I landed, instantly beginning a cast of a Supercharged Mana Shield to bolster my pitifully low hit points. As I did this, I looked over at the group just in time to see the saurshrikes reach the beacon platform and engage our fighters there—all three of which, I noticed, were now level 5. The spirefiend had leveled them up—leaving me to wonder how experience was divvied, given that I’d done almost all of the damage.
I wanted to celebrate because the biggest of the demons was dead, but a few seconds of watching the fighting at the beacon platform told me that we were still losing: as I watched, Oderion had his arm grabbed in the jaws of one of the beasts, and while it didn’t seize him immediately and impale him on the backs of one its allies like my lore skill had warned, he did no damage to the thing while he fought his arm free, taking hits from a second saurshrike in the process. It was simple attrition: our side’s health was depleting faster than theirs.
Once my mana shield was done, I tried to play support to our melee group. I cast Hex of Chains on a saurshrike after it grappled the gnome woman, but it broke free too quickly—that spell wouldn’t turn the tide. I cast an unmodified Mana Shield on the lowest-health fighter—the gnome again—knowing that it could interfere with the saurshrike’s ability to find purchase as it attempted to grab her, but the shield was simply damaged through in moments.
I had to take a moment to curse my obvious mistake, replacing Unnatural Confusion with Elemental Aegis instead of Hex of Chains. I knew, based on my lore skill, that the demons were all weak to psychic—surely that spell and the Terrify spell that I’d passed on would have been more useful, here? But I hadn’t thought of it: I’d convinced myself that Hex of Chains was more generally useful, been too caught up in my fear of PvP, and missed what was now so obvious.
I threw two Magic Arrows into the fray, targeting the lowest-health saurshrike, but an anxiety had gripped me. I was going to watch these people—at least some of these people—die here.
Then I saw a figure descending on the beacon, too dim to make out in the light of the sunset, flying down with their arms outstretched as if—ah, I thought. It was the Charm of Gliding spell.
Miradel – Level 8
The keeper of the observatory and the town’s only magic shop landed beside the healer and began to cast a spell. Hoping to buy her time to affect the battlefield, I cast another Mana Shield on the now 25% health gnome fighting with two of the saurshrikes.
Moments after my first casting of Mana Shield finished, Miradel’s spell finished also—and an array of bars of light appeared each spaced about a foot and a half apart and about eight feet tall, arranged in a semicircle arcing out from the flat edge of the central pillar.
“Pull back!” shouted our healer—and I watched our whole force back up, each of them squeezing through the bars of light to end up on the inside of a cage keeping the saurshrikes out. In a moment, the tide had turned.
Miradel and I both began throwing Magic Arrows at the weakest of the demons while they battered the bars of her barrier, and in the moment that our two spells struck the demon, a few things happened. The demon we’d targeted died from the combined spells of two overleveled mages. One of the bars of the barrier was broken, presumably from damage it had taken from the demons as well. Finally, two of the saurshrikes turned and began to lumber toward me—an immensely fortunate circumstance.
The fight went on in our favor. The front-liners plugged the hole in the barrier with their bodies, now able to put the highest-HP fighter in the fore. Miradel and I kept slinging spells, still both at the same target. And when the two saurshrikes reached me, two Magic Arrows after the one that had killed their friend and drawn them on, I simply used my Mighty Leap to sail over their heads and land inside the barricade of light.
Another saurshrike fell at the opening in the barrier just as another one of the bars was broken through. But the only one of them left to push through this new opening was near-dead by the time its two fellows had reached us again, and as it fell, something I had been too distracted to see coming happened:
Congratulations, you are now a level 5 Mage/Psychic!
You have a new Passive slot. Open your Abilities pane to choose a new Passive.
You have a new Passive slot. Open your Abilities pane to choose a new Passive.
Your Hit Points have increased by 70 and your Energy has increased by 130.
Human Adaptability increases each of your Strength, Agility, Focus, and Spirit by 2. You gain 2 stat points to distribute.
I blinked. A level? It was good news, but….
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Oh.
No-one was in mortal peril as far as I could see, so I began to recast a Supercharged False Identity spell, hoping to make myself look like a level 9 before anyone noticed that my Hit Points had gotten full while my level remained the same. It was a hole in my disguise that I hadn’t realized was there—and yet the likelihood that anyone would notice it seemed slim. Who was tagging me right now, with monsters attacking us from only feet away? The False Identity spell had a verse requirement, meaning I chanted the whole time I was casting it, but so did Mana Shield.
My spell finished and my level was updated. I even had the time to throw another Magic Arrow—which had gained about ten damage from a two-level increase—into the last dinosaur as I opened my menus and put two more stat points into Spirit.
The Magic Arrow connected; the last monster fell. The area around the beacon was quiet for a moment, save for the murmuring of the healer casting her spells to top up the front-liners.
“We did it,” one of them said. “We actually did it!”
But I was already moving forward, passing him by to jog to the edge of the cliffside. I looked over it, carefully searching every crag and cranny I could for more enemies—and for the shapes of people, of players, of Haroshi’s men. I saw no-one, but the sun had almost completely set—it was hard to make out anything in the rocks and trees, dark shapes on darker.
“I don’t see anymore,” I called out, turning back to the group. “But there’s been no completion for my quest—the other beacons are likely still under attack. Should we stay and guard this one, or try to reinforce them?”
“Stay,” said Miradel, and the healer nodded in agreement. “Any force which is successful in taking any of the other beacons will still need to come and take this one to remove the Safe Zone, splitting their forces and giving our defenders a chance to retake those beacons that were lost.” She nodded. “We should wait.”
“I got choices to make anyway,” said Oderion. I watched his face get the distant look that I knew by now to come with navigation of system menus.
This caught me up in thought for a moment: if the NPCs leveled up, and had classes and choices between abilities to make, then what made them different from players? More importantly, how was anyone in this town a level 4? They’d had years to farm the surrounding environs, all of them. Cuby and I had stayed at the top of the experience curve by grinding efficiently and spending almost every moment in town in pursuit of quests, but still—if a single day could get me above level 6, it made no sense that their guards were levels 4 and 5.
I pushed the question from my mind for a moment as a familiar eagerness to choose my passives.
I opened the psychic one first, since I already knew what the mage’s choices were:
Ability Selection
Choose a new passive to learn. You may replace this spell with any other spell you are eligible to learn by consuming its Ability Card or using an Ability Book.
Passive – Critical Insights
When you critically hit a creature with an attack that causes psychic damage or has a psychic effect, you gain a critical insight against that creature.
When you have a critical insight against a creature and an ability you affect it with would grant it a resistance bonus because it has been affected with that ability before that day, it instead gains no resistance bonus and you lose your critical insight.
Passive – Evasive Insights
When you successfully negate an attack against you due to your Defense Rating, you gain a bonus to your Defense Rating against the next attack that creature makes against you. The bonus equals half your level, rounded down. This ability can’t trigger from the effected attack.
I frowned at these, which both seemed quite good, and both worked with Moment of Mastery, the class iconic that I’d been using to such great effect. The offensive insights didn’t specify that the affected effect needed to be psychic, which meant it would work to get me a few more seconds on my Hex of Chains. Not bad, even if my critting attack—implosive missile—wasn’t something I saw myself using a lot in conjunction with two crowd control effects. Maybe in PvP?
The defensive ability, on the other hand, gave a hefty bonus that might help me get two misses, not just one, out of a Moment of Mastery. What was more, I already had a higher-than-normal chance to be missed because of my higher-than-normal level and agility, both of which effected Defense Rating. I took Evasive Insights.
The mage choice was more obvious:
Passive - Soul Font
Add 25% regeneration rate to your base mana regeneration.
Passive - Farcaster
Add 25% to the range of your spells.
I took Farcaster. I’d had to use a movement ability just to deliver one of the short-range Implosive Missiles to the spirefiend, and that fight had also taught me that kiting monsters with my grapple gun and Mighty Leap was a definite possibility.
What was more, a quick glance at my character sheet showed me that I had 9.3 energy regeneration, and that only 4.6 of it was from my mana. The rest was from base energy from psychic levels—I had 200—and stamina, which regenerated twice as fast as mana. The difference that Soul Font would make for my spells would be negligible, even if my growing repertoire of buffs along with Supercharged Spell was getting costlier and costlier.
Suddenly I got a system message:
Quest Completed – Defend Oromar’s Bastion
Whatever fight had been left, it was over.