Phantasm

A little while after that, we had our first air raid. We were heading back to our camp when the sirens started.

“Everybody under cover! Now!” Sarge shouted, and we all ran, following the kobold into the nearest building.

“What’s going on?” Felicia asked.

“Just find a strong wall, and hunker down,” Sarge told her. He took his own advice, huddling in a corner.

“Is this our guys doing this?” I asked, curling up against a wall. I used [Phantasmal Object] to block off the door and windows. If the British kobold sergeant found my use of magic odd, he didn’t say anything about it.

“Probably. Not that it matters. Damn flyboys can’t see a thing at night, they’re just dropping bombs on a map reference.”

“What’s—” Felicia tried again but she was interrupted by the first bomb falling.

Just like in the movies, there was a high-pitched whistling sound, followed by a loud explosion. The ground trembled, just a bit.

“Oh,” Felicia said. “That. Big fireballs, you said? Will we be safe here?”

I looked over at Sarge, who shrugged. “Depends how close they hit,” he said. “You don’t want to be on the street though, flying debris goes a lot further out in the open.”

“But if one hits here…” I said, looking up at the ceiling.

“Then we’re dead, and the mission’s failed,” he said. “Not much point in thinking about it, though. We’re going to be stuck in here for a while, might as well get some shuteye.”

He and the other soldiers promptly curled up into little balls and dropped off to sleep.

“How?” Felicia asked incredulously, looking at the suddenly snoring kobolds.

“Soldiers learn to sleep wherever they need to,” Borys said. “It’s probably a good idea to join them.”

“Shouldn’t we keep watch?” Kyle asked.

“I’ll stay up for a bit,” I offered. “I want to try and reinforce this place. My [Earth Magic] skill could use some practice.”

[Earth Magic] Level 3 acquired through use

For gaining a skill level you have been awarded 1 XP

I really had needed to practice that skill. The problem was that I could never find a reason to use [Earth Magic] in combat, which was when you got the best experience. [Iron Dart] was a combat spell that I did have, but my spell total was so low that it wasn’t worth using in most cases. Even now, my spell total for that spell was just 108.

That was significantly worse than my sub-par dagger skill. More practice would help, of course, but I was never going to get the numbers for this skill because it was based on my [Intelligence], which was much lower than my [Charisma].

This was why, I was coming to understand, that most people didn’t spread their skills as widely as I had. The first few levels came quickly, but if you wanted to get a skill up to six or seven you needed to practice, practice, practice.

You could get away with less training if you did it in a dangerous environment. Floor seven of a dungeon while under bombardment seemed to count. I might get the skill to Level 4 by the time we were done here.

Of course, [Earth Magic] had uses beyond direct combat. To start with, I’d managed to mend the numerous cracks in the walls here, reinforcing the structure. Changing the flat ceiling into a dome should also increase the strength of the building.

Scooping some stone out from the centre of the room allowed me to make little alcoves to cover the sleeping kobolds. This house didn’t have a basement, and I suspected that none of them did, as I could only go two meters down before I ran into a rock that I couldn’t affect with my Skill.

It looked normal, but… oh, right.

[Identification]: - Impervium Stone - Quality: Perfect - Properties: Impervious, Scryproof.

Nice stuff. I was pretty sure Rhis couldn’t make this. If he could have, he would have built everything with this, mana cost be damned. I wondered if I could get a piece of the stuff for him to absorb. It seemed unlikely, but maybe an elf would carve off a piece if I asked nicely.

Finishing the shelters for the humans left me with a large hole in the middle of the floor, but we weren’t planning on staying long. There was just one thing left to do before I woke Cloridan to take his shift.

More spell levels mean more spell points, thanks to [Extra Spells]. I now had enough to buy the spells needed to take people with me into shadow.

[Shadow Magic] was a little weird in that respect. Instead of offering a higher-level spell to take more people, it had two spells that combined to let you add people in.

15 Cloak - Gather Shadows to cover a person. Light will dissipate shadows after duration. (15/-) (five minutes)

20 Enshroud - Allow a Cloaked object or person to be included with the caster for any Shadow Magic Spell (20/-)

I could have gotten [Cloak] already, but it was pretty useless without [Enshroud]. Better to save the points in case I needed them for something, or until I was ready to get [Enshroud].

Which was now. Right? I thought through my options. Up until now, I’d used [Shadow Walk] to stealthily infiltrate on my own. That had worked on Floor Four, and for the first part of this floor, when all I needed was information or to collect an item. But I expected that at least one of the next objectives would require us to do… military stuff. We had that squad for a reason, after all.

Getting one person past the defences was nice, but if we could get the entire unit through… that was something else again. It would be expensive, though. About eight hours of mana regeneration, which was an insane amount for me. Illusion spells were cheap. Despite throwing them out left and right, I still had 80 percent of my mana. Casting this on the group would cost me twelve percent.

Still worth it though. I bought the spells. I’d try them out in the morning.

I was woken up by a gunshot and a sudden brightness. When I poked my head out of the shelter, I saw light shining through the door and Sarge grinning at me.

“Wakey wakey, sah! This… thing was blocking the door. Seems to have sorted itself out though.”

I grimaced. “You couldn’t have woken me up—normally—to get rid of it?”

“This was quicker,” he said. “And you’re up, along with everyone else.”

“Right. What’s the agenda for today?”

“Back to the camp. If it’s still there, we’ll get some grub. Then, I reckon we can find this institute that they mention in the notes. Chances are there’ll be soldiers in the way, so we’ll be in for a fight.”

“We’ll see about that,” I said. “Let’s get some food and then I’ll tell you about how we’re going to get past the soldiers.”

With Cloridan scouting invisibly, and the Sarge’s… knowhow, we didn’t have too much trouble avoiding patrols as we made our way to the Institute. Once we got there, though, we found an obstacle we couldn’t sneak around.

“It’s like this on the other three intersections,” Cloridan explained.

“This” was a military camp. The roads had been choked off with six-foot-high walls of sandbags, arranged in a square with only a single-lane gate to allow any necessary traffic on each side.

“It’s ridiculous,” Borys said. “There’s not enough room for all the soldiers there.”

“What do you mean? It’s not like they’re spilling over the sides,” I said. The fortresses were pretty small, constrained by having to fit into an intersection.

“I mean, where do they sleep? It’s standing room only in there. Where do they eat?”

“Maybe they don’t eat, or sleep,” I said glumly. Sarge looked at me scornfully.

“Or,” he said, “They took over some of the buildings between the checkpoints.”

“Damn,” Cloridan said. “I was thinking we could sneak over or through some of those buildings, but that’d be pretty dangerous if there are off-duty soldiers in them.”

“Aye, it would be a dumb plan regardless,” Sarge said. “The lights would get you before you crossed the road.

“Huh?”

“Those small towers,” I explained. “They have powerful lights on them. At night, they’ll light up the whole street.”

“And they’ll light you up with tracer fire when you try and cross it,” Sarge said gleefully. “Nah, we’ll have to punch through the lines. Take ‘em off guard and go through one of the forts before they know what hit ‘em.”

“The military solution,” I said thoughtfully, staring at the institute itself. It was a big neoclassical pile of stone, with soaring columns and clean, undecorated walls. There were windows, but none of them were within twenty feet of the ground.

“Do we know what the other buildings on that block are?” I asked.

“Aye, that’s in the notes. It’s all one compound, but only the administration is fancy, like,” Sarge said.

“Let’s have a look at the other intersections then,” I said. To my shadow senses, the street was a blazing no-man’s land. I doubted that would change come nightfall. There were shadows beyond the street, but I couldn’t sense very far into the building. There might be something better from another angle.

“If you say so, sah,” Sarge said doubtfully.

“At least there’s no tanks,” Kyle said as we pulled back to approach from another direction.

“Tanks don’t mix too well with infantry,” Sarge said. “On account of how they don’t care too much who they kill.”

Borys snorted. “Germany invented combined arms doctrine. It’s a strange sort of war recreation that doesn’t include it.”

“He probably can’t make any changes right now,” I said. “But let’s not give Axel any ideas of how he can make this floor harder, hey?”

“Good point,” Borys allowed. “Sorry.”

We snuck around for a while, but the second approach hit pay dirt.

“Okay,” I said. “I can sense a way through. Some place nice and dark without any moving voids in it.”

Sarge stared at me without comprehension, the way he always did when I talked about magic.

“Brace yourself and get ready,” I said, and then I started casting spells.

I didn’t think that I needed to do this in shadow. [Cloak] suggested it would last for five minutes even in the light. But we were holed up in a deserted storefront near one of the intersections, so it was a moot point.

I needed to cast [Cloak] and [Enshroud] once for each kobold soldier and on each of my friends. Fortunately, they were both the set-and-forget kind of spell. As I covered everyone in shadow, the already gloomy room became wreathed in darkness. [Enshroud] didn’t have a visible effect, but it had an effect on me.

I became bigger. It felt really weird. Somehow, everyone I cast [Enshroud] on became a part of me. Not in the sense that I could control them, or sense anything from them. I wasn’t clear on why I thought they were a part of me. I just knew that they were.

It all became clear when I cast [Shadow Walk]. It wasn’t like I had expected, that they would all be able to walk through the shadows at the same time. Instead, I stepped through, and they all came with me. I could move them, just only through shadow.

I’d never noticed before, but there wasn’t any sound in the shadows. I noticed it now because I was fairly sure that my friends were trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear them. All I could do was move them to our destination and release the spell.

“Gah! That was really uncomfortable!” Felica was the first one to speak. The others made similar noises, complaining about the trip, and the dark. The last, I could do something about. I cast [Light].

“Quiet,” I said, looking about. “We’re here.”

A notification window popped up.

Palace of the Endless Dream, Floor Seven: Objective 2/5 completed!