Sorcerer Ascendant: Singularity Online: Book 2 Read online

  Eventually, his SP ran too low to continue his practice, and he sat back to allow it to regenerate. As it did – thanks to his high Wisdom and Instinctive Meditation Skill, that would only take a couple of minutes – he started pondering a few new Spell ideas he had come up with. So far, he’d mostly created Spells as he needed them, without any future considerations. That wasn’t going to work for very long, though, and he wouldn’t always have time to craft a Spell on the fly.

  Up to this point, he’d also focused on crafting a Spell in one sitting; he basically just kept pouring SP into that Spell to the exclusion of anything else until it was finished. However, Lythienne’s specter had told him that Master Sorcerers often had several powerful Spells lingering in the formative stage, slowly being built over time. No reason I can’t do that, he thought. So, what are some Spells I’d love to have but that might be too powerful for me to create in one sitting?

  The first one, and one that he’d been considering for some time, was a warding Spell. If he and his Follower Geltheriel were going to be traveling, especially through Corrupted Lands, they’d need some sort of protection against random encounters. While he knew that he could set up a simple alarm system easily – all it would take would be a diaphanous curtain of mana that, when shredded, set off a mental alarm – he wanted something more active.

  He also needed to figure out how to pass messages to other players in game. He and his friend Phil were separated when they entered Singularity Online, and the game’s messaging system only let him reach out to players in the same domain he was in. Since he couldn’t message Phil, that meant the other player wasn’t in the elven lands, or at least not the nearby ones. He’d ask around the city and see if there was a way to send a message – maybe some sort of magical email system – but if not, he’d see if he could create a Spell for it. He had a feeling he’d need advanced mana for that, something like mental or illusion magic, but he was pretty sure he could create a base for the Spell and then figure out those mana types later.

  Next, he wanted to be able to create walls of fire. The corrupted version of Lythienne had used those against him to some effect, although he could think of a few ways she could have been smarter with them and wanted to try those out himself. I guess your strategic planning goes out the window when you go insane, he mused darkly. He knew that he could create that sort of Spell now that he’d figured out aspected mana, but doing so would probably take a ton of SP, and he’d rather create it in stages.

  Finally…he wanted to fly. He knew it was silly, but now that he had air mana, he wanted to figure out how to use it to carry him into the air and zip around like Superman. He could imagine himself, flying around a battlefield, raining flaming arrows and icy barrages down on helpless, grounded enemies. Not that it would actually work out that way – nothing ever went quite the way he wanted it – but it would certainly be cool.

  Before any of that, though, there was one Spell he wanted to create that he figured he could probably do in one sitting. When Aranos had been battling the gasha – giant, magic and damage-resistant skeletons forged from the bones of those who died in betrayal – he had lacked a way to hit a single target with sustained damage. His Mana Barrage Spell gave him some of that, but it wasn’t really designed as a DoT, or damage over time Spell against single creatures. The Mana Barrage was like a rapid-fire grenade launcher, meant to wipe out large numbers of low-level, low-hp creatures quickly.

  Now that he had figured out how to add aspected mana to his Spells, he wanted to make use of it and create a Spell that would allow him to pour sustained, elemental damage onto a target. Basically, he wanted a flame thrower.

  Because he already had his concept down, forming the Spell wasn’t very difficult. He closed his eyes and envisioned drawing fire mana up from his center, pouring it into his hand, letting it build into a crescendo, then allowing it to burst forth in a searing gout of flame. He felt the heat as it radiated out from the torrent of power, sensed the burning in his arm as he pressed energy into it, smelled the scent of cloth and flesh burning as he bathed some vague, shadowy figure in flames, heard the roaring and crackling of the inferno.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite working as he wanted. He could call the fire mana, now, and he could push it out of his hands, but he couldn’t get it to project. Once the fire left his hand, it simply dispersed into the air, going perhaps 3 feet before fading out. It didn’t matter how hard he pushed; the flames themselves simply wouldn’t hold together.

  Frustrated, he stopped and went back to the beginning of his idea. Pure fire mana wasn’t working, obviously. Well, he mused, a flame thrower doesn’t really shoot pure fire, either, does it? It fires some kind of compressed, flammable liquid. It’s that liquid that holds the flames together and allows it to be fired over a distance. The only liquid mana I know of is water, and I don’t think that’ll help me make a flame thrower!

  He allowed his thoughts to drift as he considered the problem. I need something to condense the flames, he began, trying to define the problem. Something to carry them and hold them together. Water won’t work. Earth might, if I could create lava, but I have a feeling that wouldn’t project, either. I’d just get a puddle of lava on my feet. That just leaves air, and that might work, or it might just blow out the fire. Worth a shot, at least.

  With a mental shrug, he began again, this time drawing fire and air mana from his spirals equally. At first, it was a struggle, since the two mana types didn’t seem to travel well together, and it was hard to guide them. They would mix and swirl in unpredictable ways, causing his Spell to fizzle. Eventually, he had the idea of keeping the different energies separate and moving together by spiraling them in a double helix, an inspiration he got from watching his mana spirals whirl for a moment.

  When the two types of mana erupted from his hand, he tried to summon a wave of fire and push it forward with a blast of air, but that simply gave him a puff of smoke as the fire was extinguished by the wind. He tried to create a funnel of wind to direct the fire, but keeping the wind focused was almost as difficult as keeping the flames intact.

  In a combination of desperation and instinct, he finally tried to replicate the double helix spiral that worked so well drawing the combined mana forth and push that into the air. It took him several tries to find a combination of spin and angle that held the flames together over a significant distance, but suddenly, his mind’s eye was rewarded with a gout of brilliant, white fire that roared in a nearly straight line for 30 feet before sputtering out.

  Excited, Aranos repeated the construct, adjusting the flows of energy to fine-tune the blast, trying to get the perfect combination of heat and distance. He pictured the flames washing over a gasha, heard the bones cracking under the heat, smelled the odor of singed wood and dust as the fire roared through the air, tasted bitter ashes on his tongue. Once he had the image down as perfectly as he could imagine, he began applying SP, slowly pouring the power into the construct.

  Time and again he ran through the vision, adding energy to it at a faster and faster speed until the flow slowed, and he was forced to halt the process. He opened his eyes and saw his mana spirals were heavily depleted, so he paused his creation and waited for the power to regenerate. He spent the time with his consciousness floating among his spirals, smoothing flows, repairing worn channels, and gently nudging the flows to begin the process of splitting them into more fractal-like shapes.

  Once his mana fully regenerated, he threw himself back into his Spell creation, pouring power into it until the Spell coalesced in his mind. He immediately pulled up the notification and laughed aloud as he read it.

  Aspected Mana Discovered!

  Aspected mana contains a single type of magical energy, such as fire or water. It is generally both more powerful and more limited than unaspected mana.

  Aspected Mana Spells: As a Sorcerer, you can empower any normal, unaspected Spell with aspected mana if you have previously adapted the Spell to that mana type. This can be done in or out of the mindscape and requires minimal SP, although some mana types might be suboptimal for certain Spells and may thus need a larger SP investment.

  Aspected Mana and SP: Your SP pool is your total amount of unaspected mana and does not reflect how much of each mana aspect you can use. Each aspect you discover represents only a fraction of your total, stored mana, and using that aspect drains SP not just from your total, but also from that stored percentage. If you run out of SP of a specific type of aspect, you can’t use it until you’ve regenerated sufficient SP to power a Spell. For example, if you have 200 SP total and 40 SP is fire mana, you can cast 40 SP worth of fire mana Spells before losing the ability to use this aspect, even though you would still have 160 SP of other mana types remaining.

  Currently, your unlocked aspects make up the following percentages of your total mana:

  Air – 12.5%

  Earth – 12.5%

  Fire – 12.5%

  Water – 12.5%

  These percentages can change if you are regenerating mana near a strong, natural source of a one or more aspect types, or through certain Perks or Abilities.

  Spell Created: Radiant Blast

  Rank: Novice 1

  Channel a gout of radiant mana at an enemy, doing fire and air damage.

  Effect: Fire a line of radiant energy at a target within 30’. Does 10-15 LP radiant damage to the target (14-22). Can be Channeled.

  Channeled: Do damage equal to 50% of base per second for 50% of SP cost. Damage can be increased and cost reduced by improving the Spell Channeling Skill.

  Cost: 40 SP

  +150 XP

  When I play with fire, you’ll get burned…

  Skill Gained: Spell Channeling (Untrained)

  Rank: Novice 1

/>   Allows you to maintain the effects of an instant Spell beyond the initial casting. At Novice 1, do 50% base damage for 50% of the SP cost per second. Add 2% damage and subtract 0.5% from the SP cost per level after the 1st. (1% damage and -0.25% SP Cost)

  +1 Int

  New Aspect Discovered!

  Aspect: Radiant

  Radiance is a composite aspect formed of a combination of air and fire mana.

  Radiant Damage: Radiant mana does both fire and air damage to the target. A target that resists fire or air damage but not both does not resist radiant damage.

  +250 XP

  Composite Mana Type Discovered!

  Composite mana types are formed from a combination of two primary mana types and have elements of both of those types.

  Composite Mana SP: Using composite mana draws equally from both of its component primary aspects. If you do not possess enough SP in either of the constituent aspects, you cannot cast a Spell with composite mana.

  Composite Mana Damage: Composite mana does damage of both of its component aspect types. To resist composite mana damage, you must be resistant to each component type; if you are resistant to one component aspect but not the other, you take full damage from that composite mana type.

  Quest Unlocked: So Many Aspects!

  Objective: Unlock more Primary and Composite aspects

  Difficulty: A

  Reward: +250 XP per Aspect unlocked

  Special Reward: For unlocking all Primary and Composite aspects – Bonus Perk, Bonus Title, ???

  Failure Conditions: None

  Do you accept? (Yes/No)

  “So cool!” he shouted, pumping his fist in the air and quickly accepting the Quest. “Okay, so if I channeled half of my SP into this, I’d do, what? About a thousand LP damage over a bit less than a minute? That is ridiculous!” He stopped and read the notifications a bit more carefully. “Wait, no, I guess I can only use about a quarter of my SP pool, max, to power the Spell. Still, that’s five hundred LP damage, which isn’t too shabby…”

  He called the Spell forth in his mindscape, and a jet of brilliant, white fire roared across the dojo in a narrow line, only two or three inches across. It bathed the invulnerable dome in energy, and he poured more power into it, maintaining the flames and moving them across the shiny surface. Finally, he cut the power off with a huge grin.

  “I cannot wait to try that Spell against something,” he almost giggled. “Maybe I can go do some hunting in the forest today…although I suppose a flame thrower in a forest might be a bad idea. Maybe there’s some kind of practice range I can use? I’ll ask Geltheriel later.”

  He sat back down in his chair and turned his mind toward his new Spell ideas. First, he considered the warding Spell. What do I need to have in the Spell? he pondered, closing his eyes and trying to picture it. He imagined being camped out with Geltheriel in Haerobel, knowing there were enemies around them and unable to get a decent rest for fear of being attacked. We solved the problem by hiding, he recalled, but I’m looking for defense, not concealment. If we had been found, we’d have been in trouble.

  The first thing he needed, he realized, was a barrier of some kind. Unaspected mana will work, he considered, but it would take a lot of it to make a decent barrier and that much would glow. Might attract the wrong kind of attention. Same problem with a fire barrier. Air is probably the best bet: if I can make air armor, I can make an air dome surrounding us.

  He envisioned the dome in his mind, imagining it hovering in a hemisphere 20 feet around them. He could feel the tiny whorls of air spinning through the shield, linking to one another like a suit of chainmail, the rapid wind speeds pushing out intruders. He could feel a band of edimmu, the twisted, dark blue remnants of the elves of Haerobel encountering the dome, pressing against it. He could hear the whine of the wind shredding their skin, smell the scent of pure air mixed with blue ichor, and taste the perfection of the undiluted mana on his tongue.

  Once the image was firmly in his head, he began adding mana to it, very slowly, letting the energy fill the pattern he was creating. He watched his SP bar as he went, not wanting to add too much to the construct; he knew it would take him multiple attempts to fashion even this part of the Spell. Once he got to about 50% SP, he broke off and allowed the image to fade from his mind, having spent about 550 SP at that point. He wasn’t worried: the mana he’d invested was enough to give the Spell sufficient form that it would wait, buried in his subconscious until he was ready to add more energy to it.

  He moved to his concept of a flight Spell, which turned out to be much, much harder than he thought it would be. He pictured the air flows swirling around him just like they did with his air armor, trying to hold him aloft with wind. He could imagine the feel of the pressure as the swirling shell wrapped around him, feeling it grabbing his frame and gripping him tightly. However, that was all it would do; he felt exactly zero amount of lift from the swirling vortices. He tried again, examining the swirls of wind closely, and he quickly understood the problem.

  All the wind flows are going in different directions, he realized. Since they’re pushing in all directions, the net thrust is basically zero. What I need to do is get the wind to stay interlocked to hold it in place but spin in one direction, to give it lift. Sort of like a drone copter, with dozens of little rotors.

  Coming up with the concept was the simple part; creating it was much, much harder. First, he got all the blades spinning in one direction, but shell of air simply whirled itself to pieces, as the rotors weren’t quite interlocked. He tried weaving them together, but they tended to rest at angles and ended up pressing on him equally from all sides

  It took a fair bit of trial and error to find a herringbone pattern that locked everything in place but still give directional thrust. Once he had the construct envisioned, though, he silently rejoiced as the Spell lifted his mental image a couple inches from the ground. That was all he could do for the moment: with his mass, the small rotors didn’t quite give enough stability, and any movement would cause his imaginary form to topple.

  That’s a problem for tomorrow Aranos, he decided, simply holding the swirling mana pattern in mind and feeding SP into it. Again, he fed half his total mana into the construct, repeating the image over and over as he did, until half of his SP was gone, and he let the image go.

  Creating an elemental wall was much simpler in theory, but still difficult in practice. He could easily picture what he wanted – a 15’ by 20’ wall of searing flames – but he quickly realized that fire wouldn’t simply float in the air. He could generate the initial pattern of mana, but the moment the flames appeared, they collapsed into a burning line of fire on the ground. Still nasty, he admitted, but not what I want.

  He tried again with air mana this time, and that worked fine; he could just use the same interlocking pattern of vortices that he’d envisioned in his warding Spell to create a wall. Earth mana was also simple, creating a solid wall of rock, although it was unstable and tended to fall easily. Water mana, he was unsurprised to find, also just collapsed into a puddle of water on the ground.

  He frowned, considering the problem. Both fire and water are just fluids, he reasoned. Air is, too, but I can create those linked cyclones of it, and it’ll hold together. I can try that with water and fire; maybe it’ll help them hold together?

  That was a total disaster. When he spun the vortices of fire, they were simply blown out. The water spun, but it took far too much energy to get it moving fast enough to link it together. Okay, so rotation won’t work. At least, not like that. Let’s think about this: what is the problem, and what can I do about it?

  The issue, he reminded himself, was that the heavier fluids were falling to the ground the moment they were formed. He could probably hold them up with a mana form, but then the wall would be unaspected mana filled with elemental energy, not an elemental wall. No, what he needed was to anchor the mana in place somehow. Like to a wall…

  He started over, imagining a thin wall of nearly transparent mana and binding the elemental energy to it. He slathered fire over the surface like paint, plastered swirls of pure water across it, and layered stone over the wall, and to his delight, it held. He decided to start crafting just the mana wall, first, and slowly added half his SP to the construct.