LTSV - Harbingers of Change - 15 (Patreon)

Mira watched through a circle she’d made with her thumb and index finger as Penny snuck up to a pack of goblins a few blocks away. Mira had burned a few stamina points on a farsight spell to observe her and it was already paying dividends.

In the distance, Penny phased into visibility and slapped the biggest goblin right in the ass before flowing off towards the Boss’s lair. The goblins shrilled in outrage and charged after her. Penny kited them straight to the Boss and they were too focused on her to realize where they were going—if that even mattered. The other goblins they’d seen fighting the Boss had just charged it when they got close enough.

So far, the goblins didn’t seem very intelligent. Her original impression of them being angry plastic bags with teeth was still holding up. They could use tools and execute basic hunting tactics, but they didn’t exhibit any self preservation behavior until they’d been badly hurt and, even then, it was only to run a short distance away. If something moved in front of them, they’d attack it first and ask questions never.

The dimmed lantern had almost, but not quite, recharged by the time the goblins entered its domain. It stopped its meandering circuit of the area around the portal and turned to look at the goblins. The ring of lanterns surrounding it rotated until another lantern, different from the dim one, landed in front of the Boss’s torso area. It fired another wide beam at the goblins, obliterating them in one fell swoop. Penny was long gone before that happened. She’d phased out before they hit the Boss Zone and the goblins had kept charging forward like lemmings into their doom.

The good news was that they were racking up some XP from this experiment. They’d also confirmed that the lanterns all produced the same kind of attack. Mira had also noticed something else.

“It skipped a lantern,” Cecily said. “It spun the ring of lanterns and it landed on the lantern to the left of the dim one, but it didn't shoot and spun the wheel again instead.”

“That not only implies that there’s a randomized element to the mechanic of its attack, but also that it could draw a blank if we bleed off a few more lantern lights,” Randall agreed.

“It also doesn’t want to use that one lantern,” Mira pointed out. She was pretty sure that was the most important part. That one lantern was still bright and, if all the lanterns fired a similar attack, then why didn’t it use that one? “If we’re still operating under game logic, that could be its soft spot.”

“We need more data,” Alan pointed out. “We can’t make that call on one spin. Can Penny get us more goblins?”

Mira queried her familiar and chuckled and the bloodthirsty little mental giggles she got back. She turned and pointed to where Penny was already kiting another group towards the Boss Zone. “She’s way ahead of you.”

“You know, this is a pretty decent XP farm,” Alan commented as the fourth batch of goblins got annihilated.

Mira made an agreeable noise. Her banked XP was sitting at 5K, which was twice what they’d earned in a full day of exploration. If they’d had time for a nap, she’d have seriously considered trying to level up before they went to fight the Boss.

That said, she was running out of patience with this data collection exercise. They’d confirmed that all the lanterns had the same attack and that the Boss would never fire that one singular lantern. They’d also cleared out nearly all the local goblins, although more were flowing in from the surrounding zone. There wasn’t much more they could learn from this, even if Penny was having a marvelous time.

For one thing, they were officially out of clean water. For another, Mira needed to reassure herself that Adra was alright. She knew, logically, that the list of things that could hurt him was very short. Emotionally, she needed to reassure herself—also, he still hadn’t caught up to her and she didn’t like what that implied. What if this System had managed to nerf him the way it had nerfed her?

The only thing between her and the exit was one monster and she was being tempted to do something real stupid.

On the one hand, she wanted the kids to fight the Boss Monster. Now that she’d been watching it for a while, she could tell that it had clearly been designed as a learning exercise to teach new hunters how to figure out raid mechanics. It only had a few idle behaviors and those were easily identified. It probably only had one or two battle tactics too.

The whole dungeon had been like that. The goblins started out in smaller, infrequent packs and those encounters slowly escalated in size and frequency to keep the hunters from getting too comfortable. The Gévaudans were remarkably non-hostile for wandering Field Bosses. Their function might well just be to make the new hunters realize that sort of thing could happen and they should plan for it. There were plenty of materials to harvest and bank up. Ergo, this was a Starter Dungeon and every experience here was valuable to new warriors.

This would probably be the only Dungeon they ever entered that was designed to build them up rather than tear them down.

On the other hand, she wanted to have eyes on Adra. Even if he wasn’t hurt, he was probably just as pissed and scared for her as she was for him.

“I wonder if I could knock out that one lantern out from here,” she mused aloud. She didn't want to get into melee range if they didn't have to.

“Do you have the stamina for another new spell?” Cece asked. She’d been sitting on the roof edge next to Mira and watching Penny play with the goblins, while also taking notes. She’d had a college-ruled notebook and a sharpie in her bag that they were using to take notes on the Boss’s tactical playbook. So far, its playbook had one line of text in it: nuke everything.

“My stamina is almost full,” Mira replied. “I can’t predict the cost yet, though. That telescope spell only cost me one SP, but some of my others cost as high as thirty SP. The telescope spell is more complicated than my elemental darts, so it’s not the density of the spell language that’s determining the SP cost. It has to be determined according to the future mana cost of the hypothetical spell. If I make something big, it could wipe out my stamina. I could still cast spells, but I wouldn’t be able to run around or dodge.”

If only there was a way to bypass the stupid System and just cast spells the way she knew how to…

Mira’s gaze wandered as she tried to workshop solutions and, in doing so, she happened to spot the sharpie in Cece’s hands and an idea occurred to her. Cece eeped as Mira closed in on her and grinned, “Can I see the marker for a moment?”

Cece turned bright pink and handed it over.

Mira uncapped the pen and crouched down to stare at the pale TPO roofing material that made up the flat roof underneath their feet. Earlier, before the System Incursion, she’d used a similar pen to purge her system of the whatever-it-was that Mason had slipped her host. Writing out the spell rather than visualizing it had been a crutch that allowed her to focus all her attention and will on cramming her limited available mana into the spell formula. The major difference between then and now was the change in ambient mana in her environment.

She drew out a simple radiative dew harvester charm and, right away, there was a visible difference from that charm in the hospital. The pen didn’t actually touch the ground and her first stroke appeared in midair, a few inches off the TPO, in a crackling violet arc. She forced herself to complete the charm diagram without stopping. When she placed her water bottle in the middle of the array, it began to fill up with crystal clear water.

Now, she probably should have expected that this would happen, but the planetary announcement still caught her by surprise. She dropped her bottle and used both hands to cover her mouth to keep from screaming.

[PLANETARY ANNOUNCEMENT: Hunter Samira Bellamy has discovered the Spell Inscription of the Hunter Network System. All Awakened Hunters can now purchase the Basic Spell Language Primer through the Hunter Network System.]

[You have received a private database: Basic Spell Language and Formulae!]

[You have received a private database: Advanced Spell Language and Formulae!]

[You have earned 100 XP for being the first Hunter to decipher Spell Language. Your name has been entered in the Cybelan Record. Your name will live on in history! Work hard to uncover new aspects of the System for your fellow Hunters and earn more rewards.]

Mira landed hard on her ass and kept her hands clamped down on her mouth to hold back the tidal wave of swears that threatened to spill out of her.

“I hate that so much,” she wheezed once it was over.

“Bright side, I don’t think anything on the ground could hear it,” Alan said. He came over with his water bottle out. “Can I?”

Mira waved him ahead. “It’s fine. Everyone can refill their water.”

She checked her status and her mana showed as full. The 200 flickered briefly to 199 as the others replenished their water and then snapped back. The mana expenditure for the water spell got soaked by her regeneration rate. If she hadn’t been watching the status, it might have looked like the spell cost her nothing.

Randall came over to stand next to her once he had taken his turn. “You know, I don’t think we asked,” he said, looking down at her with a complicated expression. “What is your class?”

Mira looked back up at him and realized that, no, it hadn’t actually come up. Andrei had told them she cast spells and that was it.

“I’m an Archmage,” she said. “Casting the spell that way took more setup, but didn’t cost me stamina. I also didn’t get a notification that they were going to sell copies of my spell.”

“So, it’s like using a ritual instead of a spell slot,” Randall muttered to himself thoughtfully. Then he stopped and re-focused on Mira. “Wait, they’re selling your fucking spells?”

“That’s apparently what my class does,” Mira explained. “I didn’t get any starter spells. I’ve had to make them up on my own and then those spells automatically go up for sale in the System Shop.”

“So, you learned to do that through the System’s auto-generated spells?” he asked, gesturing at the now-fading spell array floating in the air in front of her. She’s stopped feeding it mana, so it was dying out.

“Sort of,” Mira replied.

This was going to be difficult because she’d just realized that she actually didn’t want to lie to Randall. Even in their previous life, he was more of Cece’s situationship than he was Mira’s friend—although, she couldn’t deny that they were friendly. It wasn’t like this, though. She’d never been a member of the ‘team’ before. She’d been Cece’s plus one. Now she was being included and it felt bad to replay that trust with deceit.

“I can see the construction of the spells when I make them. A spell is really all pretty straightforward if-then statements written out like a diagram. The System can automatically design a formula, but its designs contain too many redundancies. The spells I write myself are more efficient than the System generated ones and end up as stronger spells that demand similar mana expenditure. My mana is hard to exhaust so I’m really only limited by my vocabulary.”

There, that wasn’t entirely a lie. It was just a very strategic arrangement of true statements.

“This spell didn’t activate until I triggered it,” Mira continued and stood up to walk a slow circle around the fading spell array. “I had to prime it with some mana, but it let me set up an activation condition; in this case, inserting a receptacle into the center of the array. I could also trigger one by just feeding mana into it.”

Cece had backed off a little when Mira made the water fountain spell, but she hadn’t gone far. There wasn’t far to go, so everyone in the group had been within earshot of the conversation. “So, we’re not just limited to what spells we have in Will’s book or your list?”

Mira grinned. “Let me show you what I’m thinking.”