For the next couple of days, they practiced out by the edge of the woods. There was a spot where Henry and a couple of the other guys from the neighborhood had a couple of targets set up at the base of a hill. A stream meandered at the bottom of the hill, its water level higher than normal because of the massive amount of rainfall they experienced during the storm.
According to the weathermen, who mostly served the purpose of trying to explain all of the strange weather events that were popping up all over the country instead of predicting them, the storm had been as severe as a category three hurricane but had not originated out at sea but as a regular thunderstorm. Eight people were dead, and several dozen others were missing. There had been no mention on the official news broadcast of the dungeon entrance. It seemed like the attempts by news programs to keep them out of the eye of the general public were still in full force, although Jeremy could not understand why.
Caleb practiced his slicing and dicing spell religiously, turning soda cans and beer bottles stacked on top of tables on the far side of the stream into circular strips of metal and glass. They confirmed that he was actually adding space between the two sections of whatever he was separating because he experimented around with modifiers and found a strengthening rune that allowed him to change the size and shape of the space he was creating. If he added a chunk of space several millimeters tall, as well as wide, within the side of a can of soda, it would tip the top half of it over as though a wedge had been driven into the can. As he practiced the spell over and over, he also added a modifier for accuracy. Eventually, he was able to create a flat plane of space that could separate the top half of several cans at once, spanning about a foot in area. When he did that, there were several strengthening runes on his simple manipulate space spell, and he could only cast it once without running low on mana.
“It’s fine,” he gasped, laying on the forest floor, which was soft with a thick layer of old fallen leaves and other detritus. The ground was covered in a layer of newer fallen leaves, some green from the storm and others that were yellow and had fallen naturally. Caleb had one hand over his eyes to apparently combat the spell of dizziness that made him lay flat on his back like that. “It’s not like I have to cast it really big anyway. The lightning elemental cores were pretty small, so…”
“You should start focusing more on casting the spells in quicker succession instead,” Jeremy told him.
They had realized over the course of practicing that the more they practiced a spell, the quicker the runes literally formed as they envisioned them.
“In a minute,” Caleb groaned.
Jeremy and Zanie were currently taking a break from practicing their own spells, which involved her putting up a barrier made of electrical energy and him attacking a couple of targets made from stacked strawbales that some of the neighbors had gotten from the farmer back behind the woods in preparation for fall decorating. The mana attacks impacted them like a physical force, knocking them over and helping Jeremy make sure he was hitting where he was aiming. He could tell that the spell went off successfully because the runes would appear, but since he could not see just pure mana, he could not see its effects without something to aim at.
At first, he had practiced just shooting projectiles of mana, but then quickly moved onto adding a condition to his spells so that the mana was not shot straight out from where he stood, but simply appeared where he envisioned it doing the damage. This way, he could attack from behind Zanie’s lightning barrier.
She had also been practicing her barrier with the same strengthening runes that Caleb used on his spatial spell. But when added to her spell, they made the lightning barrier more resistant to damage. They had limited ammunition, so Jeremy did not want to shoot at the barrier to test that, so he and she practiced together quite a lot. She would put up a barrier, and he would switch from attacking the hay bales to attacking it, watching the way the lightning pulsed white when his mana attack would impact it.
They had nearly reached the next level, each with an overlay that was light blue, nearly white in color, which would then coalesce into the ring. By the end of the day, Jeremy expected them all to have their rings, and then they could sit down and put together an actual plan from all the brainstorming they had done while resting in between practicing spells. He was excited to see what effects getting a ring would have on each of them if it really was just a marker because the overlays ran out of colors to transition through, or if there was an actual impact on their ability to use magic.
“You ready to start practicing again?” Jeremy asked Zanie.
“Sure.” She did not stand up with him, however. She cupped her hands in front of her so that they would fill with water and drank it. “You know, these strengthening runes are really useful,” she said while casting the conjure water spell again. “I thought maybe it would take less mana to use one of them to get more water than doing two conjure water spells, and it works pretty well.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Jeremy crossed his arms and scratched his jaw. He needed to shave again. “Well, the conjure water spell without any modifiers takes…say, ten mana or something. If you put a strengthen run on it, then it takes fifteen. So, two conjure spells would take forty and the single one with a strengthen rune would take twenty-five. So that makes sense if that’s how it works.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird that half the time, you can’t even conjure water at all?” Caleb rolled onto his side and propped his head on his hand. “You manage to successfully cast manipulate heat with a condition to create lightning bolts consistently every time, but a little zero-step conjure water spell is a dud most of the time for you.”
“You have the same issue,” Zanie pointed out. That’s why I’m trying to figure out ways to make it cost less mana.”
“But wouldn’t a more complex spell with a modifier be more likely to be faulty when you cast it?” Caleb asked.
Jeremy rubbed his forehead and grimaced. “I think it probably just has to do with the fact that it’s a different magic type than what you guys are geared toward. Both of your Unique Personality traits are affinities for difficult magic, right? Like, I can’t cast any of the spells you guys are doing, but anyone can cast a basic elemental spell for fire or water, right? So, space and heat magic are more advanced, and you guys can only do them right off the bat because of your Unique Personality Traits. Maybe that just makes you shit at all the other types of magic because you are so specialized?”
“That sucks.” Caleb frowned. “But I’ll take telekinesis over being better at more generalized magic, honestly.”
“Hey!” someone called down the hill from the backyards of the properties across from Henry and Julie’s house. “Y’all should come up here quick! Something just came out of the dungeon.”
“Shit.” Caleb scrambled to his feet and swayed for a moment, looking like he might tumble down into the stream before scaling the hill toward the yards. Jeremy scrambled after him with Zanie in tow. As they booked it across the lawn, Caleb huffed, “I’m still low on mana, so I probably only have one of my spells – unmodified – in me.
“That’s alright,” Jeremy told him. “Zanie and I can probably corner it with a couple of barriers to keep it in one spot so you get a good shot, and if your spell doesn’t cut it, then it will be an easy target to hit with one of the M4s.”
They rounded one of the houses and saw that, thankfully, the court was deserted. Everyone was in their houses, safe and sound. From talking with Jeremy and company over the past couple of days, they knew that it was difficult to kill the lightning elementals through physical means. Jeremy was a little surprised that none of them were standing on their porch trying to take a shot at the core, but everyone was inside, peering through their curtains at the elemental hovering beside the dungeon entrance.
It looked the same as it had in the dungeon – an abstract gathering of lightning bolts, brightest in the center where its core was. The bots jutted out from its form, slamming into the ground and nearby trees randomly. And its presence in the court filled the entire space with the sharp scent of ozone and raised the hairs all over Jeremy’s body.
Unlike in the dungeon when they had disturbed the room that one of these creatures had resided in, this one did not seem to notice their approach and drift toward them. This also separated it out from the imps which had attacked nearly anything that moved on site. Jeremy was not sure what the deal with these dungeons was, but these lightning elementals seemed much less malevolent than the imps or the nightmares had been, even though they were a greater challenge to fight.
“Zanie, go ahead and put up a barrier between it and us before we attack,” Jeremy told her. “We should give it a change to attack the barrier, just to see how it reacts.”
Zanie had hit the barrier a few times with her own lightning spells, and they seemed to do significantly less damage than Jeremy’s mana attacks, but the lightning coming from the elementals might have a different effect.
She nodded and threw up the barrier, which did draw the elemental’s attention. Instead of randomly targeting mailboxes and such with the lightning strikes arcing out from its core, it became more focused on the barrier. Each time a bolt of its lightning met with the net of zapping, hair-raising electricity that formed Zanie’s barrier, a brilliant flash and shower of sparks tumbled across the asphalt. Since the creature seemed to be targeting the barrier exclusively, they waited to see how long it would take for Zanie’s barrier to fall. It had two strengthening runes on it, which would usually take three of Jeremy’s mana attacks and six of Zanie’s lightning attacks to bring down.
Jeremy counted eight lightning strikes before the barrier fell and Zanie put up another one to keep its strikes from reaching them. Caleb held up his hands and looked at Jeremy with a raised eyebrow.
“Give it a try,” Jeremy told him.
Caleb cast his spell, and Jeremy watched the runes zip out of his hands. The lightning elemental obviously took some damage. A huge flash of light exploded in the court, making Jeremy shut his eyes to protect them, and a violent spread of electrical bolts arced out of the creature, but it did not go dark and a core did not shatter to the ground the way it had when Caleb killed the last one. Instead, it began to swirl in a circle as if off-balance. Perhaps Caleb had only cracked the core instead of slicing it in half.
Jeremy attacked it with mana a couple of times, casting the spell so that the attack originated on the other side of the barrier. A few of these spells nudged whatever damage Caleb had done into critical levels. There was another flash of light and shower of sparks, and then the core shattered to the ground, and the court became quiet.
After the constant buzzing and crashing of the lightning bolts into the ground and barriers, the gentle buzz of Zanie’s barrier practically sounded like silence. When her barrier fell, the silence was almost deafening. Then Jeremy heard a flock of geese somewhere out in the distance, still apparently on route to fly south for the winter, despite all the wild changes happening on the earth below them.
“Hey, Jer…um…” Caleb’s voice wavered behind Jeremy. The tone of his voice made Jeremy spin to check if he had somehow got injured. But instead of seeing anything awful, he saw that Caleb had formed a ring.