Nero Walker, Book 3 Ch.84 (199) (Patreon)

Specialist Howard heard Sergeant Blackwood’s voice over the command channel they’d set up for their unit, “Are you sure you can combat cast in these conditions?”

Mentally scoffing, Specialist Howard replied, “It shouldn’t be a problem, Sergeant.  Lower kobalds don’t exactly have a strong ethereal presence.  Even with their numbers, their harmonic force is practically non-existent.  I shouldn’t have a problem isolating what I need.”

Even over the command line, Specialist Howard could feel Sergeant Blackwood rolling his eyes at his exaggeration.  “If you say so.  Feel free to join the fight when you feel like it then.”

“Don’t mind if I do, Sergeant,” replied the specialist.

He was looking forward to getting back to what he was good at.  Recent events had become overly complicated for his tastes and he needed something familiar to settle his center.

He mentally chuckled at the thought of referring to recent events as ‘complicated’.  ‘More like utterly and obscenely perplexing,’ he remarked to himself.

After they’d nearly been killed in what was, at best, a poorly handled envelopment maneuver, he and the elites had ended up being saved by Lord Walker of all people.  Somehow, the little lord had already created his own little force of personal adherents while also enlisting the aid of penal conscripts… hells be damned penal conscripts!  Then, for some reason or another, the captain had agreed to join Lord Walker in an unsanctioned military action after filing an official complaint against Command for their ‘dishonorable conduct being unworthy of the oaths they’d sworn’, or something like that.  To be honest, the entire situation made absolutely no sense to him, and if he hadn’t personally seen it all happen, he wouldn’t have believed it.

Back, before this all happened, when the general had told him that this assignment would help him with his shortcomings.  He had thought the ‘strategic thinking’ he was supposed to learn would have had something to do with war.  After all, he was a war mage.  At the time, it had seemed like a reasonable conclusion to make.

But now he wondered if he had missed the general’s point entirely.

Was he supposed to have been learning something from Lord Walker?  Maybe Captain Angleton?  Had the general been hinting at something else?  Was it a warning about the attempt on his life?  Someone else’s life?  Everyone’s lives?  Or did the hint he missed have something to do with the recent ascension of Lord Walker to unique?  Possibly, it was something else altogether.

Unanswerable questions like these were why he hated being away from the battlefield.  Outside of combat, almost everything became too convoluted and chaotic for his liking.  He simply wasn’t suited to a life behind the walls among the schemers.

But out here, on the battlefield, none of that mattered.  Taking a deep breath, Specialist Howard relished the smell of war in the air.  It was pretty ironic that the only time he truly felt at peace was when was engaged with the enemy, surrounded by his fellow soldiers united in their singular purpose to eliminate all that opposed them.

Rather than worrying about Captain Angleton’s politicking, or whether or not someone from Command had actually tried to kill them, he was able to focus on the here and now.  The assignment he’d been given this time was straightforward and uncomplicated:  Stay with Sergeant Blackwood on the right flank… and kill the enemy.

With a gentle flex of his will, he separated his essence field from the emotional confluence being maintained by the shield bearers.  Once his harmonic signature was isolated, he reached out to collect essence to add to his essence shield.  He probably didn’t need more, but he’d drilled the practice so often that it was almost a reflex at this point.

Choosing to keep it simple, he decided to start off with a few ‘flame lances’ and one or two ‘sensory disruption orbs’.  Since the kobalds were all basically weaklings, even the big ones, he knew he didn’t need to empower his spell forms all that much.

After stamping the four spell forms above his head, he infused them with his center and latched them to his essence shield. Being careful not to disrupt the shield bearer's control of the ether, he harmonized with the essence waves and coaxed them into his ethereally carved spell forms, making sure that whatever essence he was pulling in came from the reserves he’d collected. Next, he allowed a trickle of his center to flow through his shield and into the runic patterns until it filled the spell-wrought constructs he was building.  When they were ready, he fired his spells into the kobald horde over the heads of the melee fighters.

With a grin, he watched as the flame lances blasted threw the kobald’s poorly constructed earth walls. The sensory disruption orbs did their jobs, and the lizards flailed around like fish denied the comfort of their watery home.

After waiting for the melee fighters to finish off the kobalds, he fired another volley.  Like a carefully choreographed dance, he watched events repeat themselves.

Again, and again, he fired his spells and watched the results while occasionally refilling his essence reserves to maintain his essence shield’s cohesion.  The only variation from his perspective was the result of his carefully monitored center expenditures.  After every volley, he adapted his spells slightly to improve their efficiency. The simplicity of this type of combat eased his worries and acted like a balm on his soul. Even with the violence and death all around him, he felt the world beginning to make sense again.

Unfortunately, that sense of peace and order didn’t last long.

Somewhere near the center of their formation, he felt the ether stir in a way he was surprisingly unfamiliar with.  Considering how much combat experience he had, the feeling of being caught off guard by what was happening raised the hairs on his neck and drained the blood from his face.

‘For the love of all that is good and just, what is it now?’ he wondered.

He was completely done with being caught off guard.  He was a hells be damned war mage.  If he couldn’t find a sense of normalcy out here in his element, he was well and truly screwed.

Spreading out his perception field, he tried to determine or at least locate what had happened.  He carefully studied the ether surrounding the shield bearers all along their lines.  Not finding anything out of the ordinary, he continued his sweep, analyzing the spells the kobalds were reigning down on them.  Narrowing his eyes in concentration, he continued his vigil while maintaining his fire support for the melee troops in front of him.

He knew he hadn’t imagined whatever it was.  Something had gone off like a bomb in the ether.  A great deal of essence was returned to the ether and he’d felt the shockwave.  Spells, constructs, and even rituals usually bled into the ether when they dissipated.  They DID NOT do whatever the hells that was.

‘There!’ he mentally shouted before his mind stumbled hard enough to almost lose control of his spell forms.

He had no words to describe what he’d just seen.  Somehow, that little unique, Lord Walker, had disrupted a constructed enchantment… at a distance… on his own.  He didn’t disenchant it, or even dispel it.  He SHATTERED it.  All that potential unraveled and returned to the ether alongside the essence it had infused.

He could only assume it was another example of whatever weird ability the young lord had to directly manipulate essence flows.  Calling it ‘unique’ was right.  And now that he’d seen the process happen with his own senses, he suddenly felt like he understood why so many random people were following him.  ‘If he keeps doing impossible shit like that, even I might want to stick around just to see what he’ll do next,’ he thought to himself.

—-

Frowning in annoyance, Nero used his mental projection in his essence field to examine the strands of various essences filling the ether.  He had figured it would be easy.  The flows weren’t exactly hiding, and he’d had no trouble finding what he’d needed before.  However, in retrospect, he should have known it wouldn’t be that simple.

When he cast a spell or took hold of what he needed, he usually didn’t have a problem grabbing whatever essence stream caught his fancy.  It was a simple matter of reaching out and taking hold of what he wanted.

But now that he was reversing the process, trying to put a spell form on top of the essence stream he wanted to use, he realized how impractical his idea actually was.  There was simply too much essence in the ether.  It was like the difference between using a needle to pull out a single stitch from a sweater and trying to actually stop a car on top of a dime.

Every single cubic inch of the ether had hundreds… thousands… maybe millions of strands of ether that he was only now noticing.  The closer he looked, the more he found, and the less he recognized.

‘This isn’t working,’ he told himself with a sigh.  He was thoroughly disheartened at having his totally brilliant revelation proven wrong and once again confirming that he had very little idea how anything around here actually worked.

No matter how ‘close’ he put the spell form he was building, the essence refused to join with his spell inputs.  There were so many strands of what he needed all over the place, it practically didn’t matter where he put his spell form.  It was always both right next to what he needed, and far enough away that the essence refused to cooperate without him.  The only option he could see was forcing it to with his own essence, otherwise known as his center.

‘It’s got to have something to do with my mind.  It’s the only thing that makes sense,’ he decided.

He was relatively sure that his soul was what gave him the ability to see and take hold of what he wanted in the ether.  And while it was only conjecture, he thought his mind might be what controlled his actual presence in the ether.  If he were able to carefully control how strong a hold he had on the essence streams, he might be able to ‘convince’ the essence to flow while not ripping it out of the control of everyone around him.

He’d done it in duels with Specialist Howie and in the fight with the mage that had tried to assassinate him.  Even when he was around Nick in the wilds, they’d been able to cast when they’d been right on top of each other.  Now that he was in the middle of so many people vying for control of the ether, the only difference was a matter of scale… probably.

‘I just have to look at the problem correctly,’ he told himself, refusing to admit defeat.

Swallowing the mouth sweats that resulted from his decision to experiment and possibly disrupt the shield over his head.  Nero, for once, thought about the consequences of his actions.

“No.  It’s not like we’re losing, or even taking losses.  I can experiment and figure this out when I’m not in danger of killing anybody,” he muttered.

Pulling back on his senses, he decided to hunker down and concentrate on bringing down the mud walls and looking for other ways to contribute.  He didn’t want his desire for relevance to get any of the dumb bastards who decided to follow him killed.

Mentally returning to the battle, he saw that the melee fighters were, in fact, already at another mud wall.  Reaching out, he did his thing and watched as the wall vanished into the ether.

Not having anything else to do, he thought about what he could practice without screwing up the good thing they had going on.  After mentally running through his options, the only thing he could come up with was practicing his mage armor.  As far as he knew, that didn’t require ripping the control of essence away from anyone.  All it required was for him to spread out his senses and scoop up whatever essence wasn’t being used at the moment.  The only time his control came into it was at the edges, and even then it wouldn’t affect anything.  It wasn’t like the essence inside his ‘bubble’ disappeared.  The flows were still there, still under the control of whoever had a grip on them.  They weren’t even replaced immediately, they were permanent fixtures in the ether.  It was like he was just using a net to pull in whatever wasn’t currently in use.  Worst case scenario, he got nothing and all he did was waste a little brain power.

Deciding to try it, he threw open his essence field and slowly grabbed hold of the edges.  His touch started off so light that he wondered if he was actually holding anything.  Watching carefully, he slowly increased his mental grip while paying close attention to see if what he was doing might start affecting the casters maintaining the shield.  Unsurprisingly, he didn’t see a single caster doing anything other than holding the shield together.  ‘If it were easy, everyone would be doing it,’ he consoled himself.

After getting a solid grip on whatever he could, he took a moment to confirm that he wasn’t affecting anyone else.  With a sigh, he mentally prayed to whatever gods they had here… maybe that chick Goddess Seline Dion or whomever.  “Please don’t fuck up.  Please don’t fuck up,” he muttered to himself over and over again.

With a slight flex of his will, he started pulling in his shield.  With a smile, he watched as the essence he stripped completely bypassed whatever flows were being controlled by the casters all around him.  It really was like a net, or maybe a big bubble that was shrinking in the water.  As fast as he pulled it in, the essence behind it filled up what he took.  What he was doing affected nothing, and the casters were none the wiser.

Chuckling merrily at his theory being successfully proven, he compressed the essence into a film around his body.  Now that it wouldn’t affect anyone, he took hold of it and exerted his authority over it.  Next, he had to fill it with his center so that he could give it purpose and create his mage armor.

Suddenly he stopped in his tracks, realizing what he was about to do.  He was basically about to cast a spell… just without a spell form.  So why couldn’t he use the essence he’d collected to cast a spell?

Resuming his glacial advancement alongside the rest of the troops, he angrily muttered, “I’m such a fucking idiot.”

He suddenly recalled how Specialist Howie had his spell forms floating alongside him.  It all became so simple now that he thought about it.  If the essence he was using to cast was attached to him, then the spell form he created from it would follow along.

It was almost too easy to carve his simplified fireball spell and attach it to his shoulder.  He didn’t even bother making the mage armor he had planned, he just relied on the essence field he had collected to power the spell.  He didn’t even have trouble funneling his essence through his field and attaching it to the spell form.  It was so disgustingly simple that he almost felt like screaming.

The last time he’d missed something this obvious was when he realized the division symbol was literally a symbolic representation of a fraction.  The two dots were just the places where the numbers were supposed to go.  It was NOT a proud collegiate moment for him.

Without any further ado, he launched his spell only to then scream, “FUCKEDY FUCK FUCK!”

Like an idiot, he’d anchored the spell right next to his head.  The fireball he launched completely charred the side of his face with the resulting heat.  Luckily, it fired fast enough to maintain the aim he’d set up, so no one other than him was hurt.

Of course, the pain was enough to cause him to lose control of the spell form, and the resulting pain from the miscast spiked into his brain as if he’d just walked in on his grandparents doing it.  Now, with a headache to go with the ruined half of his face, Nero stomped around like he was throwing a tantrum all the while screaming obscenities loud enough to cause everyone around him to flinch.  Luckily he was still in the middle of an active warzone, so his voice didn’t carry nearly far enough to pull that much attention to his plight.

No one who actually heard him dared interrupt his tirade until he was done.

After a bit, he managed to calm himself down enough to cast a healing spell or two.  But, it took more than a few to rebuild his cartilage, his inner ear, muscles, and skin.  The only thing he didn’t know how to fix was his hair.

“Are you alright, my lord?” asked the caster he’d been using as a walking assistant.

Looking up at them with a glare, he replied, “Just peachy.  I’m just figuring some stuff out.  Mind your business.”

Seeing the poor guy flinch and pretend to ignore him, Nero sighed.  This world was filled with people that made him feel like he was kicking puppies.  He didn’t even know why he felt bad, these idiots would kill each other in arenas, and execute people who broke the law when they weren’t enslaving them with magitech.  Not to mention base their entire society around combat and archaic nobility systems.  Yet, give them some sass and a little gentle ribbing and they folded like a blanket.

Running his hand through what was left of his hair, he said, “Look.  Sorry about that.  I didn’t mean anything by it.  I just… It’s like this.  I was experimenting with a spell and… well, you saw what happened.  You’re doing great, so just keep up the good work.  Don’t mind me.”

The wacko smiled at Nero like he’d just been offered a yearly bonus for exceptional service.  “Thank you, my lord.  Combat casting in conditions like this isn’t easy.  I never got the hang of it myself.  But, if you need anything, just let me know.  We’re almost at the kobald’s defensive tower.  You may want to prepare yourself.”

Nero looked up at what he could see, and sure enough the tower they’d been approaching now loomed over them like a city block-sized apartment building.  The earthen walls looked compressed enough to be called rock, and the almost black structure was filled with open platforms filled with snarling kobald casters reigning hell down on the shields over his head.

Looking back at the wacko caster walking next to him, he couldn’t stop himself from grimacing at the man’s smile.

‘How in the hell is his head not pounding after holding a shield through all that spell fire?’ he wondered.

With a sigh, he patted the man on his arm and returned to what he was doing.  ‘I really do have a lot further to go before I can consider myself a competent mage, don’t I,’ he complained miserably.

Setting aside his proclivity to accept his shortcomings and instead pull out a snack, Nero firmed his will and began gathering more essence so he could try again.  By the time they made it inside that monstrosity, he needed to be able to cast his spells without nearly killing himself.

‘Oh! The melee fighters are stuck at another mudwall… aaaannnd done,’ he said to himself happily before resuming his experiments.