Chapter XX - Calm before the storm

*** Kiara ***

Mana flared all around me. A sharp headache pierced my head like a glowing red nail. I felt tears in my eyes as I suppressed the pain. I could see everything. I felt everything. I tasted everything.

It was amazing, at the same time, it was simply too much to be sustainable. Mana was everywhere. It saturated every brick, every floor board, and a fly swirling around in the room. My senses encompassed nearly the entire house.

Runes and glyphs everywhere! Most of them felt asleep, dormant, but others were brimming with Mana and doing something. Nearly every wall was covered in runes, as were the floorboards and sometimes even the ceiling.

“Those have to be Magdalena’s safety measures,” I mumbled to myself. I didn’t dare touch or interact with any of them. Given all I knew of my grandmother, it might very well burn the house down or move the house to another dimension.

Room by room, my attention traveled through the house. Two things stood out. In my parents' room, I found a black box, roughly the size of a large chest. A plank space in my Mana Sense. It was like there was truly nothing there. I can feel the very air around me. There was not a lot of Mana in it, but it was there. Faint like a smell of which you're not quite sure whether it is really there.

This space felt empty. It felt like nothing was there at all. No matter how much I focused on it, I couldn’t pierce whatever kept my Mana sense at bay.

A lot of the pathways led downward through the floors and gathered in a little, mostly empty room I hadn’t even been aware of. It formed an additional sublevel underneath the normal cellar. A large runic circle was woven over most of the ground a little pedestal sat precisely in the middle of it. Several Magic crystals were inlaid into the pedestal. It had to be a kind of safe room and control center for the weaves distributed around the house.

Frustratingly, I couldn’t sense a way to access the room. It didn’t have a door or other apparent way of entry, I could sense.

I was itching to go and find a way into the room. To go to my parents’ room and have a look at whatever was in the blank space underneath their bed. Even just studying all the traps and protections my grandmother had put up was an enticing proposition.

However, that was not what she needed to do right now. She had been given the skills to sense and control Mana and the mental abilities to barely keep her head from exploding.

I willed my Mana Sense to contract to an arm's length around her. The strain on her mind immediately lessened. I went through the steps my grandmother had shown me. I gathered Mana above my hand, flattened the sphere into a thin shield, and willed it to become dense.

Taking a closer look, I noticed several problems. The Mana concentration was uneven throughout the shield. Mana was mostly concentrated in the center of the circle, leaving the edges more fragile.

What had looked at first glance like a homogenous mass, revealed itself as a swirling mess of always changing Mana streams, with a few impurities enclosed. A small vapor of Mana continuously escaped the small shield.

I reabsorbed the Mana I had spent. What are my requirements for an effective shield?

Strength, if it collapses to a marble, it is useless. In the best case, it would stop a strong physical and magical attack.

No weak points. The impurities and uneven Mana concentration would make certain points in her shield way more vulnerable than others.

Upkeep and cost. In her training with Magdalena and Maya, I felt the strain on my Mana pool, and we only practiced for a short time, and I was only generating small shields. I also need to consider the Mental cost. If I need all my focus to form a shield, I can not attack or flee at the same time.

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Speed or sustainability. Either I have to keep a shield active at all times, or I will need to be able to raise it in the blink of an eye. To keep it up constantly seemed impossible for now. The advantage would be ambushes or attacks she did not see coming.

Area covered. It needed to engulf her whole body. The marbles looping around her and striking her back had made it way too apparent what control a capable Mage would have over his or her spells. Strength is the ability to protect others. Sooner or later, she would need to protect others, which also added range to her growing list of requirements.

“The way to mastery is repetition and a good foundation of the basics,” I mumbled.

I released my Mana again, not forming it into a sphere but instead willing it directly into the shape I wanted it to assume. It helped to keep the Mana concentration more evenly distributed. As my Mana formed into a shield the size of a dinner plate, it engulfed some ambient Mana, which formed most of the impurities. I willed the foreign Mana to the edges of the shield and let them escape. Better.

Under my concentration, the Mana hardened. It became a viscous fluid. Poking it with my finger I felt the resistance. It would be able to stop a marble without a doubt, but given how much it gave when force was exerted on it, I highly doubt it would stop an arrow or a sword, or the claw of a beast.

Not good enough. I took additional Mana and forced it into my shield and forcing it to compact further and harden. Slowly, at first, singular crystalline structures formed in the Mana soup. Then it suddenly went quick, and the Mana became completely solid.

I opened my eyes and saw that a thin sheet of crystals had formed. It was nearly invisible, but it deflected a little bit of light. It looked somewhat like a shattered thin glass pane.

Poking it again, my finger was stopped. I pushed harder. It did not bend underneath my finger. Better, but was it good enough?

Pulling back, I punched it. Not with all my strength. If I broke my hand while playing around with a shield, I would never be allowed to be alone again.

Yet, it was painful to punch the sheet. It fractured underneath my punch. It didn’t break completely, but several cracks had formed. The spiderweb of cracks, formed mostly along the lines where two crystals connected. The pain had broken my concentration, and the edges of the sheet had immediately started vaporizing before she had gotten her Mana back under control.

Reabsorbing the crystalline Mana seemed impossible, so she took the time to first change it back into liquid Mana and then Mana vapor, which could be reabsorbed. It took way too long to be viable in any time-critical situation.

Again and again, she formed sheets of Mana. Keeping the Mana from crystallizing turned out to be fruitless. She could seed the points of crystallization, which resulted in a more regular and durable structure.

Releasing Mana vapor from her skin and crystallizing it allowed her to form a somewhat brittle shield encasing her whole body. It would certainly give her the edge in a playground brawl. As she moved around, crystals broke, and she had to spend Mana to repair them. Progress had been made, but she acknowledged she still had a long way to go.

*** Maya ***

The rest of the group took a short rest. It was my task to scout the village ahead. She had been to Woodington before. Not recently, but several times over the years. It was a quaint village. About a hundred residents. Mainly woodworkers and farmers. Hardened by manual labor, but friendly and kind.

A large wooden palisade surrounded the whole village. Webbing covered part of the wall, and several of the thick tree trunks had been shattered or pressed down to the ground. Several large Arachnid bodies were scattered in the field before the wall.

The village itself was quiet, which was not a good sign. Even in the bunker, the villagers should be able to operate the rudimentary defenses. Without getting closer, she channeled some Mana into her eyes to activate [Hunter’s eye], an evolved version of Mana Sense.

Arachnid Mana was all over the village. She could see it hovering in the air above the village. On the ground, she saw faintly glowing traces of the Arachnids. There were too many to get a clear number, however, she estimated at least four grown Arachnids accompanied by at least twenty infants.

Guilt was weighing heavily on her for not taking the scouting job of the Arachnids. There had been more important things in her life at the moment, and others had paid the price. Given the timeline, it was unlikely she could have prevented the attack, but she could have tried.

She returned to camp. They would attack in two groups, one was to scale the wall, and give the sign for the other group to advance through the destroyed section of the wall. The sun was setting. It would be a long night. She sat down and ate some hard bread with slices of sausage and cheese. The water in her canteen tasted stale. Absent-mindedly, she counted the arrows in her quiver and checked all her other gear. It was a necessary break. They needed a short rest before the fight, but she hated the calm before the storm.