Elysium's Multiverse

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.

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

The information was burned into his brain now, and he could summon the new spell at will. He knew what they could do, how he could do it, and he was just dying to try it out. Thus he waited another five minutes for the headache to clear, pushed off the wall with a grunt, and walked out into the ancient ballroom again after flinging the old door to the side.

He looked around the dimly lit room for a clear space, but there wasn’t much to be had. So instead, he got up on one of the rickety tables—making sure it could bear his weight—and stood up straight. He concentrated and began twisting his fingers with an inward clawing motion using his conjuring hand. This clawing motion, via body parts or instruments, was the specific motion required of this particular Tier 2 spell.

The spell scroll hadn’t lied—this ability did indeed have a medium time to cast. Unlike his other spells, where he could cast instantly, this one took a few seconds to charge up after the initial hand motion. As he channeled the magic into his arm, red wisps of liquid magic rose off his skin like soft, slow-moving ribbons, all the way from his fingertips to halfway down his bicep. When those wisps of energized blood reached his bicep six seconds later, the spell discharged—ripping through the targeted table like it was wet paper and impaling the stone floor behind it in a flash of red energy.

The attack itself was shaped like an elongated, spiked lance, hence the name, and the shaft of magic was probably five feet in length, with the width being slightly smaller than Riven’s forearm. The end of the glistening red spike sticking out of the floor that wasn’t halfway embedded into the stone was also incredibly sharp. The projectile had pierced a couple feet into the stone structure underneath him but hadn’t entirely gone through… Even so, it was significantly more powerful and faster than his spinning blades of blood.

Trying to cast it again with a bit of excitement bearing down on him, he unexpectedly felt the magic resist, and a cooldown sigil indicating Blood Lance appeared in the top right-hand corner of his vision.

Raising an eyebrow, he felt something inside him click into place a solid nine to ten seconds later and was once again able to cast the spell.

Meanwhile, he was able to repeatedly fire off discs of Bloody Razors almost one cast after the other with a very short cooldown, if it even activated a cooldown at all—each not having any casting time at all. The discs of serrated blades formed by blood were created immediately instead of having to charge up. When compared to the power of the Blood Lance, though, the serrated blades only scratched the surface of the stone or shattered on impact without penetrating.

Interesting. He’d experienced cooldowns only a few times since acquiring spells, but he knew it when he saw it. Still he repeated his experimentations with this new spell, continuing to charge and fire them off intermittently between his other two offensive spells—the snare and razors. He spent quite a while doing this, figuring out that although cooldowns didn’t always kick in with his Blood Lance, they occurred far more often when compared to his Tier 1 spells. From what he remembered, cooldowns basically occurred because his channeling pillar became rigid after pushing an influx of mana into a particular part of it. He also knew that the power of the spells would increase and the cooldowns of those same spells would decrease as his Intelligence got higher, so perhaps one day in the future he’d be able to fire off numerous Blood Lances simultaneously without any cooldown kicking in at all.

He read the spell description again and nodded while slowly rubbing his chin. He walked over and inspected the hole his last lance had left in the stone floor after the magic vaporized into thin air and then looked about at the other holes decorating the ruin floor. Damn right, his spell could pierce through things! This attack was incredible! Faster, stronger, and more lethal…with the downsides of having a charge-to-cast time and a cooldown time after that. Between the two, he’d have to charge up the Blood Lance, fire it, wait for the cooldown, if he got one, and begin to charge again before a second one could be fired. That was currently somewhere in the realm of fifteen or sixteen seconds between shots, and he could fire off eight rounds of two Bloody Razors apiece for sixteen razor attacks in those sixteen seconds. That fire rate for the Blood Lance was doubled when he charged both arms, each hand creating a clawing motion to initiate the spell as red wisps traveled across his biceps, forearms, and hands when the power built.

He’d also have to use this spell sparingly, at least for now. Not only would it take time to cast—and it felt like it cost more mana, too—but he would also be broadcasting his upcoming attack immediately after the enemy knew what those red wisps crawling up his arm represented. They’d be able to anticipate the move. However, with some further experimentation beyond the normal basic information that’d flooded his mind, he found out some pretty unique things concerning the spell. Through trial and error, he was thankfully able to stop the immediate discharge and hold the spell there within his arm for minutes at a time once it charged. This meant that although they’d know he had it at the ready, he’d not have to immediately fire it off and could wait until the opportune moment to let the magic go. He was also able to discontinue the spell, and canceling it sent the mana flowing back into his body with only a very small amount of the mana actually being lost in the transition.

Getting another idea, he decided to try and channel the Blood Lance through his arm while using his staff-wielding hand to conjure Bloody Razors by creating a curling sweep in the air with his weapon. To his absolute delight, it worked—and the mana actually channeled through his fingers and into the staff before discharging the Blood Lance amid an onslaught of power across the room.

However, he was only able to keep this up for a short time before he’d run out of mana completely. He could tell in the three levels he’d grown that he could already cast more frequently than when he’d been level 1 in the duel versus the necromancer from Chalgathi’s quest line, but the change was minimal, and he definitely had limits. Still, if he’d progressed this much in just three levels in terms of how often he could cast spells, then by level 40 or 50, he would be able to cast consistently without having to fear running out of mana—unless he was in a prolonged battle.

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.