It burns with acid and venom as it bites into my skin. I look at where the knife came from and find… nothing.
“Hey,” I announce to Sylves and Amelie. “I’ve been stabbed. I’ll be doing something about it.”
Instantly, I stop helping the frontline, and instead deploy my field of [Suppression]. It crashes down into the rock with gravity, stopping Sylves from floating, pressing Amelie into her wheelchair. I don’t have the luxury of excluding them.
My side stings. It burns and melts. It hurts. I look around, trying to find a hint of the rogue, but there’s nothing.
Another stab, this one into my lower back. I whip out to grab a wrist, anything, but come up empty again. I feel my flesh dissolve. My eyes narrow. The field thins, smaller but heavier. Mana pours into the skill, weighing down anyone, anything approaching me.
I get stabbed in the shoulder. Damn it. Not strong enough. I draw the field even tighter.
[Suppression 10 > 11]
It’s not enough. The slash lands on my ankle, and my leg buckles. I am sent to the floor, kneeling. But my field holds. I feel a tingle of heavy, slowed mana leak from the wound.
My mind whips at it, and I take hold of it. It’s inside my body, so it’s enough. [Selection] lands on my wound, from there, latches onto the tendril of mana, and traces it back to a target.
[Selection 8 > 9]
I look in the direction of the rogue, kneeling. They’re a blur to my magical senses, and invisible to my eyes. “Opal!” I yell, and then reach out.
My skills form a brutal chain of effects. First, [Selection] lets me target them, find them. [Suppression] comes down like a hammer, slowing the rogue, slowing their abilities, dragging them down. Then comes [Solidification], a needle of mana driven into their leg when they don’t pay attention, exploding and messing with their skills. Finally, when they’re disrupted, I pull on my new knowledge, and [Deconstruct] the rogue’s magic.
Effect after effect, I find, analyse, weaken, and then break the skill.
The magic shatters.
All of a sudden, the rogue is just standing there, blinking, confused. The invisibility is broken, and suppression hammers in even harder. They try to move, but I break that skill, too.
[Deconstruction 7 > 8]
[Class up! Nullmage 0 > 1]
Then Opal appears in a blink, and stabs a sword through their chest. Their wings stop beating, settling on the ground as their heart is pierced,
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[Level up! 22 > 23]
I begin to focus my efforts on the poison and acid currently working its way through me.
First, I [Suppress] the effects, pouring more mana into my skill. Then, I rip off bits of my shirt - which means I’ll need a new one yet again, dang it - trying to wipe away as much of the horrid stuff as I can, smearing the fabric with blood and goop. It burns my fingers, too, but I’ll live.
Then, I use [Flesh Restoration], leaning on the system a bit, but fueling it with enough mana to kill me, focused entirely on purging the venom.
A surge of vitality passes through me as my mana gets converted, the new points in vessel from my class level already proving valuable. “Level?” I ask Opal.
“Thirty-one,” they reply, then blink back to the scramble of frontliners.
That’s… high, but not impossibly high. Enough to counter with a combo of my skills, apparently. I vomit a good mouthful of blood.
Okay, maybe not completely counter.
But it’s enough. I breathe, slowly, the sensation of my heart thrumming against my chest uncomfortably exhausting me as strength pours out of me and into healing. I’ll need a big meal after this. That’s okay, though. There’s something more important to do first.
Loot the bodies.
- - -
In the end, there are only two enchanted items among the bounty hunters. A waterskin that purifies even the nastiest stuff poured into it into drinkable water and can hold about twice as much as it looks like it should, for one. That one’s valuable and we want to keep it, so it is immediately taken away from me and safekept by Inu.
Shame. It would have been interesting to take it apart.
The other is a stone. It looks like a compass, with a needle that points at something near us. Probably the city, given the direction.
We decide there is a good chance it might be transmitting our location to whatever guild the bounty hunters belonged to. Everyone decides we should break it, so I get to trace the runes, then try to modify them to practice.
[Inscription 4 > 5]
It goes poorly. As I pour mana into the modified version, some mistakes light up and blow up in my face, showering me in a minor debris of mana shards. Nothing major, But it makes my mana go haywire for a moment, and gives me a horribly tight feeling around my heart for a moment. A little like heartburn.
Slowly, bit by bit, I’m figuring out runes. Whenever I have time, I still trace the ones on my phial, slowly making sure I remember them all. I also analyze the bits of the sensory skill of the tracker I broke, and the stealth one from the rogue.
There’s a decent amount of overlap between the rogue’s skill and whatever shadow aspected ability that I broke before befriending Kuro.
But, of course, a lot of my mana goes to healing our frontliners. Dar, especially, took a couple of nasty blows, and Norman got stabbed once. Inu’s tough, so the wounds she did receive are a lot more shallow, but I heal her, too.
We eat. It helps me feel less weak, and returns the feeling to my hands and feet, which’ve been all pins and needles from the poison. It’s nice to be able to hold a spoon again without using mana. “Where did we get the spoons?” I ask.
“I had Norman take them,” Jess supplies calmly. “From the inn, where we stayed at? A couple plates, bowls, pots and pans go a long way in the wild.”
Her husband looks a little ashamed at it, but I just smile. “Good call.”
Somehow that makes Norman feel more ashamed. “I’m a thief,” he mourns into his hands. “I never thought I’d be a thief.”
“And we’re eating better for it,” Richard says. “I, for one, think we should steal more!”
I smile at her, too. She’s absolutely right. Stealing is the best.
