Ar'Kendrithyst

Before Erick knew it, a month and a half had passed him by. Classes came every day, and every day he learned a little bit more. The stability of it all was something Erick had no idea he needed. No monsters outside the walls. No shadows looking at him from darkened corners. No great big problems. And he was learning all sorts of important stuff! About the math and intricacies of [Teleport], about the nuanced, not-magic of Professor Rue Down’s Esoteric Magic. About different spells and different paths to power, and about the truly world-changing spells out there that every mage longed to master. All in all, Oceanside was rather relaxing.

The most dangerous thing to happen to him the whole time was Erick’s every-other-day beat down in Professor Ulogai Tinawa’s stone arena, where he sometimes won his fights, but not always. Erick’s anonymity in the arena had been ripped away after the third class, just as they were moving on to magical combat. After that, the fights got both a lot harder, and a lot easier. Some of his opponents wanted to give him a polite nod and then scamper off, but some of them were all bravado and power. Erick learned a lot more from those magical fights with young hotheads than he had learned in all his physical combat since falling to Veird. Mostly, Erick learned that he was not cut out for hitting someone with a stick. But telekinetically slapping someone out of the air with a block of stone? That was okay.

According to Poi’s occasional updates and Ophiel’s vision, Spur was doing alright. Erick rained on the farms every afternoon. Mog sent requests every so often for him to kill various monsters headed Spur’s way. Erick responded with lightning and fire and violent dehydration. With a bit of math, and some time to think, Erick took the time to count the distance between Oceanside and Spur and discovered the two were not 12,500 kilometers away from each other, but 13,700. It wasn’t much of a difference, though.

He talked to Jane when he could, though she had been off killing unicorns for a while and that extra distance was a bit harder to overcome, not to mention other emergent problems. Every time he tried to contact Jane she was either busy with her new friends, or busy being an ooze, and [Telepathy] didn’t work on oozes. But she had gotten her unicorn form and she had made some new friends, so that was pretty great.

The updates of the last few days were a bit concerning, but Jane was back home in Spur, and she had told him of most of the hunt, and nothing too concerning jumped out, so that was that. Hopefully Redwood’s story was true, and they weren't being set up to be killed, but they were out of there. Erick was glad Jane escaped that situation as fast as possible. Just yesterday she even talked of possibly coming to Oceanside before she went on to finish her Polymage quest.

Rats signed up for work at Oceanside’s Hospital after the first week of arriving on the island. He was learning a lot about a lot, especially since people from all over the world came to Oceanside for medical help. [Greater Treat Wounds] and [Cleanse] solved a lot of problems but some problems required technique. Cancers in stranger locations, like inside the brain, demanded knowledge of the body and skilled hands so as not to damage the psyche or personality or memories. Parasites of all kinds were also a major concern, but Oceanside had some of the best anti-parasite magics and techniques known on Veird.

There was no way to truly prevent parasites aside from walking around encased in metal and completely cut off from the world. For most worldly interacting, this was not a valid strategy. You just had to know how to deal with them after the fact, though identifying the vectors for such infections and thus preventing the infection in the first place was helpful in combating common parasites found in nature. Don’t drink water from strange sources, even if you [Cleanse] it first. Don’t eat meat left out for the flies. That sort of thing.

The parasites created by the Parasite Mages or Parasite Warriors of the world were best defended against like how you would defend against any insidious attacker; through constant vigilance and knowing your enemy. The problem there, was that not many people knew they were under attack by a Parasiteer until they were already infected.

As for Teressa, the grey-armored orcol often accompanied Erick to Rue’s classes. They worked on Mana Sense as a group and individually every so often, but even the other, smaller Esoteric Magics of the world had Teressa chomping at the bit to know more. Teressa would sometimes remark, after classes or back in Windy Manor, that it all reminded her of her tribe’s hunting traditions. She never really spoke past that point. Erick could tell that her past was bloody and uncomfortable, so he never pushed.

As for his own Mana Sense, Erick was not doing well.

Poi was ever-watchful, as always, but even he seemed to relax a little as time went on and nothing happened.

Hocnihai died two weeks after leaving Oceanside. He passed from the world the age of 116, surrounded by his family, friends, and a few other archmages. Daily treatments of [Greater Treat Wounds] and [Regeneration] helped him to dictate three final tomes of his accumulated knowledge, for the use of future generations. Each tome was three hundred pages long and filled with all of the magical knowledge Hocnihai had accumulated during his long life. These tomes were bequeathed to his grandson, who was already an accomplished Warder, already on the precipice of becoming an archmage himself.

When ambassadors from the Wasteland Kingdoms came to Erick on Oceanside to tell him this, they also gave him copies of those three tomes and a formal state-backed invitation and an assurance of peace, if he should ever want to visit the Kingdoms. Hocnihai had given the Kingdoms, in detail, every bit of knowledge that Erick had given to him in that singular lecture. They were already developing ‘electricity’ and ‘lightbulbs’, and would love if Erick could see what they had managed on so little information. Erick sent them off with a ‘maybe’. That was good enough for them.

Kiri was doing fantastically well. Being Erick’s apprentice opened a lot of doors for her, like being invited to classes outside of those Erick chose to attend. She even got an invitation to Professor Ulogai Tinawa’s advanced mage combat classes. She was busy all the time.

As for Erick himself? He was barely passing almost all of the more ‘important’ classes. The math involved with Spatial Magic was too much for him. He understood the pictures, but when the professor linked those pictures to equations made of squiggles and letters, Erick felt lost at sea with no land in sight. Kiri had no such problems. Kiri helped Erick to understand some of those classes, after class, back at Windy Manor, but not all of it, and Erick was honestly tired of asking for her help. She was way too busy with homework of her own and Erick was not going to hold Kiri back from her own success.

So Erick read a lot of books, over and over. The lessons were all in the books, anyway.

But as time went on, the math of every single magical class was too much for Erick. From Defensive Theory, to Spatial Magic, to Basic Enchanting, all of it involved math, and all of that math was too much, because none of it involved what Erick would have called ‘real geometry’. None of the math of Spatial magic seemed to be based around real, tangible space; all of the math went off of imaginary, nonsensical insanity. Erick would have called it multi-dimensional calculus, but the professor was adamant that real Spatial Magic never involved other dimensions at all. And besides: Dimensional magic was Banned, after all.

But not every magic taught revolved around non-real space. For certain disciplines there were diagrams and charts all based in real reality, and all of that seemed rather intuitive. Like how to plot out the best way to place defensive, anti-specific-magic runes around a room, or how to design a dungeon. Basically, you just had to know the rate of mana flow, the direction, and about a dozen other smaller facts based on whatever situation and furniture and lives lived in the space, and the rest was easy.

Defending a house through anti-specific-magic runes turned out to be kinda fun. Erick wasn’t able to do a lot of the math that Professor Egallia Stomp demanded, so Erick failed many of the paper practice tests, but by the time physical tests came around, Erick was able to routinely place anti-[Teleport] runes where they needed to be without doing any math. He just sort of placed them were the mana swirled. It wasn’t perfect placement, but it was 90 percent effective, which was pretty good for just looking at a room and feeling the mana therein. It also only took him a minute to rune a room, instead of the ten or twenty minutes it took to do the proper math. Egallia Stomp was simultaneously furious and fine with it all.

“Some people just have a natural mind for mana,” she would say. “The rest of us need math.”

A real Mana Sense would have helped, for sure, maybe even allowed for 98 or 100 percent effective rune placement, but the barely-there vision and feelings given to Erick by Meditation was enough to allow him to see and feel the flow of mana all around him. It was enough, for now.

Nowhere was this fact more apparent than in Professor Apell Calloway’s class. While Esoteric Magic and Professor Rue Downs’ continual round table discussions of stranger magics was a delight, Dungeoneering was the single class where Erick excelled.

Professor Calloway’s class had taken Erick and twenty other students into the deeper parts of Oceanside Island to build dungeons that spun the flows of mana into slimes, and in the rare occasion, into ‘naturally’ occurring elementals. Both of the starter dungeons voted on by the students were partial successes, each with their own failures or bounties, but the textbook dungeon was an all around success providing for the growth of two to three slimes for every one produced in the students’ attempts.

All three of those starter dungeons were all dismantled a while ago. Now, everyone in the class had been charged with building their own dungeon in one of several different locations scattered around the Island, from the western coast where mana rushed against the cliffs, to the relatively calm interior with forests and few mountains, to the beaches of the eastern edge, where eddies and swirls produced odd currents and so many water slimes.

With all those slimes, the threat of oozes was always close at hand. But the professor wasn't really worried. Water oozes were a danger in every dungeon on Oceanside, but the danger was minimal.

According to Erick’s Monster Ecology class, as well as his dungeoneering Professor, Apell Calloway, different slimes needed to get to different levels, or to fulfill other requirements, in order to transform into an ooze. For water slimes, the level for a transformation was generally around level 45, and those kinds of levels just did not happen around Oceanside, which was naturally between 20 to 37. It was only when students died in their own dungeons to their own slimes that oozes came out, but even then, those oozes tended to rush for the water to hunt more prey. They were water oozes, after all, and the oceans were the largest source of food around.

(According to Monster Ecology, monsters leveled differently than Matriculated people. Mostly, they gained levels based on how many rads they ate, or how many essences they gained, or any of a hundred other ways. Age was a major factor for levels, for those monsters which didn’t lose physical power as they grew older, as well as how much they dominated others in their territory. Slimes were one of the monsters that fell into this category. Wyrms were another. Unicorns, were yet another. But really: there was no set path for monsters gaining levels like how there was for people.)

Erick’s own attempt at dungeoneering was not in the western cliffs, taking advantage of the mana river, or the eastern slope to the beaches, but in a relatively calm area north of Windy Manor, in a part of the forest where no one lived for a hundred kilometers. Whereas everyone in the class visited everyone else’s dungeons in order to learn from each other’s mistakes, the Headmaster and Calloway both agreed that Erick’s location should remain a secret. Oceanside was safe, but Erick was an archmage, and certain things were expected to remain hidden. This was fine with Erick. He had experiments to do.

- - - -

Erick stood in the forest with tiny Ophiel on his shoulder. The sun shone down from above, scattering light through leaves.

The land around here was vibrantly green and full of tall, thin trees. Occasional cracks in the ground broke up a monotony of small hills and slight rises, while a heavy undergrowth of ferns, grasses, flowers, and mushrooms accented the forest floor. This was not an ancient forest, barely tread by people where monsters ate other monsters. This was like any forest back on Earth, near where Erick lived his previous life. It was wild, for sure, but there was this feeling that civilization was just over the next hill, or around the bend. If Erick walked for ten minutes in any direction he felt like he would accidentally end up in someone’s backyard.

This was, of course, a failing on Erick’s part. Civilization was a hundred kilometers away and this might not have been an ancient forest, but there were monsters that lived around here.

‘Were’ being the operative word.

Right now, there was no one here except Erick, Ophiel, Poi, and the natural wildlife. Erick had already killed the larger monsters that roamed into this part of the forest with a quick application of [Domain of the Withering Slime], as he had done every time he came here for the last two weeks.

As the white sphere of Erick’s Domain peeled away like flaking ash, Erick gazed upon an inconspicuous bend in the forest floor near a larger tree than most, like the bend in the ground was a present waiting to be unwrapped. This is because it was. Erick glanced at his most recent notification. It had finally happened.