Sacrifice Mage

I stared at her. “What? When did I agree to host a booth at the magic festival?”

“When we were talking last time,” Silhatsa said with genuine sincerity. “Don’t you remember? You helped me shop with your Gravity carrying everything.”

“I remember saying I’ll think about it.”

“Right! And now that you’ve had ample time to think about it you must have come to the conclusion that hosting a booth will bring with it a wide variety of benefits you’d be silly to pass up.”

I stared at her flatly. When our staring match didn’t end in a few seconds, I raised the stakes by crossing my arms. Then I added the twist of arching a singular, haughty eyebrow. I wasn’t very haughty in general, but it added just enough for Silhatsa to fold.

“Alright, look.” She bowed just a bit as she leaned forward, almost pleading with me. “I don’t have much time to explain, since there’s more people besides you who need the services of the Mage Guild receptionist.”

I remained unmoving. There was literally no one behind me. We had some time. “Go on.”

“The magic festival needs someone like you to shake things up this year, Ross. I obviously haven’t signed you up for anything without your consent. But I’m highly recommending it because I’m not lying. There’s a lot you can advance by taking an active part in it.”

“Alright, I’ll bite. How exactly is this supposed to help me?”

“Did you know that they’re holding the festival in a few weeks to coincide with the big auction that the Councillors are setting up? Guildmaster Lancko wants it to be the best one in decades because we’ll be getting visitors from Claderov, Sinthesar, and even from Vyorel Kingdom. This is going to be huge.”

I hadn’t even known that the auction was coming up so quickly. Se-Vigilance hadn’t mentioned it, but then, we had both been preoccupied by the actual important matters of the Nether Vein.

This whole auction business was just a side-show that was supposed to elevate Zairgon’s standing.

“How does that affect me, though?” I asked.

“Here, look at this.” Silhatsa proceeded to pull out a register that looked extra-official somehow. So much so that I was starting to think that I really wasn’t supposed to see it. “This lists a lot of the particulars about the magic festival, but I want you to look at this section right here.”

Her finger stabbed to a few numbers and scrawls near the bottom, most of which were outlined in bold.

“This is…” I frowned. “Ticket prices?”

“Yes. Various admission and attendance fees, basically. How much a basic ticket will cost, how much it is for couples and for families, with or without meal tickets, how much for special events, and so on.”

“If I’m reading this right, it says even basic tickets cost five gold. Just the cheapest, simplest one.”

“Right…”

Another little staring contest occurred, but this time, I lost.

“You really think my participation is going to help bring the costs down?” I asked. I was all for that, of course. But… “Will they actually let it go down? It’s a once in a year thing, right? Maybe once in several decades, since your Guildmaster wants it to be this oh so special thing. Wouldn’t they want to make the most of it if they want to maximize profits?”

Maybe I was still talking too much based on my experiences back on Earth. Profits always had to go up. There were times I had grown to hate it, but as a PA to businesspeople, it wasn’t something I could easily get away from.

I also didn’t have a good clue of what the average wealth of anyone not on Ring Four was supposed to be like. Was five gold a day’s worth of meals for Silhatsa, or was it a whole month’s rent?

Going by her expression, it was most likely the latter.

“Stop judging me, Ross,” she said.

I held up my hands. “I’m not judging. I’d just like to know where you’re coming from.”

She sighed. “Well, you know I’ve visited Ring Four now, don’t you. I’ve been to your little fete and then the Remembrance Ceremony for the Elder of your Sun Cult. I’ve been there a few other times too. And I know for certain that almost no one in Ring Four can afford this.”

“Hold on, Silhatsa. You’re really doing this to help Ring Four attend this magic festival?”

She leaned forward some more, earnestness shining in her eyes. “Don’t you want that too? For everyone to get the same opportunity? I’d like for as many people as possible to attend, from all over Zairgon. Especially when we’re going to get visitors from other places. We need to show unity!”

I blinked at her for a few moments. For a receptionist, she had bigger ambitions than I had given her credit for.

“I didn’t know you were that driven,” I said.

“Yes, well, I got tired of seeing you be the only driven one around here.”

I scoffed. “Well, that’s as good a reason as any.”

“So you’re in?”

I didn’t even know Scalekin eyes could get that big and pleading.

“Alright, alright.” I groaned, sighed, then smiled. “Yeah, I’m in. It’s a worthy goal.” I squinted though. “So long as this isn’t going to be a huge time sink, and you also haven’t explained how exactly my participation is going to help lower the admission prices.”

Silhatsa slowly smiled. “Leave that to me.”

The next few days had me running all over the place to get the booth thing going. I was just relieved that it didn’t take up every single moment of my waking hours.

First, I tried contacting Urhei for some guidance. But I had received no replies. I eventually found out she was on holiday somewhere, so I just left a message asking if we could talk and figured I’d get information some other way.

I did the further testing I had sought for my Overclaim Affix. It turned out I had been right in thinking it wasn’t an end all be all for defending myself. At least, not directly.

Even though I could throw out nets of mana, the wide variety of attacks I could face meant that Sacrifice just couldn’t keep up. For instance, a beam was the easiest bypass. Sacrifice wasn’t going to work perpetually against a continuous stream of energy. It would only burn away a certain chunk of the beam, before the rest of it then pushed forward and struck me anyway.

Sure, the reward from Sacrifice would help stave off some of the damage from the beam, but it wasn’t foolproof. Slightly annoying, but not at all unexpected. I had known there would be very obvious limitations.

When I asked Vandre and Lujean to fire their Aspects at me like they’d have done in a real battle, I found that Overclaim couldn’t, well, lay claim to most of the fired Aspects fast enough. There was just too much fire and blood everywhere, no matter how much mana I pushed out.

I did manage to create a net that could catch it all eventually, but that was more because I had learned to predict how they were going to throw their blood and flames. In a real battle, against opponents whose move set I’d have no idea about, Overclaim wouldn’t be very reliable.

Unlawfully taken from NovelFire, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Not directly, that was. Sneakily however… I smiled as I thought up a myriad ways I could use it to surprise opponents.

One of the other things I needed to test was how well it acted on casts from opponents that weren’t aimed at me. As in, when I Sacrificed Lujean’s flames or Vandre’s blood, I got an enhanced resistance against their casts’ effect on me.

But what if their cast wasn’t something directly affecting me? What if it was something that buffed them? Magic was boundless. Who knew what sort of crazy Aspects other people and monsters possessed. Not everything used by my enemies was going to hurt me directly. So getting a damage negation reward for cases like that was going to be pretty useless.

Yet another thing I was hoping to train up was another Affix for Gravity. The idea had come as a result of practicing with Overclaim across a few days.

I had already noted that if my opponents’ attacks came in slower, Overclaim worked much better in stopping them.

Which meant if I had something that could slow down my opponents’ attacks, then that would come in tremendously handy. And wonders of wonders, I already had an ability that could impair my target’s motion to some extent, assuming they weren’t overpowered freaks from within Nether Veins.

So if I could somehow use Gravity in such a way as to create a zone of repulsion that slowed down attacks, I could really boost Overclaim’s effectiveness.

Figuring out how to get Gravity to do that was the real challenge. It didn’t help that my mind was distracted from creativity by all the things I needed to do for this booth thing at Silhatsa’s magic festival.

“Have you filled out the form for the requisition of any supplies you’ll be needing?” Silhatsa asked when we met again in a couple of days.

“I have,” I said.

“How about the safety and precautions form? They had this section on it that stated you need to put in your bank and other financial details in case of any injuries or other things you might need to remunerate for. Did you do those too, Ross?”

“Yep. All done.”

“Great. How about the form for your Path and associated Aspects and Attributes? Oh, and then the form for—but right, I’ve seen that one.”

“Yes,” I said again. I had hidden the fact that my second mana core said “Beyond” in my status now, as Councillor Se-Vigilance had instructed, but it was a minor thing. It wasn’t like there was a way to verify that. “And yes, and yes again for anything else you might ask.”

She glared at me briefly, though it was without much of any heat.

It took only two days for them to set up the area where I was supposed to erect my booth. There was yet another form that had me detailing what exact magical experience I was going to deliver at the festival.

“…rocks?” Silhatsa asked a little dubiously. “That’s all you’ll really need?”

“Are you seriously doubting me?”

“Well…”

“Me? I, who went into and emerged from the Nether Vein not once but twice, who defeated the Blight Swarm for good that no one else had ever figured out to do before, who—”

“Alright, fine.” She huffed. “I wasn’t doubting, just curious.”

I grinned, then winked at her. “You wouldn’t want me to spoil the surprise, now would you?”

“Why am I the one who needs to be surprised?”

I ignored her rhetorical question. “I suppose I should put in another supply requisition. Something to help with any potential accidents. You know, just in case.”

Silhatsa nodded. “Precautions are good, yes.”

The next day, I took some time to focus on training. All the periodic sparring with the Scarthralls and training with Gutran had ranked up my Agility again.

[ Rank Up!

Your Agility and Fervour Attributes have risen by one Rank.

Your Ritual and Entropy Aspects have risen by one Rank.

Your Path of the Auric Hierophant has risen by one Rank

Agility: Gold V

Fervour: Silver VIII

Ritual: Gold V

Entropy: Iron VIII

Path of the Auric Hierophant: Gold IV]

Of course, I wasn’t just ranking up the Attributes and Aspects I was targeting explicitly. There were constant uses of every other thing I could improve in the background to make sure they slowly gained ranks too.

Continuous Imbuement with Illumination to keep lighting things up, Flare getting practice via Concentration to constantly draw in heat while Absorption made sure I didn’t burn up. Daily casts of Gravity to change up my weight and Sacrifice to mess around with all my casts.

And of course, most of the spars and other practices we performed were preceded with Rituals of Growth. No wonder Sacrifice got a nice rank as well.

I also hadn’t forgotten to keep working with Entropy in the background. It was harder to find use cases for it, other than the farm of course. That didn’t mean I was going to let it languish.

It was another day later that I discovered an interesting interaction between Entropy and Gravity. More specifically, an interaction between a couple of Affixes they had. I found that it wasn’t just energy that I could affect with Emission. Matter wasn’t safe from it either. I could channel Emission onto one of my trusty old broken bricks and watch it slowly start to crumble.

That rate was so terribly slow, I was bored out of my mind. I counted out the rate. I honestly sat there for at least an hour, trying to measure—well, estimate, since it was entirely visual—just how much Emission reduced the brick in that time period.

Not a lot. That was my conclusion. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, just then.

I obviously needed to rank it up to make it more effective at causing entropy on solid matter, but the other side of the coin was that it was essentially causing radiation. If it did too much of that from the get-go, I’d be blasting myself with cancer without any proper precautions against it. And I was pretty sure Ephemeroth didn’t have chemotherapy.

Sure, I had Intake to counter that, but still. Not everyone around me did.

The interesting interaction came when I plugged in Granular Control via Gravity alongside using Emission from Entropy. That easily quadrupled the brick’s decay rate. No, more than that.

Where I had seen only a tiny sliver of the brick, an almost imperceptible amount, dissipate over an hour, I found nearly a quarter of it gone at the same time when I used the combination of Aspects. Alright, now I really needed to be wary of radiation. Especially since it was matter now, I needed to worry about things like alpha and beta particles and all that.

There were a few obvious applications when it came to combat. With Granular Control accelerating Emission a great deal, I could test how effective it would be at some point.

But it was difficult to think of economic potential for a discovery like that. This world didn’t have nuclear power. I definitely wasn’t anywhere near experienced enough to set up a nuclear power station or anything of the sort, nor did the idea actually appeal to me.

That said, I wondered if Linak would have ideas once I told him about my discovery.

Which was good because I met him a couple of days later at the Mage Guild. He was setting up a booth for the Artificer’s Guild. Not just him and his guild, but Ascelkos too.

“Ah, we’re all finally here,” Ascelkos said. “The three crafty conspirators.”

I greeted them with a pleased wave. If I had friends participating in the magic festival alongside me, it would be a lot, lot more bearable. On hindsight, I should have figured there would be others I knew taking part. “What are we conspiring?”

“How to take over the magic festival, of course!”

“With the power of artifices!” Linak said, beak clacking excitedly. “Glad to see you’ve returned safe and sound, Ross.”

Ascelkos echoed the sentiment, saying he wanted to hear everything about the Nether Vein when we were both free. Which we weren’t just then because we started talking about the festival and our plans for it.

Apparently, both Ascelkos and Linak were indeed working with artifices. Or crafting style magic in general.

Linak had a lot of interesting things his guild had been working on that he wanted to showcase. I got an early demonstration of a gun-like device that could clean things like furs, feathers, and things like that were generally harder to dust off. Basically, a blow drier, but one that was extra special in picking out those tiny bits of dust that were harder to reach.

“Powered ingeniously by a Wind Aspect Enchantment,” Linak said with no small amount of pride. “And obviously some runes to power it.”

I didn’t fully get how it worked, but I nodded. “Obviously.”

“The runes are hand-crafted by us too!”

Ascelkos was a bit more taciturn about what he was cooking up.

“I want it to be a surprise,” he said with a mischievous little glint in his eyes.

“Wait,” I said. “So it’s not going to be something to do with your Bloomwagon technology?”

Ascelkos clutched his chest like I had grievously offended him. “What are we, one-trick havershals? The Anymphea have more accomplishments to show off than just our Bloomwagons.”

I snorted, wondering if these havershals were anything even remotely like ponies on Earth. “Sorry. But now I’m even more curious.”’

We probably would have talked a bit more, but we were soon interrupted by Silhatsa coming over, looking for all the world like she was being chased by Nether Vein monsters.

“He’s here!” she hissed. “Get into position. Now.”

“Wait, I had a position?” I asked. It was impossible not to feel urgent with how she was acting just then.

“Who’s here?” Ascelkos asked, peering over and around us to look around.

Silhatsa ignored him. Just went to show how anxious she was at the moment. “Yes, of course you’ve got a position. We’ve got positions. If you want this to succeed, then you’ve got to stand out a bit. He’s going to find out anyway, but it’s best we pick the battlefield for optimum results.”

I groaned. “Alright, fine, lead the way. You’re making it sound like I’m going to die if this doesn’t work out.” She only grunted at that. Very reassuring. “Any specific advice you can give before…?”

“Nope. You’ll have to trust your instincts and keep a hold of your goal. All I’ve managed was to get him this far. The rest is on you, Ross.”

“Who’s he?” Ascelkos called out from behind, still nonplussed.

As Silhatsa continued shoving me forward, we both glanced back and said, “The Guildmaster.”