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Chapter 170

Nym had known that, intellectually, he’d be stronger without the curse. He understood that they worked by setting down roots in the victim’s body that drained arcana away whenever any was pulled in, and they were impossible to starve out. They stuffed themselves with massive reservoirs that, ...

Chapter 169

“That’s one nice spell,” Nym said.

“I built it myself,” Archmage Veran told him. “I don’t think I’ve ever taught it to anyone else.”

“Yeah, I can see that. This thing is a monster.”

The spell in question, a long distance scry, was without a doubt the most c...

Chapter 168

Ambushing the drug runners wasn’t hard. Nym and Analia floated a hundred feet in the air over the group, safely hidden behind his camouflage screen, and hit all four of the adults with paralysis spells. Two of them started casting immediately, so he peppered them with arcana injections. The oth...

Chapter 167

Nym expected some complaining at the very least. Cern was a fantastic complainer. But it didn’t happen, not this time. He supposed the alchemist probably knew a lot about ocean tears and the kinds of people who were involved, because all he really did was direct Nym on what to do in order to ke...

Chapter 166

They left the drug runners behind, paralyzed and gagged in the back room. Nym planned to go back for them later, when things weren’t so pressing. Analia assured him that she could handle this on her own, but she was still only second circle, despite how strong she’d gotten. He would feel much...

Chapter 165

Nym waited for Analia to explain. Instead, she just glared at him. When he didn’t say anything, she said, “I don’t need your help with this.”

“Didn’t say you did. Just wanted to know what’s going on.”

The glare faltered, and she said, “It’s complicated.”

�...

Chapter 164

“The challenge with all communication-based magic is finding the recipient,” Archmage Veran said. “This is by far the biggest arcana investment in even the most basic message spell, and that has a range limited to mere miles and relies heavily on the caster’s knowledge of the recipient to...

Chapter 163

“Oh, and I guess I need to set up a postal box,” Nym added to the end of his explanation. “That has nothing to do with all the other stuff, just a thing I need to take care of and haven’t figured out how to do yet.”

“Ah, yes, plague-bug infestations and mystical animals possessi...

The God Machine

Hey guys, for the last few weeks I've been working on a new project. I am tentatively planning for this to go live on RR and Patreon Monday, Feb 13, but if you'd like to get a sneak peak of it now, here's that the first 3 chapters.

I'm calling this one the God Machine, and it's a story insp...

Chapter 162

The entire class was gathered in the lecture hall, which Nym had gone ahead and thrown stone warming spells onto multiple walls to heat up. Everyone was sick of the cold, everyone was tired, and everyone was annoyed at having spent the whole day freezing and walking only to get nowhere at the end...

Chapter 161

As it turned out, for once, it actually wasn’t that hard and didn’t require Nym to put himself in any sort of danger to identify the source of the feverish corruption that had infected the Garden of Winter. He circled around the outside edge to examine the arcana from a few other angles, and ...

Chapter 160

Nym hadn’t been idle while he spoke with the mystical fox. One air golem had shadowed the class as they moved, and the other had scouted ahead. He knew exactly where everyone was and, now that they were outside the draining radius of the fox’s magic, they were progressing much more quickly. 2023-01-25 15:00:40 +0000 UTC View Post

Chapter 159

“I don’t see where there’s much to talk about,” Nym said. “You’re stealing arcana from the students I’m supposed to protect. You’re a threat to them. At the rate you’re draining them, they’ll die out here.”

“That is all true,” the boy agreed. “I suppose you’re ...

Chapter 158

Nym hadn’t had to use the stimulant spell he’d learned back in Ebalsan in a long time, but that morning it was necessary. By the time he’d gotten to bed, there had barely been an hour left before the sun came up. Fortunately for him, his suite had no windows. Unfortunately, the field trip s...

Chapter 157

Nym sat a thousand feet up in the sky, surrounded by a shell of arcana that held both him and Risa aloft without so much as a stray breeze to ruffle their hair. In the soft light of the stars and moon, he could see the valley stretched out for miles below. Risa sat next to him, a soft smile on he...

Chapter 156

Their path ended in a box canyon with a massive frozen waterfall at the north end. Smaller falls blanketed the walls, anywhere from ten feet in height to over two hundred at the very end. The walls themselves were thick ice instead of stone, and they walked on a frozen lake where the wind had blo...

Chapter 155

The class set out in the early morning hours, fully expecting to spend upwards of three hours traveling through the ice and snow. It was a bright, clear day, the kind that Nym hated to fly over snow during. Even with a perfect vision spell active, he quickly found himself with a headache from the...

Chapter 154

After they returned, Professor Lakton directed the class to the lecture hall to discuss internalizing the memories of the ice cave so they would associate it with the intent filter they were trying to create. Nym sat in the back of the hall, several rows behind the students, and tuned out the les...

Chapter 153

Nym’s first thought was to use hydrokinesis to divert the snow. It couldn’t be that heavy, after all. Then he watched it obliterate a fully grown tree on the way down and decided that it could in fact be that heavy, and that the better course of action would be to get everyone out of the way....

Chapter 152

Since Nym wasn’t at the glacier to get in touch with his inner icicle, he saw no reason to suffer. The others could shiver and cope; he’d already done his time with that. Professor Lakton had probably done this trip quite a few times. She already had a personal heating spell going before Nym ...

Chapter 151

With Analia comfortably settled into her new home, a two room house a few blocks away from the workshop that was costing her seven dakars a month, Nym left the pair of them to their work and returned to Archmage Veran’s sanctum. His own studies were progressing somewhat smoothly, though he was ...

Chapter 150

Nym eyed the trunk doubtfully. “Why don’t I come back for it later? We don’t want to haul this around all day.”

“Then I’d need to pay for another day’s lodging,” Analia pointed out.

“Might be doing that anyway. There’s no guarantee we’ll find a place on the first...

Chapter 149

Nym’s first impression of Shu-Ain was that there were a lot of people with much darker skin than him speaking in a language he didn’t know. Even on the outskirts of the main city, the streets were packed. A great number of people lived in the city, or at least were visiting it today.

Th...

Chapter 148

After a year spent wasting his time mucking around in the minds of various weak-willed humans, Abdun was desperate to be off this job. He was of the opinion that Nyramin had actually died when he’d fled, but Exarch Myzalik wasn’t interested in the opinions of a lowly sixth layer ascendant suc...

Chapter 147

“If you don’t mind international travel, there’s a city in Byramin known as the birthplace of alchemy. It’s called Shu-Ain. Many alchemists still go there to train. It’s an incredibly fertile region, flush with the types of materials we need. However, the prices are correspondingly low....

Chapter 146

The refugee camps were functional at best. They were made completely from earth magic, which was fine for making thick walls and large buildings, but didn’t do much for insulation. Nym understood why they’d raise twenty long halls each capable of holding fifty or more people, but keeping that...

Chapter 145

“We’ve hit something of a dead end,” Lord Feldstal said. “I’m not saying it’s impossible to solve, and we do have more time now that this current crisis is all but dealt with. However, our funding is going to drop drastically and we’ll need to show our progress.”

“What doe...

Chapter 144

Nym took the next few days easy. It turned out he’d botched quite a few things trying to heal himself, and what he’d done right had been more of an accident than anything. Archmage patched up enough to keep him alive, but neither of them had the energy to further right then. The problem was e...

Chapter 143

Nym felt something invading him, not physically, but grasping at his soul well. If he hadn’t already injured himself, hadn’t already spent so much time staring inward while he tried to fix it, he would never have been able to stop the root.

Thankfully, and that felt odd to think, he had...

Chapter 142

Nym shared illusions he crafted from what his scrying spell showed him. The first root-corpse in the link was embedded in a random tunnel wall, almost completely buried except for its face. It would require some excavating to dig it out, but not so much that anything other than basic terrakinesis...