AA-88

  “This is awesome,” Mia said in awe, waving around her two hands as a pair of arcane bucklers followed the movement and floated about above both of her palms. “How did you know?”

  “You have all the runes for Arcane Shield twice in your runic-model,” Carmilla said. “And I guessed your Control and other stats should be high enough to double cast a spell as simple as that.”

  Mia was beating herself over never figuring the trick out before by herself. Sure, the willpower needed to cast the same spell twice was a fair bit more than twice the initial amount, but the trick itself was to merely assemble the same spell circle twice in her runic-model. With her having two of each rune needed and her model generating new shapes as needed for the spell boundaries, it was almost trivial with a spell she was familiar with.

  I could have a Shield in one hand to protect me and a Bolt ready to cast in the other … but that’s for the next test for when I’m not in a pretty little cafe. I don’t want to blow the decor apart. Still, this is awesome!

  Before Mia could launch into a cheer again, a chilly breeze blew right into her face, making her shiver. Glaring over the table at the lounging blonde, Mia grumbled at her. “That was rude.”

  “Blondie’s just jealous about your fancy magic,” Mark said from the next booth over, earning a glare from Lina. “And so am I! Here we are, throwing around pebbles and blowing hot air while you two are doing real fantasy bullshit magic.”

  “Oh, stop whining.” Mia rolled her eyes with a huff. “Do you know how hard that little twister you’re spinning in your palm without a thought would be to replicate for me? If we’re talking jealous, I’m at least twice as jealous as you are!”

  “Booooo!” Mark called out, ignoring Mia’s retort in its entirety, and the pink-haired girl just slouched back with her arms crossed.

  “So anyways!” Mia said, turning as to put the grouchy Elementalists out of her line of sight. “Any other neat tricks like that I should know of?”

  “I don’t think there are any,” Carmilla said with a barely veiled smirk at the group’s antics. “Not at Rank 0 at least. But what I know is heavily limited to stuff that’d be useful for baby vampires of my bloodline … so I wouldn’t stop trying to experiment if I were you.”

  Could do a Spectral Blade in one hand and a Shield in the other … the only problem would be my non-existent strength at that point.

  Was there a way to if not fix, then sidestep that problem? Maybe some super Natural Treasure that increased Base Attributes … No, that was impossible. Maybe an armour like Brent’s that stored kinetic energy and then released it by empowering sword swings?

  At that point, why go with the crutch at all, why rely on an item that could be stolen or broken? Mia was an arcane mage after all, controlling kinetic energy should be well within her capabilities if only she got the relevant runes and spell circles.

  Spell circles, that was where her plan came apart at the seams. Her Spell Tome was full, and she didn’t know whether she was getting any new empty pages even if she managed to Tier Up her Class.

  She probably would, but how many? Would they be enough for everything she wanted, plus curiosities like dabbling in newbie force magic.

  Sure, swinging a magical sword around would be immeasurably cool, but would it be worth not getting another spell that might be even more useful in actual combat? Or, for that matter, a spell that would ensure she stayed alive like the outwardly boring Alert Ward she was currently working on.

  It might not be the flashiest, but it would put up another layer of protection for when she went to sleep just beyond trusting a Familiar to watch over her.

  Speaking of, she had made an effort to keep the same Familiar going since the last delve since it seemed to have a knack for understanding more complex orders, even if it lacked much in terms of a speciality.

  “I’m still struggling with that exercise you’ve told me about, though,” Lina said, sounding like she was chewing through an especially sour lemon as she did so.

  Mia looked over at her with a raised eyebrow, blinking in incomprehension. “Which one?”

  “The one with trying to copy a rune,” Lina said, twirling her fingers as she drew out a basketball sized rune mid-air. “I can’t make it any smaller without messing up the mana flow.”

  Of course, Lina was using her Air Manipulation Skill to draw out the rune in mid-air and not Air Mana Manipulation. If she could draw the rune outside her body, she’d be having no problems doing so inside her mana pool.

  That also showed how much easier direct elemental manipulation skills were to control. Though, Lina doubtlessly also had her Bloodline to lend a hand when it came to shaping Air as she wished so maybe she wasn’t the best metric for how challenging each was.

  “That thing fits inside you?” Mark asked in a scandalised tone, which earned him a blast of air to the face. “Damn you! Do you know how long it will take to groom my beard to be as sleek as it was before you messed it up?”

  Lina just rolled her eyes in an exaggerated manner, not bothering to reward Mark with another word as she looked at Mia expectantly.

  “I haven’t managed it yet either,” Mia said, letting a little sparkly mana drizzle out of her fingertips as she waved her hand. “I think we’ll need to wait till Rank 1 for that too. I feel like I’m getting close to replicating a rune in my runic-model, but it’s much easier with a reference so I wouldn’t beat myself over it if I were you.”

  “I see,” Lina said with a sigh. “But I should be able to cast real spells if I get this down, right? Like, if I can replicate an Air spell circle with runes and all, the spell will work, right?”

  “Everything points to that, yeah.” Mia nodded, then glanced at Carmilla for clarification who gave a shallow nod. “But I don’t think we could cast even the most rudimentary Novice spell before peak Rank 1 or early Rank 2. Our Control is just too flimsy for it … or maybe it’d just take years of practice, which we don’t really have.”

  “Well, that’s another reason to beat some sense into those idiots grandstanding over there,” Lina said, motioning vaguely towards the window, through which the square and the mass of beastkin could be seen. “I don’t know about you, but I’m just about done with being stuck at level 10. If this rift situation isn’t getting fixed in the near future, I say we set off to Vienna.”

  “We talked about this like … half a dozen times.” Mia massaged her temples, sending a weak glare Lina’s way who crossed her arms unrepentantly. “No need to do anything rash, I’m sure it’ll get sorted out once someone beats it into that big bad werewolf’s head that we need to destroy the rifts to get an obelisk.”

  “I’m just saying,” Lina said, pulling her lips into a thin line. “I am not willing to wait around for more than a week here. I almost died in the goblin rift because I was too weak. Waiting around and hoping for the best is asking for getting gutted or walked over. You might be fine with that, but I am not!”

  Mia grimaced, while Carmilla just tensed up, but it was Mark who reacted most explosively.

  “Will you calm your tits for a single damned moment?” The dwarf asked, hopping off his seat and stomping over. “You think you’re the only one fucking worrying? Well, tell you what, we all are and I’m damned sure the lot of us are trying really damned hard to act normal and just keep ourselves sane by pretending everything’s fine. Yeah? So for a change let us all pretend without bitching. Shit’ll get sorted, or it won’t but it doesn’t help any to keep kicking the mood when it's already down in the gutters.”

  Lina just leaned back, her face a picture of outrage warring with shock. Her mouth opened for a scathing retort, but she snapped it shut before it came out and glared instead. Those grey cloudy eyes narrowed to slits, transforming to blades that could have cut the air itself but Mark was nothing if not stubborn and sent back a glare of his own.

  Neither budged for a moment, and Mia wondered how to better become a part of the background. She didn’t breathe, didn’t move and just watched as two of her friends butted heads.

  She should have spoken up, she felt. This could get ugly in a hundred different ways and Mia really didn’t want the two of them to form a grudge over thi-

  “Finneeeeee,” Lina said with a defeated sigh, running her fingers over her face. “I’m sorry. You’re … sort of right, but fuck you Mark. You’re an asshole.”

  “Never said I wasn’t.” Mark shrugged, but Mia saw relief in her oldest friend as tension drained out of him.

  “I need a moment,” Lina said, then stood up with a huff and strode right out the door, leaving it slamming shut behind her.

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  “I don’t think she meant that ‘fine’,” Mark said after a moment of silence. “Think we’ll see her again?”

  Mia glared over at him. She stood up and hurriedly jogged to the door too as she turned to speak over her shoulder. “I’ll talk to her.”

  She couldn’t stop the fight itself, but Mia was determined to at least dampen the blowback now that it was over.

  Mark might have had a point, but so did Lina and Mia didn’t want the girl to do something rash and dangerous just because Mark made her feel unwanted in their group.

  Mia barely heard Carmilla rising to her feet to follow by the time she was through the door and jogging after the sound of Lina's footsteps.

  With a mental nudge, her Familiar shot off and disappeared over the rooftop to scout for any danger while Mia finally caught sight of Lina after rounding the corner.

  The blonde elementalist was pacing, walking up and down the length of a parking lot with a faraway look in her eyes. So lost in her mind she was, that only Mia slowing to a walk and starting to walk by her side snapped her out of it.

  “What?” Lina snapped, a bit of a bite in her voice. Her face practically screaming she was not in the mood for a conversation.

  That made Mia quickly change her angle on the fly and say, “I just came out to keep you company, feel free to ignore me. Plus who knows what’s lurking around here. I don't want to leave you alone if I don’t have to.”

  Lina just gave a halfhearted shrug and continued pacing, and Mia was happy to leave her to it. She was there, if her friend wanted to talk and if not, then hopefully her presence would at least show something positive.

  Mia knew just how easy it could be to get lost in a spiral of negativity, and unlike her, Lina didn’t have a childhood friend, her mother or even her new girlfriend to lean on emotionally like Mia did. It was the least she could do to be there for the blonde.

  With the silence starting to stretch, Mia took the opportunity to just take in the world around her while trying to clear her mind of bothersome stuff like thoughts.

  The sky was a pretty soft blue, vibrant and clean with only a handful of small clouds. The sun shone bright, still on its way towards its apex this early in the day and the weather was just on the border of being uncomfortably hot even with her heat-absorbing skill going on in the background.

  With a thought, Mia turned the thing up to full throttle and smiled as the warm breeze suddenly felt like it came right from the nearest glacier. That skill could eat enough heat that she could sit in an oven and remain unbothered, a bit of sunlight was nothing.

  Now, if only it saved her from getting freckles too. She usually found them pretty on other girls, but she never quite liked how they looked in the mirror and the Awakening had banished what few she had. She wanted to keep it that way, but she’d probably need some sort of Light Absorption skill for that and selectively absorb UV lights. Maybe sometime well into the future. There had to be a skill for that, no doubt about it.

  As her gaze slowly sunk downwards from the sky, landing on the buildings, houses and the abandoned parking lot around her, Mia felt a sudden sense of vertigo. She knew this parking lot, of course she did, one of her favourite restaurants was just down the street and they had come here once a month while she was a teenager.

  Instead of cars rolling down the street, honking and roaring as they went, the street was empty, as were the sidewalks. Doors hung ajar, hinges barely keeping them attached and more windows were busted in than intact which she took as a sign of some monster barreling through to have a go at the people hiding inside.

  She strained her ears in a faint hope that she’d find a heartbeat or shallow breathing anywhere, but all she heard was the distant murmur of the argument back on the square and the huddling monsters further away.

  The two images overlapped for a moment, what she had known this place to look like and what it did look like at the moment and the dissonance of the two scenes made her grimace. The world might not have quite come to an end, but calling the awakening and the advent of the System an apocalypse was apt if nothing else.

  Throwing that depressing line of thought into the garbage bin, Mia looked down at herself instead and barely held back a grimace. Even with her sneakers being black, she could clearly see spots of dried blood on them. Sadly, taking more than one pair of shoes was out of the question when she was chased out of her home by that cunt Jeff, so she only had the ones on her feet.

  Clothes were better, the black pair of jeans she’d swapped her white one out for looking just as great on her while the jacket and crop-top combo could never go wrong.

  It wasn’t exactly the best getup for a fight, but she didn’t expect to get into one when she got dressed today.

  How weird could life get?

  Here she was, worrying about how her clothes looked while a mob of angry beastkin just a few hundred metres away were maybe getting ready to murder her and everyone she cared about — emphasis on the maybe.

  Still. Who did that?

  Someone not quite sane. I’m just losing my mind, that’s all this is.

  Too much thinking again, Mia chastised herself and instead launched into a light meditative mana exercise. Her mana twirled and churned, flowing into her channels and vitalising them in a way that left her refreshed.

  It wasn’t quite a coffee, but it helped and it put a slight smile on her face.

  A few minutes later, despite her earlier resolve to just let thoughts fly right out her ears, her mind circled back around to her earlier worry: spells.

  Specifically, whether she had been an idiot by not having a specific specialisation in mind before she started just picking out whichever Runic Lexicon caught her fancy.

  Arcane was a damned versatile element with more schools of it that Mia had fingers to count them with. Conjuration, Abjuration, Illusion, Warding, Transformation, Alteration, Dispelling, Scrying, Divination and a whole lot more, especially if you counted the disciplines like kinetomancy that focused on playing with a specific non-magical energy,

  The options were endless, but the choices she had were fewer. She couldn’t pick all of them, and even if she could, she’d just become a jack of all trades, master of none.

  Should she just go all in on what she already had? Conjuration and Abjuration were the most cookie-cutter attack and defence schools and if she added in some Summoning and Warding, she had the beginnings of something great.

  Did that mix need some force magic? Did it benefit from her having some direct melee capabilities?

  Wrong question. Mia thought with a mental shake of her head. What does that kit need to be more well-rounded? What am I missing?

  Sure, she’d have problems if someone came up into her face with something pointy, but that’s why she had her Familiar and why she was really looking forward to getting Wisp Form. Hell, even her other summons would help out there once she finally got to do the damned ritual for getting them.

  Painful as it was to admit it, she didn’t need to be able to swing a sword around. But she could hope, and she decided to go through her training manual and her book on Arcanism with a fine comb before she decided on getting into anything new.

  She wasn’t desperate for a new tool anymore, especially with a few new spells she hadn’t even been able to add to her Spell Tome. She had options already, and even Mage Armour could solve her melee issue in a way.

  When Lina stopped, Mia was so deep in her thoughts she went on for a few more steps before she snapped back to reality and spun around to face her friend with a sheepish look.

  Lina had an eyebrow raised in apparent amusement as she asked. “I thought I was the one brooding out here.”

  “I was just lost in my thoughts.” Mia shrugged, waving it off. “You feel better? I wanted to say I’m sorry about Mark, he gets … abrasive when he’s nervous.”

  “You don’t have to apologise on his behalf,” Lina said. “I know he is sort of right … not everyone is aching to advance like I am and that’s fine. I know it is, but I really think it’d be for the best if we all kept ahead of the curve- “

  “Lina,” Mia said, holding up a hand with a frown on her face. “I know. We all know, and I’m sure most of us want to get stronger- I want to get stronger, but I don’t want to only ever worry about that. We’ll either get the Obelisk here in Graz in the next week or two, or we leave. Brent might resist, hell, he might want to stay, but I’m not willing to cripple myself for the good of the people here.”

  “I know all that!” Lina said, then winced as she noticed how she had raised her voice and added a quick, “Sorry.”

  “I know,” Mia said, patting blonde on the arm with what she hoped was a gentle smile on her face. “What I was trying to say is that you’re not alone … we might have only known each other for a month, but we are sort of friends, right? Just keep that in mind.”

  Mia finished awkwardly, scratching her cheek as Lina sent an amused look her way.

  “‘Sort of friends’,” Lina repeated with a chuckle. “Alright … what does ‘sort of friends’ mean anyway?”

  The question was thrown out there with a smile on Lina’s face, so Mia let some of the tension drain out of her shoulders as she thought of an answer.

  In the end, she just shrugged and said, “I suppose it means we try to accommodate each other, on some level? Like, I want to at least try our best here to get the Obelisk before we even consider ditching the city and leaving it to its fate. But with you wanting to leave already, I guess we can set a deadline. Ugh, that’s far too transactional. It means we care about what the other wants and try to help … I guess?”

  “Mhmm.” Lina nodded, then raised an eyebrow. “How’s that different from just being friends?”

  “It’s-“ Mia started, then huffed and threw up her hands as the awkwardness of the conversation became too much for her to bear. “I don’t know. You figure that out! I’m not some wiki-“

  Her head snapped to the side as her ears twitched.

  “What do your elven ears hear?” Lina asked.

  “A rat farting in that garbage bin,” Mia said, pointing off to the side. “And Mom calling out to us to get back … and they are still not elven ears.”

  “They look elven enough for me.” Lina shrugged, then set off back towards the square. “Come on, sorta friend, we have people to beat up!”

  “I swear you sound like a brute sometimes,” Mia grumbled as she jogged to catch up with the blonde, recalling her patrolling Familiar with a thought. “And I’m sure we’ll just have to stand there menacingly or something.”

  “I hope not!” Lina said, cracking her knuckles. “We’ve never fought anyone who wasn’t a monster before! This could be good practice.”

  “I don’t want to fight people,” Mia grumbled, a picture of a pile of corpses dotted across the square already playing out before her mind’s eye. “And I really don’t want to be forced to kill someone.”

  “Who said anything about killing anyone?” Lina said, looking over her shoulder. “We just have to break some bones and make sure they don’t get up again … but if they go for the kill, I’m not willing to hold back either. Sort-of-friends staying alive is more important than not killing dumbass beastkin thinking they are hot shit.”

  That thought resonated with Mia, even if she wasn’t willing to say it aloud. Doing so would make it feel far too close to a promise for her liking. Instead, she just gave a severe nod. Keeping her friends alive was more important than keeping her hands clean of blood.

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