Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sofia chose to train on the sprite skill first, because out of all the things she had to do, it was the most uncertain one. By the time she had to come out to teach again, her progress was not very good. Clearly trying to copy the entire thing at once was a fool’s errand, so she had to train to form the mana pattern bit by bit. It was easier said than done. Reproducing about a twentieth of the entire thing at once was the best she could do. She learned two such fragments, but trying to reproduce them at once only led to the collapse of both and her body suffering a minor backlash from the mana going astray.

Her scepter could absorb the backlash, which would make the process easier, but since the students had no access to such a tool, she had to find a better way to teach them. It would have probably been easier just to ask any other teacher what the usual method of learning to cast wild spells from the raw schematics was, but she wanted to find it by herself.

That day’s class came and went. The five students spent two hours in a five versus one battle they couldn’t hope to win, with Sofia using no skills and relentlessly slapping them with a napkin every time they failed to hit her. Despite their best efforts, they touched her zero times.

Sofia, hauled up in her room, spent more time trying to learn [Call Elemental sprite] until her last class of the week, which was spent on more theory. Then came the three days of the week she had no work on.

“Almost there…”

I can’t believe the system does so much of the work normally. Even with ungodly amounts of mana to waste on this it’s still taking forever.

Sofia had finally found a working way to reproduce the spell pattern with her mana : cheating.

If she couldn’t use the help of the system controlling the mana for her, what was to prevent her from using her bone sculpture as a guide? No need to precisely copy the pattern, just fill the bones. The backlash would also be absorbed by the bones instead of her body, which made this even better. The only issue was that she was learning to cast the spell outside of her body instead of inside, which failed to produce any kind of magic even when it looked like the spell was resolved correctly without any backlash.

It did nothing the last three times… I assume that means the position of the magic inside the body has its importance.

Does that mean a race with a different anatomy needs a different pattern for the same spell?

Exidians are pretty similar to Humans, from the outside at least. So it’s probably fine.

Sofia tried reproducing the spell inside of her body like the visualizer room had shown. She failed to construct it properly without the bone sculpture to guide her mana and the spell crumbled. The mana rampaging inside her body was more violent now that the spell looked more like it should. She coughed up some blood.

I need more training with the sculpture as a guide.

“But what if I just…”

Sofia used [Bone Dominus] to break one of her ribs, which took much longer than she thought it would, as she kept hesitating at the last second. Once it finally snapped at the base of her spine, she pushed it around inside her, making her skin bulge, which felt quite unpleasant, and waited until her passive healing rebuilt the missing rib. Just like this, she now had an extra piece of bone inside her torso. With [Bone Dominus], she pulled a fine bone thread from the loose rib, and started recreating the spell pattern from inside.

If the guide is inside me, it will definitely work, just like my veins being the guides for the Apostle form spells.

Still it was easier said than done, she could only very slowly spread the bone thread around, to leave her passive healing enough time to stop the internal bleeding she was causing. Pain was actually not too bad, now that she had gotten started. She soon realized that the slightest of her movements would cause the bone threads to snap, leaving small bone shards everywhere in her thorax, this happened a few times until she locked her movements by encasing her torso in a rigid shirt of bone. Last but not least, some parts of the mana pattern she simply couldn’t recreate because pesky human organs such as the stomach or the heart were in the way. However, all non-essential parts like her lungs were mercilessly pierced through. Slowly but surely, the new internal bone sculpture grew.

Not accounting for the parts she couldn’t copy due to stuff being in the way, she had about sixty percent of the spell pattern now inside of her, and it was very easy to send her mana to fill it up. Now I only need to focus on the remaining parts, much easier!

Much easier still took her an entire day, but finally, the spell successfully activated.

Mana gathered around her, and slowly, it coalesced into a single dot of black ‘light’, floating up and down right in front of her face. There was a faint connection between Sofia and the sprite. Much fainter than the one with Pareth, but a connection nonetheless.

Hi? Sofia wanted to try to touch it but she couldn’t move her arms due to the bone shirt, and she didn’t want to shatter the internal guide again.

The dot of light didn’t answer, and [Identify] gave nothing, but Sofia willed the sprite to stop moving, and it did.

Great, so it does act like a summon already. Nice to count you among my army, small sprite. Now what element is that? A shadow sprite?

Pareth had been sitting motionlessly on a chair for several hours, but he chose this moment to stand up, walking closer to Sofia, he raised his right arm and summoned a small shield of light.

Smart. Go on, sprite, attack Pareth’s shield!

The sprite flew away from Sofia, it fluttered over to Pareth and to Sofia’s surprise, threw itself against the shield like a rock out of a slingshot. The sprite disappeared as it hit the shield, as if absorbed by the solid light, but Sofia could tell it was still there, on or inside the shield. The shield grew a bit dimmer.

I think it made your shield weaker? The mana in your shield looks a bit looser now.

Sofia recalled the sprite, which struggled to free itself from the shield for a second before being slung across the room, then fluttering back to Sofia’s side.

The shield is back to normal. The sprite is costing some mana to keep around, but I can’t really say how much, less than what I regenerate at least. Maybe around twenty mana per second? The spell itself was around one hundred. No wonder Shaily runs out of mana so fast.

Sofia activated the skill again, or at least, she tried. It took another twenty minutes before her second successful attempt. During which the black sprite had stopped hovering around her and started to roam around the room. This time, the sprite was of an unstable, flickering blue, it formed around Sofia’s right hand and leisurely spun around it.

Lightning?

Pareth raised his shield. Sofia grinned and gave the order to attack.

The sprite moved in fast, angular motions and collided with the shield. It exploded with a thunderclap. Although it was quickly fixing itself, there was visible damage on Pareth’s shield.

Lightning sprite!

Uhm…

It’s dead?

Unlike the shadow sprite, which had survived its own attack and was currently exploring the bathroom, the connection with the lightning sprite had been severed. It was nowhere to be seen.

Alright then…

The next activation of the skill called forth a second shadow sprite, which quickly started following the first like a puppy following its mother. The third summoned a Light element sprite. Just like Shaily’s light sprite, it was reluctant at first, but after Sofia spent half an hour trying to coax it, it finally accepted to come closer, and settled atop her head.

Finally! I’m not even going to try ordering it to attack, it’s been hard enough to get it to come closer, I don’t want to scare it away.

I don’t really get if these are very smart or not. They’re weird, but they do have different personalities depending on their elements. I would call them cute but they’re also just flying specks of mana and light.

So far I have three elements. Let’s try to get a fourth one!

Despite several ‘correct’ activations, no more sprites appeared at all, leading Sofia to believe her current maximum number of sprites was three. She asked the shadow sprites to ‘go back’ and they quietly disappeared. The following two casts instantly summoned a lightning sprite each.

Sofia spent the entire weekend getting used to the spell pattern and playing with sprites.