205 – Perspective

Voidlings were deceptively weak when their own energy was turned against them, Saffra discovered fast. The System provided an estimated level for each of the creatures, but that approximation must have been designed with the understanding that they resisted all other forms of energy. Without that advantage, their assigned number was a serious exaggeration.

Even with classical spells adapted with Lady Vivi’s anti-void principles, the monsters were more fragilethan a run-of-the-mill opponent. With [Void Slice], the full void ability the Sorceress had developed, that disparity only widened. It was hard to pin down exactly, but a level 600 [Voidling] felt about as durable to Saffra as a normal 400.

I wonder if that means I’m getting two hundred levels of extra experience? Saffra thought as she watched her [Void Slice] sever one of the alien creatures in two. As the separate parts slid down and impacted the ground, she made note again of their lack of internal organs. Their insides were just more of that dense, marbled black-and-violet material. The hairs on her arms prickled at the uncanny sight.

Saffra glanced over at Lady Vivi. The woman was floating in mid-air, frowning at King Alistair’s sword. Her grimoire hovered beside her, flipped open to two intricate arcane diagrams similar to the one she was currently etching into the air.

A wyvern-like ice elemental sat a dozen paces away, its crystal eyes trained on Saffra with unwavering intensity. She suppressed a shiver of unease. Since Lady Vivi was occupied with research, she’d summoned a guardian for Saffra—though she was no doubt keeping half an eye on her to be safe, too.

“Still no luck?” Saffra asked.

“It’s proving to be more stubborn than I assumed,” Lady Vivi replied with a half-attentive murmur. Saffra didn’t want to imagine what kind of magical principles were giving the woman trouble, since anything capable of perplexing the Sorceress would probably make her own head pop like a melon dropped off a cliff.

“But you are getting somewhere?”

“If it were inert, I could shelve the theory as a dead end. But I’m getting results back, they’re just garbled. Which means there’s a link of some sort. It’s an issue of refinement or approach.”

“Interesting,” Saffra said, which she somehow meant despite not having a clue what her teacher was talking about. She didn’t know divination, much less divination at that level. “Um, but that’s all of the nearby ones, by the way. So we’ve gotta move again.”

Lady Vivi paused, then finally looked her way and around at their surroundings. “Right.” She waved her staff, first dismantling her ongoing spell before casting [Detect Presence]. Saffra grabbed Lady Vivi’s wrist in preparation; they’d repeated this process a few times.

After finding a pocket of level-appropriate enemies, Saffra’s mentor [Blinked] them away, then started clearing out anything too strong in their vicinity—which for Lady Vivi didn’t even include the [Lesser Voidbeasts], since those were only on par with a regular archmage. Obviously not something worth worrying about.

“T-thanks,” Saffra said as she watched a titanic [Greater Voidbeast] fall from the sky like a meteor, its descent seeming almost glacial at such a distance. When it hit the ground, the earth trembled.

“No problem,” Lady Vivi replied, still clearly distracted.

You’re kind of scary sometimes, you know that? Saffra thought.

She glanced at the giant ice wyvern staring daggers at her, its coiled posture suggesting it was ready to burst forward at any moment. Even though she knew it was there to protect her, it seemed more like a predator restraining itself from gobbling her up.

She shook herself, then refocused on her task.

It’s been a while since I last leveled up, she thought as she picked the closest [Voidling]. Probably getting close to the next one.

[Void Slice] came into existence one painstakingly drawn rune at a time. She was still pretty clumsy with it—a regular mage could expect fluency with a new spell after several hundred attempts, and while Lady Vivi’s supervision and incredibly powerful gear helped with mana costs and regeneration, she hadn’t had that much opportunity to practice yet.

As it turned out, her intuition was on point—or more likely she’d made a lucky guess—because right as her next opponent collapsed after being severed in two by [Void Slice], two screens appeared in front of her, the first blocking the second.

***

Level Up!

You are now a level 440 [Pupil of the Magus Prime].

***

Saffra hastily dismissed the display, wanting to see the more important notification lurking behind it. She scanned the resulting words with a burst of excitement.

***

Skill Earned!

[Void Attunement I]: Grants a small bonus to manifesting and channeling void effects.

***

…void attunement? Why does that sound familiar? She brushed aside the question almost as soon as it popped into her head. Forget that, a void-related skill? Already?

She couldn’t believe it. Specialties were one of those things that varied far too much to make sweeping statements like ‘it should take this long to start getting skills related to your chosen path,’ but it hadn’t even been a week since she’d decided to pursue void magic.

That was fast. Weirdly fast.

Was it because nobody besides her and Lady Vivi was capable of casting it? Though, the Fell Apostate could too, she supposed. But he might have to use rituals; she didn’t know.

Maybe the sheer rarity of the magic, or her being a frontrunner in the field, was to thank?

Now that I think about it, didn’t Lady Vivi say she got hers right away too?

“Did something happen?” her mentor asked, proving that despite looking distracted, she really had been paying attention—she’d noticed Saffra’s silence.

“Leveled up. Got a skill.”

“Oh, congratulations. Is it a useful one?”

“[Void Attunement I].” She opened her mouth to relay the description, then clicked her teeth shut, dumbfounded, as she realized why the name had struck her as familiar.

“That’s the same one I got,” Lady Vivi said. “That’s funny. We’re probably the only two people in the world with it, then. We get to share.”

She definitely hadn’t meant to break Saffra’s brain with that statement, but that was what the words did. Saffra’s thoughts ground to a halt.

A skill totally unique to a person wasn’t the craziest concept, given how varied classes were, but at her low level? Low gold?

And she was sharing that unique skill with the Sorceress.

Every time Saffra thought she was getting used to all of this, something reminded her in a fresh new way how absurd her life had become.

“I guess we are,” Saffra said faintly. “Like master, like apprentice, as they say…”

Lady Vivi was clearly amused by her reaction. “That was four-forty for you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So you have a level-fifty marker coming up next. You’ll get something even better, and it’ll probably be void-related too, since this one was. You were right about how it’d be smart to pivot fast—it’s already paying off.”

Interest sparked in Saffra. What would her fiftieth-level marker give, the 450 landmark? A bonus to her offensive potential on all void spells was already a solid pickup and standard for mages—they usually got passives like that.

Unfortunately, she wouldn’t get an answer for a bit. The Chalice slowed her progress too much.

Normally, that didn’t bother her. In fact, she liked how the artifact kept her growth more in line with other people’s. She’d been conflicted about launching through the levels so fast ever since that first hunting expedition, where her combined gear, improved spells, and massive apprenticeship bonus had resulted in multiple advancements in a single session. Nobody could keep their spellcasting ability aligned to their raw mana pool at that rate. Plus, she hadn’t wanted to leave Isabella behind.

But for the first time, she felt a trickle of annoyance at the limitation. She wanted to see what skills she would get!

The feeling disappeared quickly. Nothing about her previous misgivings had changed, and she was still happy about the cup’s existence. Particularly because it let her contribute to Lady Vivi’s own development.

Patience is a virtue, I guess, she thought to herself.

“Let’s see how much stronger [Void Slice] feels,” Saffra said. Only a crazy person wouldn’t be excited to test out a newly acquired skill, so she scanned for a target with growing eagerness.

As the description had promised, the boost was a small but noticeable one. Seeing how that extra power had manifested from thin air, on top of the incremental upgrade from leveling itself, she felt a glow of satisfaction as she went from [Voidling] to [Voidling], cutting them down with new and improved slashes of black-and-violet energy.

“Neat,” Saffra said.

“Neat,” Lady Vivi agreed, having apparently set aside her work to watch Saffra’s experiments.

The hunt lasted about an hour longer after that milestone, and Saffra had nearly exhausted her mana pool by then. She felt the emptiness as a physical ache: a tiredness distinct from its mundane counterpart, but still presenting in the same way, making her want to go lie down.

As was ritual by now, Saffra unhooked the Chalice from her belt and handed it to Lady Vivi. Saffra found it just as amusing as the first time, the way the demon’s nose wrinkled at the object. Expressiveness came so slowly to Lady Vivi that seeing her shudder visibly whenever she needed to down the liquid was both novel and entertaining. The blood-like essence must have a seriously intense taste to make her react like that.

Saffra had a question in her eyes when Lady Vivi wiped her mouth and handed the cup back.

“Not quite,” Lady Vivi said. “Maybe the next one.”

Saffra nodded, a bit disappointed. It only made sense that even with the ridiculous artifact, levels would be slow to arrive for the Sorceress.

She wondered, not for the first time, what level her mentor was. Her apprenticeship bonus told her she had to be at least 1940, but she itched to know the exact number.

Honestly, given that Lady Vivi had fought the Dragon King and his entire court, she had to be closing in on the cap. Even assuming she was monstrously strong for her level—which shouldn’t be the case when everyone at those heights was already an unmatched prodigy—being able to come away uninjured from a fight of that caliber was just absurd.

The ease with which she could put down [Greater Voidbeasts] could be explained by having figured out their enigmatic defenses, much the same as Saffra was finding them simpler and simpler to kill. But that logic didn’t hold for dragons. Much less the Dragon King.

The Sorceress was the Sorceress, she supposed. Lady Vivi was just a tier beyond even her theoretical, non-existent peers.

“I can’t believe I made so little progress with the divination,” the woman grumbled as they headed for the dimensional portal, sounding uncharacteristically frustrated. “I can already tell it’s going to take a couple of sessions to work through. Why can’t problems ever be easy to solve?”

Saffra stopped herself from side-eyeing her master. Solving novel magical dilemmas didn’t happen in one or two hours of study. Saffra couldn’t even learn tier-zero spells that fast, let alone design new ones in fundamentally unique disciplines.

“Life is horrendously unfair, isn’t it?” Saffra replied, unable to keep some snark from leaking in.

To her equal parts outrage and amusement, Lady Vivi nodded solemnly in agreement, missing the sarcasm.

“Remember, keep your eyes shut, and don’t try to make sense of anything,” the woman said.

“I’m not trying to let my brain become dimension-goo,” Saffra assured her. She had no intention of ignoring a warning the Sorceress herself had given on esoteric magic.

They floated through the portal, and the passage was just as weird as the first time. It took a few moments to get her bearings on the other side.

Right away, she noticed that the sky had turned dark. Saffra blinked several times in surprise. They’d been gone for about two hours, so there should’ve been a while left till nightfall.

Oh, right, the time-warping stuff. Lady Vivi had mentioned it so often that Saffra felt a little stupid for having forgotten.

“Looks like it stretched instead of shrunk this time,” Lady Vivi said. “Really not sure what’s deciding that.”

Lady Ember rose from her cross-legged floating position. “Sorceress.”

“Sorry for the long trip,” Lady Vivi said, which for some reason prompted the Princess to roll her eyes. “That was my last for tonight, though. Ready to head back?”

“I am.”

Another warp later, they were in Vanguard’s guildhall.

“Any noteworthy findings?” Ember asked.

“Not really. Didn’t have much luck with my initial divination theories, so I’ll have to keep fiddling.”

“I take it that means I’ll be needed tomorrow as well?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Call on me as necessary,” Lady Ember said. She turned and walked toward the living quarters, raising a hand in goodbye.

She’s surprisingly helpful, with how she was acting before, Saffra thought. Then again, she’d experienced Lady Ember at her most ridiculous, back when she and Lady Vivi had both been attempting alternate identities in that elaborate game of theirs.

“Now,” Saffra’s mentor said, turning to her. “Let’s go grab some dinner.”