Chapter 41. Learning to Cast Spells

You received 2 Ectoplasm.

You received 2 Ghost Cloth.

You received 30 Silver.

Definitely not what I was looking for in terms of items. I needed magical items to break down into Enchanting materials and shards for the legendary weapon quest. But the Ectoplasm was useful, and I practically gawked at the Silver. More than gawked. A fantasy flashed through my head of standing in one of those money chambers where the cash flies all over the place and you have to grab it. Thirty bucks in five minutes of fighting? Yes, please! At this rate, maybe I could actually justify being an adventurer.

“What is Ghost Cloth?” I asked.

“It’s used for Tailoring,” she said. “It’s an Uncommon material, so it’s possible to create set items out of it.”

“Oh,” I said, “That could be useful.”

“Could be,” Janica said. “Probably not for what we have in mind for you though. But it’s worth asking Dread.”

“That fight was a little rough,” I said.

“It was easy peasy,” Janica said.

“Easy? Are you crazy? If there was one extra mob we probably would have died.”

She shrugged. “You worry too much. But I’m missing so many of my good skills. I can’t execute. I can’t go defensive when I need to. We need levels. And I need another weapon besides this mace.”

I sat down, waiting for my mana to regenerate.

“Speaking of levels,” I said. “Why were those Wraiths only level ten? The ones outside the instance were over level twenty.”

“Because instances scale based on the average level of the party and the number of people in the party,” she said. “This is actually an advantage for you. I’m considered a companion, so you’re getting double the experience you would have if you were with another adventurer.”

She was right, 360 Experience and Reputation was a lot. It was almost double what I had received for fighting The Headmaster. At this rate, I’d get another level in one more set of mobs. And I’d only need about eighty-five kills to get tenured with The University.

“Lightning Strike is good,” Janica said. “But you pulled aggro. That was bad. So watch when you cast that. Wait until the mobs have lower health.”

“Okay,”

“Also,” she continued, “I think it’s time I taught you how to instant-cast your spells so you don’t have to open up your Spell Book every time.”

I perked up at that. “Yes, please. How do I do that?”

“It’s not easy,” she said. “You need to study. And practice. Open up your page to Rejuvenate.”

I did.

“When you first opened that page, was it a bunch of stuff you didn’t understand? Symbols and mathematical equations and such?”

“Uh huh.”

“Do you see anything on the page that makes more sense than it used to?” Janica asked.

The diagrams didn’t make sense to me. It looked like a human body, labeled in some unknown language. It didn't mean any more to me than it previously had. But on the other side of the page, I saw some math that started to make sense. I’d always liked math, unpopular as it was with most people.

“Spend a few moments trying to decipher it,” Janica said. “I doubt you’re smart enough, but it’s worth a try.”

I ignored her barb. I searched the page for meaning, knowing that it probably had to do with how much healing I did with each spell. I had played dozens of games in my youth that required deductive reasoning and other techniques to solve puzzles. This was no different. Yet there didn’t seem to be enough information to break the code.

Janica laid on her back, in the air, and pretended to snore. She was a real treat.

I looked back at my log and noticed that I had healed Janica thirty-three health over five seconds. My tooltip said I would heal for twenty-nine, which was the exact value of my Intelligence. That was a good clue. Maybe it had something to do with the haste buff I gave myself.

Feeling stuck, I tried to switch my brain into a different mode. I needed to think in a different way. Sofia and I sometimes did physical puzzles at home. I had learned that depending on what you’re looking for, you can make progress in different ways. At first, you look for edge pieces. Then you might switch and look for specific colors or straight lines that run through the picture. When you’re trying to complete a section of blue sky, you might look for smaller nuances in color or even the shape of the pieces themselves. Puzzles were like this, and if you knew how to switch modes, you could attack the problem from a new angle.

So I tried a new technique. I flipped back and forth between the spell page for Rejuvenate and the page for Lightning Strike, looking for patterns. Lucky for me, there were similar variables. Double lucky for me, many of the symbols were normal mathematical operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and parentheses. Had this not been the case, I would have been lost. But I had the feeling that they wanted players to be able to decode the formulas with some work.

I switched puzzling modes again to one of my favorites. I call it brute force. I would never tell this to Janica, because she would endlessly make fun of me, but brute force was a technique of trial and error. I began taking numbers from my character sheet, plugging them into the formulas, and seeing if the output was what actually happened against the Wraiths. This took a while, and Janica interrupted me twice to ask if I was done yet. But pushed her away both times, convinced that I could figure it out. And then it happened. I found a combination of stats and formula that, when put together, gave the exact amount that I had healed Janica with Rejuvenate. Inside, I jumped for joy. I had done it! On the outside, I acted as nonchalant as possible.

“I think I got it,” I announced without much of a reaction.

Janica sat upright, startled at my announcement. “Open up your Spell list.”

I turned to the index where it listed my spells. Next to Rejuvenate, it read “33% progress.” I relayed this to Janica.

“Great!” She said, “you must have figured out the hand motions. That was the easy part. Now you gotta figure out the words. Not too difficult. And then the math. Gross. Some people have to get a tutor for that part. Or increase their Intelligence stat.” She made a fake vomit sound.

“No,” I said. “I figured out the math.”

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

“Really?” She looked genuinely surprised. She tilted her head sideways. “Maybe this caster thing suits you.”

I dove back into the process, working on my other spell. But now that I had decoded one spell, the next was much easier. In moments, I figured out the other formula. I announced this to Janica. “Lightning Strike does damage equal to half of my Perception, modified by—”

Janica cut me off. “Lalala mathmathmath,” she chanted with fingers in her ears.

I sighed. When she stopped, I asked her: “How do I get that number from 33% to 100%?”

“When you cast them the slow way,” she said, “pay attention to the words in your head and the way your hands move.”

Weird. I hadn’t noticed either.

“My mana is full. Let’s keep moving.” I set my Job to Instructor and bought both Lightning Strike and Rejuvenate. I had enough job points to buy both. Then switched my load out.

“Incoming,” Janica said, charging into a Wraith and a Banshee.

I immediately casted Rejuvenate, wanting to stay ahead of the damage. As I casted it, I noticed that my right hand moved outward and then back with my first two fingers pointed downward. It wasn’t a large sweeping movement. More like a quick, micro movement. I followed the spell up by pulling out my drum and pounding out the beats for Rhythm and Tempo.

Janica focused the Wraith down harder this time, ignoring the Banshee. By the time its stun wore off and it began to cast enrage, its health was down to 55%.

It Enraged and started swiping at Janica. Her health ticked down and then up, like a bouncy ball slowly losing height.

The Banshee’s stun wore off, and it started casting a spell. It had a purple ball of energy between its bony hands that was growing in size.

I turned to Lightning Strike in my Spell Book and began casting the spell, which took 2.7 seconds to cast. I watched my hands. My spell caused my index fingers to touch up in the air and then one finger bolted down like lightning would.

Before the spell cast though, the Banshee’s spell released, sending a streak of purple energy at Janica. It chunked her health down by 20% and Silenced her. The spell bounced off of Janica and careened toward me. It interrupted my Lightning Strike, causing the energy inside of me to sizzle and dissipate. It also took 20% of my health. I tried to activate another Lightning Strike but found that I couldn’t. I couldn’t cast Rejuvenate either.

“You’re locked out of casting nature spells for three more seconds, down from six,” Janica said.

What a nasty spell.

Janica finished off the Wraith and turned to the Banshee, who was lining up another purple bolt. Janica ran away from the Banshee until she had a little distance, then charged her, interrupting her cast with a two second stun.

I threw a Rejuvenate on Janica, then a Lightning Strike on the Banshee, and she fell to the ground, buzzing with electricity.

You defeated Banshee x1.

You defeated Wraith x 1.

You earned 360 Experience.

You earned 360 Reputation with Edreru university.

You earned 40 JP with the Instructor Job.

You gained a level.

I grabbed the loot. More Ectoplasms and Silver.

Janica jumped into the air. “New skill! One step closer to my former self.”

“What’s you get?” I asked.

“Execute.” She smiled big. “Big damage on anything under 25% health.”

“What about all those weapon skills you bragged about?” I asked. “Like mace and sword techniques?”

“My Weapon Expertise is capped at five times my level,” she said. “I just hit level eight because you hit level eight. So my Expertise is now forty with all weapons. I’ll get access to new techniques at Expertise level fifty. I used to have over 200 Expertise with some weapons.”

I raised my eyebrows in admiration, and Janica shrugged in response.

I looked at my Spell Book, and noticed that each of my spells were at 67% completion. And the diagrams with the human bodies on them had transformed into drawings of hand gestures with little descriptions written in English. In my own handwriting. The game had, once again, created something from my brain. The remaining 33% of the spell completion percentage would come from decoding the words of the spell, and this gave me some anxiety. As Janica had suggested, I tried to pay attention to the words in my head as I casted my spells during that fight. However, I never fancied myself a linguist, and the words I heard myself say while casting didn’t make any sense to me. It all sounded like gibberish.

“Do you have any tips for me with the words of spells? I can’t figure it out.”

“They’re words from the original language,” she said. “Before elves, humans, and dwarves split to form separate societies. I’m not a caster, but I know a couple phrases.”

“Okay, what do you know?” I asked. “Maybe that will help my pronunciation.”

“Sure,” she said. “Es mundus excrementi!”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means you are a pile of shit .”

I laughed. “Okay, what else?”

“Mori in igni,” she said, “ means die in a fire! ”

“So basically you know a bunch of curses. That makes sense.”

“Yeah, I know a lot more. Want me to keep going?”

“No,” I said. “I’m good.” I had an idea, but I wouldn’t be able to research it until I logged out of IO.

After those first two pulls, we got better as a team. We continued to focus-down the Wraiths first, as their damage was significant enough to be the biggest threat to our team. We countered the Banshees by creating more distance between Janica and I, preventing their purple spell from chaining between us. I would have preferred to stun the Banshees mid-cast, but my Lightning Strike took too long to cast, and it was nearly impossible to predict when they’d cast Shadow Bolt. Lightning Strike was a cool spell, in theory. In practice, it was tough to use. It took a long time to cast and pulled a lot of aggro.

We even managed to pull groups of three with little danger. I would put Rejuvenate on Janica early, then I’d help her burst down the first mob by placing Lightning strikes so that they’d only hit the first target. It was a waste of dps not aiming for all of the enemies, but at least it didn’t grab the attention of the whole group.

We had killed a total of eight mobs and we leveled up again. The levels were coming fast, now. I had earned almost 180 Silver since we had entered the dungeon which means that I only needed about 600 more to make my rent for the week. I was also able to purchase Talk to Spirits with Mystic Job Points, which was the last purchasable skill in the Mystic Job. When I did, I got an unusual game prompt.