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

Rubidi (presumably) came out of nowhere, hurling herself straight at him like a shadow-fed spear. Her fingers were now claws, her mouth open in a voiceless snarl.

She's going for the kill, Fabrisse realized. He raised another Stupenstone and tried to aim, but didn't know where to.

The purple gleam of the rod shaft shivered in the air as Lorvan stepped in the way, followed by pearl white shards. The rod writhed in his palm. From its end, seven serpentine appendages burst forth with a crackle.

Purple-gold sigils flared across their fanged mouths as they expanded, whip-like and precise.

They struck just as Rubidi closed the final meter.

One snake wrapped around her wrist, halting her claws inches from Celine's bulwark. Another snared her ankle and yanked her. She staggered, then spun. Rubidi tried to counter, bringing her free hand around in a raw palmstrike, but two more serpents coiled around her waist and neck, anchoring her like she was being caught in a ritual web.

Lorvan raised his left hand, fingers already weaving the configuration. His voice dropped into the rhythm of spellcraft:

"Seal the fourth with tethered thread,

Lock them fast or strike me dead."

A binding circle surged beneath her, white runes flaring across the floor like horizontal lightning. The serpents anchored her limbs with radiant precision, feeding their energy into the tightening lock.

He had her. For a heartbeat, it looked absolute.

Then Rubidi screamed. The serpents convulsed.

It's this feeling again.

Fabrisse felt the void; it felt like someone was constricting his windpipe. Cracks spidered across her limbs, and the void swallowed the cracks. She was phasing through her bindings.

One serpent slipped.

Rubidi's ankle twisted in an inhuman angle as the void slipped through the coils. The snakes' fangs dug deeper, radiant gold sparking at their seams.

A final serpent lunged for her throat—one last desperate clamp to stall her phase distortion—but it passed straight through. She was slipping out of time, out of form, out of containability.

And then the Veyruhn's Lock tried to close.

It slammed with a clap like heaven breaking, glyph-spikes punching up from the floor to impale the shadow beneath her.

But they hit nothing.

Rubidi had already torn free.

"Voidphasing. That's a technique only someone who's neck-deep in Voidcasting could learn." Lorvan closed his palm. The Lock shattered on impact with the void, fragmenting into a whirl of dead symbols and bleeding sparks. "She's in a Voidfold now."

"Why can't we just attack that visible rift?" Fabrisse pointed at the same rift that'd brought all these void creatures into the pondside.

Lorvan replied, "It's a mouth. What we're seeing is just the lip of it; the entry flare. A fold so strong to the point it can summon infinite voidspawn has to sit beneath the space, braided into the leylines."

A crack of soundless golden lightning split the sky. It struck down, targeting what looked like empty air outside the pond's perimeter.

The moment the bolt descended, a vertical seam in reality split wide like an eyelid opening. It sucked the lightning in, and the fold closed again before the echo of its presence could fully register. The Voidfold devoured it whole.

"Found the fold!"

The voice rang out from the edge of the shattered dome. A tall silhouette stood against the light, coat flared by magical recoil, his fingers still crackling with golden aether sparks from the spell's release.

Professor Kaldrin!

More voidspawns peeled out of the shadows. One spawned too close to Fabrisse, and he jolted as he dodged aside and cast Tremblehold on it. Either the creature was too heavy or it had become much more dexterous now, because his spell could barely sway it for a second. Celine immediately hit it with a javelin, slamming the creature against the inside of her bulwark. However, the creature didn't die. It wiggled and attempted to regain its footing.

Celine scowled. "That should've pinned it."

She summoned another javelin and rammed it through the creature's chest before it could lurch. This time, it spasmed and dissolved into oily smoke. Close. But the delay was new, and deeply disturbing.

Fabrisse saw Celine sweating, and after a quick check with Spectral Appraisal, he confirmed his suspicion:

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

His own was not much better: 18 out of 34. He was very close to worsening his own performance.

A new shriek split the air as another voidspawn erupted from the rippling edge of the Fold. This one was longer-limbed, its joints double-hinged and too fluid, its surface pulsing with tiny motes of static. It didn't hesitate. It ran.

The voidspawn barreled toward them, dragging static across the scorched floor.

Before Celine could cast, a new voice cut in from behind. "Guys! Move."

Flames exploded across the creature's path as Tommaso stepped forward, hands already sheathed in blaze. He snapped his wrists, and three ribbons of fire lashed outward in a forked arc, corralling the voidspawn. The creature leapt tight into a blast column that erupted from the ground beneath it, consuming it in roaring flame.

Another spawn rose from behind it—this one with plated shoulders, half-molten horns writhing across its head. Tommaso twirled his arm, summoned a firewheel, and hurled it like a discus. The wheel bit deep into the creature's midsection, dragged fire with it, and detonated in a shockwave that took two more of the smaller spawns with it.

"Heck yeah!" He'd already scanned the surrounding space. "Let's turn the heat back up."

Five mini voidspawns burst from the ground in a simultaneous shriek, bursting into the yard at full sprint. Hunched and sinewy, they were leaner than the others. They zipped across the field in a streak, weaving around embers and debris, all zeroing in on Fabrisse like knives shot from a spring trap.

A massive translucent hand, sculpted from ice, slammed down from above with a wham. The mini-voidspawn got pinged off the surface like skipping stones launched from a catapult, arcing through the air in cartoonish spirals. Two of them flew higher than the still-squawking cluckclebeaks, who flapped in all directions in their usual feathered panic. One voidspawn went pinwheeling off into a tree and exploded in a puff of smoke. Another simply vanished mid-air with a horrified squeak.

Ilya stepped through the detonated fire from the firewheel. Hovering behind her, sealed in an upright slab of thick, rune-etched ice, was the unconscious masked caster, now unmasked. Of course it was Ganvar.

Why does Ilya always have the most ridiculous spells . . .

However, a more important question popped up in his mind. The pond is part of the Synod. Surely with this magnitude of spells being cast, somebody must have noticed?

His eyes rose on instinct, and for a moment, he thought he'd gone partially blind. The sky had dulled. Not just clouded, not just darkened—dulled. All color was leached out of it like ink washed from a page. The blue had drained to a flat, cold gray, a tone so desaturated it looked like it had given up entirely. Even the outlines of clouds blurred into one another, reduced to a slow-churning monotone.

It felt like being quarantined.

"You need to remove the caster, Instructant Lugano," Ilya said. "These voidspawns will get stronger and stronger."

Tommaso wiped a streak of soot off his cheek with the back of his hand, grinning as he stepped beside Ilya. "Nice of you to show up, Ice Queen. I was three seconds from spontaneous combustion. Could've used some of that frosty affection."

Fabrisse, catching the tail of the line, braced himself. Here comes the usual verbal slap. But instead of her usual exasperated scoff or a deadpan reprimand, Ilya's lips curled slightly. She didn't even roll her eyes.

Another mini void-thing spawned right behind Ilya, and she smacked it skyward with another ice hand, smaller now. The creature cartwheeled into the air before vanishing.

Ilya leaned in and pressed a quick, efficient peck to his cheek.

Wait, what? Fabrisse's brow furrowed. She has never shown affection before, and she decides to do it now, of all times?

A glowing glyph flared on his back at the same time, a soft shnnk of layered magic knitting into his mantle.

"Aether pool reinforced," she said, already turning to face the fold. "Don't waste it."

I heard about that in Basic Water Theory. It's a rare cryo-aether technique, letting casters bypass burnout thresholds without shredding their mana channels. No wonder Tommaso's been able to cast flashy spells for so long. But a Rank V iteration of a Tier III spell? That has to be somewhere close to Instructant level.

"We can hold for another hour, Mentor. Do your thing," Tommaso said. His back was now to Fabrisse, but he didn't need to see his face to know exactly what kind of smug grin Tommaso was wearing.

Lorvan, now near the center of the shattered dome, cast a glance toward him. "I'll leave them to you." He then strode toward Kaldrin.

Kaldrin was already weaving. Golden light had gathered around both of his arms now, dense and thrumming as he formed geometric arcs in the air. With a flash, he snapped his fingers, and three radiant chains cracked into being, writhing like living gold filaments, charged and tense like lightning frozen in motion.

"You see it now?" Kaldrin called out to Lorvan. "They're anchored to a leyline scar . . . clever. That's how they nested the Fold."

"These folds aren't stable," Lorvan answered. "If we synchronize, we can rip whoever's casting from the anchor lines."

"Just like L'Nair's Siege?" Kaldrin asked.

Lorvan's brow ticked up. "Cleaner. I've upgraded."

Wait. Those two go that far back?

Kaldrin rotated both wrists, and the golden chains reared. The arcs of light in the air interlocked into a shifting mandala. Lorvan mirrored the motion from across the broken field, his serpentine rod unfurling again, this time with tighter control—each head glowing with synced sigils. The ground under his feet began to pulse with layered circles, a rhythm that matched the hum around Kaldrin's chains.

"On my mark," Kaldrin intoned.

The aether between them surged. Two distinct geometries aligned across the fractured battlefield. The air bent, threads of unseen force warping into focus.

Fabrisse squinted through the glare, peeking past his fingers. Even half-obscured, it was breathtaking. The golden chains whipped forward with impossible precision, like the battlefield itself had bent to obey.

For a moment, all he could do was stare.

"Now," Kaldrin commanded.

Lorvan slammed his rod into the earth. Kaldrin swung his arms wide.

The golden chains cracked forward, trailing afterimages in the air as they converged, then struck.

Right into empty space.