You have fallen under the effect of [Nethergill toxin]
You have gained the Status effect: [Fearful]
You have gained the Status effect: [Terrified]
You have gained the status effect: [Frenzied]
…
[Nethergill toxin] has been purged from your mana channels.
Ding!
Your party has slain….
Your party has slain Mature Woodland Locust – LV 22
Your party has slain Mature Woodland Locust – LV 25
Your party has slain Gold-Specked Locust – LV 29
You have gained Experience!
You have reached LV 34
You have reached LV 35
All the notifications, hundreds of them, served as evidence that indeed, Janet's plan was well underway.
Yet despite her outwardly steely resolve, her heart was rife with palpitations as the reality of what she was about to do sank in. She’d not been merely acting scared at Janet’s threat to use [Construct Zone]. Even now, as Janet made the necessary preparations, she felt her knees tremble at the mere memory of the incident inside the tunnels.
Her fear, however, was not regarding the zone cast by Janet that was currently getting smothered by the eerily still horde of locusts. No, she feared that Janet would use her and her peculiar [Talent] to activate that infernal zone of death.
“This is a bad idea, Janet,” she remembered complaining, her voice laced with doubt after Janet presented her plan to hunt the pigs right inside their stronghold.
According to the battle-hungry maniac, there was no better way to mine Experience than in a life-or-death battle. And if she knew hogs, they would protect their dens with a ferocity rivaling a dragon with egg.
“Why are you doing this? Didn’t Sylthis warn you countless times not to get into unnecessary trouble?”
Janet, looking resplendent in her snazzy leathers that never seemed to wrinkle, suddenly lost all her cheer. Her face turned into a frown, and her veneer of confidence crumbled into clear frustration. “Since the demon, I’ve not been able to level up. Not once!”
“But…” she was lost for words. “But we’ve been taking down Second Circle beasts every day!”
“I know!” she threw her hands into the air. “I think I might have broken something inside me when I took in the demonic flame.”
She had no way of consoling her. Leveling was the main way – the only way for most people – that one could use to quantify their growth. Janet’s mana density had increased and her strength had ticked up a few notches, but she attributed that to her diet. Levels were more intrinsic than simple Stat increases.
“If I can’t level, I’ll never be able to use spells.”
There was a note of helpless finality in that statement that chilled Aurelia to the core. Janet was all about magic. She slept in an envelope made of magic, she studied runes and formations while she ate, and even her walks to their hunting sites were spent trying to reconcile her theoretical knowledge with the conventional understanding.
While she enjoyed those discussions and had learned a lot from them, Janet cherished every moment of them. She lived for magic, and the only way to unlock more functionalities of mana was to advance through the Circles.
First Circle gave one access to mana, along with a few Skills. Second Circle, to spell circles and rudimentary runic formations. Third Circle tied the two together, allowing one access to spells as System templates depending on one’s understanding and proficiency.
Basically, at Third Circle, one could perform a Fireball spell within moments, as long as they had a complete understanding of the powerful spell and its properties. Janet never stopped talking about how versatile [Fireball] was as a spell, and how she couldn’t wait to cast a different [Fireball] for every beast she encountered.
Having to give up on that dream was a fate too cruel to imagine.
“You know what? Let’s go hunting for pork,” she acquiesced. She had a faint inkling as to what she’d agreed to face, but the sheer joy that radiated from Janet after her acceptance dulled the pangs of terror that threatened to turn her femurs to jelly.
A trek into the darkness followed, neither of them needing any light due to their honed sense of mana. Perhaps they should have invested in a torch, anyway, seeing how things panned out.
Before they could even hunt one hog, they found themselves in a rough cylindrical chamber that had a hole right at the center of the ceiling that was open to the sky. The ceiling was over ten meters from the ground, and a pond of clear water at the floor’s center reflected sunlight onto the walls in a mesmerizing display.
Peering deeper into the more shaded areas revealed the extent of their naivete. Huge hogs, each a meter across and with protruding tusks that were longer than each of their legs were peacefully sleeping away the hours of daylight. Each of them, tens in number from a rough count, began to shift in their sleep and sniff at the air when the two entered their den.
Before either of them could regret being such huge morons, a hog that proudly grunted out its displeasure at their presence blocked the exit.
“We’re dead meat, aren’t we?”
“Not necessarily,” Janet sighed after a short pause where she stared into the hole in the ceiling. “Do you trust me?”
“What…” she stammered as Janet took hold of both her shoulders and gazed deep into her eyes.
“I need you to trust me on this,” Janet stated before her shadow rose from the ground and linked to hers.
“What are you doing?”
“You know how you can barely use any metal magic?” she nodded, dumbfounded at the sudden shift in the conversation.
“Well, Darius and I have a theory that you’ve not yet awakened to your [Talent], yet.”
“And you want me to do that here? Now?”
“No, I want you to explode!” Janet made the universal gesture for boom, her eyes shining with insane glee, like a mad scientist.
When she tried to pull back, Janet’s grip tightened and her eyes grew softer. “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. I’ll even restore you to full function if anything goes wrong.”
Before she could speak out regarding the sinister notes in Janet’s tone, she felt a stream of warm, euphoria-inducing, lifeforce-bolstering energy cascade into her mana pathways like a flash flood in the desert.
“What is that?” She managed to squeeze the question through her mushy brain that wanted to just relish the warmth and comfort of the strange energy.
“I never told you, but my main [Talent] is actually not shadow. I can’t tell you what it is in case some unsavory characters try to torture it out of you one day, but I’ll be using it to stimulate your [Talent] into activation.”
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“And… you’re sure that it’ll work?” There was a tinge of desperation in her voice that she hated. A failed metal mage in a household of brewers was only useful as a bargaining chip in an arranged marriage, and not a very good one at that.
“It’s completely safe.” Janet missed the point entirely. “I tried it on a puppy once, and he Awakened almost instantly, and with no major issues.”
“A puppy?!”
“He’s called Tippy.” The flow of energy slowed to a trickle as Janet’s eyes gained a far-off look. “I hope you’ll get to meet him someday. He’s the bestest little guy.”
“What element did he awaken to?” She wanted to know more about Janet’s longing look, but there was danger in the air and she had doubts that even with control over metal, she would be of much help.
“Demon flame.” Seeing the confusion on her face, Janet expounded, “He’s a hellhound.”
That… that made her gain some faith in the success of Janet’s mad plan. If she’d caused the awakening of a creature that by logic and Natural Law could not awaken within their Sphere, perhaps there was hope for her.
As the flow resumed and her every organ was bathed in what felt like paradise, her mind drifted with a blinding crispness to the memory of the day her parents had decided to focus all their efforts on her brothers, leaving her education to the Seldorian Institute.
The schooling there was below par as her abysmal comprehension of her chosen profession attested. To add salt to injury, a noble in a school of commoners was a prime target for bullying, especially when those commoners were aware that her parents had washed their hands off her.
Seldor-Tep was a small town, after all.
All that isolation and ostracization, all that resentment and shame, simply because her primary [Talent] had refused to manifest. How was that a failure on her part? In the four primal elements, she was way more skilled and proficient when compared to her agemates, even without the advantage of private tutoring.
She could cast spells at record speed and formulate complicated rune arrays in one go, something that even experienced adventuring mages struggled with.
And yet, even when she completed a Guild commission at 12 or won the town’s Spellweaver Contest beating out her oh-so-talented cousins, her parents refused to give her the time of day. All because of stupid metal affinity.
What good was the element anyway when…
Her depressive spiral came to a stuttering halt as the deluge of warm energy stopped. Before she could begin to think that Janet had reconsidered her course of action, her entire body lit up in a golden glow.
“Here we go. Now, try to channel everything into my shadow!”
“Huh?”
“You don’t want to actually explode, do you?” Janet asked. “Your core will begin accumulating mana in alarming amounts. You’ll need a place towards which to shunt the excess.”
The warmth had been a trap to get her to relax and accept the infernal energy into her mana system. Instead of making her feel like an angel bathed in holy light, her entire body felt like it was being assaulted by a million needles that had all been preheated to excruciating pain degrees.
“You don’t seem to be doing okay,” Janet observed coolly like an alchemist looking over an ongoing experiment.
“Of course, I’m not,” she growled through gritted teeth. “I feel like all my cells just caught fire!”
“Huh, Tippy never experienced anything like that. Although, since he was awakening to fire, might he have been resistant to sensations of burning?”
“Are you seriously comparing me to a puppy right now?” Her anger somehow intensified the pain, so she dialed back the vitriol in her voice a little bit. “We are literally about to get stomped down by a bunch of three-ton pigs!”
Janet chuckled. The sheer audacity…
“Not even the hogs are dense enough to approach the storm of raw, uncontrolled mana that is radiating from your body.”
Uncontrolled mana? What was she talking about?
Ignoring the crazy mage with her emotionless gaze of scientific disinterest as well as the scorching in her insides, she let her [Mana Sense] inspect the space around her. Janet was right. It was as though she had been turned into a fount of mana, her pores gushing hundreds of MP every second.
“What is going on?” what was happening was supposed to be impossible. Where was the mana coming from? Was the pain a result of her body breaking down into its constituent affinities?
“I stimulated your dormant [Talent] by infusing your soul with frankly ungodly amounts of catalytic energy. Okay, okay. I’ll put it in layman's terms, just stop glaring at me with those bulging eyes,” Janet took a step back, her eyes holding Aurelia’s gaze.
“I’m supplying your soul with what you might understand as refined Experience. It’s made up of multiple elements and affinities, and all in relatively even saturations so all our bases are covered. I’m hoping that among the hundreds if not thousands of elemental affinities inside that energy, just one will stimulate your [Talent] enough for it to roar into action.”
“What about the mana? Am I going to explode?” She was panicking, and somehow that was making the mana come out in even larger amounts.
The way Janet explained it, the power she’d injected into her body had been drawn into the soul, as that was its natural nexus inside a body – like mana sought out a core. The energy stimulated multiple affinities that made up her soul, most of which were structural to it but that she did not possess the ability to control.
The energy, according to her, agitated the dormant Mysteries in her soul – even the trace ones that she’d obtained from say, eating a certain beast or watching a beautiful sunset. Magic was weird like that, every experience building upon one’s accumulations.
And since all those Mysteries were being stimulated, her soul drove her core to produce mana of that type, which caused the phenomenon she was witnessing.
As to the actual Awakening, Janet directed her to try and control the mana that was accumulating inside her core and direct it into Janet’s shadow. Janet would facilitate its manifestation, and they would then have some clue as to what her [Talent] actually entailed.
“The fact that you struggle so much with manipulating metal got me thinking; what if your [Talent] isn’t centered upon all metals, but rather one specific metal? It would make sense that you could still control other metals since they have overlapping qualities, but since they’re only based on adjacent Mysteries, you suffer that huge inefficiency in mana use.”
Like Janet’s fire affinity and Hellfire. Although she could control flames perfectly, demon flame had almost scorched her to a lump of coal. She could control it because it was of the fire affinity, but there were penalties involved.
As directed, she calmed her heartbeat by controlling her breathing. She then deactivated her [Mana Sense] since it was blinding and distracting. The next step was taking hold of her core. It was her mana. If she could command even a fraction of this power…
She tried to influence her core, and thrice she failed spectacularly. Her mind was simply too weak to take command of such substantive amounts of mana.
The affinities that were gushing out of her were those that her core couldn’t hold on to. As for the ones that it could hold, the rate at which her core was filling up promised an imminent explosion if she didn’t act fast.
Chastened, she decided to follow Janet’s directive. Rather than aim for complete control, she pushed at the mana to make it flow from her core to the pathways and diverted it toward her shadow. It felt… odd. Before attempting it, she hadn’t been aware that her shadow was home to a network of mana pathways.
“Good, keep going,” Janet cooed with encouragement. “Don’t let up. Try to take hold of as much mana as you can so your system cultivates a memory of what affinity it is that you can control.”
Reminded of what the end goal was, she intensified her efforts. The amount of flow that she directed increased from a fraction of a percentage to about a hundredth, then it ticked up from there as she got a feel of what affinities to target.
There was of course the primal four, and those hitched a ride nonetheless as they were the most abundant, but she began to discern another hue – a shadowy grey that shifted from iridescent brilliance to the greyness of a cloudy twilight depending on how she looked at it.
Was that her element? Had she finally cracked it?
“Concentrate!” Janet commanded. Her voice carried a bit of strain, but Aurelia ignored it. She reasserted control over the flow.
A few minutes more went by while she squeezed out every ounce of mental stamina to direct the flow that didn’t seem to be abating at all. Or was it a few seconds? With the gushing mana and the dead silence of the den, she had no way to tell.
“That’s enough.” Janet’s voice was almost a whisper.
“Hmm?”
“That’s enough practice for the day. If you go on, I might actually explode.”
“But the mana is still building up inside my core!”
“Oh, the energy I gave you is almost spent. Only a few seconds remain.”
Hearing that, she opened her eyes and took a look at her friend. Janet did not seem to be in the best of health. Her skin was shimmering in a sickly grey, and the shadow that connected them was bulging like a distended belly.
“Is that… mana?”
“Yep,” Janet’s every word seemed to exert unbearable strain on her.
“What do we do?” she asked, afraid. If Janet died here, there was no way she’d escape from the den by herself, and even if she did Sylthis would rip her in two and then reanimate her to do it again.
“I think…” Janet’s gaze darted all over the cavern, eventually settling on the shimmering rays of the sun dispersed by the still pond. “Why don’t we try a [Construct Zone]?”
“But that’s my mana,” she argued. “Won’t it end up like the demonic flame?”
Janet gave it a little thought, then she nodded and looked up with purpose in her eyes. “I’ll shape the Skill template, and you’ll feed mana into it.”
Again, she’d shifted the subject.
“Are you thinking of a joint Skill?”
“Precisely.”
Joint Skills only worked when both parties possessed similar affinities. And although they did produce spectacular amounts of power, whenever they failed…
“The mana is already poisoning my body. This is the only way.”
Without waiting for her to argue, Janet simply closed her eyes. A section of her shadow began to undulate ominously. It separated from the rest, only connected by a thin thread.
Gradually, too slow for comfort in her opinion, the separated section began to form into a circular formation. It consisted of runes and geometric shapes arrayed into a square whose edges were fused to the circle’s circumference.
The connecting thread was nested in the circle’s center, right where was this a spell, the mana input runes would be.
“Now!” Janet shouted. “I won’t resist, so just push all the mana inside me through the formation.”
“All the mana?” she asked, “Isn’t that template meant for shadow affinity?”
As she came to learn, [Construct Zone] was one of the most versatile Skill templates. As long as there was enough mana to power its activation, it didn’t matter what input came after. It was why [Construct Zone] could be so violent due to the interactions of the different types of mana fed into it.
“Okay, then.” She exhaled and cracked her knuckles. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Unfortunately, Janet’s knowledge of magic was very much theoretical. And some metals… well, they didn’t like it very much when they were mixed with water and fire.