Durability. Mobility. Firepower.
Empowering his Shadow could be immensely valuable in the future, but to get to that future, he needed to live through today. Betting on a long term prospect after crippling his most powerful weapon against tougher targets was a fool’s choice. He discarded the option without hesitation.
Though his mental eyes looked hungrily upon the skill to empower his spells, they were still drawn nonetheless back towards improved mobility. What if empowered spells were less efficient? What if they couldn’t be empowered very much and the skill proved to be a dud in the short term? Mobility seemed to be the promise of maximum efficiency as well as a defensive skill. He was already faster than Them, being even faster meant he could more easily dodge and outrun the endless spawn which sought to constantly surround him.
Good points. All of them. He figuratively patted himself on the back for taking the consideration seriously, even though he already knew his choice from the beginning. Unlike the ill-considered and in hindsight, obviously so, choice to increase the volatility of Arcane Spark, this was incredibly utilitarian. Assuming it empowered his only offensive option, Mana Bolt, enough to improve his takedown of the more heavily protected entangled groups, it was a short term win. In the long term, it would apply to any and all spells as far as the feeling he got from the proffered knowledge went. Therefore it would also be a long term win.
Reinforce his Shadow, long term maybe, short term no.
Mobility, short term maybe, definitely long term valuable, though possibly not necessary even then.
Bigger punch for all spells? Win-win.
The volume slotted itself into his sparse but growing collection and he allowed the knowledge to flow through him. It was… disappointingly obvious. The spell lines were manifestation of his willpower made real, in a fashion, from Mana. To make them stronger and allow them to contain more Mana, he had to form them with greater mental effort and care. It was, quite literally, that simple. Well, in practice the skill had probably cut short more than a month of dedicated effort to improve, so that was no wasted choice. He suspected that much like skills could be developed without being force fed to him, he would eventually learn to create spells too.
He had to live long enough though to have the time and the amount of information he needed to do it. So, first things first, deal with the encroaching heavies. Heavies, truly, was the right word, as entangled groups had started to entangle further with each other. While they were still erratic, constantly shifting balls of Shadow and Chaos, a few were approaching the sheer volume that the insectoid had been. None had the thick Shadow skins or demonstrated much in the way of cohesiveness that it had done though. Even before most of its Chaos core had been forcibly vented, the insectoid had at least had an implied form. These were just blobs. Jiggling, undulating, blobs, where whips of Shadow or arcs of Chaos just jutted out without a moment’s notice.
At least, when they weren’t trying to defend themselves from something. The entire process of picking the skill had only taken less than a minute, so his targets were quite far out. At the edge of a reasonable Mana Bolt shot, still wading, thick Shadow layers forward like amorphous shields, taking the occasional hot arc of latent Spark from the jagged lines cut by the spell. He formed a Mana Bolt, something he’d done literally tens of thousands of times. This time though as he formed it, he didn’t just follow the ‘muscle memory’ of the spell contained within the Mana Bolt volume in his mind.
No, this time he focused more, formed the tubes that would contain the Mana more deliberately, really concentrated on holding the shapes firmly and well. It was more difficult. The spell formed more slowly. Though he had the knowledge, the memory of empowering the spell structure, he hadn’t actually built up the mental muscle. Like remembering how to ride a bike but the last time you did it, you were a kid and so much more fit and energetic. He could do it, just not with the ease or at the level his implanted memory told him he could do it at.
The spell took at least ten times longer for him to form, but when he pushed Mana into it, it took almost double what it normally did and it did so with ease. The Bolt that came forth appeared brighter, more opaque. The big one of Them that it shot towards didn’t even shift it’s shield, focused as it seemed to be on the next jagged crack it was approaching. The Mana Bolt hit the big blob and punched into it with a visible ripple of force in the heavier layer of Shadow the bigger group had, even without reinforcing it. At first there just seemed to be the ripples and a little bit of Chaos that ruptured out of the opening. At first.
The Mana Bolt must have been slowed as it entered into the hot core of Chaos within Them, or there was some other cause of delay, but at some point the Bolt lost its structure and the Mana expanded, pressing outwards. The entry point had started to close up, but the wave of pressure forcibly opened it up, the shell of Shadow bucking and splitting open before the entire thing popped like some sort of impossible water balloon filled with rainbows.
Ten times longer to form, but only twice the Mana. The Chaos and Shadow that pulled into him from the kill was as much as almost fifty of the smallest of Them. He could at best have kited them into a line and destroyed five to eight per shot. That would have been five to ten shots at least for what he got for the price of two. Sure, it was slower, much slower to pull off. But he had an armor buster. Perhaps this was even a substantial part of what the upgraded Mana Bolt would have offered him, had he selected it rather than Arcane Spark? Or perhaps that was a different spell structure altogether that created a similar gain but with the ability to improve it further with skill.
What he knew, beyond a doubt, was that he was going to push himself to perform every task better, as much as he could. If he could avoid needing to waste upgrade options on skills and obtain instead, more spells, more knowledge about the formation of magical effects and less circumvention of sheer practice and experience, that would give him the best result, he felt.
The smaller clusters and individuals of Them were rapidly pressing forward to fill the newly made gap. They were weaker though, many were burst by the latent Sparks still remaining as they pushed past the barrier thus created upon the sacrifices of those who came before them. He had time. Minutes. Even taking the time to charge it carefully, Mana Bolt could be fired in a handful of seconds. He would focus on empowering it first, taking out the big ones from a distance, then try empowering it less and less to improve his speed. Eventually, he felt he’d be able to build an empowered spell in a moment. Until then, he’d practice.
--
Damn! Damn-damn-damn-damn!
His Spark barrier? The cracks the overloaded spell had left behind still charged up with remnant energy that defended him against the incoming wave? Well, that wonderful, delightful, fortuitous boundary… was totally indiscriminate. The first time he’d confidently glided up to one of the heavy rents near the edge of the blast crater, he’d been blasted by a Spark so hard that he felt like he’d blacked out for nearly a minute. At least, by the time he woke up, feeling that the compressed center of Mana within him was on the verge of fracturing and his Shadow was noticeably reduced, the incoming swarm of Them had gotten a fair bit closer.
So he’d stayed back from the deadly rents, their due a price he simply could not pay. Instead he’d extracted a tax of Chaos and Shadow from Them, picking off the biggest tangles. Sometimes they noticed the incoming Bolt and built up a shield. Though they did not manage to totally deflect the damage, the injuries did not result in a total rupture like the first fortuitous strike. At least a third of them, if not a full half, had to be battered repeatedly until they were destroyed. The empowered Bolts really made a huge difference though. Only, they took so long to cast compared to the base spell that he simply wasn’t clearing the big conglomerations as quickly as they were forming.
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And they were forming even more quickly now that they had toughed and sacrificed their way nearly within reach of him. There were so many of Them pressing up against each other, trying to push those in the front forward, that the smaller ones in the back were literally piling over the larger ones in the front. The rate of their encroachment was accelerating, though he was also being literally flooded with Chaos and Shadow. It was so much he was almost becoming overwhelmed by it, as had happened when he caused great damage to the insectoid all at once. Just barely, barely, he was keeping control, though as his core filled up rapidly, the rate at which he refined the Chaos slowed.
He needed to punch through and he needed to time it just right so that the adjacent parts of the front presented to him did not just pincer him. He had no confidence that he’d manage to resist their ravenous consumptions for more than mere seconds.
He was getting desperate. He’d thought to try and repair Arcane Spark, trying to mentally reconnect the broken parts, hoping the spell could be made to work again. It was so mangled and confusing though that he didn’t even know where to begin. Instead he reconsidered the possibility of copying something. Mana Bolt, being that only something he could feasibly copy a working version of. So he tried it. He tried mentally tracing a second copy of the spell. There was… something there, something he wasn’t quite getting, but there was definitely… something.
A copy though, it was not. Maybe with a thousand repetitions or some such bull, it would work. That was time he lacked. So instead he considered Arcane Spark once more. Not with the intent of fixing the spell or anything, but rather, how it had released in an alternative way. Did all spells have multiple functional elements? Of the two spells, Mana Bolt was a much simpler structure, yet it was still quite complex. If he were to draw it with pen and paper he would have to do it incredibly slowly lest he make a mistake. Relatively simple, but not simple.
He could practically feel the ‘breath’ of Them as he built another empowered Mana Bolt. He paid especially close attention to how his memory of casting the spell assembled it in sections, how there were different intents to the portions. Those tubes allowed large quantities of Mana to flow, these thin lines were more like logic level. This seemed to siphon tiny amounts of Mana off into the logical elements which in turn triggered switches… like transistors? Only they were switching the full brunt of the main Mana circuit.
The Mana flowed through all of the sections, not revealing some unused mode, though there were two ‘dials’, so to speak, that he’d never noticed before. They seemed to function like an analog element and he was able to ‘turn’ them with a minor mental effort. Both were approximately in the middle of their selection range.
Time to find out what they did.
The first one, he turned all the way to what he thought was the max, building and firing a base version of the spell for speed. Rather than a small, cylindrical Bolt, what came out was more like an conical wave of energy that mostly just tickled the Big Blob, as he thought of it, that served as his test subject. Sparks ripped into the Big Blob and it was nearing a collapse, so he turned to the next target, another Big Blob which was slowly layering Shadow before approaching the last heavy Spark infused crack before it. Dozens of smaller and some medium of Them flowed in a wave over it, falling into a dazzling display of Sparks which largely returned back into the crack. The energy only expended itself as much as necessary to destroy Them. Now it was further weakened though, and the Big Blob was approaching.
He turned the dial to the minimum and fired. The shot was almost painfully tight, an extremely compressed beam almost as long an thin as an arrow shaft. Not denser, but because it was a longer column of energy, the Shadow barrier it struck was drilled into deeply enough that a small flare of Chaos shot out before it quickly closed.
So that one controlled the diameter and spread.
He left it at the default setting on the next shot, turning the second dial to the maximum instead. This time the shots came out in rapidly stuttering bursts, like very short machinegun shots of Bolts rather than one single Bolt. The shots were far less accurate as each shot caused some small recoil from his outstretched hand. Interestingly though he realized that he could keep feeding Mana into the spell and extend the rapid fire shooting over a longer period of time, spraying out a lot more energy. The spell structured started to ‘heat up’ though and his mind blared alarms and images of the destroyed Arcane Spark, so he cut the feed and let the spell fade.
When he reformed it, it was still ‘hot’. Good to know, forcing the spell to fire nonstop had potentially permanent consequences. As he felt it with his mental fingers, he noticed the ‘heat’ was dissipating, the structure becoming more firm and the sense of imminent failure fading away. He turned that dial down to the minimum and found a fat sphere of Mana was the result, literally bouncing off of the Shadow barrier it hit, forcing him to dodge his own spell as it careened back at him before digging a furrow in the slope of the blast crater.
He glided back and along the upper edge of the crater, as those of Them that he’d been nearest finally managed to breach through. The reaction was almost instantaneous, the collective front of them suddenly moving in a frenzy to get to the breach. The Big Blob didn’t stop any of the small ones from squeezing under, around, and over it, but it grappled with any of the larger ones and another Big Blob that tried to get past, merging into something as large or larger than the insectoid had been. The entire time, he was keeping an eye out on the opposite side. Not all of Them had given up on breaching elsewhere, many of the Big Blobs doggedly pushing onward.
He was rebuilding the Mana Bolt structure with every fiber of his mental effort, reinforcing every main Mana tube to his limit. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. The small ones of Them were slow, but they had chased him around the rim to nearly the other side, where he was hoping that other, slightly smaller Big Blob was going to breach through very shortly. If not, he was going to have to hope the rapid fire version would hold out long enough to finish of the little ones and still take down the Big one.
Luck was on his side, in the end. The Big Blob he wanted to break through did, along with a half dozen others breaching at different points. He didn’t even want to glance at the bear sized mass that was forming at the original breach, long whip-like tentacles growing from it and snatching at any of Them within reach. He wasn’t sure he would even be able to take that thing down. If it had the reach of the Insectoid, he was within striking distance too, right now.
The Big Blob he’d targeted rolled and shifted and undulated towards him with what his mind interpreted as delight, its prey coming right to it. When he was very nearly in its reach, he flipped the dials to a thin beam, rapid fire. The empowered shots were much brighter and despite being short bursts, they were almost as long as a standard size shot. As such, they punched through the Shadow layer with ease. He sprayed a line across the Big Blob and it split open, bursting out as the long line of punctures formed into a continuous rupture.
He staggered, struggling to hold the spell structure, as Chaos overwhelmed him. Still, he’d managed to hang on before. With sheer will, he did so again. Mana tinged with Chaos flowed continuously into the Bolt spell. Two. Three. Four. Five Bolts worth of energy, empowered Bolts worth, coursed through the spell as he carved a path through the breached location and the much thinned horde there like an action hero in an old movie. Huh, a memory? Later! Something to think upon later!
For now, Bolt was starting to overheat, the structure beginning to warp. His instincts screamed at him to stop, to let it fade, but he still had more to get through. He couldn’t stop. It was literally, do or die.
At last, he cleared the thick of them. There were still hundreds, thousands of little ones of Them bobbing and rolling their way towards him, spread out as they continuously spawned in some unknown, but large, radius around his location. They were dodged as he glided at top speed. The spell faded, feeling right on the edge of failure, but still holding the structure. He focused for a time on getting a distance from the army which he’d just escaped from the center of. Mana Bolt was given a long, long time to cool down. He couldn’t take any risks. Instead he focused everything he had on gliding faster, better, moving higher off the ground. It worked, maybe. Maybe there was a tiny improvement?
He'd just have to keep at it.
For now though, as he pulled up Mana Bolt and felt it to be barely warmer feeling than normal, wholly intact, and without any deformation or damage, he was just grateful. Grateful to be alive. Grateful to have escaped the trap he’d laid for himself. Most of all though, he eyed his mostly full center and considered his ready to use again spell.
He was grateful, and he was hungry.