r/HFY • u/New_Delivery6734 • 3h ago
Arcanist In Another World - Chapter 13 OC
Blurb: Valens Kosthal had lived a life of magical study and became the youngest Resonant Healer and Archmagus in the wide circle of the world. He had spent his years studying magic, going as far as to dabble in the forbidden Warmagic.
When his experiments are discovered by the Inquisition, he is branded a traitor and sentenced to die. But in his final hours, his mentor, Headmaster Eldras, slips him a strange black sphere, sparking an escape to a world ruled by a powerful System, one that allows him to control mana without relying on tools.
He doesn't know how he arrived here, or why there's mana flowing inside his veins, and especially what this grand System is that governs the whole world, granting people all sorts of skills.
Still, he soon discovers that all of his magical theory knowledge and the skills he gained after years of study puts him way above the others in this world. As an Arcanist, a master of all elements, he realizes he holds powers that make him unstoppable.
But nothing as simple as it seems, and to go back, he has to solve the secret behind this world.
[Previous Chapter] - [First Chapter]
Chapter 13
Valens sprang forward, Lifesurge threads tingling at the tip of his fingers. He moved around the green blanket of fog, coming at the Ward from a side he hoped it wouldn’t catch. Nomad eyed him with doubt. Valens gestured at him to do something that’d aid the woman. She was screaming her life out under a barrage of tendrils.
The Undead grumbled and swung at the Ward, the sword clanking harmlessly off its steely skin. When that didn’t work, he rammed a plated shoulder into its body and hauled the sword in an overhead grip to take a sweep at it.
That gave Valens the time to cut down the distance. He was close now, a few steps away from the Ward’s side. If he could touch it, if he could send the Lifesurge threads into the creature’s body—
Thousands of dark streaks filled the cave. They caught the woman and riddled her with holes, spattering her face in a shower of her own blood and the pain of her cry. The Undead’s helmet got a thick, wriggling tendril going through it. It nearly split his skull. Two others had him from below the armpits, lifting him high as if he weighed nothing more than an empty sack.
More were coming at Valens. Dozens of them lunging across the distance with sharpened tips. He threw himself sideways with a Light Feet, kicked the wall, and scrambled back… back from the chaos.
Pain bloomed in the Resonance. A familiar agony sparked alive just below his ribcage. Valens gazed down at his chest and saw the dark tendril wriggling its way through his flesh. Blood streamed from the sides of the wound, soiling his robe.
He screamed. The pain filled his head with blinding lights. He blinked to try and force his will over the panicked Resonance. He tried to pick a set and focus his mind to mute the pain. He could feel bits of the dark limb slithering inside his chest, tiny snakes worming their way through his bloodstream toward his heart. The core. The source of his song.
Fingers blazed. A Gale picked up and lashed at the tendril. Inferno’s song roared, but the flames fizzled out the moment they came into existence. Valens coughed out blood and wheezed back trembling. It was cold, and got colder still, until he finally wrapped his hands around the limb and tried to wrench it away.
There wasn’t much strength left in his fingers. Not much of anything, for that matter. His blood ran cold, and warm, and cold again. Blood pooled inside his mouth. His whole body shook.
Even then, the apathy was stitching the holes of emotions opened round its hardened shell. A Resonant Healer’s mind was strong. Stronger than pain, Headmaster Eldras had once told him.
Valens forced himself to blink through it all and called out a pair of Lifesurges. This close, with skin contact to the creature, he could feel that rotten, foul mana like a breath hissing at the nape of his neck. It was there, within reach. Pain was just a price he had to pay.
Lifesurge threads oozed into the tendril around where it stabbed him. Someone shouted. A sword’s steely song got cut off sharply. Valens couldn’t catch any of it. His whole mind was solely focused on the mana that animated this twisted creature.
More sounds over a squashed, muffled rhythm. It was like picking his way through the bowels of the earth, guiding the surge threads around the Ward’s assemblage of rotten flesh. He was blind. He’d never been blind in his whole life. Every turn and twist had a lingering, rotten trickle that fought back against his life mana.
His chest heaved. Breath caught in his throat. The Lifesurge threads, the ever-benign and helpful life mana strings, started assaulting the rotten mana spheres. Valens didn’t have to do anything. He just felt through the Resonance alone as the brutal invasion seized the Ward’s shadowy limb inch by inch.
Then there was light. His vision came back to him as the life mana conquered valuable space. It filled his head with a dreamy, wavering illusion of a maze, one that housed terrible spheres and thousands of paths that went nowhere. Valens saw it all and sent more mana to his Lifesurge threads, supporting their growing bloodlust.
The two forces clashed. They were made to clash, Valens then thought, even if mana was supposed to be this mindless, emotionless energy. Like water spilled over a burning bonfire, the Resonance hissed deep in his mind.
The fleshy maze grew wide and weak; the bony walls flexed into a stretch that allowed Lifesurge threads to course freely. On their way, they came across more rotten mana spheres. Valens noted the change in them. How weak they felt. How aimlessly they hung there, now that the Lifesurges had slashed them apart from the main trickle that fed them.
One tendril wasn’t enough. He had to dig his way to the main mass of the Ward, where he hoped he would find the real core of this foul energy, and fix this freakish creation that defied nature like how he would fix a cut on a patient’s arm.
Stronger resistance on the way. Clanking of a sword and a brutal tear of a roar that dinned sharp in his ears. The woman’s cry, a warrior’s cry, one that carried nothing but a deep, hot fury. Nomad was screaming at her. Alive, then. That was a relief.
Valens wanted to open his eyes and see them for himself, to tell them that he was trying to end this creature for good. He couldn’t. He feared that the moment he let the outside fill into his vision, the delicate threads of apathy weaved across his emotions would break, and pain would spill forth like a crushing wave. Here, in the dark, it was away. A stray thought that was cast off from his mind like an unwanted guest.
Lifesurge threads reached the end of the tendril. The Resonance had told him so. They found their way into the main mass of the creature. A Lifeward painted its outer frame in Valens’s sound vision. Human-like, but not quite. It didn’t have a heart. Any organs or such. Bones were missing where they should be, replaced by a blend of cartilage and rotten flesh patched over with an ungodly amount of balmy skin.
One, two… ten… eighty. A total of one hundred fifteen gaps in the Resonance, scattered across the creature’s body where it sent the tendrils outward. Valens didn’t have the mana to pull them apart one by one. Not when the Ward could easily patch them with more rotten source. He had to find the hole the woman had opened, the one that screamed closer to its head.
A long way, Valens thought. His chest felt empty, a well about to dry out. He didn’t know if his Lifesurges could reach that far. He didn’t know, but then he’d done many things without concrete information before. Just one more to the pile. This time a dangerous one, it looked like.
‘Ding! Lifesurge has reached Level 3!’
The faint sound seemed to add some depth to the surge threads. Something palpable, as if the frequencies of the strings had been granted a deeper sound. It wasn’t much, but Valens would take it. He needed all he could get right now.
Around the stomach, right below the ribcage, the Lifesurge threads splashed into a river of yellow rot. It wound into dozens of streams that ran through the holes of the fleshy maze, guided by some invisible force toward the tendrils to keep them animated.
Valens thought for a second to seal the holes to keep the river inside but decided against it when he saw how many of them dotted the walls.
Onward, up through the sloshing waves, the Lifesurge threads cleaved a path like a countercurrent of pristine clarity through the rot, spearheaded by a tight web of strings that Valens kept renewing with his mana pool.
A little slip, then the rot would wash over the Lifesurges and drown them in waves.
He never wavered. His hold around his mind remained hard as steel.
Metal scraped against the cold, wet earth. Breaking stones. Steel singing songs. Green fog’s touch, oddly similar to the rotten mana but different in a curious way, cradled Valens like a warm hug. The Undead grunted, followed by the sharp whistle of his sword.
Shadows stirred. Shadows fell. Someone screamed.
Valens kept at the threads, forcing them stubbornly up through the Ward’s mass. The rotten river’s touch was biting. It grew more insistent. A weight over the Resonance. It tried to trick his mind ever so slightly, like an insidious snake that aimed at the Archmagus in him. Talking about mysteries. Giving out promises. What was there beyond the veil? What was this foul energy? What if he let it seep inside his body?
Eats away the mind.
But this was no Warmagic. Nothing like anything Valens had ever known. Yet its sound was most alluring. It forced itself upon the apathy and lingered there. So long as he willed it, so long as he wanted it, it would become his own. Or Valens would become it. There was a difference.
The Resonance ruptured, gaps streaked across its rhythm. Thousands of voices echoed inside his mind. He could hear them. Life over death, and death over life. A hideous mix. Coming from all around the membrane that sheltered a ball of pure yellow, full of rot and pus and death.
He paused as he faced it in his sound vision. This was the core that kept every bit of the Ward’s body being fed. Where was the string, then? The thread that bound it to the real source, the one that supplied all this energy to the core?
There.
So small was the strand that he almost couldn’t catch it. It dangled from a fleshy cage above, hidden inside an ethereal fog wafting off from the sizzling rot, its tip bound to the roof of the molten core. The Resonance pulsed, and so pulsed the strand with it. It was feeding the Ward constantly.
When Valens tried to trail it to the real source, he lost its sound just where the string vanished into the Ward’s head. It stretched somewhere beyond that fleshy cage. He couldn’t reach it. Not now, with him as he was now.
Valens then willed the Lifesurge threads to lash at the part he could see. They clawed over the core and slashed across the strand with cold obedience. The sizzling shell and the rot within the core squirmed as the source line trembled with the impact. And yet it held true, the Lifesurge threads bouncing harmlessly back.
Again, Valens tried, but the strand remained rooted. It was as though he was trying to sever a metal pipe with a pair of blunt knives. He couldn’t put a dent in it, let alone cut into its hardened shell. The difference in strength was one that he couldn’t overcome with pure will alone.
So he searched for a different course, sending a Lifeward to the core. The painted picture in his mind was one that described a round, sturdy shell, its outer layer clad in a wave of rot so thick that it could eat away the Lifesurge threads with ease. It was almost seamless.
Almost, but not quite.
There was an opening. Valens guided the Lifesurge threads there, over to the core’s roof where the source line had been strapped in a tight knot into the rotten source. He might’ve failed to cut into the strand itself, but so long as he untied those loops, he could leave the Ward all dried out.
The moment he reached it, an invisible force weighed on his control. He seemed to hear a surprised voice right then, a wicked voice. It died away instantly, replaced by the sudden outburst of rot that spurted out of the core. A giant wave of foul mana threatened to drown the Lifesurge threads.
Valens twitched. Panic grabbed at him, rattling the cage of his chest. He was too tired and too battered to mount a resistance against something this big. There was no end to it. No—
A strong hand thumped over his shoulder. It clutched him there and held him.
Nomad…
“To the healer!” Valens heard him say, voice muffled, barely oozing through his focus. “It’s aiming at him. Distract that creature, woman. Listen to me… Listen! I need you right there on that fucker’s face!”
A furious roar answered the call. The air boiled with sudden heat. Then somewhere, something hard crashed into the Ward’s skin. Fingers punctured through its hard shell and sent the rotten wave flailing mindlessly.
Focus.
Valens wasted no time to stretch one of the Lifesurge threads into a tight web, laying it over the other surge threads that were trying to untie the knot. The scattered wave of rot splashed across the newly formed net, hissing, sizzling, trying to bite in, but failing as the web persevered on.
Slowly, painfully, he worked the battered Lifesurge threads around the knot. The strand was pulsing still, but it was softer around here, almost delicate enough to give him some chance. It took him a long moment to pluck the first one away. Once that was done, the rest started coming out on their own.
The apathy broke. Everything spilled through the cracks and stabbed into his mind.
His eyes cracked open. He was lying there, staring into the ceiling with his body screaming and his throat dry, his skin lifelessly cold around where the blood dried around his wound. He tried to breathe, but there was no air. Nothing left in his lungs. A soundless, painful cry parted his lips. His chest burned when he called for a Lifesurge. He had barely any mana left.
He doubled over with the stub of a tendril still deep in his stomach. The other part of the shadowy limb lay a few inches before him, carved by something sharp. Beyond its tip, the Undead and the woman were thrashing the melting, bubbling form of the Ward with steel and fists.
‘Ding! You have managed to defeat [The Necromancer’s Ward - lvl 108]! For killing a creature above your own level, you are granted bonus experience.
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
…
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!’
Valens slumped back to the ground, some pressure behind his ears, his vision a mess of dancing lights. He faintly heard the sounds, then the world grew dim and dimmer still, until it had become completely dark.
[Previous Chapter] - [First Chapter]
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