Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG)

The moment the first flying eagle-like monster swooped towards us, I felt my heart sink. I could see several more eagle monsters divert their attention from the town towards us, and in moments, we had nearly fifty monsters flying towards us while our ember dragged us closer and closer to the battlefield.

I tried to estimate how much damage I could do to one of the monsters with a single extinguish, and quickly realized it was nowhere near enough. Trying to kill one of these flying abominations with an extinguish would be like trying to put out a wildfire with a jug of water. That didn’t mean I was useless, though - even if most of my alteration spells would struggle to be useful here, my portals might be useful, if I could get them open fast enough to react to the lightning bolts these creatures were tossing around.

As I saw another lightning bolt crash into a defensive wall of ice, I had a new idea.

My current abilities, apart from extinguish, weren’t strong enough to impact the battle much. I didn’t like that - I wanted to help where I could. If I were more confident in our clan’s strength, I would be content to sit in the back and heal people after the fight - but I wasn’t really certain that we could win this battle at all. I wasn’t sure if I could tip the scales in our favor on my own, but I certainly intended to try. My current abilities might not be strong enough to impact the battlefield - but there was still hope. {Endless Hunger of the Ocean} might give me an advantage. I just needed to find an eagle monster that was injured enough for one of my extinguishes to finish it off.

I scanned the battlefield, but I didn’t see any eagle monsters in kill range. Most of the ones that had been seriously injured during the battle with the settled town had already died, and the rest were too far away for me to hit.

Luckily, our clan was quickly organizing. The warriors of our clan had spent their entire lives fighting to keep the clan safe, and the moment they realized we were about to engage a powerful and dangerous tribe of monsters, they had begun organizing. I could already see spells and arrows whistling into the sky, targeting the wings of the eagle monsters and seeking to slow them down. I did my best to exercise my patience as battle began. I took a few moments to examine what our mages and other warriors were up to.

Mages were erecting defenses around the village-bearing beasts, to make sure that they didn’t get killed in the crossfire. However, they were encountering serious problems - namely, the fact that the ember was still charging ahead, and most of our mages with defensive abilities were ice mages, who created defenses by building walls of magically reinforced ice. That was rather difficult to do when the village-bearing-beasts were in constant motion.

If we had stopped and set up defenses for a siege, we could have started building some real protection - perhaps a dome that covered us from the threat. Unfortunately, our ember kept rushing towards the dying ember in the distance like a madman, completely indifferent to the dangers in doing so.

I still couldn’t find an opening to kill any of the eagle monsters. I hesitated.

Our trainers had stopped paying attention to us. Evidently, they had no time to babysit us in the middle of this battle. Normally, they would use it as a teaching moment - but now, the clan’s survival might actually be on the line. They were still sticking near us, probably to keep us from getting fried in the crossfire, but they had no time to teach us or help us.

Another blast of lightning crashed into the ground near us. I watched in horrified awe as it vaporized layer after layer of snow and ice, revealing long-frozen grass hidden deep beneath the surface. The fact that grass even grew on the soil of this world baffled me, but I had no time to ponder the ecology of this dimension. After seeing that lightning blast, I realized that while these birds weren’t as terrifying as the interdimensional warrior we had seen earlier, these eagle monsters could still kill our village-bearing beasts. Things were already cramped after the village-bearing-beast deaths from the interdimensional warrior incident. If any more beasts died, we might not be able to bring everyone with us after the battle - which would mean leaving a whole lot of people to freeze to death if our ember kept charging recklessly forward. I didn’t want that.

I gritted my teeth, and then used my new third-rune ability to erect my own protection around the village-bearing beasts. A rippling mass of darkness, water, and ice appeared around each of the beasts, twitching and swirling at the edge of my vision like a sapient blob of ooze. It looked more than slightly unnerving, and erecting six barriers that covered the ridiculously massive village-bearing beasts also ate nearly three quarters of my absorption essence. I was actually surprised that I managed all six - I had expected the rune ability to cost far more essence than it did. When I had run tests earlier, I had noticed that it cost around 10-15% of my reserves to shield Anise. With how much larger the village-bearing beasts were, I hadn’t really expected to protect them all. Why had the spell protected each village-bearing beast.

A moment later, the answer came to me. Absorption essence was now linked to the conceptual side of reality, due to my eldritch keyword. Perhaps the size of a target didn’t matter at all - instead, the cost of my rune ability worked off of some other metric entirely. I didn’t know.

A scream tore me out of my thoughts, and my head spun towards one of the other village-bearing beasts. There, I saw one of the better [Fire Mages] in the village. Or, more accurately, I saw what was left of her corpse, as it smoldered. Beneath her corpse, there was also a huge gap in the spatially contained water I had just erected. Fortunately, my protection spell had kept the village-bearing beast from getting killed by the blast. Unfortunately, it had done nothing for the woman standing on top of it.

I grimaced, but there was nothing I could do for her anymore. I turned my attention back to the eagles in the sky.

Another one opened its mouth, and before I could react, a blast of lightning tore out of its mouth and slammed into a defender. This time, the defender lived, though he was seriously injured. It was obvious that he had invested a great deal of stat points into raising his survivability - and it was equally obvious he wouldn’t survive another blow. Another eagle opened its mouth to shoot a blast of lightning.

Now that I was paying attention, my abnormal [Perception] was more than high enough to allow me to react in time. I could see the twitches and movements of the eagles as they prepared each lightning blast, which made it easy to see where I needed to set up a portal and redirect their attacks towards themselves. As the eagle opened its mouth to shoot, I snapped open a portal right in front of its mouth, and redirected its own attack into its eyeballs. The eagle screeched in pain, and nearly half of its head turned into charcoal as rivulets of lightning magic burnt its flesh and eyes into mush.

I blinked in surprise. I had expected these creatures to be rather resilient against lightning, but evidently, they weren’t.

The other Mages of our village seized the opportunity to pelt it with fireballs, icicles, and arrows, and the eagle monster quickly fell to the onslaught of spells. My precise eyeball attack had ruined its ability to navigate and dodge - thankfully.

I quickly realized what value I had in this fight. The next time an eagle opened its mouth to shoot a lightning bolt at one of our villagers, I redirected a bolt of lightning back into its eyeballs. Unfortunately, this time, the monster redirected the lightning out of the way of my portal - as if the creature had noticed my intervention and adapted. I managed to open another portal, and push another lightning bolt into the monster’s eyes anyway - but in the time that I was distracted, fired another lightning bolt and killed another mage. I gritted my teeth.

My unusual [Perception] could allow me to overcome these creature’s reactions and change the battlefield - but I was just one person. I had no ability to totally change the battlefield, and the monstrous birds were clearly intelligent enough to change their tactics when I countered their attacks.

A moment later, I saw a beam of blue light flash towards the sky, as one of our [Ice Mages] used some kind of feat. For a moment, three froze in midair. Our mages immediately began hammering them with every spell they could manage. I quickly realized that the monstrous birds were actually a bit more resilient than I had thought they were - the birds just had unusually unprotected eyes. The other Mages didn’t have the same ridiculous [Perception] that I did, so they couldn’t exploit this weak point - but I could. Even so, I needed better tools to exploit openings in the fight.

When another of the birds was nearly dead, I used an extinguish to kill it. I wanted to see what skills these creatures could give me. Even though the battle had barely begun, and even though I wasn’t having too hard of a time dealing with a few of the monstrous birds, our clan as a whole was struggling to fend off just the small detachment of birds that had come to attack us. I wanted to maximize my impact on the battlefield instead of just controlling a small corner of it.

Slaughter: You have killed a Lightning Roc for the first time

Achievement + 3,500

You have leveled up! Ice Mage has advanced from level 26 to level 29! You have acquired a secondary Spark!

+5 Free Stat Points (X3) +2 Sense (X3) +2 Mind (X3) +2 Vitality (X3) +4 Mana (X3)

Power: You have Levelled up (X3)

Achievement + 600

Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured a Lightning Roc for the first time. New Skill created.

Breath of Fire and Lightning: You gain the ability to spend any kind of essence to create lightning or fire based attacks and launch them at an enemy.

I glanced at my new skill, and then smiled. Lightning based attacks didn’t have any real synergy with my build, but the fact I could spend any kind of essence to create lightning attacks was important. Equally important was the fact that lightning was much, much faster than ice and fire. One of the big reasons our clan was struggling to fend off these creatures was their agility - if we could stun them for long enough, we would at least have a chance to fight back on more even grounds. This Skill could do exactly that, and unlike my portals, it wouldn’t be as easy for the lightning rocs to avoid my influence on the battlefield. Based on the way the rocs used this ability, it also had a much larger range than most of my other abilities - which was perfect, because these annoying birds refused to get anywhere near us for their attacks, compounding our disadvantage.

I tried unleashing a blast of lightning upon one of the flying rocs using the local mana of this world, and then grinned as my lightning bolt once again cooked one of its eyes and left it vulnerable to bombardment from the rest of our clan. This one managed to turn its head at the last second, and keep one of its two eyes - but it was still having a much harder time avoiding our projectile attacks than before.

I could work with this.