Chapter 147: Cast (2)

Jaxir watched the next curtain of willow leaves sweep across his Cast and finally understood what had been bothering him for the last ten minutes.

The Witch’s water followed the lake, its wind followed the space between the hanging branches, and the leaves followed the wind, giving every spell it used a principle that already existed before its mana ever touched it.

Jaxir’s Cast had nothing like that.

A beam of water drilled toward his chest, forcing him to push off the lakebed while another formed along the path of his retreat. Jaxir twisted between them and released two Casts before landing, bending one high enough to pull the leaf storm upward while the second curled beneath it.

The lower shot struck one of the thick roots supporting the Witch.

[-39]

Jaxir landed ankle-deep in the lake and immediately moved again as mist rolled across the water around him. Something about his conclusion still felt wrong, mostly because Cast was supposed to be exactly what he had just accused it of being: raw mana shaped into the simplest offensive expression available to every member of the Magic Class. It was the neutral foundation everything else grew from.

Except Mina had already told him that wasn’t quite true.

Every Root Ability could be taken in a direction, even one whose description looked painfully simple on the surface. Channel had seemed like nothing more than holding mana inside a spell until Jaxir learned to coax his mana and body into repeating the patterns he wanted, while Attune had stopped being about preserving every drop of mana and become an understanding of what actually needed to remain. There was no reason Cast should somehow be exempt.

The Willow’s branches bent low as another wave of leaves tore free, their edges catching blue and gold light while wind spun them into Jaxir’s path. He sent three Casts toward different parts of the storm, then curved all of them at different moments, forcing the Witch to spread its defense wide enough that one mana bullet slipped through near the water. It caught bark instead of the root joint he wanted, but Jaxir barely cared about the damage anymore.

[-36]

His Cast hadn’t always behaved this way either. Back when his mana had been raw, getting a bullet to travel in anything but a straight line had required far more effort, while Twinkle Mana had made bending, redirecting and confusing trajectories feel increasingly natural as his comprehension deepened. Light Mana had inherited much of that behavior because Jaxir still hadn’t given it a direction of its own.

Another water beam passed close enough to spray his cheek, and Jaxir’s grin returned as he kicked sideways through the mist.

His mana wasn’t neutral, which meant Cast couldn’t truly be neutral either, since the spell was made from that mana in the first place. Every evolution had already been changing it. Jaxir simply hadn’t been deliberate about what those changes meant.

"If somebody had Fire Mana..." Jaxir murmured as he sent another Cast around the edge of the leaf storm. A Magic Class following an elemental path might not need to create every part of an attack from nothing at all, since their Cast could seize the heat already in the air, borrow from an open flame or guide an existing element the same way the Witch guided water. They could spend less mana because the world itself supplied part of the spell.

That answer worked beautifully for an elemental path, but it left Jaxir with the more annoying question. Destruction had an obvious direction, with Cast becoming denser, heavier, faster or simply more violent until every use existed to hit harder than the one before it. Jaxir followed Hex.

None of his Hex abilities were direct attacks in the ordinary sense. Wither poisoned mana by exploiting how a target used it, Bind found something already restricting or governing mana and tightened it, while Fracture searched for weaknesses that existed before Jaxir ever touched them. Drain, Unravel, Entropy and Haunt only pushed that same relationship farther.

A beam erupted from the lake beneath him, and Jaxir vaulted sideways before turning in the air. He fired while falling, but instead of immediately deciding where the Cast should go, he watched the Willow’s mana first, the way the current shifted around its roots and the leaves tightened along the right side of its defense. Jaxir adjusted the bullet after he had already released it.

The Cast twisted.

It didn’t follow one clean curve this time. The mana bullet spiraled through the damp air, narrowed itself as a water beam crossed in front of it, then caught the edge of the wind spilling from the Willow’s leaf defense and used that current to contort around the drilling water. The shot struck squarely where root met trunk.

[Critical Hit!]

[-60]

Jaxir landed hard enough to send water spraying around his boots, then straightened as steam curled from his breath through the heavy humidity. He hadn’t overpowered the water beam or forced his Cast through the leaf storm, and he hadn’t even needed to predict the entire path before he fired. He had gathered information, then changed the spell to match it.

There it was.

The thing every one of his Hexes wanted more than anything else wasn’t damage, control or even weakness by itself. They wanted information.

The more Jaxir knew about the target, the more precisely Wither could poison it, the tighter Bind could close around what already constrained it, and the deeper Fracture could dig into the cracks that were already there. His later Hexes would be no different.

Jaxir’s gaze darted from the water to the roots, then up through the spiraling leaves as the entire battlefield seemed to separate into relationships he hadn’t bothered distinguishing before.

The Willow drew from the lake before forming its beams, the lake displaced around its roots whenever it redirected mana, the wind compressed before the leaves moved, and those leaves changed their angle depending on which direction the defense needed to catch his Casts.

Every action gave something away.

That was exactly what his Light Mana should do.

It didn’t need to become Fire, Water or Wind, and it didn’t need to imitate Destruction by turning every Cast into a heavier hammer. It would change shape, density, speed, weight and even the character of its movement for one purpose: touching the enemy in as many different ways as necessary to understand what was there.

Every Cast could become an answer to a small question.

One might strike quickly just to see how a defense reacted, while another could slow halfway through its flight and watch how the target adjusted. A third could flatten, spiral, split its pressure unevenly or change its bearing against another spell, gathering one more piece of information every time the enemy answered.

Jaxir didn’t need his Cast to know the solution before it left his staff. It only needed to illuminate it.

The thought settled deeper than the others had, touching something inside the Light Mana that had remained unfinished since the Goddess placed it within him. Silver-blue mana surged through Jaxir’s body while the faint slivers of gold that had continued hiding among it finally burned away, leaving a fierce silver-blue light that poured through his staff and reflected across the dark lake.

Light revealed things.

It didn’t care what stood beneath it, and it didn’t choose which truths deserved to remain hidden once they were exposed. Beneath daylight, king and beggar, monster and man, weakness and strength all received the same treatment.

Everything could be seen.

The Willow’s leaves began turning again while water gathered across three points of the lake, but Jaxir no longer saw separate attacks waiting to happen. He saw the pressure building in the water before the beams formed, the wind bending around the leaves before they moved and the slight shift in the Witch’s mana that connected both processes together.

His grin spread as he slid across the lake, slowed, then allowed his boots to sink ankle-deep into the water.

"Let’s end this, then, shall we?"

―

Cast Lv41 > Cast Lv54

―