Arcane Apocalypse ~ 162 (Patreon)

AN: I am an absolute idiot and somehow forgot to add Lina to this little training exercise thingy. I fixed that retroactively by writing in a few sentences here and there. Apologies for that.

*****

“So how is this going to go?” Mia asked, looking around the deserted square in the abandoned part of Graz that Gabe had chosen as the site of their first training session. For this one, it was only her, Camie, Lina and her Mom, with Brent having gone to train his rookie militia guys and gals.

“Elemental Infusion,” Gabe said, then paused. “For everyone except you, sis. Arcane doesn’t really do Elemental Infusion, so I’ll be doing some combat practice with you to help you get used to commanding so many summons. But before that, Mom, with your mana being Storm elemental mana, Lina's being Air and Carmilla’s Blood, all three of you could make use of Elemental Infusion. Storm grants improved agility, speed and ridiculous reaction speed while Blood Elemental Infusion grants an all-around general physical buff, plus a massive enhancement to natural regeneration. Air's is speed, weightlessness and some damage mitigation."

Right. Arcane’s primary downside was that it didn’t really do Elemental Infusion. All infusing your body with arcane mana did was prevent outside influences and mana from affecting you. Useful, but it was the only one of the seven base elements that couldn’t be used for physical enhancement. 

 “Mia, I want you to beat the foes I throw at you, try to do so with only five spells being cast per enemy, and no, Sparkle will have to sit this one out,” Gabe said, and before Mia could ask for clarification, a spell circle bloomed to life above her brother’s palm. It was a vibrant marshmallow pink, the same colour as her hair, and it surprisingly felt like a Rank 1 spell. “I’ll get started on the Elemental Infusions in the meantime. Have fun with this little guy.”

A mirroring spell circle bloomed to life on the ground a few metres ahead, searing itself into the pavement. Mia felt it stretch and connect to a distant place, establishing a corridor reminiscent of her own summoning spells. A creature rose from the circle, its skin pitch black, rough and cracked like stone, with electric pink arcane energy seeping through the gaps. Its eyes were crackling pink orbs set in deep indentations on its blank head, making them look sunken. Its body stood two metres tall, and its clawed fingers thrummed with arcane power. 

“That’s a Greater Arcane Elemental,” Sparkle said. “Seems like one of the more brutish ones, huh.”

‘Any suggestions?’ Mia asked.

“Dodge,” Sparkle said, and Mia’s eyes widened as the elemental leapt forward, arcane energy exploding under its feet to launch it forward like a rocket. 

It crossed half the distance between the two of them in a blink, but this wasn’t Mia’s first time fighting a foe with superior strength and speed. Carmilla was faster than this thing when she actually pushed herself to the limit, and not by a small margin … which probably meant speed wasn’t this thing’s highest attribute, because its presence felt nearly thrice as great as Camie’s. 

Mia’s feet left the ground as she hopped into the air. The White Guardian materialised next to her and, with a well-practised backhand, threw her further away. Then it set its feet and raised its shield, meeting the elemental’s charge head-on.

Mia grimaced as she landed, hearing the sound of a loud crash as she rolled to her feet. The Black Knight appeared next to her and leapt forward, its aura of bloodlust exploding outwards while Mia quickly revolved her runic model, assembling her new spell circle for the Mass Find Familiar spell. Her wand was in her hand in a blink, and the spell snapped off, three arcane constructs shaped like translucent pink tigers appearing before her. The lesser elementals slotted in, and Mia gave them a simple mental command that even they’d understand: Kill the greater elemental. 

They leapt into the fray, beginning to circle the chaotic battle where Mia’s two pseudo-spirits fought a vicious battle. One kept the elemental at bay, always interrupting it when it tried to bulldoze its way past them to get to Mia, while the Black Knight fought with wild ferocity, its massive blades always tipping through the air, thrumming with killing intent. Its attacks tore into the elemental, leaving deep cracks and gouges in its stone-like flesh, but they didn’t slow the creature much. Not that the Black Knight seemed to care, its ferocious attacks never stopping as it danced around, the return blows coming its way with surprising agility and skill.

It was no mad beast just throwing itself at an enemy and hoping for the best. It was Slaughter personified; its fighting style was wild and relentless, but not utterly reckless. Still, watching it in motion against a superior foe was like watching a honey badger fight a buffalo. It was almost comical.

Mia’s next spell was ready, Mage Armour activating and wrapping her body in its protective embrace. That was two spells; she had three more for this guy. One would probably have to be an Arcane Missile as a finisher, but the others would either be setting up the finisher or supporting her summons, depending on how the fight went. For now, her pseudo-spirits seemed to be about equally matched with the elemental, neither side allowing the other to get in any decisive blows while the spectral tigers skulked about, nipping at the elemental’s heels and pouncing only when the Guardian exposed a weakness or the Knight’s relentless advance made the elemental expose a vulnerability. They didn’t seem to have the power to deal any real damage to it either. 

“Your Black Knight will be able to kill it with time; all of its blows leave behind lingering Slaughter essence in the wounds,” Sparkle said. “The elemental is taking more time to recover from those wounds.”

“Will it die if I have the Knight cut off its head?” Mia asked.

“Die? No,” Sparkle said with a snort. “Get banished back to the Astral? Yes. Technically, you just have to destabilise what’s anchoring it to this plane, which is currently the arcane construct it’s inhabiting. Cutting off its head will disrupt it, but so will cutting off all its limbs or an equal amount of damage elsewhere. It has no brain or heart, so they aren’t really weak spots.”

Gabe must have selected this elemental after seeing how strong Mia’s two pseudo-spirits were, because it seemed to be just a bit too much for the two of them to handle, putting them on the back foot as the fight went on. 

Mia kept angling herself to keep the Guardian between her and the elemental, trying to make the spirit’s job of keeping her safe just a bit easier. Maybe then it could give the Knight an opportunity to end the fight without Mia having to intervene. 

It was surprisingly challenging. Even with the Guardian’s placid serenity shielding her mind and spirit, she still felt the unending bloodlust and the dark glee the Knight was radiating as it went about its business. That undercurrent of self-satisfaction thrumming inside the pseudo-spirit was so pure and potent that she couldn’t help but feel a bit jealous. 

But she was a mage, an arcane mage, which was the mageiest mage class there was. The only way she was ever going to feel an enemy’s bones break under the swing of her blows was if she gave up on her path and changed her class to Force Mage. Or maybe Force Knight. 

But that wasn’t her. Even if the Black Knight was gleefully showing her just what she was missing by staying a fragile little back-line mage. 

Or maybe not. I could get into a melee fight if Sparkle made some progress in teaching me how to possess arcane constructs in my Wisp Form.

It didn’t matter. Not now. The fight was a drain on her mana; every wound on her manifested pseudo-spirits that she had to mend, took a small chunk of her mana, and fueling their manifestations wasn’t exactly without cost either. The efficiency had improved greatly compared to the spell version, but even the Skill version was far from free. 

I shouldn’t waste time waiting for an opportunity that might never come. Mia thought, her eyes narrowing. Not when I can make my own opportunities. 

The elemental fought like a brawler, though one that could instinctively use arcane mana in all its forms as easily as mortals could breathe. Eh, it probably had the Arcane Mana Manipulation skill at a stupidly high level just because it was a greater arcane elemental. Its clawed fingers were coated in a crackling film of destructive arcane energy, and its fists landed with the power of a speeding car whenever they struck true. It wasn’t any fancy technique, just a coat of mana on its hands, explosions under its feet, and simple kinetic energy projection. But all of it used together in a cohesive combat style made for a fearsome opponent nonetheless, especially because the elemental seemed to have inexhaustible mana reserves. It had already gone through enough mana to exhaust Mia’s core three times over in just a minute or two of fighting, in fact. It was ridiculous for a supposedly Rank 1 creature.

Mia watched the fight, an Arcane Blast forming in her hand. She had learned that she didn’t need verbal or even telepathic commands to give orders to her two pseudo-spirits. Whenever she wanted them to do something, they did it … which wasn’t always a good thing. The two may have come with a respectable level of instinctive combat skill and knew how to fight, how to strategise a bit, even. But Mia? Whenever she’d made them do something more complicated than ordering them to ‘defend me’ and ‘destroy that’, they started making mistakes. Not big ones, but they would overextend, show their backs to enemies and things like that, prioritising her wants above everything else.

They were extensions of herself, and their biggest limiter was, funnily enough, her own lack of proper combat education. She’d been … winging it so far, going by common sense and instinct, but that could only take her so far. She just hoped Gabe had actual instructions lined up, too, because if all he had planned was to throw monsters at her and hope she figured it out herself, she would probably strangle him. Lovingly. Just a bit. As siblings do.

So she had to be careful, only make slight nudges so their eagerness to fulfil her will wouldn’t override their non-existent survival instincts, or rather, their default behaviour. Firstly, she had to test whether a rank 1 Arcane Blast would even faze this creature. It was an arcane elemental, so she wouldn’t have been surprised if it had an immunity, or at least a resistance of some sort. That’d be annoying. 

She kept the spell circle in place, trying to mentally infuse it with her Will to reinforce it. Arcane Blast’s Rank 1 enhancement hadn’t been anything groundbreaking, and it probably wouldn’t help here, but dismissing it outright wouldn’t be good either. It was a simple thing, just that the more times she cast the spell with the same spell circle, without dismissing it, the more potent the spell would become. There was some recursive mana feedback loop that reinforced and empowered each consecutive Blast. 

It wasn’t multiplicative, much less an exponential increase, more like an additive +20%? Roughly? But it was still useful, especially when Blast was her most used spell by far. In a relaxed environment, she could get up to ten subsequent Blasts before the spell circle tore free of her control, which made the final Blast nearly three times as potent. In combat, she’d only gotten to three so far.

Mia focused, doing her best to keep her mental touch light as she impressed her will upon her two pseudo-spirits. The three spectral tigers pounced as one, doing away with their wary demeanour. One latched onto the elemental’s right ankle, another leapt at its face only to get smashed apart with a vicious backhand, and the third threw itself bodily at the elemental’s back. 

The elemental lashed out, stomping on the tiger, chewing its ankle and a hand reaching back to grab the other, mauling its back. Before it could throw the last familiar away, the Guardian slammed into it, tower shield hitting the larger creature like a runaway truck and making it stumble. 

The Guardian stepped back, and the Knight leapt forth, not to leverage the elemental being slightly out of balance, but to make it worse. Its bastard sword swung in vicious arcs, keeping the elemental out of balance for just a moment longer and distracting it while Mia’s spell actualised and zipped through the air. It slammed into the elemental’s chest, and Mia grinned when she saw a head-sized chunk of its stone-like flesh vanish. 

Arcane energy poured forth from the gaping wound, crackling wildly, and the elemental’s presence started to bleed away. Mia pulled back her mental touch, which the Guardian and the Knight took as their cue to leap back into the action. 

It wasn’t a mortal wound; Mia could see translucent pink flesh knitting over to seal the hole she’d torn into the arcane construct anchoring the elemental, but it was now firmly on the back foot against her two summons.

Mia circled around it, keeping the spell circle firmly in place for now as she waited. Using the same trick twice probably wouldn’t work; the elemental would know to retreat when her summons pounced on it as one instead of fighting through the assault. So what now? 

An idea occurred to her a few seconds later, a bit risky, but she had Mage Armour on, and Gabe was probably keeping watch, so it would be fine even if it ended up getting her punched in the face by the elemental.

She shot off another Blast, aiming at the elemental’s head this time, but without any preparation. Predictably, her target saw it coming and made use of the big, blocky White Guardian and its even larger tower shield, angling itself so her spell would hit the Guardian instead of it. Mia waited a moment and flicked the mental switch just as her spell was about to tear into the back of the Guardian’s helmet.

The White Guardian vanished, dismissed, and the spell was free to slam into the elemental. Not its head, unfortunately, just its shoulder since it’d managed to move faster than Mia thought by shoving itself aside with a small explosion of kinetic energy. The Blast tore through its shoulder, the limb dropping from its body and dissolving before it even hit the ground.

The Black Knight was on it in a blink, and with one of its arms lost, plus a new gaping wound bleeding it of energy, it couldn’t keep up with the vicious flurry of slashes. The storm of blows tore into it, covering the elemental in deeper and deeper wounds, and then the Knight lunged, one of its swords slamming into the elemental’s intact hand to throw it aside, and the other leapt forth like a serpent, piercing straight through the elemental’s neck where a previous slash had weakened its stone-like flesh.

Mia could feel the Knight’s glee as it twisted its wrist and wrenched its blade sideways, tearing through the elemental’s neck and sending its head flying. It never reached the ground, dissolving into a mist of pink sparkles, just like its body a moment later. 

“Well done!” Gabe said, giving her a slow clap and a grin. “That was a pretty good showing.”

“Are you going to just keep throwing stuff at me to fight and hope I figure things out myself?” Mia asked, crossing her arms with a frown. Not a pout. She did not pout. 

“I wanted to see you fight now that you had a week to get used to your improved capabilities.” Gabe shrugged. “And one thing you’ll have to learn is efficiency. As a mage, your mana reserves and mental endurance are both crucial. It’s one of the primary things I’ll be helping you learn. Did you know that higher-ranked Rifts have a time dilation effect?”

“I recall reading something like that,” Mia said, raising a curious eyebrow. 

“Well, Rank 2 Rifts have a two-to-one time dilation effect. Rank 3s a ten-to-one and 4s and 5s are even higher, do you know why?”

“Nope,” Mia said, rolling her eyes. “But I’m guessing you’re about to tell me?”

“Because Rifts grow exponentially with each Level,” Gabe said with an amused smile. “And by that, I mean in the size of the demi-plane on the other side of the Gates. Rank 3 Rifts can take months to fully clear, even with the maximum number of participants, all at the highest possible level allowed inside. I heard Rank 5 Rifts can take decades to clear once. From the outside, however, it would seem like they’d just gone in and had it handled in a week or two. If you want to stay alive and grow stronger, you will need to learn how to pace yourself and how to stay safe while in a hostile environment teeming with monsters for days or weeks at a time … for a start.”

“And how are you going to do that?” Mia asked. It all sounded reasonable … but she still thought learning how to actually fight was more important in the short term. She was sure she had glaring weaknesses that an expert could point out and help her remedy, stemming from being basically self-taught, if it could even be called that. 

“For now? Practice,” Gabe said, then snapped his fingers, and another spell circle burned itself into the pavement. In a second, a new Greater Arcane Elemental stood before her once more, though it might as well have been the same one. “I will be controlling this guy this time around. Punish any mistakes you make and take advantage of any vulnerabilities you show. I know it’s … rough, but I’ve found that showing works much better than telling to make sure the lessons stick. It’s how I learned to fight, and it's the quickest way-“

“Good,” Mia said, cutting in when he started to ramble, as if he had to justify himself. “You don’t need to justify yourself. I was about to ask you to do the exact same thing if you started treating me with kiddie gloves. It’ll be fine.”

*****

It was not, in fact, fine. Mia groaned as she lay splayed out on the cracked pavement, her skull pounding from an absolute bitch of a headache. Having her Mage Armour shattered caused a backlash that even her wand couldn’t fully stop, and the stupid elemental punched through the Armour right after it had torn through her familiars, which only exacerbated the effect.

Mia hadn’t won a single time since the first bout. The elemental had the exact same presence and abilities, but with Gabe at the driving wheel, it always managed to slip past her pseudo-spirits and send her on a blind date with a wall or the asphalt. That damned elemental was slippery, and despite its power, Gabe always tried to work around any trick she threw at it instead of just bulldozing through them. 

Gabe’s own shields always made sure her losses never earned her anything worse than a bruise, but it still hurt. On another note, she now knew her Mage Armour could protect her from exactly five pavement-cracking slams. Did he really have to make it grab her by the ankle and swing her around like a club? In retrospect, she could have escaped its grip with Wisp Form, but she was a bit too busy screaming her heart out in terror. 

Being smacked around by a monster that looked like it ate souls for breakfast and drank a glass of infant tears to wash it down made it a teeny tiny bit challenging to focus. A painfully tight grip around her ankle, the wind rushing in her face as she was swung through the air, feeling weightless one second, then getting the air knocked out of her lungs as she slammed into the ground. Weightless, slam, weightless, slam, repeat. 

Not that getting slammed into the ground was comparable to feeling like her skull was about to split open. Fuck. Even just formulating a cohesive thought took effort in her current state, and the mere thought of trying to cast magic like this made her head throb with a renewed pulse of agony.

“You alright in there?” Gabe asked, leaning over her fallen form lying in a Mia-shaped indent in the ground. He looked halfway between amused and worried, that look only an older brother could wear whenever he wasn’t quite sure, yet he’s hit his little sibling a bit too hard and whether she’d go snitch on him to Mom for it. 

“Fuck you,” Mia gasped out weakly, her face scrunched up in pain as she covered her eyes with a forearm. Did the sun have to be so goddamn bright? “I hate you.”

“Sounds like you’re fine.” Gabe snorted after hearing her half-hearted words. “Here, drink this.”

He placed the mouth of a small vial to her lips and tilted it back. Mia gulped down the contents without hesitation, frowning a bit more at the weird, cold, and minty flavour, then gasped when a chilling coldness radiated outwards from her tongue. Her brain chilled painfully, feeling like it had frozen over, and Mia’s hands came up to massage her temples while a pained groan slipped free from her lips. Magical brain freeze, of all the things that had to be a thing, this was surely in the running for being one of the worst. It faded a few seconds later, and it took Mia a moment to notice that it had taken her migraine with it, leaving her mind clear and free of that pulsing agony. 

She blinked in wonder, then pushed herself up with a groan. “I didn’t know there were potions for treating spell-casting backlashes?”

“Just mild ones, like the headache,” Gabe said with a smile. “You can only take it once per day, and they strain the Mind, so they can’t be overused. But it’s a simple enough potion, and I knew the recipe; luckily, I’d spotted a monster nest nearby that had the primary reagents growing around it, so I just picked up a few bagfuls.”

“Neat,” Mia said with a thoughtful hum, her eyes wandering over to where her mom and Camie were sitting on a bench. Had they been watching her get her face smacked in? … awkward. “We’re done for today?”

“Yep,” Gave said. “We went a bit harder than I’d been planning to, so tomorrow’s training will be a bit lighter. I think … hmm, you haven’t tested all of your new spells against actual monsters yet, right?”

“No?” Mia said.

“Excellent!” Gabe clapped his hands together, then held one out to help her up, an offer which she graciously accepted. “Then I think we’ll be going on a small hike tomorrow, seeing what we can find skulking in the nearby forests around Graz.”

“Sounds good to me.” Mia shrugged, wincing a little as she took a step and a nasty bruise on her hip throbbed. Without the headache to distract her, those bruises suddenly didn’t feel so insignificant anymore.

They were a good reminder. She was a mage; if anyone got close enough to put bruises on her, then she’d fucked up significantly somewhere along the way. Her White Guardian was good, but Gabe had shown her that it had little long-term thinking. It worked on pure instinct, doing its best to defend her from attacks as they came, without thinking ahead or at all. Gabe had managed to get past it three times by throwing a chunk of rock or a car wreck towards Mia to make the Guardian block it, even though Mia could have dodged something like that easily. It was almost entirely reactive. Meanwhile, the Black Knight had no care for her safety at all. It was like the variable of her own survival, or collateral damage, didn’t even enter the equation, rolling around in its empty head.

Two very good things to know before smarter enemies exploited them and harmed her, and Gabe was right, she would never forget these lessons with the comic-book worthy beat down the elemental gave her every time she failed. 

Camie jogged over to her when she saw her coming, and Mia couldn't help but smile as the redhead looked over her with a worried frown. “Are you okay?”

“Yep, just some nasty bruises,” Mia said, tapping her hips and wincing. Then she hummed, a playful smile tugging at her lips. Something silly and flirty was already on her tongue, something about kissing her bruises better or treating them with some cuddling, but not while her brother and mother stared at her. Yeah, she wasn’t quite shameless enough to flirt with her girlfriend while they were watching her. Still, she grabbed Camie's hand and intertwined their fingers, leaning into the taller girl’s side. “Let’s go home. I need a bath, and I want to pass out on a bed for ten hours minimum.”

Preferably while cuddling Camie, and after getting in her daily prescription of kisses. She had so many kisses to catch up on with her pretty vampiress after abstaining for nearly two months.