Chapter 485: Cooperative Casting (2)
Anise felt the thrum of magic resonate through her body as she reached for the Sanctuary spell. For a moment, she worried that her friends wouldn’t be able to adapt to the spell quickly enough - after all, she hadn’t shown them this spell very many times. She had only occasionally mentioned it during their previous life as she worked to develop a comprehensive spell library for future worlds. Would they really be able to modify the spell and cast it with her before the monsters reached them?
A moment later, Anise shook her head so hard that a few locks of bubblegum pink hair nearly covered her eyes. They would make it work. They had to - otherwise, everyone would die.
<I’m starting the spell!> yelled Anise into the communication bracelet. A moment later, she activated the spell map she had created an entire lifetime ago, and started pouring manifestation essence into it. Anise intentionally slowed down the rate at which manifestation essence entered and exited the spell map, to give her friends as much time as possible to react, and also fed every single sensation she was seeing and feeling into the bracelet, to keep her friends up to date on what was happening.
A moment later, Anise felt Sallia stuff a few giant globs of absorption essence into her shoulder, and through her shoulder, into her sanctuary spell. For a terrifying moment, the structure of the spell started to unravel, almost as if someone had just dumped a barrel of acid right into the middle of the delicate spell structures she was trying to control.
The spell groaned under the weight of Sallia’s essence, before Anise felt Felix feed a little bit of his own binding essence into the spell. The destabilizing pressure of Sallia’s essence churned and bucked, like an unruly bull trying to escape - and then, Felix’s essence snapped into place. Anise quickly realized that Felix was treating the spell itself as if it were a work of alchemy - an item being created, rather than a spell being cast. Felix’s own essence didn’t seem to like what he was trying to do with his essence - Anise could feel little bits and pieces of Felix’s essence rebelling whenever he stopped paying attention to it. However, Anise and Felix managed to keep the spell under control as Felix worked to bind Sallia’s essence and weave it into Anise’s own spell.
In a moment of strange enlightenment, Anise realized that this was the true nature of Felix’s binding essence - it was, at a conceptual level, the ability to bind things together. To make even the most incompatible things fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, even when they really shouldn’t work together.
A moment later, Anise felt Miria’s hand wrap around her own, as if they were still sisters like in their previous world. A surge of alteration essence reached into the framework of the spell they were casting, smoothing out the rebellious bits of essence and warping the nature of the sanctuary spell. Miria’s essence forced Sallia’s essence to stop fighting against the spell, and become part of the very nature of the spell.
Rather than simply stuffing extra essence into the spell, it felt more like Miria’s essence was taking Sallia’s absorption essence, and then teaching the Sanctuary spell what to defend against. It was like feeding the spell a small amount of something it hated in order for the spell to build up resistance to it. For a moment, Anise felt the entire spell shudder and quiver, as if it were on the verge of collapse again.
Then, she felt another surge of essence from Miria - this time, touching upon a concept that Anise understood very well, if only because of Miria’s reports. The concept of hope. This spell contained the hopes of every single person in their alliance of clans. If it failed, everyone’s hopes for a future without the universal tree would collapse.
Miria’s conceptual level eldritch manipulation worked. All of the different, contradictory aspects of the spell finally locked into place as if they were one perfect, cohesive spell. Anise smiled, as she felt the spell finally stabilize.
With the spell finally running smoothly, Anise didn’t need to hesitate any longer. This spell only bore a faint resemblance to the original Sanctuary spell, but Anise was still a competent enough mage that she could force the spell to activate anyway, despite her unfamiliarity with it. A surge of manifestation essence pulsed out of her body, before a giant barrier of white light spread through the village-bearing beast.
Instantly, Anise felt the unnatural sleepiness that had plagued her thoughts dissipate. The crushing, mind-numbing need to sleep into the world of dreams collapsed, leaving behind ice cold clarity and fear.
That mental attack had nearly spelled the end of their entire alliance, and their clan.
A moment later, Anise saw an image of Miria’s soul-sight transmitted through the bracelet. Anise grimaced at what she saw.
Even though Anise and her friends had moved as fast as they could, many townsfolk had lost their lives before the sanctuary was erected. Perhaps ten percent of the clan had died in less than ten minutes. Even if the clan survived this attack, their ability to contribute to the offensive push against the extradimensional invaders would be much weaker than before. Even more worrying, the other clans in the alliance would likely have suffered a similar number of casualties.
The alliance wasn’t finished, but it was definitely weakened - and the enemy itself hadn’t died yet, so this was far from the total losses they would suffer that night.
Fortunately, with the slumber spell deactivated, the other warriors of the clan jolted awake. It wasn’t easy for a regular combat-ready warrior to sleep through the process of being eaten, after all. In moments, the town erupted into a cacophony of screams and battle cries, mixed with the bombardment of spells and arrows. Anise felt a few spells slam into the sanctuary she had erected, and made a few small adjustments so that people could fire spells from inside of the barrier to outside of it. Even though she and her friends had worked to make the spell as perfect as possible for the current situation, it clearly still had a few quirks and oddities to fix. Fortunately, she had caught this issue early on, or she might have lost control of the spell entirely.
A moment later, Anise heard Miria start yelling warnings to the town through her portal network again. It was far from perfect, but it was good enough to get more of the warriors of the clan on their feet and ready to fight.
“Regroup near the center of the village! Follow the giant glowing blue light!” Yelled Miria. “Then we’ll bring down the closest wooden butterfly together!” Anise wondered when Miria had created a giant glowing blue light above her house, before she realized Felix had launched some kind of light into the sky. He must have made it in his spare time - Anise had never seen any of these light-producing items before.
She heard a chorus of agreements and battle cries echo through the portals as Miria shut them down and then created a new set of portals, before yelling the same orders through the portals again.
Meanwhile, Anise started to feel something else claw and rip at the sanctuary spell she was trying to maintain. The rats. Some of them had already noticed the barrier she had created that blocked out the butterfly’s sleep magic, and were trying to gnaw at it. Disturbingly enough, it was working, even though Anise’s spell wasn’t built to intercept physical objects at all - it was only built to funnel out mental attacks. She and her friends had modified the spell specifically so that Anise wouldn’t instantly run out of essence while trying to single-handedly hold off an entire army of monsters by herself.
“Just hold on. Once other warriors from the clan arrive, we can blast down the rats that are targeting your Sanctuary spell, and then deal with the butterflies,” said Miria. At the same time, Anise felt a few ripples of essence - the same kind she usually felt when Miria was using her extinguish spell. Sallia didn’t say a word, but she leapt out of the house and started cutting down rats in the area, while Felix remained right next to Anise to serve as a final line of defense.
Fortunately, shortly afterwards, the more melee-oriented troops from the clan started to arrive. They quickly established a perimeter, which Anise was more than happy to hide behind while she maintained the Sanctuary. Soon afterwards, spellcasters also started to arrive, and the rats trying to nibble away at her spell started to disappear, which was a relief. Anise’s essence reserves had taken a bit of a beating, but she still had nearly half of her essence left, which should suffice as long as they killed off the closest butterfly quickly.
“All right! We have enough people! Melee combatants, keep this area clear! Mages, Archers, and anyone else who can hit an aerial target - work with us to take down the closest butterfly! Once we bring that thing down, the other clans will also wake up and join us!” Yelled Miria.
A few of the Mages and warriors gave Miria dubious looks - likely due to Miria’s small stature and obviously young age. However, after a few seconds of hesitation, they still followed her orders. In this kind of situation, everyone needed to work together to survive - and Miria’s words made obvious sense.
Fireballs, icicles, and streaks of other kinds of magic started to rip and tear at the closest wooden butterfly, and Anise prepared herself for a response from the enemy. If there was one rule of warfare she had learned over the past few lives of constant battle, strife, and reincarnation, it was that things never went according to plan. The moment the enemy realized that something was happening, they would create a countermeasure and start fighting back. She expected the giant butterfly to start firing spells back at them, or grow an extra couple heads and shoot laser beams at them, or… something. It was impossible to guess what nasty surprises a multiverse-level civilization might pack into one of its biological weapons.
A minute later, Anise started to stare at the wooden butterfly in disbelief. It wasn’t because the enemy had done something miraculous that would turn the battle around - it was because the wooden butterfly was clearly starting to die, but it hadn’t done a thing yet.
Even as the edges of its wings started to get charged, then burnt, and then sliced into ribbons, the butterfly simply kept trying to cast a sleeping spell at their clan and keep the portals open. Anise frowned. The creature didn’t even seem to be aware of its own injuries, even though fireballs and icicles were ripping apart its wings and charring its wooden skin. Another minute later, part of its body started to fail. Not even the ridiculous life force of the creature was capable of keeping it alive when it just sat there while an army of mages threw everything they had at it, after all. Three minutes after the bombardment started, Anise watched in disbelief as the butterfly suddenly dropped dead, and Anise heard Miria cackle into the bracelet.
<It’s dead! I got a skill from it by hitting it with an extinguish when it was nearly gone.>
Anise didn’t even hear Miria’s follow up words, as she stared in disbelief at the dying wooden butterfly.
There was really nothing? No hidden surprises or tricks?
A moment later, Anise frowned. Perhaps the universal tree hadn’t anticipated the four of them creating a cobbled-together, slapdash spell that could resist the wooden butterfly’s sleeping spell. On one hand, that meant that the universal tree had gotten lazy - it hadn’t made its bio-weapons very resilient against unexpected situations. That also probably meant that the universal tree was either underestimating them, or was so stretched for resources that they couldn’t afford to spend more resources and essence on ‘less valuable’ abilities for their bio-weapons.
On the other hand, as Anise turned towards the other three wooden butterflies hovering over the rest of the clans, she started to get an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach.
They could probably deal with this wave of monsters just fine - with one butterfly down and a quarter of the remaining members of the clan alliance awake again, sieging down the other three butterflies wouldn’t be difficult at all. However, the universal tree might also realize that something was wrong after this battle was over.
Anise didn’t think they could stop the universal tree from realizing that something had gone wrong, but she didn’t see what they could do to change that. She just hoped that in the next few battles, things didn’t go even more wrong for the clan alliance.