Chapter 39: The Abble Tree Root Cellar, Pt. 4

  Having had a few minutes of rest once more, Theo’s mana was regenerating steadily. He wasn’t about to refuse to fight more as Grace’s reasoning was sound, all things considered; some day he might need it. What he instead refused to do was to use his sigil weaving to do so, or rather, to cause such torture to an innocent creature with it. That didn’t leave him without options, though. He still had Chaste’s scroll with the glyph for ‘Fireball’ on it. Also a hard pass. Killing something with flames was… cruel. There truly was no other word for it. He supposed, if his life was in immediate danger, he could do it, whether it was the ‘Fireball’ spell or his sigils, but… Not here, not now.

  Grace offered an option, though she had no such convenient thing as a scroll on hand. She had, in her own words, memorised a 92% grade ‘Wind blade’, an 89% grade ‘Water bullet’ and an 81% ‘Earth spear’, all spells of a castable quality. Theo had no clue what any of those numbers meant, though her explanation brought to the surface some memories of Chaste explaining the same thing a bit more simplistically.

  Glyphs weren’t an exact science. Okay, they were, actually, but no one officially really knew the 100%, completely and entirely perfect glyphs for any spells, much less Level Two or higher ones. They required a match of higher than 75% to be recognised at all and form a magic circle. It was actually a somewhat lenient amount, Theo thought, but didn’t consider that all this would have to be done several times or in the middle of combat. A weaker match, or grade, would result in a weaker spell.

  A 92% graded spell was actually pretty high for a generalist, of which Grace didn’t proclaim she was. As she’d said earlier, she wasn’t focused on spellcasting at all. The only reason she knew these was thanks to her churches’ demands that their priests and clerics knew of them. Experts of certain spells, because that was a thing, usually got their glyphs to about 97 or 98% before the final minute alterations required started to confound them. Without assistance from any kind of system, and only guesswork and endless amounts of iterations to do with every single line the glyph consisted of, Theo knew he’d go mental if that was him.

  Choosing to learn the water bullet spell from Grace, she gracefully showed him how it was done multiple times. He traced it himself without weaving, choosing to conserve mana rather than waste it.

  Hours passed, and Theo was sure Wen and the rest were starting to get anxious about their return. Still, he was getting the hang of it and Grace was kind enough to guide his hand from the moment he felt ready enough to weave the over-complicated symbol. While it had taken a lot of time to learn well enough, Theo felt his hand was much steadier than when he attempted the fireball almost two weeks ago, at this point. Of course, he’d earned a lot of skills and stats since then, which was surely helping his control of his own body.

  Grace’s hand guided his own as mana scratched the very air at his fingertip. The reason for choosing the water spell was two-fold; it was more powerful than the earth spell and he didn’t have the wind affinity skill. It should be pretty straight forward to fix, but he would have to do that on his own time. Grace was gracious enough to let him waste so much of her time down here as he was, though if she was truly in a rush to get out, she hid it perfectly.

  The path curved endlessly, cornered almost randomly and crossed itself numerous…-ly. The colour of the line he weaved in front of him was slightly off. Usually it was off-white with a tinge of nearly blue. It was a shade of deeper blue now, categorically not white anymore as the marine colour overshadowed it. The reason for this was that Theo, for the first time ever, had elementally charged his mana. He was slowly becoming a mage, through and through. He was doing things properly, now.

  Somewhere close to his stomach was a ‘water gate’. Mana channeled through this gate was affected by the water element, taking on its sheen and potential. The difficulty, though not as difficult as weaving the glyph itself, was not to open the valve for mana to flow through that gate, but rather to then lead it through the chaotic jungle that was his mana network and out through his finger. It wasn’t instant in any way, nor automatic, so it took some time to get used to. This was why it was important to know one’s mana network, he realised. Much more important to anyone but him, but important nonetheless.

  The blue tinged mana drawn in the air firmed, locking in place as his first ever completion of an elementally charged glyph flashed an ocean hue. A ring resembling an intricate web of twists and turns appeared around the recently weaved glyph, using Theo’s weaved symbol as a set of instructions to build itself upon. The world itself certainly had a finger in the game, but even Theo could feel that this circle lacked a certain… presence that his sigil casting had. It was the world on auto-pilot rather than the hands-on approach of Theo’s regular magic.

  A flaw in his weaving introduced itself as what resembled a crack in the forming circle appeared. He eyed the glyph and saw a line had been ever so slightly squiggled, likely from a nervous twitch. It wasn’t obvious to anyone not closely paying attention, so much so that he hadn’t noticed it himself when weaving it. Still, the circle continued rather than fizzling out into nothing but mana vapour. It formed entirely. It wasn’t perfect. It was probably not even close to the 89% grade that Grace could manage, but it was a spell.

  A transparent globule of water formed from the magical circle and vanished the very next moment. While gone in the blink of an eye, it was expected, at least so much as Theo expected himself to manage the weave. A splash sounded from further inside the tunnel. He’d done it, he realised. He checked his mana, finding another twenty points gone. Spellcasting was expensive work. Luckily, he had been back to full, his mana pool only needing about a bit over an hour to completely refill.

  Theo headed over to the end of the tunnel ahead of him, finding a hole in a thick root just below head height. It didn’t go all the way through, but there was a steep crater, almost like an actual bullet hole, if perhaps a bit wider than he’d expected.

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  “Great job!” Grace confirmed as she walked up to him. “Probably around the end of the 70s percentage mark, but that’s to be expected. You’ll be a mage in no time,” she smiled.

  Theo beamed with pride despite the rather low numbered grade of his first ever glyph-based spell. Hopefully he’d learn plenty of normal spells as well. They were more complex to cast, but offered far more complex effects than what Theo had available with his Sigils, at least for now. He did know the sigil for what he expected to be a ‘Remove’ effect, he remembered. Digging holes or removing the existing dirt for planting would’ve been easier with that… all that hard work could’ve easily been replaced with magic!

  “I’m not ready to use it in battle, I don’t think,” Theo apologised. He considered using the water bullet spell, and didn’t think he’d find shooting the treens with it too awful. It was just that setting someone on fire was so terrible a thing to do to someone.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take the next ones a bit slow so you can make your mind up and try weaving it in active combat. And don’t worry about hitting me with it,” she grinned. “You couldn’t take me on even if you tried.” She blinked with her right eye as she giggled and headed onwards through the tunnel.

  Wiping away his gentlest of blushes at where his mind had gone for a few moments, Theo followed after her, a bit more sure of himself than he’d been earlier.

  Three more treens stumbled upon them, or the other way around, during the next fifteen minutes or so. Grace hadn’t been joking; she took them on slow. She’d spent almost an entire minute on the first one, mostly dodging and parrying with gentle nudges as the treen hit and shot abbles at her. Theo was too busy analysing the treen’s movements than anything else, hoping he’d at least find a pattern that made it more likely to hit with in case he’d like to try. Its movements were rather basic, though it was a tree. It only had so many ligaments and joints. Actually, it had too many, considering it was a tree.

  While watching the tree was important, he couldn’t help it when his attention nudged towards Grace. Her own fluid motions seemed perfectly natural to her, her legs controlling most of the directions she moved as she remained low to the ground. They spun in half-circles, full circles, shorter this-way-and-that rotations that astounded Theo how they were even possible. The core strength this woman must possess was out of this world. Definitely out of his world. She made it seem so easy, yet Theo was certain he’d just fall over simply by attempting the low stance, much less the circling motions she used to move around the treen.

  He was a bit less mesmerised during the second fight, and felt he’d gotten the gist of the treens’ general way of moving around and attacking. So long as Grace was close enough, they’d rather attempt to slam their branches into her than fling fruit, though possibly due to her body staying mostly close to the ground, they sometimes did that as well even when she was technically directly adjacent to them.

  During the third fight he noticed a slight flicker on her waist as she activated some form of spell. It was just for the briefest of moments, but something lit up on her skin. Her shirt lifted only slightly as she moved, revealing mostly nothing, but the timing of the activation and a sudden drop of her torso revealed it for a fraction of a second. While intrigued, Grace had avoided showing him earlier, so now wouldn’t be much different, he figured. He decided to let it go. Maybe he could ask later. She was a villager now, after all. She’d likely stay in the town for a while more.

  A heavy set of wooden doors, with rusted iron hinges and door knobs stood facing the pair at the end of the tunnel. It looked ancient, though the wood seemed sturdy and healthy. Theo couldn’t remember seeing anything metal down here earlier, making these tiny details stand out more than they otherwise would have. In front of the elderly door stood two young’uns, far from processed into planks just yet. Their hats were littered with healthy-looking red fruit, ripe for Grace’s taking.

  “They’re guarding the entrance to the boss room. Usually, the boss has its own domain where the surrounding area can work in their favour; special plants they can eat to heal themselves, pods birthing minions or anything like that. This one has a few roots growing from the ground that attempt to grab hold of your legs. They are rather slow, but you should try to keep an eye on the ground and move about every once in a while,” Grace explained.

  Dungeons were rather wild, Theo realised. Why did so many of them keep to the same kind of concept, though? Was it the world itself forcing them into keeping consistent with a set of rules? It certainly couldn’t be coincidental if there were so many of them that did the same thing.

  “Why don’t you pull these two with your water bullet? They won’t attack you before you get too close.”

  “How do you know?” Theo asked. The two guard treens had certainly spotted them by now, no matter what kind of senses they had without any visible eyes on their trunk, yet still they remained standing in front of the door.

  “I’l like to say something other than simply ‘it’s typical’, but that’s generally just the way things are. Few dungeons are ever surprising once you’ve been in a few different ones.”

  “Okay…” Theo responded, then walked a bit closer to make sure the treens were in range of his water bullet. He could’ve said no, but he was kind of excited about being able to fight back, again, without torturing his enemies.

  He started weaving, eyeing the treens who stood still in front of the door ahead of him. He could practically feel their attention pushing down on him, keeping him from straying too close to their guarded object. He wasn’t allowed here, he sensed from them.

  Theo felt himself fumble a widely arching bow. The entirety of the brightly glowing glyph was instantly ruined, so he cut the valve in his finger off and let the glyph dissipate before retrying the same thing. Again, he failed, this time much later in the process. There was nothing to do to fix it, so he once more cancelled his weaving.

  “Relax, Theo,” Grace said in a deeper-than-normal voice. “You’re not in a fight right now. You have time.”

  Theo breathed slowly and purposefully. He tried inhaling a stress-free amount of air, then exhaling the tension from his shoulders and arms. Inhale calmness. Exhale the tightness of his neck and chest. Weave.

  With a sure hand and a firm mindset, Theo weaved the glyph again. Halfway through, he was pretty proud of himself as the first half was near-pristine from what he could remember. The second half rushed along like a blaze. A bit shabbier, he had to admit, but the glyph locked in place in the air and expanded into a fine circle, free of the crack from the previous completed casting, as well. The circle flashed brightly and the treen on the left side of the door creaked and groaned as the hard projectile of water drilled into its trunk.

  The fight was on.