Arcane Apocalypse ~ 185 (Patreon)

“Done,” Mia said, slumping back in relief while radiating satisfaction. Her Spellbook, and the list of spells there was finally, fully overhauled. 

There were lots of spells she’d kept of course, it would have been stupid to discard her bread and butter spells, or useful utility stuff, but she’d carved out the chaff. Now, she had 25 spells, all with distinct and useful functions.

The only problem was that she currently had 4 Reactive spells in her arsenal but could only pre-cast 3 at a time. Alas, the Reactive Arcane Explosion would remain of limited use, so one would be left out. 

She would have replaced it entirely, had it been an option. Unfortunately, it was just about the best counter for being overrun with a swarm of tiny monsters, be they bugs, critters or other types of vermin. An omnidirectional blast of Chaos-infused arcane power would take care of them or at least give Mia the breathing room she needed. 

Spirit Blink was always an option, but experience taught her that it wasn’t always usable. If Sparkle was flying through the air, or engaging in combat, teleporting to him would just trade one sort of problem for another. Solutions were much more preferable.

Just looking down at her notes filled her with the satisfaction of a job well done. 25 spells, all useful, even if some of them were rather niche. Her runic-model was approaching its capacity, so she could add enough runes for two or three new spells at most, but no other full makeover of her list of spells would be happening until her Rank Up. She’d tried out a good number of her new spells before settling on this set though, so she could swap those around back and forth if she ever had a pressing need for them.

***

Spellbook [25 / 25 pages]

Arcane Blast - Rank 1 mod: Each subsequent casting of an Arcane Blast with the same spellcircle is able to take in escalating quantities of mana and deals an escalating amount of damage. 

Arcane Bolt - Rank 1 mod: Manual ranged control. The mage retains the ability to direct the bolt manually even after it’s been cast.

Arcane Bolt / Piercing variant: a spinning spike of solid arcane energy that is twice as fast as the standard Bolt.

Flashbang: Conical blast of blinding light and deafening sound. Rank 1 mod: Comes with a Chaos aspected pulse that bypasses weaker Wards and Shields.

Arcane Shield: 1.5 metre in diameter round shield. Rank 1 mod: Upgraded with added kinetic dispersion capability and simple durability.

Arcane Shackles - rank 1

Mode 1: Shoots out six arcane chains from the spell circle that swarm towards the target like snakes to tie them up.

Rank 1 mod: It disrupts spellcasting in those entangled and becomes a one and done spell. It constricts the target like a boa, no longer connected to or controlled by the caster beyond the fact that only they can dismiss it easily.

Spectral Blade - Rank 1

Mode 1: When wielded in hand, it takes on the form of a spectral longsword with little weight.

Mode 2: Similar to Mage Hand, it can be set forth in a straight line from the mage’s hand. When leaving the mage’s grasp, the sword starts spinning in a circle like a shredder.

Rank 1 mod: Chaos Aspected mana coats the edge, enhancing cutting power. Especially against magical protections.

Phalanx - rank 1

4 x 2 blocks. Each 1m x 1m. 

Rank 1 mod: Now looks like a castle wall/palisade with firing holes and parapets. It also becomes 6 x 2 blocks wide and tall, with the last two columns curling inward to give greater cover.

Ward of Protection - rank 1

Touch applied thin film of protection.

~30 min duration in combat. 120 minutes out of combat.

Deflects 2 attacks from a level 20 goblin.

Rank 1 mod: Reactive to incoming projectiles and attacks instead of always active. Increases duration greatly.

Alert Ward - rank 1

Spreads a thin film of mana out in a sphere, wrapping around walls and objects if it encounters any. Alerts the caster when anyone enters it.

Variant: tied to a monster core, other people who imbue mana into the core are attuned and exempt from the ward.

Mage Armour - rank 1: A personal Ward of Protection only applicable to the caster. Can be recharged mid-use from the caster’s Core. Can withstand roughly twice the punishment a simple WoP can.

Mass Find Familiar: Summons X number of Arcane Elementals to possess X number of arcane construct shells to do the caster’s bidding.

Unseen Servant: An invisible, weaker-than-standard humanoid summons that hovers above ground. Arcane construct possessed by an Arcane Elemental. Its hands can shift between gangly humanoid fingers and clawed arms lined with wickedly sharp talons.

Reactive Shield: An Arcane Shield spell that can be pre-cast, meaning it goes dormant after casting, ready to be triggered at a moment’s notice later on. Once pre-cast, the spellcircle can be released and no further mana needs to be supplied. 

Precastable Spells: Only 3 can be active at a time. 10 Spirit Attribute = 1 Precastable Spell. Currently have: ~30 Spirit.

Reactive Arcane Explosion: Omnidirectional blast of destructive arcane energy. Can be pre-cast. 

Glyph of Warding: magical landmine. 

Warding Bond: 60% of the damage received is offloaded to the warded partner, though the bond itself mitigates half the damage.

Arcane Missile - rank 1

A custom combat spell. It’s a merging of a baseline rank 1 Arcane Blast and a Greater Arcane Bolt. It’s basically an arcane Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) missile. Takes a massive chunk of mana though. 

Blur: Distorts the caster’s image, making flickering illusionary doubles appear in a small radius around them. When powered with Chaos Aspected mana, it generates a thick fog of rainbow colours in that same radius that not even the caster can see through.

Invisibility: Self-explanatory. Only visual invisibility; does nothing for smells, sounds and supernatural senses like Mana Sight. Rank 1 Mod: Duration-based now; can be applied to others like WoP on touch.

Reactive Counterspell: A Bolt-type spell. When it strikes an enemy mid-cast or currently manipulating mana, it disrupts their mana control, causing a mana cascade that usually results in a severe backlash for the victim. Sufficient Control and Mana Manipulation skills would lessen or negate the effect. The rank difference between caster and target would exacerbate the effect. Should be useful for up to Rank 3 enemies. 

Dispel: Dispels magical effects on the object or person it affects. Touch-range. Some weaves are made to resist attempts to dispel them, though none should appear below Rank 3. Weaves made from mana a Rank higher than the mana powering the spell have a high chance of resisting the effect.

Danger Warning: Divination spell. Detect imminent physical harm to the caster a moment before it actually happens.

Silence: A field in which no sound can be made, centred around the caster.

Reactive Kinetic Dispersion Shell: Extremely mana hungry. Disperses all kinetic energy and force affecting the shell, or those inside it, into the surroundings. 5% mana per second while channeled at 33 Spirit.

Pre-Cast (3 / 3): KDS, Shield, Counterspell, 

***

Sad as it was, both Featherweight and Levitation lost out to Kinetic Dispersion Shell in the end. The use-cases of that spell were just much wider than the previous two spells. Its mana-hungry nature was a pain, and it only grew with the added function of making it pre-castable, but it was worth it. 

It would save her from falling just as easily as it could save her from a boulder flying towards her face at Mach speeds, or from a charging rhino. While it was active, no kinetic impact would ever harm her. 

Mage Hand, Phantom Steed, Arcane Bolt variants: Blunt, Rapid-Fire and Homing had all been axed. They were either too niche, too useless or just redundant. For example, the Blunt Bolt had been replaced by Flashbang, an altogether much better non-lethal and crowd-control option. The rest were just the most replaceable of the lot, falling short of expectations and being much less promising than the new spells they had been replaced with. 

Invisibility was a bit of an odd one, but it would be useful, especially when combined with Silence. With its Rank 1 modification she could also apply it to Carmilla, whose Unknowable unique Primary Skill synergised disgustingly well with it. That stupid Skill of hers wiped away all the downsides of the humble Invisibility spell, making her imperceptible to supernatural senses. Camie could already move without sound, and that only left smell … which vampires apparently didn’t have. Not naturally anyway, smell could cling to them, but they supposedly had no body odour.

Mia could have sworn Camie smelled of roses and pines though. Maybe her nose was smelling her magical presence or something? She’d heard some beastkin could track people just by the ‘scent’ of their magical presence lingering in the ambient mana. Maybe it was something like that, just on a much lesser extent. 

*****

“Do you think it’s teachable?” Mia asked as she watched the Enchanter who’d introduced himself simply as Fritz, turn her water rock this way and that. The blonde man glanced up with a distracted blink. “Enchanting, I mean. Do you think it can be taught?”

“Sure,” Fritz said, visibly relieved she’d repeated the question. “It’s just manipulating mana, weaving it into proper shape, then anchoring it to an object. Only that last part makes it any different from casting spells, from what I understand. We are very busy though, so I doubt any Enchanter in Graz will have so much as a minute to spare for teaching a class or something. We are swamped with work. I have my next two weeks filled up and I’m not even one of the poor sods with a Rare Class. Thank God for that. I doubt I’d see my girlfriend more than a minute a day if I was. At least I can pawn off the work of handling the socks and the boots to Eva — another Enchanter — thankfully I can only work with solids. Fabrics are supposedly more specialised, and my Skills don’t work well with them. You’d have to find a proper Weaver or whatever the Class is called if you want more enchanted socks.”

Alchemists were probably just as overworked too, given the ridiculous number of potions and other types of alchemical products Zeigler’s Alchemists were churning out. I also noted the distinction Fritz made between enchanting fabrics and solid stuff like rocks, jewelry and probably weapons. 

“I doubt being overworked like that is good for your health, or for the quality of the stuff you make,” Mia noted absently. “I’d probably have blown off my hand by now if I went around casting spells all day long.”

“Most of the work’s more repetitive than anything, and we get a cauldron of watered-down mental acuity brew from the Alchemists, it keeps us from making any egregious mistakes even when fatigued.” Fritz said with a shrug. “I’d much rather do this than sit at home feeling useless … though I’d still pick that over fighting monsters. I’m not suicidal … no offense.”

“It’s fine.” Mia waved him off, her eyes darting back to her precious water rock. It wasn’t like she was going to tell him she’d rather die than remain weak and helpless. Willfully and knowingly choosing to be helpless … she suppressed the disgusted snarl trying to creep onto her face. “I hope I’m getting that back, by the way. It’s not one of those deals where you have to disenchant it to learn how it works, right?”

“Nah. We can do that, mind you, but we’ve been told to keep your stuff intact so we will have to go with the slow and steady method,” Fritz said, gently running a finger along a line of dormant mana on the rock’s surface. “We will carefully map every channel of mana on this thing, make a few blueprints of it, then do our best to reproduce it. From what we can tell, this doesn’t harm the original object at all. It’s time consuming and a pain in the ass, but it is what it is. 

“It’ll get better as your Sensitivity grows, I’d assume?” Mia asked curiously. Enchanting and Alchemy were both professions she could theoretically learn as an Arcane Mage, though she’d never have any Skills that would assist her in either endeavour. Still, it could be a literal lifesaver if she could learn how to make simple potions or enchanted trinkets if she ever found herself with no one else to rely on. 

“ … yeah,” Fritz said after a moment, snapping out of his daze again. Damn, he slipped into ‘the zone’ quite easily, didn’t he. “I’m lucky enough to have the Mana Sense Trait, which apparently scales somewhat better than the Skill equivalent. Still have to kind of … feel it out, like being blindfolded and made to copy a sculpture based on nothing besides what you can feel from touching it. Except, enchantments have some rules and commonalities. Like spellcircles, I’ve been told. Now, I have a lot of work to do and I’m not saying that just because I want to kick you out, but I work best when I have some peace and quiet. Do you need anything else?”

“No, thank you,” Mia said, feeling a bit embarrassed at the not so subtle rebuke. Curiosity has gotten the better of her again it seemed. “Sorry for taking up your time. When do you think I should come back to retrieve my stuff?”

The only other thing she could have asked about was how they were proceeding with turning the Light Ward spell into an enchantment, but Zeigler said that was being handled. There was no point to bother this specific Enchanter about that. Gabe claimed the spell was simple enough for Rank 1 Enchanters to rework into an Enchantment. The enchanted trinkets would likely not last long, but they should start to become available in a few more days at most. 

“I should be done by … “ he trailed off, eyes glazing over while he made a thoughtful frown. “Tomorrow? No, the day after. I’ll get the stone done by tomorrow though, that’s the only crucial one, right? The rest should be non-essentials.”

“Yeah,” Mia said with a shrug, and he gave her a small smile. The same kind Mia had probably given many guests who’d overstayed their welcome and refused to catch a hint that they should really get going. “See you tomorrow then.”

He was already back fiddling with her rock by the time she made her way out of the fancy office room he’d been given to operate out of. Well, here was a meeting with an overworked Enchanter done, now all she needed to do was get started on figuring out how in the Nine Hells she was supposed to find five trustworthy, competent people to fill up the five leftover slots of the party. Zeigler had directed them to Vienna to look for volunteers to recruit, so a trip to the capital of Austria was next up on her to-do list.

Mia really didn’t want a repeat of the first few delves she’s had with Anna so she wanted whoever she took along for the Fetch Quest to be at least marginally reliable and not predisposed to stabbing her in the back. She still didn’t quite trust Anna, not fully, and it was … exhausting. 

Mia wanted a team she could trust. Fighting monsters and wandering the world would be tiring enough all by itself, she really didn’t want to stack any more sources of worry on top of that if she could at all help it. 

Not that it was going to be easy.

*****

Vienna. It’s been more than a year since Mia had last been to the city. It was always been larger than life, the city that had once been the capital of the Habsburg Empire, the city that had finally beaten back the inexorable advance of Suleiman the Magnificent, the city that’d halted the Ottomans, the city that had been the centre of classical music for centuries, the city where Europe’s future was decided after the fall of Napoleon. It may have fallen out of the collective consciousness as one of The cities of Europe in recent times, London, Paris, Madrid and Rome having become the cities people’s minds went to when they thought of Europe, but Vienna had been the beating heart of Central Europe for more than five hundred years. 

She loved this city, even though her college years spent there had been pretty miserable. It had some precious memories, school trips, family holidays … just thinking about the Christmas market they’d made a family tradition of always attending brought a small, wistful smile to Mia’s lips.

In Mia’s mind, Vienna was still the lively metropolis with its beautiful architecture and centuries of rich history and even richer memories. She failed to reconcile that mental image with the sight that greeted her eyes, even as the minutes went by and the details slowly cleared up. 

The city was a … ruin. Devastation had consumed the massive outer sections that had once been home to industrial sectors and towering housing complexes. Even further in, in the mid-ring, it was a hollow shell of its former self, lifeless and decrepit. Maybe one in five buildings escape collapse. But it was the sight that greeted her at the very centre of the city that made her blood run cold. It was just … gone. The historical centre of the city with the parliament and dozens of historical buildings that had been home to government agencies just months ago were nowhere to be seen. 

Mia saw a massive hole, hundreds of metres wide. It had no bottom, just a dark void that no light could pierce. That was what her regular eyesight could see anyway, but her Spirit Sense was different. With the ability to glimpse supernatural energies snapping into place, she saw a towering pillar of energy so dense it seemed solid. Somewhere high above, kilometres into the air, it broke apart into a billowing mushroom cloud, like some colossal tree with a sprawling canopy. All that energy scattered into every direction, probably sinking back down to the surface dozens of kilometres away in the form of ambient mana.

So that’s a Mana Well. Mia thought numbly. It made her feel small, like an ant watching a supernova from up close. She knew in her gut that if anyone was stupid enough to jump into that well, they’d be erased long before the fall to the bottom of the hole could kill them. Trying to skydive into that would be similar levels of stupid as trying to take a dive into a volcano’s magma pool while it was an actively erupting. Probably had roughly the same odds of survival too … which was none.

Somehow, it didn’t seem to be affecting the city around it in any obviously harmful way. The mana was surging straight up into the stratosphere and trickling down far away, though considering the thicker ambient mana in Vienna itself, it probably crept back in. 

The closest thing she could visually compare it to was how it looked when someone ran over a fire hydrant with a truck and the water came surging up into a pillar-like torrent, only coming down in the form of rain. 

“Isn’t it dangerous to live around that?” Mia asked anxiously. Gabe took them straight towards that horrifying force of — supernatural — nature. It was hard not to be anxious. She could almost feel her fight or flight instincts getting ready to go haywire. 

“You would think so,” Gabe said with a small, amused smile. “But no, quite the opposite, in fact. A Rank 5 Mana Well like this might as well be an unlimited source of mana, which means the greatest bottleneck for laying down barriers and wards around the entire city is nonexistent. I’ve already begun working on a proper Wardstone for the city, but I’m only Rank 3 and my Class isn’t any more crafting-focused than yours. I have some practice making Wardstones, but I’m in no way an expert, and the largest I’d ever done was for a merchant’s oversized mansion. This is an entire city we’re speaking of, so I’m a tiny bit out of my depth here. Still, it will be a good enough stopgap measure and allow the Marshal to move around more freely without having to worry about some random monster stomping through what remains of Vienna.”

Mia was struck by the sheer dissonance between their two perspectives. What she saw as a horrifying natural phenomenon that was dangerous to even look at, Gabe saw as an incredible resource that could give them a massive edge. It made sense, in a way, danger and opportunity walked hand in hand since the System’s arrival. 

Suppressing her instinctive, primal reaction to the sight, Mia willed herself to think rationally, to consider the Mana Well from the perspective Gabe had outlined. If it truly was a practically endless source of mana for whatever they wanted, it could be … useful. 

The Obelisks deployed that monster-deterring field around cities, the strength of which scaled with the Rank of the highest Levelled person within any specific city. Could they game that mechanic with the Mana Well?

Maybe with a Titan? Mia recalled that the main bottleneck for Elemental Titans was the mana cost of making and maintaining them, which apparently grew exponentially with each Level. 

Would a Titan be considered a ‘person’ though? Elementals were supposedly only semi sentient, and far from sapient until they reached Elemental Lord status. Titans were a … different evolutionary track, of sorts. They were dumb as rocks, literally, in some cases.

A Spirit then? Could we summon a high Ranked Spirit and just have it sit on its ass all day long in return for a steady stream of Rank 5 mana? 

There were too many unknowns, so she couldn’t make any definite plan just yet, but even just theorising was doing wonders for her instinctive apprehension. They had options, lots of them, and it made Mia feel … better. Hopeful. In control. 

She found she quite liked that feeling.