20demayo Chapter 115: Realization
Chapter 115: Realization
Chapter 115: Realization- Mok’freya. Troll Ice Mage, Ambassador of Telim Gor.
Aliandra
Ali flew down the sewer tunnels, following the twisting path without paying much conscious attention, her mind filled with runes and the intricate structure of teleportation magic. She had a few exciting ideas while she was in the baths, and she couldn’t wait to try them out as soon as she returned to the Grove.
She very nearly zoomed around the corner when a scream of pain and the sudden icy bite of frost in the air pulled her up short.
Several heavy thumps echoed through the dimly lit sewer tunnels up ahead, followed by the screams and shouts of people in real pain. Frost began creeping up the crumbling brick walls right before her eyes. Ali crept closer to the entrance of the next cross tunnel, cautious now, making out several voices and the sounds of heavy boots on damp brick.
A sudden clear shouted voice rang out through the tunnel, “Tell him, otherwise he will kill you!”
“Miss Aliandra is friend. Havok not betray. If Havok tell, then he kill Havok Miss Aliandra.” The Goblin Adventurer’s voice rang out, clear and recognizable, stunning Ali into stillness for a moment.
Ali carefully poked her head around the corner, but the sight that greeted her made her blood run cold – and not because of the frost gripping the walls. All the novice adventurers writhed in pain, pinned to the ground or the walls by pristine white spikes of conjured ice, leaving their blood pooling on the moss.
Thugs wearing the Town Watch colors marched toward them from the far side. But Ali’s eyes were drawn to the broad-shouldered man dominating the center of the tunnel. He stood with his back to her amid the blood and ice, a fine white robe gracing his back, radiating an intense mana that fueled the frost on the walls.
She recognized him from the Goblin siege, but it was the pitiful figure of Havok pinned to the wall by several large ice lances that gripped her heart and made it impossible to breathe. There was so much blood on the wall.
“…but why are you messing with that green scum, this one on the ground is the mayor’s son.”
The voice sounded harshly indifferent to the suffering all around.
“Ok. Last chance, Goblin. How do I find Aliandra and her dungeon? Tell me or die.” The mage’s voice was loaded with spite and contempt as complex formations of ice mana surged within his broad frame.
“No.” The Goblin’s body was already pierced with ice, pinned to the wall, and drenched in his own blood. He could barely even twitch, but his face remained defiant, and his voice clear.
Ali was stunned to hear the defiant Goblin’s final resistance.
“Fine,” the white mage snarled. Within him, the formations twisted, rapidly reaching a crescendo.
“Havok! No!” Ali screamed. Without thought, her mana flowed. In an instant, she summoned the strongest barrier she could muster, drawing heavily from the power of her domain to reinforce it. The dense golden wall of arcane magic snapped into existence right in front of Havok’s face as he hung helpless on the wall, staring down the wrath of the ice mage.
There were several loud cracks as lances of ice shot out, striking her barrier. The construct shattered, an explosion of golden shards and splinters of ice filling the tunnel with deadly shards and shrapnel that ricocheted from the walls and the mage’s Ice Shield, drawing blood from anyone it touched.
Shouts of alarm echoed wildly through the tunnel.
“Fuck!”
“Roderik, that’s her!”
“Get her!”
“Kill the dungeon!”
Every eye turned to see her standing there; a discordant mix of hope for salvation clashing against naked greed and rampant bloodlust.
“You’re mine!” Roderik yelled, vanishing in a flash of complex mana, and appearing right beside Ali, his grasping hand shooting out toward her neck.
Ali screamed. Cold billowed from the menacing ice mage, claws of frost bit through her cotton clothing. She snapped a wall of golden magic between them, blocking off the entire sewer channel. His hand cracked against the barrier, and he spat out a harsh curse, but Ali’s mind had already found a Toxic Slime at the far end of her range.
Her mana pulsed, and her surroundings flickered as Minion Teleport whisked her away. She instantly summoned a disk and took off down the tunnel as fast as she could. A tinkling crash and shattering ice echoed from down the tunnel she had hastily vacated. Roderik’s curse cut off mid-cry – somehow, the silence was far more chilling than anything that preceded it.
She threw up a tunnel-blocking barrier, but ice magic teleportation formations surged and Roderik appeared right beside her, ignoring her blockade. Frantically, Ali scoured the area, finding another slime and switching locations in the nick of time, just as several Ice Lances shot out toward her.
Her heart hammered deafeningly in her ears. Breathlessly, she summoned a new barrier and raced down the dimly lit sewer tunnel while her mind struggled to grasp what had just happened. Her friends had just been assaulted by the Town Watch, and she was being hunted by a murderous ice mage. She had been living under a bounty for a while now and had even been shot at by an assassin with a crossbow, but nothing had prepared her for the murderous rage of this Ice Mage. It had all happened so fast; she didn’t even know if Havok had survived.
She was still running on adrenaline-fueled panic, but her senses were already
With frantic speed born of desperation, she scrambled through her class skills, picking the only choice she could.
she screamed at the golden text unfolding on the parchment in her mind. She was painfully aware she was an instant away from death, but she would not go quietly without a fight. Not to a bully like him. She didn’t even know if her crazy idea would work, but it wouldn’t matter if she couldn’t make the switch before he completed his Ice Lance.
Something deep inside her ripped away, leaving a gaping hole where her skill had once been. All the levels earned and advancement torn away to the sound of a chime.
Arcane Recall – level 1
You are proficient with Arcane magic. You gain +5% to spell power, spell haste, mana control, and mental reaction speed with Arcane magic.
Mana: Ignore the recharge for any Magic skill, spell, or triggered ability. Your magic is cast instantly. Recharge: 24 hours.
Arcane, Metamagic, Mastery, Intelligence
Ice Lance hung within Roderik’s frame, a glittering formation of power and elegance. Mana surged toward it as his skill finalized the spell. With frenzied urgency, Ali slammed mana into her new untried, untested skill.
The entire world halted.
Ali blinked – or at least she tried to, finding herself unable to move, or even breathe. Over Roderik’s left shoulder, a nature wisp hung suspended, frozen mid-zig, no longer green but gray. Roderik also seemed frozen, his face a twisted sneer, and his mana halted just shy of filling his formation.
To her intense surprise, she recognized this place. Everything – the trees, the ice, the moss, and the mage in front of her – had frozen in place in a familiar world of gray.
Her mother’s last words echoed in her memory.
The force of raw grief slammed into her anew as her mind was instantly transported back to her mother’s final sacrifice, and the magic she had wielded to save Ali’s life.
A unique magic that Ali had just wielded herself.
The gray surroundings flickered then, and Roderik appeared several meters back, as he had been moments before he had knocked Ali from her barrier. The world flickered back to now, and she could clearly see the mana of his ice lance had completed, with the beginnings of the lance appearing before his hand.
With a supreme effort of will, she forced her mind back to the present, putting her grief away for later. If there would be a later.
She didn’t know how to use this strange magic, and she had only a single chance in which to get it right.
The gray, color-leached world flickered again showing her a scene she had witnessed the first time around. The starry sky was clear above, and the forest renewed, and moments later the mountain exploded sending uncountable tons of rock down on top of her.
She would have flinched if the spell allowed her to move or look away, but mercifully the world flickered back to the present moment before the avalanche hit.
Anticipation prickled along her skin while time was held in abeyance. Ali read the description of the skill once again, racking her brain for some clues for how to use this magic.
She suddenly noticed the slow, persistent trickle of mana being drained by her Sage of Learning. It was then that it clicked. Arcane Insight was working too – her passive magic and her mind were unaffected by the frozen time in this realm, unlike her body.
she realized. With infinite care, she mentally summoned her Grimoire. The sudden appearance of her magical tome was shockingly bright and colorful against the contrast of a static world cast in gray. She willed the pages to turn to the imprint she had hoped to use with this magic. Her expectations of how the spell would work were so far from the actual experience that she had momentarily forgotten her plan. But her Grimoire obediently paged to the Elemental imprint, stopping on the variant she required.
Her mana flowed into her imprint causing a riot of brilliant color and magic as she summoned the largest, heaviest, and highest-level monster she had: the Forest Guardian. Still held in stasis, she nonetheless kept a worried eye on Roderik and the powerful magic that would be unleashed the instant she was freed from this bizarre world.
But it held, patiently holding the entire world back as her magic flowed; intricate runes swirling to form the giant monster of wood and bark. Minutes passed and as her magic neared completion, she prepared herself, bracing herself for what must come next.
It all happened in an instant. Her Forest Guardian appeared between her and Roderik, and the bizarre color-leached world of her mother’s magic vanished in an instant.
“” she screamed at her Guardian, while simultaneously wielding her barrier magic. Weaving her skill and her domain, she wrought several wickedly sharp golden spikes, fixed in place. Ice mana flashed brilliantly as Roderik’s Ice Lance pierced through the chest of her massive Guardian. But that was not enough to stop it. It roared in pain and anger and blurred with sudden speed as its Rush skill launched it forward.
The Rush lasted only two steps, but Ali’s bones shook from the raw force of several tons of high-speed wood and ferocity.
A musical, glassy tinkle sounded as his shield of ice shattered, followed by a disgusting, wet crunch and a gurgling sound. Ali’s notification chime sounded as her Guardian backed up, leaving the grotesque sight of Roderik hanging impaled on her barrier shards with a look of utter surprise frozen on his dead face.
Ali bent over and threw up.
It didn’t matter that he had been intent on murdering her. She felt sick to the core of her being.
She knelt there dry heaving for a while, but the persistent regeneration aura from her Forest Guardian slowly began to make her feel better. She snapped out of it when the aura finally finished repairing her ankle and her bones twisted back into place, painfully shattering the ice that encased her legs.
As her awareness expanded, distant shouts and muffled explosions of magic made themselves heard.
She had defeated Roderik, but it had been by the skin of her teeth, and now she no longer had her Arcane Recall, nor her Arcane Bolt skill to help her out. Aside from the Forest Guardian, she had no minions left to protect her – the stinging snaps of her mana reservations releasing had died down to nothing. Already, there were plumes of smoke and fire and she could her domain burning.
Ali hauled herself to her feet, earning new scrapes and cuts from the sharp ice which her Guardian healed, and forced herself to approach the mangled corpse. She choked down the bile rising in her throat. It was one thing to deconstruct a strung-up Sewer Rat, but this had been a person. Before she threw up again, she deconstructed him, dismissing the barrier shards holding him suspended in the air. Then she stored his gear in her ring so that hopefully nobody would realize what she had done.
“Don’t let anyone pass,” she instructed her Guardian, stepping onto her barrier, flying into the small cave, and entering the ventilation shaft.
She fed the mana she had just earned from Roderik’s corpse into Domain Mastery, making Aether-Fused Obsidian flow from her Grimoire as she filled twenty meters of the shaft behind her with solid rock. Then she fled, flying in a dazed desperate shock through the countless ruined buildings of Dal’mohra to the library itself.
Her mind raced, while her emotions churned in turmoil. She had survived, but only by killing a person. There was a horde of angry people destroying her domain up above. She desperately hoped that Aiden and Havok, and the rest of the novices, were alive, but she had no way to tell.
But it was Roderik’s confident insistence that she was a dungeon that sent true threads of icy dread stabbing deep into her heart. For some reason, she couldn’t shake the horrid premonition of disaster that lurked deep in the back of her mind. As she finally collapsed onto the stone floor of the library, she retrieved the terrifying book she had been avoiding for too long.
The mere sight of the Lich’s seminal work filled her with horror and fear, but she had to know the truth. She had to clear the sense of impending doom that filled her heart.
Paging quickly through the chapters, she came at last to the piece she needed near the end of the book.
A ghastly chill settled in her heart, dwarfing anything Roderik had caused. The book fell from her nerveless fingers, clattering to the ground as the realization slammed into her like a spike of ice through her heart.
She had a domain. A magic that was tied to the land, just as the book claimed. She had even studied the bone and death domain of the Ruins of Dal’mohra, fascinated by the remarkable similarities to her own.
Her plants expanded her domain, just as the bone piles and Deathcap mushrooms expanded the ruins dungeon, or Naia’s slimes expanded her smaller underwater domain.
And her pride – the Grimoire of Summoning – allowed her to deconstruct and learn new plants and monsters, just like Nevyn Eld’s book explained.
She was powerless to resist the clear and suddenly obvious truth that slammed into her heart with the force of a mountain collapsing on top of her. She could barely breathe.
The signs had been there all along. Even Naia had accused her of being a dungeon, and, in her naivety, she had refused to believe it – certain instead that the mimic slime simply had a poor grasp of the language. The dungeon-rage she had triggered when her domain had encountered the death and bone domain. Even her newest discovery that her Moss Creepers, Floral Menaces, and Spore Spreaders could grow the plants for her domain matched the Spitter Drones of the Ruins of Dal’mohra, spreading bone throughout the dungeon’s space.
Her friend’s parents – and indeed her entire life – had been destroyed by a dungeon. There was no way she would accept Ali after she found out. She could clearly see the expression of hate and anger on her face as she imagined meeting her friends and telling them the truth.
Within her heart, a deep empty loneliness bloomed as her entire life collapsed in tatters around her.
She reached her hand out, grasping the tiny jasmine flowers wreathing the railing of the landing beside her. She had been blissfully unaware of the truth, going about her merry way, creating with her magic, believing she deserved friends, and that she could be an adventurer. But she was no summoner – she had unwittingly been creating the most terrifying of magics – a dungeon.
She ripped the flowers from the plant, throwing them into the emptiness of the atrium in her despair as her mind fled to a dark place. Silent, insensate, she lay there – waiting for them to come for her.