But a little embarrassment was worth it. He now knew that his best defense against aranea (and other psychics, he supposed) was actually the basic mind shield spell. Other, more sophisticated spells couldn’t seem to cope against Novelty’s telepathic attacks.
[Most of the spells you used were really easy to trick and bypass with a few feints and a bit of careful timing,] Novelty explained. [They were all based on simple defense patterns and always reacted the same to my attacks. That magic shell you used to surround your mind with, though… it’s such a crude thing, but I have to admit it gave me trouble. No patterns or anything fancy, just a solid, unyielding mental barrier. I don’t think I’d be able to bypass it at all if you hadn’t kept messing up the spell every time you cast it.]
«I was messing it up?» asked Zorian in surprise.
[Yeah. The shell had these minute imperfections in it that I used to slip past it. I don’t think those were supposed to be there,] Novelty said.
Hmm, minute imperfections, she said? Sounded like a normal result of a usual spell boundary. Very few mages could cast a spell flawlessly, and they rarely needed to — minute imperfections rarely mattered unless you were dealing with very special circumstances.
Apparently this was one of those special circumstances. Zorian suppressed a sigh — he could already hear the ghostly voice of Xvim in his head lecturing him about the failures of today’s mages and the need to practice until you could do the spells right instead of good enough.
In retrospect, he was just asking for trouble with that line of thought.
When Zorian arrived at his weekly session with Xvim, he fully expected to get an hour of his usual crap from Xvim… which in this particular restart meant taking a bundle of thin sticks and trying to incinerate one of the sticks without singeing the rest of them or burning his hand in the process. Admittedly, Xvim was staring at him pretty hard when he came in, but Xvim did a lot of really weird things during their sessions.
Zorian hadn’t even taken a seat before Xvim decided to speak to him.
«I have heard you have been casting fireballs,» Xvim said. «Is that true?»
Zorian forcibly stopped himself from scowling at the man. Him making a comment like that was never a good sign — Xvim was never impressed with anything Zorian did, so no doubt he found something objectionable in his combat practice with Taiven. How the hell did the man even find out about that?
Xvim’s face told him nothing, and Zorian had already tried to use his rudimentary empathy on him to no avail, trying to see what made the annoying man tick. Xvim had an incredible control over his emotions, and virtually nothing fazed him or truly set him off.
«I can cast the spell, yes,» Zorian said carefully, as if talking slower would help him evade whatever minefield Xvim set up for him with his question. «Admittedly only at minimum power, but—»
«So that’s a no, then,» Xvim deadpanned. He stared at him, as if challenging Zorian to contradict him. Fortunately, Zorian was far too wise to get worked up over Xvim’s proclamations at this point, so they simply stared at each other in silence for a few moments. Eventually, Xvim broke the stare-down with an overdramatic sigh. «Mages these days, always rushing into things half-baked. I expected better from you. There is nothing wrong with being interested in combat magic, but immediately going for the flashiest, highest rated spell in your reach is unwise. A half-powered fireball is no fireball at all. You should have concentrated on building a solid base until you could do it properly.»
«Well,» Zorian said calmly, «why not show me how it’s done, then?»
In response, Xvim wordlessly drew a stack of cards from his drawer and threw them at him. Zorian instinctively caught them before they could collide with his head, too used to his antics to be surprised at the move.
«Cards?» he asked, turning them over in his hands. They looked like regular playing cards, except their faces were replaced with squares, lines, circles and other geometrical shapes.
«Cards,» Xvim confirmed. «Specifically, cards made out of mana absorbing material. The seemingly ornamental sigils on the corners expel any mana the cards gather, radiating it away into the surroundings. It takes a lot of mana to affect them in any way.»
«And I’ll be affecting them?» Zorian guessed.
«You’ll try, I’m sure,» Xvim said airily, pointedly rearranging the pens on his table instead of looking at Zorian. «They’re very hard to affect for mages of such meager skills as yours are. To make the story short, you’ll be trying to burn the shapes painted on the cards — and only the shapes. You may begin when you feel ready.»
Zorian stared at the cards for a moment. He suspected he knew what the point of this exercise was — he had to use a lot of mana, and he had to use it instantly or the corner glyphs would simply radiate his mana away. That was pretty much the basic challenge of all combat magic: shape a lot of mana quickly without messing up the spell boundary too much.
So he took a deep breath, picked a card that looked easiest to him (it was just a circle in the middle, how hard could that be?) and poured a sizeable chunk of mana into his first attempt.
Other than the corner glyphs glowing a little, nothing happened.
Damn it. This just might be a little harder than he thought it would be.
After failing to affect the cards a few times and then overdoing it and burning down a few cards to cinders, singing his fingers in the process, Zorian finally managed to burn some blurry shapes that were clearly inspired by what was drawn on them instead of being an irregular hole burned through the center of the card. Predictably, Xvim had some very disparaging things to say about that.
Eventually, Zorian ran out of mana and had to stop. What kind of shaping exercise was so mana intensive you can actually run out as you practice? The Xvim kind, apparently. Instead of simply sending him away, though, Xvim then proceeded to lecture him about the proper way of gathering ambient mana. Apparently there was a way to assimilate ambient mana faster if you sat completely still and focused on doing absolutely nothing else. So not very useful, all things considered, but probably crucial if he intended to complete Xvim’s newest exercise in any sort of reasonable time-frame.
Then, as a parting remark, Xvim casually remarked that they were going to continue their lesson tomorrow. That tomorrow wasn’t even a school day didn’t bother Xvim in the slightest.
«Good,» Xvim concluded. «We have a whole day, then. We will need the time from what I saw today.»
It wasn’t an isolated occurrence. From that day on, Xvim insisted on practice sessions every single day, monopolizing every bit of free time Zorian had. Why did Xvim suddenly decide to do that, when he usually never interacted with him outside their assigned meeting times? Hell if Zorian knew. It was certainly annoying, though.
The aranea, on the other hand, had their own frustrations. Trying to track down the ward-breaker that hired Taiven’s group to recover the watch turned out to be fairly easy, but getting access to him was anything but. In addition to being good at breaking and analyzing wards, the man was also good at building them, and he was a very capable mage to boot. The aranea lost two of their members trying to corner him and eventually gave up on him for that particular restart, focusing on other leads for the moment.