Ends of Magic

Instead of charging off into the distance, the first thing Nathan did was take an inventory. The Heir's bedrolls and almost all of the gear had been levitated and teleported wholesale by Badud’s spells - including every single dimensional bag. However, they'd finished setting up camp before collapsing for the night.

That meant various gear and items were scattered around the area, including makings for breakfast tomorrow morning and the magical cooking equipment to prepare it. There were a few other magical odds and ends that Nathan quickly tallied up - Stella had an enchanted tarp that could be erected in case of rain, and Aarl had left out a lightstone that mimicked a flashlight in function.

Regardless of what other value those items have, right now they’re worth Stamina, which is speed, and thus time. The resource I most want to deny my enemies. The less time I give Taeol, the less bad things happen to the Heirs. I hope.

Nathan surveyed it all, building a mental list of how much magic each item carried with respect to its weight. He’d need to bring most of the food to stay fed, but he wanted to bring only items which were enchanted enough to be worth the load.

After all, once I hit my Stamina cap, both absorption and Stamina usage are less efficient until I drop past my cap again.

Nathan absently stuck a bare foot into the fire, absorbing the long-lasting spell that Stella had left there to provide them with heat. Then he went through the kitchenware, absorbing the mana from the cooking pot - heating and cleaning enchantments. He likewise broke down the enchantments in the plates and the canvas shelter and checked his Stamina.

Deepened Stamina: 3787/3810

He snapped the serving spoon in half, which ticked his Stamina up to max. Then Nathan nodded and surveyed the stuff he was planning to carry. He dumped all of the usual odds and ends out of his knapsack, rescued the jerky and packed in all of the remaining food. The lightweight enchanted items went on the outside layer so they’d be as far from his skin as possible.

Then with one last glance around camp, Nathan stopped suppressing the urge to go. He sprinted out of the rock formation, heading north through the darkness. The lack of clouds meant that the blue and white glow of the world above illuminated the landscape well enough for him to see, and [Notice] took care of any ambiguity in footing.

Nathan ran for hours across the barren landscape, the scenery blurring together as he just kept going. He tried to focus on the run, on his plans and intentions. He didn’t want to start imagining what might be happening out in Halsmet.

I hope Taeol likes his beauty sleep. He was up kind of late last night, after all.

Night turned to day with the suddenness of a cosmic lightswitch, and Nathan sped up slightly. He had done some running back on Earth, but never long-distance or cross-country. With the Heirs he’d run a few miles at a time, but now he was looking to run over a hundred miles in a day. Through mountains full of dangerous ruins. But Nathan wasn't worried about motivation. The knot of hatred and worry in his gut pushed him onwards even as it made it hard to breathe.

I’m not sure of the exact distance but not because I can't remember the map, it’s because the map isn’t really to scale. But I know the direction to Halsmet.

Luckily, there were some big landmarks to guide him - the mountains, and a few peaks in particular. Halsmet was due north of a giant half-crater that had been left when a dungeon exploded fifty years ago with enough force to spray half of a peak over the rest of the range.

Halsmet was a militarized city, residing as it did in a large valley on the direct line between Gemore and Giantsrest. It had been the launching point for every Giantsrest attack on Gemore, and was the focal point of patrols in these mountains from both sides.

I’m not going to worry about that yet. I’ll figure out a way to sneak in. My worry now is getting there before they're expecting me.

So far the running hadn’t been too bad - Nathan was spending Stamina at a steady clip to keep himself sprinting along over the rugged terrain. He was sticking to valleys and trying to avoid the dungeons that dotted the landscape. Most of them let him pass peacefully, but a grove of trees had launched barbed thorns as he passed by, each of them coated in a paralytic poison.

Dungeons don’t always look like dungeons. Sometimes they look like spooky forests. Where’s the dungeon that’s a spring filled with hot people? I wouldn’t stop now, but I’d mark it down as a place to come back to later.

The run was going well - but Nathan was well aware that his Stamina was dropping rapidly. His Rage kept trying to activate, and it took constant attention to keep the furious blaze of anger under control. He needed to pace himself, keep his Rage suppressed, and figure out better paths around the dungeons. He couldn’t skirt miles out of his way to avoid every fortress or spooky tower. But he also didn’t want to die because he walked too close to the wrong ancient ruin and it dropped a giant rock on his head.

One problem at a time. Running first. Stop thinking about other things, and focus on running.

Nathan varied his pace, feeling his Stamina tick down while he tried out different breathing methods and running patterns. It was hard - he found himself naturally settling into a meditative trance as he ran, relaxing his attention as his legs carried him forward. The relaxation lasted until Nathan saw a giant face carved into a cliff, with giant green flames burning in its eyes. Winged figures launched themselves from the eyes now and then, and he could swear that a few of them were watching him.

He diverted himself from the valley, spending Stamina to climb the slope across from the Fortress of the Face. The steep slope jolted Nathan out of the rhythm, and he spent nearly a hundred Stamina on the rapid ascent.

That’s not sustainable.

Then he was going down the far side, and the variable slope once more confounded his attempts to find an efficient rhythm. It was maddening. Nathan’s anxiety had been building, and this minor frustration saw it spike.

At this rate I’m going to run out of Stamina and be dead on my feet by the time I arrive. If I arrive. Likely enough I’ll just get eaten by a dungeon. Wouldn’t that be a thing. At least it would really confuse Taeol and Badud if I vanished from Davrar.

Nathan slowed down. He closed his eyes for a moment, relaxing his shoulders and settling back into rhythmic breathing. Stress and tension weren't going to help him here. He needed to be loose and relaxed as he ran.

Don’t force it. Just settle into a rhythm and let it adjust to the terrain.

Nathan ran another hour like that, learning the rhythm. He ran over fields of broken stone and across sandy slopes, allowing his subconscious to pick out the obstacles in front of him and only keeping a conscious eye out for any Dungeons revealed by each new valley.

He almost missed the next dungeon - which was camouflaged into a low hill. Without antimagic letting him see through the illusions, Nathan would have run right into the hidden pits and fallen prey to the dog-sized insects lurking within. As it was, he ran at an angle, outpacing the springing leaps of the hunters that chased him.

I don’t even have to change my pace to leave them behind.

Congratulations, you have developed the [Mid-tier Sprinting] utility skill into [High-tier Sprinting].

Utility skill: [High-tier Sprinting]

This skill will help you run very quickly in the future and increase the Stamina efficiency for running. Will not allow you to run in circumstances where you couldn’t otherwise.

Excellent. Now I can just keep going.

Nathan kept his pace up through the difficult terrain, keeping a tight leash on his Rage. His Stamina was ticking down - but more slowly than before. He took a few short breathers throughout the morning to munch on food, not eating too much at once.

The scenery around him was unique - this wasn’t just a gorgeous range of mountains, it had also been carved into dungeons by multiple different civilizations. Each dungeon was unique and interesting, but Nathan struggled to appreciate it - to pull himself back from the worry and fear gnawing at his gut. The fear of what might be happening to his friends at that very moment.

The day marched on, and the terrain got rougher. Several times Nathan was forced to detour past mountains to find a pass that wasn’t just a sheer cliff face. As he moved north some of the taller peaks became capped with snow, but none of it extended down into the valleys.

A few times he descended steep slopes with the use of [Slow Fall], leaping off cliffs and down slopes that would have been bone-breaking to descend any other way. He was hoping for Talent ranks, but was not rewarded.

Sometime later, Nathan exhausted his food. He took a long look at the bag before draining all of the magic from the odds and ends he’d been carrying. Then he discarded it on a rocky hillside, lightening his load and increasing the pace.

Nathan kept running. It wasn’t even halfway through the day, and Nathan must have been running for nearly nine hours.

High-tier Sprinting 2 achieved!

He eyed his Stamina total and winced.

Deepened Stamina: 653/3810

I can’t be too far away - I just passed the crater-mountain landmark. Halsmet’s almost due north of me, and can’t be more than fifteen or twenty miles. If I’m going to fight a battle at the end of this I’d like to be a bit higher on Stamina.

Unfortunately, Nathan’s standard methods of attaining Stamina weren’t really on the table right now. He couldn’t ask Stella for a zap, he’d eaten the last of the food and absorbed the magic from all of the items. Settling in for a nap was the last thing he was about to do.

Then his eyes found a tower atop the mountain in his path. He had been plotting ways around the peak, but all of the slopes were rugged cliffs. There was a path up the slope in front of him, leading directly to the structure at the peak.

It was a harsh spike of metal, standing straight up from the jagged peak like a dagger piercing the sky. The top of the tower was surrounded by a permanent stormcloud which didn’t seem to care that it was one of the only clouds in the sky. Arcs of multicolored lightning jumped from the angry cloud to the tower, playing over windows filled with stained glass.

Kalis conclave outpost? Not sure. Regardless, magical as hell. It’s a shortcut and it’ll have magical defenses I can siphon a bit of juice from.

Nathan shrugged and started up the path, headed towards the foreboding tower.

The Adventurer’s guild teaches that it’s a terrible idea to interact with Dungeons unless you know a lot about them - it’s not a Delve day, and if I wake this dungeon up in a bad way it could be a disaster. But I’m closer to Giantsrest than I am to Gemore, and I also don’t care. I need this Stamina, and going around will take too long.

Decision made, Nathan flew up the steep ascent, grinding through Stamina as he climbed up thousands of feet at a loping jog. The wind grew strong and cold as he climbed. Half a mile from the peak the bare path transitioned to a worked stone staircase.

When Nathan was hundred feet from the base of the tower, words formed in the air before him. He stopped, reading them aloud. “Depart or die.” Then he looked up at the tower. “Can I take a third option? I’m in a hurry, and need to go that way.” He pointed past the tower, in the direction of Halsmet.

The words remained floating in the air, and Nathan went to push past them. The words pulsed threateningly, and he snorted.

This thing’s in my way. If it wants to zap me as a toll for passing, it’s more than welcome.

Nathan stepped through the words and they were revealed to be more than just decoration - there was a magical effect woven into the display. The pattern of mana clung to Nathan, attempting to burrow into his skin and change him. The spell was significantly more complex than anything he had felt before - like a combination of a [Dominate] and a [Paralysis], but also containing a dozen other layers.

He didn’t understand what it was doing - the mana was slipping into his mind and body. As it progressed, Nathan figured it out. It was trying to transmute his flesh and consciousness. He felt overcome, bowing his head and letting loose a soft “baaah.” With his consciousness disrupted the ever-present Rage slipped free of its noose, and the strength flowing through him banished the spell.

Did that spell just try to turn me into a goat? Holy shit that magic was intense - about five hundred Stamina worth of half a dozen different kinds of mana intertwined in the most complex spell I’ve ever encountered.

High-tier Spellsense 10 achieved! Congratulations, you have maxed out this utility skill! It cannot be improved any further. You must achieve Insight into this talent to develop it further. As it is high-tier, the kind of Insight will affect how it develops.

It was a mistake not to activate my Rage - I got so focused on holding my anger back to conserve Stamina that I didn’t even think to use it. I didn’t sleep last night, and I need to realize that’s a problem. I can’t make that kind of mistake in Halsmet.

Unchanged, Nathan glared up at the tower. “You think that was funny? Screw you.”

He stalked forward, climbing the steps and coming to the flat top of the mountain. A huge disk of dark stone served as the foundation of the tower. To Nathan’s magical senses it felt… solid. Magically enhanced for durability in so many ways that it felt like the mountain would break before it did.

Once Nathan stepped onto that disk, the tower apparently decided to stop playing games. A bolt of multicolored lightning struck from the cloud above, as thick as a tree.

If the previous spell had been a masterpiece of complex magic, this was a carefully guided torrent of unadulterated destruction. It was like a disintegration spell in the same way a furnace was like a candle.

The spell didn’t just seek to turn him to dust, it wanted that dust to explode, to be rendered down to component atoms scattered across Davrar. There were portions of the magic that were clearly dedicated to breaking magical shields, shattering armor and cutting through innate magical defenses.

Against any other target, it would have caused instantaneous annihilation.

But Nathan absorbed it all, walking through the magical energy as if through a sudden downpour. The magic blinded him, but his Stamina shot upwards. He continued farther towards the tower and the spell intensified further, until Nathan's world was entirely replaced with a cascade of destructive mana.

He couldn’t see, could barely feel the Rage flowing through him and warding off the terrible spell that assaulted him. The magic was so intense it wiped out every other sense, but Nathan kept putting one foot in front of another even as the feeling of Stamina overload made him want to sprint.

Devoid of landmarks, Nathan reached out with his antimagic, trying to get a sense for if he was about to run into any obstacles. He hadn’t seen anything that would block his path, but who knew what was happening outside of this personal cataclysm? Nathan paused when he felt his bubble of perception expand for a moment. He closed his eyes against the visual noise of the spell, concentrating wholly on the magical senses provided by his [Magic Absorption].

He wasn’t extending the antimagic out of his skin - just his ability to sense magic. The torrents of energy beat against him in waves, and Nathan felt those waves rebounding off the surfaces around him like sonar. He built a mental map of the top of the mountain as he remembered it, with the obdurate stone beneath his feet and the tower a dozen paces to his left.

Then he compared his magical senses to that model - and found he could feel the bulk of the tower to the side, a blazing pillar of spellwork that rebuffed the fringes of the spell assaulting him. No waves of magic rebounded from in front of him, and Nathan was confident there were no obstacles in that direction.

Congratulations, you have developed the [High-tier Spellsense] utility skill into [Magical Perception].

Utility skill: [Magical Perception]

This skill lets you sense the mana around you and understand its purpose.

All of a sudden Nathan’s world expanded. He could feel the vortices of the magic buffeting him, the dozen spells that watched and analyzed and guided the annihilation spell. Nathan shrugged and jumped up to grab one of the relatively tiny tendrils of mana guiding the destructive working.

The guidance construct vanished in Nathan's hand, and the pillar of mana veered off course, heading for the tower. It cut out before it could get there, and Nathan took the opportunity to lurch forward into a sprint.

I filled up my Stamina and even got a unique skill Development. Let’s not overstay my welcome before it decides to bury me in the mountain.

Nathan sprinted across the rest of the flat space before the tower decided to up its game. He reached the far side and almost tripped over his own feet at the view that greeted him.

The back of the mountain was a sheer cliff stretching thousands of feet straight down - into a chasm which extended deep into the ground. Beyond the crevasse was a green valley marked with a patchwork of farms.

And just visible beyond the next mountain was a city.

Halsmet.

Skill comparison:

[Mid-tier Sprinting]:

This skill will help you run very quickly in the future. Will not allow you to run in circumstances where you couldn’t otherwise

This skill will help you run very quickly in the future and increase the stamina efficiency for running. Will not allow you to run in circumstances where you couldn’t otherwise.

[High-Tier Spellsense]

This skill will help you identify mana types and the detailed construction of spells more easily. Helps you understand the overall purpose of spells and how individual elements contribute to that purpose. Does not grant understanding of how to weave mana together for specific spells.

[Magical Perception]

This skill lets you sense the mana around you and understand its purpose.

Status of Nathan Lark:

Permanent Talent 1: Magic Absorption 10

Permanent Talent 2: Perfected Body 4

Talent 3: High-tier Slow Fall 8

Class: Implacable Antimage level 117

Stamina: 3810/3810

Antimage’s Impassivity

Antimagic Momentum

Raging Thrill

Implacable Inertia

Unarmored Resilience

Improved Antimagic

Strenuous Agility

Hand-to-hand Expertise

Utility skills:

Battle Meditation 5

High-tier Earnestness 9

High-tier Sprinting 2

Magical Perception 1

High-tier Notice 4

High-tier Identify 5

High-tier Dodging Footwork 5

High-tier Enhanced Memory 7

Mid-tier Lecturing 8

High-tier Tumbling 2