Aurelian slammed back onto the ground with a pained wheeze and his sword clattered down beside him. He heaved for breath as his sweat-beaded torso — his shirt long-since discarded — rose and fell with exertion and the desperate need for oxygen. Tarixi hovered nearby, suspended in the air with her arms folded and zero pity in her gaze.
“That was better, Aurelian, but not nearly good enough. You barely managed to defeat your enemy and you’re useless for at least the next minute. How are you planning on facing the source of the Undead if this is your best?”
“I just defeated three Aspirant tier undead!” He wheezed.
“And you did so only because they were being remarkably stupid in their approach. Had they even once worked with proper coordination to attack, you’d have been dead.”
“None of the undead so far have—”
“So far. That is correct. That does not mean none of them ever will! We have spoken about this.”
Aurelian grunted at her more than fair rebuttal and sighed as he reached up to rub his face, and took a moment to review his sheet after the latest round of training.
Name: Aurelian Lucis Imperius
Temper: Untempered (Purified Novitiate)
Core: Calamity Core (Ignition Stage)
Level: 18 | Race: Elysean (L) | Origin: Nephilim (L) | Gender: Male | Zodiac: Dragon (L)
Health: 560 | Mana: 186 | Stamina: 137
STR: 58 | AGI: 43 | DEX: 42 | VIT: 56 | END: 27 | INT: 40 | PER: 23 | WIL: 66 | CHA: 24
Mind Skills: Revelate (E) 9 | Linguistics (UC) 1 | Philology (R) 5 | Exploration (UC) 6 | Investigation (UC) 6 | Iron Will (R) 19 | Tactician (R) 7 | Deception (UC) 3
Body Skills: Pain Tolerance (UC) 23 | Longsword Mastery (C) 23 | Running (C) 19 | Dodge (C) 20 | Durable (UC) 18 | Brawling (C) 13 | 14 Fire Resistance (UC) 11 | Lightning Resistance 8 (UC) | Ice Resistance 4 (UC) | Breath Control (UC) 12 | Acrobatics (UC) 9
Spirit Skills: Mana Control (R) 15 | Firebolt (UC) 13 | Shockbolt (UC) 8
Traits: Fast Learner (E)
Titles: Elysean Reclaimer (U) | Survivor (R)
Languages: Draconic
62% to Level 19
You have 18 Skill Points Available!
You have 3 Skill Evolution Points Available!
Strength, agility, dexterity, and endurance had all improved by at least two levels — or six in case of endurance — and pushed him toward a higher capacity of power in combat. He had also gained several new skills thanks to the various nightmares he had been subjected to, and the amount of times he had been forced to lie about not being angry at those same nightmares in a convincing manner. He still wanted to grumble thinking about receiving the Deception skill notification. It made him feel almost dirty, and yet he suspected Tarixi had wanted him to develop it. There were plenty of reasons, but he hadn’t bothered to ask. She’d tell him when she was ready.
As for his Attribute improvements, well, there were by no means any massive leaps outside of endurance, and even that was more due to Tarixi pushing him until he collapsed repeatedly with neither remorse nor restraint. He sighed and with a flick of eyes stole a quick glance at the new clock installed at the top of his HUD, which happily told him it had been almost sixteen hours since they had started his three-day training montage. Even with all his improvement, and indeed there were many; Aurelian was somewhat biased as to his perspective on which qualified as a true breakthrough. In his opinion? It was undoubtedly the fact he had finally been able to start learning proper magic.
Aurelian couldn’t help but grin at the memory of its apotheosis.
> “You must focus!” Tarixi had all but growled at him as he’d lost control of his mana for the literal umpteenth time, and the spell he’d attempted to form had fizzled into nothingness.
>
>
>
> “I am focusing—!”
>
>
>
> “No you are not. You are thinking about the result instead of looking toward the journey. Magic is not a snap of the fingers discipline. It is a process, one that was refined to an artform in the time of the Era. Start again from the top, and speak the process out loud as you go through it.”
>
>
>
> Aurelian had given Tarixi a frustration-fuelled glare as she’d ordered him to start again, but had not argued. His eagerness to learn magic and lingering guilt from the realisation of his various faux pas statements to the Echo had gone a long way to smother his instinctive desire to snap back at her due to his own frustrations. He had closed his eyes and attempted to centre himself like she’d instructed, immersing himself in a darkness of his own mental creation.
>
>
>
> Then he’d started to weave.
>
>
>
> It was a process that was hard to describe in any other way. He had reached inside of himself and, with great care, identified and taken hold of the ‘threads’ of mana flowing within his channels. These he had started to ‘guide’ toward the many spider webbing routes throughout his interior self that led to various different ‘paths’ of his physical anatomy.
>
>
>
> Tarixi had, at the beginning of their training, enlightened him to the concept of ‘mana gates’ inside of his body, and only after several attempts at reworking the explanation in a myriad of forms had Aurelian realised that it had been chakras of which she spoke. Fucking Chakras. It had felt as if he had been preparing for that realisation his entire adult life, given his obsession with LitRPG and Cultivation — and he had dived into his body to find his ‘root’ chakra at the base of his spine with gusto.
>
>
>
> Thus as he gripped and guided the ‘threads’ of mana, he moved them in a controlled circulation throughout his body and toward the still-clogged ‘knot’ that was his root chakra. It was not that the knot prevented chakra flowing through, as Tarixi had explained, but instead that its state meant he could not take advantage of its ‘compression’ and ‘purification’ features.
>
>
>
> Mana in its bodily state was ‘unfiltered’, as Tarixi had told him, and required ‘filtering’ through the gates of the body to achieve a higher potency. For every knotted gate he unravelled, his mana would not only flow faster to its designated points — thus increasing the speed of his spellcasting — but would also flow more efficiently, which in turn would result in a net increase in the amount of mana compressed into a spell and thus a higher level of power with each casting.
>
>
>
> With all this in mind Aurelian had carefully funnelled the mana through his root chakra and upwards into the sacral chakra below his navel. Each time the mana he actively controlled had passed through a chakra, the effort to hold onto it had become noticeably harder. Tarixi had explained it was due to the knotted and closed gates in his body, which instead of balancing and affirming the flow of his mana instead warped it; not unlike a large boulder in a riverbed. The water — or mana in his case — would eventually flow around the impediment, but the result would be a destabilising alteration in the density and consistency of the flow.
>
>
>
> With each gate he had guided the mana through, his resulting control had become less firm and more tenuous until by time he had shifted, cajoled, and shoved the mana toward the crown chakra at the centre and top of his skull; his physical body had been covered in sweat from the sheer effort of controlling the mana. It had been small comfort when Tarixi had happily informed him that opening even one chakra would have made the effort monumentally easier, as each one essentially added ten percent more control.
>
>
>
> In the case of knotted gates, they conversely detracted almost seventy percent of his control by time the mana had flowed through from the first to the seventh chakra. He had just barely and by the sheer force of his Iron Will skill been able to hold control of his mana, and in that moment had done as Tarixi instructed and ‘plunged’ it into his spine. The energy had raced through his wide, rushing spinal pathway like a sudden torrent of power. He had sat up straighter at the feeling, and it had felt like soothing warmth and relaxing cool surging through his spine and nervous system.
>
>
>
> At the moment the onrushing tide had met the targeted branch points, Aurelian had forced it apart and toward one of the other ‘main’ pathways from his spine to his shoulders and down his arms. His eyes had snapped open and, as Tarixi had painstakingly instructed, he had given the ready mana form and fixture by incanting his desire with a flare of Soulforce and an application of Intent.
>
>
>
> “Firebolt!”
>
>
>
> The small streak of flame that had erupted from his outstretched hands had blazed forward nearly eight metres before guttering out, and had left his mana drained down by a sixth. It had also resulted in an onset of vertigo and accompanying lethargy that had forced him down onto his back, unable to do anything more than listen as Tarixi lectured him on the correlation between chakra-locked spellcasting, mana shock, and stamina erosion.
>
>
>
> It had been a long lecture.
“Aurelian!” Tarixi chided with a tone he’d come to identify as ‘long-suffering teacher’. “Are you daydreaming again? Your stamina is almost fully recharged, by my calculations! It’s time for another round.”
Aurelian sighed and closed his eyes for one more drawn out, precious moment in order to reconcile his thoughts… and then pressed his now-calloused palms against the granite floor and pushed himself up and to a sitting position. His stamina, at a quick glance, was in fact restoring at a rapid rate — but it was not full, and he had no intention of granting Tarixi the satisfaction of simply launching to his feet on command.
Small rebellions. Small victories. It was all he had, really.
He studiously ignored the spectral Goblin’s glare and turned to pick up his sword, which he promptly used as leverage to push himself off the floor and to his feet in full. As innocent a smile as he could manage was directed toward Tarixi, and then he settled into a set of rote and useful stretches she had taught him that helped with relaxing the muscles.
They were admittedly very good at exactly that.
Aurelian turned his eyes next toward the actual source of his pain instead of the floating Echo, and narrowed in his focus on a new addition to the otherwise plain chamber within which Bael’tharax’s monumentous bulk — no longer quite as terrifying — lay suspended: a stone plinth topped by a humming blue crystal, with Tarixi’s Memory Gem inserted at the base of the crystal’s mount.
The Simulacrum Generator was in essence a mana-weaving construct that crafted enemies of specified difficulty and number as high as Specialist tier and in as many as a full squad of ten. He doubted he would ever need to test the device’s maximum limits in the near or less-than-near future, but knowing its capabilities was certainly helpful. He had also found something else that had lifted his spirits when he’d used Revelate on the plinth.
Name: Simulacrum Generator
Type: Mana Weaving Construct
Rarity: Epic
Description: This Simulacrum Generator was one of the premier tools of training and advancement for the younger and less capable members of Elysean society. It possesses the ability to create and grant limited autonomy to up to ten Mana Constructs simulated at any capability from Level 1 Beginner to Level 74 high Specialist tier.
Special Effects: All Attributes and Skills Advance 10% faster when training against this Simulacrum’s Mana Constructs.
The additional ten percent experience had been, in a word, game changing for his ability to advance his skills without breaking himself on ludicrously high levelled constructs. As it was Tarixi, who had taken direct control of the Simulacrum, had ensured that while the constructs wouldn’t kill or permanently cripple him, they would do everything just shy of both. It had resulted in him being beaten, kicked, stabbed, clawed, punched, burned, shocked, paralysed, and repeatedly knocked down to near the point of death.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
Due to the fact that he wasn’t in actual lethal danger, however, none of it had triggered any kind of reward or achievement from the System. That in and of itself was a point of simmering and continuous frustration, as Aurelian had grown quite used to the odd and wonderful ways the System rewarded his less than stellar record for self-preservation.
Oh god. He suddenly realised with alarm. I really am going full Murderhobo.
“So what’s next?” He asked Tarixi out loud to distract himself, while practising swinging his runesword through the air.
“Another test of your mana endurance.” She decided with only a little smug satisfaction. “The same rules as the last few times: You may only use Firebolt or Shockbolt, and may only use one of each on a target. They will have the same vulnerabilities as you might expect actual Undead to possess, and will attempt to close distance with you. If you engage with your runesword, you will lose.”
Aurelian nodded as she clarified the rules once again and took a steadying breath in while shaking out his arms, and shifting from foot to foot in a standard warm-up exercise. Blood pumping as it was, it might have seemed pointless, but Tarixi had told him the importance of such things and he was not one to needlessly question a multi-thousand-year-old battle mage war veteran.
At least not about the truly, blatantly beneficial things.
“This will be the last projection before you must refill the mana well again.” She warned. “Are you ready, Aurelian?”
His awareness shifted to his health, mana, and stamina and confirmed they all showed full. When he had confirmed it he nodded.
“Begin.” Tarixi said without pageantry, generating ten rapidly materialising silhouettes of blue light.
Revelate!
Name: Armoured Skeleton Simulacrum
Race: Mana Construct
Level: 22
Tier: Novitiate
Health: 300/300
Description: A simulated opponent for use in training.
That description was repeated across the hovering text around several of the other Simulacrums, and so Aurelian turned his gaze to the ones that had not yet been ‘tagged’ by his Revelate as identical, and checked in on them as well.
Revelate!
Name: Spellcaster Skeleton Simulacrum
Race: Mana Construct
Level: 26
Tier: Aspirant
Health: 450/450
Description: A simulated opponent for use in training.
Aurelian barely had time to call out in surprise at the lethality of the remaining four skeletons before he had to throw himself aside to avoid not one, but two firebolts aimed at his location. He buried his complaints about Tarixi’s sadism beneath his focus and keyed his Iron Will to full strength so that he could focus.
His Tactician skill passively ramped itself up and clarified his situation in his mind, and Aurelian acted by rapid assessment as much as by instinct. Mana cycled through his body in a way that was almost instinct by that point and he shot his right hand out at one of the approaching skeletons to meet its charge with his magic.
“Firebolt!”
The gout of concentrated flame smashed into the skeleton’s skull and blew it from its neck, killing the simulacrum and dispersing it into an array of effervescent blue lights that were drawn immediately back into the generator. It was a recycling mechanism, Tarixi had explained, which allowed the generator to subsume whatever mana remained after a construct was destroyed. The sooner it broke, the more mana was recovered — though it always recovered less than it had initially infused into them.
A shard of ice smashed into the floor near his feet and Aurelian backpedalled away from the impact point, narrowly avoiding a raking claw from one of the other armour skeletons and darting in-between another two to avoid both their attacks as well. His movement took him into and then out of a sudden melee and he started to turn mid-step while jumping for the air in the same motion.
The Acrobatics skill helped immensely with what he’d come to call a ‘bunny hop’.
Mana roared through his body and he extended a hand toward both a Spellcaster and Armoured Skeleton and discharged two attacks back to back with a sudden and perilous drop of his mana reserves.
“Firebolt!” followed by “Firebolt!” again rang throughout the area.
The Armoured Skeleton staggered back, hurt but not downed, and the Spellcaster did the same — though in its case its greater fragility meant he at least snapped off an arm for his trouble, though he didn’t wait to see the limb turn to motes. By time the arm had dissipated Aurelian had already landed and started running as fast as he could in a wide circle.
He had learned quickly that the undead were both intelligent enough to try and attack as a group, and stupid enough to chase him in a relatively consistent pattern if he widened the arc of his pathway just enough to make it seem as if he were actually running away. He had learned to use just such a method to corral the creatures many times during training, and he anticipated the newest instance to be no different.
He was, unfortunately, proven wrong. Quickly.
Aurelian cursed when the undead split up and moved to cut him off, shifting along the narrower path to intercept him while others maintained gait at his rear. A glance at his mana showed him down to two thirds. It was an improvement from his original expenditure, thanks in part to his levelling of his spells, but was not ideal for what he was facing.
His mind worked furiously as he assessed the now-adapting undead, and quickly he found a logical hole he could exploit. Tarixi had forbidden use of his runesword to engage the undead, but she had said nothing about his body. An amused huff erupted from him at the thought of what he was about to do, and Aurelian threw himself in an abrupt about-face toward the pursuing skeletons.
In the process, he also left the ones swinging around to pincer him abruptly out of position.
More spells were flung at him from the more cautiously moving spellcasters, but Aurelian dodged them or weaved through them carefully. His eyes remained locked on the lead armoured skeleton and moments from the second of impact, he leapt into the air and summoned mana into his right hand. He did not unleash it however, and trusted his Pain Tolerance to help him ignore the immediate pressure-pain that built from the sudden ‘blockage’ of flow.
The distance between himself and the skeleton closed rapidly, and upon reaching his target Aurelian extended his right hand and — with a snarl of effort — slammed his palm into the Simulacrum’s skull and slammed it backward and into the ground with every point of his strength and his body weight. As he did, he growled out the ignition phrase with every speck of his Intent behind it.
“Firebolt.”
The creature’s head detonated against the cavern floor and Aurelian was thrown backward from the blast with a hiss of pain. He flew through the air for almost three seconds before smashing into the rocky ground, and only had time to check his health — it sat ten percent lower — before rolling away a little too slowly from a discharged shockbolt.
“Fuck!” He shouted in pain-fuelled anger as his leg spasmed and collapsed under him. “That fucking hurt!” He complained even as he rolled away to dodge another volley of magical attacks, and attempt to orient himself on the closest enemies: two Skeletons charging him from his rear, two from his front, and the spellcasters encroaching from his right.
Picking his targets quickly, Aurelian threw himself to his right and rolled up to his feet with his hands already held at his sides. His legs pumped as he sprinted, and his stamina burned dangerously low while he forced mana to cycle inside of his body. His regeneration was keeping up, somewhat, but he was still below half and had to make it count. He’d need to buy time, make space, and give himself enough breathing room to recover… and that meant two of the spellcasters had to go.
Aurelian’s approach had not gone unnoticed, however, and the spellcasters reacted accordingly. Two of them flung ice spikes in his direction, a third cast a crackling shockbolt, and the armless one on the far right threw a firebolt at him as some sort of karmic retribution. Or perhaps it was pissed, if mana constructs were even capable of such. He was uncertain.
What he did know was that he had to eat at least two of the spells in order to complete his own attack run with any success.
This will suck. He thought to himself before throwing his body into the path of the ice spikes. Lightning and fire cascaded past him and burst somewhere behind, and Aurelian gritted his teeth a moment before the slightly slower air and water mana — formed into shards of ice a foot long and half as thick — slammed into him like buffered gunshots.
Aurelian staggered mid-stride and barely managed to keep balance, while his lungs struggled to restore the air that had been punched out of them. He managed to retain focus only through a combination of his Iron Will, Pain Resistance, and stubborn refusal to surrender.
Ice Resistance is now Level 5!
He put on a final burst of speed and bled his stamina dry as he closed the distance, all while mana cycled rapidly into his hands. Instead of attempting to take the skeletons down as before with his weight, he shifted position mid-run and threw himself to his knees. He ignored the pain as his pants were shredded further and the skin beneath grazed and bloodied by his incredible momentum, eyes locked solely on the two undead. With his hands angled slightly to avoid having to dual-cast — an ability he still hadn’t mastered — and his activation timing gracing him with a solid one second of error, Aurelian bellowed the ignition phrases as he passed by the staring undead.
“Firebolt!” he shouted as a gout of flame exploded into the skull of the first and dissipated its body instantly into azure energy, followed by another “Firebolt!” that triggered the second blast to erupt from his right hand and consume the head of the second spellcaster in an inferno, one which detonated the more fragile skull into a spray of bone and subsequent eruption of mana motes.
Aurelian barely had time to do more than huff in victory before he was scrambling to his feet again, and wheezed while his stamina flashed angrily at him in his HUD. He had burned it down to three percent with his last mad stunt, and even with the regeneration he knew he’d need to find a way to buy time until it resolved itself into a position he could put it to proper use again. Or in simpler terms; he needed to take it easy until he caught his breath.
The implacable quartet of armoured skeletons were already closing distance, the spellcasters were reorienting, and he was almost bottomed out on mana. It was a dangerous situation, and one that Tarixi had warned him could happen in a real engagement. That was the point of training, after all: to prepare for the worst and learn to take advantage of it.
A quick bit of haphazard mathematics told him the melee skellies — he suppressed a tired chortle at the thought — would intersect with him in roughly eight seconds, and the spellcasters that remained would volley again in three.
Aurelian had focused inward while his mind calculated those numbers, and leaned into his new ‘Breath Control’ skill. It had been part of his learning when figuring out how to control and weave his mana, and had been another Cultivation-themed skill he’d found in common with many of the fictions he’d read. Breathing after all was a core component to any meditation. He felt himself calming and his stamina regeneration ticking along solidly as he relaxed away his subtle, jittery tension until he found a kind of ready calm.
Aurelian’s eyes snapped open and he looked up as a firebolt and shockbolt were conjured in the hands of the spellcasters. His mind narrowed in focus and he could almost hear his own breathing.
Inhale. The spells materialised. Exhale. The spellcasters raised their arms. Inhale. The fire and lightning started to discharge. Exhale. The magic arced through the air with bleeding contrails of light and mana. Inhale. The spells crossed the intervening distance to his position like quarrels from a crossbow. Exhale. His stamina finally hit twenty percent. Inhale.
Aurelian exploded forward with a surge of strength and agility, faintly cracking the granite under his ruined shoes and more launching himself at the two undead Simulacrums than sprinting at them. The ground behind him exploded when the spells hit, but he was already gone. He extended his palms outward as he accelerated and reached out to grip the construct on the left — the shockbolt spellcaster — by the shoulders with a grunt of agony in his wrists at the impact. Trusting in his Pain Resistance and Durable skills to see him through, Aurelian smashed his knees into the creature’s torso. The spellcaster went down with Aurelian riding shotgun, and before it even hit the ground Aurelian was tensed.
Brawling is now Level 14!
The moment the creature was crushed by his velocity, weight, and the unforgiving power of inertia into the stone; Aurelian threw himself at the one-armed Simulacrum that remained. He reached out to grip the creature’s already-conjuring left limb, twisted it around toward its own face, and shoved its igniting palm against its skull as it detonated a firebolt. The creature’s skull vaporised under the power of its own spell, and Aurelian snarled in satisfaction while turning to his left…
…directly toward the imminently approaching quartet of charging skeletons.
His stamina was alarmingly low, his mana was barely at twenty-five percent, and his hands were already starting to shake. He did not have enough mana for more than two firebolts, but perhaps he’d only need two. Aurelian’s mind whirled as Tactician fed him information in a passive process and he broke into a run to meet the charging skeletons.
The first to come he ignored entirely and threw himself into a powerslide between its legs, bypassing it completely and rolling out of the slide to dodge the reaching claws of the one behind it. Aurelian’s mana had already been cycling as he’d moved and he pointed his hand up at the skeleton while it bent toward him.
“Firebolt!”
Its body started dissipating the moment the flames blasted through its skull, and Aurelian turned to face the first and now-encroaching skeleton, while also being fully aware of the two coming at him from his rear. He wasted no time while glancing at his stamina, and used a burst of strength and speed to duck under the skeleton’s grasping arms and grab it by the hips. The construct’s claws tore at his exposed back, and Aurelian — completely lost in the moment — bellowed “John Cena!” with a howl of rage, pain, and focused aggression while lifting the creature bodily from the granite and suplexing it into the waiting bodies of the two undead already upon him.
Condition: Bleeding (Minor)
The tactic barely worked as the three skeletons collided in a mess of mass, and while it didn’t take down the new pair nor kill the suplexed skeleton, it did give Aurelian time to roll away and scramble to his feet with a heavy, exhausted breath. He could feel the burn on his spine where the creature’s claws had raked him, but he refused to let it distract him and instead rapidly assessed the three skeletons already recovering to come at him again.
Aurelian winced at the feeling of his body’s screaming protests and, ignoring them, threw himself at the skeletons again. They each were of a height with him or slightly shorter, but that only helped his efforts. Using his superior agility, Aurelian ducked under the two rapid swipes thrown at him from the closest creature and kicked out to his right to leverage his power and push away the second.
The suplexed skeleton started to approach and Aurelian chose to give it no time to act as he charged after the kicked Simulacrum and threw himself into the air and wrapped his arm around its head. A snarl of pain was pulled from his lips as the creature bit down on his right bicep, but Aurelian was not to be denied. His Iron Will, Durable, and Pain Tolerance skills flared in unison while he used his weight to force his arm down and around the creature’s neck, turned so his feet hit the floor, and then heaved to bend it over backward.
Strength has risen to 59!
Brawling is now Level 15!
Brawling is now Level 16!
Condition: Bleeding (Moderate)
A terrifyingly audible crack resounded throughout the cavern, and Aurelian tore the skeleton’s head from its spine in a spray of razor shards that gouged his own abused flesh, and tore open his cheek before the entire creature faded into motes of mana. He needed to catch his breath but had no time, and instead scrambled to his right with a stagger and a cry of pain as another clawed swipe tore open his left shoulder. Blood arced through the air and Aurelian used the adrenaline, fear, and rage to focus on his task.
The skeletons were already pivoting to face him when he moved in and, with the last dregs of his stamina, weaved an elaborate Z shape around their slashing claws to emerge behind them both. He received another vicious cut to his lower back as recompense, but the flank succeeded in buying him two precious seconds in which the puppet-like creatures were forced to shift awkwardly to face him, now at their backs.
Aurelian used the full investiture of his strength attribute and, when they turned, stepped forward to grip the right arm of the right one and left arm of the left one. With them held Aurelian forced both arms and bodies together as they attempted to gauge him, and used them as leverage to swing himself up and straddle the right one around the hip. His core muscles screamed while he pulled his wounded body up to allow him to face them both from a side-on mount, his head coming up level with the grappled skeleton’s own.
Both heads turned to face him at once.
Aurelian pointed his right hand at the head of the one he had mounted.
“Dodge this,” he snarled as his mana blazed. “FIREBOLT!”
Both skeletons’ heads were obliterated by the blast of close range magic, and Aurelian smashed into the unforgiving rock below while his body went into mana overdraw deprivation and his stamina bottomed out.
Firebolt is now Level 14!
“Get Trinity’d,” he croaked with a deliriously bloody smile, laughed, and then succumbed to unconsciousness.