Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Two hours later, Riven’s head hurt like crazy as the influx of knowledge was downloaded directly into his subconscious brain. Motions, internal activation sequences, and basic knowledge about the new spell flooded his mind and were implanted into his subconscious brain. The feeling was like a killer migraine, or better yet—like he’d been a ping-pong ball put into a glass jar and shaken around frantically for a good long while.

He clutched his forehead after finishing the scroll and groaned, but he couldn’t help but smile despite the pain as the newfound ability was registered into his character sheet. Not only did he see the new ability, but he had an entirely new section solely concerning his new core of original sin—which was still currently under construction and otherwise didn’t provide details yet.

[Riven Thane’s Status Page:

He took in a deep breath. Patience was a virtue.

He continued to use the scattered skulls, chairs, and various pieces of furniture around the ancient ballroom as target practice while diving, ducking, and running. All the while, he continued casting and trying to get a feel for combining his new abilities. He knew after talking to Athela that many types of mainstream builds for casters generally lacked mobility...so he needed to make up for that weakness by practicing firing while on the run. Athela had mentioned to him that casters often met their demise because they stood in one place while channeling spells or thinking themselves safe on the back lines of a group, and he was determined not to be one of those fatalities.

He spent the next hour practicing, becoming more confident with his timings between the cooldowns of his spells when they triggered and finding that the Wretched Snare spell required about the same hidden mana cost as his Bloody Razors, and it had about the same cooldown when it happened. He could spam the Wretched Snares rather easily, but the problem was it was far shorter of an attack than either of his other projectiles. In his duel with the necromancer in Chalgathi’s quest line and when using it on the would-be rapists in the tutorial, he’d been rather close in proximity while using the sticky, burning snare. Here, though, he quickly realized it had half the range of his Bloody Razors and about an eighth of the range of the Blood Lance. Standing at one end of the ballroom, he could fire a Wretched Snare halfway across the large chamber before it fell to the ground. The Bloody Razors made it the entire way across and out the windows before they started to sag and decline in height. Meanwhile, the Blood Lance completely went out the opposite wall, through an open window halfway up, and into the next tower over.

This was, of course, just using the base spells for each of them. If he imbued them with even more mana per cast, he was able to make them each go farther or hit harder or even grow the size of his projectiles.

Oddly enough, Blood Lance also made very little noise when it struck an object. It was almost completely silent, unlike the snare, which hissed and burned, or the spinning razors, which trailed out ribbons of blood in their path or shattered in explosions of red upon impact with harder surfaces. But the power behind it was far more deadly, and he could only imagine how it’d affect a person’s body.

He also took an hour to try and figure out how to manipulate the spells he did have in various ways. Athela had told him that he’d be able to conjure just one disc of a Bloody Razor at a time, and she had mentioned that spells did different amounts of damage dependent on the mana spent. So he used what she’d said concerning mana as a clue to try and change how much power he put into every spell, instead of the standard amount he naturally prescribed.

Upon his first two tries, it didn’t work.

The amount of mana for his Bloody Razors didn’t change, but on the third attempt, he was able to decrease the mana amount significantly as he fired a spell and saw the spinning, razor-like discs of crimson decrease in size by two-thirds. This was exciting to him, because he’d never altered a spell to this degree before. Combined with how he’d used his snares to get out of the trap room, this was another testament that he could change and alter given spells in various ways to find different combinations or uses for each basic form of the spell.

He concentrated harder, trying to do the same thing again and again, and finally got the hang of mana manipulation—being able to reduce or increase the size of his Bloody Razors based on how much mana he placed within them. The bigger the size, the more apparent damage they did to the targets they struck. However, it was much harder to figure out how to change the actual number of razors, and that’s where he got stumped momentarily. At first the razors would crack and break; other times the spell would just fizzle out completely, and yet another hour passed before he was finally able to figure out how to fix it.

The trick had been visualization. He’d had a certain vision of what the spell should look like, ingrained in him through reading of the tome that’d first taught him the spell. When he changed that visualization and used it as a new template, he was able to create one, two, three, four, or even five spinning discs of razor-sharp blood magic before it became a problem when he tried to up it to six. So he remained at five or fewer for now, after repeatedly failing to conceptualize a number over that properly and seeing his magics fizzle out or shatter when he tried too hard. He knew he’d probably end up being able to do it with practice, but each disc required a small amount of individualized concentration upon the summoning, and it was temporarily beyond his ability to do so with more.

Another thing he quickly realized was that the amount of innate mana he used was less with single casting when compared to multiple casts of the same spell—and he did this by feel. He could literally feel his hidden mana pool empty each time he used a spell, even though he had no visual tool to help him monitor it. When using his blood magic and creating four simultaneous discs of the same size—compared to using two castings of two discs or four castings of one razor disc—he realized by feeling out his mana pool that the single casting of four discs cost less than the two castings of two discs, which in turn cost less than the four castings of one disc. It appeared that each initialization of the spell had a base cost to it despite what the actual spell was, so he would be able to utilize his mana more efficiently by using fewer individual casting initializations. He also decreased the number of cooldowns he got simply by casting less frequently and in bulk, so that was yet another reason to cast as much as he could all at once versus multiple casts of the same spell.

During this time, he was very pleased with his results, though more than once he suffered from a complete lack of mana that occasionally gave him a severe migraine. He even got a decent feel for when his mana pool was about to hit rock bottom, and he tried to avoid it in order to avoid the spinning visual auras and headaches that sometimes accompanied mana expenditure.

He decided to wrap things up and was just about to head back into the room for a final look around, specifically to see what those two leatherbound books on the nightstand were about, when he heard a noise from behind and down the near hall leading out of the ancient wreckage of the ballroom.

Riven paused, his blood running cold as he heard again what he thought to be metal-on-stone grinding along the floor...echoing distantly off the stone walls. He turned to the hallway he’d initially come from, staring down the dark corridor as the sound became progressively louder...and louder...and even louder. He didn’t know what would make that noise, but his mind went wild with possibilities... He glanced up at the corpse hanging overhead, remembered the skinned bodies strung up in the streets of the city below, and he immediately looked around for a place to hide and watch.