Choose one Spell to learn:
Ethereal Armor
School: Arcane, Summoning
Type: Activated
Cost: 150 Mana
—
You summon one of two sets of magical armor – Dark Plate or Light Plate. You may dismiss it at any time. It will be automatically dismissed after 60 minutes.
While wearing Dark Plate, you cannot take more than 50% of your maximum Health in damage in a single second (155 damage). Preventing damage this way breaks the Plate, making it unusable for 60 seconds.
While wearing Light Plate, your other spells cost 10% less, though still gain Spell XP as though they weren’t discounted.
Intelligence information:If you choose this option, your next Spell options will be:
Ember Gale - School: Fire
Expedite - School: Alteration
Heartstone - School: Alteration, Summoning
Abrupt Decay
School: Nature
Type: Activated
Cost: 75 Mana
—
Choose a being you are touching. If it has less than 300 Health, it dies.
Intelligence information:
If you choose this option, your next Spell options will be:
Damnation - School: Demonic
Mana Seism - School: Arcane
Contaminated Bond - School: Curse, Nature
Stasis
School: Curse, Arcane
Type: Activated
Cost: 280 Mana
—
Freeze time for a single being that you are touching for 10 seconds. The being cannot move, think, or otherwise perceive the outside world for the duration, and its body cannot be forcibly moved or damaged.
Reduce the duration of this spell by 1 second for each 10 Endurance the entity has. A being with 100 Endurance is completely unaffected.
Intelligence information:
If you choose this option, your next Spell options will be:
Chain of Vapor - School: Aqueous,Arcane
Killing Wave - School: Arcane
Luminous Bonds - School: Curse, Divine
I looked over the three Spells being offered to me, trying to decide on which would help the most.
Out of the three, it was difficult to choose a best option. Stasis’s flashy effect drew my eyes immediately, of course. Who wouldn’t want the ability to completely freeze someone in time for 10 seconds? Presumably longer, if Ranking the Spell up also increased its effect length. Even if I couldn’t damage them while they were frozen, I could very easily turn the tide of battle purely through positioning in that time.
If I was up against a melee-focused enemy, I could get plenty far away with ten free seconds. They couldn’t even perceive the world around them, so I could even freeze them, and then go off and hide somewhere before they came back. It sounded incredibly useful. Of course, it needed contact, so it wouldn’t be as good against ranged enemies, but that didn’t mean it was totally useless.
However, that last clause made me wary of it. If I was up against someone with a decent bit of Endurance, the Spell’s effect would be shortened accordingly. Even if it was used against me, with my relatively low Endurance Stat, I’d still cut off thirty percent of its length right there. How much Endurance did the Infernals have? If it was above 100, the Spell would do nothing to them.
Still, it was a great option to have, and, of course, I couldn’t forget the fact that its length could increase with Rank-ups, making it much more effective against those high-Endurance targets.
Ethereal Armor was also interesting. Immediately, I recognized the usefulness of the Dark Plate. Especially in my circumstances, I could face death at any moment. It’d happened multiple times now that I’d been completely surprised by an attack that dealt my entire Health’s worth of damage in a single instant. And, with Dark Plate, it’d at least take two hits to kill me like that.
Even if that didn’t save my life, the extra time it bought could allow me to gather a bit more information about my situation and succeed in the next timeline. It really synergized quite perfectly with Time Loop. And, of course, it was also useful in the middle of combat, too.
Light Plate was a bit less intuitive. I’d spend 150 Mana to get a 10% discount on Spells for an hour. But, in reality, it’d be difficult to actually profit Mana off that deal. Even if I spent the entire rest of my Mana after summoning the Light Plate, I’d only save 75 Mana – half what I spent. So I wouldn’t actually be ‘saving’ any Mana at all.
The only way to actually save Mana using Light Plate would be to also spend all the Mana I regenerated during the entire hour it was summoned. If I had 830 when I summoned it, spent all my remaining Mana, and then continued to spend all my Mana for the entire hour afterward, I’d end up saving 182 Mana. Minus the Mana I spent on the Spell itself, I’d have saved 32 Mana. Not much reward for so much work.
The only other way Light Plate could end up benefiting me in its current state would be if I cast it, regenerated my Mana like normal, and then got into a fight with full Mana, plus with Light Plate equipped. That would end up effectively allowing me to enter the fight with 10% extra Mana.
But then, it was also completely possible for me to cast Light Plate and instantly find myself in a fight, and thus enter the fight with less Mana. So it was a bit risky to use. Still, as the Spell Ranked up and I got more Mana as I Leveled, Light Plate would become more and more viable. But for the immediate future, I couldn’t see myself having too much of a use for the Spell outside of Dark Plate. So that was important to note.
Still, it wasn’t like Dark Plate was bad. Any time I felt like I was in danger, I could just put on the Dark Plate and instantly be immune to one-shots. Hells, thinking back a bit, I could’ve gotten through that barricade from before by donning the Dark Plate, stepping right on the depot of mines myself, and kill everything nearby while only taking half of my Health in damage, myself. Moments like that made the Spell seem very attractive to me.
Abrupt Decay seemed good, too. Killing anyone with less than 300 Health in a single instant was unbelievably good. It could make any encounter with a lower-Level opponent as trivial as touching them. And, of course, if they had too much Health, all I had to do was hit them with my other Spells until they were within that threshold. It wouldn’t be too great on Infernals, sure, but even in that previous fight at the barricade it would’ve been good. I could have used it on the Human soldiers – especially the Archers, who would’ve had less Health than any of the others.
…Though, I wasn’t sure I wanted to use the Spell on people. The name – Abrupt Decay – made me envision something that wouldn’t be… pleasant to see another person go through. Not that I could really afford to be making decisions based on what I thought was gross. My situation was a bit too dire for that.
Still, I was aware that there were other downsides of the Spell. The main thing I noticed was that there was, of course, no actual way to tell someone else’s exact Health. The only method would be trial and error. Sure, when the Spell worked, it would be a very efficient source of damage, but if I was even a single point off in my estimation, it’d be 75 Mana completely wasted. That, especially if it happened multiple times during a fight, could mean the difference between life and death.
But, then again, it worked uniquely well with Time Loop. Sure, I wouldn’t know how much Health they had the first time in a fight, but as long as I made an effort to remember how much damage an enemy took when I fought them, if I went back to do it again, I could use that knowledge to know how far they were from 300.
But all that mental stress from trying to calculate and memorize Health totals could make me perform worse in fights. Argh, it was just too hard to decide.
“Hey, Erani, you mind helping me choose a Spell?” I asked, keeping my eyes closed so as to not break my mediation.
“Yeah, what’s up?” I heard her respond.
Once I was done reading the choices out to her, I heard her hum in thought.
“Yeah, those are weird, alright,” she said. “Spells normally get more complex as you get into the higher Levels. So it makes sense. Which are you thinking?”
“Well, I’m not really sure. Stasis seems good, but maybe a bit conditional – especially for its cost. Abrupt Decay is super efficient, but it’s also a bit conditional. And Ethereal Armor seems interesting, but, well…”
“Conditional?” She laughed. “Yeah, I mean, you have your main arsenal by now, right? You’ve figured out the basic way you fight, and probably aren’t looking for a dramatic change to it. So you’d probably want to take something that enhances the style that’s already there with some pin-point usefulness, rather than something that’s just generically good like Ray of Frost. That’s what the experts say, at least. So normally, at this Level, you’d want to find a Spell that shores up on a weakness, rather than a Spell that does something you’re already good at.”
“Huh, yeah. That makes sense. I guess in that case, Abrupt Decay doesn’t seem as good as I thought. Especially if I’m in a position where I can physically touch them, Noxious Grasp already does its job. Sure, it’s not quite as efficient in certain situations, but I guess I shouldn’t just take a bunch of effects that all do the same thing.”
“Yeah. That’s something that us Sorcerers have to watch out for a lot. Since we don’t get many Spells, we have to constantly make sure that the ones we take aren’t redundant.”
“Right. With the other two, though, I don’t really see them being redundant with my other effects. I mean, other than Ethereal Armor’s Dark Plate. It protects me just like Regenerate does, I guess.
“Well, they both protect you in different ways. I’d say they’re even synergistic. The Dark Plate helps you survive any hits that would kill you instantly, and then Regenerate brings you back above that halfway threshold so that you aren’t quite so close to death afterward. Once the Dark Plate comes back online in a minute, Regenerate can help you survive another hit worth half your Health. If you didn’t heal, you’d just die anyway.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Besides, you also have the Light Plate aspect of it, right?”
“Yeah, but what’s that even supposed to do? I did the math, and it won’t really save me much Mana, when factoring in that it takes 150 to summon in the first place.”
“Well, first off, that discount’ll probably get better as the Spell Ranks up, so I imagine you’ll start saving a good bit once you get into the double digits of Spell Ranks. Second, I don’t think it’s supposed to be used in fights. If anything, you’d get the best use from Light Plate out of anyone around.”
I frowned. “How?”
“I think the key phrase you’re forgetting in Light Plate’s description is that you ‘still gain Spell XP as though the Spells weren’t discounted.’ So, if you profit a hundred Mana, that’s one extra Spell XP gained, totally for free.”
“...Huh. You’re right.”
“So I’d say Ethereal Armor has two main facets of usefulness. Light Plate for the more long-term practice angle, and Dark Plate for short-term protection.”
“And I guess the extra Spell XP will only get better as I Rank Ethereal Armor, too,” I said. Then I shook my head, trying to get back on track. “Well, still. We need to compare it to Stasis. What do you think about it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t done much research on melee combat, so I couldn’t tell you how helpful an effect like that would be. You’re the fighter, right? Seems like it might be useful, might not be. Depends on your combat style.”
“Well, I guess I’d say I also don’t know how to feel about it. I’ve only got 800 Mana. So, spending 280 on a single ten-second Spell is… dubious. It could certainly be used to get a positional advantage on someone, or to run away from something chasing us, but…”
“...But if they're strong enough that we’re running away, they’re probably strong enough to shrug off the effect.”
“Yeah. That’s what I keep coming back to. Seems like it’d be absolutely phenomenal in a one-on-one match of even strength, but I feel like I already do just fine in those. With Crippling Chill, Ray of Frost, and Gravity Well, I can normally limit someone’s mobility just fine without freezing them in time. It seems great, but, well, redundant.”
“Right, that makes sense.”
“I kind of want to take it anyway, though. You said Spells are dependent on previous choices, right? So if I turn down Stasis here, wouldn’t that mean I won’t get more time-related Spells in the future? I’m kind of a time mage. Feels silly to turn down a time Spell when I see one.”
“Not particularly. The Spells you’re offered are based on your previous Spell Choices, but it doesn’t mean you’ll only ever get Spells that do the same thing as the ones you’ve already taken. They’ll just synergize with your previous choices in some way. So, by turning down Stasis, you aren’t telling the System that you don’t want any time-related Spells, you’re telling the System that you don’t want Spells that, for example, prevent you from damaging your opponents. Or Spells that only work based on touch. It’s not really a single choice that’ll influence the System like that on a broad scale, but more a series of choices. It wouldn’t stop offering time Spells to you just because you turned a single one down.”
“Huh, alright.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think that settles it.”
I went ahead and chose my Spell.
You have learned the Spell Ethereal Armor.
Your next Spell options will be:
Ember Gale - School: Fire
Expedite - School: Alteration
Heartstone - School: Alteration, Summoning
And while I was at it, I assigned my Stat Points. I was tempted to put some in other Stats like Endurance, but with Ethereal Armor, Conjuration was looking more attractive than ever. Dark Plate helped shore up my problem with occasionally getting killed in a single hit during a surprise attack, so Endurance wasn’t quite as integral, and with Light Plate, every point I put into Conjuration translated to even more Spell XP. So I put my Stat Points into Conjuration. All 9 of them.
You have used 9 Stat Points to increase Conjuration.
Your Conjuration value is now 83.
And with that, I opened my eyes, blinking at the morning light. Erani was half-sitting, half-lying against a nearby tree, obviously getting some rest. And the Dryad was still meditating with her eyes closed. I wondered what she was doing.
“Well, I guess I should go ahead and get to Ranking my Spells,” I said. “I got two more Soft Cap levels, plus the new Spell, of course.”
But just as I was about to try out Ethereal Armor, the Dryad’s eyes shot open.
And I heard a voice in my head.
“Can you hear me?” it said. “You two. Can you hear me?”
The Dryad looked back and forth between me and Erani, as if awaiting a response.