Isse thought she should’ve been panicking.
They were being bombarded with all sorts of Spells – mainly fireballs – and motherfucking harpoons! Well, the harpoons had actually stopped falling once the people aboard the enemy ship had realized how useless they were against the Skill-enhanced chitin, but the Spells were still coming.
“Can you do magic?” asked Shriya without turning to look at her, her eyes fixed on the ship behind them as it slowly crept closer and closer, like a shark stalking its prey in one of those B-rated movies.
“Yes, what of it?”
“Can you intercept those Fireballs? Our ship is resistant, but sooner or later they’ll get lucky and hit something that can actually feel the damage. We can call ourselves fortunate that for the silvers’ fleets Fire Magic is standard.”
“... My magic isn’t exactly good at that. I know some illusion spells, I have [Colored Water Arrow] and [Fireball] and I can also summon lightning bolts and snowballs, but I’m more focused on… altering Spells and emotions. Interacting with them, doing things with them. Problem is, I have to touch them to do that, and I’m not keen on touching a ball of flames that is seconds away from exploding. I have two hands and I’d like that number to stay unchanged.”
But wouldn’t having more hands be cool? asked Siidi.
Shut u – actually, no, you’re right, that would be cool.
“Correction, at most I’d like the number of hands to increase.”
The birdkin [Druid] shook her head, muttering about something called ‘Sklun’ having disappeared.
“Ok, so, just use a mana whip.”
The arachne looked at the harpy, an eyebrow raised in question.
“You have no idea what I’m talking about, am I right?”
“Nope!”
She sighed and beat her foot on the bridge, a single vine growing out of a fissure between the chitin plates with sinuous, nearly catlike, motions. A moment later it moved towards an approaching fireball, seemingly slashing through it. The vine was burned to a crisp but, surprisingly, the Spell exploded on the spot.
“Should’ve guessed, it’s a tactic we use only in the jungles. And, I guess, in the Tower Academy, or so I heard.
“It’s something our [Whip Fighters] came up with: infuse your Mana in a far reaching item, a whip in their case, and use it to disrupt the structure of an incoming Spell.”
She sagged a bit in place and put her hand on the railing to support herself. Cold sweat beaded the line where hair met forehead.
“Only problem is, it’s mana intensive. I hope you’ve got a big Mana Pool, ‘cause you’ll be going through it pretty quickly if you can help.”
Isse, who had been trained by what was probably one of the greatest [Mages] of their time, looked at the harpy and, after a moment, asked a simple question: “That bad?”
The birdkin smiled bitterly and took a vial off one of the belts around her hips: “It is.”
She bit into the cork and spat it out, drinking the contents and immediately beginning to look revitalized: “Mostly though I have a shitty Mana Pool. The advantage of being a [Druid] is that you don’t tend to use your own Mana. Usually I just ask nature to do something very gently and respectfully and it does so. The expenditure of energy on my side is minimal. Even up here, thanks to the way this ship was made, I usually don’t have to use much Mana.”
She looked back at the oncoming ship and, a moment later, another vine whipped out of their own back and cut a bolt of lightning in twain. Again, she sagged, but this time she didn’t look as tired as before.
“Breaking Spells though? That’s hard. So, please, figure it out and fast, I won’t be able to do this for long, they’re starting to target places where it’ll actually do damage if they hit.”
With that she turned back towards the enemy ships, growing more vines out of the chitin and… just letting them sway there, as a deterrent. Was it working? Well, seeing how the number of Spells seemed to reduce drastically it did.
----------------------------------------
Furioso glared at the quite literal forest that was slowly growing out of the Amissa’s back, a forest made of vines of all things that swayed gently in the wind. And yet, whenever a Spell came too close to the airship, they lashed out, destroying the fireballs and lightning bolts before they could do any damage.
“Stop casting!” he shouted.
Only for Murgia to shout: “Counter that. Keep throwing Spells at them!”
The [Captain] turned towards the naga with a scream: “What are you doing? We’re just going to consume our [Mages]’s Mana!”
“Yes, we are, but I know what she’s doing. Mana Whips! It’s an old tactic we use during wars. Infuse an object with enough Mana and throw it at Spells to break them apart. But it’s intense. Whoever’s doing that will run out of mana before we do. So we have to keep throwing magic!”
The two looked at each other, then Furioso grunted and gave the order to start shooting again.
“I hope you’re not wrong.”
“I’m certain.”
----------------------------------------
Apparently they’d already seen through their trick because the reprieve lasted the beauty of a single minute: enough time for Isse to weave herself an actual whip of spidersilk, definitely not enough for anything else though.
“Moon, who did you say was on that airship?” shouted Shriya as she had to sit down, her vines breaking apart Spells as she drank another potion down.
“It’s Murgia! You know, the lizardkin who used to sell me nails at half price!”
“Him? With the silvers?”
“He says the food’s good and that he’s fucking the captain!”
“Feather rot, we’re fucked! He’s jungleborn like us! He knows our tricks!”
“You’re absolutely right, he knows our tricks,” she smirked, looking down at the arachne holding her impromptu length of spidersilk, “He doesn’t know hers!”
“You’re betting everything we have on an emotionally distraught and extremely unstable single teen mother of five?”
“Hey!” shouted Isse, her cheeks reddening.
She’s not wrong though.
“I am!”
Shriya made a strange noise, then grunted and shook her head, her face not looking surprised in the least.
“Fuck it! That’s why they call you the ‘Mad Engineer’.”
“What can I say, I embrace the title!”
She was actually so close to getting that title as a [Title]. All she needed was someone just a tad higher in the hierarchy of power in the Alannan fleet to call her that… or a few hundred more common people. The System had already chosen a Skill fitting for it.
Anyways, back to Isse, she looked at the rather long length of rope she’d created, her hands holding it while her brain tried (and failed) to figure out what to do.
“I suck at throwing stuff,” she finally said, resigning herself. She had been trained in many things but both Master and Albert had given up on her when it came to knife throwing. One could have all the enhanced senses and reflexes of the world, but it didn’t help when you couldn’t use a dagger just right.
“Give that to me,” said Shriya as she offered her hand. She looked relieved that she would be getting a moment of pause from the ‘spell whipping’. Her hands moved with a strange fluidity as she gathered it into a hank.
When she was sure she had it ready she… let go?
“Why did you spend so long gathering it together just to let it go?”
“‘Cause you made it too long girl. If I want to use it right it needs to be of the right length and weight. Since both of those were wrong I had to measure it out, otherwise this whip will turn into an overboiled noodle.
“Now, when I throw this at a Spell you make sure to let your Mana flow through it, alright? Do you know how to do that?”
Isse nodded: Grandmother had taught her how to infuse items with her Mana. It had been one of the first lessons actually, right after she’d learned how to use her Mana Sight.
“Good, then let’s start. And tell me if you start feeling faint!”
With that she looked at the sky behind the ship, her arm moved back, ready to throw. She watched the approaching Spells, letting her vines die off without actually stopping them, observing and, probably, trying to see which ones were targeting vital parts of the protective plating.
Then… it happened.
Her arm moved, faster than the eye could see, throwing the impromptu whip towards an approaching Fireball.
“Now!” she shouted at the same time.
Isse let her Mana flow through the length of the whip, her own silk being a perfect conductor for it.
The two touched.
Her Mana reached the fire that was already beginning to blacken the wonderfully soft and tense but extremely flammable silk.
Her Mana.
Her soul.
She touched the Spell.
And the world turned to flames.
----------------------------------------
The city was burning.
High stone walls behind and in front of her slowly crumbled and melted into unrecognizable masses of tumorous bubbles and growths that popped and grew and fell to the ground, forming abominations of statues that would come to life and die in a matter of minutes as the heat would birth and destroy them.
Houses of wood and clay burned, their glass windows having long since exploded or melted down as charred remains tried to hang onto their original form, remembering they were once houses, bullheadedly attempting to keep performing their original task. Some managed, some failed, nearly all were nothing more than husks with carbonized corpses that were slowly being turned to dust by the flames as they ate through that too.
In the distance, near the center of the city, a castle burned, its high spires reminiscent of the cathedrals of Earth. One of them emitted a great rumbling sound as cracks began forming on its surface and, suddenly, it collapsed in on itself, falling towards the ground as a great gout of flames, like a dragon’s fiery breath, bellowed up towards the ash stained clouds.
There was no more screaming.
All was dead.
Isse and Siidi stood in the middle of a soot painted square. Once upon a time there had been a probably beautifully decorated fountain where they were standing: now though, the spouts and white granite – or maybe marble, they couldn’t tell – had broken and melted into a discordant mass of screaming holes that reminded them of a face out of illustrations of a Flesh Abomination from one of the horror novels Albert had bought them.
There was no fire near them – there was nothing left to burn to begin with.
The two arachne stared at the maddening sights all around them, astonished, deep down in their souls scared, and completely lost.
“What should we do sister?” asked Isse, her hand moving towards Siidi’s, finding it halfway through.
“I have no idea. I don’t think this is what Shriya thought would happen.”
But, in truth, it was. This was what happened every time someone interacted with a Spell the way they were doing now. It’s just that nobody ever noticed. Or rather, nobody ever remembered.
It was also why Spell Whipping was so tiring to most people: they saw a city on fire and all they could think of doing was find a way to snuff out the flames. Well, it wasn’t always a city, but you get the gist of it.
“We can’t stop the fire,” said Isse matter-of-factly.
“Understatement of the decade,” her voice felt pensive.
They kept on staring, uncaring of the heat around them: it was real only if they allowed themselves to make it feel real.
“Then what can we do?” asked the youngest of the two.
“As I said, nothing. We’re in what I imagine Airm looks like and we don’t even have a glass’ worth of water, let alone the sea it would require to snuff all of this out.”
“We could try to… oh, I don’t know, take all the air out?”
“Yeah, right, because you’re the Shaper of Skies.”
“I’m just throwing out some ideas, it’s more than you’re doing!” she said, turning to glare at her sister and soul half, a single step away from beginning a shouting match,
“Oh, trust me, I’m doing plenty. I already told you: we should do nothing. Just stay here, sitting or standing or whichever you prefer, and wait for the fire to eat itself. Sooner or later there won’t be anything left for it to burn through. It’ll starve and we’ll have won.”
Isse opened her mouth to say something, then closed it, her eyes widening slightly as the idea took hold.
Then, finally: “It can’t be that easy.”
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“You’re right, it’s not that easy!” agreed someone behind her.
“Oh, thank y – WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU!?!”
Both arachne turned around, their hands raised protectively and aggressively. Siidi was already holding her favorite giant fountain pen in both hands, wearing a blue leather jacket made of happy memories, while Isse found herself holding with more certainty than she’d ever had… Albert’s dagger.
The mythril dagger he’d told her a few stories about.
She’d completely forgotten she had it.
And right there, standing with his hands behind his back and a small, pleased, smile on his wrinkled face, was an old man. His pupils were golden, as if stars had been placed behind them to be shining beacons in a dark world, his teeth white as the heart of said stars, his skin slightly tanned, as if he’d spent most of his life working behind a desk under the kiss of the sun for only part of the day.
Isse immediately frowned at that last idea: it was way too… not hers. Unlike her. She liked to be descriptive, but this one just wasn’t in her style. It was… extraneous. Had she just gleaned a fragment of this thing’s past?
“Oh, it’s such a pleasure to finally meet you! I’ve been waiting for so long! You’re actually the only reason I didn’t look for a successor all these centuries!”
“Who. Are. You?!” asked Isse, not caring a single iota about this man’s rambling. Her dagger – Her dagger now, stars above and devils below it was hers – was now pointed towards his throat.
“Oh, no need to be that hostile dear. I’m just a merry old man, your typical old codger who really should stop being so much into gossip.”
The old man kept on talking as if it was nothing even though now he had a pen planted right into his heart. A pen that had gone from side to side.
He looked down, completely unfazed, and with a snap of his gnarled and liver spotted fingers made it disappear. The two arachne stared in astonishment at the hole in his chest that, slowly, began closing: they could clearly see the city behind him.
“Oh dear oh dear, you’re quite jumpy. Rest assured, I have no bad intentions towards the two of you. Or anyone really. I’m a rather peaceful one as far as Old Men come. I’m certainly less prone to violence than old Seas, and very much less grumpy than Mountains.”
And at that Siidi’s eyes went wide with horror as she took a few steps back. Isse clearly felt the sudden panic going through her and, too, took a few steps back, interposing herself between her sister and this strange old man.
“Siidi?”
She tried to say something but her lips and tongue couldn’t seem to move in sync as she mumbled nonsense.
“Siidi, get a grip! What do you know about him?” shouted the younger arachne, her eyes never leaving the man’s, who just stood there, hands back behind him, although the small smile had disappeared, his face now showing concern.
“H-He’s a-a-a-an Old Man!” finally managed to say her soul half.
“Yes, well, I can see that he’s old, thank you, why would he be any different?”
Siidi shook her head emphatically as she took a sit on the fountain’s ‘edge’, lowering her head… in reverence?!
“Not any fucking old man Isse, he’s an Old Man. Capital letters. He’s the [Old Man by the Stars].”
Isse stared at her sister. Then back up at the old man, who was shaking his head in resignation, and then back at Siidi.
“Should that mean anything to me?”
Because yes, nobody had ever told her the stories of the Old Men.
As those words left her mouth the man in front of her opened his eyes wide in surprise… and started laughing. A loud, hooting, sound that was more reminiscent of a wild screaming monkey with a deep tone than a human.
The man laughed and laughed and he even had to sit down and hold his stomach, although her [Perceive Emotion] made her feel like that was him playing into it rather than actually feeling pain.
In the end, though, he finally calmed down, tears running down his cheeks that he had to scrub off with a now ash-covered sleeve, leaving a dark streak on his face.
“Hoooooooo… sorry about that, but it was just hilarious. One of you two knows about my stories, while the other doesn’t have a clue who she’s talking to. Heh, that’s what you get when you suppress stories I guess. Although, hopefully, there won’t be any more of that soon.
“Anyways, let me tell you the story of the [Old Man by the Stars]!”
He made a grand gesture with his hands, one pointed up at the starless sky with a flourish while the other sat over the still closing hole where his heart should’ve been.
“Once upon a time, when this world was being made by the gods, we didn’t exist. Rather, we didn’t have physical bodies. We were concepts with a level of sentience and an understanding of our nature. There were three of us: me, the oldest of the three, for the Stars were the first thing the gods made; then came Seas, for those were the second thing the gods made; finally came Mountains, for the gods painted the earth over the seas like they were a canvas.
“For the longest time we stayed that way: concepts who looked and existed and did their thing. Then the creatures the gods made began to evolve: first they learned to mine, then to sail, and then I came.
“And as they did that, we saw opportunities. Seas was the first to become an Old Man. He saw himself reflected, all of his nature, in an old [Sailor] – a common [Sailor], not a [Captain], nor any other fancy Class – and, in the moment of his death, they made a deal: to become one. Not for the [Sailor] to be an Avatar of him, nor some kind of [Priest]. No, for the Seas and him to become one and the same. That day the Old Man by the Seas was born, although he had a different Class at the time.
“Then Mountains did the same with one of the dwarves. Unsurprising: they understood the earth and its bounties and rules better than most.
“And finally I followed them.”
He stopped, looking at Siidi, who in the meantime had calmed down slightly.
The Old Man gave her a slight smile and made a ‘go on’ motion, as if telling her to finish the story.
Siidi’s eyes widened and seemed to ask a simple question: Me? Really?
He smiled and nodded.
So she spoke: “Of the three, the Stars had it the most difficult, for nobody could reach them. So they had to reach down themselves. And what most represented the stars? What was the meaning behind them? They were observers, is what they were, still are. They observed everything and everyone and, in exchange for that, they gave back light and Levels. So they searched, searched for someone who loved to observe and, most important of all, learn.
“They found their someone in an archive. The first Old Man by the Stars was, indeed, a woman. An [Archivista] whose true Class was forgotten in the passage of the Ages. A woman who, some say, had been a Wisher. A person from another world.”
The Old Man nodded, his smile now turned melancholy.
When Siidi closed her mouth, now looking much more calm, even though her muscles were still tense and she’d summoned back her favorite pen.
“Her name was Isetnofret. It meant, in her tongue, ‘Isis is beautiful’. She had been a young librarian working in the Library of Alexandria. She died attempting to save as many books as she could when the Library burned down after Julius Caesar’s arrival. Her Class in this world, when I first met her, had been [Axechastos Archivista]. Archivista of the Unforgettable. She spent all her newly given life studying the story of the world as it was recorded and going as far as exploring it in an attempt to record every possible story that could be found, together with developing a new kind of paper that would never burn nor age. To this day the College still has some of her books stored safely away from people’s eyes, although the Drowned managed to, somehow, get their hands on a few of their own. Good people, the Drowned. Seas made a good choice when he made them.”
His smile had turned distant now as he stared up at the starless sky.
“Still, I’m not here to reminisce. I’m here for a greater purpose: mainly to tell you that waiting for the fire to burn out will be useless: time in here is slowed down, but not stopped, so by the time – heh, time time – the flames die down it’ll have hit your little airship. You’ll need a different approach.”
Isse felt the impulse to tell the Old Man to fuck off but, seeing how Siidi was shaking her head emphatically at her, she decided to swallow down her frustration and simply say: “What do you suggest?”
The Old Man looked at the burning city, his eyes suddenly distant.
He remembered this place, these flames, those melting walls and burned houses and crumbling castle. He also remembered the screams that had come before the flames, heat and ash had killed everything in it.
He also remembered who had started the fire.
Just as the world did.
For those flames had burned Creation itself.
“If it were me I’d just send an asteroid down here and end this whole thing in one fell swoop. A fast one. But you don’t have the power nor the abilities to do such a thing.
“So, tell me, little arachne who hates fire more than anything in this world and still, for some reason, learned to craft Fireballs, what do you do when you want to stop a fire that has spread far and wide? You can’t suffocate it, for there is no wet blanket big enough for it, nor enough sand at your disposal. You can’t douse it, for you cannot fly to drop an entire ocean on it… yet. I once met an arachne who’d learned to fly, so I wouldn’t be surprised.
“You cannot wait for the fire to go out, for your time is limited. What is left for you to do?”
Isse and Siidi looked at him, waiting for an answer.
He smirked: “Why, of course, the answer is surprisingly easy: you send it back to where it came from!”
Both arachne looked at the man as if he’d just gone insane.
“We can’t send fire back to where it came from… in a city.”
“But that’s the thing: you’re not in a city. You’re in the memory of a city, while you’re inside a Fireball. You could try to snuff it out, that’s what most people would do when seeing a burning city, but you? You know how to see through souls dear. And I’m pretty sure you’ve been taught how to change perspectives.”
“...Sort of?”
The Old Man raised an eyebrow: “No, I mean I know for a fact that you’ve been taught the basics of it by Grandmother.”
Immediately Isse took a step back, raising her dagger again: “And how would you know?”
He looked at her, then gestured with his hands at his body: “I think I’ve said it. Oh, no, wait, I didn’t, that was another timeline. Pardon me, it can get confusing every now and then. Anyways, I am the [Old Man by the Stars]. It is my title and my Class. And I am certain I said this: we Stars observe. It is our purpose. Or rather, it became our purpose. To observe everything. We’re how the System looks at the world and judges what Levels and Classes and Skills you get. No Stars then equals no System. Therefore Stars equals a lot of gossip and schizophrenia for me!”
He was smiling now.
While the arachne stared at him as if they’d just met god.
Honestly, he, like the other three Old Men, was the closest thing to a god most people would ever get to meet.
A kind god too!
“Anyways, as I have stated, I know for a fact that you’ve been taught the basics of Perspective Shifting. It is a very powerful tool for [Soul Mages] since it allows you to basically fight on home turf even in a hostile person’s soul.
“Haaa, if only you’d been taught in the ways of [Dreamers], that would’ve come in handy: those hopeless sods do it on a regular basis and don’t even realize they’re doing it!”
The two arachne kept on staring at him in utter bafflement, until Siidi finally snapped: “You can’t just reveal a truth of the world and its workings and then go back to talking about other stuff like it’s nothing! That’s so many different kinds of fucked up!”
The Old Man shooed off the idea with a wave of his hand, sitting down on the edge of the monstrous fountain, his left knee beginning to bob up and down in what had probably once been nervous energy but had since become a tic.
“I can and I will. I’ve already given enough to munch on to the audience,” he smirked, winking at them, although it didn’t feel like he was winking at them, if that made any sort of sense.
“Now stop wasting time: this city won’t burn forever, that Fireball won’t be flying for much longer and I won’t be allowed to stay here for too much time. The only reasons I’ve been allowed in here are that someone wasted a great amount of a precious and very limited resource and because you’re in the skies, my domain. So no more wasting time and do as I suggest: shift your perspective. Turn this place into something more familiar!”
Isse hesitated, clearly wanting to get more out of him, but there was something in the Old Man’s voice that told her there wasn’t an alternative.
So, gently, she closed her eyes.
And thought about a place, a situation, that was familiar to her, that could bring her an advantage.
In the darkness of her eyes she thought of snow.
She thought of the gentle, half remembered, notes of a song played by her Violin the first time she’d taken it into her clammy hands from a vault covered in ice, surrounded by icy flowers that followed her every skittering step.
And, as she remembered, as she told herself with increasing certainty that that had been where she’d truly been standing all along, the world around them changed.
Siidi saw it, together with the Old Man.
And the first thing to change was the way the flames flowed.
They began to burn backwards, to unburn the reality of this memory.
Siidi watched in amazement as the walls began to wobble back together, the melted stone turning into golems turning into strange slimes that ascended back to the top and slowly remade themselves, the wood revitalizing, the houses and castle ‘uncrumbling’ themselves as windows reappeared. The fountain around her moved backwards in time and, suddenly, she found herself staring at the face of some angel that was spitting water at her feet.
Then, finally, she saw them: the skeletons. Blackened, disintegrated, and the square they were in was filled to the brim with them. The bones began bleaching white again, assembling into figures, flesh forming anew on them, covered next in… scales? Yes, scales.
Had this been a city of lizardkin? In Eva? But… how? Where? She’d never heard of anything like this.
Drakes, whispered a voice in the back of her mind.
Her eyes snapped wide open and she looked towards the Old Man, who was staring at her, the cheerfulness that had constantly been there now completely gone.
[Whisper Them Sweet Nothings]. A useful Skill for someone of my nature. Isse won’t hear me, nor you.
What was this place?
One of the drakes’ cities on Rodar. As you saw… it didn’t end well.
Siidi had heard about the Drakes. A race of dragonborn, one of the races that had been made by the gods at the beginning of Creation. She’d also heard they’d gone extinct but, seeing how things had gone here, in this memory of a city, and what the Old Man had said about the flames that burned this city having ‘Scarred the world’, she doubted it had been their fault.
She watched then as the drakes began running backwards as, suddenly, a wave of fire moved backwards, towards an epicenter near the center of the city, where, now, a ball of flames appeared.
She wanted to say something, anything, but then… it was all gone.
They were in a snow covered plain now. A few trees grew here and there and, in the distance, a forest loomed. A forest of pines.
And there, smack center of the clearing, was what remained of a wooden lodge, one that had been burned to the ground by a fire that had then frozen into place, ice covering and trapping the flames forever, turning the destructive flames into a beautiful light fixture.
It took her a few moments but, in the end, she recognized the place they’d ended up in.
“You brought us to Grandmother’s soul…” she whispered as sadness filled her heart and made her eyes tear up a bit.
Isse opened her eyes and… shook her head: “She’s dead. This… is how I imagine she would’ve liked her grave to look like.”
A ball of flames stood near the entrance to the Lodge of Frozen Flames. It seemed to shiver in the glacial cold, as if fear had finally found a way to take a hold of them.
Isse smiled: she understood fear. She’d felt so much of it, after all. She’d feared Siidi and her hate, she’d feared Grandmother and her harsh kindness, she’d feared the [Soldiers] and the fire that had killed her sisters, she’d feared Albert and then she’d feared the people who had come to hunt her in the city she’d just started to call home. She liked to think she knew fear better than most. Certainly better than a ball of fire that had known nothing but the memory of the complete annihilation of a city and its people.
She smiled, for she understood now how to do what needed to be done.
The Old Man had told her to ‘send the fireball back to its sender’.
And she knew exactly how to do that.
From the woods in the distance figures emerged. Many small, quadrupedal, furry, figures.
“Wolves,” whispered Siidi as she recognized them.
The same wolves that had hunted them many times in Grandmother’s soul as she taught them ways to defend themselves and attack things made of soulstuff.
One of them reached the shivering ball of fire and jumped, picking it up in its mouth and biting down hard. The Fireball didn’t disappear or pop, naturally. It began to burn through the wolf’s head but the beast didn’t care and, instead, turned around, scampering back towards the treeline it had come from.
The white of its skull peaked through now, but when it started to crumble to the ground it simply threw the Fireball to another fellow wolf.
They soon disappeared into the treeline.
The Old Man smiled: “Good. Now, let me give you one final piece of advice: don’t do this too often. It is less intensive than the usual method used by the lizardkin in Eva, but it still consumes Mana. Mana that your kids need. So… keep it under control, alright?”
Isse turned around to tell the man that she understood, even to thank him, but he was already gone.
As was the snowy field and the forest.
She found herself standing back on the airship’s bridge, right beside an astonished looking Shriya, the sound of Moon’s mad cackling right accompanying the sight of the [Fireball] she’d touched having turned around and now flying towards the enemy ship.
“Could you do that again?” asked the birdkin in the end.
Isse nodded.
Moon kept on laughing.
In the distance, a murder of crows approached.
[Shadowed Soul Shaper Level 26!]
[Skill – Soul Locus: The Cabin of Frozen Flames Obtained!]
[Skill – Soul Defense: Wild Wolves Obtained!]