CHAPTER 250 – FRUSTRATION
Tom knew what he wanted to do, and he was convinced it was possible. There was a blazing pit of certainty in his guts. Two spells that had overlapping components were ripe to be combined into a single entity. His forty years of experience had to count for something.
All he required was an idea of how to combine them, and then a burst of fate would bridge the difference. There was no need to spend months practicing and seeing the spells almost form before they collapsed like he had done when extending Spark. With fate, he could get it right the first time.
Carefully, he catalogued the key features of each of the spells. Sense Earth extracted detailed information of everything in range of him continuously. Then the threshold benefit would alter the footing of his enemies. It was all innate, but his experiments in extending the ability to find rockfall opportunities showed how it could be manipulated beyond the obvious parameters.
Remote Earth Manipulation was a targeted, direct version of the same skill. It too got detailed information, but in a much tighter cone of awareness and then it let you manipulate the rock to do what you wanted. In that aspect, it was very similar to the Hostile Earth condition.
Tom smiled at the result of his mental exercise. If you looked at them with the right lenses, the two spells were almost identical. Each of them had an ability that gathered data followed by one that shaped the earth at the back end of the spell. The macro applications, of course, were very different. One was primarily for information analysis and the other for directed earth magic, but despite those varying uses, structurally there were a lot of similarities.
The deployment mechanism, unfortunately, was completely different. Earth Sense was an on off trigger while Remote Earth Manipulation actually involved the execution of three distinct steps closely together. The first infused his consciousness in an area of stone. It was a useful ability that could be used both for its intended purpose and for scouting. Then the guts of the spell consisted of him creating an image of the what he desired to happen including the intermediate steps. Once the visualization was complete, then the spell form would snap into position if it was valid. For example, if you imagined teleported rock from step A to B or creating rock from nothing. After the pathway had been confirmed, which was effectively a proof of concept all that remained was to power the effect and the spell would complete.
The next question was what he wanted to do with that information. His ultimate aim was to forge a domain which meant amongst other things, progressing his spells so that manipulating stone near him would become like moving a muscle. The most logical first move was to use the Sense Earth spell to remove the first part of Remote Earth Manipulation. If he could use Sense Earth to skip the manipulation’s spells requirement to insert his consciousness, then the speed of casting would be greatly improved. Then, just through practice, he could boost the ability until he powered it at the same time as visualising, which would make it almost an instant cast spell.
He bit his lips as he thought about the problem. He guessed these leaps forward required more than inspiration. Experimentation would be vital.
With a flex, his mind sunk into the stone wall behind him. He wanted to observe what the addition of Remote Earth Manipulation to the continual presence of Earth Sense looked like in practice.
A frown transformed his face. “Maybe this isn’t going to work,” he muttered to himself as he examined the result from alternative angles.
The two layers of energy were distinct and completely different from each other. They couldn’t be compared. Earth Sense was like the finest of misty rain landing on your nose versus Remote Earth Manipulation was like someone dumping a bathtub full of water over you.
There was no accurate way to compare them.
They functioned orders of magnitude apart.
Behind him, he completed steps two and three and a small slither of rock emerged from the near smooth wall just how he had imagined it. From his imagination to action was less than a second and, most fascinating was that the energy in the rock from the first step had not changed. It had not been consumed even in part by the conversion of the stone.
A thrill of excitement went through him. That meant that his approach could work. He had been worrying the dense energy would be needed and used in the powering process, which would have meant Earth Sense could never be an alternative. The fact none of the energy was consumed meant his plan could work.
He created another miniature spear of rock behind him.
The gap between this ability evolving to act like a muscle and its current clunky state was a daunting one to imagine crossing. That tiny spear had taken well over a second from conception to delivery. “One problem at a time.” He told himself.
He cancelled both spells before he engaged the manipulation one separately in order to study it in more detail. With a flick of his mind, he dispelled and recast, but this time he attempted to limit the energy he pushed into step one. It barely had an effect on the spell. It completed as usual with the volume slightly smaller but the intensity the same. That was not at all what he was going for. Stubbornly, he tried different approaches to impact step one. More focused, less directed then with an image of the outcome being pushed at the same time. None of the results inspired him. He continued to fiddle with the spell to get a better sense of it.
Everlyn emerged briefly from her puzzle when he was between casts, pondering what he had learnt. She glanced right at him, or more technically the flag that he oversaw. She caught him staring, smiled brightly, waved, and then disappeared into another challenge. Thanks to his dream they were on a timer.
Tom returned his focus to the problem. The simple fact was that nothing was succeeding. Thor, Harry and Rahmat all appeared and vanished. They were still in the outer rings, so they had less time trapped in each puzzle, so they appeared more frequently.
Why wasn’t it working?
“Toni,” he yelled as he spotted her emerging from a ring of eight puzzled just thirty metres from him.
She came over cautiously. “Do you want me to switch?”
“Not precisely,” he admitted. “I was hoping a different perspective might help me.” He then explained his aims and what he was attempting to achieve.
“I’ve never tried anything like that.” She said finally. “If I were you, I would consult Everlyn, Rahmat or Keikain.”
He smiled. “But they’re not here and you are.”
Toni hesitated. “I’m not an expert.”
“Whatever pops into your head.” Tom said hopefully.
She hesitated clearly thinking things out. “It might sound stupid. Maybe keep Earth Sense active and try to use your remote skill while suppressing stage one.”
He nodded. “I’ll test it out.”
Toni returned to complete another puzzle, and he commenced working on her idea.
He could see the logic in the suggesting even if it felt off base. But his own attempts had been a failure, so he might as well try this. Earth Sense was engaged and then he tried to cast Remote Earth Manipulation while he actively suppressed stage one.
It did not work at all. He would cast and then hold back stage one, and the result was that the later steps were completely blocked. It was only once he released stage one that the other two could be used.
The nature of the spell form meant that each step had to be completed before the next could activate. His mind flirted around the topic, considering various ideas and abandoning them. His mind caught on one of the stray thoughts, same concept but a different spin. What happened if he infused his consciousness in one spot but triggered the secondary stages in a unique area? Would the secondary step then work by utilising the consciousness already present from Earth Sense, or was there another mechanism that he was missing?
Tom started by infusing focus at a point as far away from him as he could and tried to manipulate rock behind him with steps two and three. That dense energy he had sunk into the stone reacted to his change of attention by switching positions.
It was a failure.
He tried again, but this time actively attempted to stop the first stage of response.
It was…
Pain split his head as his attempt failed.
While massaging his brow, Tom stood and paced around. That backlash was more than he had expected, which made him wonder if he was doing something incorrectly. The headache fortunately faded quickly, and he sat back down to try again with a clearer head.
The majority of the backlash had occurred when it had leapt over the distance that separated the two points. If the locations had been nearer, his gut told him that the damage would have been significantly less. He could do more testing if he didn’t suffer regular backlashes, so he brought the components closer together.
Tom completed test after test. He waved at everyone as they emerged and then disappeared again.
Initially, the approach of pinning stage one in place and doing his manipulation did not appear to be working. Once he started using steps two and three, that dense energy would rush to the right spot. He stubbornly persisted and slowly the reaction of the secondary area got faster and faster.
It felt like there was a separation between the start of stage two being powered and the energy from stage one arriving. Experience told him he just had to be successful once and then the system would kick in and help him going forward. Yet no matter how many times he cast there was no ding to announce success. No evolution of any spells or levels in Earth Sense or Remote Earth Manipulation that would suggest progress.
He was making progress, but not enough. A perfect cast where stage two finished before the energy got across was what he required. He only needed to achieve it once. Knowing the answer, he double checked his fate pool.
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It was full.
A thrill of excitement went through him. His manual practicing had brought him close, and fate could give him the slight push he required to cross the remaining gap. He formed a clear picture in his head of what he needed. The requirement was that the second and third stages would complete while he kept the first stage active on the ground in front of him.
Ten fate vanished, and Tom cast the spell immediately.
Everything happened instantly and because he was not in combat and being aided by his dodge skill, there was no slowing of time to let him assess and adapt to what was happening on the fly. It felt like his brain was splitting in two. The first stage stayed where he wanted to. The chip of earth he was creating fell from the wall.
A surge of success flooded through him.
He had done it…
But there was no ding.
Why was that? He could sense the dense energy unmoved where he had kept it, but there was another patch right at the location where he had thought his spell might have worked.
“Damn it!” He thumped the ground in frustration. Somehow, he had launched some form of duel casting and it had left his head aching.
He activated Healing Tranquillity.
There were burst blood vessels in his brain that he quickly healed. Then he checked notifications already knowing the attempt had failed but hoping, anyway.
There was nothing there.
All the expenditure of fate had achieved was allowing him to complete some multicasting. It was disappointing he already knew it for other spells.
He hit the ground but kept practising. One, twice and then the third time all without fate. On that last endeavour, he split his focus once more. He could simultaneously manipulate rock in two separate spots, but this time because he was more conscious of the actual process he could see that he had managed it without using Earth Sense at all.
It was a failure.
He considered spending more fate. Then decided against it. He needed a break and instead of continuing his training he switched out with Harry and entered a trial. The fight was against a flock of birds, which the tile symbols had indicated had a vulnerability to lightning. It hadn’t lied, and the battle was far easier than he had hoped.
When he was let out of the challenge, Rahmat was on watch.
“Fun fight?” the spearman asked.
Tom shook his head. “No. It was boring. I hard countered it.”
“Easy points then.” The spearman smiled at him.
“I guess so.”
“You sound down.”
Tom leapt at the chance and described his problem.
Rahmat nodded thoughtfully.
“And you developed your domain didn’t you?” Tom probed hopefully for some insight.
“I did, but a spear concept differs greatly from earth.”
“But?” Tom prompted, catching the slight hesitation.
Rahmat held his spear, so it was close to him against his chest and then shoved his arms out so that it was further away.
It looked ridiculous.
“What are you doing?”
“A domain isn’t like a spell. A spell can form at the same power anywhere with a specified area.” The tip of his spear shone a familiar blue. Rahmat shifted his hand to the base of the spear and then arm straining stretched the spear straight up so that it was literally as far away from him as he could physically get it. The glow had remained at the same luminosity right up to the last ten centimetres where it blinked out. “Power Strike has a range limitation but everywhere within that range it strikes the same.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Rahmat put a finger to his lips. “Making a point here. Everywhere it is active it has the same strength. A domain.” Once more, he moved his spear closer, and then away. “Is not like that. It decays the further away you get from it. Do you know any advanced physics?”
Tom shook his head.
“Doesn’t matter then. All you need to know is that when it talks about absolute dominion over an area in the skill selection, it’s lying. What it means is that it is absolute, providing that no one is contending with you for control over it. If they are, then relative strength comes into it. Generally you will be able to beat them close to your body, but further away your power weakens and they might overpower you.”
“What point are you actually making?”
Rahmat stopped playing with his weapon and looked Tom in his eyes. “The domain radiates from your skin out. If you are trying to develop a domain, then it’s useful to know that anything a metre away you can do far easier closer to your body.”
“Is that what you think my problem is?”
The other man laughed. “I don’t know. I had a spear domain. You’re attempting to create an earth one. My experience is probably not at all relevant.”
“The power of my spark domain doesn’t behave like that. I’m just as powerful at three metres as at…” Tom trailed off into silence. “That’s because it’s not a domain is it.”
Rahmat shook his head. “Your correct. It’s just a basic spell that has been optimised into something that is incredibly powerful and useful.”
He was eager to keep going and he could already see several new ways to approach the problem. “Thank you. I think that might get me through the bottleneck. If you want, I can take over guard duty.”
“Lucky me.” Rahmat said and picked up his weapons and went back the way he had come.
Tom watched him go and thought about what had been shared. The spot he had been targeting had been half a metre away from him. This time, he put his hand on the ground. He would alter the rock to create a handprint. Nothing more. That would ensure he was manipulating as close to his body as possible.
He didn’t want to waste his fate. So he practised until he could feel his concentration wavering. The changes he had made from the Rahmat conversation were not working. He needed a different source of inspiration. He glanced down at the latest hand print he had created and then erased it.
He needed a mental break, so he left to fight a puzzle. Harry was on the way in so there were no issues with the changeover.
The fight he chose was not an advantageous matchup for him, but that changed nothing. It was all so easy… if this was the true levels of the fights maybe he could beat that second ring challenge. Maybe that third ring fight had been unusually difficult… He stopped the thought dead.
The progression in difficulty of the fights was clear and the third ring one had almost killed him despite the match up being favourable. There was no way he would be able to defeat a tougher challenge.
He replaced Harry on guard duty and kept practising, and then finally he saw the person he had been waiting for. He waved Keikain over. “Did you get an earth domain in the tutorial?”
“Yes,” he snorted. “It wasn’t earned. I cheated and purchased one.”
“I’m trying to develop my own by evolving my Earth Sense spell.”
Keikain gestured with his hand a polite request for him to hurry and get to the point.
“I’ve got something I think is on the right track, but it’s not working as I would like. Can you watch?”
The earth mage did not look happy but nodded his ascent. Tom quickly described what he was doing while he focused on his fate usage. This time he wanted fate to both help with the output by linking the two second stages to Earth Sense and to avoid the double cast.
Another ten points of fate vanished.
He attempted the spell. It was like he was hitting a diamond wall with his fists. His magic successfully pinned the dense energy down. Nothing escaped that area, but likewise where he was trying to push his hand down into the rock it failed completely.
He was getting nowhere. The extra steps were refusing to activate on a spot that did not contain the dense energy.
Mentally he panicked, and he felt a second cast of Remote Earth Manipulation trigger. He cursed to himself as his hand left a deep handprint on the floor.
Keikain frowned. “I guess that was a failure.”
“I…” Tom didn’t know what to say. He had been hopeful that with the fate infusion that it would work. But the approach was a turkey. That was what the nature of his failure made clear. Everything he had worked on for the last couple of hours was wasted. “It’s a dead-end path.”
“Hmm… probably… I‘m not sure your reasoning is that off.” Keikain stated finally. “But you’re choosing the wrong spell. What do you think Remote Manip does?”
“It infuses part of me into an area and then I can add more magic to create an action.”
“Beyond the superficial.” Keikain told him with a note of frustration. “What purposes does that dense energy serve?”
“I guess there is some form of connection.”
“Exactly. There’s a connection. That resonance, how important is it to the spell? How vital is it in your end state?”
“I don’t know. Very? And not at all.”
“Probably,” he smiled. “I don’t know either… but… it’s easy enough to see its adding a level of complexity you don’t need.”
Tom considered that new bit of information. “But that is what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to replace that communication link in the Remote Manipulation spell with the one from Earth Sense.”
Keikain scratched behind his ear, absently. “It’s not working, right?”
“Obviously.”
“That ability to influence away from your body is a complicated one. How many other of your spells can do it?”
Tom considered that for a moment. “None.”
“Exactly. It’s rare and I don’t know how deeply it’s embedded into the rest of the spell form. If I were you, I would use a different spell. Breaking remote Manip in half might be impossible.”
“You mean I should be making these attempts with basic Earth Manipulation? But how would that work?”
The other man shrugged. “That or Stone Skin are you only options.”
Tom looked down at the most recent handprint he had left. “I guess I’ll try both.”
“You should fight first.” Keikain said quietly. “We’re almost at fifty percent and you get more points per minutes than everyone else outside me and Michael and you have five more fights to go.”
“But I…”
“Give it a break. Look Clare’s coming in for a rest. She can stand guard while we two go back to work.”
With a sigh. Tom went over to his next fight.
Stone Skin Keikain’s last comment echoed in his head.
He materialised into the arena his feet sinking into the soft sand. His opponent was directly in front of him and it was an eldritch like monster. With four legs and what felt like twenty whip like appendages sprouting from its back, but in practice there was only ten.
Tom moved to engage it and discovered the tendrils were indeed whips. His threshold dodge bonus blared a warning, and he retreated to avoid the flashing barbed tentacles. He could avoid being hit easily enough, but that wasn’t helping him get a kill.
Like in the previous battles, he decided to settle down, learn its patterns, and let fate build up.
Stone skin. Keikain’s voice once more echoed in his head.
Tom agreed with the idea even if he couldn’t see how it could progress his domain. Partial stone skin was a great skill and one that he had been neglecting. It would also synergize beautifully with his main defensive abilities and the threshold benefit that let him estimate damage. He had been ignoring it because of the mana costs associated with taunting the enemies.
Against these creatures, however… His arm hardened and the force from the whip went from sufficient to cut into the muscle to bouncing off without damaging him. It was nice to tank a blow without suffering any pain. He dodged again and this time his ankle and foot became stone and the cracking whip was mitigated.
Yet all that practice with his remote earth manipulation kept eating into his thoughts. The advice of both Keikain and Rahmat combined together inside him and they resonated.
The hostile earth condition was not doing much but was faithfully trying to entangle the other monster’s legs.
He continued to selectively turn sections of himself to stone to block the many whips. Sense Earth was active, and he noticed something interesting. He could it feel it when the whip hit the solidified sections. It was not normal, but rather an effect Earth Sense had facilitated.
The reason why Keikain had suggested this spell was obvious, and he felt stupid. His skin became rock but instead of it becoming inert it remained part of him because of Sense Earth. An idea occurred to him. Maybe if he combined all three spells together… the implications were a lot… it would almost certainly trigger an evolution… but could he, do it? It would take dual casting, but he could do that.
Unlike the experiments he had run previously, this idea was genuinely dangerous. He didn’t want to lose a foot, but the upside was massive.
With a wide grin, he decided to go for it.
He spent a hundred fate with a clear image in his head, preferring overkill to the potential consequences. Instantly Tom recalled thousands of separate facts, most of them from Healing Tranquillity about the inner anatomy of all the bones in his ankles.
The monster lashed at him.
His foot became stone, and when it landed on the ground, he made it bend like normal. All that medical knowledge allowed him to manipulate the stone properly. He did not make the ankle flex like melted wax instead he made the internal components move relative to each other like they were still flesh.
He landed on the stone foot. The manipulation of the rock allowing him to keep his balance. He dodged and ducked and then, as an afterthought transitioned it back into flesh.
Multiple dings went off, signifying an evolution.
He grinned like a madman. It was not what he had set out to do. But it was a step toward the establishment of the domain. He just needed to finish this fight and check his reward, and being able to move his stone parts would be a massive upgrade in so many places.
Not now, it wasn’t needed right this instant. These monsters were easy. He had their measure.
Lunge activated, and he skewered his opponent. Briefly, its whips wavered in distress.
After a moment, it tried to hit him, but he was already retreating, weaving between the swinging tentacles. The back of his head briefly became stone and then he was outside its range with his head ringing slightly but no cuts. The monster stumbled after him, but it was clear it was near death.
It tumbled forward, and sand went flying. Two more of them appeared.
Tom ran at them. Now that he knew them and by using stone skin when required, it was almost too easy.