Time passed slowly as their resources recovered point by point and Pellen’s injuries closed up. They took turns dozing, but neither was truly comfortable enough to sleep.

“What now?” Pellen asked many hours later. “Should we return to the main path?”

Cass reached out for Salos. He was still above them. Cass shook her head. “I don’t think our allies have caught up yet.”

Pellen frowned but didn’t ask how Cass knew. “Then you want to risk another room?”

Cass nodded at the door at the far end of the hall. “Don’t you want to see what else there is here?”

“N-not more than I want to avoid another Soulbound Wolf,” Pellen said.

Cass nodded. That wasn’t unreasonable. “Did that one come because we killed the snakes?”

Its Identify description suggested it might have. On the other hand, it was possible they just patrolled the halls at random and they’d gotten unlucky.

Pellen shrugged, clearly of the same opinion.

“But imagine if we find more skill gems,” Cass said.

Pellen’s eyes glistened hungrily. “I suppose looking won’t hurt.”

The next room had a single snake about twice the size of the twelve in the previous room. It hissed at the sight of Cass and Pellen but did not immediately launch into an attack.

Silversoul Snake (lvl 23)

It was bigger than the ones in the previous room. Its body was as wide as her chest and three times as long as she was tall. Its underbelly was the soft green of the exoplasm, while its back was lined in silver scales and exoskeletal rib bones.

Around them, the walls were lined with shelves, every shelf bursting with books. Pellen’s eyes widened, glazing over the snake like it wasn’t there.

“Do you suppose those are tomes?” Pellen asked quietly. “They look like tomes.”

“They’re probably in ancient Jothi,” Cass warned. Given the writing on the doors and the catacombs dated back to Salos’s era, it seemed unlikely they’d be anything else.

Pellen’s face scrunched up, consternation at war with hope. “They still might have readable spell forms, if not the notes around them…”

“We should continue, then?” Cass asked.

Pellen blinked, perhaps noticing the hissing snake in the center of the room for the first time. “Oh. Right. Um. Yes. Like before, I’ll support you from here.”

Cass nodded. Old books didn’t exactly excite her, but unlike Pellen, she had an angle on actually reading one. Maybe she’d try out Chanting too. Any spells the Averenis family thought were worth locking up had to be pretty good, right?

If nothing else, Pellen couldn’t be the only mage hoping to get a peek at them. She didn’t have an income, so any she could sell would be nice.

Cass tightened her grip on her staff and stepped forward. The snake hissed more forcefully. A final warning.

A Wind Blade flew from her staff, catching the snake across the face. It sliced into the soft flesh between the metal skull.

The snake snapped forward, its body bristling with electricity. Cass Dodged its snapping jaws, slicing along its side as she moved. Her glaive’s blade caught on the first rib of its metal plates, yanking her off balance. She spun as the snake coiled around her.

The narrow tip of its tail looped around her ankle, yanking her off-balance body to the floor. She tumbled, rolling aside as the jaws came at her again.

They missed her by inches. She shoved herself to her feet, spinning around to drive her glaive into the snake’s eyes.

The snake twisted its head, her Wind Blade striking the silver scales of its face instead. It glanced off the plates, sparking as it skidded.

The sparks slithered off its body, dancing into the air and forming a snake of lightning.

Cass pulled back, her staff in a high guard as the lightning snake dive-bombed her. She swatted it to the side, cutting the stream of lightning in two. The front half disintegrated into harmless light, but the back half zipped toward Pellen.

Pellen stood back near the door, their tome open, chanting. Without stopping, they lifted the book and swung it at the incoming lighting, swatting it like a bug.

The snake wasn’t idle while its summoned spell chased Pellen. It snapped at Cass again, its tail slipping behind her ankles.

Cass Dodged forward to avoid tripping, leaning in with her glaive, Staff Mastery stabbing at the snake’s underbelly.

It hissed in pain, sweeping its head through Cass. It took her full in the chest, knocking her across the room to her knees.

It didn’t wait for Cass to get up again, racing after her far faster than a thing with no legs should move. The jaws snapped.

Dodge pulled her away at the last second. But it wasn’t enough.

Lightning burst from the snake’s body as she scrambled away, slamming into her back. Her scream froze in her throat as her muscles seized.

The snake snapped after Cass, jaws open. She needed to get out of the way. She couldn’t feel her legs.

Pellen shouted the end of her Chant.

A wall of force appeared between Cass and the snake. It rammed headfirst into the barrier.

It shook itself, turning its glare on Pellen. Pellen flinched back.

Cass needed to get up. Her foot twitched.

Pellen started chanting again. The snake swirled around the barrier, its body sliding past Cass as it approached the argu.

Damn it all. There wasn’t time to be stunned. She needed her body to move. To help Pellen.

Pellen’s eyes flicked between Cass and the snake, their lips speeding through the syllables of the Chant, the snake sliding closer with every passing second, Cass entirely unable to move.

There had to be something she could do. Some skill she could push beyond its ordinary scope. Some trick she hadn’t tried yet.

She couldn’t move. But maybe she didn’t need to?

Elemental Manipulation had no vocal or gestural component. It was just her and her Will. Couldn’t she do something with it?

But what? She’d done most of her Manipulation around her hands or staff. What about when she’d run from Levina? The stone spikes she’d pulled up had originated beneath her feet. And she’d continued pulling on them even after she’d moved away from them.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

So starting the skill around her hands was far from a hard constraint. Could she do it under the snake? Was that close enough?

She reached with her Will for the stone beside her. She’d made spears so many times now. The only difference was it wasn’t under her hand. She could do this. What was the point in extended range if not for this?

She didn’t get the usual message, but she could feel her Will grasping a section of stone.

She yanked it upward, into the snake’s underbelly.

It hissed, writhing off the spike, leaving a trail of glowing green ichor. But it didn’t turn away from Pellen.

Pellen kept Chanting. An energy was building around her that Cass could feel without even looking at her. That the snake could no doubt feel.

Another wave of lightning erupted from its body, expanding through the room.

But Cass was ready for it this time.

She grabbed it.

It resisted her grip. It hated being held. It wanted to run. To fly. She understood. She understood in a way that she could not quantify.

She held it anyway.

Not all of it. There was so much of it, bursting in every direction off the snake’s body, there was no way she could hold all of it.

Not the slice that was rushing toward her. She was already paralyzed. A little more would only hurt. She’d survive.

No, she reached as far as her Will would let her and snatched the section racing for Pellen.

Several of her eyes were screwed shut, braced for the lightning coming. But her main eye kept to the tome, her mouth continued the Chant in rapid but precise order.

Cass pulled the lightning wide, like splitting a veil. It fell to either side of the Chanting mage.

Pellen didn’t have the luxury of sighing in relief, but a few of her eyes popped open again as the lightning turned away from her, her Chant uninterrupted on her lips.

They could not relax entirely, however.

The snake continued its charge, unphased that its lighting had been redirected. Nothing had changed. Cass had only bought Pellen a couple of seconds before the snake swallowed her whole.

Stabbing it with stone spears had barely slowed it. Cass could barely redirect its lightning. She couldn’t move.

There had to be more—

Pellen’s book snapped closed, all her uncountable eyes snapping on the snake as they Chanted a critical word of their spell.

The energy in the air twisted. It rushed in from around them, funneled through Pellen, and blasted out at the snake. It coiled around the beast’s coiling body, manifesting as binding ribbons of white light.

The snake hissed and thrashed, but the ribbons pulled tighter.

It threw off another wave of lighting, but the energy was caught along the ribbons, and they glowed all the brighter for it. They kept squeezing, tighter and tighter and tighter.

Pellen was still Chanting, but it was the same arcane phrase over and over again. With every iteration, the bonds squeezed tighter, accompanied by a pulse of energy. Of Focus.

They dug into its flesh. Green ichor dripped from around the bands. The snake’s head thrashed. Its tail flailed. It couldn’t move more than that.

And the binding tightened again.

And again.

Until flesh popped. The bonds cut the ectoplasmic flesh through to the metal scales. Green ichor flooded out and the body slumped in bindings, suddenly loose.

Pellen fell silent, their body slumping as the tension and urgency faded.

Cass struggled to her feet, jerky and unsteady, leaning heavily on her staff.

Dodge has increased to level 16.

Elemental Manipulation has increased to level 17.

Wind Blade has increased to level 13.

“We did it,” Pellen said, her voice rough from the prolonged chant. “I did it.”

Cass nodded. “Good job.”

“How did you redirect the lightning?” Pellen asked.

“Skill,” Cass said with a shrug. “What was that last spell?”

“Everholding Bands, fourth edition,” they hesitated before adding, “Modified.”

“Modified?”

Pellen looked away. “It’s just supposed to hold a target in place. But we needed more than that. I realized as I was preparing it that if I tripled the core section and then reversed the order of the last two instructions, I could repeat the commands for ‘tighten’ instead of ‘hold’. Um, it was much less Focus efficient than I expected though. And I think if it were any more powerful than me, it would have broken out immediately.”

“Is that how real mages cast magic?” Cass asked.

Pellen shook her head. “Um, no. Not really. It’s really dangerous to rewrite spell forms on the fly. If you hadn’t gotten knocked down, I would never have tried that.”

“Well, I’m glad you did,” Cass said. “Come on. We shouldn’t linger any longer than we have to.”

They glanced back at the door behind them, remembering the wolf they’d fought in the previous room.

“But we can search the shelves a bit first, right?” Pellen asked.

Cass nodded. “That was the whole point.”

Pellen immediately ran to the nearest shelf, her hands running along the spines of the books. Every couple of tomes she pulled one from the wall, creating a stack on the floor beside her.

Cass returned to the previous room, scooping up the salvageable wood pieces from their old fire and starting another camp in the center of the snake’s library. They would not be here for long, but any Focus Pellen could recover before they moved on would be worth it.

Only then did Cass join Pellen at the shelves.

Again, Cass wished Salos was here. He wasn’t a mage, but he could probably read the spines, right? Cass’s crash course in the city library wasn’t cutting it.

Pellen hummed to herself from her side of the room, her pile growing.

How was Pellen deciding on which books were interesting? She shouldn’t be able to read Ancient Jothi either. Cass could ask, but she didn’t want to distract the mage when she was enjoying herself and their time was limited.

But there had to be some process to it. Cass watched her for another minute.

Pellen’s eyes flickered up and down the shelf, each moving independently of the others. Her hand traced the spines of the shelf at her chest level, but she pulled books from shelves above and below just as often.

Was it something she could see? It probably wasn’t the words themselves. Then maybe…

Cass activated Mana Sense. The room burst into brilliant color. The books were glowing. The shelves were glowing. The ceiling and floors were glowing.

Cass took a deep breath. That was a lot of magic. Was the entire building like this?

She stepped into the previous room. It had far fewer magic sources. Just the doors and the boxes that had held treasure. Interesting.

Then the library here was special?

Cass queried Trap Detection, wondering if there was some other secret trap waiting to be sprung. It declared there was nothing to be worried about with all the confidence of a level 2 skill.

That said, Cass was inclined to agree with its assessment. If it was a trap, wouldn’t they have already triggered it by now? They’d killed the guard (admittedly, that was a kind of trap, summoning more monsters to reinforce the slain) and tromped around the room, touching all the books and pulling them from their shelves. If there was a trap, at least one of those things would have been the trigger.

But if not a trap, what were all the lights?

That the tomes were sources of magic made a kind of sense. That had been Cass’s suspicion when she’d activated the skill after all. The books glowed in widely varying strengths and with a dizzying variety of colors. Pellen’s pile was all shades of deep purple or blue, like the color of the dark horizon at dusk. There seemed to be no real pattern in the strength of their glow.

Did the color have to do with the kind of magic then? That seemed likely. Pellen was a scholar, after all, with a highly specific field of interest from the sound of it. Taken together, Cass guessed that the particular purple color had to do with the spatial magics Pellen was interested in.

But that did not answer what the magic on the shelves, floor, and ceiling did. Cass glared at them for another minute. They had a minty color, bright in a way that had nothing to do with light intensity and entirely to do with color shade.

But no amount of glaring at the shelves would answer her question. Would she know if her skill was Mana Identification instead of Sense? Would she know if Mana Sense was at a higher level?

Perhaps Pellen knew, and she could ask later.

Regardless, Cass started pulling the brightest glowing books from the shelves. She could not read any of their titles, as they were all written in that same script she’d seen inscribed on the catacomb’s entrance. But Salos could translate them for her later. Maybe she’d end up a cool wizard like Pellen when this was all done. Would that mean she could finally stand on the back line instead of darting around enemy attacks like a madman?

She probably should stop getting separated from Alyx if she wanted that.

Pellen stood in the center of the room, her eyes darting in every direction. She nodded to herself and packed as many as would fit into her bag. And then a few more into pockets in her robes Cass hadn’t noticed and still couldn’t find visually from the outside. And then another into yet another pocket in their pants.

Somehow, they got all but two into a container on their person. They looked longingly at them.

“Give it here,” Cass said, gesturing for them.

“But I couldn’t!” Pellen said even as she held the two books out to Cass with endless hope in her countless eyes. “And where would you even put them?”

Cass shrugged and slipped them into her Bag.

Pellen’s brow furrowed, but she didn’t say anything about it either, instead bombarding Cass with countless thank yous.

“Do we keep going from here or double back now?” Pellen asked. “Do you have room for more books, do you think?”

Cass suppressed a chuckle. Salos was still above them, nearer now, but still a way off. “Let’s see what’s ahead and go from there.”

Pellen nodded, a hungry greed glinting in her eyes. She pushed the next door open and she and Cass entered.