PoV: Snow Okiyama - Ion
“So that’s how it works,” I hum calmly.
Pieces of magic swirl inside my head. They gather in the archive that I’m building, and my mantle hums as the spells keep coming apart. I don’t break them fully - not yet, at least. All I do is… pull off parts. A loop here, a rune there, a sequence of glyphs at the edge of the mana.
And bit by bit, I take larger pieces. Every time the priest heals, I cast again. Every time the clothmancer waves a hand, I cast again. My mana bleeds out of me as I [Select] and [Observe] their skills. But the broken bits of magic fuel me again.
They’re so strong. Far, far stronger than Opal or I. We shouldn’t be beating them, and yet, Opal still lives. Their skin glistens as if faceted, and my magic swirls through the air in grey-blue cracks.
Streamers of mana seek out activations of spells, and slow them. Make them crumble. And piece by painstaking piece, I reassemble them, feeding them to my vessel.
Until it clicks.
“Yeah, that makes sense,” I say quietly.
[Deconstruction 19 > 20]
[Biological Restoration 17 > 18]
[Nullmage 19 > 20]
The healing finally shatters. It was targeting a small cut - a gash Opal left on the priest’s shoulder. It should have healed. He should have raised his arm and blocked the incoming swing.
But he can’t. The muscles don’t knit back together. Flesh refuses to mend, and a blink later, Opal’s sword slams home. Steel bites into bone, and the arm breaks. Blood splashes across Opal, and they almost look surprised, then look at me with something between a smile and a sigh.
A moment later, cloth wraps around them and spikes them face first into the ground. I sigh as I dedicate more mana to healing that. The clothmancer, of course, promptly tries to approach me, a brutal tempest of wire-thin fabric slicing towards me, clashing into a barrier of solidified mana.
It’s not enough. Opal reaches them within a moment, and again, their blade meets flesh. It slices the sumeen’s stomach open, a grizzly wound. The priest casts a heal, and I let it pass through. There’s still more for me to learn, after all.
“Opal?” I ask and they turn to me. “Catch.” A good chunk of my mana compresses into an enchanted knife, dense and engraved.
[Solidification 17 > 18]
It darts forward and lands in their hand elegantly. A moment later, they embed it into the clothmancer. Even though these copies are meant to be silent and expressionless, I still see the shiver run through them. “Must feel horrid,” I theorize. “All that foreign mana coursing through you, messing with your magic…”
And then I walk forward. I’m not fast, not nearly as fast as them. But I have more mana. Despite the level difference, I have more mana. My mantle swirls, and their attempts break against it, weakened multiple times over by my layers of defense. [Suppression], [Deconstruction], barriers of [Solidification], my mana leeching into and polluting their insides…
Powerful skills turn powerless as I kneel above the sumeen. Then I manifest a nail from my mana, and stab it through their hand. Then another nail, a third and fourth. I grow barbs, making sure they’re securely in the ground, leaving the sumeen with nowhere to go. “I’ll be right back,” I tell them.
Then I sit next to the priest, Opal’s sword pinning him to the ground. He burns with golden light, conjuring flames, and I smile. “There we are. That’s a new skill.”
Like the others it shatters and I hum.
“Show me again.”
- - -
An hour later, Opal and I finish the trial.
[Challenge completed. Ascend.]
[You have killed a lv. 80 Soothsayer]
[Level Up! 55 > 57]
As per the usual, my points go into mana, bringing it to an impressive 285. I breathe in, then out, clicking on my headphones even as the ascension well takes me. I learnt a lot from that little fight, and I mentally thank the tower for it.
Seems it doesn’t like descenders going after totally helpless little newbies like me. A small smirk plays on my lips. It’s imperfect, but, well, I do now have a full understanding of all the skills the priest had when he was level 80. The way he healed, the way he conjured flames, the way he used to track us, the way he conjured barriers.
All of it, housed within my Archive. Filed away and neatly understood, all its weak points marked like a drawing on a pinwall with a bunch of sticky notes. Points of failure, little efficiencies - how I can use a tiny pinprick of mana to make his entire skill crumble all at once.
[Memorization 3 > 5]
The same goes for the soothsayer of course. By the end of the fight, I could stop them from using their cloth entirely. Which is by no means a guarantee that I’ll be able to do so when we fight them for real, but it’s most certainly an advantage.
In fact… I feel a flicker of divination around me. Now that I know what to look for to spot the skill, it’s almost obvious. This is more solid, though. Stronger, far, far stronger.
So I simply pour half my vessel into shattering it entirely.
My mana plummets so much that I actually feel my breath hitch. But the flood of power crashes into the divination, and rather than crack and make it fall apart, it’s utterly annihilated. I smirk.
Then, Opal gently addresses me. “Hey, Snow. Look around.”
Something in their voice makes me listen, and I properly take in the fourth floor, the light of the ascension fading away and letting me take it all in. I smell the stale, musty air, drenched in the faint odour of rot. I look at the purple, trampled grass all around us, covered in faint, chilly fog. The trees with limbs like skeletal fingers.
And the tombstones.
The entire floor is a graveyard. I breathe in another breath stinking of mold and fetid flesh.
Then the ground cracks open and fingers of rotting flesh rise up.
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