---Maddy---

Maddy found herself thinking through the results of her unhinged copies rant – attempting to fill in the missing pieces.

Because there were missing pieces to the story.

Her copy…her copy had a third affinity and had seemed to have learned something from the queen to lead her into gaining it.

Destruction and creation. Jess’s affinity. It made sense…Maddy had considered a third affinity several several times and that was the affinity she would choose if she picked up a third one.

Maddy found herself latching onto her old ideas as she sat trapped against the wall – it helped keep her mind off her situation and collect herself.

In terms of picking the best affinities the options of the remaining ones she didn’t have yet were ranked in her mind. From lowest to greatest there was fire and ice as her third pick. That would increase her damage and the control of her spells by quite a bit – fire could spread and with dark death fire she could make some potent burning. Same with ice – she could probably freeze creatures with damaging cold death. Fire and ice were one of the most popular mage affinities and if she didn’t have death mana she would have been waffeling between life/death and fire/ice for the better damage vs versatility of being able to heal as well as kill.

Higher on her list was movement – speed/slow mana. Maddy could already move her mana about a bit and on a side path could move things a bit with her own spells…but if she really wanted to use magic to actually move things she needed movement mana. Might let her fly on a broom – imagine if she had her scythe back and could fly around on it like a witch from a story. She vaguely remembered seeing a witch flying on a scythe once in an anime and the aesthetic had stuck with her.

It would also give her a massive amount of control over her own spells – instead of attacking wildly with sound she could probably eventually make her spells dance to her thoughts their every movement under her control. She could use sound to actually attack with – the sound being the damage instead of the medium the damage was moved in. Unlike fire and ice which would increase her damage and spread the range she could attack in movement magic felt like it would increase her strength in a more fundamental manner. Usually movement mana was one of the most popular warrior affinities and shunned by mages…but Maddy had already picked up the most optimal second affinity for a mage – light/dark mana – and going against the most popular choice for a third mage affinity felt more useful.

And that’s when she came to her third and most considered option. Creation and destruction. As far as destruction or void magic went it was known as the most immediately damaging…but that was it. Its pure universal damage was balanced against the versatility of spreading continuous fire or death related damage types. Considering Maddy’s main damage of necrotic attacks was countered by anything non living – not that she had had to deal with that yet – void attacks would round out her range against non living threats…but that side of the coin was just a bonus. The main reason Maddy wanted the affinity was because of creation mana and the reason she wanted it was both in the brief descriptions she had read and been told about along with how she was positive it could work.

As far as mana went, mana had the potential of all the mana types contained within it and you could usually achieve some measure of all the parts as far as it affected spells. The main part of affinities were hard lines that couldn’t be crossed. You could make spells that moved without a movement affinity for example – otherwise most spells wouldn’t do anything…but without a movement affinity it was difficult to impossible to make a spell that moved ‘things’ or people. There was also a limited amount of control over the movement spells could have without a movement affinity – you could make bolts of magic that shot out or attach your spell to a wave of sound…but controlling every exact movement of your spell was next to impossible as was designing those sorts of spells without a concept to guide them.

Similarly, you could ‘create’ a spell and spells could momentarily appear to create a physical thing – an ice spell for example creating what looked like a solid bolt of ice – but those spells couldn’t truly ‘create’ anything the way creation mana could. The momentary summon would disappear as if it were a lie the spell would fade.

From what Maddy could tell creation magic…creation magic was the path towards permanency. Creating a sentry eye that lasted for years. Creating a spell and then spending it later. Maddy was nearly positive the mage queen had a creation affinity that let her create the floor to the town and have it last forever…or last so long as it was in her domain? Maddy didn’t quite know the specifics. Despite the information her clone had given it wasn’t enough to say she knew exactly how magic worked. What she could say was whatever her clone had heard had pushed her to finally getting this affinity.

Maddy really really wanted this affinity. She could think of dozens of spells that needed it. She could imagine so much potential in the affinity.

Of course…there was a reason Maddy hadn’t gotten this yet. The cost. The cost to doing it herself – as far as she knew the only way to gain that third affinity.

She would need to give up four stat areas.

One area of stats for the creation/destruction mana.

One area for the creation pool mixed with the life pool.

One area for the creation pool mixed with the light pool.

And one area for the triple pool – life/death+light/dark+creation/destruction.

Of course she could always choose not to go all the way…decide not to gain the full set of pools all the way up to that fabled triple pool…but that triple pool was part of what made this path worth it. that triple mix of mana types would be exponentially stronger than her double mix in every way. Each stat lost would decrease her strength and only by going all the way to that triple pool could the increase in magical strength almost make up for that.

A risky increase with hard consequences. An increase in strength and versatility that would decrease her strength and versatility in another manner…something that would turn her into a glass cannon in a way she didn’t know if she wanted to commit to.

That right there was a huge commitment. One Maddy hadn’t been willing to make and still didn’t feel willing to make. She could toss her last body stat easily enough, but then she would still need to eat 3 areas between mental strength/speed/defense and soul strength/speed/defense.

It was a risk in a way every other decisions hadn’t been – Maddy still didn’t fully know what the soul stats did for example.

What stats did her copy sacrifice?

…

Finally after thinking through the whole setup, Maddy realized. She dumped mental defense…the stat the system warned was important with my foundation…was her future self really stupid enough to have dumped mental defense and then gone down to fight a mental threat in the jellyfish sirens?

Maddy understood in that moment that was exactly what her alternative self had done. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that was one of the sacrificed areas that led to mirror Maddy having a creation affinity. If Maddy had a way of staying safe and attacking from afar – say a skill from beating this dungeon – she might have thought she could stay in the city and attack and collect her scythe from safety…but hindsight said the first time Maddy had been attacked by the sirens it had been through her magical eyes. A single level of abstraction wouldn’t protect her from the mental horror hidden below.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

If Maddy had to guess based on her current thoughts her copy had probably dropped her last almost unused body stat, her mental defense, and two soul stats with soul defense probably being one of them.

Can I use that?

She would have to escape first…but that weakness gave her something she could focus on. Something else to focus on at least. If she thought about her situation she’d probably start panicking and that wouldn’t help her escape or beat her self in any way.

Mages with similar affinities and concepts hard countered each other and countering specific things instead of blocking a wide variety of attacks was always essentially 100% effective. Slimes were the biggest proof of concept of this law – the only reason they were 100% immune to specific types of attacks was because they had no defense against everything else.

Specialized defense perfectly blocked specialized attacks…it was the commonly known idea in magic and Maddy already knew every single one of the spells she knew and loved were going to be ineffective against the shade with her powers.

If she had some time to plan after all she could pretty easily make a counterspell for every single one of her own spells and there was no way her copy hadn’t.

She had also plumbed the depths of her early concepts pretty hard so far…Maddy had no way to know for certain but it didn’t feel like she could get out of this just by shifting the way her spells worked slightly. She couldn’t just say – use a different shape than maggots and hope it worked.

What Maddy needed was to start from scratch with her build and there was one method she could see to do that. Her new concepts…

Delineation and polarity. She hadn’t fully explored them yet – they were something added onto her list of spell components. Something she hadn’t had time to focus on yet.

It looked like her copy was using delineation quite frequently – she had even…even abused the concept far from its roots and turned it into something that cut.

Delineate… delineating a split between two different areas and focusing on the split itself until she could almost cut space just by separating the areas. That sounded good but Maddy couldn’t just copy her future self. Not if she had a chance of winning.

There was living proof she could abuse delineation into cutting – especially if mixed with void mana – but if she tried to think of a different use…

Maddy hadn’t fully actualized delineation yet. She had the rune already – a long solid line with a little tick on one side and not the other…but she hadn’t gone through the steps of feeling the concept out yet. She couldn’t speak or draw…but Maddy could make that shape considering how simple it was.

Rolling onto her side so she was laying facing the wall Maddy kept her body as straight as possible her outstretched arms bound to the wall beside her.

This…this was basically the shape. Her arms were a bit too close to her head – they should be in the middle of her body for maximum impact – and her

Delineation was the idea of making a border between two areas. Not necessarily of cutting something into two…but of simply marking down a boundary. Of declaring two areas to be separate but not necessarily forcing that divide… There was something else about it…Maddy didn’t have a dictionary to confirm anything else but she thought she had heard it used to describe stuff before…

That wasn’t important, she had the main definition she knew – Maddy knew delineation could indicate a boundary. Something like “delineating the border between countries” was an English description of it and a magical description could be delineating the border between spell effects.

Could Maddy focus on how the concept would let her treat two areas separately?

…yes she could, instantly Maddy knew that it was even the way the concept wanted to be used. If she worked on this she could make a spell that worked differently depending on which side of a line something was…something like delineating a battlefield and her mana would heal everything on one side and damage everything on the other?

Yes…Maddy could feel the barest tingle of recognition with the concept – her current laying pose was not close enough to her regular shape to get a full vibrating answer but it was enough for her current purposes.

She could…she could make two lines and make a delineation triangle! That would be a way of saying everything in this slice of the world gets effected by my spell in this way…

That idea gave a weaker feedback but still a feedback. Like maybe a pizza slice with two delineation lines would really just be a single bent delineation and the line didn’t want to be bent?

That gave a bigger feedback.

Maddy paused.

Even if she made her spells work differently on two sides of the boundary that wouldn’t help her against her copy would it?

…except that was thinking in too simple a manner. If she could effect magic…if a domain could effect magic and everyone had a domain…if her copy could control her maggot and shift it didn’t that mean Maddy could make a boundary that effected others spells as well? She could make a line that made all of mirror Maddy’s spells heal her on Maddy’s side of the line and damage her on mirror Maddy’s side.

That…that seemed like a good start. She would need to actually test this spell out to see if it worked how she was hoping it worked…except it probably wouldn’t effect things crossing the boundary right? If it damaged on mirror Maddy’s side it would probably continue damaging even if it crossed into Maddy’s side?

Mirror Maddy had said phase when she shifted Maddy’s spell. Polarity…polarity is a shift of sorts right? Could Maddy shift the polarity of mana between life and death?

That felt like a more concrete plan. The more concepts she combined the better chance her goal was of succeeding.

Of course this probably wouldn’t help defend against mirror Maddy’s creation and destruction affinity. Maddy felt like she wouldn’t be able to shift the direction of mana types she didn’t have…unless the concept was even stronger than she was imagining.

Which wrapped around to blocking mirror Maddy’s methods of attacking. Maddy would need to…the best thing she could do would be blocking sound. How could she prevent sound? If she had a sound affinity she could invert it to silence easy and some simple shaping could make a sphere of silence cutting off her foes chants…but she just had the concept of silence and no real way to invert it.

…But maybe she was thinking things in too limited a manner again. When she was taught magic her teacher had gone over how concepts could be used on one end or the other. She hadn’t fully understood it – and had felt like the descriptions on both sides had sounded so different they were something else entirely.

But that obviously wasn’t true so how might it be working? If Maddy figured this out she was sure she would have a tool her copy didn’t. The goal was instead of a spell that attacked using sound when she spoke…a spell that attacked the sound that others spoke? Every time her copy tried to chant a spell her own would activate?

Maddy continued to plan and brainstorm staying in her pose until her arms began to hurt. Hours had passed already and she had dozens of ideas for spells that might work but no way to test any of them.

And then the sound of the door above opened and Maddy sat up.

She banged her bare feet on the ground and croaked slightly – her mouth too broken to try and scream – hoping the slight thumping might alert whoever entered. It was either someone random or it was her copy after all.

Mirror Maddy was at the top of the stairs now.

Her attempt at noise had been useless.

Mirror Maddy grinned slightly as she came up noting Maddy’s attempt and pulled out a knife.

“...another application for now, going try and filter the application through the dungeon's domain once more then you’ll get a friend.” her copy told her.

This time Maddy was ready for the pain and grimaced looking away from her captor as the madwoman carved magic into Maddy’s side.

As soon as she was done, mirror Maddy pulled her own shirt up and looked carefully noting down some old scar lines and nodding to herself. “It worked kind of like how I was imagining…I’ll have to test the other version to see which one was better.”

Standing up and then pausing mirror Maddy looked down at her. “Don’t want anyone seeing you like this, it is my body after all.”

Activating some spell Maddy found cloth begin to materialize out of nowhere – a rough seamless sort of gown to protect her modesty.

Nodding at her handywork mirror Maddy left once again – ignoring all indications that Maddy was a human and treating her like little more than a doll.

A few minutes later she returned this time leading a man as they dragged…a second identical man?

The stranger carried himself like a man with plenty of stats. Instead of dragging his double down the stairs like Maddy’s had, this copy lifted his bruised and battered clone like a sack of potatoes tossing them roughly down beside Maddy.

“There we go, glad to find someone to help” Mirror Maddy nodded to mirror dude and the man looked annoyed.

“I’m doing this for myself. This dungeon doesn’t control me and you don’t either Maddison.” He spoke.

“Of course not, I do wonder why you were so rough on your dungeon clone though James,” Mirror Maddy spoke as she finished chaining the unconscious man to the wall.

“I hate that guy, he reminds me of myself.” Mirror James spoke as he led the way back upstairs. “So tell me about this dungeon puppet master again… This dungeon’s weird, I want something I can punch.”