Magical Engineering

I looked at the list and decided the only things I wouldn’t enable were cutting my level beyond one-half or removing my armor. Further deleveling still seemed too risky to win the fight. If I screwed up and didn’t have any of my added resistance and shielding, I risked burning my brain out for nothing. In a last-second change, I also realized I needed my vision. I had no idea how the shield worked, and I had a feeling I was going to need to see it. I took a deep breath and decided it was now or never.

“Mel, I’m going to press start in ten seconds,” I said, starting the countdown in my head.

“Good, don’t screw this up and ruin all my plans before they even really start,” Mel said. Ignoring the burning curiosity of just what the man was planning, I instead hit start on the wasp dungeon and saw the lava flash around me briefly before my new shell popped into existence.

I immediately put my new shield magic into use, and while I couldn’t see it, I could feel it. My stone cocoon was rapidly cooling. Before it had a chance to fully harden, I rapidly flexed and shook my body enough to break some of it away and then slammed my wrist into the chunk on my face, breaking that off as well. I gulped down the strangely cool fresh air as the world around the shield was lightened from the magical energy that currently protected me. I only had inches of space, but it felt like infinitely more oxygen than I had the last time I did this.

I could make out some of the wasp queen's bodies pressed to the outside of the shield as they slowly melted away from view. For the first time since starting these simulations, a thought arose in my mind. How real were these constructs? Did they feel pain? I hoped not. I didn’t need a new philosophical guilt on my mind.

I watched as my mana levels rapidly dropped. I knew it wasn’t the end of the world if I lost the shield, as I still would have my own regular defenses that would hold for a while longer, but that didn’t mean the wasp queens didn’t, too. Just because the ones in front of me were gone didn’t mean that held true across the board. There were also the starvation and poison effects taking their toll on my body, but I didn’t think those were likely to become a problem before I was burnt to a crisp anyway.

The tail, though, that was an odd sensory experience. It was like having a new limb with a single big finger. That likely meant it was prehensile, but it wasn’t like I had any experience to know that for sure. Would a zoologist be able to tell the difference from feel alone? I doubted it, as you’d generally need a personal basis to compare without an actual test.

Did my mind always wander so much as it waited for the possibility of death? I didn’t have the answer as this wasn’t something I had ever had a chance to experience back home. All my near-death experiences had been incredibly recent, with no time to waste pondering them before they had entirely passed. My life had certainly taken a strange turn.

I saw a large crack appear in the front of the shield. My mana was still over a quarter full, so the shield must have been quickly reaching the maximum damage it could handle. Could I just put up a second shield behind the first? It was too bad I hadn’t seen the original come to life. I wanted to know how it had drained the lava from around me. Another crack appeared in the shield, and I decided it was now or never to try the second shield.

A film of pure mana seemed to form around me and then slowly grow out until it covered the inside of the nearly failed first attempt. With it came a new burst of fresh air and a pleasant cooling feeling. I really liked this new mana orb. Was it possible to expand beyond the six I had in my system now? I know I had read about people with two orbs per slot. Was that a possible future for me? I had no idea, but if I wanted to push this experiment as far as I could, I’d likely need to find out. Did I want to? Was that where my life would go once back on Earth?

A message popped into my view just as that thought ended.