Chương 30: 30 loop 1, part 10

The monster was a Frollart. It stood on its knuckles, and it had the monobrow and the slack mouth and everything. But then my brain caught up with the scale and quietly resigned in protest. The babies upstairs had been knee-height, but this one was three of me standing on my own shoulders. Unlike the smaller versions, though, I had no idea how this one was still alive. Its skin had split wherever the muscle outgrew it. The splits had then been stitched shut with coarse black thread and wrapped in grey gauze.

The bandages on the small ones had been for hygiene. These were keeping the damn thing sown together. A Frollart the size of a siege engine deserved a better name than Frollart. Or at least a lazier one. I decided to call it a Froll. The Froll lowered itself onto its feet and started punching the dome of my uncle's ward. One hit after the other. With every hit, the dome flickered, cracks spiderwebbed out from its fists, they crawled, and then they sealed slowly back. The creature didn't react to the failure at all.

Instead, it raised its arm and hit the ward again without stopping. It knocked at a patient interval over and over. I hovered at the edge of the clearing, uncertain what to do, watching it work. The ward was failing, that much was certain. As dumb as the Froll was, it was patient. It was going to hit the dome until the dome stopped existing, and then it was going to eat my uncle. Which meant I had to do something. A sentence I had structured my entire life around never thinking. I didn't bother with a plan.

Plans were for reassuring other people. Instead, I just started blasting. [Trip] went first. The bandages on its right forearm seized, twisted, and knotted into the wrapping on its bicep. The arm cinched against itself mid-swing, and for a second, I thought it would work. But the creature just tore the bandages apart, ripped its arm free, and hit the ward again, as if it hadn't even been stopped at all. [Slick] went second, on the stone directly underneath it. At first, the creature wobbled.

But then, it planted a palm on dry stone just outside the [Slick] puddle, its feet still set on rough rock behind it. It stopped moving. And while now it was only punching with one hand, it was still making huge dents into the ward. Fine. The floor wasn't interested in stopping it. I'd ask the ceiling. The rock over its head was rough-cut and crumbling, and maybe [Topple] would work. I asked the biggest loose cluster of stones I could find to stop holding on. It worked. The spell dropped the rock.

In my excitement, my book slipped out from under my other arm, and hit the floor spine-first. It skidded away into the dark. Rocks the size of bread loaves rained down on its skull and shoulders, any one of which would have put me in the infirmary for at least a week. They bounced off the creature, leaving it completely unharmed. The creature looked up, skipped the ceiling entirely, and glanced at me with what looked like mild annoyance. It turned back to the ward. I had been assessed and dismissed.

Honestly, that was fair. So far, I had been like a fly against a horse. I was still thinking about what to do next when things got worse. The sound of knocking had been rolling through the room for several minutes, and my [Topple] had gone off on top of that like an avalanche. And Frollarts, as a species, had demonstrated two consistent behaviors throughout all of mankind's interactions with them. The first was that they loved cheese. And the second was that they went toward noise.

The sound of knuckles started on stone. It came from my left, and from behind me, from somewhere inside the shelves themselves. The soft, rhythmic slap of bandaged hands that I had spent the whole night learning to hate. The first one squeezed out from between two stacks that had no gap between them, popped free, and waddled into the clearing. Two more followed after it, and three more after that. They ignored the Froll completely. The Froll was family. Instead, they came after me.

And worse, they came for the gold thread running from my chest across the clearing to my uncle. The nearest one stopped, lifted its face, and snapped at the air three feet in front of me—exactly where the tether ran. The pulse skipped in my chest. The thread went slack for a beat and then came back. And I decided I had officially run out of patience for being nibbled on at the soul level. I cast [Slick] on the floor in front of the first cluster of Frollarts.

The front three went down chin-first, sliding into a pale blue pile like dominoes. It bought me mere seconds. And that was all it bought. The ones behind them simply started climbing over the pile, and the walls kept producing more. There were a dozen now. And then there weren't, because there were fifteen, and then eighteen, and then twenty. They just kept coming. Outlasting them, then, wasn't an option, and leading them away meant leaving my uncle alone. Nothing stopped a Frollart horde once it got going.

Nothing, nothing except food. And I already knew exactly which food. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. And I had just dropped an entire book on food magic on the far side of the clearing. The book lay twenty feet away with twenty idiots in between. So I did the most athletic thing I'd done in practically my entire life. I leaned forward in the air, kicked off a shelf with both feet, and dove toward the book.

[Float] turned the dive into something between a glide and a swim. I skimmed over the horde of Frollarts crowding around the book. I was unfortunately low enough that one of them lunged up and clipped my shoe with its blunt teeth. Somehow, I managed to scoop the book off the stone, clutching it with both hands and kicking the Frollart off my foot. But moving down so low came with a host of problems.

The horde reoriented, and I was forced to spend the next stretch of my life weaving between knee-high monsters while trying to read the book. I dodged left around one, and the page I'd opened to flapped shut. I spun away from a lunge and nearly lost the book a second time, fumbling it off my fingertips and catching it against my hip. This wasn't working. I blamed it on the fact that I was tired. But finally, my brain started working.

These idiots were knee-high, and their reach barely extended two feet into the air. I stopped dodging and used the shelves to propel myself upward. I rose three feet, then five, until the tallest lunge in the room fell comfortably below my shoes. I hung there in the dark above a churning carpet of pale blue. The horde piled up underneath me and snapped at nothing. I opened the book and read while the monsters seethed beneath me like the world's ugliest tide. I skimmed. I didn't have time to read.

Any moment now, the Froll would destroy my uncle's ward and potentially kill him. The book held dozens upon dozens of spells, full incantations, mana costs, academic theorizing. It was everything I ever wanted. There was a spell for summoning broth, a whole roast, a conjured pastry called [Ex Nihilo Crustum] —pastry from nothing, if the description was to be believed. It was complete with the incantation and a diagram of the wand movement, a short rising flick, like lifting dough off a board.

Which, in any other circumstance, would have ended my night of research on the spot in favor of casting the spell until I ran out of mana. I had been waiting my entire life for this book. And it had been sitting in a dead queen's kitchen the entire time. But what it didn't have was a spell for conjuring fucking cheese. I wanted to throw the book in frustration. But I didn't give up. I went to the index, and because whoever had written this book had loved their readers, it had a very detailed one.

I dragged my finger down the C column while something snapped its jaws under my shoes. And there it was. Cheese. There were four different page numbers where it was listed. I turned to the first one. This book is just an introductory text for the wonderful world of food conjuration. For more advanced curricula, please see... And then it listed a whole mess of different foods and specific books about conjuring each one. I looked for cheese immediately and saw it.

The reader is directed to the definitive work, Ex Nihilo Caseum. It was the book. I stared at the entry, flipped back to the pastry spell, and read its name again. The incantation was the title. The cheese spell wasn't missing from this book. I pointed the wand at the empty air beside me. It was a long shot, but I copied the pastry spell's movement on a hunch that family recipes shared their technique. My hunch was correct and I successfully cast the spell." [Ex Nihilo Caseum]."

[Ex Nihilo Caseum - Manifestation] Cost: 25 mana. Conjures cheese. Duration: The conjured cheese persists until consumed. The mana left me in one clean pull. A wheel of cheese the size of a dinner plate condensed out of nothing, and dropped into my free hand. I let out a whoop. It worked. It actually worked. I had been working on food conjuration since last year. I had notebooks full of notes.

I had a shelf of failures, a standing feud with the dining hall, and a promise to myself that the day I cracked it, I would never attend a scheduled meal as long as I lived. And everyone in my life would be worse off, except for me. And here it was. Warm, gooey, a pale yellow, with a beautiful rind, smelling like the sweetest victory I had ever had. I took a few moments to revel in this victory. And then I threw my dream as far as I could.

The wheel arced over the horde and landed deep, fifty feet behind the horde, with a soft, mana-expensive thud. And the entire cavern changed direction at once. The pile beneath me collapsed outward in a flood. Twenty Frollarts converged on the landing site like the cheese owed them money, climbing over each other, shrieking their kettle shrieks. The first one that made it to the cheese pulled a giant wad, stuck it in its mouth, and bit down, biting into its own hand. That explained the bandages.

In seconds, the cheese wheel was gone. I cast the spell again and lobbed the second wheel farther—past the first, deeper into the dark. I moved forward so that I could get better distance, and a third cast produced a third wheel. I threw it off into a side passage that pointed away from us, willing it to roll. The unoccupied part of the horde funneled after it, a pale blue river pouring itself out of the cavern.

And the sound of knuckles faded into the stacks until the only things left in the clearing were me, my uncle, and the obnoxious, giant knocking. For what felt like the first time in my life, I wasn't upset at casting 75 mana in quick succession. Three cheese wheels had cost me what a week of classes usually did, and my pool was down to about half. I had probably just invented the most expensive distraction in the history of my life. But it was also the single best thing I had ever cast. By Therumia. Holy shit.

Food magic. I was literally tempted to cast it again just to eat it. But that damn knocking interrupted. I held the book against my chest and drifted back down toward the floor. And then the knocking stopped. I turned, and the silence explained itself. The Froll stood above the dome with its fists still raised. The ward, which had flickered, dimmed, and recovered, finally failed. It shattered soundlessly into motes that hung in the air before they evaporated. There was nothing between the Froll and my uncle.

The creature raised its hand.