Nero Walker, Book 3 Ch.74 (189) (Patreon)

Academian Quincy stood in the middle of their little formation. Scholars Idrius, Mortem, Yarborow, Vaxas, and Dramit stood alongside him on his left and right. All of them were in their combat robes. Yet, only Academian Quincy and Scholar Idrius had enough personal skill and reserves to maintain an enchantment connection, allowing them to use their preferred robes. Unfortunately for the others, the essence in the ether was simply too thin to maintain anything stronger than the basic enchantments found in the weaker cities of Oglivarch.

So, while Academian Quincy and Scholar Idrius were both resplendent in their shining robes lined with glowing arcane runes, the other looked like elitist assholes watching the battle without even bothering to change out of their robes.

Yet, none of them were complaining. They were all simply too excited to see Lord Walker in action. Even though they’d seen him fight through memory engrams, seeing it in person allowed them to use all of their senses to figure the young man out. Every one of them had spent more than a few hours trying to discern the thought process behind some of Lord Walker’s actions, not to mention just ‘how’ he did what he did. So, now that they had been given the opportunity to see him fight in person, they were simply too excited to worry about how vulnerable they were without their normal accessories… or how ridiculous they looked.

Standing several paces behind the support section of the lines, they watched in confusion as Lord Walker looked around as if he were deciding whether or not he was actually going to participate. Not knowing what to say in response to his odd behavior, they stood in silence despite their isolated mental connection being hosted by Scholar Idrius for convenience.

The first one to break was unsurprisingly Scholar Vaxas. He had always been one of the more impatient members of their little infiltration team.

“What’s he doing?” he asked, his irritation at not getting to see their new lord doing anything clearly on display.

Ignoring him, they all continued to observe Lord Walker with every one of their senses, both ethereal and physical.

“Perhaps he is unhappy about how small a section of the line he’s been given?” posited Scholar Mortem.

Mentally scoffing, Scholar Yarborow replied, “I doubt it. They’re lucky to take over what they have. They’re untested, and can barely field six teams right now. Until he grows his forces, this is the best he can expect.”

Not missing a beat, Scholar Idrius added her own opinion to the discussion. “I believe he is just soaking in the experience. This is his first large battle from behind the front lines. Before he was on the line, fighting in melee. Now that he is acting as a support mage, he probably…” she trailed off in stunned silence, not surprising anyone with her inability to continue.

They all marveled at what they were seeing. Right in front of their eyes, they saw Lord Walker copying a spell-form from the mage a few paces to his right. Granted, it was a simple tier 1 combat spell form, one used in situations just like this to offer support while not requiring much center. The spell form was intended for low-level mages to aid their melee counterparts during long engagements while maintaining their essence reserves. Yet, despite its simplicity, Lord Walker had not cast a single spell that could explain how he was doing what he was doing. The only reason they could even tell that he was copying the spell was because he was doing it so slowly, so carefully, and that the spell form was so universally known.

Normally, mages would cast observation spells in order to see what other mages were casting. It took skill and practice to identify someone else’s spell during combat. In certain cases, normally outside of combat, an observer could follow a spell form being created. But it required the caster to open themselves up to the observer, along with no small amount of effort on the observer's part. Even then, it usually required the caster to carve their spell form slowly, basically screaming their intentions into the ether. It was a matter of intention. Without someone intending to show their spell form, an observer should only see a general outline of a spell, not nearly enough to copy it so easily. What Lord Walker was doing wasn’t necessarily impossible, but it was the equivalent of watching a person casually walk across a tightrope while blindfolded…. Backwards…. And during a snowstorm. Or perhaps a better comparison would be finding someone who can read what’s written on a page, while both the page and the ink are the same color.

Usually, to learn a spell, a mage would be shown the spell form intentionally. No one in their right mind would try and copy an active spell. It just wasn’t done. There were piles of research on how to best impart a spell form in a way so someone else could see it. Countless studies have refined the art of teaching into a well-developed system. One which, over time, has become an unchallenged common practice universally accepted across all of the known world.

Scholar Mortem whispered over the connection, “Are you all seeing this?”

“He didn’t cast any observation or perception spells did he?” asked Scholar Yarborow.

“I didn’t see any, but I might have missed it,” replied Scholar Vaxas.

Interrupting their conversation, Academian Quincy replied happily, “No. He didn’t. He’s simply watching the woman cast the spell and copying the ethereal echo her center is causing in the ether. It’s like he’s a walking, talking, ethereal essence scanner.”

Scholar Idrius, sounding impressed, replied, “I know that it is theoretically possible to do what he’s doing. But seeing it in person is quite something, isn’t it?”

Scoffing, Scholar Yarborow replied, “Yeah… it’s something all right.”

Academian Quincy watched closely as Lord Walker continued to toss his spells over the front lines into the charging kobalds. He narrowed his eyes in interest when Lord Walker paused, holding up his spell form as if he were unhappy with it for some reason.

Suddenly, Lord Walker thrust out his hand and a spike of acid launched itself into the distance, skewering then exploding inside a kobald’s shoulder. Apparently not satisfied, he lowered his hand again and stared at it for almost a full minute. Then, without warning, he thrust out his hand again. This time, one after another, balls of acid shot forward, flying into the kobalds like a series of essence charges.

Scholar Yarborow whispered, her voice somewhere between confusion, terror, and awe, “Did he just create a spell variant for the spell form he JUST learned? How is that even possible?”

Academian Quincy replied quickly, “I believe he somehow grafted the infusion and stabilization sections of the spell form onto one the ‘stone-spike’ variants he created during his time in the wilds.”

Everyone stood in silence, letting Academian Quincy’s simple explanation sink in. Once again, it was conceivably possible to understand what Lord Walker had done, but it was so totally incomprehensible to them that anyone could actually do it.

Almost a whisper, Scholar Idrius hissed, “The Walker’s legend will be talked about for ages.”

While no one replied with words, their essence fields all began leaking their pride and conviction at being proven right in choosing to follow the young man.

—--

Nero giggled, actually giggled, as his spell form snapped into place. In his perception, the cobbled-together spell form looked like a misshapen tattoo that warped due to expanding back fat. Nevertheless, it worked, and that’s all that mattered.

He launched multiple rounds of acid without having to reform the spell form from scratch. He’d changed it from a one-off, into an automatic. He couldn’t stop himself from giggling like a madman.

Yet, he felt his enthusiasm dim a bit when he witnessed the damage his spell had wrought on the kobalds. His acid balls had ripped through their forces like the aftermath of biological warfare. Instead of a few dead and injured kobalds, the entire section he’d targeted was filled with crawling kobalds struggling to move forward while their skin and gear melted off them. It was gruesome enough to cause his giggle to die in his throat. The sickening sight was nearly enough to cause him to start gagging in revulsion at what he’d done.

‘OK. Magic is fun and all, but I need to set some boundaries. I don’t want to turn into some kind of sadist,’ he told himself grimly.

After taking a deep breath to center himself, he began targeting groupings of kobalds with the sole intention of aiding the melee fighters. That was his job, and he forced himself to focus on it. He refused to get lost in the vagaries of magic. He was an adventurer, not a dickhead, and he needed to remember that.

With his focus retasked to his duty, and his desire for new magic temporarily sated, he let his senses spread out and looked over as much of the battlefield as he could. While he had no trouble covering the entire section his wackos were holding, he couldn’t see much more than that.

He remembered being in the wilds, and the feeling of being able to look at so much more than what his eyes could see. But here, without the trees and other obstructions in the way, his impressive magical field of vision wasn’t all that much greater than what his eyes could show him.

So, he returned to an old standby and used a simple spell to raise himself a little platform to augment his height. Since the shield above him was taller than a basketball hoop, he had plenty of room to maneuver. And, since the reworked spell he’d appropriated now didn’t require an arc for him to throw it, he figured it was common sense to give himself a better firing position.

Now standing on a 4 ft. tall block of dirt, Nero continued his assault on the incoming kobalds. Wave after wave of enemies were pelted by his acid balls, each causing the kobalds who were hit to fall easily before the wackos' blades in front of him. Just like the last time he’d faced them, he could see that their attack didn’t make any sense.

Looking around, he wondered if they were trying to reopen the portal with all their sacrifices. He could see them amassing in the distance, the shamans and taller kobalds corralling the little ones and sending them off to die. He could even see a few surviving siege wyrms being herded into attack formations. What he didn’t see was any sort of ritual that could explain the idiotic charge they were doing.

While he continued to pelt them with acid, he noticed Nick a few teams over from him. Focusing his senses on the man, Nero watched him form some kind of fireball in his hands before launching it like a volleyball over the lines. Nero paused his attacks to stare at the man in disbelief. He couldn’t understand the point of that kind of delivery system. Who in their right mind developed a spell that was launched by underhand ‘serving’ it into the enemy?

But, Nero couldn’t deny its effectiveness. In front of the area Nick was manning, there were large sections of earth that were burning merrily and causing the kobalds to struggle to find a safe path forward. Nero could even tell that Nick was doing his best to not completely cut them off. Instead, his goal seemed to be to make them slow down and approach in a single file before they met their end via the fighter’s blades in front of him.

Nero used his senses to look closely at what Nick was casting, but it was too far away to really see what his friend was doing. But, he wasn’t discouraged. He easily remembered a variation of napalm that he’d developed. So, he shouldn’t have much issue copying and improving on Nick’s dumbass spell.

Halting his acid barrage, he took a moment to admire how efficient the spell he was in action. After a good long while of constant casting, his center reserves were barely touched. He seemed to be able to cast this support spell all day if he managed to keep his concentration up.

Deciding to chance it, he altered the part of the spell he decided to call the element designation. He had no idea ‘why’ this part of the spell did what it did, but he knew that it did, so that was enough for him. Not bothering to worry about the details, he inserted the ‘sticky fire’ part of the other spell he’d copied from… somewhere.

‘Wasn’t this one of War Mage Howie’s spells?’ he wondered, not really caring all that much about where he’d seen it.

Crossing the fingers on his left hand for good luck, he carved a new spell form and admired the poorly shaped design forming itself in the ether. If the previous spell looked like a melted pictogram, this one looked like a jigsaw puzzle piece solely created to cause headaches. It took him three tries, and a good bit of finagling before the spell form decided to snap itself together. But, in the end, his desire for a ball-spitting napalm delivery system wouldn’t be denied.

Smiling at the resulting spell form floating in his hand, he stretched out his arm and unleashed hell… kind of.

For some reason, the spell did NOT work as intended. Luckily, he managed not to hurt anyone other than kobalds, but it was a closer thing than he’d like to admit. What was supposed to be a ball spitter had somehow become a flamethrower.

The moment he tried to launch a sticky ball of fire, the spell form kept drawing essence while launching the collated and converted essence into the air. Nero couldn’t stop himself from flinching in surprise when a large arch of burning goo flew over the front lines and started exploding on contact with whatever got in its way. The explosions weren’t very large, but they did spread out the flaming goop in a five-foot circle wherever it landed. And it landed… everywhere.

In awe of what he was doing, he ran the line of fire across the area in front of him like he was watering the lawn. Before long, the entire area in front of his team was burning with two-foot-tall flames that seemed to both be ‘there’ and also ‘not there’. Whatever the fire was, it certainly wasn’t natural, and there wasn’t enough fuel on the ground to ignite a natural flame as a result of his magical fire.

Cutting off his spell, he frowned in thought at what he was seeing. He could tell that the flames were ‘there’ with his senses. He could ‘see’ it with both his eyes and his perception field. Yet, at the same time, something about them looked… fake. ‘Perhaps I didn’t use enough center,’ he thought, while completely ignoring the kobalds trying to force themselves through the flames and catching fire as a result of their persistence.

Trying again, he put a little more center into his spell form and launched another stream. He covered another few rows, back and forth across the area in front of his team's line. The result left him with more questions than answers.

Instead of two-foot-tall flames, there was now a five-foot-tall wall of fire cutting off the kobalds from getting to his team. The entire section in front of them was burning. What few kobalds were brave enough, or stupid enough, to force themselves through the fire immediately collapsed once they made it through the flames.

As a result of his ‘brilliant’ casting, the entire front line turned around and looked at him in confusion. They stood there with their bloody weapons, not knowing what they should do now that no kobalds were making it to them.

Nero, trying to buy himself some time to figure out what he should say, simply stood tall on his pillar of dirt and shrugged in commiseration with them.

Figuring that he had to say something, he looked down from his perch and shouted, “Don’t worry, the flames won’t last long. I’ll figure something else out in a bit. Rest assured, everything is under control. I just wanted to give you guys a break and see if you needed any healing or anything. Um… so, do you need healing or anything?”

The team he was working with exchanged a few puzzled looks with each other before turning back to him. The man who’d been assigned as his team leader shouted up at him, “No, my lord. We’re doing well. We can return to the fighting whenever you’re ready.”

Nero, fighting the urge to fidget under their stares, raised his hand and gave them a thumbs up in appreciation for all their hard work.

Before he could give the weird lull in battle any more thought, he heard Cathleen’s voice in his head causing him to flinch as if he’d been smacked.

Her anger suddenly being clearly transmitted, he heard her shout, “What the hell are you thinking? Don’t force them to bunch up. The goal is to allow them to spread out and attack us without mobbing us.”

Nero replied dumbly, “Uh… yeah. You got it. Sorry. Won’t happen again.”

He could almost feel her rolling her eyes through the connection before it muted itself again.

While his team turned back to the battle, waiting for the flames to die down and the kobalds to resume their charge, Nero took the opportunity to look over the battlefield.

He could tell that the lines had moved forward a bit, but not as much as he thought they would. It seemed like there was some kind of unspoken agreement for the lines to maintain their pace. After chalking it up to some kind of weird groupthink resulting from the overlapping essence fields, he took another look at the kobalds, trying to determine what their plan could be. He refused to believe any sentient creature was dumb enough to commit suicide in such a complicated and ridiculous manner.

With his elevated position, along with the rising angle of the mountain, he had a pretty good view of the entire battlefield. Or at least the portion he could see until the edges fell off behind obstructions.

A few football fields away, his attention was grabbed by a mass of kobalds racing across the spell-assaulted area between their forces. Rather than run across the open area in clumps, these kobalds maintained their horde. It looked like a long, thick line of kobalds shooting out from their forces like a lizard-filled laser.

Nero turned to see a bunch of soldiers riding horses like they were racing to beat the kobald rush. Realizing they must be some kind of relief force, meant to reinforce the line wherever it seemed like it might buckle, Nero suddenly understood what was happening.

The constant assault of weak kobalds was merely meant to slow down the human advance toward their position. It was simply a buffering maneuver. The crazy bastards were sending their weakest to their deaths so that their stronger forces could muster organized assaults on the lines. He assumed it must be both incredibly effective and terribly wasteful. Not to mention completely classist and evil.

Nero’s attention was caught by the team in front of him getting ready for battle. He looked over to see the flames he’d sprayed everywhere finally going out. As they died down, he saw a horde of kobalds grouped up and ready to renew their assault. Rather than coming one at a time, it looked like he’d accidentally herded them into an ad hoc formation. ‘Well, shit,’ he thought to himself.

Feeling the need to apologize, he shouted a little too loudly, “My bad guys! Don’t worry though, I got this!”

Raising his hands in front of his chest, he focused on creating two acid ball-spitting spells in each of his hands. While it took some effort to keep them both fed with his center and active, it wasn’t that bad considering he wasn’t trying to maintain the complicated version of his mage armor.

Firming his jaw, and dropping into a very poor imitation of a horse stance, he held out his hands and let loose with his magic. He imagined himself looking totally badass while standing on his pillar and dual-casting his acid machine guns.

He managed to keep his positive attitude for all of 10 seconds before he flinched away from what he was seeing. The dense grouping of kobalds made his acid explosions so much worse than he’d expected. He’d also clearly invested way too much center in what he was casting since the kobalds were practically melting in front of him. Between the dying screams and the omnipresent sound of ‘hissing’ from the acid, he felt the bile in his throat giving him mouth sweats and reminding him of the time when he was forced to dissect a pig in his high school biology class.

Dropping his hands after he cleared out the field, he heard an angry voice coming from below his pillar on his left.

“Seriously!?! How do you expect us to pick all that up?” the man shouted. He stood there with his hands on his hips in front of a few people pushing a corpse cart.

Nero realized they must be the ones in charge of clearing the kobalds off the field, and immediately felt like he’d accidentally knocked over a display at the supermarket. These poor bastards were just doing their jobs, and he had to go and make it so much worse for them.

Thinking quickly, Nero reached into his personal space and pulled out one of the shovels he’d grabbed in case he needed it at some point.

Tossing it down to the man, Nero shrugged awkwardly and said, “Sorry man, I’ll try and keep them ready for easy pickup going forward. I’ll admit that my spell may have gotten away from me a bit. You can use this to scoop them up. Don’t worry about returning it, I’ve got a spare. Thanks for all your hard work.”

Nero finished with as charming a smile as he could muster under the circumstances. However, in response to the gift of his shovel, all he got in return was some cursing and the man stomping off.

Although he felt bad about it, some of his guilt was alleviated by the fact that the man DID, in fact, take the shovel with him when he stormed off.