Mia woke up the next morning with a smile, feeling the warm rays of the sun caress her cheeks and the warmth of her girlfriend’s body still embracing her. Camie was snoring softly, her fingers curled into the hem of Mia’s PJ shirt, and a leg thrown over Mia’s.
The girl was a cuddler, and Mia couldn’t have been happier for it. She’d read once that people had different love languages, such as words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service or whatnot, but she’d always felt physical affection to be the most important, with quality time spent together coming in as a close second.
She relaxed, deciding that the world could wait another hour or two. She would have to enjoy these quiet moments if she wanted to keep her sanity in this mad world. The happiness she felt just from cuddling and having a warm bed for herself was something to cherish.
Unfortunately, as all good things, it had to come to an end.
“M-morning?” Camie asked drowsily, then gave a jaw-cracking yawn.
“Morning,” Mia said, squirming around to face the other girl with a radiant smile. She’d gotten a bit sweaty from what had to have been more than eight hours of cuddling, but the morning shower would take care of that, so it did nothing to diminish her good mood.
Camie smiled back seemingly without thought, her smile so pure and happy it sent a warm, fluttering feeling through Mia. How could she look so happy just from seeing her? It was both flattering and so sweet at once. Mia was glad her family didn’t have much of a history with diabetes, or she might just die early from it if the vampire kept this up for a few more months.
“Do we have any plans for today?” Camie asked softly, as being any louder would shatter the peaceful atmosphere of the moment.
“No, I don’t think so,” Mia said in the same tone. “Someone will need to catch Zeigler up on what happened in the Rift, and get caught up on the happenings outside in turn … but that’s what we have Brent for.”
“So, no plans?” Camie mused.
“I was thinking of getting started on my new runic lexicons.” The thought of proper Rank 1 spells made her salivate. “Or maybe I could finally do that Ritual of Duality thingy with the rewards I got.”
She also wanted to finally add Mage Armour to her Spell Tome, even if it meant getting rid of one of her current spells. Also, with her new hat in place, everything should be so much faster. She wouldn’t need to spend an entire week adding all the runes she’d need for a single spell.
On that note, Spectral Blade’s runes were almost ready. She had only a handful of runes remaining at Rank 0, but she had them in pairs, ready to be fused. She’d have her first Rank 1 spell by the end of the day.
Camie giggled, making Mia blink away her spiralling thoughts and snap back to the present. Yes, the likelihood of overwhelming magical power in her near future was tantalising, but so was the vampiress in front of her.
“Sorry,” Mia mumbled. “Did you want to do something today? None of my plans need to be done today.”
“It’s fine,” Camie said. “I know you’re aching to play with your new runes, you’ve got that dopey look on that you only get when thinking about magic.”
Mia’s cheeks turned rosy; she didn’t have a dopey look! Damn it! But Camie’s giggle was so-
“I don’t feel like moving much today,” Mia said, changing the topic with the grace of a train wreck. “We’ve got enough physical exercise and excitement for the entire month over the last 24 hours.”
“Sounds fine to me,” Camie said, then rolled onto her back before stretching languidly, arching her back with a satisfied groan. Mia’s rosy cheeks turned even redder, but she refused to avert her gaze. “I should probably check out that book I got too.”
“Book?” Mia asked distractedly.
“Yep,” Camie said, sitting up with a heave and swung her legs off the bed. “It supposedly has a nifty new spell and some specialised exercises I’ll need to do for a while if I want to make use of it. Looks promising though, even if it’s a bit creepy.”
“Well, it’s blood magic,” Mia said, sitting up too. “Being a bit creepy is a given. If anything, your previous spells were a bit too mild to really fit the vampire blood mage vibe.”
“Blood magic is not about eating babies and bathing in the blood of virgins or whatnot.” Camie rolled her eyes, hands on her hips. “It’s just blood, life, death. I’m afraid if you want a stereotypical vampire, you should look for a Dark ritualist or something.”
“Nope,” Mia said, popping the last ‘p’ of the word. “I’m plenty happy with my current vampire, thank you very much.”
“G-Good,” Camie said, smiling. Mia ignored the slight stutter, seeing how hard Camie was trying to pretend it didn't happen. “We don’t do any refunds, I’m afraid. You’re stuck with me.”
Mia giggled, then hopped off the bed and gave her silly girlfriend a quick hug.
“Happily so,” Mia said, then pulled away with a smile. “Let’s go. I need to take those Alert Wards down before Mark stumbles into one of them half-awake on his way to the loo and wakes half the building.”
“Is that what those do? Screech like a car alarm?” Camie asked in apparent curiosity as the two walked out to the kitchen. Mia stepped into the anteroom, a quick poke to the diminished mana core she’d left on the floor banishing the spell.
“Yep,” Mia said, hurrying over to the balcony, not wanting to keep Camie waiting. She got back in less than ten seconds, another diminished core in hand. “It’s described as ‘sounds like a flock of newborn howlers getting butchered’. I have no idea what a howler is, but I can guess. There were even warnings about getting temporary, or not-so-temporary ear problems.”
“Huh,” Camie said. “I think I had a dream that included howlers once. My ancestor poked out his own eardrums with his claws the moment they opened their beaks, so he didn’t have to hear them, so I doubt it's a pleasant sound.”
“That’s mental,” Mia said, trying to imagine a sound that would make her rather poke a pair of pencils in her ears than listen to it ever again. “Interesting though. So they are birds?”
“Some kind of land-bound bird coming up to your waist with large, round beaks,” Camie said, looking thoughtful. “You know, like that one bird that makes a rattling machine gun sound as a mating call? What was its name?”
“The … shobill? Shoebill?” Mia tried wracking her brain for it. “That. I know the one.”
“Yeah, like those but a bit smaller and with Sound magic.” Camie nodded. “The stupid things gave me nightmares as a kid … though that was probably more because I associated them with feeling a pair of sticks sticking out of my ears.”
She shuddered dramatically, then sipped her coffee. There was a slight grimace, but she nodded thankfully at Mia.
Mia had made the two of them some instant coffee she found on a shelf, heating the water up to a boil with nothing but her mana manipulation. It was barely scraping okay as a coffee, but maybe Mia’d just spoiled herself a bit too much over the years with freshly ground coffee beans. Still, it was warm, and the taste was vaguely familiar, kicking her sleepy body into ‘day’ mode just by sheer Pavlovian habit. It didn’t even need to have any caffeine; the taste by itself would have probably been enough to start Mia’s boot-up sequence.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Sooo,” Camie started, drawing out the word as her eyes flickered up to the top of Mia’s head. “What’s up with the hat?”
“Huh-? Oh!” Mia startled, reaching up to pat the witchy hat she’d just remembered owning. “It’s probably the best one of my Rewards. A Soulbound artifact, which I hope is as huge of a deal as it sounds because it has some awesome effects, like increased neuroplasticity and memory retention while wearing, and all my runes get absorbed and fused twice, or even thrice as swiftly.”
“That’s … sounds useful?” Camie asked, and Mia slumped a little. “I mean it is! It’s totally awesome, yeah.”
Mia snorted. Obviously, the vampire didn’t know how annoying it was when you had books upon books filled with runes and you had to wait out the hours it took to add them to your runic model. One by one. It was torture.
“Thanks,” Mia said, smiling. “Did you get anything interesting?”
“Beside the spell that lets me give people muscle cramps?” Camie raised an eyebrow. “Nope, not really. I got a new casting glove, a chain-mail made out of something called ‘bloodsteel’ and some magic candies that will supposedly increase my bloodline purity.”
“Muscle cramps, really?” Mia raised an eyebrow, giving the vampire a playful glare. “You might be more evil than the child-eating vampires.”
“It is what I got.” Camie shrugged a bit awkwardly in a ‘what can you do’ way. “It’s certainly more convenient than having to sacrifice virgins every time I want to cast a spell.”
“Is that a thing?” Mia asked, unsure if she really wanted to know the answer.
“Sacrificial magic is a thing,” Camie said. “Not sure why someone being a virgin would make them any better at being a sacrifice, though. Bloodline quality and purity on the other hand … we should be careful about mentioning that to anyone, I think.”
“Right,” Mia said with a frown. Sacrificial magic. She had to worry about some lunatic tying her to an altar and sacrificing her for magical power or whatnot. What had her life turned into? She shook her head wistfully. “Well, I’m gonna go ahead and grab those rewards I had the System store for me.”
Do you wish to retrieve stored Rewards from Raid: [Forest of the Wolf King]?
[ Y / N ]
Yes. They dropped onto the table the moment the affirmation formed in her mind, the Rank 1 runic lexicons stacked on top of each other along with the two crystalline essences, one of them dark and blood red, the other white and silver.
“What’s that?” Camie asked, leaning forward with her crimson eyes staring intently at the darker crystal.
“Minor Essence of Slaughter, or something like that,” Mia said, eyeing her girlfriend with a narrowed gaze. “It’s not for eating, and I need it for a ritual.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Camie leaned away with a huff, but there was a slight pout on her lips. “It resonated with my mana, is all. I got curious.”
“If I ever get another one, I’ll let you eat it,” Mia said with a teasing smirk.
“I wasn’t going to eat your stupid rock,” Camie whined, and now she was definitely pouting. “What spells do those books have anyway? Rank 1 stuff should be better than anything you have now, right?”
“Well, I’ll have to skim it and check,” Mia said, a hand snaking out and snatching up the Rank 1 Conjuration lexicon, as it was the one most likely to hold offensive spells.
She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. Much the same as the Rank 0 lexicons, really. A list of runes, a spell or two, some magic theory and practical spell usage. And … she got that, in part. But it was both more and less than she expected.
There was only one new spell, Arcane Tether. It would allow her to launch an ethereal rope visible only to her and reel in either the object it struck or herself to the object. It was a magical grappling hook, which, while cool, wasn’t as cool as teleporting with Spirit Blink.
She only skimmed the practical uses section, but it seemed she’d be able to do some truly ridiculous feats of acrobatics with this spell if she trained enough. It could go from being a rope to a pole in the blink of an eye, allowing her to vault off the ground with it one moment, then latch onto a building like the famous web-slinger from Brooklyn the next. With practice, a lot of practice.
It was only a small section of the entire book, though; the rest was taken up by Rank 1 spell variants of Conjuration spells she’d gotten from the earlier, Rank 0 lexicon. There was a rune-combination she could add to the Spectral Blade spell to coat its edge in crackling Chaos-aspected magic to grant it additional cutting power. There were rune combinations for halving the blade’s length and conjuring two of them instead, another that would remove the handle and make it 100% blade. She could make two floating blades that would orbit her and tear through anything daring to come close.
Arcane Shackles had a rune combination that made it disrupt spellcasting in people whom the chains managed to wrap around. Another that would make it a cast-and-done spell to throw at people like a self-constricting net.
She wasn’t just getting new spells from higher Rank runic-lexicons, no, she was getting new building blocks for spellcrafting and examples on how to use them. She could add in parts she wanted, cut out others, mix and match pieces … although if she didn’t use one of the pre-made Rank 1 spell circles, she’d have to worry about all the rules of spellcrafting. Synergy, symmetry, resonance, mana flow, rune placement. Ignoring those and just throwing in everything that she liked would make a patchwork monstrosity of a spell that was just as likely to blow her hand off as it was to work. At best, it would be so wildly inefficient that it’d drain massive chunks of her mana for middling effects.
No, if she wanted something handcrafted, a custom spellcircle of her own, that would demand experimenting and lengthy iterative spell optimisation.
“So?” Camie asked, amusement and more than a hint of affection rolling off that simple word in waves. Mia startled, snapped out of her fugue state and … oh, thank God she wasn’t drooling again. That would have been supremely embarrassing.
“Eh? Oh, right,” Mia said, clearing her throat to wipe away the embarrassment. “Right, so it’s like, I got a single new spell, and a bunch of rune-sets I could use to upgrade my previous spells. It’s pretty cool, I’ll just have to decide on which variant I want. I think I’ll use one of the pre-made ones for each spell and work on making custom ones afterwards.”
There were only so many pages in her Spell Tome. Perhaps it was for the best she didn’t get a whole slew of new spells. It would have been downright torture forcing her to pick and choose between what spells to keep and what to discard. Not that she escaped having to do that entirely, but she’d have a much smaller pool of options, which was a benefit in this instance.
While they were chatting, mostly about Mia’s new spells, the others slowly started to wake up. Mark emerged like a zombie and stole Mia’s coffee thermos, for which she silently swore vengeance upon him, and Nikki came after, joining in on the spell discussion, mostly to practice her German by the looks of it.
Brent still looked like death warmed over when he came out of his room, but he forged on and, after a short breakfast, left to talk to Zeigler. Helene only came out after it was closing in on noon, but Mia was used to that; her mother could hibernate like a bear if she got the opportunity to, so an 11-hour-long nap wasn’t that much of a surprise.
Mark was busy playing with a chunk of magical clay he got from the Raid, and Nikki too retreated to an armchair to read after an hour, leaving Mia chatting with Camie again as she skimmed the rest of her runic lexicons.
Not all of them had the exact same spread of spell variations and new spells. The Warding lexicon had a whole three new spells, and only a single rune combination, but that one was the function needed to make Wards reactive.
For now, the trigger was anything crossing an invisible 1-meter sphere of mana around the wearer faster than a thrown rock. It had its downsides. It wouldn’t detect someone trying to stab her, or anyone who fired a bullet into her head point-blank, but for all those downsides, it massively increased the duration of the Ward. After all, it would no longer be always on, its energy depleting with every footstep.
The new spells were mostly specialised wards. One focused on defending against energy — primarily mana and mana-based attacks —, another against physical forces and bladed weapons and the final one against specific enemy types. Elementals, fiends, spirits, shades, undead and aberrations were the named ones, but the book said the Ward could be tuned for any specific group of magical creatures by a talented enough mage.
The other books also held interesting spells and rune-sets, but Mia circled back around to the Conjuration one. After all, Spectral Blade would soon be a fully Rank 1 spell, and that meant it was the first opportunity she had to make use of her new Rank 1 runes.
Without further ado, Mia started sketching out the new and improved spellcircle she wanted. The Chaos Aspected edge enhancement was a must-have upgrade in her opinion, so she started with the spellcircle that used that one. For now, she didn’t want to aim too high; this would be the first proper custom spellcircle she had ever made, after all. Baby steps. So she decided to attempt improving the parts of the spell responsible for the Blade’s autonomous movement.
Even the Rank 0 version of the spell had the option to throw the Spectral Blade and have it spin like a magic blender as it flew out and then came back like a boomerang. Mia wanted the option to just have it launch out of her grasp like a lance, giving her both a ranged piercing and slashing option for the Blade. Nothing fancy. Not yet. Still, it was proving to be surprisingly troublesome. The System-made spellcircle was complete after all, every rune-chain perfectly plotted, symmetry perfect even across the entire structure, and the mana flow steady despite the over a hundred runes contained within the circle. It was harder than she thought to fit in her own adjustments without ruining the spell’s efficiency so much that it wasn’t even worth it anymore.
It seemed like getting her first custom spell would be a long-term project, but Mia wasn’t deterred. How could she be when she was handcrafting a magic spell? That was some arch wizard-level stuff! Her hat also helped, both in its practical effects and in adding to the vibe. Her System interface might not say ‘Witch’ next to ‘Class’, but only having a cauldron and brewing potions would have made her feel any more like one.
AN: I'm not happy with the pace the story is going, and I'm overdue for a week of rest, I think, since I'd skipped the one I usually take over the Hollidays. So, I'll be trying for a double-length chapter for next Monday to wrap up this fight (I don't want to spend another week on it, dragging it out), and then I think I'll take a break on the week after that one. I'll also need to start outlining and plotting the next major Arc because I kinda-sorta only have a basic structure made of duct tape and hope, if even that, for it.
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