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

The hairs on the back of Fabrisse's neck stood as a pressure ripple surged toward him from the entrance. His body moved before his mind caught up.

A tendril of absolute void cracked through the space he'd just been standing in, severing the edge of his sleeve with surgical silence. It didn't bend any light or make any sound.

He dove sideways, instinct guiding him better than sight ever could. His knees slammed into the tiled floor and skidded. The whip hissed past his cheek, a hair away from smashing him with the breathless chill of the void.

That's the same whip as earlier!

Another pulse; another wrongness. Smaller than the one hitting Celine, but wasn't any slower. Fabrisse flung himself in the same direction as before, heart pounding in his throat. The second void whip lashed through the space he'd just vacated, perfectly mirroring the arc of the first.

It was following a pattern.

He hit the floor hard again, shoulder first this time, and scrambled to his feet. His back slammed into a cold marble wall. There was no way left.

"C-come out and fight fair!" He shouted. "L-like a . . ." He couldn't find a word to finish his sentence.

"Oh, I'll come out," a voice resounded. But it didn't come from the void. It came from the floor.

A seam split open in the tiles beside him, unzipping reality with a wet crunch. Darkness poured out. Something punched through it.

A hooded figure surged upward from the rift, a blur of motion and force. Fabrisse stumbled back, expecting a blow—

—but the figure pivoted past him. The newcomer raised a hand, fingers splayed, and a shimmering disc of pitch black force caught a third void-whip midair, deflecting it with a shriek of twisting space.

The shield cracked instantly under the impact, but held long enough.

Then the figure turned, eyes glinting from beneath the cowl. He spread his palm and fired a bolt of darkness straight at Fabrisse. This one seemed to have been powered by devotion, judging from the golden sparks buzzing around it like electric wasps, orbiting the core of inky black.

A ring of shadow flared and curved, forming a hexagonal dome of woven strands—dark yet glinting with golden starlight, each line inscribed with sigils that throbbed with steady rhythm. The cage locked shut with a final metallic chime, anchoring him in place.

Fabrisse's eyes widened. It wasn't cold inside, like the void outside. It was warm. Warm darkness was a weird thing.

He barely had time to catch his breath before the figure shouted, "Catch her!"

"What—"

From behind the broken pillar, Celine's limp body lifted into the air, surrounded by a bubble of suspended aether. The moment it cleared the pillar, the figure hurled her forward like a spear of moonlight.

He threw himself to the side within the cage just in time to catch her crashing into him. The impact knocked the wind out of him, but he wrapped both arms around her reflexively, cushioning her fall as they tumbled to the side of the cage. It lost its spark for exactly that moment, then resumed its lightning-like charges as soon as Fabrisse got his foothold.

The figure didn't explain further. He stepped beyond the edge of the cage, facing the churning dark that still festered at the broken threshold of the room.

"I can't hold the fold open and fight at the same time," the figure muttered, almost to himself. "I just need a crack big enough to force it into manifesting." Then he said, louder, "Don't touch the cage. Stay grounded. When it breaks the fold, we run."

Fabrisse checked up on Celine Moose. She wasn't bleeding, and it didn't look like she suffered from any external injuries. But her eyes were half-opened and unfocused, and her right cheek was soaked with her own drool, which was rather worrying. He checked her breathing and her pulses and they seemed normal.

Looks like the real Celine and not any mirage. What happened to her?

The void fought from the threshold. The tendrils writhed out in fractal bursts of anti-light, refusing to give shape to itself. The hooded figure rolled his shoulders, cloak lifting like mist, and muttered a short phrase that made the air pull in around him.

This is too high-level for me to comprehend. Whoever this person is, they must be at least Magus Exemplar level.

Chains of darkness uncoiled from his arms—three at first, then six, then more, slithering like serpents and etching themselves with golden veins. Each link screamed with a clanking sound Fabrisse couldn't hear but felt in the roots of his teeth.

He snapped his hand out.

The chains launched like harpoons, diving through the twisting void with impossible precision. One missed. The second curved around like a whip. The third struck true.

It didn't wrap around a limb or a head—it anchored into nothing. A clutch point in space that resisted like a living thing.

The void screamed.

Space twisted into spiralling ribbons of void as the aggressor tumbled out.

Dragged out like a fish caught on a hook, the figure was hauled from the fold in a warped tumble of limbs and smoke. A half-formed thing—cloaked in void, head shrouded by a featureless mask save for four glimmering sigils orbiting where the eyes should be.

Stolen novel; please report.

The hooded figure snapped his wrist again. More chains burst from the ground, slamming into the aggressor and yanking them down.

The hooded figure knelt, slammed his palm against the floor, and literally peeled the marble floor. It curled away as he inscribed a sigil mid-air with one finger. Each stroke hung in place like fire suspended in ink.

A tear began to open beneath Fabrisse and Celine: a yawning fold in space, its rim lined with mirrored light and geometric glyphs like rotating puzzle pieces.

The hooded figure's voice sharpened, threading command through every syllable, "Brace yourselves. I'm dropping the cage."

Fabrisse tightened his grip around Celine's shoulders, heart hammering. The base of the cage inched toward the breach.

Then the void roared.

The bound aggressor's body shuddered, then exploded in a burst of inverted light—white that splattered like ink, silence that cracked like thunder.

Chains snapped. Golden-veined links unraveled midair, burning into ash.

The aggressor raised one arm. From its palm, a perfect circle of glyphless, silent seal formed and launched it toward the tear in the floor.

He's cutting the passage.

The seal struck the fold before the cage could drop in. It imploded on contact, collapsing the tear in a sudden flash of concussive compression. The floor slammed shut like a book snapping closed.

Fabrisse cried out, shielding Celine as arcane shockwaves rattled through the cage walls. She made a gagging sound.

The chains on the aggressor's arms melted off, leaving streaks of gold dripping down its limbs like molten wire. It turned its featureless face toward the hooded man, and its sigil-eyes flared with furious brilliance—four rings rotating independently like mismatched gears.

Then it lunged like a rabid dog.

Its tendrils whipped out in a spiderweb pattern. The hooded figure moved with fluid certainty, arms tracing quick arcs as he wove layers of translucent wards between himself and the oncoming storm. His magic flared gold, then deep violet, then black again. Each shield he raised cracked under the impact but reformed instantly.

They were meant to withstand.

He's not trying to win. He's buying time.

Fabrisse felt a tug at his wrist. He looked down and saw that Celine's fingers had closed around his hand. Her eyes were still unfocused and glazed with pain, but they were searching. Her lips moved.

"Celine?" he whispered, leaning closer.

She tried to speak again. It came out as a whisper, threadbare and broken by shallow breaths.

He put a finger over her lips. "Save your breath. It's okay." It wasn't okay.

His hand clenched around hers harder than he meant to. She had dragged him into this, hadn't she? He hadn't known the details, but her mumbling apologies were more than enough to pin her guilty.

She finally stared at his face now and managed a weak nod. The nod was so faint it barely counted. His anger stuttered, caught on the sheer fragility in her eyes. Her skin was clammy, trembling. The detail lodged in his mind and derailed the heat in his chest. His irritation broke against it like a wave, leaving only the bracing need to keep her hand steady in his.

The clash was becoming untenable.

The aggressor's strikes came too fast for Fabrisse's eyes to track. It had now formed blades of folding dark, warps of logic-defying reach. One blow shattered five layers of wards, and the hooded figure was forced back as his boots skidded across the floor.

Fabrisse could only see shockwaves and the strobe of colliding magics, each flash lighting the black-shrouded form of the void-being as it pressed. It had gained the upper hand.

Tendrils surged again; too many. They punched through a final barrier like spears through silk, slamming into the hooded man's side. He staggered, breath torn from his lungs.

A second wave came. The void was hungry now, scenting blood.

Then the aggressor stopped.

Shrouds of darkness furled in like smoke being sucked into a vacuum. The howling void stilled. One by one, the rotating sigils over its face halted their spin.

Fabrisse stared in disbelief. The void influence was retracting. The being seemed to fold into itself, body glitching at the edges, gradually losing solidity.

It turned, shuddering, and stepped backward, melting into the crack it had torn into space. The gap closed behind it without a sound. The room fell silent, save for the hiss of still-dissipating energy.

The hooded figure reeled himself upright, blood soaking the left side of his robes, and tore a fresh sigil into the air with three fingers and a snarl of effort. The glyph expanded with radiant urgency and a lack of proper elegance.

A crack split open across the chamber's far end. The hooded man turned toward the suspended cage. He reached out with both hands, twisted something invisible, and in a sharp jerk, he yanked the entire cage across the threshold and out of the warped space.

For one agonizing second, it felt like falling through glass. Then Fabrisse found himself in the secluded place behind the refectory again.

Celine had now clutched his arm so hard it started hurting. "I—I'm sorry. It took the shape of the tipster . . . I—I thought . . ."

The tipster? Whatever could she mean by that?

"It's fine." Fabrisse patted her on her back. "I know this feeling." Panic. He'd been there before. "Breathe. It's all good now."

"I'm sorry . . . I'm sorry . . ." And that was all she said for the next minute.

The surrounding space seemed . . . normal. Apart from the pen Celine had thrown, everything was where it should be on the table. Background noises had returned from the refectory, and Fabrisse could hear people chatting like nothing had happened.

The hooded figure stumbled once, then righted himself with a grimace. He reached up, unfastening the clasp of his cloak, and let the blood-soaked garment slip off his shoulder. Beneath it, a deep gash ran from his ribs down past his hip, likely from the void thing's strike. He snapped his fingers, summoned a thread of pale golden light and pressed it to the wound. The magic crawled over the torn flesh, slow and shaky. It wasn't healing fast, but it was working. He'd survive.

Fabrisse, breathing hard, caught a clearer look at the discarded cloak. His eyes narrowed.

That wasn't a Synod issue cloak.

It bore the iconography of the Southern Branch of the Order, stitched in archaic threadwork around the hem. Someone from the Order just walking around the Synod grounds, and someone that strong? That wasn't casual.

He also seemingly had access to everywhere. He was in a Synod building the last time he watched over Fabrisse too, and Fabrisse was sure that building was in possession of the Department of Aetheric Resonance Research, which meant only academic researchers could enter such a place.

Rolen said his aid didn't come from the Synod. If this person was his aid, then . . . this must be the en-route professor Lorvan mentioned during the meeting with Sil and Dir.

"Are you," Fabrisse whispered, still half in shock, "Professor Kaldrin? Of the Outer Fold?"

The man turned, hood still obscuring most of his face. He paused for a moment and said, "Have you heard of me?"

That meant yes.