Magnus Thorne 02

02 – Killing monsters

Having absorbed the power of the cage meant that I could explore the hidden secrets of magic once more, but unfortunately I was still mostly a mortal.

A loud growl made me think of a monster at first, then I realized it was my own stomach. It’s not like the cage, which held me in suspended animation with limited brain function, cared enough about me to feed me and hydrate me sufficiently. A hassle. I would have to spend my last two charges of Power on something as trivial as keeping my mortal body alive.

Fine.

“It's been a long time since I ate or drank. | My hunger is not sated nor is my thirst quenched.”

[0 charges left.]

The sensible thing to do now would have been to wait until I had all my charges back. It would be quite dangerous to try to force the sealed door open and venture into the dungeon with only a modicum of magic at my disposal, and a terrible control over it to boot due to years of imprisonment.

Unfortunately, rational thoughts are for the rational men. And I was not one of them. The only thing I wanted to do was get the hell out of the cave I spent an eternity in, and it all began with leaving the room as soon as possible.

Forcing the door open, I found myself in a long, dark corridor. The only light that allowed me to at least have a sense of its shape was coming from some strange plant growing on the stone walls, emitting a faint blue light from its wet lichen leaves. It plunged the place into an eerie atmosphere fitting of a dungeon, limiting visibility and making the cramped space feel even smaller.

I checked my magic. I could do some basic spells, up to Tier Level Circle equivalent 1-1-0.

By the way, the numbers were not my mind going insane after too much time spent in captivity. They were part of a nifty, if a bit verbose system I had developed to compare the strength of my freehand magic to the most notable and powerful sorcerers I encountered over the years.

The fact that everybody used a system did not mean that everyone had the same metrics. The infuriating thing about systems has always been, to me but also to many others, just how vastly different they were between one another, as if they had been tailored specifically for their user and their user only.

The three most powerful spellcasters had three different systems that classified their skills based on three different metrics. All three were useful, and my pettiness had never stopped me from taking inspiration from other people when they seemed to be onto something. Using TLC metrics allowed me to map out exactly what magic I could do, with higher numbers being better.

This gets us to the present time. Yes, I am narrating stuff to myself. What do you think happens when someone spends a hundred years in a cage alone? They go all sorts of silly in the head, that’s what! (I might have stated barely two sentences ago that it does not, in fact, do that. Now, here I am contradicting myself. A wise reader of this sort-of memoir will surely understand the difference in circumstances and in gravity between the two apparently contradictory statements, and if not, the reader can go to a certain place below the Prime Material where demons happen to live.)

I will explain TLC later. Right now, I had something else to deal with.

At the end of the corridor there was a door. Of course, being me, I opened it without thinking because I momentarily forgot that I am now a weak mortal and should not have my head in the clouds. Not that it would have made a difference.

On the other side of the door I finally met the first denizen of the dungeon: a monster. This one didn’t look too strange or strong, reflecting what I had observed about the state of magic saturation in this corner of the Meandering Crevasse. Still, it spotted me almost immediately and began to charge at me with great speed.

It looked like a small rodent. A rat, with yellow rotting teeth and matter fur covered in blisters. From what I know about dungeons and monsters, the worse looking a creature is, the nearer it is to the end of its life cycle, making it aggressive as it searches for sources of mana to prolong its suffering in the Prime Material.

I decided, therefore, not to wait until the last second to dodge. My wits were sharp, it was my body that was weak. And I still had zero charges.

Fortunately, I knew a Tier 1, Level 1 spell that I could make work even with Circle zero capabilities. It was a copy and improvement of a skill I stole from a silly mage back in the day, the first person I ever killed. After Chester, that is.

Wind blade.

I felt a considerable amount of magic leave my Astral Soul – I made sure not to tap into the magic that was seeping into my body – and as I dodged the rat’s sloppy attempt at charging at me, what appeared in my wake was an invisible blade made of compressed air. The rat screeched as it realized it was going to miss me, and it clawed at the trailing fabric of my oversized shirt, ripping it apart.

A sharp pain exploded in my side. Shit, the little bugger drew blood.

This is all me for not putting enough mana into the wind blade, and making it too slow. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter much because the didn’t manage to arrest its momentum until after it collided with the sharp edge of the blade, and was bisected into two parts, neatly sliced and oozing blood.

Why would monsters have blood eluded me. Perhaps in this new life I could dedicate some time to the study of these strange materializations of magic, who knows.

The death of the rat was not only a small victory, but it was also a Pyrrhic one. I checked my wound, touching the wet blood with my fingers and noticing that it was already starting to turn dark. Dark means infection, in case the state of the rat’s dirty claws was not enough to notice. Not just a simple infection either, but full-blown Dungeon poison.

Now, I must choose what to do, and what to waste the charge of Power that’s surely about to come back to me on. Cleanse the poison or try to absorb some more magic from the felled rat?

In the end, I made my choice. I was, already in the moment of making it, pretty sure I would later come to regret it.

“I killed a rat monster, and it’s turning back into raw magic for the dungeon to absorb. | Of course, there is nothing I can do to intercept it and steal it for myself.”

A thin tendril of dark, tainted mana became visible to my eyes (experiments had shown that such occurrences were only visible to me). It rose from the carcass of the dead monster, hollowing it out from the inside until there was nothing left, with the intention to rejoin the dungeon core and be reincarnated into a monster again. Ù

I reached out to it with a hand coated in what little mana was left in my Astral Soul, using my golden mana to cleanse the corrupted stream of energy before its taint added Soul poisoning to my already poisoned body, and absorbed what little energy I could.

And as the energy was finally absorbed, I noticed with extreme satisfaction that my Astral Soul was now quite larger than before. Once it’s full I will allocate a part of that energy to enhance my body to Refinement 1, while the rest will be enough to grant me a mana pool large enough to cast TLC 1-1-1 spells.

Speaking of: perhaps it’s time I explained TLC and Refinements.