22. Complications

Chapter 022
Complications

Zorian woke up in his bed in Cirin, Kirielle wishing him a good morning in that charming manner of hers. He was annoyed both at himself for not paying more attention to his surroundings and at the unknown attacker that did him in. It figured that he would survive all those close calls and near-death situations, only to get killed by a simple sneak attack.

He passed the train ride sketching magic item blueprints in his notebook. Most of them were trivial things, like plates that kept the temperature of a meal constant or explosive traps that triggered on their own when certain conditions had been met, but he was toying with the idea of designing a practice dummy. He had found a combination of alteration spells that should allow him to construct a dummy out of wooden scraps and soil, but making the animation core was no simple task. And then, even if he managed that, he would have to design a warding scheme to etch into the dummy’s surface, lest it disintegrate when he started hurling spells at it… possibly in an explosive manner, showering him with wooden splinters and shrapnel. He should probably also add at least a weak self-repair function, to prevent the dummy from falling apart from micro-fractures and such…

He didn’t expect to finish this project in the current restart.

In any case, this time Zorian didn’t wait much before contacting the aranea. Upon entering his room, he spent an hour crafting a rod of magic missiles for basic self-defense and then promptly marched off in the direction of the nearest Dungeon entrance.

Unlike his previous attempts to look for aranea, he wasn’t simply walking around, waiting to stumble upon their scouts – he was trying to sense their minds with his brand new mind sense. Sadly, he sensed nothing except an occasional rat and-

He stopped, sensing a mind of unusual strength from one of the rats ahead. He mentally ordered his floating light to intensify for a moment and was rewarded with a disquieting sight of a rat missing the top of his head.

For a full second, Zorian and the cephalic rat stood still and watched one another in indecision, trying to decide on a course of action. Then – gently, hesitantly – the rat extended a telepathic probe at him, trying to worm into his mind. For one small moment, Zorian considered trying to take it on telepathically, but then discarded the thought as stupid and risky. He was completely untrained in telepathic combat, and that one rat was merely a conduit for the entire cephalic rat collective. So instead he drew his brand new spell rod and fired a magic missile at it.

The moment he reached for his spell rod, the rat immediately dropped its telepathic probe and tried to run. It was too slow. The bolt of concussive force slammed into the tiny creature with a loud crack, pulverizing its bones and crushing it into paste.

Well, so much for that. Zorian extended his mind sense as far as he could, trying to sense the rest of the collective, but found nothing. Either this one was an isolated scout or the rest had some method of hiding from his scans.

By the time he had decided to move on, the pulped body of the cephalic rat was already being enveloped by a green, translucent mass of crawling gel. The oozes that patrolled these walled-off sections of the dungeon were artificially engineered to be less dangerous and aggressive than their wild counterparts, but Zorian was never a fan of tempting fate and did his best to side-step the things as he moved past them. Acid burns were hard to heal, even with magic.

When he finally did find the aranea, the meeting was pretty disappointing. The aranea he met was one of those that didn’t know how to talk to humans, so it took him 10 minutes of telepathic pantomime that left him with a raging headache, and once the matriarch finally showed up she basically told him to get lost for a few days until she came to terms with the contents of the memory packet.

Not an unexpected turn of events, but he had been hoping that the matriarch had refined her memory packet into something that could convince her past-self a bit faster than last time. The matriarch was a bit pushy and conceited, but it was nice to talk to someone about the time loop. Also, the truth was that there was little he could do to unravel the mystery of the time loop without aranea help other than steadily gathering magical skills and keeping his eyes open.

As he walked back to his room to sleep off his newly-acquired headache, he tried to think of a way to advance faster in his magical studies. He needed a teacher. One willing to teach him spells most instructors would consider too dangerous for the likes of a freshly certified student. Who did he know that would… oh.

That just might work.

– break –

The next day, when Taiven came to recruit him into her little sewer expedition she found him practicing combat spells on one of the Academy training grounds instead of sleeping in his room. He could have easily warded himself against her divination spells at this point, but having her track him down was part of the plan: he was hoping to recruit her as a sparring partner, and possibly teacher.

He had always thought he had gotten over Taiven’s (oblivious) rejection of him, but apparently there was still some lingering resentment remaining because he noticed something very important in the previous restart. Something he should have noticed way sooner, had he not been unconsciously ignoring her and pushing her away. Taiven was not at all opposed to helping him out, especially if the help was somehow related to combat. Why was he insisting on learning combat magic alone, without an instructor, when he was friends with someone who specialized in that very field of magic?

So here he was, carefully casting magic missiles at the target in front of him, trying to make them as mana efficient as possible. He was hoping that Taiven would offer to help on her own when she saw him practicing, and he wasn’t disappointed. She did, however, attach a condition to her offer.

“So, in conclusion, I get a month of instruction from you, free of charge, in exchange for joining you on this sewer run of yours?” Zorian asked.

“Yup!” Taiven said happily, looking very satisfied with herself. Zorian could guess why – she just found a way to pressure him into accompanying her, and all it took was promising to do something she was inclined to do anyway.

“I suppose that’s okay,” said Zorian, mentally considering how he should approach this. He could, of course, simply trail after them and let them fumble around for a while – it’s what Taiven expected him to do, and he was pretty sure the aranea wouldn’t ‘attack’ while he was present. However, after some thought, he decided to go for a different path. “I have a request though. I am on speaking terms with a colony of sentient spiders living in the sewers, and I have a sneaking suspicion they’re the ones that supposedly took the watch. I’d like to try actually talking to them before you go in and start burning things.”

Taiven gave him a curious look. “You are friends with a bunch of giant, sewer-dwelling spiders?”

“Pretty much,” Zorian agreed with her. He would describe the aranea as acquaintances and allies of convenience instead of friends, but she didn’t have to know that. “I trust you and your friends can keep that a secret? I’m sure you can see why spreading that around might cause problems for me and the spiders both.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not a tattletale,” Taiven said dismissively. “And I’ve yet to see Grunt and Mumble engage in any kind of gossip, so your secret is safe with us, oh great monster charmer. You think they’ll just hand us the watch if we ask?”

“If the client’s story is not made up, then yes. I don’t see what use they would have for a pocket watch. But anyway, I have a request for you before you run off to do your thing.”

“Oh? And what’s that?”

“Teach me a fire spell more destructive than flamethrower,” Zorian said.

“How big are your mana reserves?” Taiven immediately asked, not at all disturbed by the request.

“Magnitude 12,” Zorian said.

“Hmm, a little lower than I thought, but decent enough I guess,” Taiven said. Zorian decided to keep quiet about the underwhelming nature of his natural reserves. “What kind of spells are you looking for, anyway?”

“Preferably something that can one-shot a troll,” Zorian said.

Taiven looked at him like he was crazy. “What? Roach, you’re far too green to go around picking fights with trolls. What the hell are you on?”

“Just humor me, Taiven,” Zorian sighed. “Besides, this is pure self-defense – I won’t be picking fights with anything.”

“Hmph,” Taiven shrugged. “Says a guy who goes around meeting giant spiders in the sewers in his free time. But alright, I guess if you’re going to do stuff like that you’ll need some stronger spells under your belt. I expect an explanation about that soon, though.”

“After the summer festival,” agreed Zorian smoothly.

“I’ll hold you to that,” Taiven said, poking him painfully in the chest. “Now, there are two spells that kind of fit your criteria, although they will only kill a troll if you can hit the troll in the face with them – fire bolt and incinerating ray. The bolt can home in on the target and is cheaper in terms of mana use. The ray is far more damaging, but also far more of a mana hog and you need to worry about your aim.”

“Teach me both,” said Zorian. The bolt seemed like something that would be more generally useful for someone like him, but he needed the raw power as well.

“You sure you have the shaping skills for this, Roach?” Taiven asked. “’Cause this kind of spell isn’t going to fizzle out if you fail – it will blow up in your face.”

Zorian snorted derisively. “Trust me, shaping skills are not something I’m lacking in,” he said. He raised his arm into the air, palm pointed towards the earth, and willed some of the dust and dirt to rise towards it. The dry, loose material that covered the training ground slowly rose towards his hand in a diffuse pillar, coalescing into a rough sphere once they reached his palm.

Once he was satisfied with the size of the sphere, he pointed his palm towards one of the targets and willed the mass of dirt rapidly forward, catapulting it towards the target. Sadly, the impromptu construct was too structurally unsound and disintegrated into dust halfway towards the target, so some of the effect was ruined.

It didn’t make the feat any less impressive to Taiven, though.

“Damn, that was impressive as hell,” Taiven said. “How can you do that? I don’t think I could do that… Lift a rock off the ground, sure, but diffuse material like soil? That’s a pretty advanced exercise. Hmm, if your shaping skills are that good, I guess there are a few more spells I could teach you…”

Zorian smiled. This had definitely been a good idea.

– break –

During the next several days, while he waited for Taiven to gather her team for the journey into the city’s sewers, Zorian got a crash course in combat magic from his friend. Taiven took a surprisingly broad approach to the topic, opting to teach him as many different spells as she could manage instead of having him practice a few until he had a firm hold over them. She claimed that he already had a core of spells he was properly proficient in, and that he needed variety and breadth of possible options more than he needed a new ace in the hole, but she later admitted she was testing him, trying to discover the limits of his shaping skills. Something she didn’t end up finding – Zorian’s shaping skills were better than hers; every spell she could cast, he could as well.

Not all of the spells she taught him were of the typical offensive sort he expected from her. Some of them, like the ‘spider climb’ spell that allowed him to cling to sheer walls and other stable surfaces, ‘featherfall’ that allowed him to survive high falls, or the various comfort spells that blunted temperature extremes and other environmental conditions, could be more properly classified as survival spells. Nonetheless, Taiven insisted that sometimes the environment itself was just as big of a danger to a mage as his living opponents, and that he needed to know these spells if he was going to waltz around the dungeon and similar places.

She was also fairly horrified by his lack of defensive spells. Not just a lack of any defensive barriers more substantive than the basic shield, though she wasn’t happy about that either – no, she was talking about wards. Wards were fairly useless once the fight started, since they were slow to cast, and few opponents would give a mage the time needed to cast them during a battle, but Taiven claimed they were absolutely essential for a mage who expected to get into a fight. So long as you weren’t ambushed or otherwise surprised, and actually knew you were going to be in a fight soon, you could at least cast some basic wards to improve your spell resistance and counter some of more common spells. And if you actually knew something about your opponent’s spell repertoire and specialties? Then you could really ruin their day with a few choice wards. This was the reason why humanity had been steadily encroaching on monster-held territory with every passing year – most magical creatures only had a handful of inborn magical tricks and abilities on their side and once you knew what they were you could devise a perfect counter for them in advance.

Unfortunately, you could only stack so many wards on top of each other before they started to interfere with each other and the whole edifice collapsed, and some of them inherently interfered with each other’s operation, so knowing how to combine them effectively was a bit of a specialist skill. Taiven was not very proficient with wards herself, being more offensively focused, so he would need to find somebody else for anything except the basics.

However, most of the spells she taught him were various offensive and defensive energy projections, largely ones revolving around fire and force, but also some spells based on cold and electricity. Among other things, Zorian could now cast the ever-famous fireball spell… exactly twice before he ran out of mana. So not very useful, honestly, but Taiven claimed that any mage worth their name should be able to cast a fireball, and that the utility of such spells would naturally increase along with his mana reserves.

“Actually, I’m curious… is there some way to speed up the growth of mana reserves?” asked Zorian. “I know that artificially increasing them has bad side-effects, but is there some kind of training method that would speed up natural growth?”

Taiven looked at him, looking apprehensive. “Technically, yes,” admitted Taiven reluctantly. “It’s as simple as using mana-intensive spells to constantly exhaust your reserves. It would kick the growth of your reserves into overdrive. However, that kind of unnatural growth would completely wreck your current shaping skills – your normal growth of reserves is so slow because your soul is making sure your control over mana doesn’t slip. Wrecking your shaping skills just to speed up the growth of your reserves is really short-sighted, Roach. Please don’t do it. I never would, and you know I’m not exactly the most responsible girl. Surely you can wait for a few years for them to grow on their own?”

Well he certainly wasn’t pressed for time at the moment, Zorian had to admit. “I suppose that makes sense,” he said. “I guess the reason why mana reserves plateau after a while is that there is only so much power a soul can safely handle. Increasing the cap artificially after that point messes up the mage’s shaping skills with no hope of ever regaining them. No wonder everyone recommends against doing it – no matter how benign the enhancement process, the result is still more power and less control over it.”

“There is always a trade-off between control and power,” said Taiven. “It’s just not apparent most of the time, since very few people try to develop their shaping skills to their limits. Many mages think that having more mana is always better, since you can always work harder on your shaping skills, but increasing your mana reserves without bad side effects is essentially impossible. It’s not true, though. No matter how much time they spend honing their shaping skills, people with huge mana reserves are outright incapable of performing some particularly finesse-focused spells – things like advanced mind magic, detailed illusions and complex alteration constructs.”

“Wait, you’re saying that I’ll lose the ability to cast finesse-based spells as my mana reserves increase?” asked Zorian in alarm.

“No, no, I’m talking about your natural mana reserves – your inborn capacity before you start to increase it through regular spellcasting. About magnitude. Most spells, even highly sophisticated ones, are designed for average mages – magnitude 8 to 12, in other words. You’re 12, so still comfortably within the intended range. Hell, I’ve heard of a one particular 15 magnitude mage that became a damn good illusionist, so even if you tip over a little it will hardly matter.”

Considering Zorian’s real magnitude was 8, he apparently had nothing to worry about. Still, it did make him wonder about Zach, who seemed to have magnitude in the low 60s. How did that kind of monstrous power factor in Taiven’s scheme?

“How about people with really high magnitude?” asked Zorian. “How high can you go before finesse-based spells become impossible?”

“I’ve never seen hard numbers, but I’d guess around magnitude 20 or so,” Taiven shrugged.

“How about the really high numbers?” Zorian asked. “Something like magnitude 60?”

Taiven blinked, seemingly baffled by the question. “Well, that would be downright inhuman!” she said finally. “Is that even possible? Anyway, I’m not sure whether that would even be a good thing, even for a battlemage like me. Anyone with such mana reserves would have to spend years longer than their peers just to gain a basic level of proficiency expected of a certified mage. Maybe as much as a decade even, I don’t know.”

Zorian thought about what a relative failure Zach was before the time loop and frowned. He had thought that Zach had simply been a lazy slacker, but maybe there was more to it than that? Then again, he had a feeling Zach was a special case. Those inhuman mana reserves were just that – completely outside the human range. He found absolutely no records of people like that in any of the books, and most of the experts he asked flat out told him such people didn’t exist outside of myths. Also, while Zach had been a crappy mage, he did succeed in getting certified so his huge mana reserves clearly weren’t as crippling as they should have been.

Maybe it was a Noveda House bloodline? One that gave their family huge reserves without the crippling loss of control, perhaps. Of course, the Noveda publically claimed they had no bloodline, but it wouldn’t be the first time a House had lied.

“I hesitate to even bring this up,” Taiven said, breaking him out of his thoughts, “but if you’re really desperate for a short term mana boost, you can always absorb ambient mana faster than you can assimilate it. I’m sure you’re aware of the drawbacks, though…”

Zorian nodded. There were two main forms of mana available to the mage: his personal mana and the ambient one that emanated from the underworld. Personal mana was something that all things with a soul possessed in varying amounts, and it was attuned to the person producing it – it bent easily to its creator’s will, and was innately more malleable and controllable than anything else they might use to power their magic, since it never resisted the caster’s efforts to shape it. Ambient mana, on the other hand, was both harder to control and toxic to living beings. Not enough to kill a mage just for using it once, but any substantial, prolonged use resulted in sickness and insanity. The mages of old believed that ambient mana was tainted by the World Dragon’s hate for humanity and shunned its use, but modern mages had discovered a few tricks to making use of it. One was by using it to power items, which had no minds to corrupt or bodies to sicken. The other was to assimilate the ambient mana into their personal reserves, negating its toxic properties. While the process of assimilation was too slow to power actual spells, being able to regenerate personal reserves faster was useful enough that the skill spread far and wide. These days, every student of magic was taught how to do it along with the other basics of spellcasting.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

“I’ll get sick,” Zorian said. “And possibly mad, if I keep using it constantly.”

“Right,” Taiven said. “Using raw mana on a regular basis is pretty stupid, but if you’re in a real bind… well, it’s better to spend a few days bedridden with a fever than end up dead.”

“You’ve used it before,” guessed Zorian.

Taiven gave him a surprised look, like it was unexpected he figured it out. “Uh, maybe once? Or twice?” She shifted her stance, looking uncomfortable. “But keep quiet about that, will you? Most combat mages have done it a couple of times in their life, but Guild inspectors don’t accept ‘everybody’s doing it’ as an excuse.”

Zorian made a gesture over his mouth, indicating that his lips are sealed. It’s not like she didn’t know plenty of things to get him in trouble with, anyway.

“Let’s just get back to the lesson, oh great teacher,” Zorian said. “Since you’re so intent on teaching me mana-intensive fire spells, how about that fire vortex I heard you can cast…”

– break –

When the time came, Taiven and her two friends let Zorian take point as he led them towards aranea territory. They had already tried and failed to divine the location of the watch, which wasn’t terribly unusual if it really was taken by the aranea – the aranea had been engaged in a shadow war with the invaders for a while now, even before the time loop started, and their anti-divination wards were top-notch.