At this moment I can see Shamon coming towards me. Well, this is going to be a pain to deal with, especially when I have finally started work on another formation.

"Shamon, nice to see you down here. It is rare to see you come down here.", I begin, hoping that I am going to be left alone soon enough. Inscribing is a process that requires complete focus.

"Captain, there is talk among the soldiers about your behavior." Shamon begins, stopping himself before he can be considered to be insulting. He must have quite the experience considering the people that he is supposed to be dealing with normally.

"Well, if you were to specify what is so concerning we can talk about it. Quickly if possible", I speak, while looking at the formation which is just behind me. The man picked the perfect time to bother me you know.

"Well, I am going to be blunt then, we are worried about your life, captain.", shamon begins. "It almost seems as if you have been trying to commit suicide in the last couple of days. Nobody has ever tried to fight ice beasts while the chill is still present in them. It is almost a wonder that you have not ended up dead yet."

"Well, expelling the chill takes time Shamon. Time is something that I do not have too much of. Well there would be no point in buying time if I do not use it now, does it?" I speak, shifting my vision from the formation to the man. He looks quite haggard, the last few days taking their toll on the man.

"Well, if the goal is to distract the enemy then why the hell does it seem that you want to hunt them? There was no need for you to leave the defense of the wall yesterday if that were the case." By now, Shamon has an edge in his voice, the kind that seasoned soldiers tend to get when they are seriously pissed off. I put on a serious face and hope sensitive egos are a trait that Shamon has not inherited from his people.

"Well, I do not have a need to nor the capability to explain that to you Shamon. I do not know what is the punishment for you guys to break a chain of command, but in the black mountain, we take your heads for that. Now, leave before I have to consider if I have to take your head for this.", well even I am surprised by the result of this bit of intimidation. "Now, the situation is still under my control shamon. Just because I choose not to remove the chill does not mean that I am not able to. You want to understand why I do not want to remove it. It is for the fact that now is the ideal time for me to build a formation. Do you know what is a major flaw with druidic formations? it is the fact that the formation base for druidic formations is notoriously difficult to stop once they have been started like yesterday."

"Yes, captain." Shamon suddenly speaks, catching me off guard "We have been feeling that from yesterday. It was another reason that I wanted to speak to you. Isn't it supposed to be wasteful?"

"Well, I can't stop it now. The formation base will fully close in a couple of days. The fact that the formation base can do that is a testament to my skill. druidic formations are meant to nourish their villages. Whatever excess is released is often absorbed by their plants or the druids themselves. That way they rarely need to completely shut down the formation base like we are having to do here." I begin. "It is quite wasteful in a mana desert like this but it gives me an opportunity that I have not had in the last couple of days. How do you think the ice beasts have been tracking the process of me building formations."

"Isn't that by tracking the abnormal amount of non ice elemental mana that you are releasing in the process of inscribing? You told me that the last time.", Shamon begins to speak, as realization hits him "but that can be hidden by the mana being emitted by the formation base."

"Yeah, which should explain why I have to do this inscription in this period. I can purge the chill after the inscription process is complete." I begin, getting annoyed. "Do you think I enjoy feeling as if a block of ice has been tied everywhere in my body? Also, it would be nice if you were to leave me alone, I have another formation to inscribe after all and talking with you is wasting precious time. We do not know when the ice beasts might launch another attack after all."

"Oh, oh, yeah. I apologize captain", he begins, as he almost runs back from the formation base. Well, I am not sure if I needed to scare him like that and I certainly hope that it will not lead to overly negative side effects( scare a person too much and it is more likely that he will slit your throat in the night. Scaring people is a fine art.) But he is correct in certain factors.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

One is my certainly crazy tendency to engage in close range combat. Normally formation mages do not have too much to do with the battlefield. We are meant to stay in our forts or our formations and make sure that the enemy does not get too close to us. I am something of an exception because most of my formations up till now have been about close combat, especially my sword which would have been such a useful thing to have here. It would have made me virtually unkillable.

That is why I am overly inclined to fight like I have done up till now, even with the injuries that I have had to face in this location. It is my first instinct to charge into a melee wherever I see it, an instinct that I have to honestly begin to learn to curb,

Thankfully, I do not think that I am going to end up in any more fistfights. I might just end up dead the next time that I do so. At the very least, I honestly want this freezing sensation that I have been feeling to stop. The chill is no joke.

Regardless, it is about time that I return my focus to the matter at hand, which is the formation that I will be inscribing today. It is a support formation known as a water quiver, whose purpose is quite simple. To put it simply this formation is going to be storing the water bolts that the formation will be building.

For now, I am forced to make the bolts actively in the middle of the battlefield. Such a thing will take time and that time is something that I might not have when facing proper enemies. With proper enemies I mean beings like the snowlords, who will most likely end up with my head in their hands before the first water bolt is even released. The formation has to take water mana, condense it into the form of a bolt and then release it to wherever the enemy is. With this formation, only the third thing will be done during the time of battle.

This formation is going to be pretty useful on the day that the formation base is fully activated. Druidic formations are unique in that way. Most formations are meant to be run only for a limited amount of time and are meant to be quite efficient with the mana that they use. A druidic formation is neither, it is meant to run nearly forever and it is so inefficient that nearly fifty percent of the mana in the base is going to be wasted once the formation begins properly.

In druidic villages wasted mana is not too much of an issue since that becomes a safe way for them to absorb mana from nature for their cultivation. You can say that the formation takes on the role of a geyser, freeing the trapped mana from an elemental node (which exists underground mostly) and then releasing it to the world around. That way, they do not need to dig the ground like most races do for elemental mana. (The druids have their own less destructive ways of finding elemental nodes.).

Even here the mana is not going to waste as it will essentially create a bubble surrounding the fort in which the ice mana found outside will be harder to use in.

Anyway, cultural context aside it is about time that I begin the process of inscription. Extending strings of mana into the piece of copper bark, I can feel the entire structure of the wood, giving me near absolute sensation of the entire thing. I can feel four sets of runes interspersed all over it which are the formations that I have already inscribed. While I feel them, I have to take every precaution to make sure that my mana strings do not make actual contact.

If I were to do that, it would activate the rune and the formation would activate fully. The formation base will push all of its mana into the water bolt formation and it will begin to produce water bolts at a breakneck pace. If I do not aim these water bolts at something then they will dissipate leading to a ridiculously high wastage of mana.

With the quiver, I would be able to store a few of these produced bolts at least, at least up to a thousand if I inscribe the runes perfectly, though perfection is nearly impossible in my present case.

Now, to properly explain the process of inscription I will begin by explaining what is spellcasting at its core. This is basic knowledge that most people have, but it is policy to explain everything. What we call casting a spell is essentially us using our minds to create runes from the correct mana source. As an example, a fireball at its core is nothing but a set of runes that has been powered with fire mana. The same set of runes powered with any other element will lead to weird and often disastrous results.

These runes determine everything about the spell, the size of the spell, the amount of mana that will go into the spell or even the color of the spell. The art of inscribing is nothing but taking a set of runes from a given spell and then using mana strings to paint it onto the formation core.

This way I can essentially leave a skeleton of the runes on the core, using which the formation will do its work in the future. Describing it like this might seem like an easy task but you have to remember that inscription is one of the hardest things that I have ever attempted in my life.

One thing that you have to remember about all of this is that this is not your mana core, where mana is under your absolute control. I have to do this using mana strings, which I can describe as trying to thread a needle with the usage of stilts. You also cannot forget that error might lead to disastrous consequences too (a rune must have a very specific shape, and if there is a mistake on that it will lead to a big boom).

Well, it is about time that I got back to work on this damn formation, which is a task that I am not going to be logging any time soon (I am not sure that even my master is capable of that.) And it would be quite boring to all non formation mages anyway.