149 - Boom
Alexandra stood in the lizard cave, Rays Of The Sun active behind her. She let the light diffuse in every direction, allowing her to see what she was dealing with. Meanwhile, through Familiar Contract, Speck’s senses allowed her to scout every dark corner in the area.
There were a lot of lizards. A lot more than around the massive Gold-rank they’d met earlier. Bronze and lower ranks were already scurrying away from her, sensing that they were no match. Three Silvers, however, had gathered around her, and they didn’t look friendly. The size of a dog, they had sharp teeth and claws.
“I’m not here to hunt,” Alexandra said.
The lizards didn’t seem to care. One took a step toward her, its long, thin tongue poking out of its mouth.
She shrugged. “Have it your way.”
Alexandra adjusted her light to focus a single beam on the offending lizard. The searing-hot solar energy homed in on the beast, burning through its scales in an instant.
The lizard’s body fell limp to the floor.
“Anyone else?”
The other two lizards looked at their fallen brethren, and without hesitation, scurried away.
She smiled as she stepped closer to the corpse. Aside from a cauterized hole splitting it in two, it was in relatively good shape. She could practice her cooking on it later.
For now, she started with her experiments. First, she dispelled her light before casting it again. She wanted to work with a fresh spell. Next, she wove the reflective shell around the orb, leaving only a single hole for the light and heat to escape. She aimed it to the ground, far enough from her that she didn’t risk hitting herself. Smoke rose from the point of impact as it started melting through the stone.
Then she lowered the amount of mana she was pouring into the spell and completed her weave, obscuring the hole and cutting the beam.
The weave held for a few seconds.
Then the orb tore through it, light and heat bursting outward in a single violent flash. Alexandra threw herself sideways, hitting the ground as the shockwave rolled over her. Rock cracked above. Dust and grit rained down onto her back.
She stayed flat, arms over her head, until the rumbling stopped.
Leander was right. It was always going to explode.
She pushed herself up, ears ringing, and looked at the crater where her spell had detonated. The stone around it had split into a spiderweb of fractures, some running all the way to the ceiling. A chunk the size of her torso broke loose as she watched, crashing down into the space she'd occupied a moment ago.
She scrambled back, boots skidding on loose rubble, and didn't stop until her back hit a wall. The ceiling groaned. More debris came loose, smaller pieces this time, pattering down like hail and burying the Silver lizard’s corpse.
Alexandra pressed herself against the wall and waited for it to settle.
“Fucking hell. That’s not it.”
The damaged section groaned again, another sliver of rock breaking free somewhere in the dark. Alexandra didn't wait to see where it landed. She pushed off the wall and made her way deeper into the cave, past the crater, past the widening cracks, until the ceiling above her looked solid again.
Clouds. That was the idea. Not a wall blocking the light outright, but something that let a soft and diffuse portion through. Perhaps a few small openings instead of one or none at all.
She cast Rays Of The Sun again, wove the reflective shell around it, and began pricking holes into the weave with careful motions. One. Two. Three. Small, she told herself. Keep them small.
The skill had other ideas.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Three thin beams shot outward with concentrated power, one close enough to her that she felt the heat brush her skin. She dropped flat again, and the beams sliced through the stone around her, carving smoking grooves into the rock before she could stop the spell.
Alexandra lay there a moment, staring up at the fresh scorch marks inches from where her head had been.
“Okay,” she said. “Small holes are not it either. Got it.”
Once more, she moved deeper into the cave, afraid that the section would collapse around her if she ran too many experiments in the same place. After those demonstrations, the lizards living in these parts were wary of her and didn’t show their faces.
Alexandra snapped her fingers in quick succession. None of her ideas were working. The weave had been her best shot. Perhaps opening even smaller holes would help, but she didn’t think her control over mana was good enough to pull it off.
“What could I try next?” she wondered aloud.
She took out her journal, and using Rays Of The Sun, she went through her skill list, looking for inspiration.
One skill in particular caught her attention.
Solar Concentration hadn’t been her most useful skill so far. In fact, she wasn’t certain it was doing anything other than vaguely holding her mana inside her core.
She tapped her fingers on the page.
Solar Concentration - Uncommon:
Your solar mana will naturally concentrate inside your core instead of radiating outward.
Each level increases your solar mana density.
Alexandra turned the words over in her head, inspecting her core to understand why this wasn’t enough. When she looked at her solar core, the threads of her mana were indeed staying inside, unlike before acquiring the skill.
However, something still radiated from her core. Otherwise, nobody would be able to see it and detect her divine class. If it were the case, Leander would have told her. Hell, there would have been at least a Keeper back at the library to let her know.
Solar Concentration Training Quest: Cast a new spell inside your core (0/1)
The training quest hadn’t changed. The new spell requirement meant that farming the quest for points wasn’t going to be possible. But she was confident in training the skill the natural way, though it would take a lot of time.
Then again, there was no guarantee that it would help her hide her core and her divine class. It was possible that denser mana would be easier to spot.
She scratched her head. “This isn’t easy.”
Just reading her skill list gave her a few ideas. Mana Manipulation, which had now become Solar Manipulation, was capped at the maximum level of the common grade. Evolving it would help her in a lot of ways.
There was also A Face Among Many. While the skill wasn’t hiding her divine class, it made people pay less attention to her. It might be a path worth exploring.
She even considered a curse that would make her mana invisible. However, while she could unravel curses to some extent, she had no experience casting them.
“Except for Inflict Weakness,” she whispered, and the word forced her to slow down and think it through. She had gotten started on her path to understand the conceptual truths behind the sun through her Light skill. She could see herself doing the same for curses with Inflict Weakness, Life Curse, and Curse Unraveling.
The idea of cursing herself felt wrong. But, in essence, a curse was just a pattern applied to her mana. It didn’t strictly have to be nefarious.
The more she thought about it, the more appealing it was. The only thing was that it would require experimenting, and since she was the only one with solar mana, she would have to experiment on herself. Capturing a Platinum solar elemental to experiment on wasn’t exactly possible.
She pursed her lips. She wanted to try.
Alexandra closed her eyes and focused on her three curse-adjacent skills. If she was going to do it, she would have to inflict herself with a few curses while focusing on understanding how they were affecting her mana. She’d done that before when she was training Curse Unraveling, but at the time, she wanted to get rid of the curses, so she hadn’t paid as much attention to the moment the curse took hold.
Then, the plan would be to design a curse, and if it worked, a sickness.
She sighed. “This is stupid.”
She’d worked so hard to get rid of her sicknesses, to shift her skill set away from Dark Bolt, and now she was going to do that…
Still, it seemed like a decent bet.
She opened her eyes. “I should ask Leander first. He’s going to think I’m crazy.” She paused. “Well, I’m hanging out with a fucking ghost, so maybe I am.”
Dispelling her journal, she turned toward the path back to the tomb, thinking that she had to make it work sooner rather than later. It had already been three days since she’d left Balrum, and she didn’t want to make Kam and Willow worry more than they likely already were.
But just as she started her walk back to the tomb, a low hiss sounded behind her, loud enough to make the already damaged walls of the cave shake.
Slowly, Alexandra turned her head.
Two massive eyes were glowing in the darkness, and through her senses, she felt the massive body of the Gold-rank lizard uncoil in the depths.
She looked at the path to the tomb through the ruined cavern, then back at the lizard behind her.
It was too close.
“Fuck, I’m not going to make it.”