Mia sat on the large terrace atop the hotel they were staying in. It had a cosy little sky garden of sorts, though it was starting to get rather overgrown. Either the gardener was dead to some monster or his skills were in much higher demand at one of the food-growth facilities Zeigler’s people had set up. Greenhouses, crop fields, vegetable gardens, or anything else that produces edible food. Why would they waste time on making sure some bushes were perfectly cut into spherical shapes or that the weeds didn’t overtake the small strips of grass on some hotel’s rooftop?
Mia watched the city, her gaze taking in the landscape and the vast swathes of buildings that made up Graz. It felt so empty without the constant sound of cars rolling by down on the streets, without the occasional shouts and constant chatter. It was silent, too silent. It was eerie, giving her the feeling of a ghost town despite knowing there were people living in it … just far fewer than there should have been.
At least we don’t have to pay rent anymore. Mia mused. No one needed to, though if they wanted food, water, and other stuff they’d need just to live, they’d need to make themselves useful. Everything was rationed, and the Mayor wouldn’t be giving out the fancy new magical knick-knacks his enchanters and alchemists came up with to layabouts.
Mia and her friends were in the enviable position of being largely exempt from that on account of having played a crucial part in saving Graz from being wiped off the map. They had something of a non-spoken agreement that they’d continue hunting monsters and would at least seriously consider handling other bigger problems on the Mayor’s request on the side while continuing to grow stronger.
Mia knew she was lucky, incredibly so. The Mayor and his people were very enthusiastic about ensuring she and her friends-slash-family had everything they could ever need to survive each fight they got into and grow stronger as fast as possible. Potions, system-books, tools, reinforcements, rations, divination assistance, training, weapons, and just about everything else the local military detachment or the mayor’s office could provide were at their disposal. They had clearly taken Gabe’s warnings to heart about how the world was going to become much more dangerous before things even began to stabilise.
With a huff, she closed her eyes, gathering her legs into a lotus position atop the rug she’d laid down on the cold, concrete tiles. That done, she cleared her thoughts, banishing useless lines of thought from her mind as she focused on the ever-flowing arcane energy coursing through her channels. She wasn’t sure the lotus pose helped with meditation — she was pretty sure it didn’t, in fact — but it made her feel like a wise monk or something, and it was fun besides. It’s only recently, due to her raised Flexibility stat, that she’s managed to do it properly and hold it without it becoming extremely uncomfortable very quickly. If she had a few dozen more points into that attribute, she could probably twist herself into a pretzel and still be comfortable enough to fall asleep. Stats were weird.
But that was besides the point; she came up here for a reason. The shared room was nice, but she wanted some calm for what she was about to do. Gabe had gone off to talk with the Mayor about the greenskins and their much larger-than-expected underground settlement within spitting distance of the city. She wasn’t sure what would come of that, but it gave her at least a few hours of calm to do as she wished while they got busy discussing and planning.
Mia was ready. She had almost succeeded the last time she’d tried to conjure a Rank 0 rune on her own, and she’d gotten 3 stat points into the associated attributes since then. She could do this!
Her focus turned inward, and slowly, over the course of long minutes, she managed to narrow it down. Distant sounds faded away, not gone, just pushed into the background where her conscious mind no longer had to process them. Smell followed, then the sensation of the soft breeze catching her hair, caressing her skin and tugging at her tee-shirt. The feeling of the rug faded next, the rough, coarse strings of it pressing against her bare thighs because she’d been stupid enough to meditate in shorts, and then the hardness of the floor faded last, though she knew she’d feel just how inadequately padded her seat was when she resurfaced from meditation.
Mana flowed through her body, streaming through energy channels to the beat of her Mana Heart. That was the hardest to ignore, almost impossible. Her blood, too, thrummed with mana, infused with potent arcane energy by her Arcane Blood Trait. Both Traits were useful, but so very annoying at the moment. It was like trying to meditate while someone was chattering in your ears, and there was an illegal track race going on around your meditation spot.
Mia cycled through mental exercises, trying to find one that worked. It took her nearly half an hour until she managed to shut that final line of distraction out, leaving her with only the image of her Mana Core floating before her mind’s eye. Inside it, she watched her runic model slowly move and shift, revolving around its centre in ways that didn’t quite obey standard geometrics.
Her focus narrowed further, bringing only a single Rank 0 rune into focus while the rest — everything — faded into the background. It was a simple rune, the simplest one she could find and the one her choice had fallen on after days of overthinking and overanalysing. It looked like the letter ‘b’, but instead of having a curved belly — or whatever that protruding curve at the bottom was called — the rune had two straight lines meeting in the middle like a triangle. Just three simple lines, sticks made of mana. Simple. Easy.
She would have to get the mana flow perfectly; it had to start at the tip at the top, go down vertically, then turn and turn again. The moment the mana touched the initial vertical line, she would have to freeze it, turn it solid and static. There were instructions for it in her Training Manual, of course; according to it, having a runic lexicon to absorb runes from was a luxury few could afford.
Her first attempt came out better than expected … which wasn’t that much of a surprise, to be honest. The mana control and shaping exercises she’d been doing on and off again through the preceding weeks had her moulding her mana into a variety of geometric shapes from spheres to pyramids and everything in between. Three simple sticks were simpler, though the precision required was much greater.
Her focus wobbled, and the first line came out in a way that reflected that. She took a moment to calm herself, then she tried again, and again and then some more. The rune had to be at least as precise as the one she’d absorbed from the runic-lexicon. She was using it as a reference, noting the way her lines weren’t quite perfectly straight, just a close approximation of it. The Training Manual had been quite clear on the fact that while her runic-lexicon would accept and absorb substandard runes, making it do so was directly weakening her foundation, and would correlate to a higher likelihood of spellcircle failure, and would weaken the potency of her spells besides. She needed to be within a 10% margin of error when compared to the standard rune, at the very least.
On her tenth try, she got close enough, but she failed to freeze the mana in place at the right time, her flexing of her Will came a moment too late, and the third line collided with the first one, bursting through it and scattering the mana all over the place. Attempts eleven through fifteen were worse; she was focusing too much on the finish line and stumbled along the way, accidentally turning the sharp angles into curves. Attempt twenty was close, though she made the exact opposite mistake of the one that ruined attempt ten and froze it too early, leaving a gap between the last line’s end and the first line.
She was getting better, though, and she persevered, equal amounts of spite and stubbornness edging her on. All these attempts, every last one of them, came out better than anything she’d managed before her latest infusion of Attribute points. Runes were tiny, or at least they seemed that way to her current Sensitivity, though with the growth of her Sensitivity and Control Attributes, attempting to make them slowly started to feel less like she was attempting brain surgery with hands the size of a house and more like she was … actually, it reminded her of the delicate handwork required to paint tabletop minis.
Mia’s never been good at that; her hands tended to quiver and shake when she got nervous, and she always got nervous when she knew the shaking of her hands could ruin something. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy in that way, and supremely annoying, but thankfully, shaping mana had nothing to do with her hand-eye coordination or the stability of her fingers.
The thirtieth rune came out looking quite nice, and Mia was starting to get a proper feel for the exact way she had to flex her Will to make the rune solidify properly. Attempts 30 through 50 were spent streamlining the process, yielding only marginal improvements with each iteration. If she squinted, all of those attempts looked the same — and exactly like the rune she was copying — but when she focused on them with a critical eye, brushing her mental fingers over the lines that were never quite as straight as they first seemed, at the angles that were never quite perfect, always just a tiny bit off instead of being the perfect 60 degrees she needed them to be. She always dismissed them and tried again.
It was frustrating, and mind-numbingly boring, but there was something addicting about feeling her results slowly get better and better, even if the improvements shrank exponentially the closer she got to her target. Maybe it was silly; maybe she should have put off the attempt until later, when she got another Level and another handful of stat points in the associated Attributes. But she wanted it now, and she was getting so damned close.
The Training Manual said she had the ‘bare minimum’ stats required to make a proper Rank 0 rune if she was diligent enough. Mia didn’t know about diligence, but she was stubborn, though she partly blamed her rising Willpower for that; she didn’t recall ever being as headstrong as she’d been lately … then again, she’d gone through enough traumatic stuff in the last few weeks that a therapist would probably have to compile her ‘issues’ into volumes. Stuff like what she’d gone through changed people, she supposed.
She’d lost count after attempt fifty, only ever comparing her newest attempt to the preceding one, and to the reference rune still floating imperiously before her mind’s eye. Mia kept going, trying again and again in a half-daze some might have called a trace, only slowly coming back to herself when she was staring at her latest attempt.
She checked it twice, frowned and focused, checking two more times with even greater attention to detail. It was perfect, or at least as close to it as she could tell. There were probably still issues, but her Sensitivity wasn’t high enough to detect those minute imperfections and mistakes. But that meant it was as good as she was ever going to get in her present state. It was … good enough.
Mia had never thought herself a perfectionist before, and maybe it was the sunk cost fallacy making itself known, but she wanted this to be perfect.
She checked it three more times, carefully brushing her mental fingertips along the rune, then comparing it to her reference rune. They looked the same. She couldn’t have told the difference had one of the runes not already been connected to her runic model.
Okay. Mia thought somewhat numbly, shaking herself back to her senses. The daze and the last figments of the trance faded, and she took a deep breath, then gently nudged the rune towards her runic model, which itself reached out with a new arm. The initial connection formed, and Mia felt the absorption process of a new rune begin. It’s done. I did it!
[Base Control(Spirit): 9 -> 10]
[Main Spirit: 25 -> 26]
[Hidden Quest: Spirituality] Completed!
Objective:
Raise all Base Spirit Sub-Attributes to 10 or above.
Rewards:
[Title: Spiritualist]: ‘+1 Bonus Attribute Point to all Spirit Sub-Attributes.’
***
Rewards have been accepted!
The Title: ‘Spiritualist’ has been granted to User ‘Maria Vexley’!
***
[Control: 20 -> 21]
[Sensitivity: 19 -> 20]
[Manifestation: 24 -> 25]
[Main Spirit: 26 -> 27]
***
Mia gasped as she felt the changes take place, though the most substantial was, of course, her Main Spirit stat going up by two whole points. That was massive! Bonus stat points were also nice, considering they did not count as either Gained or Base stats, so there were no limits on them, as far as Mia knew, though so far the only source of them had been Titles, if she remembered correctly.
And those Base Attributes, she’d felt them edge closer and closer to the threshold for weeks! Finally, she’d managed to tip them over the edge. She’d read that they became much harder to get as you got into the double digits, though apparently less so if 10 wasn’t the cap on that specific Sub-Attribute. Aside from the single Base Sensitivity point she’d gotten just hours ago, she could barely remember the last time she’d gotten one.
Mostly out of curiosity, she compiled a quick display showing her Base Attributes and how close they were to reaching their upper limits. Mia wasn’t quite sure what regular people in the Mystic Realm would consider good progress, but she was quite happy with where she was at the moment.
[Base Attributes (/Base Attribute Maximum)]
[Body]
Base Agility: 9 (/15)
Base Strength: 4 (/5)
Base Flexibility: 8 (/15)
[Mind]
Base Cognity: 9 (/10)
Base Memory: 7 (/10)
Base Will: 9 (/10)
[Spirit]
Base Control: 10 (/15)
Base Sensitivity: 11 (/20)
Base Manifestation: 10 (/10)
*******
The afternoon found Mia hiking back out into the thickly forested hills, following the footpath they’d taken to the greenskin … nest? Was it a nest? They were building stuff there, carving little houses out of stone walls, so maybe it was more accurate to call it a settlement? Eh, whatever, the proper terminology didn’t matter.
The four-person squad from the previous delve was leading the group, though Brent had decided to tag along once he heard just how many monsters might be waiting for them down in those tunnels. Other than him, Zeigler had sent a squad of his troopers to join as well, though they were not there just to provide fire support. They had a pair of demolition experts among them, armed with a bunch of the newest alchemical bombs that were deemed fit to be field-tested, and their secondary task was protecting the diviner that’d also been sent to accompany them.
Command of their expanded party fell naturally back onto Brent’s shoulders, which Mia was grateful for. She had somehow, by some miracle, managed to not fuck up anything while she had command of their previous four-person group, but it was a relief to be free of the burden of command … even if having Gabe and her Mom praise her for her ‘success’ — aka, being fortunate enough that none of her plans had blown up in her face — had been really nice, and probably something she was going to remember for the rest of her life.
The odd-duck out of their party was the diviner — an introverted guy called Christoph, a name which Lina immediately shortened to ‘Chris’ without batting an eye or showing a hint of shame — who tagged along due to having a neat Skill that was basically the Mage Eye spell just better. Chris could send out a handful of somewhat autonomous floating eyeballs that projected what they saw back to him. Pretty neat, though not of much use in direct combat, which was why he had an armed escort. The mayor wanted to know exactly what to expect from these ‘monster nests’, and apparently, Chris was very good at turning what he saw through his floating eyeballs into useful data, like proper maps or illustrations.
Lina seemed to treat the poor guy’s introverted, shy bearing as a challenge and took it upon herself to strike up a conversation with him as they walked, which was how Mia found out that he was a cartographer and had been making hand-drawn maps as a hobby since he was ten.
Mia herself and the other three who’d accompanied her into the nest previously had also restocked and got some rest in the interim. Her spatial pouch had double the number of potions it had when they set out that morning for one, and she’d even gotten her standard combat dagger replaced by an enchanted one.
The enchantment itself was nothing special, just the most basic of magical effects applied to a simple carbon-steel combat dagger that’d been gathering dust in some army storage. It was a bit tougher, chipped a bit less and was just a bit sharper than it had any right to be. The true use of the enchantment came from the fact that just its mere existence made the mundane knife into a magical item, and magical items could harm things mundane ones couldn’t.
To finish up preparations, Mia had made sure her silly vampire was properly satiated, though — unfortunately — she’d had to do it the old-school way, dripping her blood into a glass for the redhead to drink. She was worried they would have gotten distracted otherwise, and besides, the Arcane Blood Trait was apparently good for more than just increasing her mana capacity. According to Camie, a single mouthful of her blood was about as nourishing in its current state as half a goddamn litre was before her Rank Up and much more ‘tasty’ besides. But that was beside the point!
Mia felt weirdly conflicted about having even ‘tastier’ blood than before. Would she have to get a vampire-swatter to keep them from buzzing around her like a bunch of flies? Would one of those water sprayers work if she filled it with holy water? Was that even a thing that worked on real vampires? Well, hopefully she wouldn’t have to find out, though she was pretty sure Camie would be more than happy to act the part and make sure they respected her … claim.
Goddamnit, get your stupid head out of the gutter! Mia grumbled at herself, ignoring the way the idea of being ‘claimed’ made her stupid stomach do silly little flip-flops. She kicked Camie in the shin for making her feel that way, making the stupid sexy vampire give her a quizzical look full of confusion, but Mia just huffed. Focus.