It wasn’t the fastest attack in the realm, but it didn’t have to be. At such close range, the Spidorilla had no hope of dodging.
The hail punctured the beast, smashing apart its invisible armor before sinking their teeth into its body.
The Ash Beast’s torso took several hits, its armor-like hide protecting it from any lethal injuries. Its limbs, however, were another story. One had been peppered through with holes, while two more hung on by a thread.
Maiya danced around the injured beast, launching Wind Blades one after another. She lopped off the two injured legs and hammered its torso with magic. With its invisible armor defeated, the Spidorilla took more and more damage.
But it wasn’t dead. Not nearly. This was an Ash Beast, after all, and though it had lost three legs, it still had five more.
“Fifteen seconds,” the commander called, right as the Spidorilla Leaped at Maiya, its eyes full of fury.
Maiya barely saw it coming. The next thing she knew, she was sailing through the air, and she couldn’t breathe.
Instinct honed from thousands of hours of practice kicked in, and Maiya flew into a roll that dissipated the impact of her fall.
She had no time to regain her breath; the enemy was already upon her.
It smashed her chest with its giant gorilla arm, and Maiya felt her Blunt Force Protection orb wink out.
Maiya rolled to the side, replenishing the orb with prana—without it, another hit like that and she’d be dead.
The Spidorilla jumped, pinning her under its legs. If it dropped its weight on her—as she was sure it would—she’d be dead.
In the distance, Maiya caught sight of her Balarian guards closing in.
If only I had another Hail Burst, she thought. But Maiya wasn’t yet at a point where she could charge B Grade orbs in combat. It took her almost a solid minute to fill even one.
What she did have, was a slew of C Grade spells.
Icicles and Wind Blades fired out. Besides carrying multiple copies of each, Maiya could now charge them in mere seconds. They did little damage, but the two spells synergized surprisingly well, with Wind Blades cutting into the Spidorilla’s underside while the Icicles gouged into the wound, expanding it, allowing the next Wind Blade to cut even farther.
The Spidorilla roared in pain and jumped off, but it was too late.
It took three stumbling paces, then keeled over, smashing into the grass with a loud thud.
“Only two seconds left on the clock. Reckless, milady,” the Balarian commander said, grinning as he offered Maiya a hand up. “Reckless, but impressive.”
She took the hand, grinning back. “That’s one down. Only four more to go for today’s quota.”
The adrenaline coursed through Maiya’s veins.
Don’t think you’ll beat me when we meet again, Vir.
45PRANA CURRENT
Vir started slowly, taking great pains to monitor the orb as he worked. There was so much going on, the task was easier said than done. Even finding the crisscrossing inscription ribbons was a chore, though after a full half day of simply staring at it, he’d learned to discern them—at the risk of going cross-eyed.
Seeing nothing obviously amiss, Vir upped the flow, cycling prana in his palm with both his blood and pranites.
Prana flowed into the orb as it should’ve, the inscription rings glowing as they hungrily soaked it in.
Vir stopped, waiting to see if the orb would crack. When it didn’t, he continued.
It cracked ten minutes later.
One moment, it had been charging fine, and the next, it was broken.
Vir forced himself to breathe, taking several moments to let his anger and frustration pass. If he’d failed while in a positive state of mind, anything less than his best would be guaranteed to result in a broken orb.
For the next hour, he studied the broken remains, but to no avail. He wasn’t able to glean any hint as to why it’d shattered.
Picking up his second orb, he tried again, starting slowly, bringing the orb to within only a few inches of his eyes.
There were so many ribbon rings that the orb was nearly submerged in them. When prana flowed into the inscriptions, they lit up.
Each ring seemed to be isolated. What purpose they served, Vir couldn’t know. He couldn’t even begin to guess.
It was only after staring at the inscriptions for another hour—and wondering if he’d gone insane—did he find a clue.
While some of the inscriptions happily soaked up prana, others rejected it. Once they’d reached capacity, they seemed to actively resist any more prana, shunting prana heading their way.
Just like blood saturation.
Vir found several more rings that had stopped accepting prana.
Each ring had its own maximal prana capacity. And, like his own blood, there were limits. Attempting to exceed those could very well damage them, similar to how his blood cells burst when filled with too much.
The knowledge was useful—Vir simply had to avoid filling those rings. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to do that.
Pulling prana into the orb was more like opening a dam, allowing a torrent of water to rush through. Turning it on was easy. Controlling where the water went was another thing entirely.
The task would have been trivially simple—if the orb was inside his body, like a tattoo. That way, Vir could control the flow, directing it to the proper inscriptions.
As it was, prana outside of his body was entirely beyond his control. And if the inscription rings were already saturated with such a low level of suction force, they might very well break and crack when Vir upped the flow.
Charging the orb slowly wasn’t an option, either. At this rate, it’d take him a year of continuous charging. He needed a better way. Vir did the only thing he could—cycle blood in his palm, hoping it would redirect some of the flow away from the saturated rings. He used the pranites, because they responded more easily to his directions, and also because he could freely move them in any pattern he wished without worrying about messing up his blood flow.
The result left him underwhelmed. The flow had shifted, just not in the way he wanted to. It was like trying to direct the surging flow of water with a single valve. If he had ten, he might’ve been able to accomplish his goal. One was simply insufficient.
To Vir’s dismay, splitting the pranites into multiple loops diluted their attractive power to such a degree that they became useless. Worse still, he had to grasp the orb with the tips of his fingers to have enough control points to direct prana the way he wanted to.
Ten fingers—ten circulation patterns. Maintaining so many circulation paths strained Vir’s mind, but that was hardly the worst issue facing him. Grasping the orb with his fingers meant he could no longer circulate prana in his palm to create an attractive effect.
Previously, prana would enter his palm from the air on all sides, which meant about half went through the orb and became trapped there.
Now, the miniscule amount of blood and pranites he cycled near the tips of each finger pulled prana in ten different ways, further diluting the attractive force. Pressing his wrists together helped, but both the flow rate and his degree of control weren’t even close to enough.
Vir found Ashani’s last syringe of pranites, and, after some fumbling, managed to inject himself, hoping the extra prana machines in his body might get him there.
They didn’t.
If Vir was going to overcome this problem, he’d need something on another level entirely. Something that would allow him to magnify the force of his attractive current a hundredfold.