Chương 464: (457) 6.71. I’ve Got the Magic in Me

With Spur's orders for some sort of big explosion and only a week and change to make it happen, Vin got to work. And he wasn't the only person who put their nose to the grindstone to ensure everything was ready for the upcoming battle. Witherson and her ever-growing team of crafters worked double-time, reinforcing the buildings all throughout Terra and even finishing up the new wall that they'd been building. By this point, Terra was beginning to look like a legitimate keep in its own right.

The main wall surrounding the town was reinforced, overlooking a moat of all things, and covered from top to bottom in a dense array of runes, courtesy of their infernal allies. Having been forced to leave town and deal with the ranker king during the battle for wave six, Vin hadn't really gotten the chance to see what those rituals were capable of just yet, and he was looking forward to a live demonstration.

With the influx of new faces they'd be getting soon enough, it had been decided that Terra needed more space. With that in mind, rather than dismantle and push the current walls farther out, a second ring had been created, drastically expanding the available space. The Bands' small offshoot village actually fell within this area, but it seemed that the space was large enough that they didn't fight back about them being enclosed.

The new wall wouldn't help all too much with any of the remaining monster waves, as the monsters would simply spawn between the outer and inner walls, but Witherson hinted that it wouldn't be completely pointless for the battles to come. Alice and her support classes outdid themselves yet again, and not just in terms of traps. She personally led her team of Trappers around the open space, rigging the future battlefield with as many explosives and other magical concoctions as she could get her hands on.

And seeing as Bill was only one of nearly a half-dozen Alchemists at this point, that was quite a lot of material to work with. In fact, Vin was pleased to discover that Bill had managed to pioneer yet another new potion that would be an essential loadout across Terra's walls, unsurprisingly with Scule's help. Unbeknownst to Vin, Scule had returned to the Rebel Queen's final resting place, where he'd helped himself to some of that sticky goo that the elite trogums had almost managed to take Alka down with.

Using that, Terra's alchemists had figured out a way to create a version of the goo that would explode outward when the bottle was shattered, coating anything nearby in a healthy layer of sticky goo and rooting it to the ground. The one downside to these potions were that they were understandably quite fragile, as it was important that the glass shatter quite thoroughly for the substance to work.

Abby herself was quite excited to see this new invention, as on top of helping with the monster wave, it gave her and her guards a new method of non-lethally taking down perpetrators from range. Shia maintained her insistence that she didn't want to turn her talents toward developing a magical plant that existed solely to be a killing machine, but that didn't mean she wasn't willing to help at all.

She, Mary, and Casper worked together to come up with an ingenuous solution to help take some of the pressure off the combat classers. Together, with a little help from some of the elderwood trees in Alka's old fragment, they managed to design a dense, incredibly durable tree that acted like a leaky mana battery. By placing open mana potions within a hollow in the tree, the tree would then absorb the concentrated mana and gradually release it over a span of a couple of hours.

Normal people couldn't even tell anything was going on, but to a monster that hunted mainly via its magical senses, it would hopefully act like a beacon, drawing any close by monsters towards it rather than any of Terra's defenders. With that in mind, the three of them got to work planting these mana trees all around the outskirts of Terra, careful to avoid the main clusters of traps Alice and her own team were setting up.

Alka drove her Slayers into the ground, preparing them for anything and everything they might end up encountering. All of her Slayer hopefuls had either obtained the class or dropped out by this point, which meant her personal squad of elite fighters was larger than ever. With only four members remaining of the Old Guard and ten of the New Guard, the eighteen members of the appropriately dubbed Newer Guard were a welcome sight for sore eyes across all of Terra.

Glancing off the wall and spotting Alka leading nearly three-dozen black-clad Slayers behind her as they ran laps or practiced fighting did wonders to instill confidence in the rest of Terra. The fact that she also had Trod's lumbering form and Curash's nimble frame beside her certainly didn't hurt. Evidently, Alka's Slayers had enough people now that she'd officially appointed sub leaders to help keep everything coordinated during the thick of things.

While Alka still remained the overall leader of all the Slayers, Tiffany was now in charge of the Old Guard, Tall Phil had taken the New Guard, and Curash himself was responsible for the Newer Guard. With this new structure, they were easily able to split into various groups and move about the battlefield as needed.

Vin was sure there were countless other things being prepared and set up for the battle to come, but Terra had long since gotten to the point where it was impossible for him to keep eyes and ears on every little thing that was going on. He vaguely understood Phil was conducting massive training exercises with all the combat classes, and Mai was leading large lectures on tactics and strategy for many of those who would be fighting on and off the wall, but he had more important things to worry about. Like magic.

Up until this point, Stone Shot and Fireball had carried Vin through quite a number of deadly encounters as his only two spells designed for combat. Yet the more he wandered throughout Edregon, the more obvious it became that he wouldn't be able to rely on just those two spells forever. Just as he was leveling up and advancing in power, so too was everyone else. And while he knew he was doing so faster than most, that didn't mean he could grow lax.

The Rebel Queen's incredible transformation had driven that point home pretty effectively. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. With that in mind, it was definitely time to add to his combat power. And when he stopped to think about what sort of spell he should make next, the answer became obvious. If Stone Shot and Fireball had carried him this far… Why not try and combine them into something new?

Vin had first had the idea after his latest encounter with mana. Once he'd figured out how to effectively curve a spell, adjusting its trajectory as it was cast and using that to bend his Fireballs around to strike at optimal locations, he realized he could probably take that a step further. Why waste time shooting something from his hand and bending it into the best position when he could rain fire from on high?

Following that train of thought, Vin got to work, happy to find that Spell Weaver gave him a thumbs up on the idea without any need for tweaking the concept. Combining two different tier-2 spells of different affinities was no easy feat, but he'd come quite a long way since frequently blowing himself up the first time he'd tried to make a new spell.

Vin dedicated his full attention to his latest spell, working literally night and day as he utilized Dream Walk to continue working on his magic with Lumel at his side as they slept. With all of his focus turned toward the creation of new magic, he didn't know if it was his increase in experience or the fact that his spell idea was a fairly simple one, but Vin was startled to find that he'd actually achieved a stable runic formation in only four days of tireless effort.

And he'd only blown himself up twice to do it! On top of the ten thousand experience he gained for the creation of a new tier-3 spell, Vin received a few other nice surprises as well. Dormancy increased to level 3! 600 exp gained. Dormancy increased to level 4! 800 exp gained. It seemed devoting so much of his dreaming time to spellwork was an excellent way to level up his newly evolved skill, and Vin was all for it.

Originally, he'd expected the new tier-3 spell to take up the vast majority of the time he had to work with before the arrival of wave seven. Seeing as it only took him four days, that meant he still had another four or five days left to work with. As the inevitable battle grew closer, John had managed to narrow down when precisely the monsters were going to appear, but he still didn't have an exact answer for them.

Four or five days and nights may have been enough for a 'simple' tier-3 spell, but the next one Vin had in mind was going to be tricky. Still, there was no time like the present. With his literal increase in firepower out of the way, Vin shifted his focus to defense instead. Even before getting mind blasted from the Rebel Queen, Shia had proposed he try to figure out a way to turn Concealment into some form of general, all-purpose magical shield one could coat themselves with.

If he could just figure out a way to empower the spell and prevent it from letting outside magic in the same way it stopped a person's magic from leaking out, it would be perfect. Funnily enough, Vin had a much harder time trying to figure out how to make this idea work compared to his previous spell. It took him some time, but eventually, he figured out the building blocks he needed. Concealment. Protection from Heat. And, surprising, Dimensional Sheath.

The trick was in how all three of the spells did largely the same thing, but in slightly different ways. Concealment created a thin layer of magic over a person that was focused inward to keep one's own mana from leaking out. Protection from Heat created that same thin layer of magic over someone, but was naturally focused outward, in order to keep them from burning alive from external temperatures. Dimensional Sheath was more complicated, but Vin only needed the first portion of the spell.

In order to store an object within another dimension, the spell first coated it in a protective layer of his mana, ensuring it would survive the stress of being shoved into the hole in the fabric of reality the spell created. In order to create his all-purpose magic shield, Vin needed to combine as many of these different layering-type spells as he could.

Due to the innate complexity of combining so many different spells and reaching for an end result he admittedly still wasn't one-hundred-percent certain of what it would do, Vin struggled with this one. He experienced over half-a-dozen runic backlashes as the days passed, but he refused to give up. Thankfully, the runic backlashes for this new spell weren't all that dangerous.

Rather than worry about blowing himself up, all he ended up experiencing when the runic formation failed was coating himself in faulty drapes of mana that either didn't hang onto his body all that well, or did weird things like make it so anything he touched received a nasty static shock as the mana was discharged.

Coming in just under the wire, and with a few pointers from Lumel during their dream session where she helped run him through how she used mana coatings for her own spatial spells, Vin managed to put the finishing touches on his new spell. Just in time for the battle for wave seven. Dormancy increased to lvl 5! 1, 000 exp gained. New spell learned! Tier 3 Spell (Neutral Skin). 10, 000 exp gained. Level up! Adventurer of the Arcane lvl 53! +3 Attribute points to spend.