Desperation

I woke up in the room where I’d taken the clothes from.

After I ran out of mana, I must have dragged myself there and passed out. The last thing I remembered was sitting at the table, trying to cast Push until my head hurt.

Casting spells was harder than I’d thought. Making the shape appear was only the first part. Building it in my mind’s eye brought up the pattern, but it didn’t make the spell work. I still had to hold it steady and push mana into it, and that was where everything kept going wrong. The first few times, I shoved mana into the spell like I was trying to force water through a clogged pipe. The spell twisted and snapped apart. Twice, backlash burned across my palms before I managed to kill the spell.

After that, I stopped being stubborn and read further. Turns out, just pushing mana into the spell wasn’t enough.

The primer called the outer shape the spell frame. It held everything together, and the frame changed depending on how complex the spell was. Simple spells used simple frames. More complex spells needed stronger frames, stabilizing runes, and more places for the spell to go wrong. The trick was to feed mana from the center outward, filling the frame evenly instead of dumping power into one point and hoping for the best.

After the spell frame came the control frame. That part told the spell what to do. Push away from me. Push outward from the center. Hold onto something. Latch to a surface. Carry an effect. The more specific the instruction, the more complicated the control frame became.

Then came the part the primer called concept architecture.

Force. Flow. Potential.

Simple words. Not simple shapes.

Each concept had to be held separately while still fitting into the whole. Mana had to be split and fed through them evenly, or the concepts could bleed into each other. If that happened, the spell might backlash, overcharge, fizzle, or become something else entirely.

I was hungry, and my head hurt. I still had a bit of jerky, so I ate a little. After that ran out, I would have to live on the berries I had left until I could either beat the beast or find a way to sneak out of here.

Not wanting to jump straight back into casting, I grabbed the staff and the skill primer, then made my way up to the training room.

I stepped into the ring and copied the first stance from the primer. One foot forward, the other turned slightly out, knees bent, spine straight, staff held level across my body. It felt stiff, unnatural, but that was probably the point. The book wasn’t teaching me how to wave a stick around. It was teaching me how to stand, how to hold my balance, how to keep from overcommitting.

I shifted, reset, and did it again. Slowly, the position began to make sense. Every angle had a purpose. Every inch of placement changed how steady I felt. After a while, my arms started to burn and my legs grew heavy, but I pushed through it.

The only reason I stopped was because a window popped up in front of my face.

Skill Acquired: Long Staff: 1

I smiled to myself. “That was progress.”

I wiped my face with my sleeve, then moved to a classroom and started working on the Push spell again. I kept failing at the concept part. It shouldn’t have been this hard. The concept was just force. The control frame was just a straight line away from me.

But every time I reached for the concept of force, it felt like it pushed back.

After a while, I ran out of mana and decided the room with the calming sensation was what I needed. I was becoming frustrated, and frustration had not made me better at anything so far.

When I walked into the room, the calming sensation washed over me. I sat on one of the mats and tried to relax. Thinking about the concept of force, I must have slipped into some kind of trance. One moment I was sitting there, turning the idea over in my head. The next, everything cleared.

My thoughts loosened and drifted, and then it made sense.

I understood what force meant intellectually. I could define it, explain it, probably even draw a diagram if I had to. But I hadn’t felt what force was. Force was more than an explanation. It was a feeling, an effect born from a cause, and I understood that now.

That was when a window appeared.

New Category Written:

Concepts (1)

Force

I wondered what that meant, so I pulled up my stats. Under Spells: None sat Concepts (1), and beneath that was Force. I guessed when I truly understood a concept, the System cataloged it.

I closed the window and practiced the spell again. When I checked my mana, I realized I’d gained nearly half of it back while sitting in the room. I didn’t know if I’d been in the trance for a long time or if mana recovered faster here, but either way, I didn’t care.

I concentrated on the shape in my mind, then pushed the mana in carefully. Everything locked together. I could feel the moment it clicked. The spell shape in front of me compressed, and a ripple of pressure ripped through the air and hit the wall.

The tower shook.

The mats went flying as the spell rebounded off the wall and slammed back into me. It knocked me off my feet, and I lay on the floor laughing.

A window appeared in front of my face.

New Spell Acquired: Push: 1% Integrated

My laughter turned into a cheer. I picked myself up off the ground and whooped.

Only after the exhilaration faded did I wonder what 1% Integrated meant.

I made my way back to the classroom where I’d left the book. After about ten minutes of searching, I found a section that seemed to explain it. Once I had sufficient practice with a spell, the pattern would etch itself into my mind. From there, the System could access it and hold the spell stable for me while I filled it with mana.

That sounded great, but by the time I reached that point, I would probably be able to do it myself.

Right?

I decided to move to the training room after that. The practice rings had runes around their edges, and I wondered if they were more than decoration. Maybe I was meant to cast in these rooms too, though I wasn’t sure.

So I tested it.

I cast and failed once before a shimmering wall appeared at the edge of the ring. It caught the spell, holding it there for a moment before it dispersed.

For the next few hours, I practiced the same cycle: cast until my mana ran low, return to the meditation room, recover, then try again. By the time I finally had to stop, Push had risen to 6% Integrated.

It seemed this wasn’t going to be easy.

My head hurt. I had ignored it at first, but eventually it got bad enough that I couldn’t concentrate. Apparently, there was a limit to how much mana I could use in a day before it became painful. Worse, each recovery took longer than the last.

Heading toward the bath, I pulled the last bit of jerky from my bag and frowned. After a moment, I changed my mind and put it back. Then I pulled out the berries and ate a handful instead.

Hopefully, I learned enough to fight the beast before I starved to death. I knew I could survive without much food for a while, but with all the training, spellcasting, and healing, I was going to burn through calories fast. My stomach was already aching with hunger, and it had only been two days since I’d arrived in this world.

Nope.

I wasn’t going to let that damn cat thing kill me without a fight.

Slumping into the bath, I pulled out the Life Mage primer and flipped to the first spell. It seemed simple enough at first, but the symbols for the concepts weren’t named. Normal casters only needed to memorize the spell, and the System did most of the heavy lifting.

I frowned down at the page.

Maybe I’d made the wrong choice.

This was far harder than I’d thought it would be. Then again, I didn’t know if the other classes would have been easier for me. My memory was crap, but patterns were my strong suit. That was why Spell Shaper had felt like the right choice.

Or at least, why I’d hoped it was.

Sighing, I set the book down beside the tub and got out. After that, I went to bed.

When I woke up, I repeated the same routine. Practice. Recover. Read. Fail. Try again. Maybe I’d get a better handle on how to learn spells from the other primers.

And maybe I’d try the next spell in the Spell Shaper primer.

Illuminate Area.

The next day, I started with staff practice like before and managed to bring Long Staff up to 4. After that, I tried Illuminate Area.

The concepts it required were not what I expected. I had to learn two concepts and one control. The first concept was Light, which was obvious enough. The second was Radiance, and I didn’t have the foggiest idea what that meant in spell terms.

The control was Anchor.

That was it.

Simple. Supposedly.

I used the meditation room again and tried to understand Radiance. At first, my thoughts kept drifting back to Light, which actually wasn’t hard. Light was something I could picture. Something I could see. Something I understood well enough to grab onto.

Radiance was different.

Every time I tried to hold it, my understanding kept collapsing back into the idea of light itself, or worse, into the way earth felt when I thought about force and resistance. Solid things. Weight. Contact. Impact.

Radiance didn’t feel like that.

It didn’t push.

It didn’t strike.

It spread.

Heat radiated too. Not the same way light did, exactly, but close enough to make the idea shift in my head. A fire could warm my hands without touching them. The sun could burn my skin from farther away than I could ever hope to reach. Sound moved differently, but it had a similar shape: spreading outward from a source and weakening as it went.

Radiance wasn’t light. Light could radiate. Heat could radiate. Maybe mana could too. Radiance was the reaching outward, the way something left its source and filled the space around it.

I opened my eyes and looked at the softly glowing runes on the wall. The light stayed anchored to the symbols, but its radiance filled the room.

It clicked.

A window appeared, and I knew what it would say before I read it.

New Concept Learned:

Radiance

With that understood, Light came easier. Just a little more thought, and another window appeared.

Casting Illuminate Area still wasn’t easy. Understanding the concepts helped, but splitting mana between the frame, the anchor, Light, and Radiance was rough at best. The first few attempts flickered, warped, or collapsed before the glow spread more than a few inches.

Then a window appeared.

Skill Acquired:

Mana Control: 1

I stared at it for a second. “Well,” I muttered, shaking out my hand. “Could have used that earlier.”

After that, practice went better. Not easy, but better. Before long, I could summon a small ball of light and anchor it above my head, beside my shoulder, or a few feet in front of me if I focused hard enough.

Useful, maybe.

But not useful enough.

A floating ball of light wasn’t going to help me escape the tower, and it definitely wasn’t going to kill the beast waiting outside.

So I moved on to the next spell in the primer.

Ice Shard.

I chuckled when I saw it. None of these spells made sense as a set. Push. Illuminate Area. Ice Shard. Why those? Was the primer building toward something specific, or was it just teaching me arbitrary things to see what stuck? Knowing my luck, probably both.

After attempting that, I had already pushed myself hard. My stomach ached from hunger, and I finished the rest of the berries.

I needed a plan.

I might not have the luxury of just training until I felt ready. Tomorrow, I would learn Ice Shard and see what was above the broken floor. The beast couldn’t stay up there forever, and maybe the floors above it had something I could use.

The next morning, after another round of staff training, I felt more comfortable with the weapon. That was when I noticed faint runes etched into the golden-hued metal, worn so thin they almost disappeared into the surface.

Out of curiosity, I tried pressing mana into them. Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe the staff would explode and prove I was still an idiot.

The runes lit faintly.

I froze, then pushed a little more. Golden lines brightened along the length of the staff, and a moment later it seemed to attach to me somehow. Not physically, but close enough that I nearly dropped it.

I could feel it. More importantly, I could guide spells to the end of it.

And, if I was being honest, it looked pretty badass.

Water and Thermal Transfer came easier than Force or Radiance, probably because I had already learned how to think around the concepts instead of straight at them. When Concept Sense: 1 appeared, I had no idea what it meant, so I closed the window and kept working.

Ice Shard was worth the effort. Thin lines of water drew inward, hardened, sharpened into a dagger-sized spike, and launched toward whatever I aimed at. The ring caught it before it hit the wall, but unlike Push, the ice didn’t disperse. It struck, dropped, and clattered to the ground inside the ring.

“Well,” I muttered. “That’s interesting.”

After that, I returned to the meditation room to recover my mana. Once I felt ready, I made my way to the teleporting ring and went back up to the broken floor.

The darkness greeted me like before.

I cast Illuminate Area.

Soft light bloomed above me, spreading outward through the ruined tower, and I smiled despite myself. It was far more effective here than my flashlight had been. The light filled the space instead of cutting through it in a narrow beam, revealing details I hadn’t been able to see before.

As the light spread, something caught my eye: the moss. Under the magic light I was producing, it glowed a soft blue. I stared at it for a moment, my hunger getting the better of me.

Could I eat that?

I walked closer and examined it, wishing I knew whether it was poisonous.

A window appeared.

Spend 1 Ability Point to acquire:

Identify I

Effect:

When activated, this ability will provide details about an object or creature.

Current Ability Points: 2

Yes / No?

I laughed at the window, then quickly covered my mouth.

“Yes,” I whispered.

Absolutely yes.

Activating the ability immediately, I focused on the moss. A window appeared.

Veil Moss

Commonly found in crypts, aged buildings, and on metal surfaces. Veil Moss reflects mana-infused light, giving it a mild glow.

Warning: Poisonous.

I stared at the warning.

“Well,” I muttered, stepping back. “That answers that.”

I tried to use the ability again on the door, but nothing happened. After a couple more attempts, I gave up. Either the ability had some kind of recharge, or it worked on a cooldown.

I made my way into the lab and toward the hole in the wall. It was daytime outside, though the sun was already starting to set. I eased closer and peeked down into the courtyard.

I didn’t see the creature anywhere.

Frowning, I leaned out a little farther and scanned the area below.

“Where are you?” I muttered.

Then I saw it.

It was stalking through the gate, probably looking for me too. Then it looked up at me and bolted into action, running for the tower.

I watched it get closer.

When it hit the tower and began to climb, I cast Ice Shard down at it. By the time I finished casting, the beast was halfway up to me. The ice shard formed, shot toward it, and completely fucking missed.

I scrambled back, hitting the counter as I moved past it.

I began casting Push before I even saw the creature’s paw reaching through the hole. Pieces of the tower broke loose as it hauled itself into the room.

My spell sputtered for a moment, but I forced myself to focus as my heart hammered in my chest.

I should have run. I should have escaped.

The thought raced through my mind as one of its tentacles whipped back to throw a barb at me.

My spell formed and shot toward it.

When it hit the creature, the air rippled, and the beast launched backward. The barb it had loosed went off course and exploded next to my head as the thing let out a gut-wrenching panther scream from hell.

A second later, I heard it slam into the ground below.

I ran to the edge of the broken wall and looked down, hoping to see a dead beast below.

My heart sank.

It wasn’t dead.

The creature thrashed for a moment before rolling back onto its feet. Two of its tentacles hung limp over one side, and it favored one leg, licking at the injury.

Then it looked up at me.

For a moment, we just stared at each other.

I grabbed a piece of loose debris and threw it down at the beast.

“Yeah!” I screamed. “Take that, you fucking piece of shit! I hope that hurt!”

It growled at me, but it didn’t try climbing the tower again.

Maybe it was too hurt.

Maybe it had finally realized I could defend myself.

Or maybe it understood the same thing I did.

Up here, I had the advantage.

With that thought, I pushed the cabinets into the middle of the room, blocking the hole as best I could. I could still see out, and the beast could probably move them if it really wanted to, but at least I would hear it coming.

I realized I still wasn’t ready for this beast.

But I might have an idea for how to kill it.

I wasn’t ready yet. The tools I had might be enough, though. Push. Ice Shard. The staff. I just needed to get better at casting. More importantly, I needed to get faster.

Thinking about the beast walking through the gate made panic crawl up my throat. What if it had eaten my friends? What if they had followed me, seen the tower, and come here looking for me?

I shook the thought from my head, but it didn’t leave. It settled lower instead, sinking into my stomach until anxiety had its claws in me.

I wanted to go farther up the tower. Maybe the upper floors had weapons, books, food, anything useful. So I made my way to the ring and thought, up.

The room blurred.

Then the blur shifted sideways.

Something tore through me.

I reappeared and hit the ground hard, gasping as pain flashed through my whole body. It felt like something had tried to stretch me apart from every angle at once.

For a long moment, I just lay there, groaning.

When I could finally move, I pushed myself onto my hands and knees and cast Illuminate Area. Soft light spread through the room.

I hadn’t gone anywhere.

I was still on the broken floor.

It was like the ring had tried to send me up, hit something, and bounced me right back.

That settled it.

I was done exploring.

That night, between the hunger and the nightmares, I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my friends lying in the forest with their eyes open, bodies torn apart, entrails hanging out across the leaves.

I opened my eyes and stared into the dark.

Sleep wasn’t happening.

So I just lay there, staring at the ceiling. I had eaten through my supplies. The jerky was gone. The berries were gone. All I had left was water, a few spells I could barely cast, and a beast outside that wanted me dead.

I knew I could survive this. It wasn’t the first time I’d gone hungry for a few days.

That thought should have made me feel better.

It didn’t.

Getting up, I spent the next two days practicing.

Staff work. Spellcasting. Meditation. Repeat.

I pushed until I couldn’t focus, recovered what mana I could, then pushed again. Every cycle left me a little sharper and a lot more tired. By the end of the second day, I was shaking from hunger and exhaustion, but the work had done something.

When I pulled up my stats, the changes were obvious.

Name: Adam Daniel Kessler [Change Name?] Level: 0 Age: 22 Health Points: 208/208 Mana: 12/150 Class: Spell Shaper

Strength: 13 Endurance: 15 Constitution: 18 Agility: 13 Dexterity: 14 Wisdom: 8 Intelligence: 22 Willpower: 21

Spells:

Push 27%

Illuminate Area 3%

Ice Shard 32%

Concepts (5):

Force

Radiance

Light

Water

Thermal Transfer

Skills:

Typical (112)

Dodge: 34

Long Staff: 18

Mana Control: 12

Abilities:

Pain Tolerance I

Accelerated Recovery I

Identify I

Languages:

English

Eurathi

Ishani

I stared at the numbers for a long moment.

Better.

Not enough, maybe, but better.

I had discovered that Identify had a cooldown of around ten minutes. At least, that was what it felt like. I didn’t exactly have an accurate way to tell time. Either way, I Identified a few things.

The staff was a mouthful.

Eurathi Long Staff of Spell Channeling

A spell-channeling staff designed to allow the user to direct offensive spells through it. The staff can amplify channeled spells using mana stored within its runes.

I could charge the staff and cast Ice Shard through it. The difference was obvious. The shard formed larger, launched faster, and hit harder than it did when I cast it from my hand.

The downside was just as obvious.

After one empowered cast, the runes dimmed, and I had to recharge the staff from my own mana.

Useful in an emergency, then.

I wasn’t sure if I was ready.

But I couldn’t wait.

If I sat around much longer, despair was going to get its claws into me, and I wasn’t willing to let that happen.

So I started working on the plan to kill that damn beast.

I just hoped I wouldn’t be too hungry or exhausted to survive it.