What We Do to Survive

With all the excitement of the previous week, the next few days were a relaxing break from all the chaos. After leaving Janna with four new exercises to work through, I spent the rest of the evening doing some light work and playing around with Mistletoe. Having run some preliminary tests on the substance, I was feeling rather confident that the new materials I was harvesting from her would be quite useful.

I was particularly curious if the stuff could serve as replacement foodstuff for Miranda. I would have to test if it could satisfy her specific brand of manavore diet. If it did, that would certainly make future plans involving her much simpler. Whether or not I decided to reign her in, having a ready supply of something for her to feed on would be very convenient.

Beyond that, I had also found that it would likely make a very potent base for certain types of healing potions. That was something I would also have to experiment with, though that would likely require some disposable test subjects so it would have to wait for now.

I spent the majority of Sunday working, switching off between spell practice, homework, and my research. I made quite a bit of progress with studying how elven intrinsic magics interacted, though I was still not going to try to copy it onto myself. I was starting to think I might have chosen an overly ambitious starting point. Even the simplest parts of Mistletoe’s internal magic seemed to interact oddly with various parts of her body and soul, making me leery of just copying it wholesale.

It came to mind that Miranda likely had some amount of natural magic herself, and I slipped her a note telling her to meet me later in the week and ordering her to look into the B girl who’s name I couldn’t quite remember. I was sure I’d described her well enough for Miranda to figure it out, and worst case I would have information on two potential targets.

My other primary project was examining the pendant the Myrddin had left me. It still resisted most of my efforts to examine it, but I found I could use the technique he’d shown us in class to suppress its effects and study it in more detail. It left me wondering if he’d done it specifically because of that, or if that was just a lucky coincidence. I didn’t much like the idea of people that much stronger than me taking an interest in what I did, but the lesson had been incredibly valuable regardless.

From what I’d found, the pendant had two different enchantments on it, or rather, two clusters of enchantments with individual purposes. One was completely unintelligible to my current skill level, making use of runes and magical principles I’d never even seen referenced before. The second was much simpler, though it made figuring out the other functions of the pendant even more difficult.

It was a powerful obscuring field, one that covered both the pendant and the person wearing it. It inhibited mana sensing, scrying, many forms of identification magic, and dozens of other detection style spellcraft I was unfamiliar with. It was an impressive piece of work, the sort of thing I could have never afforded to buy for myself even if I had wanted to.

Whatever the other enchantment did, it seemed entirely self contained within the pendant and didn’t react to anything I tried to probe it with. I wasn’t sure why exactly he wanted me to have it, but I was pretty sure that it was in no way harmful to me, so I’d decided I would be wearing it going forward. If he wanted to hurt me, he didn’t need to do anything tricky to get away with it. There was nothing I, or just about anyone else really, could do to stop him.

Beyond that, I simply continued to practice my spellcraft and control and spent some time refining my plans for the ritual I needed to do later this semester. I was pretty sure I was going to be doing a sacrificial empowerment ritual, that was what we focused on primarily in class, but I was still narrowing in on the specifics.

Classes continued apace and I scheduled meetings with Miranda and Janna for Wednesday and Thursday respectively. Eventually Wednesday rolled around, and with it the Evocation Fundamentals practical I’d been waiting for.

I was not the first person to arrive in the large practice hall where the class took place, but I was somewhat surprised by who had beaten me there. Jack Baretree and Professor Shrike were standing together to one side, quietly discussing something.

I hadn’t seen him since that unfortunate encounter outside the cafeteria, but he looked like he’d come out unharmed. I wasn’t particularly surprised, though I was curious what had happened to the younger student that had decided to pick a fight with him. Despite his aggressive reputation, Baretree was something of a gracious winner, typically injuring but not killing his opponents. It had earned him quite a few enemies, but also some amount of respect from the student body.

Still, it had been either a first or second year picking a fight with him. He might have wanted to make a point, or maybe the boy’s youth had made him hold back. The boy had certainly not won that fight, else I would have heard about it for sure. A first year beating a sixth year? That just didn’t happen.

Perhaps I’d ask him after the class. I was quite curious why he was here in the first place though. I knew he was Shrike’s apprentice of sorts, but the professor had never had any assistants helping him out in this class before. It would make sense though, we were doing counterspells and if he wanted a good demonstration, it was smart to invite another skilled mage to help.

“Ah Mr. Hunter, there you are. Come on over here for a moment.”

I looked up to see Professor Shrike waving me over, Jack standing silently beside him. I shouldered my bag and hesitantly walked over, unsure of what he wanted.

“Right, I’m sure you know my student here, this is Jack, he’s going to be helping us with a little demonstration today. I was hoping you would be willing to lend a hand as well?”

I blinked in surprise. I hadn’t expected that, but it was a good opportunity. I never missed a chance to get into my professor’s good books. “Of course, Professor. What do you need me to do?”

“Good lad,” he clapped one large hand on my shoulder and his artificial eye shone brightly in its ruined socket. “So as I told you all yesterday, we’re gonna be doing some work with counterspells today. You all should have some experience with them from last year, but we’re focusing on the elemental kind so I wanted to give a brief demonstration beforehand.”

He gestured to Jack, who stepped forward to stand beside him. “I want you to cast a couple of spells at Jack here, specifically flame bolt, rock arrow, icy daggers, and airburst. I’m pretty certain you can cast all four of those, yeah?”

I nodded.

“Perfect. After the demonstration, you can continue to work with Jack. It's not his specialty, but I’m sure he can give you some handy pointers. Now, I’ll leave you two to get ready, I have a few more things to get ready before everyone else shows up.”

He rushed off, leaving us standing together awkwardly. I was pretty excited by the opportunity, a brief demonstration of skills people already knew I had in exchange for an hour of instruction from a talented sixth year seemed like an excellent deal.

Jack extended a hand and I shook it after a moment of surprise. “Hey, it's Orion, right? Thanks for helping out.”

“Yeah, that's me. I’m happy to help and look forward to working together.”

He smiled, “I’m sure. So, just to make sure we’re on the same page, here’s the plan. We're gonna stand over there, at the back of the room, and you’re gonna launch those spells at me one at a time when Shrike tells you to.” I nodded, that seemed simple enough. “Good. After that we can see about helping you out with your own casting. Do you have much experience with countermagic?”

“A little, though it's more theoretical than practical in nature. It's hard to find good partners to practice with.”

He let out a short laugh, “That it is! It gets a little better in later years, but finding good practice partners is still such a pain! There was this time back in my own third year, I was trying to find a good dueling partner. There were a couple of upper year honor duels right back to back and it really inspired me, right? Well, so this idiot Irvin agreed to practice with me, and like, I was a little sceptical but it was third year so I thought he knew what he was doing. Very first session, dude’s force shield backfired, blew both his arms off!”

“Damn.” That sounded like quite a mess. Exploding limbs splattered blood everywhere as I’d unfortunately learned early on.

“I know right! Oh, there was this other time…”

Jack continued to regale me with stories from his earlier years as we slowly made our way over to where the demonstration was to take place. The other students slowly began to trickle in, and I waved to a few that I knew better than the rest. I wasn’t particularly close to anyone in this class except Brenda, and she was thankfully in a different section of the practical.

I wasn’t really sure what to do about her right now, conflicting ideas warring inside my mind, so for now I was just continuing as before. She’d clung to me for all of yesterday’s class and had ambushed me during dinner as well. It was annoying. Before I’d just thought she was like that with everyone, but now I was shocked about how I’d managed to miss what was happening. It really went to show how bad my social awareness was that I’d managed to let the situation completely fly over my head.

The moment class officially began, Professor Shrike immediately dived right in. “Ok, gather around here for a minute. Today we’re gonna be practicing countermagic to deal with elemental spells. A lot of creatures and races you may encounter are resistant or even immune to direct magical attacks. Someone like Mr. Weavingroot here,” he gestured to the tall elven man standing in the second row of students, “is going to shrug off many of the spells that are useful for dealing with non magical foes. Similarly, it's almost impossible to affect things like another mage’s internal organs or a cerberus’s brain like you would an ordinary bear’s. That’s where indirect magic shines. It doesn’t matter that a target is immune to sleep spells, a fast moving rock is a fast moving rock, no matter if it was thrown or fired by a spell.

That is why elemental magic, stuff like fire, force, and electricity, are so widely used among mages. As a mage, your biggest threat is other mages, which means you need to know how to deal with the magic they’re gonna be throwing at you, and know what magic to use in turn.

As I told you all in class, today’s practical will be all about how to deal with enemy elemental attacks. Specifically, today we will be practicing the elemental cancelation style of counterspells that you all should have read up on last week. This sort of countermagic is tricky to use, because it requires an understanding of what spell your opponent is going to cast, or at least what sort of spell. This has become much easier in the past few decades, as basic spells have become more and more ubiquitous and widespread.

Back in the day, there were dozens of variations on every kind of attack. Now, most low-circle mages use the same fireballs, the same force spells. Sure, those spells are much more refined and well crafted then the random chaff they used to use, but at the same time it leaves them vulnerable to a better trained mage in a way they weren’t before.”

He paused for a moment, scanning the room to check for questions. Not seeing any hands, he continued. “Now then, before we begin I’ve asked my apprentice and Mr. Hunter here to give a little ol’ demonstration. Let’s start with fire, that's a nice flashy one.”

Taking that as the signal to begin, I carefully formed the familiar matrix for flame bolt in the air under my outstretched hand. I didn’t do it as quickly as I could, nor did I use nearly as much mana as the spell could handle. This was a demonstration after all, and I wasn’t going to show off the limits of my spellwork in front of so many people.

Just as I finished casting the spell, Jack’s counterspell triggered. Counterspells were by necessity rather simple spells in execution as they needed to be faster than the spells they were trying to interrupt. A cone of dispelling magic washed over me and my spell just fell apart in my hands. I weathered the minor backlash easily, another reason to not put much mana into the spell.

“Very good. As you can see, Mr. Hunter tried to cast a simple flame bolt spell at Jack. Jack identified the specific spell he was casting and cast the appropriate counterspell, stopping the magic before it could be fully formed and hitting Mr. Hunter with the backlash. Again please, now the other method.”

I obliged, casting another flame bolt. This time Jack let the spell finish casting, but it had barely crossed half the distance between us before it collapsed in mid air as Jack cast his own spell.

“This is the other way of dealing with this sort of magic. In this case, Jack knew a fire spell was coming, but perhaps he was unsure of what sort or did not know the correct counter. Instead, he used a more general counterspell that is designed to deal with all sorts of fire based attacks. It is a more difficult spell and is less effective against powerful spells, but it did the trick here. Notably, this sort of countermagic does not cause any backlash in the enemy caster. This can be both a boon and an issue, depending on the situation. Now, let's try rock.”

The demonstration continued in that way for another ten minutes or so. I cast each of the spells a half dozen times, letting Jack demonstrate all sorts of counterspell techniques. He ended the demonstration by showing off the technique we would be focusing on today, the same sort of general cancelation spells Jack had used against my second flame bolt.

Since we were only third years, and thus not expected to cast anything over the third circle, we were limited to the bare basics of that style of spell. Unlike the fifth or sixth circle spell Jack had used, the one we were practicing could only cancel first circle (and particularly weak second circle) spells.

Had I been practicing with the other students, I wasn’t sure how much I would have really learned from the lesson. I’d hoped to practice proper counterspells, the sort that caused backlash and could dismantle all sorts of spells before they were cast, but I understood why that wasn’t a particularly good plan in a class like this. After all, spell backlash was literally part of the point, and spell backlash had a habit of well… killing people. Students weren’t supposed to kill each other during classes. That was for other times.

Since I was practicing with Jack though, the classes ended up surprisingly educational. After showing that I could cast all six of the spells we were practicing (one for fire, ice, rock, air, force, and electricity), we moved on to some more complicated techniques. Jack was a very talented mage and could easily handle the backlash of third and fourth circle spells, so I was free to practice the actually interesting techniques with him.

It went well enough. My main problem was, unsurprisingly, speed. Jack could easily cast the more complicated combat spells in just a second or two, whereas it took me at least that long to identify what he was casting, much less shape the correct counterspell. Once he slowed down a little, it got much easier and I got some good practice in identifying and dismantling the spells he was casting.

I didn’t think I was ready to use this sort of magic in real combat, not unless I was facing someone considerably weaker than I was, but it was a good learning experience regardless and I would just need to keep practicing.

I also had a chance to pick his brain for tips and training methods, which was honestly the biggest gain from the lesson. I found Jack to be an easygoing, if somewhat violently minded, man and he made for a surprisingly good teacher. I never did end up asking what had happened with the white-robed boy from the previous week though. It never came up and by the time I remembered class was already over and Jack had disappeared.