Sacrifice Mage

I felt like I was back in the Nether Vein again.

Not in the sense that I was in extreme danger. No. I was pretty sure that, no matter how much the Guildmaster of the Mage Guild might want to test me, he was not going to do anything that would leave a permanent mark. Just maybe something that would teach me a lesson.

The way this felt like the Nether Vein was in how I was once again facing an opponent who was miles ahead of me on the power curve. I was once again assaulted by that heady, frizzy sensation that engaged every single nerve and brain cell I had in making me wonder how in the world was I going to overcome this seemingly insurmountable challenge.

As the ground shook some more, everyone was warily stepping back. Right. I needed to focus.

“You may wish to relax just a tiny bit,” the Guildmaster said. “Otherwise, you look as though you’ve already accepted your defeat.”

“I thought this was some kind of test,” I said. “Not a fight between the Guildmaster and some random mage. I didn’t know I was signing up to get bullied.”

“You are doing no favours to the accusation that you have a propensity to distract from the real matter at hand.”

“How’s the truth a distraction?”

Lancko raised his hand, all graceful flourish and pretty finesse. “Your truth is a truth, Mage Moreland. My truth is seeing just what you reveal about yourself in what is about to transpire here. And that truth supersedes your own, no matter how much you seek to deny it.”

I didn’t argue. It was a pointless philosophical debate. The real issue was whether I was ready for whatever the Guildmaster was about to use. I recalled seeing what felt like some kind of strange, crystalline lightshow when he had been fighting against the giant bugs of the Blight Swarm. It was reasonable to expect something like that to appear here too.

Of course, he most likely possessed other Aspects. If he actually remembered me spotting him, then he might remember I had seen his powers too. In which case, he might decide to shake things up.

Not that using his crystals was going to be a good thing for me anyway. I had no idea what his crystal-based Aspect was other than the fact that it was crystalline.

There was another violent little earthquake, and then the ground literally began breaking apart. My eyes widened. Crystals it was, then. Faintly glowing glassy growths emerged from all around, growing up ridiculously fast to surround me in a prismatic barrier that was actually kind of pretty to look at.

And it kept growing. By the time I realized Lancko’s intention had been to trap me, I was already stuck inside his artificial barrier. Which still kept growing, like he was determined to not just suffocate me, but crush me to pulp too.

I could hear the voices of the others murmuring and talking outside. They might have fallen back at the sudden battle between me and the Guildmaster, but they weren’t too far from us yet.

But Lancko’s voice cut through the chatter easily. “Give it your all, Mage Moreland. Don’t hold back on my account. Otherwise, you might just die.”

I grinned. It was getting harder to breathe inside my crystal tomb and the threat of getting crushed had grown significantly stronger. Lancko wasn’t pulling his punches, and I was pretty sure I hadn’t even seen the tip of the iceberg he was capable of. Well, that settled it. I needed to push myself, just as I had against the Bonestrider.

Sacrifice sent out white threads all around me. Now this was the test case I had been intent about experimenting on.

This crystal cage wasn’t as direct an attack on me as the times Vandre’s blood had tried to dissolve my body. Sure, it might be like that when the growing crystals finally started crushing me for real. But that wasn’t the case yet.

Nevertheless, Sacrifice worked. Before the crystals could actually reach me, white threads burned through the space all around me. They latched onto the Guildmaster’s power, then sliced right through them. Glowing white cracks appeared and spread on the crystalline growths in an instant as I pushed out as much mana as I could.

“This,” I said. “Is nothing.”

Sacrifice burned through it all.

[ Sacrifice

You have Sacrificed 1 [Moderate] Opposing Cast of 1 Onyx-ranked Aspect. Windfall bonus activated.

Reward: Damage of next opposing cast is reduced by 3.5x. Essence of cast element now easily obtainable. ]

While my main goal had been to reduce the crystalline barrier around me to nothing, which Sacrifice successfully did, I was more caught by the last of the reward statement. Essence… as in, the essence of the crystal itself?

Silence reigned as I emerged from the rapidly disappearing crystal growth. I rose high up in the air with Siphon, white motes of the last of Sacrifice’s burned offerings floating around me. Everyone stared. Even Silhatsa seemed more surprised that I had survived than relieved at seeing me safe and sound.

I had no idea if they had expected me to just capitulate like that. The main point was that they had not expected me to burst out of the Guildmaster’s cage of crystal like that.

“Ah, a tricksy fellow,” Lancko said. He absent-mindedly rubbed one of his horns. “It seems I will need to enhance my test a bit further. How embarrassing to be pushed by you.”

I didn’t appreciate the insult one bit.

Not that Lancko cared. He had just manifested another one of his crystals next to him, this one curved and jagged like a singular, oversized monster claw.

I wondered if he was going to try and hit me with it. Well, there it was. Dropping all pretence that this was some sort of silly test or practice session. If I got hit by that thing, I’d be pulverized.

So, I activated my Ignition Charge for Gravity.

[ Ignition Charge

Ignition Charge empowers Aspect of Gravity. Charges remaining: 23

Gravity: Orbit]

Sacrifice hadn’t destroyed all the crystals. Rather, it had destroyed a significant chunk of it, enough to cause the rest of the mass to collapse. All the remains now got caught up by my Ignition Charge, quickly swirling around me faster and faster.

Some mages gasped. Several of the hangers-on stepped back even further.

Meanwhile, the Guildmaster frowned just a bit. When he threw his large crystal claw, I returned the gesture by spinning one of the floating crystals out at a much wider radius. It missed at first, but I was spinning it so fast that it revolved around me and still struck Lancko’s flying growth before I was hit. A rain of crystals struck me. I was safe, though.

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“Seems I’ll need to be a little more serious,” the Guildmaster said, his voice once again cutting through the din.

That made everyone scramble back even faster.

I thought about holding up my middle finger at him very maturely. Sadly, he wouldn’t know what it meant.

Power pulsed from within the Guildmaster. In an instant, the entirety of the ground turned crystalline, like a floor of murky glass had replaced the dirt.

I wasn’t sure what he intended with that, but I could deal with it. Field Manipulation would—

“Uh, uh,” Lancko said.

I looked at him just in time to see the crystal that had manifested over his outstretched palm. A crystal that was glowing with enough power to make me seriously wonder if he had packed enough punch into that thing to rival my average Protostar cast.

Then it shot at me. It came in fast. My reaction was instinctive. I was channelling Illumination with Imbuement to get Reflection up on me because, just as I had suspected, that glowing crystal bomb from the Guildmaster tore through my rapidly spinning barricade of the same material.

But they weren’t the same because Lancko had packed his shot with more power than all the flying crystals combined.

My instincts were also right in predicting that the blast of magical power from the crystal bomb would be something Reflection would stack up against. Or at least, that was what I assumed prevented me from dying when the energy exploded outwards with the force of a hurricane.

I was unsurprisingly sent flying back, my body struggling against the pain of that sudden impact. It was deliriously wild to see myself reflected on the crystal floor as I flew.

Even more so when I saw the Guildmaster zipping through the crystal floor way faster than me.

I crushed the crystal in my hand. Just before I had been flung away from the blast, I had managed to grab one of the glassy growths orbiting my body. And now, I let Sacrifice flow into it before my flight ended. Before the Guildmaster did whatever he was thinking of next.

[ Sacrifice

You have Sacrificed 1 [Moderate] Opposing Cast of 1 Onyx-ranked Aspect [1] / 1 [Minor] Onyx-ranked Manaformed Crystal [2]. Windfall bonus activated.

Reward [1]: Damage of next opposing cast is reduced by 3.5x. Essence of cast element now easily obtainable.

Reward [2]: Essence of an Onyx-ranked Manaformed Crystal now manifests around your body with tangible prowess for 3 hours and 20 minutes. ]

A distant part of me was fascinated that I had received two rewards this time instead of the one when I had been Sacrificing the direct cast previously. Was it because I had taken proper claim for this crystal whereas I had been forced to rely on Overclaim for the last one?

None of which I could properly consider because the Guildmaster emerged ahead of me.

He had moved through his crystal and risen far enough ahead that he could hammer me with a swing of an oversized crystal. It was my Sacrifice reward that saved me from getting my rib cage crushed. Crystal hit crystal with a detonating crack, and the sudden exchange in momentum had me feeling like my organs were trying to be rearranged.

But I wasn’t hit with as much blunt-force trauma as I would have had if I didn’t possess my crystal armour.

I got up as fast as I could. Through the whole altercation, I had been on the back foot for so long, I hadn’t taken a single action to revert momentum in my favour. So now—

An arm punched up from beneath me and grabbed my leg.

I almost screamed out in shock. Thankfully, I managed the better reaction of channelling Gravity. Field Manipulation combined with Infusion and Siphon to create a wide circle of deep purple energy, which immediately cracked and shattered the plane of crystal I was standing on.

As the crystal field was destroyed, the arm disappeared as well. There. Now I had enough breathing room to do something to win.

Said something turned out to just be calling on Flare with Manifestation, Concentration and Capacity keeping the little blobs of heat compressed into small bombs. I tried to latch them with Gravity’s Massless Control to keep them moving with me, but the Guildmaster was attacking again.

It was the crystal light bomb. Instead of focusing Gravity on my Flare, I had to concentrate on using Field Manipulation to push the crystal back. Even that wasn’t enough.

The bomb erupted farther from me than the last one had, and I was enhancing my defence with Reflection, of course. I was still thumped back at least twenty feet by the impact though. This was bad news because I was no longer near enough to take advantage of my bombs, the ones made from Flare. Worse yet, I had been thumped out of my little broken-crystal safe zone.

Something the Guildmaster immediately took advantage of by bursting out of the crystal field in front of me. Calling this guy relentless was a severe understatement.

His hand shot out again, though not with a hammering blow this time. Instead, his grasp locked around my now-glassy neck.

“Tenacious little mage, aren’t you?” Lancko said. There was something off about him I couldn’t place, but the sudden panic made it hard to think. “But all tenacity has limits.”

The panic was because I could feel what he was doing. My throat was crystallizing. Literally. Where I merely had an ethereal covering of glass-like material thanks to the earlier Sacrifice, the Guildmaster was now turning my flesh itself into his crystals.

Forcing the panic down, I called on Ignition Charge again.

[ Ignition Charge

Ignition Charge empowers Aspect of Flare. Charges remaining: 22

Flare: Immolation]

I exploded with a burst of heat. The Guildmaster was blasted with energy intense enough to melt through most metals. I wasn’t holding back. He had himself said not to, so I didn’t hesitate in unleashing what I was really capable of.

The grip on my neck loosened and I quickly retreated a bit. My throat was still crystalline and I was having trouble breathing, though the effect was slowly fixing itself.

What I really scowled at was the Guildmaster.

He hadn’t been attacking me. Not directly. It was some kind of clone made of the same material he kept manipulating with such ease, and my Immolation had turned it into a half-molten slurry. Right. Someone like the Guildmaster wasn’t going to be caught so easily.

“That will be enough,” he said, emerging for real somewhere farther off.

I shook my head. “I’m not done.”

“You are. Just take a second and feel, Mage Moreland.”

I didn’t know what he was on about, but the sensation of strangeness grew stronger. All around our little makeshift battlefield, everything was turning into crystals. The air itself was converting into prismatic planes like we were slowly getting absorbed inside a piece of quartz.

That’s when I felt. Sharp, wriggling sensations grew within me everywhere, quickly turning into something alarming. Pain grew with leaps and bounds.

“Yes, you see now,” Lancko said. “The crystals are growing inside you. In moments, you will be torn apart from within.”

He said it almost nonchalantly, like he was commenting on the weather.

“What kind of Affix lets you manifest your Aspect inside people?” I asked.

Lancko raised his brows in surprise. “That’s what you wish to know? When you’re about to be ripped to shreds?”

I took a second to focus, once again pushing past my impulse to panic. This wasn’t something unbeatable. I had the tools I needed. Tempted though I was to focus on Entropy, I was again wary of radiation sickness, so I just focused on Sacrifice instead.

It was even easier this time than with the very first crystalline attack the Guildmaster had sought to trap me within. A moment of focus and I had threads of burning white scouring through my body before they latched onto the foreign growths that had already caused some amount of internal damage.

Then they started disappearing, the same Weave messages about sacrificing an Onyx-ranked Aspect appearing over and over.

“Ah, how intriguing,” Lancko said. “You are, once again, relatively safe regardless of my attempts.”

Everything returned to normal so suddenly, I felt a little unmoored. The world reverted back to reality from turning into a gargantuan crystal. I could only stare, a little befuddled, as the Guildmaster relaxed and began walking away.

I was tempted to ask if that was really it, but then I got proof from the Weave itself.

[ Rank Up!

Your Spirit and Thauma Attributes have risen by one Rank.

Your Sacrifice Aspect has risen by one Rank.

Your Path of Starforged Firmament has risen by one Rank

Spirit: Gold VI

Thauma: Silver IX

Sacrifice: Gold VI

Path of Starforged Firmament: Gold V]

No, that wasn’t the point. This was it. This was the opening I needed. “So what, I passed with flying colours didn’t I? That means our deal stands, right?”

The Guildmaster considered me for a good long moment. No one else said anything. Through the corners of my eyes, I noted how everyone’s consideration of me had changed. Lancko had demonstrably not held anything back, and yet, I had managed to stand my ground, regardless of the vector of attack he had used.

“Admittedly, you have proven your truth,” the Guildmaster said. “As such, I will relent and slash ticket prices for the lower rungs.” His eyes sharpened, the starry light within his eyes sharpening into the horizontal pupils rams normally possessed. “But you will act according to the potential you’ve just proven, even if it isn’t through your little booth.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, and I couldn’t exactly ask for clarification when the Guildmaster more or less disappeared.

Nor did I find much reassurance when I looked over to Silhatsa, especially because she was rapidly following behind her superior. There was a bit of relief, yes, but a lot of warning too.

Great. I had accomplished what I wanted. But the cost… well, it looked like I was yet to actually pay it.