BT II - Chapter 11 (Patreon)

The spear dragged through the dark rock, giving off a keening whine as the sonic enchantment crumbled the stone like sand.  Carefully, Micah lifted it.  Around the sleeping Maarikava was a gargantuan circle carved into the mountainside, sigils inscribed every three to four paces.

Micah planted the butt of the spear into the rocks reaching up to wipe the sweat and grime from his face with the left sleeve of his pajamas.  The formerly grey, now almost brown fabric rasped against his forehead, aggravating his growing sunburn.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much cover on the island.  A handful of palm trees here and there weren’t enough to fight off the sun’s oppressive glare, and the constant reflection from the Emerald Ocean didn’t help matters.

Luckily, Micah had been able to find enough coconuts to keep himself full and hydrated, but the rich milk had played havoc with his system.  More than once he found himself using low level healing magic on himself to cure the omnipresent indigestion caused by his limited and unhealthy diet.

His high body attribute and hit points kept the combination of sun and malnutrition from being a serious threat, but at the same time, left Micah feeling absolutely miserable.  He glanced longingly back at the ocean, wanting more than anything to wash his one set of grime covered clothing, but knowing that the salt residue in the fabric would only make his problems worse.

With a sigh, he turned back to the Maarikava as it lay on the slope, surrounded by the intricate ritual circle that he’d spent days drawing.  Her chest rose and fell gently, almost invisible due to the glare of the sun sparkling off of her azure scales.

“Here I am working my ass off while you just nap all day,” Micah said with a chuckle as he checked over the runes inscribed into the mountainside one last time.  “I swear to the Sixteen, it’s like working with Trevor all over again.”

He straightened his back, ignoring the sting as the movement dragged the sweat-stained fabric of his pajamas across the abrasions covering his body.  With sure movements, he walked into the center of the circle, picking up the other object of his focus and admiring it in the morning sun.

It had taken him almost a day to craft the suit of armor and greaves.  Despite his best efforts, the end product was the crudest set of lamellar he’d ever seen that could actually be described as such.  Dozens of the Maarikava’s scales overlapped, creating a long shirt and shin length pants that would have been unreasonably heavy due to their redundant overuse if it weren’t for the plates’ almost supernatural lightness.  Jutting out from the armor’s shoulders were some of the Maarikava’s smaller fangs, razor sharp and inscribed with intricate runework.

Aesthetically, the project would make him look like some sort of barbarian prince.  Crude, violent, and draped with the trophies of his fallen foes.  Still it would be more than enough to keep him protected for the years to come.

Micah snorted, setting the armor down in a depression he’d carved in the rock earlier that morning.  The armor wasn’t quite as mobile as he would like, but at the end of the day, he wasn’t a smith.  Micah was an enchanter, and the extra layers of scales gave him even more room to inscribe enchantments and upgrade the existing runes that the Maarikava had actually developed.

He walked over to the major groove he’d excavated from the mountainside, connecting the Maarikava itself to the ritual circle and intricate runes surrounding it.  Carefully, Micah activated the sonic enchantment on his spear and stuck it into the stone, drawing another channel from the original and connecting it with the bowl where he’d placed the armor.

With a nod at his handiwork, he returned to the Maarikava, spear still humming in his hand.  He cocked his head apologetically before lifting the spear.

“Sorry about this by the way,” Micah muttered, touching the spearhead against the sea serpent’s neck where he had carefully removed her protective armor.  “If I had any other reagents to use, I would have tried to find a way to do all of this with only temporal energy.  Unfortunately, I’m stuck on an island in my pajamas so my options are limited.”

He pressed forward, the humming triangle of metal parting the monster’s lavender flesh and drawing a squirt of dark purple blood.  The steaming liquid landed in the pre-carved channel, and almost immediately it was absorbed by a rune inscribed into the stone.

Micah jogged away from the Maarikava, clearing the ritual circle as the runes began to do their work.  One sigil after another in the blood groove began to glow green.  Then the magic reached up, turning the irregular arterial spurts of blood into a steady and regular stream that filled the channel.  The blood began to glow as it split, a small portion of it filling the depression with the armor and bathing the scales.

The rest flowed toward Micah, spreading out through the intricate network of canals and inscriptions to fill the entirety of the ritual circle.  Barely five minutes after he started, every rune he had spent the last day carving was burning green as the purple blood writhed.

He glanced upward, checking to ensure that the sun was directly above him.  With a nod, he summoned the Ageless Folio, beginning the first arcane phrases of the ritual.

Almost immediately, the blood began to flow, turning the glowing network of carvings into a crude circulatory system as the liquid pushed from right to left.  Flickers of energy discharged up into the air, forming mirages of red and blue above Micah as he continued into the next stanza.

Barely two minutes into the ritual, his throat hurt like hell.  Dehydration, only slaked by coconut milk had weakened his throat, but the strange syllables called for by the casting itself tore at his vocal cords.

Micah ignored the iron taste of blood as he continued.  Despite the armor’s crude design, the actual enchantments were the most complex he’d ever attempted.  Even when he’d crafted the Astria in his past life, he hadn’t layered anywhere near this many powerful enchantments together.

Frankly, with ordinary materials and a common power source, what he was attempting would be utterly impossible.  Even if Micah doubled his enchanting and arcana skills, the current project would have been doomed to immediate failure.

Of course, that was under the best of circumstances.  Micah had slept maybe ten hours in the last four days.  The rest of his time was spent feverishly researching and setting up the ritual for the enchantment.  Right now, his eyes were bloodshot and his body was weaker than it had been since he first woke up after using blessed return.

A wave of his hand sent a pulsing tide of silver temporal energy fountaining up into the air from the Maarika.  It sprinkled down like rain over the rest of the ritual, tempering the fiery glow of the burning lifeforce and bringing the enchantment back under Micah’s control.

He wiped a trickle of blood from the side of his mouth, smiling grimly before he moved on into the next phase of the ritual.  Temporal energy was the secret.  The Maarikava was centuries old, a beast of legend with awe-filled rumors whispered about it in every tavern around the Emerald Ocean.

Her blood held enough power for Micah to create a strong enchantment, but the weight of her mythos, the time and impact that the Maarikava had on Karrell’s timeline?  Given the proper materials, that had enough juice behind it for him to craft an artifact of legends.

At the end of the day, as skilled an enchanter as he was, Micah was beyond the limits of his ability, but it hardly mattered.  The Maarikava’s scales were almost the perfect medium for fire and water enchantments, the two magics were literally woven into her very being.  Between the force of her temporal energy, life force and the quality of the scale and bone, he’d be damned if the armor didn’t serve its purpose.

The Maarikava’s remaining eye opened, cloudy and sightless as she struggled against the effects of coma.  She tried to lift her body from the mountainside only for green, burning chains to flash into view, rooting her to the stone.

Another swipe of Micah’s hand summoned a fountain of silver energy as he mined more temporal energy from the creature.  She mewled in distress, shrinking visibly as his magic drained years from her body to power the ritual.

More words, arcane and alien, tore themselves from Micah’s throat as he shored up the elements of the ritual that kept the Maarikava restrained.  The green chains flared brighter, searing brands into the creature’s flesh and remaining scales.

He turned to the side, spitting out a mouthful of blood from his cracked and bleeding throat before twisting his hand into an intricate pattern of rapidly changing seals.  The ritual circle burst into flame, flickering tendrils of green light jumping up into the sky and illuminating the mountainside.

For a moment they almost drowned out the sun with their emerald flashes dancing higher and higher to the pulse of some invisible beat.  Then, Micah threw up his arms at the crescendo of the ritual.

A harpoon of silver energy launched itself from the downed daskin, slamming into his chest with the force of a sledgehammer.  Micah grunted, digging his toes into the hillside deep enough that they crushed the volcanic rock to dust.

Temporal energy poured into him, swelling Micah with power so quickly that he was afraid he might burst.  He reached out with both hands, siphoning the uncontrolled temporal magic and channeling it out through his palms in a strobe of silver light that overwhelmed the captivating dance of the green flames.

The temporal energy blanketed the suit of armor, fusing the verdant fire into the layered scales.  One after another he could feel the enchantments click, locking into place and creating a closed magical circle as the cataclysmic forces he was channeling overwhelmed any of the minor errors made in the enchantment and the ritual itself.

He fell to one knee, unable to even reach up to wipe the blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth as another tidal wave of silver poured over him.  Energy crackled between his spread fingers, arcing from one to another as Micah’s vision blurred, every molecule of his being focused on completing the spell.

Then, with a suddenness that sent him reeling, it was over.  The fires guttered out and the flow of temporal energy evaporated.  He fell to his hands and knees, mouth open and panting as blood flowed freely, spattering the volcanic stone below him.

Without saying anything, Micah cast augmented mending, the pain evaporating as his magic knitted his injured throat back together but doing nothing for the waves of exhaustion that pressed down on him.

He staggered to his feet, ignoring the Maarikava’s corpse as he shambled over to the armor.  It was warm to the touch, glittering sparks of blue and red energy arcing over its surface as he picked it up and admired it in the early afternoon sun.

“It’s perfect,” he whispered to himself, eyes tracing over the completed runes, etched so tightly into the scales that it took a master to find where one ended and the other began.

Eagerly, despite his limbs feeling dead and leaden, Micah slipped it on over his pajamas.  Almost immediately he felt energy tingling through his system as the armor’s passive enchantments hummed to life.

Resilience, heavy resistance to both water and fire magic, and an oil-like sheen that covered his body, making it more difficult to grip or grapple him.  While those abilities were powerful, they didn’t have much on the armor’s active powers.  Between the binding enchantments in the Maarikava’s fangs, the ability to generate a scalding fog that wouldn’t obscure his own vision, and most importantly at the moment, the ability to breathe water, the armor was formidable.

There was no question that it was more powerful than anything he’d had in his previous life.  Maybe not enough to turn the tide against the third prince on its own, but certainly an important step toward bridging the gap between him and the otherworldly horror.

Finally, he pulled up his status, a smile blossoming on his face.  Apparently the Maarikava was strong enough that killing it warranted two levels on its own.  Ultimately, he’d prefer to gain levels in the slower and safer controlled environments of the dungeons, but he wasn’t going to complain about the burst of experience too loudly.  After all, he had a lot of ground to make up.

Age 21 [ERROR] / 35

Class/Level Divine Candidate 49

XP 28,902/950,000

HP 7649/7844

Class Specialty

Chronomancer, Enchanter

Attributes

Body 51,    Agility 51,    Mind 103,    Spirit 102

Attunement

Moon 100,    Sun 66,  Night 86

Mana

Moon 7820/7991    Sun 7923/7923    Night  7963/7963

Affinities

Time 10

Tier V - Foresight 17, Time Echos 3, Temporal Transfer 2, Haste 16
Tier VI - Temporal Vortex 14, Temporal Stutter 7, Stasis 6
Tier VII - Time Leash 6, Weave of Fate 4,
Tier VIII - Deja Vu 4

Wood 8

Tier I - Refresh 14, Mending 13, Plant Weave 21
Tier II - Augmented Mending 20, Root Spears 14
Tier III - Heal 13, Paralytic Sting 6, Explosive Thicket 11
Tier IV - Regeneration 14, Healing Wave 6, Poison Fog 14
Tier V - Panacea 6, Coma 2, False Life 3
Tier VI - Binding Vines 9, Infest 4

Air 7

Tier I - Gale 11, Air Knife 24, Air Supply 6
Tier II - Wind Shield 11, Sonic Bolt 18
Tier III - Updraft 5, Pressure Spear 15, Sonic Orb 14
Tier IV - Flight 12, Wind Blade 10
Tier V - Vacuum 5

Blessings

Mythic Blessing of Mursa - Blessed Return, Ageless Folio

Skills

Anatomy  10
Arcana   15
Enchanting  36
Fishing   2
Herbalism  5
Librarian  5
Ritual Magic  34
Spear   39
-Wind Spear 13
-TITS  21
Spellcasting  49

Just as he closed the sheet of information, the ground rumbled out of him, sending a wave of cinder and soot billowing out of the volcano caldera.  Trickles of lava began to slither down its slope, heralds of the destruction that was to come.

It seemed that Micah was out of time to plan and admire his equipment.