BT - Book I - Chapter 67 (Patreon)

Micah rolled his eyes.  Killing the son of a baron wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had, but if these two men insisted on dying there wasn’t much he could do but oblige them.  He opened his mouth to shout for the Luoca, but the axe wielding man beat him to the punch.

“Still Air,” Ari shouted the words as he ran toward Micah and Trevor.  A crystal the size of Micah’s thumbnail flared with a dirty grey light and mana gripped the area around him.

“Stop loafing around and get back here!,” Micah’s scream fell flat.

Micah frowned.  His wind shield had stopped Ari’s spell from completely encompassing him, but just outside its shimmering barrier, sound had stopped.  The axe warrior’s mana prevented the air from vibrating, instantly ending the thousands of tiny sounds such as dripping water or and the quiet static of the animals’ evolutions.

Instead the two opponents charged through the eerie stillness.  Micah switched tactics, casting poison fog.  Hopefully Trevor wouldn’t lose his armor, but so long as he had wind shield on and the animals were wrapped in their evolution cocoons, the spells only targets would be the interlopers.

The three burning foxes summoned by the thinner spellcaster quickly outpaced the two opponents, swelling in size until each was roughly the size of a horse.  One opened its mouth, unleashing a burst of flame that sailed in between Micah and his brother.

On instinct, Micah threw himself to the side, still mumbling the incantation to poison fog. His shoulder hit the dirt as he frantically rolled across the bumpy ground.  The spell effect from the fox exploded, spraying flames in every direction.  He could only hope that Trevor had managed to dodge the blast or that his armor let him take the blow without a major loss of hit points.

Micah sprang to his feet, taking advantage of his elevated body attribute to move directly from the floor into a half crouch.

It was a good thing too because none of Micah’s enemies had stood idle while he dodged.  His spear slammed into the side of one of the foxes heads, diverting its snapping jaws before they could close on his torso.

Finally, he finished poison fog, filling the entire lit area of the clearing with acrid mist.  It wouldn’t do much against the fire elementals that were dogging his every step, but if he could put the caster down with the poison, it would sever their mana connection.

That was the major difference between the summoning classes that contracted with elemental or spirits and a ritual caster.  Summoners needed to constantly infuse their contracted beings with mana, and the power of their summons were often dependent upon how much and what type of mana the caster could provide.  Even the spell like abilities the elementals attacked with would drain the caster’s mana pools.

Ritual summons on the other hand, were infused with all of the vital energy they would ever have when they were pulled from Elsewhere.  The only connection Micah had with his Luoca was the ritual that would force it to obey any commands it heard.

Usually, that made daemons much more powerful.  They could use any abilities they wanted, and even a weaks ritual caster could summon them so long as they had a powerful enough sacrifice and the will to bind them.  It did leave two downsides.  First, if a ritualist was silenced, there was no spiritual connection that allowed telepathic orders with the daemons unless the ritualist was as foolish as Micah.

Right now, that was a major problem.  If the Luoca were to arrive, the fight would be over in a matter of seconds, unfortunately it was busy tormenting some of the respawning undead elsewhere in the dungeon and feeding the two of them a steady trickle of experience.

The second issue was that, unlike an elemental, a daemon summoning ritual didn’t end with the death of its caster.  An unbound Luoca with multiple years worth of energy would be as much a natural disaster to the surrounding area as a hurricane or tsunami.

It was possible that Basil’s Cove had a powerful enough coalition of adventurers to bring it down, but Micah wasn’t even sure that they’d be able to catch it.  The Luoca could fly fast if it wanted to.  If he were to fall here today, it would likely be able to reap thousands of lives before the Royal Knights could respond with enough high level warriors to pin it down and destroy it.

Before now, that hadn’t seemed like much of a problem.  Micah was confident that he could handle most of what the local dungeons could throw at him.  Now?  It would be a dark kind of irony if his brother died at the hands of the daemon Micah had summoned.

For maybe the twentieth time, Micah wondered if the Church of Luxos was more overzealous than wrong in their concerns regarding the daemons.  Really, the more he thought about the beings, the more he suspected that there was a reason why their summoning wasn’t brought up in polite company.

Without even looking, Micah jumped, noting the sweep of a fox’s burning tail as it tried to trip him or entangle his legs.  Another fox lunged forward to bite him, instead meeting the head of his spear.

A tingle of mana triggered the enchantment, sawing the triangular blade down through the elemental's mouth and deep into its body.  The fox dimmed, its fires transitioning from a bright red to a dull blue as Micah fell back toward the ground.

Then it exploded.  Without a floor to brace himself against, Micah went flying.  The unnaturally still air buffeted him as he sailed through it before eventually landing on his back some twenty paces away.

The impact blasted the breath from his lungs, but Micah was back on his feet in seconds.  Turning back to the battle he sprinted to rejoin the fray, trying his best to make out the other combatants progress through the cloying poisonous mist.

Trevor and the axe warrior fought unimpeded.  Clearly the noble scion had some sort of protection against poison fog, but Trevor was holding his own through a combination of brilliant footwork and tightly controlled thrusts and sweeps.  The axe warrior on the other hand attacked with power far behind his level, but the grace of a drunken ox.

Each swing of the battle axe contained enough strength to shatter a stone pillar, but they were so poorly telegraphed that Trevor avoided them with an almost contemptuous ease.  Even as Micah watched, Trevor bent backwards at the waist as the axe passed over him before whipping forward and snaking his spear in under Ari’s guard, drawing blood from where it struck the warrior just below his bulging gut.

Ari snarled silently, and lightning began to dance around the blade of his axe.  With his next swing, Trevor dodged with his usual grace, but an arc of white and blue jumped from the axe and struck him.

Micah gasped as his brother fell to the ground convulsing.  Without thinking, he fired a pair of air knives at the figure hulking over his brother only to grimace as they shattered as soon as they hit the area under the influence of still air.

Of course.  If the spell had enough strength to stop the minute vibrations that passed sounds and sonic attacks, air magic that influenced air pressure would be useless unless it was strong enough to overwhelm the spell in its entirety.

Ari raised the axe above his head, blade still writhing with the barely contained electricity, prepared to deliver a coup de grace on Trevor’s helpless and twitching form.  Micah’s mind raced as he tried to find a solution.

He was too far away to intervene physically, but air magic was out.  Everything he knew either wouldn’t penetrate the powerful field of still air, or it would be so weakened by the spell that it wouldn’t be able to interrupt the fall of the axe.  As for wood magic?  All of his spells were melee based or area of effect.  Even then, Ari was already ignoring his only truly powerful wood spell.

Fuck.

He could heal Trevor later.

The axe reached its apex of its arc and began to travel downward, almost in slow motion.  Frantically, Micah began casting root spears.  It would probably hurt Trevor more than his attacker, but Micah was out of options.

As his mind shaped the familiar spell forms, his mouth only occasionally stirring itself to make an abbreviated incantation, something familiar stirred within Micah.  He could almost see the portion of the spell that governed the area impacted as well as the size of the spikes created.

The spell writhed in Micah’s mental grasp.  For a second, anxiety coursed through him as he feared losing control over the casting, but after a moment’s focus his concentration redoubled.

In his mind’s eye, the wooden spikes elongated, their tips turning into sharp and dense penetrators capable of punching through steel armor.  A flex of his will added backwards facing barbs that would rip and tear at any wound that they were removed from.

Micah’s focus shifted, narrowing the scope of the spell.  Rather than an entire field, it poured all of its mana into a barely five spaces across, more than doubling the length of the wooden spears as well as the speed with which they erupted from the ground.

Time seemed to resume its normal flow as the modified spell ripped itself from Micah’s outstretched hand.  Spike after spike slammed upward, catching Ari in his upper legs and lower torso.  His armor turned some away, but even more slipped through, striking uncovered areas or simply punching through the spots where his armor was thinner.

The axeman slumped slightly, his mouth working soundlessly as he screamed something indecipherable.  The attack disrupted him long enough for Trevor to roll jerkily to his feet.

Micah sprinted toward his brother’s defense, triggering another modified root spear at the summoner.  He could barely make the man out, staggering drunkenly through the poisonous fog, but the instant the spell took hold that changed.

Sunny was too woozy to even dodge.  The spears punched through the enchanted cloth armor the man was wearing like it wasn’t even there.  He shuddered, the barbed tips of the spikes penetrating entirely through his body, their bloody tips sticking out the other side.

The two remaining elementals froze.  Sunny spasmed once as the last of his hit points drained away to the combination of the spikes and poison.  Then his body hung limply, suspended on the spears of wood as the elementals faded away entirely.

The axeman slammed his weapon into the base of the spikes impaling him, breaking them off enough that he could pull himself free just as Micah arrived.  A glance revealed that Trevor was standing, barely, as he stumbled away.  He wasn’t in any imminent danger, but until Micah got a chance to cast augmented mending a couple of times, he was out of the fight.

Micah’s spear dug into the man’s leg just above the knee, opening a wound just below a wooden stake.  The man grunted, swinging his crackling axe at Micah.

Micah dodged to the side, gritting his teeth against the electricity that jumped from the weapon to his body.  For a second his vision went white and his muscles clenched, but then he spun away from the attack, whipping his spear around until its head slammed into his opponent’s hand.

Mana flowed through the spear, activating its enchantment and causing it to vibrate in his hand.  Ari’s hand disappeared in a blossom of blood, a collection of fingers falling to the cavern floor.  Once again his mouth opened to shout something, but then his eyes bulged.

Ari staggered backward, falling to his knees as his good hand clawed ineffectually at his throat while the other bled freely from the mangled mess it had become.

The man’s breath came in short gasps as the veins on his neck began to bulge.  Sweat beaded his forehead and began to pour down the axe wielder’s face.

Micah frowned, slightly, taking a single step backwards just in case his opponent was trying to lure him into some sort of trap.  The man looked up at him, panic in his eyes as he silently begged for mercy.

He took another step backwards, unsure as to what was happening.  Something hard, maybe a pebble or a weapon.  Micah glanced down, disgust briefly coloring his face.

It was one of Ari’s fingers.  A second later, Micah knelt down next to it, keeping his eyes on the struggling axe fighter.  His hand pawed around blindly before bringing his quarry up to eye level.

It was a ring.  Specifically a ring with the heraldry of House Hurden on it along with a powerful enchantment.

Micah, squinted in the gloom, trying to make out the runes inscribed in the ring.   His finger traced over the inscriptions, recognizing them as warding and mana transference enchantments.

He wracked his memory.  Micah had seen those specific runes before, he knew it.  It was just a matter of placing them.  For some reason Trevor’s armor kept coming to mind.

The sound of Ari collapsing face first to the ground, his face green and covered with black veins, drew Micah’s attention.  Sound was back.  That meant that either still air’s duration had elapsed or the fighter was dead.

“Shit,” Micah frowned looking back at the ring.  “That’s what it was.”

He sighed, dismissing poison fog with a thought.  “An enchantment of poison immunity.”