Mage Tank

I forewent physical training on the eve of our approach to the cave. Initially, I’d asked Lito if he could teach me a technique that utilized stamina rather than mana, but he was of the opinion that techniques were better ‘discovered’ than taught. I also asked Ember about her flight ability, which was stamina-based, though I didn’t see how that made sense, and she demoed it for me a few times. She wasn’t able to give me any useful guidance on how to acquire it, though.

“I’ve just always wanted to fly,” she said. “Since I was a girl, it’s the first dream I remember having. Other children would talk about growing up to be teachers, or rulers like their parents, and there was no shortage of talk about becoming Delvers. One girl in my class wanted to be a diplomat from the age of five, if you can believe it.” Her eyes wandered over to Myria. “But when they asked me, all I’d say was “fly” or “be a bird”. Sometimes I even said “angel”, those sorts of things.

“We were in our sixth gold-tier Delve, fighting a Megatross,” she continued, “It took me in its claws and flew me over this ridiculous pit that surrounded the obelisk. Biggest obelisk chamber I’ve ever seen, no idea why it needed a giant pit of all things. It let me loose, and I fell for a few seconds. Then, I stopped falling. I don’t even remember the System message, I just accepted the skill on instinct.”

[The Delve core likely built the pit for that very reason,] Grotto volunteered to me. [A poor choice, as many Delvers possess flight skills or ways to avoid falling in the first instance. The floor-space to kill ratio is terrible for that sort of construct.]

“So it just happened?” I said, ignoring Grotto.

“Yeah. Sorry if that’s unhelpful.”

“No, it’s really good to know. I just need to think about my childhood dreams and get a skill moments before my untimely demise. Easy enough.”

“That’s not usually how it happens,” Ember said with a grin. “But it happens enough that it’s a well-known strategy. Gets some people killed, so I don’t think it’s the greatest idea.”

Ember and Nuralie had been in the middle of a discussion around the finer points of fletcher-ing, so I let them get back to talking over ways of adding alchemical concoctions to arrow shafts and heads.

Lito, Myria, and Cole were going over the slate, transcribing information coming from Umi-Doo and deliberating, while Xim and Ashe were conversing about the warrior’s Dimensional Summon spell. I eavesdropped on the conversation a bit, while I sat down away from everyone else.

I hadn’t been sure that Ashe was the one to produce the summoning spell, but she had an auto-cast evolution to her Luck stat. Her build sounded atypical, since she focused on summons and Luck to mitigate damage alongside high Fortitude, but didn’t have much in the way of Strength. Ember, her archer sister, was actually stronger than she was, though Ashe used that factoid more for ribbing Ember over her muscle-mommy physique than any point of shame or embarrassment for herself.

I thought about the spell and whether it was worth picking up. The mana cost was a bit high, and the fact that the summon was decided based on “personal affinity” made it tough to justify. To what was I affinized?

I liked dogs a lot. Maybe I’d get a hellhound or cerberus. I’d had a snake for a while, but wasn’t sure I wanted to go full Voldemort just yet with my own personal Nagini. I at least needed an underage rival who thwarts my evil plans with luck, determination, and the power of a platonic Mary Sue side-character from whom they consistently steal the credit.

Dinosaurs were pretty awesome. I was huge into the triceratops when I was a kid. I was also always a big fan of horror movies and halloween. Who knows what I’d get?

Moving on from that distraction, I reached down and pulled my amulet from beneath my body-suit. I considered its effects and decided to do some experimenting now that I had a few hours to kill, so I took it off. The souls of everyone around me fluttered out like dying candles, and I was struck by how alien it felt. I’d grown used to the ability, and seeing everyone without liquid soul-essence hugging their forms completely changed the scene before me.

The five-person team of gold Delvers no longer bore the blatant evidence of their power. They looked like a group of twenty-somethings LARPing in the woods, rather than a group of superhuman killers. They were all obnoxiously attractive, though, so it was more like a scene from a Hollywood movie about a group of twenty-somethings LARPing in the woods. Not to denigrate LARPers, just saying that no normal group of humans had any right to be so really ridiculously good-looking.

Xim and Nuralie… well, they still looked like they belonged in a magical land of wonders and danger. One had red skin and had begun to review a book full of unholy, mind-melting symbols in the middle of the night, in the forest, with no additional light-source to speak of. And Nuralie was a straight-up monster girl.

Apart from the others, Lito stood out the most. Without his halo of golden light, Lito looked tired. He still had the face of a man in his mid-twenties, but his eyes and mouth were set like a guy twice his age with a rocky background who’d seen more than his share of tragedy. A guy who spent twenty years as an alcoholic, got sober, started going to church, then got roped back into his rough-and-tumble lifestyle when his daughter got kidnapped by east-european gangsters. Now he was using his particular set of skills to plot her rescue.

I focused on what Xim had told me about the Eye’s gift, and moved on from my people-watching, transitioning to soul-watching. I tried to spot any trace of the shiny stuff with my unassisted vision, though there was nothing to see. At first, that is.

After several minutes, I started to notice a faint outline around Lito’s body. I’d chosen him as my target because I didn’t want to be caught staring intensely at any of the women, and I didn’t really know Cole at all. Lito already thought I was strange, so this would just be another drop in the bucket of weird that was Arlo.

The outline was so subtle that I thought I might be imagining it. It was the type of thing that I caught in my peripheral vision, but when I looked directly at it, it disappeared; like a Hermann grid illusion.

“I know you’re staring at me,” said Lito. “I just don’t know why.”

“Guess I should have seen that coming, what with you being the truth-seer and all.”

He set down the stack of parchment he’d been reviewing with a glowstone and rubbed at his eyes, then looked over at me.

“Well?” he said.

“I’m training one of my abilities.”

“Training that requires you to stare at me?”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Either you or someone else. Figured you’d be the best person to stare at.”

“Why?”

I gestured vaguely at the rest of our company, and he looked them over.

“I see,” he said. “You don’t want any of them to think you’re a creep, but it’s fine if I do.” Lito took a deep breath and stood up, stretching. “Well, keep on training, I guess. Just don’t do it while I’m asleep.”

“Roger that.”

He raised an eyebrow, but began scanning the woods without asking any more questions.

That went on for a while. Lito stared into the woods, I stared at Lito.

Yeah, nothing much happening there. No matter how much I focused, I couldn't get the nigh-imperceptible glow to grow any larger. I squinted, tried to force mana into my eyes, tried to reach out with my aura skill, nothing worked. So, I decided to move on and began reading one of the books Umi-Doo had given me, Dimensionalism and You: Volume II. It was supposed to help me open and close the portal to my Pocket Closet faster, and a quick scan of the text told me that it was a guide for mana-shaping various dimensional spell archetypes. Portals were one of the archetypes, so I began digesting the information.

After thirty minutes I understood the theory, and just needed some practice doing it. Without going into detail, I was able to reduce the time it took to open the portal by expending mana to do so. The portal was normally free, but if I needed it open in a hurry, I could make it happen. Like Oblivion Orb, the cost of using it in this way was fairly expensive, but with time and practice it should get cheaper. That’s what the book told me, at least. If I’d known it was going to be such a quick task, I would have probably done it sooner. Still, there was another ninety percent of the book left, so there were plenty of secrets left to unravel inside.

Experimenting with the portal put me into a bit of a flow state, where I was only partially aware of what was going on around me, or the amount of time that was passing. By the time I’d spent all my mana, the area around me had grown a bit brighter. For a moment I thought I’d worked through the night to sunrise again, despite how absurdly out of whack that would have made my internal clock. No, it wasn’t sunrise, the soul-halos were back.

I looked around the clearing, observing the gold and platinum colors, but they blinked back out of existence almost as soon as I’d started paying attention to them. That’s when I realized I’d been taking the wrong approach to the problem. I was trying to open my eyes to their souls, not squint at them. Trying to force myself to see what I was looking for was actually suppressing the ability. So, I relaxed, went back to my book, and the light returned after an hour or so. This time when I dropped the book, I tried to keep myself relaxed.

Seeing the light of someone’s soul with my own eyes, rather than having it communicated to me through an item, was like staring into a bright light and trying not to blink. My control over suppressing the glow of the liquid-like stuff was far cruder, since I was essentially learning to use a new muscle, rather than having the Traveler’s Amulet do the work for me.

I was moving from pressing the start button on my Keurig coffee maker to hand grinding gourmet beans, heating water to exactly ninety-six degrees celsius in a stovetop kettle, then using a french press to brew the bean water, timed to the exact second, all according to the specific flavor profile I wanted and in line with what was best for the blend of coffee that I had.

The amulet pre-selected all the variables to provide consistent output, but the level of fine control at hand when seeing the soul manually provided far greater nuance.

My command of the ability was still clumsy, but by the end of the night I could focus on enlarging or diminishing the various layers and aspects of Lito’s soul, taking a closer look at the roiling flames that made up the core of the man, or even peering more deeply into the nature of the gold power within him. It gave me an unusual experience of synesthesia, where I could almost taste and smell the subtle color variations his soul had. The experience was exhilarating, and terrifying in its implications.

Eventually my concentration was interrupted by Myria, who informed me that it was time to open up the Closet so that everyone could get some sleep. I needed a bit of time to calm down from my adrenaline rush, so I volunteered to take the first watch. I opened the portal and bid the others good night.

The night was long and dark, but I didn’t mind appreciating the trees alone for a while. I could still study every leaf and branch, and what I’d found inside of Lito’s soul gave me a lot to think about while I did so.

****

The morning came and went and the Ravvenblaq crew showed up around brunch time, though there were no mimosas to be had. Xim and I greeted Varrin while the adults were talking.

He was as tall and broad as I remembered. His ice-blue eyes remained the only splash of color against his pale skin and white-gray hair, although the edge that was within them when we first met had softened.

He walked with a long greatsword, rested on his shoulder. It had a deep blue blade and a bone-white handle; a bit wider than a claymore, but nothing so large or gaudy as you might see in an MMORPG. A little disappointing, but it worked for him.

He also had a lovely couple of gifts for me.

“What’s this?” I asked as he handed me the fanciest scroll case I’d ever seen in my life. It was also the only scroll case I’d seen in my life, but it was still fancy. Leather-bound, well made, and with a bit of heft to it. There was even some lovely gilding in the shape of an A on the top, which I popped off to have a look at the contents.

“Your share of the proceeds from selling the Creation Delve loot.”

“Ohhhhh,” I said as I unfurled a piece of parchment about the same size as my undergraduate degree, but with far more elegance and pizzazz. It was a bank note with a value of two-hundred-and-sixty-three Hiwardian golden notes. A little north of five ruby chips, or half an emerald.

“This is a tidy little sum,” I said as I looked over the detail on the document’s ornamentation. Were those little dragons that I spied?

Were there dragons here?!

“The atrocidile parts were pretty valuable, but not as much as the c’thon’s were,” said Varrin as he gave Xim a forearm handshake. “There were also Hognay’s gloves, amulet, and boots, which weren’t the best, but still mana-woven Delver gear.”

“To the victor go the spoils, I guess.”

“Indeed,” said Varrin, before handing me the real prize. “My family bought the atrocidile and c’thon essences at market rates, then had this made for you. It’s a token of thanks for keeping me alive.”

What Varrin presented me with was a heavy, polished wood box that opened to reveal a set of eight thick, hexagonal slabs, each about the size of a dinner plate or frisbee. They were dark blue in color, the same as his blade, and seven of the plates were identical. The eighth was attached to a long armguard made of sturdy metal. I didn’t have any idea what I was looking at, so I inspected it.

Gracorvus

Unique Targe

Made with the gratitude of the Ravvenblaq family for use by Esquire Arlo Xor’Drel, this modular targe has been crafted from the essences of an atrocidile abomination and the c’thon known as Ihbriobrixilas by the renowned smith and mana-weaver Ealdric Ravvenblaq Junior. The shield was meticulously forged and woven to custom-serve the unusual needs and abilities of the recipient. It is the first and only shield of its kind.

Requirements: Strength 10, Intelligence 10, Wisdom 10

Specialized Requirements: Dimensional Attunement (Effect 1)

Armor Rating: High. This item will halt even the fangs of the mighty Chihuarberus, although it will fall short of mitigating the slavering maw of the Demihuahua.

Effects:

1: The modular slabs of Gracorvus have been woven with Ihbriobrixilas’ ability to defy gravity by altering space, along with its capacity for directing eight limbs simultaneously. This allows the user to rearrange the modular slabs of Gracorvus into a new configuration by spending 1 mana. This also allows the shield to float in place at the cost of 1 mana per minute, or move at the command of the wielder at a cost of 1 mana per second, at a speed of up to [Intelligence score] meters per second. Each individual slab can also be directed independently by the wielder at the same speed at a cost of 0.5 mana per second per plate, though the cognitive load of doing so increases substantially for each additional slab beyond the first.

2: The core of Gracorvus has been woven with an atrocidile’s frightful presence. While wielding this item in any of its assembled configurations, non-sapient enemies will perceive you as significantly more threatening than they otherwise would, and sapient creatures must succeed on a Wisdom save or suffer the same. This may cause enemies to fight, flee, or piss themselves, depending on their nature.

“Well, this looks fucking awesome.”

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