Spell Weaver-Chapter 81: Breakthrough

Mark crouched behind his shield with the short sword by his side. The Snap-Vine’s brown bulb protruded from the ground a short distance ahead.

“Ready?” Alex called from behind a tree to Mark’s left. At Mark’s nod, he lifted his wand and sent a mana bolt through the forest, causing several nearby bushes and branches to rattle together.

The Snap-Vine reacted instantly by lifting its hidden tendrils from the ground and whipping them toward Alex. Mark burst forward, shield raised, no longer having to high-step over potential vines. He intervened between Alex and the appendages.

Through his left eye, Alex saw mana swirl around Mark before rushing into him, a clear sign his trait had activated. With his blanket increase to stats, Mark moved forward, and Alex used [Feather Step] to create distance from the fight.

“Nice! This just got easy,” Sam called from his position near a fallen log. He held his staff at the ready, but the smile on his face told Alex that he was enjoying himself.

Mark blocked a vine from his left, and as a second came in from his right, he stepped forward and swung in a fluid overhead slash. The blade of the short sword sliced easily through the monster. Unfortunately, this left Mark’s back and left side open, and one of the many flailing limbs caught him between the shoulder blades.

“You just had to say it,” Mark said through gritted teeth.

“Oops!” Sam cast [Rejuvenation] while holding his staff forward. Sam normally cast his spells through his right hand, and Alex thought the way the boy cast with the staff looked like something out of a fantasy epic. He held the staff in his left hand and raised his arm horizontally while raising his right hand behind the knot at the top of the staff. He told Alex that while holding the staff, the Healing I enchantment allowed him to cast the skill through the staff and gain the bonus.

Green mana coalesced around Sam’s right hand and transferred into the head of the staff before bursting. In the next instant, Mark had ethereal leaves floating down around his body.

“Ha!” Mark reached the bulb and swung with three quick strikes, causing a purple liquid to bleed from the bulb before the vines fell limp. Alex received a kill notification in his vision, though he was certain that with how little he participated and how low of a level the monster was, he wouldn’t get much experience from the fight.

Alex smiled as Mark came back, holding the sword in the same hand that his shield was strapped to, and shook his free right hand. As he got closer, Alex noted that his hand wasn’t empty. “That strategy worked well. How’s your back feel?”

Mark shrugged, “Fine, look! Too bad Val isn’t here.” He held out a Mana Stone and tossed it to Alex before he bent and rubbed more dirt onto his shield.

“Hey, I think I see one of the other ones over there,” Sam said, pointing toward a dark mass of thorny vines in the shade beneath a fallen tree. “One of the Root Crawlers?”

Alex focused on it and nodded as the information appeared. “Yeah, level 6. Want to try this one?”

Sam’s grip tightened on his staff, but he stepped forward. “Will you help? I’ll try to do what Mark did and get to the base.”

“Of course,” Alex felt a small knot of anxiety in his stomach. While he knew the creature didn’t pose any real threat to Sam, it would still hurt to get stuck with those large thorns on its body. “Mark, hang back on this one unless you want to just help Sam block.”

“Just call if you need me, dude!”

Sam kept his staff in his left hand and pulled a dagger from his belt. It was one of the many he’d taken from the altar where Eura was trapped, and it looked almost comical in Sam’s hand. The blade was closer to a kitchen cleaver than a pocket knife.

“How do you plan to tackle the fight? Don’t forget that Mark and I are a part of your team; you can use us in this. Just like how Mark used me.”

Sam hesitated and lowered his dagger. He looked toward the mass of roots, each as thick as a man’s biceps and intertwined to look like a coiled mass of solid vegetation. “Well, if you used your strong heating ritual under it, I think that would kill it right away, but then I didn’t really do anything. I don’t really know… I want to try and fight it on my own first. Can you just watch?”

Nodding, Alex took a step back but tightened his grip on his wand. He stopped using [Parallel Mind] to work on the Gust Ritual and instead focused his attention on actively creating a Concentrated Heating Ritual. He wanted to be ready in the event Sam did need his help. He was impressed with the teen's resolve; even knowing he was likely to get hurt, he wanted to try to tackle the problem as he’d seen Mark do.

Sam squared his shoulders and raised his staff defensively before moving forward.

All three of them were surprised to see how slowly the Crawler moved. Sam was upon it and swinging the dagger several times before it even began to lift itself from the ground. Alex winced internally as he saw Sam hack away at the thick roots with little to no result. It looked like taking a machete to the base of a tree. While the tool might be effective when used on a sapling, it was clearly the wrong weapon for his current fight.

Sam kept at it for several minutes, and even though he’d made little headway, Alex had to respect his resolve. Despite constantly being poked by the thorns, he had formed a plan to slowly tease out the roots from the bundle. If there was a blunt tap on the roots, they attempted to reach out or shift in that direction from the main body. The teen stopped trying to hack his way through and instead took a slower approach to lure its limbs away from the center mass by pulling some right and then shifting to its other side to pull the other side slowly away from the center.

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When the center mass was a loose mess of cords, Sam cast [Rejuvenation] on himself before stepping in and thrusting with the knife. He repeated the action once more, gaining long cuts on his arm both times. But, soon, the monster fell to the ground.

Stepping back, he quickly put the knife into his pouch before reaching down with his free hand to use [Healing Touch] on his own arm.

“Way to go!”

“Great job, but how about we avoid doing it that way again?” Alex asked as he walked up to Sam. His long-sleeved shirt had been torn and stained with his blood. He could see Sam’s wince, though it was quickly covered by a nervous smile.

“Yeah, that wasn’t fun… But I did it!” His smile morphed into something more genuine before he nodded. “Yeah, next time you just blast it.”

Alex reached into the center carefully and felt around for a Mana Stone. He found one and added it to his pouch before high-fiving Sam. “One for each of you, nice.” He let his Concentrated Heating Ritual disappear before swapping back to his Gust Ritual testing.

Sam scrunched his face and looked at Alex’s hand. “I can’t tell what you’re doing, but I constantly feel mana in that hand. What are you working on?”

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Alex smiled and pointed his hand at a nearby trunk before pursing his lips, blowing toward his hand, and pulsing the mana through his thread. The same gust he’d hit Mark within their living room came out stronger as he put more mana into the blast. However, being that it was a single gust of concentrated wind, it didn’t do much beyond slapping against the tree’s trunk.

“Well, I am trying to figure out how to turn this into a bolt or a blade. The problem is, I’ve never seen a ritual that has that effect or components that could help me turn this into something more like a projectile than a concentrated gust.”

Sam bent over at the waist and looked at the thorny roots with interest. He answered distractedly, “What if you change what you’re putting in the Ritual?”

Alex perked up.

The catalyst?

He deflated just as quickly. “Well, I guess that could work. I didn’t think of it, but I’m trying to use this ritual specifically because I just need a source of wind and mana to activate it. If I can get away from needing to carry around and throw out catalysts, I’m getting closer to practical magic.”

“Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t work if you had to sacrifice a dagger or something each ritual to make it have a blade.” Sam continued to focus on the root with interest. He looked over to Mark, who was watching one of the floating bugs with interest. “Hey, Mark, can you cut some of these up for me?”

Mark trudged over. “Yep.” He removed a hatchet from his pouch and started cutting up some roots. “How long?”

The two continued talking as Alex contemplated Sam’s idea.

The catalyst is supposed to be more about the concept of what’s going into the Ritual. I remember going over this with Eura, but I still can’t get my mind around the concept. He told me to stick to using physical items in the rituals for the time being… but what about something that’s not physical?

Alex looked down at his hand and noted the wand.

“Oh…. shit.” He said to himself.

Alex pulled up his Status Screen to check his mana and let loose three bolts rapidly at a tree at seven mana per bolt. The result was consistent, and he held his breath as he used his other hand to form a slightly larger Gust Ritual in the air. Rather than a concentrated burst, he formed the base of the Ritual from a square, forcing the mana to remain trapped within the confines for a time.

When he finished, the completed Ritual was the size of a sewer grate. He looked at it with his mana sight before shaking his head and dismissing it.

“Ready?” Mark called.

“One sec,” Alex said. His thoughts moved rapidly, and he knew that his Willpower was working in overdrive. Realizing that his consciousness was still split, he ended the skill, hoping to put his full brain power into the problem.

He began to think out loud as Mark and Sam walked over. “I’ve been trying to make my Rituals too much like magical spells. They’re not meant to work like that. They are meant to be more lasting. What if…” He trailed off as his hand raised and [Mana Threads] spread from each of his fingers. He reformed the ritual, using a hexagon as its base with a square in the middle. He made three small mana nodes around the base and nodded at its final form.

This should work. Come on, please work.

He looked at his mana and activated the Ritual. He saw his mana drain by 30 and winced at the cost. Even with [Efficient Rites], his class’s passive skill, the cost wasn’t insignificant.

“Did it break?” Sam asked. Through his passive skill, he knew Alex had activated the ritual, but there was no effect.

“I hope not.” To his left eye, Alex saw the ritual hanging vertically in the air. The new ritual wasn’t meant to cast a gust of wind as the previous one he’d been working on. Instead, it was meant to alter mana moving through it based on the catalyst type- in this case, wind.

At the moment, it hung empty in the air, waiting for mana to pass through it.

Alex raised his wand and put the tip in the central square before infusing his mana into the weapon. The normal seven mana cost bolt came from the wand, but rather than the normal silent bolt of blue, there was a loud pop followed by a whooshing sound as the enhanced bolt took off.

His arm and shoulder rocked back from the recoil, and all three of them felt a rush of wind as the bolt blasted through the center of the hanging ritual and flew off with greater speed and force than a normal bolt should. There was the barest pause in sounds as it travelled through the air and was followed by a cracking, splintering sound as it connected hard with one of the distant trees.

“… Fuck.” Alex said.

Mark started cheering, and Sam laughed at him.

Alex felt a moment of fierce satisfaction at the result. He sent another bolt through the center to the same effect. He turned to point at another tree and frowned slightly as the Ritual stood stationary in the air.

“Hmm, I’ll need to find some way to anchor it to myself. Maybe I can-”

“Hey, hey, hey. That’s enough from you, magic boy. I need a skill, not you!” Mark said while throwing his arm around Alex’s shoulder.

Finally, some progress. I'll have to thank Sam later for the idea.

Alex laughed at Mark's remark. "You're right, let’s focus on you." Before continuing on, Alex pulled out the pocket watch he’d been given by Olivia to see how it was handling telling the time. The watch worked well; its purely mechanical nature was not disrupted by the Rift at all and continued to work normally. He smiled before he tucked the gift back into his pocket and set his [Parallel Mind] to work on the progress he'd just made.

The trio continued through the forest for several more hours. Sam did little more fighting, but he jumped in to help bait a few of the Snap-Vines for Mark, and Alex burned any of the Root Crawlers that began to move toward the group. They all completed the Personal Quest before leaving and heading to the Rift Exit.