Mana was the life blood of everything that existed. It was the very foundation of matter itself and a mage’s power was in the ability to manipulate it in all its various facets to create powers capable of bringing their enemies to their knees.
And a mage was strongest where their preferred mana type was most dominant.
Lady Long Leg’s preferred mana type wasn’t working in spades here but she had enough lava mana stored in her core to go into Overdrive and the sudden death of the Olympian captain was all she needed to activate it. The spellform was a secret, each power of Hillview holding the details of the Overdrive from each other. But if a man as powerful as Ven had died in the blink of an eye, there was no more reason to risk her life.
The spellform filled her mind and she was done chanting as she pushed herself into Overdrive. Lava mana coalesced into her hand, taking physical form. It smothered itself growing from a bright ball of liquid orange that dripped like molten metal beat together by a practiced blacksmith until it morphed into a molten spear in her hand.
It was a long orange weapon that stood as tall as seven feet and let off scorching heat that had once melted the face of a category three Beta mage who’d dared to venture too close to it. a spear of fire and lava, straight with a rounded butt and a point sharp enough to cut steel in one strike.
In her hand it was the epitome of her specialization, a powerful dissuasion from facing her in combat, and she knew it still had enough potential to grow. One day it would likely be more than a spear; an armor that would shroud her in molten earth and help her reign supreme on any battle ground. When that day comes she would rename it. But until then, there was only one name for it, and she called it as the spell solidified in her hand.
“Gae bolg.”
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Madam Shaggy gave no second thought to her safety. The moment the world faded around her and she saw the creature standing over Ven, a limb running through his suit of armor, she knew it was time to go all out. They’d just lost their strongest mage besides the Knight in what seemed to be the blink of an eye and she wasn’t going to go next.
Her power had always been for fire. Many speculated that a mage’s specialization existed in how much of the mana type they used during their time as awakened or their very own personal history. It was believed that a mage who’d been obsessed with swimming would often awaken and find themselves specializing in water mana by the time they reached Beta rank or a sky diver would find themselves with wind specialization, or a miner with earth specialization.
She’d always thought it was all nonsense, balderdash scientists cooped up in their labs spewed to justify their study on magic so that they would continue getting paid.
She had no emotion towards fire before magic had joined the world and fire magic hadn’t really been her first choice of spellforms as an awakened. In fact, she’d connected with earth and metal and fire as an awakened. But somehow her specialty had tilted into fire when she reached Beta rank and there had been nothing she could do about it.
When she became a Rukh finding that space in her core where she realized she could store extra mana but only those of her specialization, she knew she needed a use for all of it when it was full. Time had told her its purpose and she’d conjured a spell that made her feel safe. A spell that kept out all those who’d looked down on her and refused to love her with the pathetic excuse that there was no point in trying if she couldn’t love herself.
She had only asked that they love her, not her body. She had not changed not for a single day. All she had done was change her body to suit who she felt she was. And those who couldn’t love her simply because she didn’t love the body she’d been born to infuriated her.
So when her Overdrive had manifested, she hadn’t been shocked by it.
Fire mana spilled from her reserves, burning the air around her as it became a physical thing. The air was hot with her presence, the grass at her feet ablaze with fire as she stood in a sea of flames that spread all around her. In this domain, she was invincible. None would oppose her, and she solidified the spell in the waking world with its name.
“Hell fire.”
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Jason was born to a Christian family but was nothing more than a ‘church-goer’. The religious devotion to a religion was never his forte. He enjoyed the stories in the bible but not so much that he wanted to go back to them every time, quoting chapters and verses, memorizing the different books of the bible in chronological order.
No.
He was a boy born to a Christian family with an adequate appreciation for the stories in its holy book and a simple enjoyment of the church services he often attended whenever he could.
So when he’d advanced to the rank of Rukh and had found light mana channeling into a portion of his core, he’d wondered what use it would be to him as all thoughts of light mana that concentrated gave him a sense of the divine.
When he’d activated his Overdrive for the first time, his subconscious giving the mana physical form, he’d been amused at the result.
Ven’s death brought Jason physically into the present and the fear of death settled over him like a shroud of clouds on the peaks of mountains.
He slipped into Overdrive more out of fear than a conscious decision, triggering the transition immediately. The light mana in the reserves of his core pooled to his hands. It coalesced into brightly flaring weapons and he wielded two swords of light.
Jason wasn’t ambidextrous and always wondered why his Overdrive conjured two swords. He hadn’t found the answer the first time it happened, and didn’t know it now. But now was not the time for answers. It was the time to survive.
So he stood with greatswords of blazing yellow light in both hands, his veins a soft glow of light beneath his skin and a promise of victory or death in his heart.
He would either live to see another battle or he would die here. Whichever was the case, it would be determined by the power of his light.
The Swords of Light would make sure of it.
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Eitri watched with terror as Ven died at the hands of a monster that shouldn’t have been so close to them. Refusing to die here, he dived into overdrive, digging through his core to the reserve of space mana sitting dormant within him.
As a space mage, he never truly used his specialization. He hadn’t even used much of it as an awakened. He was more of a mage with a gun or a knife or a particularly large bat for his size during his time as an awakened. The few times he connected to mana, he found he only had an affinity for space magic and it helped with something of a short distance teleportation of his items, or at least he liked to call it that.
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He could reach beyond the fabric of space like tearing through a particularly thick cellophane to pick something from another part of the world somewhere not too far from him. When he’d advanced to Beta rank and found he had a specialization for space magic, he hadn’t been too bothered by it. After all, he had no affinity for any other type. Wind had never answered to him, neither had force or life or water.
As for space magic, his only expectations of it failed when he realized that while he could reach beyond the fabric of space to pluck something from somewhere, he could not bodily go through it, and even then, it felt more like he drew the device of his choice through space rather than actually crossing the boundaries of space to reach it.
When he became a Rukh and had started gathering space mana in some secluded recess of his core only then did he realize what he had been doing. He had two specialties not one, and by the life of him, he could not understand the second. Space mana was simply a tool he used to supplement whatever the second specialty was. It helped him reach for items he’d made some form of connection with and pull it through the fabric of space, defying physics to bring it across distances. When he found out, his first activation of overdrive had created a tear in the world like broken glass and he’d summoned his gun from his pocket.
It had been pathetic, but it had been educational.
That had been almost two years ago. He had grown since then. Made stronger connections. When he activated his overdrive now, the world around him cracked in different places and he felt the strength of his connection to the different items he’d accumulated over the years.
He stood, prepared to survive as thirteen cracks in the air behind him summoned weapons of spears and glaives and guns and swords. Each one was poised in the air above him, aimed at the single feline that had almost killed him a moment ago.
He had a name for this spell and he called it Gates of Babylon.
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Francis hadn’t been a Rukh for long. He could sense the section of his core where found concentrations of mana attuned to his specialization tended to pool into, but hadn’t know its true purpose until a month ago when he’d asked Heimdall in confidence and the mage had told him.
“At Rukh rank you are opened to a possibility of making your mana a lasting physical presence,” he’d said. “At the rank of awakening, you borrow the mana of the world and use it, needing water to command water and air to command air as long as you have an affinity for it. At Beta, your body starts to learn to tap from the one in the air, overriding all the others so that you can conjure water from nothing or earth from the sky. At Rukh you become better at it but your core also learns. It starts to filter your mana, takin the concentrated form of your specialization and putting it in that space. Accessing that mana is called going into Overdrive. It gives your mana and yours alone, a physical manifestation in the real world. Mana only you can command.”
“And how do I use it?” he’d asked.
Heimdall’s response had been a shrug. “I have no idea. It’s just like using mana. You just have to understand it the way you learned to understand the mana in the world and it would manifest itself.”
Francis had never learned how.
With the Olympian captain’s death and the Rukh mages around manifesting their core, he knew he needed it now more than ever and with a mental strain, he tapped into that viscous concentration of mana and pulled on it.
It gave him no answer. It left him stranded in a world of chaos with no real way to protect himself.
Fear riddled him and he paled. Not just for himself, but for Tulip, too, because while he wasn’t old as a Rukh mage, Tulip was only a month into the rank. Tulip hadn’t even begun to notice what that extra space in his core was. Francis doubted his teammate’s core had even filtered any of his core’s concentrated mana into it.
So while the mages around Francis grew deadlier and prepared to end the fight in fire and brimstone, he and Tulip stood in their places like men who’d brought knives to a gun fight.
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Oliver felt the mages go into Overdrive before he even saw them. Ven’s death had heralded it, and he steeled his resolve. Unsurprisingly, Francis and Tulip didn’t shift into Overdrive. They were still new to the rank, Francis barely six months old while Oliver was even surprised to learn Tulip was a Rukh when they were summoned for the expedition.
Jason shifted into the bright form of a dual-sword wielding knight with light in his veins and swords of blazing light. Oliver had seen the form just once and remembered how assured he’d been when he’d seen Jason fight in it. And at category three Jason had damn near mastered the form.
The other mages shifted, too. The dwarf summoned thirteen weapons in the air and—if Oliver was being honest—was the least menacing of the group.
The lady with long legs wielded a spear of molten earth as if she’d taken the rocks at the base of a mountain and melted them down into lava and given it a solid state even in its volatile molten nature. She wielded it as a spear that promised nothing good. In the heat of its presence, fire licked at her hair but did not burn it.
Madam Shaggy was the most terrifying of all of them. Fire blazed all over her, licks of flame dancing on her skin and hair and clothes but not consuming them. Standing in a stretch of fire and a burning world, she looked almost inhuman with a mad grin too wide to be natural and a cackle in her burning eyes. She looked halfway into the realm of a demon.
If Oliver didn’t know she was a category two Rukh mage, he would’ve found it difficult picking who would win in a fight between her and Jason.
As for him, he didn’t bother himself trying to shift into Overdrive. He was a dual specialization mage, and what that meant was that Overdrive was a difficult subject for him. His concentrated mana reserve was filled with tainted mana that carried both sound and gravity type mana. It made tapping into it give him a migraine and a terrifying stomach pain. According to Chris, he would need to learn to harmonize both types of mana in that space before he could go into Overdrive.
When he’d asked her how he was supposed to do that, her answer had been easy to summarize.
She had no idea.
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Tulip stared at the raging auras around him as mages shifted into Overdrive and knew he was fucked.
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Abed crushed a creature in a gauntleted hand, a frown on his face as the red haired mage, Zed, blew a monster’s head apart by dipping his hand into his mouth after taking a blow that should have sent him flying with shattered bones in his arms as if he was defending against a simple stroke of a cane.
He had thought Jason would be the only one he’d have to worry about in getting Shanine back. Chris, too, at best. Now, he was beginning to think perhaps he needed to take care of the Beta rank mage as well.
He turned around, the earth still gathering to him, and split the head of a stray Beta rank monster that had ventured too close in half with his sword when he felt auras flare on the other side of the hedge.
Abed smirked at the sensation it shook within him and knew there was no point resisting his mana’s call to the earth any longer. If his body wanted to go into Overdrive so bad, then he’d let it.
He activated his reserves and felt the earth mana around call to him as his own concentration of earth mana seeped out to cover him in a sheathe of stone gray.
Brown earth mana gathered and the ground pulled to Abed. As an earth mage, his Overdrive was always powerful. It surrendered precision and finesse for strength, strength that doubled anywhere with the presence of earth around him.
And there was plenty of earth around him.
Abed grew until he rivaled the size of an Olympian armor. He felt the power suffuse him as his Overdrive became complete and the mana solidified into form around him.
He tried not to let the power get to his head as he stood, monstrous and powerful in his armor of earth and stone, his giant sword larger and renewed.
He was yet to lose a battle in this form. After all, victory was the purpose of the Titan of Wrath.
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Festus smiled fondly as he blasted the spider with a script of water runes he followed up with a rune of lightning.
Electricity ran through the monster, sending it into spasms and halting the advancement he’d sensed it trying to break into as the Rukh mages around him shifted into their overdrive. Festus missed the old days when he was a Rukh mage. Days when he experienced strong enough opponents to make him go into Overdrive.
Now, he had no need of it. Those with enough power to make him go into Overdrive rarely fought or had reason to. They also lived in a world far away from the one he’d chosen.
Still, in respect to Ven’s death and his feat of killing the blob, Festus gave the Rukh mages his moral support.
Going into Overdrive as a Knight when he had Rukh mages so close could kill one or two of them, and judging by the fact that Tulip and Francis weren’t in Overdrive, they would definitely die from the weight of his mana, so that was out of the question. Thus, he did something else.
He released the full weight of his aura on the spider, instead, paralyzing it for a moment.
Perhaps if the others sensed the weight of his aura, they would be inspired to believing they had made the right choices.
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Big Man Desolate was strolling towards the massive tree that held whatever was left of the mana surge when Ven died in an explosion of blood, gore and a grenade. He paused when the Rukh mages went into Overdrive momentarily enough to notice it before continuing towards the tree.
Only one word crossed his mind at the weight of their aura and the gravity of their strength.
Pathetic.