Basic Thaumaturgy for the Emotional Incompetent [A Magical Academy LitRPG]

Celine adjusted her grip on the javelin forming in her hand. "Fine," she said. "You have brighter ideas than I do."

They moved quickly, ducking beneath a collapsed arch and weaving past fractured stone. The voidspawn had thinned near the pondyard's eastern fringe, but that wouldn't last.

Something cracked underfoot.

A ripple bloomed across the flagstone. Fabrisse hissed, "Tremblehold."

A void-creature erupted from the ground at the same moment, but its limbs twisted, traction lost as it flailed with a wet screech. Celine's javelin shattered its head on the downswing. The shards near her palm had already fanned out into her next summon.

Another one burst up near his side. Fabrisse's hand jerked out instinctively, and a second Tremblehold sent it face-first to the ground. The timing was near-perfect. It sprawled in an arc, scrabbling, and Celine's follow-up bisected it with an airborne throw.

Momentum held.

They stayed close, close enough that Celine's summoned bulwarks occasionally swept wide to catch angles Fabrisse couldn't see. Once, she pivoted sharply and snapped her fingers, forcing a wall to rotate ninety degrees. It blocked a lurching beast and gave them just enough space to keep pushing forward.

"You're getting good with that," she muttered. Fabrisse just kept on moving.

Meanwhile, the pondside roared with colliding forces. Tommaso hovered high in the smoke-wreathed air, arms blazing with kinetic charge. "Sunsting!"

Arcs of concentrated fire lanced down in a fan, chasing the mysterious figure's trail. They blurred sideways in zipping motion, the flames chasing but never catching. She landed then raised both arms.

Two ripples burst out from the cloaked figure, silent but devastating.

A pulse of compressed gravity folded space just ahead of them, warping Tommaso's incoming spell into a spiral. At the same time, a semi-transparent barrier rose up behind them, refracting his next flame burst into useless scatter.

Tommaso's body ignited. Wind spiraled, feeding the blaze into a compact sheath around him, until his figure blazed like a silhouette trapped in a solar flare. Flames trailed from his back like wings. Then he shot forward.

That's his combustion form, Fabrisse thought as he gazed at the sky, his feet never stopping.

Tommaso struck the ground just short of the shrouded figure's feet.

The impact detonated in a dome of flame and pressure, a controlled blast wave that curved upward like a flipped bowl. The cloaked figure shielded themselves with their cloak, and that was the last thing Fabrisse could see before the smoke engulfed everything.

Celine and Fabrisse pressed forward—until the ground shuddered again.

Celine stopped. This time, it wasn't the tremor that made her freeze.

Something had spawned just outside her most recent bulwark. It hadn't burst from the soil like the others. It slid into existence.

"Fabrisse," Celine said, voice low, sharp with tension.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

He halted.

The thing stood motionless, if 'stood' could describe it at all. Towering and asymmetrical, it resembled a massive tapering cone of sinew and slickened chitin, as if someone had sculpted a leech out of smoke and given it a set of crooked teeth.

Its limbs were gangly, uneven—two of them dragging, two more arched like bladed stilts. But the worst was its mouth . . . or what might become its mouth. A yawning slit ran down the creature's front, stretching vertically from where a chest might be too far below its midsection, stitched shut by dozens of strands of blackened membrane.

That thing could not possibly have been a normal spawn.

The moment the creature's crooked form angled toward them, Celine dropped into a stance, one hand braced to the ground, the other raised, fingers splayed and trembling. Light shimmered across her knuckles, then raced down her arm in oscillating loops. Sigils etched themselves in front of her palm.

"This will drain my aether pool by a lot," she whispered, barely audible above the mounting hum of the anomaly's presence. "But I'll try . . ."

She didn't sound confident. He dared say she was even more terrified of these voidspawns than he was.

"We should run," Fabrisse muttered.

"I—Yeah," she said. "But it's too late now."

The creature made no sound when it glided, slick like oil. Its limbs dragged with a fleshy scrape as it slithered toward them, and that slit of a mouth twitched. A stitch popped. Another followed, splitting the seam wider. The voidgate opened inside its mouth.

It was going to swallow them whole. Celine squeezed her eyes shut.

A streak of violet tore through the air: a spiraling rod drilling straight into the creature's maw.

The voidspawn seized. The impact lifted it off its limbs for a second, twitching as if caught in some invisible snare. The rod kept pushing, burning through the blackened stitches until it embedded deep inside.

Then came the second scream. It sounded human.

A voice howled from inside the creature.

The rod flashed again, and with a violent tug, it yanked out a person.

Ragged, crackling with void energy, a person was ripped out from the gullet of the beast, half-wrapped in corrupted tendrils and choking on black bile. They slammed into the stones outside the bulwark with a wet crunch, still thrashing alongside the twitching tether of the rod.

The voidspawn collapsed unto itself. Its mouth sealed like folded space, and the whole thing slumped, liquefying in real time.

Lorvan stepped through the thinning haze. On his left hand, the hand holding the rod, five rings gleamed—each distinct, set with stones that pulsed in a cadence too slow for normal aether rhythms. Their glow traced up his wrist like veins of starlight.

Fabrisse gawked. Celine, still trembling, opened her eyes with great effort.

They weren't supposed to be that surprised. Lorvan was to interfere the moment he saw anomalies. But still, the fashion in which his mentor entered the scene, and more importantly, the items he had on him, left Fabrisse in awe.

Those are definitely rings with attribution boosting properties, Fabrisse thought. So even Lorvan has to fall back on his aids now.

He knelt beside the figure he'd extracted from the anomaly's gullet.

The figure on the ground convulsed. Lorvan jumped back, releasing his rod's grip on the figure right before a shockwave of pressure sliced through the air. He pulled his rod back just in time, before a blade of darkness tore through the ground. The fissure it left behind glowed pitch-black.

That looks like a weapon, but not a weapon. It's a spell made manifest.

The body arched violently, dark ichor spewing from its mouth in a thick rope.

"Look at your hideous form," Lorvan grunted. "Have you gone mad, spending all your years diving into the darkness, just to become so hideous?"

That was a valid question. Whoever that person was, they were UGLY. Why do people go chasing dark power if all it does is make them look ugly? One could always become more powerful, but once you had, like, acne on your skin, it would be damn near impossible to get rid of it. A permanent zit the size of a magical focus crystal was not worth the trade-off.

The figure's head tilted at an unnatural angle, vertebrae clicking one by one into a quiet, controlled alignment. The darkness coiled around them. They rose.

Fabrisse's mind rebelled at the sight. The sound of Celine hyperventilating beside him didn't do much to clear his head.

That's not a person anymore.

"If the Order turns a blind eye to corruption, then we will carve justice from the dark ourselves." Lorvan's hands relaxed. The rod in his left hand gave off no noise, only vibration, an inaudible timbre that prickled across the skin. Its length flared with sigils too old for current spellbooks, too bright for the eyes to see. Fabrisse squinted as purple, reverent sparks bled from the etchings, but forming delicate helices that circled the rod's spine like prayer wheels.

Then his right hand lifted. Six thin fractures burst outward in perfect angles, knitting into a hexagram whose lines writhed like solder etched through crystal.

Innate? Does that mean . . . this is his ultimate spell? A spell only he can cast?

Lorvan never took his eyes off the aberration. His voice cut clean through the static.

"You might have merged with the dark," he said. "But I recognize you from your scream; your stance. You've gone insane . . . Affar Rubidi."