Jessie wouldn't stop talking the whole time we rode the bus to the Peoria GC training center. Eventually, I had to stop her. It was just so much. "You know you're working as an assistant front desk receptionist, right?"

"You're the one who wanted me to admin a whole guild," she shot back. "I'm just trying to do what I can, where I can. Trying my best."

I didn't have a good response to any of that, so I shut up and let her talk through how excited she was. Until she was seventeen, she'd only be able to work one or two days a week—but that was fine. She needed the time after school for therapy, and I wouldn't let her abandon school. Not when she was doing as well as she was at it. My guild idea had been…not half-baked, but premature—she needed to prioritize her own education, growth, and health.

When the bus finally arrived, it was nearly eight. I didn't expect to see Ellen waiting at the door, and I wasn't disappointed. Jessie grabbed a quick hug, then headed in for her first day.

I went to the library, grabbed a private room for the next few hours, and sat in the wooden chair. Then I pulled up my status.

User: Kade Noelstra E-Rank Stamina: 250/250, Mana: 250/250

Skills: 1. Stormsteel Core (D-02, Unique, Merged) 2. Thunderbolt Forms (E-05, Altered, Merged) 3. Mistwalk Forms (E-01, Altered, Merged) Open Skill Slots: 4

Path: Stormsteel Path Laws: First Law of Stormsteel

With Mistwalk Forms and Thunderbolt Forms providing Rainfall and Lightning Charges, I now had access to several powerful active abilities.

Flashstep consumed Lightning Charges while I was using Mistwalk Forms, and I could already see it as a massive equalizer on the battlefield. Moving from in front of an enemy to behind them instantly, or putting more distance between them and me, were both powerful. I could have three Lightning Charges at a time, so unless Flashstep consumed more than one or had some other limiter, I was now more than mobile enough to fill the striker role—even without Dash.

I could also use Rainfall Charges with Mistwalk Forms to get Cloudwalk, which reduced incoming damage. It reminded me of Flareflourish. Not a powerful effect, but a situationally useful one.

And, when I was using Thunderbolt Forms, I now had access to Rain-Slicked Blade. It allowed me to use Rainfall Charges to either ignore, destroy, or bypass enemy armor, giving my role as a striker a lot more punch. If I'd had that against the Mage-Knight Errant—to say nothing of her pillbug mount—I'd likely have been much more effective. Once again, I had no idea how many Charges it consumed.

Ellen would probably be willing to spar and let me test my forms out later, once the gym opened up to low-rankers.

For now, though, I needed to get to work. I disappeared into the library's shelves, looking for a handful of books. Before I could learn any of the four skills I needed for the Stormwind School merge, I'd need to learn an entirely different method of magic. Scripts were easy. Pre-drawn symbols, empowered with a specific Scriptmage's designs. But they had a problem, and that problem was that they were pre-drawn.

I needed something else. Magic more like what Ellen did. She knew spells, not Scripts.

The four component skills for Stormwind School were all part of that, but having Ellen would make the learning that much quicker.

First, I'd need Ariette's Grimoire. Much like the Grimoire of Shadows, the book Ariette had written would form the basis of the spells I'd be learning. I had no doubt that the Stormsteel Core would actively change the merged skill, so I intended to study mostly the air and wind-based spells, with a smaller focus on water, electricity, and sonic magic.

Spellblade Affinity and Focus Casting would work together. The first increased the speed and fluidity of switching between melee-centric combat and casting; at higher ranks, it produced something not unlike the gun-fu movies that had once been popular, but with magic. The second allowed me to cast through my weapon rather than with a free hand. Casting that way wasn't mandatory—I'd probably never use a buckler, much less a proper shield, in my off-hand—but it was part of the Stormwind School build.

The final, and active, component was Overcharge.

It was the most important part of Stormwind School for filling the role of striker. With it, I could pour additional Mana into a spell to increase its damage. It was expensive and difficult to use, but it would let me punch even higher above my rank than I already could—and it'd take the pressure off of the rest of my skills to do it.

Of course, none of those were likely to make it into the final, altered merge. Stormsteel Core had changed the previous two, and there was no reason it wouldn't do it again.

I sighed and cracked open Ariette's book. Ellen wasn't going to be here for close to an hour—plenty of time to get started.

When Ellen arrived, I carefully marked my page in the grimoire and closed it, happy for the distraction. She sat heavily in the uncomfortable wooden chair across from me, bags under her eyes. "Long night?" I asked.

"Yes. Bob was up all night working, and his office is right below my room. I think it's a tactic to wear me down. I got going as soon as I could, before he could try to snare me again," Ellen said. I noticed she didn't have her phone with her. "You got started early."

"I'm trying to understand Ariette's Grimoire. It's not like the Scripts I've been using, but I don't get what's different about the spells inside," I said. "They're still symbological in nature, right?"

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Yes. Magic—true magic, Scripts, everything—is symbol-based. The difference is in how you use the symbols," Ellen said. "With Scripts, you're inscribing them on paper, then imbuing them as you attach them to an object with your Mana. With spells, it's almost the opposite. You're inscribing them into your Mana, then imbuing them into reality."

"What?"

Ellen sighed. "How long have you been working on this?"

"An hour and a half, roughly," I said. "Why?"

"Because in my experience with Grimoire of Shadows, it took several hour-long sessions to avoid massive headaches as I unlearned what I thought the nature of reality was, then re-learned it with the spell skill's influence. It's in your best interests to take a break for a half-hour or so before that starts happening to you."

"And it's not about you wanting to get to work on your next skill?"

Ellen looked shocked. She pressed a hand to her chest as if having a heart attack. "I'd never. I'm only looking out for your best interests, Kade." Then she smiled. "I'll admit, that's part of my motivation, but not all of it. You really will start getting migraines if you keep it up."

"Pain's part of the cost of all this," I said.

"Come on, Kade, help me out. I'm stumped."

I nodded. "What do you have?"

It turned out that Ellen had very little. She'd taken care of most of her damage needs with Calliope's Shadow Tome, and even if a mage went all-in on Mana regeneration beyond Infinite Well, it wouldn't make a real difference in her Mana pool's depth. She understood that, of course. She was stuck on what her next steps should be.

"So, that rules out my first thought," I said. "I was thinking about Overload-based merges."

"Don't need them. I should be doing plenty of damage. And I don't need defensives at this point. I'll pick one or two for my unmerged skills later."

"What about more sustainability?" I asked.

"I just told you, I've got all the Mana regeneration I can fit in. Any more will have serious diminishing returns, and it won't help me cast more—not really." Ellen looked exasperated. "Weren't you listening?"

"I'm not thinking about resource sustainability. Give me five minutes," I said. Then I disappeared into the stacks. It took seven minutes, as it turned out. I couldn't remember where I'd seen the video, so I ended up having to search for it in the database, then track it down. I returned, triumphant. "Watch this."

It was a mage. A similar one to Ellen, even—instead of shadows, he specialized in darkness. Close, but not the same at all. He cast a single spell on the monster his team was fighting, then held a staff toward it, his gaze locked on the towering, mammothlike behemoth. The creature's fur crackled with dark energy as the spell went off.

"So?" Ellen asked.

"Keep watching."

The dark energy wove between the monster's tufts of fur, digging deeper. Then a second wave of it appeared, and a third. They all kept going, reduced effects ripping into the monster in a layered wall of magic.

By the time the fifth appeared, the monster was pretty much out of the fight; even so, the mage kept the pressure up for another minute, until the corpse was all but vaporized. When he finally stopped, I cleared my throat. "The skill's called Arcane Resonator. That only cost him a fraction more mana than the initial spell's Mana cost, but it echoes a percentage of the cast's damage repeatedly as damage over time. It was a merge I thought about, but discarded as too risky in melee. It's too slow for me, but for a proper mage with plenty of damage, it'd be—"

"Perfect," Ellen said. "What are the skills? I'll get to work right away."

A half hour later, I'd figured out that Ellen had lied.

Not about the headache; the pressure was already building behind my eyes and below my temples. Learning Ariette's Grimoire was going to suck. But she'd lied about buckling down and learning Arcane Resonator. Or, more accurately, about doing that instead of helping me. "Once you learn some magic, it gets easier to learn the rest. By the same token, your first set of magic skills will be the hardest to learn—and no, the stuff you put into Stormsteel Core doesn't count," she said.

"So you're going to help me first?" I asked.

"Absolutely. You need to learn Ariette's Grimoire before anything else will be helpful—no point in learning how to enhance your spells if you don't have any—so let's start there. The first thing we'll need to do is identify your core. This is going to be a lot like pushing Stamina, so you should be good at the first part."

Ellen touched her chest, right at the center of her sternum. "It's here for me."

It took only a few seconds to find it; I'd been using Mana since I stopped researching my build and started actually building it. Mine was a little higher than Ellen's, closer to that spot where my collar bones met. "Got it."

"Next, you're going to spend a few minutes meditating and just feeling the Mana."

"Jessie would be so smug right now," I said. "Meditation's her thing, not mine."

I peered inside of myself, trying to connect to the Mana core. It took a long time—not a few minutes, but almost twenty. It wasn't hard to feel where it was, though. It was the storm around it that proved to be a problem. Flashes of multicolored lightning against clouds so gray they were almost black. Driving rain that came from all directions, including below. Wind that switched directions all at once, with no warning. I'd known I had a storm inside of me, but I hadn't realized it was literal.

When I finally broke through it, though, the Mana core felt surprisingly…small. Insignificant, even. It sat on a pedestal of energy many times too big for it, a glowing ball of not-quite-yellow the size of a ping pong ball, or even smaller.

I opened my eyes to catch Ellen mid-yawn, her nose buried in a book. "Why don't you take a nap after you explain the next step?" I asked.

"Oh, you're done!" The book vanished; it hadn't been the right size to be a skill guide, and Ellen seemed a little red. "So, now that you've found your core and all that, we're going to inscribe your first spell. The surface of your core is malleable. You're going to take a spell from Ariette's book and add it to your core."

"Just like that, huh?" I asked.

"Just like that. It's hard to explain. Just…draw it onto your core."

"Into my core?"

"No, onto it." The book came out again as Ellen turned away from me.

I sighed and got to work. The spell I wanted was a simple one; Ariette's Zephyr. According to the Italian delver's book, it would create a small, hyper-compressed blast of air that hit like a sling stone and could be cast one-handed. It was also simple; I got my pen and drew it a handful of times from the book, memorizing the swirling loops around the central X. The intersections were everywhere, but the X's lines were straight enough that I didn't need to worry about accidentally inscribing a 'wrong' spell.

But…how to draw it onto my core? That was the trick, and it had me stumped. I couldn't exactly take my pen and just…write on a metaphorical core inside of me. That wasn't possible. None of Dad's training had prepared me for this. He'd been a fighter through and through, and to him, Mana was a nearly-useless stat. More importantly, I hadn't had stats and skills until after he died. Maybe things would have been different if he hadn't, but…

Okay. I focused on my Mana core. That had to be the first step. This time, it was easier to peer through the storm and feel the core. I touched the surface for the first time; just like Ellen had said, it gave a little, then rebounded when my not-hand left its surface.

So. That was strange. I felt like I was on the verge of something. Maybe not something new like my Path, or dangerous like the egg that had, thankfully, stopped growing in my bedroom. But something I'd never experienced before.

I 'grabbed' at the core, then scraped a fingernail across it in the shape of the spiral. For a moment, everything held together. The spiral was perfect; it vibrated slightly, an orange blemish across the not-quite-yellow core. Then, I lifted my finger to begin inscribing the X.

My core seemed to explode, and I gasped in pain as Mana surged across my body.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.