Another elemental conjuration later, I was freely flying on the sky, ready to visit Titania to test the limits of the Divine Spark injection. The repair of my soul space was already completed thanks to the latest stat increase from the —likely misleading— an achievement I had received earlier, which increased my capabilities significantly. Even in my current extreme stat spread, five points of stats across the board was not something to snuff at. Most people failed to gather that much in their whole life.
Since I didn’t want to waste the traveling time, I decided to experiment with the divine light node resting in my fake soul space. Integrating it into my own soul space was out of the question, naturally. Even if my System wouldn’t have devoured it immediately, it still didn’t remove the requirement of tricking the headmistress.
Instead, I decided to use it as a focus, similar to an external magical item. A simple push of featureless mana later, created a bright explosion of light, even sharper than I expected.
“Not bad,” I murmured as I repeated it a couple of times, to understand the effect. Essentially, it worked as a static converter, adding an overwhelming light element to mana, though devouring some of the mana in the process. It took a while to get a better understanding of how to arrange the portions.
Then, I focused on testing natured mana. The elemental mana resulted in some rather volatile results, forcing me to stop that track rather early. It wasn’t impossible, but it required a more suitable location —and maybe a few wards to prevent dangerous accidents. Still, I wanted to experiment on that, excited about just how much damage a light-infused fireball could inflict on a pack of bone dragons.
Arcana worked better. It didn’t create any synergy in terms of damage like infusing it with other elements, but it allowed me to use the light element in a more nimble way. It wasn’t as cost-effective as casting it directly, of course, but if there was one thing I wasn’t currently lacking, that was mana.
Things started to get interesting when I started to use it in conjunction with Biomancy. It didn’t work with healing magic, on the contrary, turning it into an unstable mess, too sharp to heal, but too soft to hurt anyone. The energy I termed as life energy, the kind I used to detect and destroy undead, however, mashed with the light magic perfectly.
To lack of a better term, the life energy was as soft as healing energy, making it difficult to deliver it in range, both in terms of detection and damaging undead. I had circumvented the first part by dumping an ungodly amount of mana to it, and the second application was viable because of the excessive weakness of the undead. Still, life energy wasn’t the most viable energy for weaponizing.
Mixing it with light mana worked perfectly. The light worked as a delivery mechanism, carrying the light energy to the distance without losing its shape and energy, increasing its ranged viability several times, both in terms of damage delivery and detection.
Enough to make me tempted to find Zokras the Eternal and his death knights, to see whether I could turn his title to an obsolete piece of history.
As I continued to play with the life magic and light magic, trying to find the best mixture for different purposes, I suddenly felt a muffled reaction, barely noticeable even to my sharp senses. With a frown, I repeated the detection magic, but this time as an actual spell rather than idle experimentation.
[-641 Mana]
With the increase of power, several dark presences popped into my detection range, making my eyes widen in surprise by the sheer amount. None of the groups I had detected was particularly strong, but the sheer number of small pockets I had detected in the range surprised me. Their presence was muffled, indicating that they were behind some innovative wards to hide their presence. Not to mention, they were quite deep in the ground, likely reached their position from an underground tunnel.
I would have been surprised, but considering the huge underground roads that connected the necromancer base with the various access points, established without anyone being aware of, establishing some small undead pockets wasn’t too challenging.
After quickly destroying the detected ones, I started circling the school, creating huge circles, destroying every detected one immediately. As I destroyed them, I started cataloging the result.
The first important detail was their strength, or more accurately, a lack of it. None of them were particularly strong. Most of the pockets had an average of Class Five power or lower, with the occasional stronger one barely reaching Class 8. Still, considering there were hundreds of those little pockets, they were still a dangerous threat.
There were far too many to be placed around during the last month, not without being detected even with the assistance of their spies in the faculty. Most likely, even a year wasn’t enough, proving that the plan to take down the school had been going on for a long time.
I continued to destroy those pockets, despite the fact that I wasn’t expecting them to attack the school immediately.
Their strategy clearly changed from an overwhelming ambush to an extended siege, forcing Silver Spires to either lose the surrounding towns to weaken it permanently —both in terms of logistics and reputation— before they launched a final attack from all directions, using the undead packets they had created.
Still, destroying them was the better idea. Since my latest assault on their base, they were aware of my presence, so enhancing my reputation wouldn’t hurt, even though destroying them wasn’t particularly difficult. And that was only the case if the necromancers had detected their destruction. There was a good chance that they wouldn’t be aware of their disappearance until they tried to summon them.
Their concealment wards were that good, and there was no warning flare occurring after their distraction —no doubt to prevent their detection when the underground monsters discovered their presence and destroyed them.
I had a calm smile on my face as I destroyed the dormant zombies and other abominations, using earth magic to grind them into pieces with a leisure pace before injecting a dash of life energy to purify the remains.
As I continued my search to clean up a wide area around the school, I couldn’t help but pity Zokras, or whoever was behind the complicated plan to take down Silver Spires. They went all that effort and came up with an amazing strategy. Even the last part was an amazing stroke of genius.
With disposable monsters hidden under an area that was assumed to be safe, they could have waited until the reinforcements that were sent to the surrounding towns started to return, attacking them with their main forces to threaten those forces to retreat faster, before suddenly launching the attacks of hundreds of small undead groups from the rear, utterly shredding the defenders in a deadly ambush.
Pity that my unique combination of skills destroyed yet another deadly plan. From an intellectual perspective, I couldn’t help but pity them. After years of planning and effort, their contingencies were being destroyed by me one by one.
And to make things worse, it wasn’t the first time I had ruined one of their plans. Even before my latest achievement, three of their dangerous strategic ploys —surprise undead assault before the school could establish defenses, artificial beast hordes, and fake hordes with exploding gems— had been ruined through my involvement, a count that didn’t even include many smaller tactical operations I had prevented, from saving the Dragon they had been trying to corrupt to saving Titania from two deadly ambushes, as well as finding their plans to break the defensive wards of the school and repairing them…
I was the sole reason for the current stalemate wasn’t a devastating defeat.
At the first glance, a stalemate looked to their benefit. After all, due to their nature, necromancers could reinforce their armies endlessly while we could only lose ours in battle, but that didn’t factor in the overwhelming advantage of our current defensive position.
As the many citizens, as well as some of the weaker students, took the walls to defend the towns against the endless monster assaults, a significant number of them would level up in the process. Hunting in the wilderness was significantly harder than shooting arrows from the walls, and a lucky hit to an already dying Class Ten beast could give enough experience to level up a peasant a couple of levels immediately, maybe even an achievement or two for overwhelming power difference if they were lucky. As a result, the more the cities survived against the monster hordes, the stronger the defenses would get. And if they dared to attack one with enough strength to raze the towns, they would open themselves to counterattack.
I doubted Zokras was enthusiastic about taking the field after losing five precious death knights in his own base, along with an impressive number of liches a huge chunk of the army. Combined with my mysterious identity, I was literally a weapon of mass destruction tailored to take down the undead, and to make things even worse, I could sneak attack. They still didn’t know who I was, no one really did. Even if they identified me correctly, my previous reputation was so horrible that it looked like a badly arranged cover job.
I wondered how the headmistress would have reacted if she knew that a horny midnight adventure of two salacious students was the only thing that saved Silver Spires from a certain doom…
With a sigh, I continued to destroy all the undead pockets I could discover. It was a boring, grueling task despite my recently enhanced abilities, making me waste several hours in the process. It would have been faster if I could have burned mana freely to detect them, but that would have alerted others to my presence. Light-infused life energy wasn’t exactly the subtlest magic one could cast, after all. On the positive side, it gave me enough time to completely repair my soul scape, ready to level up once again.
I started traveling in Titania’s direction…
[Level: 31 Experience: 467193 / 496000
Strength: 46 Charisma: 58
Precision: 40 Perception: 42
Agility: 40 Manipulation: 45
Speed: 39 Intelligence: 49
Endurance: 39 Wisdom: 51
HP: 6324 / 6324 Mana: 6841/ 7595 ]
SKILLS
Master Melee [100/100]
Master Tantric [100/100]
Master Biomancy [100/100]
Master Elemental [100/100]
Master Arcana [100/100]
Master Subterfuge [100/100]
Expert Speech [75/75]
Expert Craft [59/75]
PERKS
Mana Regeneration
Skill Share
Empowerment (1/1)
Teleportation
COMPANIONS
[Cornelia - Level 21/25]
[Helga - Level 17/21]