Eramith
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Book 2: Chapter 65
🕑 Added 2023-06-09 13:01:00 +0000 UTCHe wanted to go perform further tests on the enemies in and around the castle but he needed a better way of dealing with the archer’s first. If he used the shades to fight the same way he had here, he would run out of mana in minutes just from trying to block arrows. He was starting to really regret that the alchemist’s camp had exploded because what he really needed right now was a weapon of mass destruction.
He could run around to try and deal with all of the guards, but from their aim alone, they were far faster and more coordinated than even the armored Devoured from the second general’s army. If he really had to deal with them in a more individual way, he wanted to deal with the monstrosities in the courtyard first so at least they weren’t chasing after him the whole time.
The best idea he could come up with was to create a wedge of Mana Shields so that they redirected the arrows instead of destroying them outright. While he knew that would decrease the mana expenditure, he also knew it wasn’t nearly enough. Also the guards fired from multiple angles meaning some would still be perpendicular to the shields.
He briefly considered wind spells and making a tornado but unfortunately the fantasy didn’t quite pan out in reality. He would have needed way more mana to create then sustain a tornado and basic wind spells at the power he would need that they would have been much less efficient than just plan Mana Shields.
He thought about trying to incinerate all the arrows in the air but didn’t think that would pan out because they moved so quickly and D grade wood seemed to be more difficult to ignite. He thought about trying to sneak in to the camp to sabotage all the arrows first but he knew they probably carried a lot on them already and he didn’t really know where they were stored. He also wasn’t entirely confident in his stealth skills just yet.
Felix started to think through every spell and spell component he knew trying to think of something and settled on an idea that was ambitious but too tantalizing to ignore. He did some quick mental math and figured it actually had a decent chance of working, but required a lot of experimentation and spell work.
The first thing he had to do was determine if his idea was actually possible to create as a spell. If it wasn’t he would return to the drawing board, disappointed but he would at least have time to think of something new. It didn’t take long to come up with a proof of concept spell form that worked swimmingly on the devoured he tested it on.
The issue was going to be expanding the effect. Making a really big spell wasn’t overly difficult, the issue was that Felix only had a limited set of spell components. He ultimately felt fairly limited in what he could do. He was almost certain the spell was possible, for someone who had more spell components at their disposal. It should be possible for him as well, but it was not going to elegant or efficient.
As he saw it, he had two options. He could either try and create a massive spell form that surrounded the entire castle or he could create a bunch of smaller ones that slightly overlapped to create the desired effect. Both had strengths and weaknesses like resiliency, simplicity and time required but Felix remained undecided between them.
HIs ideal was a hybrid option between the two but he didn’t even know if that was possible. He was sure it must be but he had never seen, heard nor read of anything like it. He was the ideal person, as a mana engineer, to figure it out, but the question was if he had enough time to do so.
It took Felix about a day to figure everything out and he was both satisfied and disappointed with the result. He was pretty sure it would work, it was just very crude. The hybrid approach he settled on was a simple combination. He would have a large spell form surrounding the castle that collected ambient mana, supplemented with batteries, then distributed and contained it within the castle walls.
The density of the aether within the castle should then be high enough to power simple little spells that Felix had inscribed on spell scrolls in his inventory. Initially he wasn’t sure if the E grade spell scrolls he had acquired back in the tutorial would hold up to the amount of mana he was going to need, but his tests suggested they would be fine.
He also wasn’t sure if the spell scrolls would work for spell forms that used ambient mana, something he thought of as more of an enchantment. Luckily, they didn’t seem to care at all. In testing, he had found that they limited the complexity of the spell form inscribed onto them, but ultimately that had helped him keep his solution simple.
He could have inscribed the spell onto chunks of stones and bricks ripped out of the buildings around him, but the scrolls were easier to inscribe meaning he could make a lot of them very quickly. The stones and bricks would have likely required him to use an inlay material of some kind.
His biggest problem was going to be placement because he had no way to conditionally target the Devoured, his spell was inevitably going to target the buildings as well. If he managed to nail the placement though, everything else should be easy to overcome.
The plan was relatively simple. He had to stealthily set up the spells around the outside of the castle that would collect, distribute and attempt to contain mana within the castle. Once that was done, he had to draw out as many Devoured guards as he could. Lastly, he would fly around dropping the spell scrolls around the camp, strategically.
He had created multiple sizes of spells so he could drop small ones between buildings and larger ones in open areas but the success of the operation depended entirely on his placement. He just had to make sure there wasn’t too much building in the target area and it was mostly Devoured instead.
Felix wasn’t entirely confident in his stealth ability, but he didn’t really have a better option and all he had to do was remain unseen as he walked around the outside of the castle. The spell forms for the collection of mana needed to be oriented correctly, he couldn’t just air drop them like he was planning to with the spell scrolls. He inscribed the spell forms required onto large slabs of broken walls, floors and rooves that he collected around him and even made multiple extra for both the walls and corners.
Before making his first attempt at his stealth mission Felix quickly performed his daily routine as almost a day had passed since he had last done it.
Steeling his resolve, Felix cast a light spell then dimmed it until he could just barely make out the ground in front of him and shrouded the outside in his robe. At first he would open the robe, illuminate the path in front of him, memorize it, then hide the light and proceed based on memory.
Once he got within range of the patrolling guards on the path though, he changed tactics and used their lantern light to memorize the ground, moving only when they were far enough away from him. As they passed, he scurried away from the path and used whatever cover he could find to stay hidden. Interestingly, he noted that the lanterns seemed to be powered by ambient mana as they didn’t flicker and cast a much whiter light than any fire he’d ever seen.
He suspected his almost entirely black ensemble contributed immensely to his success in making it all the way to within a hundred meters of the gate undetected. Once he was there though, he wasn’t exactly sure how he was going to proceed.
The guards patrolling the top of the wall all carried lanterns and kept them trained on the ground around the castle, among other areas. As far as he could tell, there weren’t any gaps in the rotation either, so he couldn’t just run up to it. He figured if he could get up to the wall, the guards didn’t really look directly down so he should have a blind spot to hide in all the way around the castle.
Ultimately, he decided to create his own distraction. He almost fired off a Fire Ball but stopped himself when he realized that would illuminate the area so instead he simply shot a tiny light grey bead that gave off no light. The bead soared off down the path and slightly to the left, away from Felix, creating a massive bang on impact. As it was a sound spell with no other effect but the loud sound alone was enough for the guards to investigate. Unfortunately, only the guards patrolling the path went off to investigate and the ones on the wall completely ignored it.
Once they returned, having decided the disturbance was nothing, they walked right up to the castle and began combing the area. If he stayed in the bushes, they would inevitably find him. He was actually surprised they had the ability to determine the sound had to have come from somewhere. Thinking about it a little more though, he decided that was probably trained into them as guards, an instinct that stuck with them after being devoured.
Not a video game. Right.
Felix had to backtrack over a kilometer, right to the edge of the guards patrolling range then sneak past them again as they slowly combed through everything. There weren’t many of them so it wasn’t difficult to find an opening but he still had no way to get past the guards on the wall. He tried distractions in the air above them, but the guards split their attention immediately between it and the ground.
He was tempted to just launch Fire Balls from all around to make them think the castle was under siege but he was pretty sure the guards would be all the more alert if he did that. In the end he decided to give up on distractions and instead decided to maximize his stealth. What he really needed was cover.
Smoke was ideal but he didn’t have a good way of creating smoke without fire, which was bright. He had an alternative but it relied on the Devoured’s limited ability to think. Any normal sentient guards would see right through it and investigate but Felix was pretty sure Devoured were mostly just reacting how they would have in life. He was hoping this was something they hadn’t dealt with before.
Instead of heading back down the path, Felix crept his way to the edge of the cliff and stepped off. He slowly fell down to the lake and began inscribing enchantments into the stone of the cliff using a simple malleable inlay material he had from the tutorial. He liberally used Force Bombs to clear away the dirt and grime because the guards had no way of investigating the disturbance.
All he was inscribing was a simple heat enchantment a few meters below the surface of the water. He powered them using ambient mana which he thought would be more than enough and he also let them run without limiters, getting as hot as they could with the mana they had. The beauty of it was that he couldn’t overheat the water because as soon as it boiled and turned to steam, it would float up and away.
By the time he made it all the way around the cliff, Felix already saw a steady wall of steam rising up from the lake. He waited a little while for the steam to get thicker around the castle then headed up to the edge of the cliff and cast very light wind spells to push the steam towards the castle. Felix hopped into the cloud and flew inside of it right up to the side wall, pressing himself up against it and waiting for the cloud to float away.
Once the cloud dissipated a little, Felix waited a few minutes to make sure the guards weren’t combing the area and ensured that his blind spot theory held up, then got to work. He carefully placed the spell form so it would push mana towards the walls then ran a short distance away and placed another.
He placed the corner specific spell form down and adjusted it then looped around the back of the castle so he dealt with the front gate last. He was less worried about being seen the side under the main structure because looking straight down through a window was harder than peering over the edge of a wall.
Felix looped around and easily placed everything up to the front gate then carefully used a wind spell to pull a cloud around him and ran past the front gate. As he ran, he dropped the spell forms all along the wall. Instead of jumping off the cliff once the mission was over, Felix ducked back into a brush on the path and waited for the guards patrolling the path to loop back around.
He waited with bated breath for the guards to spot the spell forms but sighed in relief when they seemed to completely ignore them. He wasn’t sure if that was because they only reacted to living things as Devoured or if it was because he had inscribed them onto debris. Either way, he felt relief that they hadn’t spotted them and excitement at the next part of his plan.
Now, all he had to do was wait about a day for the ambient mana to rise inside of the castle. He was confident the Devoured wouldn’t notice it happening as he was pretty sure even most sentient beings wouldn’t even notice it. He dropped off the edge of the cliff and flew to a house he knew was empty and intact then spent the rest of the day practicing something he had thought of while trying to use the axe.
Using the axe, before they bonded, Felix tried to use force spells to propel his swings as well as halt them. Recently though he started thinking about why he didn’t do this with his own body. Theoretically, he should be able to use force spells to step off the ground, pivot his body faster, punch harder and generally make every movement he made faster and more impactful.
It would be slightly dangerous, considering he could potentially just shatter one of his bones or accidentally remove a limb if he used too much force. He was confident enough in his spell formations though that the limiters he placed on them would hold up, even if they were janky as hell. He didn’t actually have proper limiting spell components like a fuse or anything so he instead made one part of the spell very fragile so that it would hopefully break down before his limbs did.
If this worked out well he was debating switching out the enchantments on his shirt and pants for something similar. He was starting to realize the mana shields should probably go on his outermost equipment, which would be a cloak when he finally replaced that. A cloak could cover his entire body save for a small gap in the front that he could worry about later.
He also realized that having his shirt and robes overlap was completely useless, at least for the enchantment he currently had on them. If he enchanted the cloak with shields and the shirt and pants with movement enhancement, then his robes could be enchanted for climate control or something more useful down the road.
For now though, he performed the steps for the Dragon Dance to the best of his ability. He paid attention to every movement he made and did his best to get a feel for how fast and how powerful they were. After doing it three times, he started to add in tiny force spells into the big movements and paid attention to the differences in how it felt and how it performed.
The first issue was getting comfortable and used to both using force spells and how his body was moving. It threw him off at first, even tripping a few times, but eventually he learned to suppress his expectations for how his body would move and rely more on what was actually happening.
He made sure he could perform the steps in their entirety, comfortably, before slowly adding in more force to the finer movements. He hadn’t quite gotten to the point he was happy with, not even close actually, but he stopped himself anyways because it was just a couple hours until he wanted to sleep.
He was hoping to have added force to every movement he could, at least in a testing capacity, but had only added force to maybe a tenth of the overall movements. He had gotten very comfortable with spitting out force spells as a by product of his training though. For the last two hours before he slept, Felix flew over to a denser area of the kingdom and parkoured through the streets fighting Devoured.
He gradually added force to as many of his movements as he could, where it made sense to do so. By no means was he proficient by the end of that but he was starting to get a feel for it. For now, he would probably avoid using it in any fights unless he really needed to or it was a simple movement like an axe swing or a jump. He was still happy though that he had spent the time figuring it out because he was excited for the future.
