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

The rod cracked against the air. Then all sound fell away.

The duo raised their hands like conductors invoking the overture of a war-symphony. Kaldrin's left gauntlet dissolved into strings of light-incoded symbols. Golden loops unraveled from his wrist, each one forged from braided light, each link interlocking with the rod's pattern like a clasp finding its twin.

The Fold mouth, an ugly, writhing mouth of spatial impropriety, tore.

The boundary wrenched; cracks bloomed along its rim as if the very fabric of place was tearing itself open under protest. Lorvan angled the rod down like a spear being twisted into a joint. Simultaneously, Kaldrin yanked the chain forward, and the rod-chain spearheaded in two directions, ripping the mouth further apart with a growling sound Fabrisse felt in the enamel of his teeth before he even registered it in his ears.

They're not just casting, Fabrisse realized. They're amplifying through glyphcraft.

He'd been behind for so long that he forgot there were so many branches of magic to look into just within Thaumaturgy itself.

As the Fold-mouth split wider, the chain-rod launched inside like a harpoon. It howled through the warped air, burning golden against the colorless void beyond the breach.

Kaldrin and Lorvan moved in tandem. Their stances mirrored each other: one grounded, one drawn taut like a bowstring. The chain stiffened as tension fed back through it, turning fluid light into solid pressure.

"Extraction," Celine murmured. Fabrisse had seen it done before, when Kaldrin yanked the void entity last time.

Kaldrin braced his heels against the soil, grinding a boot into the ley-warmed ground. Lorvan twisted the rod with both hands. But sparks of orange flared even harder from their chain-rod.

Their aether was destabilizing. The sparks worsened, erupting into angular faultlines along the links.

"Kaldrin," Lorvan barked without looking. "Hold—" The rod sagged in his hands. The chain rumbled, links dimming to a dull bronze.

"If extraction fails, what do they do?" Celine asked.

"I don't know," Fabrisse replied. He also didn't know why Celine thought he'd have the answer.

Behind them, Ilya kept pace with deliberate urgency. Her braid was scorched at the ends, her coat ripped open along one sleeve, but her posture remained resolute as she hurled a sequence of high-grade incantations accompanied by volleys of frosted arrows at the newly-spawned void creatures, now twice as big as before. "They'll jump into the Fold," she said. "If the pull fails, they'll force a crossing."

"They'll jump in?" Fabrisse echoed.

"How bad is that?" Celine asked.

"Not good," Ilya said. "But it might be enough to enable external help."

"What do you mean by external help?" Celine continued.

"You seeing the sky, Fabri?" Said Tommaso as he skated past low over a muddy patch, his boots not touching earth at all.

Beneath him, hexagonal panes of luminous flames shimmered with faint green edging, assembling in real time like stepping stones laid by invisible hands. He was chaining it with near-zero delay, all the while throwing simple fireballs at advancing voidspawns.

Low aether draw, self-propelling, good terrain avoidance. Huh, Fabrisse thought. He's conserving his focus points.

Tommaso, who usually preferred explosive speed bursts and gold-lined barrier punches, was sticking to an efficient movement suite?

That could not mean well.

"We've already been swallowed into the Voidfold," Fabrisse concluded.

"Unfortunately," Ilya said. That must've been the reason nobody had noticed anything. They weren't in the Synod anymore. "But worry not. My tracking concludes there is only one caster inside the heart of the fold. Whoever's in there, they will have a hard time sustaining the fold while—"

Sounds blurred around Fabrisse.

A bottomless hole split open just two paces in front of him. Claws—no, fingers—long, barbed, and jointed in a way no human's fingers should, snatched him by the collar and chest. They moved like Rubidi's, but larger. More evolved.

He cast Tremblehold on instinct. Tremblehold didn't work against a black hole.

"Fabrisse!" someone yelled—Celine? Lorvan? He couldn't tell. The moment had no depth, only static.

The claws yanked him down.

He fell through the rift, through the absence, through the screaming edge of space—

And then nothing.

The rift behind him closed with a snap. He stood, trying to feel the lightless space before him, but he could sense nothing. There was no texture to the space around him. His limbs floated, yet he felt the lurching suggestion of a downward pull beneath his feet.

Panic tried to sprint up his spine. He wouldn't allow it.

Checklist, he thought.

He clenched his fists. The familiar compression of his gloves gave him a half-second of tactile anchoring.

Checklist. Stabilize. Enumerate. Prioritize.

Orientation.

No gravity. Visual field absent. No known threat in direct contact—

yet.

Light source.

Needed immediately.

Aether channels.

Unclear interference, possibly suppressed. Test draw.

Time perception.

Already unreliable. Avoid second-guessing. Use spell loop as external rhythm.

Mental scripts.

Run known mantras for void exposure. Reinforce self-concept. Identity must stay intact.

"Draw breath, coax warmth, speak bright," he whispered. "Draw breath, coax warmth, speak bright."

A weak curl of orange twisted into being between his palms. Not fire—just the ghost of it. It lit only a narrow cone in front of him, as if the air was too thin to carry light. The edges of the spell didn't cast shadows. They were swallowed instantly by the void.

One meter visibility. Low flare duration. Aether pressure compromised. Noise profile low. Good.

The helix fluttered. He adjusted his fingers as precisely as he could, even as his breath shuddered. His chest still spasmed with adrenaline, but the spiral of steps began to hold him upright like a scaffolding.

Then he heard breathing behind his neck.

He turned. The helix caught it—her—just as she moved far too close. Rubidi's face emerged out of the void like a thing peeling from a veil. Her eyes were bottomless pools of tar, far too wide to be human.

"How do you like this?" She breathed into his mouth. The words entered his ears in the wrong register, with an accent no species had a right to own.

Fabrisse flinched so hard his combustion helix wavered into smoke. He fumbled to recast it, and couldn't. She had violated his personal space too hard.

"We shall make this quick and painless. No one will know."

Rubidi's gaze pinned him in place. Her hand rose, and with it, the void thickened. She didn't reach toward him, but rather through him, phasing her arm partially into his chest. It didn't feel like touch, but like that deeply intolerable pressure building up in Fabrisse's chest.

She whispered, almost reverently, "Rare constructs like the Eidralith are old. Ornery. But they bind. And bindings can be unwound."

Fabrisse spasmed involuntarily. His knees buckled as his flare guttered out. But his mind still ran. This is harvesting. That means she's focused, and likely not fully aware of her surroundings.

He couldn't do anything to harm her. But if they were in a voidfold, surely there would be a mouth somewhere to interact with.

He scanned the voidspace. Even in the dim halo of his extinguished flare, Fabrisse's gaze snagged on something. A patch of space that resisted being blank.

The void around it angled, like the idea of a vanishing point rendered in three-dimensional geometry. Subtle seams formed where the backdrop of nothingness felt slightly . . . structured. It almost seemed like those delicate mirage-lines that appeared in the desert near the edge of his commune, ones that made solid shapes ripple. Just like the one I saw when they first tried to kidnap me.

He could feel it, that awful unraveling, like his Stone Affinity was being peeled away layer by layer, not cut but sanded, frayed until the shape no longer held. It felt like he no longer knew how to levitate a stone.

No. Not my stones. I have to do something about this.

But his very Stone essence was being taken away from him, and he found it hard to even bring to mind the names of the spells he wanted to cast. The name of his own stone. Every time he tried thinking about Stupenstones, an inexplicable wave of nausea hit him and ceased his cognitive function.

"Give up," came Rubidis whisper. "You are weak. You can't touch me in this form."

I have to improvise. There's one skill I can use.

His hand curled, steady now. He needed this to work.

He reset his posture. Bones aligned, chest open, breath measured. He remembered Rolen's instruction: lead from the center. Not the wrist. Not the shoulder. Will first, motion second.

He extended his hand and screamed the mnemonic.

"Ash above, ember below. Sight the flame and let it go!"

A sputtering spiral of orange and gold burst forth from his palm, trailing heat like a comet too small to matter. It rocketed toward the rippling seam in the void, that half-seen vanishing point, as Fabrisse prayed the distance wasn't too far. He needed it to reach. He needed it to reach.

The flare flew straight. Then, without even a flicker of impact, it vanished. Gone, like the void had opened its throat and swallowed the flare whole, as though it had never existed in the first place.

Fabrisse stared and held his breath. That was a distress flare spell. It was designed to bloom, violently, unmistakably—a scream of fire in spellform. Instead, it winked out like a dying thought.

He didn't know if it made it to the ripples.

He didn't know if anyone saw it.

He just knew the void had taken it.

Rubidi let out a cackle. "Fool. Shoot spells all you want. Even if you can somehow find the mouth, nobody will know. I've connected the voidmouth to the safest retreat. Nobody will come for you."

A cold beyond cold began to take root in his gut, anchoring there like stone in deep water.

Rubidi leaned close, her presence vast and slow. Her voice dipped into something deeper than language.

"Let the void claim you," she murmured, "and then I'll claim your Eidralith."

He tried to summon the words to cast again. Something—anything. His lips moved, but his hand faltered. The sparks didn't form.

His fingers curled. His chest rose once, sharply—too sharply. His lungs seized. No spell would come. Not with this drain.

He realized now—she wasn't just unbinding his Affinity. She was draining his Focus. Starving his capacity to resist.

The world dimmed. His limbs sagged like the strings had been cut from them. He was nothing more than a vessel on the edge of collapse. It was all over.

A searing rod of light speared through the ripples. The void warped in response, the rim of the mouth spasming, failing to reject the intrusion.

Fabrisse tried to gasp, but no air came in. The intrusion was too sudden, too directional, too targeted to be accidental.

Rubidi jerked, her hand retracting from his chest as if burned.

Her void-shaped body stiffened, and for the first time since the rift swallowed him, Rubidi's composure cracked. Her head turned, slow and rigid, toward the source of the light. ". . . How?"

So someone actually saw my flare.

Fabrisse dropped.

His legs folded beneath him, and the rest of him followed, limp. The faint tether of resistance snapped, and the void caught him like he was dropped into thick fluid.

His limbs floated. The weight of the world peeled away. His chest rose—and this time, it stayed risen. He could breathe.

The voice rang in his ear again. "I've always wondered," she said, not quite steady, "why you thought it wise to teach me forbidden magic." A second rod followed, locking in parallel to the first, splitting the spatial seam wider, prying the geometry apart. "And explain this, Rubidi," the voice pressed, sharper this time. "Why do you have three unpublished papers on void-based extraction of affinities and bindings?"

"You . . . Stay away from this!" Rubidi growled, a primordial grumble. "I'm doing what's best."

"Best? I see it now—where I've been wrong about this partnership of ours all along." The voice curled with scorn. "There's no honor in winning by fraud."

Fabrisse couldn't see her, couldn't move to look. But the light reached him, a rising storm of it, gold and white and severe. His pupils cinched to pinpricks, every part of his skull flinching from the sensory spike.

And yet he welcomed it. Even as his eyes stung and watered, even as shapes shimmered behind his lashes, he'd never been more grateful to be blinded.

Then the voice returned, this time, with poise. "Now explain. What is the meaning of this?" With a very familiar, utterly smug, insufferably grating poise.

The one who came for him was Severa Montreal.