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Mira and Tiamat followed the best option shown by the Seer’s Halo. They avoided the gate and the Rocs, both. Shortly they found the same location, as in the vision, and used Mira’s Portable Hole on the wall. Mira had been shaken by the multiple images of failure, and having things go right again was slowly rebuilding her confidence.
Unfortunately, as Mira was setting up the delicate operation of retrieving her magic item with her improvised fishing pole, she was interrupted at the worst possible moment. Mira had just loosened the magical portal and had begun to invert it when a flurry of legs came rushing from the gloomy depths of the hall. Before she could react, a charging mass of spiders had swarmed over her. Mira screamed and fell back while Tiamat flew to the ceiling.
Magic in the Mystic Realms game could be used in several ways. Purely instinctive manipulation of magic was possible. Qi (internal or personal energy) or Akasic (external or realm energy) could be achieved with willpower and instincts alone. This method was what primitives used and was sometimes termed witchcraft. It was wild, unpredictable, and usually very inefficient in terms of energy usage.
One of the forms of magic taught at the Imperial Arcanum was the use of detailed runes and glyphs. These had been learned by observation of the natural patterns of magic used by witches and beasts over the centuries. Forming these symbols of mana had been found to focus and shape the flow and conversion of Akasic energy. This way provided a highly effective use of energy with well-defined results but also required either time or preparation to cast.
A mage could take the time and cast the ritual, tracing the symbols of mana and then manipulating the flow of energy through the spell form. However, far more popular was preparing the phantasmal sigils and storing them in a ready-to-cast state while they stayed anchored on the user's Qi core or upon an enchanted item.
Powerful mages like Mira had many overlapping spell forms anchored on their cores. It required ever-increasing power and skill to create additional layers of pre-formed spells. Weak mages had small cores and not enough “surface area” to anchor many spell forms. Additionally, each idle spell had a small but cumulative drain upon a mage’s energy to prevent it from fading before use. If a mage maintained too many spell forms, they might not have enough energy to spare for activating and executing the spells.
Mira was a magus with years of growth to her Qi core and the knowledge of proper stacking techniques for her spell-form layers. Despite her surprise at the spider attack, her years of combat-casting enabled her to quickly activate a repulsive force script, blasting the mass of beasts off her. The bodies crashed up and down the hall and against the walls and ceiling in a shower of gore and bug parts.
“Go’dan’it! Mah mout wa open! Gak! Pfft!” Mira gagged and spit as she brushed bug parts off her robes. Tiamat sniggered as she hovered above Mira. She had taken to the air and had escaped the spiders' rush and the resulting splatter fest. Mira grimaced in disgust and then was horrified to see the fishing pole tangled up and her priceless Portable Hole had been torn apart during her aborted attempt to recover it.
Before Mira could even begin to grieve over her loss, a fast-paced clanking rattled down the hall coming from down the hall, the source of the fleeing spiders. Another few spiders skittered past Mira as a clanking contraption wheeled into sight. It immediately blasted the fleeing arachnids, and Mira, in a spray of spell fire.
With a resounding clang, the flames subsided. Mira, only slightly singed, fought to get free of her cloak and see what happened. The Impervious Cloak had deflected far worse in its day. Made of dragon scales lined with a blend of finely woven mithril and orichalcum thread, its outside layer was highly resistant to magic, piercing, and elemental attacks; while the inside lining absorbed blunt force and empowered the cloak. The garb had been enchanted with a beast-like intelligence and would interpose itself when she was attacked. Sometimes, it got a little too protective, as it was now, where she had to fight to free herself from its tight cocoon-like embrace.
“You really need to keep your guard up. We’re in the legendary death trap dungeon now, no time for hysterics, M.” Tiamat scolded from atop the caved-in body of the flame-throwing automaton. Mira finally got her cloak under control and stood up.
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“Gods, I hate spiders. And stuff like this is exactly why we explore together, T. We’re a team. I know you will always have my back. Now, I need to rinse bug guts out of my mouth.” Mira countered. After a drought of water from her Polyphial flask, Mira walked over to stand near Tiamat and the wrecked machine.
“So, what have we here, then?” Mira asked, bending over the device.
“A pile of parts, thanks to me. I don’t think it even saw you. It was after the spiders.” Tiamat said.
Mira inspected the partially destroyed device. It had appeared to be a cheap, magic-tech-style R2D2 droid, at least it had before Tiamat had cannonballed through it. Instead of legs, it had big steel wagon wheels. Instead of LEDs and circuitry, it sported sigils, glyphs, and some special gems with runes to sense the area and more to store and convert mana to a fire aspect.
“It looks like gnomish work, judging from the mechanisms and sigaldry. Pretty crude though. I hope it doesn’t have any magical connections to the palace security. I don’t see anything in the way of alarm or communication sigils. Either it’s a dumb pest control device, or you were too fast for it, T.”, Mira concluded.
"Hopefully, the first one. I don’t hear any alarms.” Tiamat answered. “I am so jealous of those flame throwers. I’m a damn dragon, why can’t I breathe fire!”
“Huh, those fire gems are quite a lot better than just a single spell trap gem, those are permanent enchantments. If we find a safe room, maybe I can rig you something. Why on earth did you wait until now to mention this? I could have figured something out at the tower, where I have all my supplies.” Mira asked.
“I don’t know, it didn't seem as important when we aren't running for our lives. So, which way now?” Tiamat asked.
Mira took a couple of breaths to calm down and allowed her mage vision to dominate over her normal eyesight. The threads of fate went in both directions, but the path where the monster traffic came from was slightly stronger and more active.
“I think we track back to where all these things came from. Do you mind taking the lead? You are better about being sneaky with your chameleon scales.” Mira asked. Tiamat flapped silently down the hall, avoiding the still burning webs lining the walls, and tried to blend into the gloomy passage.
Mira and Tiamat were able to proceed quickly but stealthily into the Cloud Palace. They encountered more spiders, but the little things proved no match for Tiamat’s claws and her occasional use of the fire gem Mira had rigged into her tiny horns with some Mithril wire. If their numbers were too much for the dragonette to dispatch quickly, Mira used a custom spell she called Multi-Missile.
This spell would launch a flurry of magical missiles, each embodying a different elemental energy: force, fire, lightning, ice, light, shadow, poison, stone, wind blades, summoned acid, crystal, anti-magic void bolts, and more. The spell maintained a connection to the bolts to verify their impact results, the most effective bolt would be the only bolt charged for continuous fire until the spell was discontinued, or Mira ran dry of stored mana.
The only pain in the butt was that by using the spell from her phantasmal array, she would need to redo it. This spell had a very complex sigaldry script which could take a while to redraw. Mira, of course, had a hack for that. She had two identical spells stored in her array. She had developed a method where she could use her spare, almost like a carbon copy process, to quickly redraft and set her spent spell form. When it came to magical firepower, Mira was a heavy hitter. Due to her cautious nature, she saved her personal spells for unplanned emergencies and generally relied on preprepared spell gems and her magical equipment.
The hallways sported many mundane rooms for janitorial supplies, magically mediated heating, cooling, and plumbing, and a surprising number of empty guest and sitting rooms. Mira found one mechanical room with unpowered gnomish pest control automatons, and she swiftly stored them in her dimensional inventory. Mira would take the whole castle if it would fit in her storage.
The pair steadily covered ground following a complex path through the rooms and halls by expeditiously minding and following the Faen tide-flows.
The spiders, which Mira had used a spell to divine information about, were called Shadow-Web Arachnids. They were demonstrably weak critters. Mostly they depended upon web traps to gather small prey, but their spawn rate was crazy fast. The pair encountered a lot of them and more than once found other creatures, trapped and dead, in the webs. A tiny pixie-like imp called a Glimmerling was one such, another was a tiny little mushroom man called a RedCap. The spiders were vulnerable to most attack types and easily dispatched.
They only encountered the Gnomish Exterminator Automaton once more. It was more durable, and resistant to fire and piercing attacks, but a solid hit would generally take them apart. Luckily, they weren’t tied into any magical security system, so removing them didn’t appear to force the pair to change their plan of stealthy exploration. The fire gems and golem parts, of course, went into Mira’s storage.
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