bad.
It was time to use one of his healing potions. There just wasn't any way around it. He would heal from the wound naturally, but probably not before the protective barrier dissipated.
With a half bark half grunt, he rolled back off of his side and his pack. That was fortunately on his left side and hadn't been hit by the close call with the lightning. It unclasped with a touch of his nose and a thought, and he was able to rummage in it with his nose. He pulled out a healing potion. Fezzic had designed the bottles especially for Cooper. He couldn't uncork a regular bottle without spilling it, so these were made of an edible material that wasn't sharp when broken. The downside is that they couldn't get wet while in storage, but his dimensional bag was warded against moisture, so that wasn't an issue.
He wolfed down the potion, crunching the bottle before swallowing. Immediately a fierce burning covered his right side, and he could feel the wounds closing on their own.
When the healing faded, he still felt awful, but he was well enough. His hair was still burned off, and that would make staying warm in the storm much harder, but at least he could move.
The greater serpents had, from what he had just seen, retaken the section of the island just past the northern jungle. He would need to avoid them for a while longer. He considered his strategy for not just growing but surviving.
Almost all of the lesser, as he thought of the smallest, serpents were gone, replaced by the middle sized serpents — regular sized. These were still a challenge to kill, but he could handle them back to back and possibly two at a time if he needed. The lesser serpents weren't worth killing outside leveling his classes, and even then they only provided a small amount of experience. Their meat had stopped giving him storm affinity, but the regular serpents still did. He also discovered just spending time outside in the storm increased his affinity, albeit very slowly. Even so, a week spent killing serpents and braving the elements had left him close to his goal.
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Storm Affinity
* Progress: 92%
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He hadn’t yet gone back to the temple of the storm god to try to figure out the mysteries there. He was waiting until his storm affinity reached 100% to see if that unlocked anything else. He still used the building frequently, but usually just for some megar shelter from the winds. It didn’t help with the rain.
The rain was the worst part. He’d been wet his entire time on the island, and the pads of his feet were soft and painful if he tried to run on uneven terrain. He was just glad his toughness from leveling up seemed to have prevented major damage. A few months ago, his feet would have been ruined by now.
Cooper watched the huge serpent in the distance, where it disappeared off the coast. The serpents didn’t mind the surf and frequently left the island to hunt, he assumed. They didn’t attack each other, and Cooper was the only other living animal on the island. Unless they could do something like eat power directly from the storm, they would need to hunt.
While he waited to make sure the serpent didn’t come back, he practiced his rituals. He carefully walked through each ritual that he knew, examining them in his mind’s eye before drawing them out. He still had Olivander’s book on ritual magic crafting, but with the rain he hadn’t taken it out on the island. The reading had given him some ideas on customizing rituals, but he didn’t have any way to directly apply the practice.
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Where Olivander could draw out rituals with perfect accuracy and recall, all while having an incredible variety, Cooper only had a half dozen rituals he was proficient with, and none that he would be able to draw while directly engaged in combat. Still, he figured it was better than sitting around doing nothing, and being able to draw up a custom ritual would certainly come in handy someday.
A few hours later, Cooper felt something he thought he might never feel again. Dry. He almost rolled around in the dirt just to revel in the sensation, before remembering that, while his health was as full as it was going to get in the immediacy, his burned half was still quite tender. Fezzic’s healing potions were good, but they weren’t miraculous.
It was time to head back out into the storm, as much as he didn’t want to. He would love to avoid getting wet.
He stopped on that thought. Maybe he could do something about it?
Since he was dry, and the ritual circle was preventing the rain from coming in, he risked pulling out Olivander’s ritual spellform crafting book. He thought he had spotted a particular example…Yes!
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Like most manipulation spells, water manipulation requires an ongoing mana expenditure. For most magicians, in terms of ritual spellcasting, it’s untenable. Rather than relying on a ritual spell, most magicians are better served by applying simple mana manipulation to work with small amounts of water, and an umbrella if they’re simply looking to stay dry in the rain.
That said, the following water manipulation ritual is an excellent example of a number of ritual techniques we have talked about over the last chapter.
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Untenable for most magicians…but not for a magus? Maybe not for a dog with an item that can give him free mana?
Harvey had expressly told him not to draw on the Eye unless he gave Cooper explicit permission, but Harvey wasn’t here. He told Cooper to master the storm, and while he was pretty good at one wind ritual and knew a lighting spell, Cooper knew practically nothing about water magic. Surely, it wouldn’t hurt to at least try?
He wouldn’t use the Eye at first. He would use his own mana and see how long the ritual lasted. Maybe it wouldn’t matter. He couldn’t draw that much mana from the contained Eye anyway.
Accepting his current limitations and goals, he got to work sketching out the ritual.
The ritual flashed and broke apart, and the small amount of water he had collected and pooled inside the ritual didn’t do anything. He was missing something in the activation, but he didn’t know what.
Manipulation spells required mana upkeep, and he was keeping the connection open to push mana into the spell. That seemed fine. These kinds of spells also required a firm intent to do the manipulation the caster wanted. He was focused on picking up the water and simply spinning it about him once. This ritual didn’t have an activation word, though he had tried a bark anyway. So what was it?
He drew out his wind gust ritual and the water manipulation ritual side-by-side. They were different in most ways, with different activation and effects, but he still compared them to see if there was anything else he was missing.
The wind ritual resonated with him strongly. It wanted to be activated, and he felt like he could do anything he wanted with it. After the extensive practice, he was sure he could do just that. Harvey’s simple test of pulling a single piece of paper out of a pile would be trivial for him now.
The water manipulation ritual didn’t have the same resonance. There was a connection, but it was…well, watered down. Incomplete. Looking inward, he had a thought. He was a storm magician, sure, but he was also a Canine Striker. The wind gust was a strike of sorts.
Using the concepts of ritual crafting he had read about, he extracted the mechanisms from the wind gust spell and applied them to water manipulation. He was attempting to create a water strike. It might not help him with his goal of staying dry, but it was a start. He used the references in his book to help guide the process.
Unlike with the water manipulation ritual, he had success almost immediately. The small pool of water in front of him was blasted away. The water directly pushed by his will away from him. The ease of using the elements that synergized with one class in a manner that synergized with another left him with a thrill. He immediately started more experiments.
Cooper jumped right into an advanced technique in ritual spellcraft. He layered two effects together. It was technically two rituals loosely coupled, but he should be able to activate it like a single ritual with a combined effect. The effects weren’t truly combined, but since they were affecting two different elements, it didn’t make that much of a difference.
His affinity drew his attention to mistakes. Any time a mistake led him from strikes or the elements he was aiming for, the connection to the ritual became noticeably shakier. He hadn’t really used such an intuitive method for ritual crafting before, but it seemed somehow like cheating. He wondered if this was how it felt when Olivander drew rituals.
When he finished the ritual and activated it, there was a brief flash of wind in a shell around him, focused on a point directly in front of him where water was simultaneously blasted out. Or at least water would have if there was any around. He might need to leave the ritual circle to test his new creation.
He looked up at the sky. It was hard to tell what time it was with the constant storming, but with careful observation he could just make out the sun’s position.
He had spent most of the day in the ritual after his morning exploration had been interrupted. It was time to hunt some serpents. His stomach rumbled in agreement.
Bracing himself for the rain, he left the ritual. The storm temple was directly in front of him, and he could see a single lesser serpent floating through the air, but he ignored it. The southern beach looked like prime hunting location. He guessed he had occupied himself long enough that the greater serpent had left the area.
He put on his Trickster’s mask and stealthed his way toward the beach. Two regular serpents coiled through the air, spinning and occasionally shooting out arcs of lightning between each other. Maybe that was how they communicated.
When one came close, and the other relatively far away, he struck.
Cooper swapped to his Canine Striker class and sank a Bone Breaker bite into the serpent’s flank. It howled and Cooper quickly swapped back to Storm Magician before jumping away. The serpent’s howl was interrupted by a blast of lighting to the face. He fought like that, keeping one eye on the second serpent who slowly made a loop down the beach. If he didn’t defeat the first serpent quickly, the other would see one of its kind in battle and join in. It was one of the reasons he liked to hunt near the temple. It was easier to isolate opponents.
He took a few superficial hits that he could ignore, but used a little more mana than he would have liked. The serpent went down without much fanfare, and he debated his plan.
He was around half mana, but his health was in a decent spot. He could run two or three experiments, assuming he had enough time to draw the rituals, then finish off the serpent before it finished him.
The plan was a good one, primarily because he was very close to Harvey’s ritual, and could retreat if another serpent joined or if he got in over his head with the single beast.
He strode out into the middle of the beach, and drew out his ritual. He filled it nearly to activation and held it there. It would degrade with mana inside, but the process would take longer than the few minutes he had until the serpent noticed him.
The serpent spotted him almost immediately. It howled and swam through the air straight toward him. The beast would be able to hit him with lightning from about twenty or thirty yards out, but he would have to wait until the beast was within maybe ten to activate the ritual.
The first bolt of lightning lit up his affinity senses a moment before it struck. The blast kicked up sand in a column from the spot he had been standing a moment before. He flew through the air, to the right, but also toward the serpent. He risked destabilizing his ritual by using his own lightning spell to slow the serpent. He needed to get just a little closer.
It shook off the blast, but did indeed slow its approach at attacks, moving warily. Cooper jumped forward and activated the ritual. Wind spun around him and pulled the water from the air, condensing it into a bar of water directly in front of him, then it blasted out in a strike that cracked against the serpent's scales.
It howled in pain, and Cooper was happy to see he had drawn blood with his improvised ritual. It worked even better than expected, but now he came to the hard part. Drawing the ritual while engaged in combat.
With a new weapon at his disposal, he bared his teeth in a wicked grin.