BT - Book 1 - Chapter 58 (Patreon)

Micah sat just inside the entrance to the cave, enjoying the afternoon light as it 

poured into the opening.  He flipped another page in the Ageless Folio, frowning slightly.  He’d never bothered with using a ritual to improve his affinity before. There always was a reason to avoid them.  While he was in the Capital, his time wasn’t his own and the Royal Knights would’ve punished him for trying.  In the last timeline, there hadn’t been time.  Everyday was a headlong rush toward accumulating the power he thought he’d need to defeat the Durgh.

Now he had a plan.  Well, Micah smiled slightly.  The plan was ‘accumulate enough power to defeat Krosst’s lava titan in one on one combat.’  More of a goal than a plan really.

Still, as far as fulfilling goals went, extra affinity would go a long way.  Time magic provided powerful buffs, but it wasn’t the best at targeting anyone other than Micah or his companions.  Technically temporal transfer could be used to increase or decrease the level of temporal energy in an opponent, but ultimately it was a laughable idea.  Temporal energy was more powerful than mana by an order of magnitude making any transfer outside of a ritual incredibly inefficient.

Wood and air magic on the other hand, represented fields where he could tangibly increase his combat potential.  Of course, both weren’t terribly efficient against Krosst’s fire magic.  Wood based defenses tended to be weak against fire attacks and air attacks tended to be weak against fire defenses.  It wasn’t a hard and fast rule, but Micah didn’t have a lot of hope that air knife or pressure spear would do much to the tower of molten rock that the durgh khan could bury himself in.

If he was going to fight Krosst, it would need to be with his spear.  That meant getting close enough to the towering magma avatar to try and actually stab the durgh.  Even Micah’s luoca took a fair amount of passive damage from fighting the khan.  

Micah’s magic kept it from being hit more than once or twice, but unsurprisingly the khan’s blessing produced enough ambient heat to damage his opponent simply for approaching.  If he actually meant to fight the durgh, he needed constant and mana efficient healing which meant a high wood affinity.

Unfortunately the books he’d copied from the Royal Academy library were limited.  They described enough of the first tier rituals that he’d be able to piece them together given a little time.  The passages on astrological conditions and the specific portions connecting the ritual to the affinity in need of enhancement were scant to say the best, but that was how almost every piece of ritual magic was recorded.  

There were just too many variables to record all of them so scholars focused on the core of the ritual.  Beyond the introductory primers, any competent ritualist was expected to research and adapt the ritual to the specific circumstances under which they planned to use it.

The biggest problem was that even the first tier required a significant amount of energy.  Either he was going to need to sacrifice a dungeon boss to complete the ritual, or Micah would need to find an alternate source of energy.

As for the second tier?  The books contained hints.  More a general description of reagents and half of the runes that the author of one older grimoire wrote for her mentor when she helped him enact the casting.  He wouldn’t quite have to build the entire ritual from the ground up, but it was close enough to give him a headache.

He leaned back, massaging his temples in a vain attempt to alleviate the pain behind his eyes.  At least he had an idea for the first tier.  He wasn’t quite high enough level to raid the grove, the dryads could put up one hell of a fight, but as soon as they had access to the old growth trees, it would solve their energy problem.

Sudden pain flashed through Micah’s ankle as a pair of razor sharp teeth broke through his skin, drawing two beads of blood. 

“Shit!” He yelled, dropping the Folio as he reached down to slap his hand over the sudden injury.  The ancient book disappeared into motes of light the instant Micah’s focus lapsed, lighting up the cave entrance in a rainbow of scintillating light.

A pair of cheerful yellow eyes looked up at him as the panther cub scurried away from his foot, cocking its head at him as Micah cast mending on the stinging bite.  

Cursing softly he rubbed his now healed foot, trying to massage the phantom pain out of it.  The action did little more than rub the two drops of blood around as the ball of fur stared at him expectantly.

“Are you hungry?” He asked the knee high cat, straightening his body and standing up, the Folio forgotten.  The monster thrummed happily, walking over to Micah and rubbing itself against his shins.

“Did you feed the panther?” Micah shouted, turning to the cave entrance.  Absentmindedly, his left hand began scratching the cub behind its flicking ears.

The buck snorted back, not bothering to rise from where it lay in the clearing, soaking up the last of the afternoon light.  Micah stared at it for a couple of breaths, waiting for it to respond in some meaningful way.  Instead, the cub mewed plaintively at him, bumping its nose into his calf before moving its mouth dangerously close to his ankle once more.

He knew it didn’t want to seriously hurt him, but once the cat realized that he could heal himself it certainly became a lot more free about expressing its displeasure in physical ways.  On one hand, Micah tried to look on the positive side of things.  This behavior was more or less confirmation that the panther was intelligent in the same way the stag was.  With enough training and experience it could evolve.  Given how dangerous an ordinary shade panther was, he was excited to see what the mischievous little ball of fluff would turn into.

On the other hand, its needle teeth hurt.  A lot.  He was still trying to figure out a way to train the panther to vocalize when it had concerns rather than nipping him, but even with his years of experience and entire libraries worth of books, Micah couldn’t find a reliable method of training a cat.

“Come on,” Micah begged the deer.  “We both agreed to take turns taking care of the newbie when we pulled her out of the den.  Trevor’s barely been around to help and I’m pretty sure that I’ve done almost all of the hunting for her and you won’t even walk to the riverbank with her when she needs to use the bathroom.  I swear I’m the one doing all the work around here.”

It sniffed the air before laying its head on the grass and closing its eyes, drawing a sigh from Micah.  He knew it could hear him, it just chose to ignore his plight.

He stepped to the side, shaking his head, as the panther cub playfully swatted at his leg.  It looked up at him again before headbutting his knee once more.

“Calm down little guy,” he smiled at the oversized cat.  “We’ll get you fed.  The last boar is getting a little rank, what do you say we go hunting?  We could both do with a little bit of exercise and some fresh meat certainly wouldn’t hurt.”

It purred at him, walking out of the cave, it’s tail straight up and twitching slightly.  Just after it passed the threshold it looked back at Micah, cocking its head quizzically.

He chuckled as he grabbed his spear from its crude wooden rack on the wall.  The cub had almost doubled in size since the deer and him had taken it in after orphaning it.  Mostly due to eating almost half of its body weight daily.  Even the amount it was eating couldn’t properly explain the panther’s growth spurt.  Micah suspected that it was gaining some experience from the kills when it joined him on a hunt, but there wasn’t really a way to be sure without actually viewing her status.

At first the stag had helped with the hunting, but Micah was pretty sure that it had grown annoyed with the cub’s constant attempts to play with it.  As cute as the little girl was, having a ball of fluff and claws pounce on your back while you practiced spear forms was a jarring experience to say the least.  

If he weren’t confident that the cub would be capable of hunting on its own soon, Micah might have started to resent it as well.  After all, now that Trevor was establishing himself with the Lancers, rearing the baby panther took up a considerable amount of his time.  Time that he needed to be spending on leveling and refining his skills if he wanted to actually fight toe to toe with Krosst.

As soon as the cat saw him leave the cave, it dashed into the forest, leaping from the ground onto a nearby branch in one sinuous motion.  Micah shook his head and smiled at her.  

That was why he was willing to waste time on the cub.  It wasn’t even a year old yet, but already it moved with the deadly grace of a consummate predator.  With a little more practice, it’d be a capable combatant, and hopefully it’d help him solve the problem of the heavily regulated dungeons.

Micah’s face quirked into a half smile as he ran through the forest, trying to keep up with the fleeting shadow of his new companion.  Things had gotten out of hand in his last time line and he’d become a bit reckless.

After his semi-retirement to work on enchanting, a weight had dropped from him.  Each and every day wasn’t a constant nightmare of work and struggle.  He’d had time to come up for air and reflect, and those reflections led to some unpleasant realizations.

Between isolation and mania, he’d spent most of the last time-line critically depressed.  He hadn’t gotten over the original sacking of Basil’s Cove let alone what the Royal Knights had forced him to do.  Rather than trying to confront those traumas, he’d simply tried to outwork them.

Rationally, it didn’t even make sense.  Micah had used augmented mending too many times.  There was a pattern to these things, and it always involved curing the underlying infection before you healed over a wound.  Otherwise, the disease just festered, poisoning the entire body.

That was what Micah had done.  Jumping from emergency to emergency, he’d promised himself that he’d address what he’d been through when he got a chance, but in retrospect he could see what those promises were.  Avoidance.

Instead the scars on his soul and psyche were neglected and festered.  By the time things came to a head, he’d been weighed down with a fatalism that bordered on suicidal.   

Now that he had the perspective to look back on his actions, Micah couldn’t help but cringe.  Needless melodrama aside, he’d taken insane risks.  Raiding dungeons at night when any guild member could have ran into and reported him?  It wasn’t as dumb entering Elsewhere with his physical body, but it wasn’t that much smarter.

He ducked under a branch and skidded to a stop, noticing the flicking tail of the panther from a nearby tree.  A couple dozen paces upwind from them, one of the forest’s many boars was rooting through some foliage, searching for its dinner.

Micah smiled as he shifted his grip on his spear.  He shifted forward through the bushes, eyes on the pig. 

Soon the panther would be big enough to contribute in combat, but even now, its nose was a valuable addition to the team.  Unless someone had a blessing enhancing their senses, they’d be able to escape before any other human even knew they were there.

With an exhaled breath, Micah cast plant weave trapping the boar long enough for his thrust to find it.  Hot blood poured down its flank as he stepped to the side, letting the cub finish it off.