Henry Dracul was the first to make a move as he created numerous [Blood Fires] in the air and began launching them at Maria. His opponent responded by putting up a [Barrier] and an [M. Barrier] around her before conjuring a few [Fire] spells of her own and firing them at her enemy. She also topped it off with a few [Blood Ray] spells that quickly followed after her first attack spell.
This shocked her Vampire opponent who immediately dispersed in a cloud of smoke before reappearing in a different place. Henry couldn’t remain idle, however, because the [Fire] and [Blood Ray] spells Maria fired that didn’t explode or hit something were already homing in on him.
“What?!”
“Hahaha, dance for me vampire!” Maria said as she immediately began casting a few other spells and firing them at Henry Dracul.
Many players in Unitale possessed the Magus subclass as it was sort of a prerequisite for anyone who was trying to main and become a decent mage-type player as the Magus subclass allowed the players to be more flexible with their magic spells. Performing multi-casts or stack casting was only possible if one possessed the Magus sub-class. The art of multi-casting spells is when a mage-type player conjures more than one spell in a single instant like what Maria had just done.
She cast [Barrier], [M. Barrier], [Fire], and [Blood Ray] in almost an instant to defend herself and attack her enemy. Seeing so many spells being activated at once startled Henry Dracul and seeing as it was too late to do anything about it, he was forced to dodge and was then put into a passive position as Maria now gained the initiative in their battle. Despite how easily Maria managed to pull it off, the technique wasn’t something that could easily be done if you weren’t proficient enough with it. Maria could multicast more spells as 4 wasn’t her limit though she didn’t do that.
Her repertoire of spells was pretty limited compared to other full-fledged mages so she had to use them intelligently to make up for this lack of spells that she had. The only solace was that her 4 basic elemental spells were pretty flexible as she could mold them into any other spell she wanted. The effects wouldn’t change much but firing a [Fire Lance] or a [Flame Arrow] was usually better than using just a regular [Fire] spell. This was only possible because her basic elemental spells were the enhanced versions that she learned from her mentor, the Demon Archmage Paimon.
Naturally, multicasting so many spells at once wasn't the only unique magus skill she had. She learned from the 4 elemental spells that Paimon taught her that those spells, as well as any other one, could be ‘stack cast’ on top of each other. That was the term Maria used as she didn’t have a better name to describe what she did. Her 4 elemental spells had a limited number of charges and if she used the charges all at once, she could ‘stack cast’ 10 [Fire], [Blizzard], [Aero], or [Terra] spells all at once. It would cost her a lot of Divine Energy to do this but with her massive reserve pool, it wasn’t a problem at all.
This ‘stack casting’ was something unique to only her enhanced elemental spells but she learned how to stack cast a few of her other spells as well after she practiced, practiced, and practiced. Naturally, she wasn’t able to stack cast 10 of her other spells all at once like she did with her 4 basic spells, but 5 to 6 was doable for her. Despite being able to do this, however, Maria never once had to use all of her spells' charges since most of her opponents would die before she needed to.
Maria liked keeping most of her abilities in secret and whenever she did go all out, her magical capabilities were usually overshadowed by her melee combat capabilities so only those that were very attentive would notice that she was not only a very skilled fighter, but even more so an extremely skilled mage. The system hadn’t labeled her stack casting as a new skill or anything, but whenever she did use the technique, she would obtain an insane amount of proficiency points for the spell she used and for all of her Magus subclass skills she learned.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Most of her Magus subclass skills had reached rank S except [Magic Comprehension] which was still A. It needed around 2500 proficiency before reaching S and once she was able to get S-rank in that skill, she’d be able to combine all 3 of her Magus subclass skills and evolve it into [Magic Mastery E], which was said to be the starting line if a mage wanted to walk down the road to become an Archmage. This was her goal because Maria thought it was the minimum level she needed to reach before she could go save her mentor, Paimon, from the prison that he was sent to from planet Eur.
No matter how she tried to downplay her magecraft, Maria’s way of spellcasting was pretty unique and the mage community on Unitale had picked up on it after a while so other players had begun using her unique stack casting.
Of course, they weren’t as great as her since even the best of the mages in Unitale could only manage 3-4 on their own, which was already amazing in itself. They weren’t taught by some Archmage and only copied her, but they were able to reach that level through their own efforts.
Maria still had room to improve on her stack casting so she wasn’t going to neglect this opportunity to test out her magic combat style since her opponent was also a mage. The only people in the game that could probably rival Maria’s unique stack casting were likely the NPCs.
Henry Dracul was one of these NPCs because after Maria showed an opening, he suddenly cast multiple instances of [M. Barrier], teleported away with a [Shadow Blink], before immediately retaliating with a few attack spells of his own. Maria wasn’t the type to run away from a direct confrontation as she was completely confident in her magical capabilities. She responded to her opponent’s retaliation by casting [Blizzard] and matching the number of spells that were coming at her with a similar number plus one so she had the advantage.
“Come on! I’m beating you! Hahaha!”
With her new items, Maria felt like her initial number of multicasting and stack casting had increased so she wanted to test that limit but first, she needed to have a little bit of fun with her test subject.
“Tsk, you arrogant little–”
“I don’t think you have the leisure to talk and insult me!”
Maria increased the magic output of her spells and raised their potency by a level with her [Energy Manipulation] skill. It burned a bit more of her Divine Energy to cast her spells now, but that didn’t matter as her natural regen could make up for the extra cost. No matter how hard Henry Dracul tried, he was struggling to match or even keep up with Maria’s spellcasting. He was slowly being overwhelmed and he couldn’t understand why.
The girl in front of him was obviously much lower leveled than he was, but he was actually weaker? He didn’t want to even believe this was true, however, the evidence was right in front of him. No matter what kind of trick he tried to pull, his opponent would always be able to defend against it and even counter it in the next moment, giving him no time to rest or plan out his next course of action as the only action from there was to avoid being hit by Maria’s counter spell.
If Henry didn’t dodge and tried to do what Maria did, matching her spell for spell, then he was going to be the one on the losing end of it for her spells were outmatching him even in terms of damage output and intensity. His [Blood Ray]s were being completely outdone by Maria’s [Blood Ray]s and this was with him having the environmental and racial advantage on his side.
“How? How is this possible?”
No matter what kind of Blood Arts he used, Maria countered him with the same Blood Art that she learned from Ash and Carmilla. Her energy output was even higher than what Henry could muster so she was always winning each confrontation but despite all of those wins, Maria never went in for the final blow. She would always fall back and wait for her opponent to make a move after she made him dance around a little.
Maria didn’t know this, but all of her actions were really sadistic. Watching the handsome but poor enemy vampire pounce around at her bidding was just too funny and she was enjoying every moment of it.
“Come on! Don’t stop dancing for me! If you stop, I’ll kill you! Hahaha!”
“!!!”
She definitely meant it when she said this as her eyes glowed with an eerie light. Henry Dracul wanted to stop and accept his fate but seeing the scary look in his opponent’s eyes, he didn’t dare to stop.
‘S-Shit, I might face a fate much worse than death if I surrender to this psychopath!’