Zeroth Moment: My Cheat Skill Is Stupid, So I'll Just Ignore It

Topher had now made three right turns, two left turns, and gone down a flight of stairs, and he was almost certainly lost.

His original plan had been to map the dungeon in his Ledger, but almost immediately he'd realized that that would be impossible -- with Sanctuary active, he had to keep his hands empty (which was why he'd gotten rid of his spear), and he couldn't even mumble reminders to himself since speaking aloud would break the spell. So instead, he'd decided simply to lean into the problem; after all, if he didn't know where he was, any would-be assassins would have no chance.

The good news was that his Sanctuary spell definitely seemed to keep monsters from attacking or even noticing him; he'd passed a few skeletons, one at a range of less than five feet, and none of them had even glanced in his direction. He had a suspicion that the spell only worked on monsters, which made his casting of it to prevent muggings in town downright comical; but if that was the case, at least he'd been right not to rely on it in the fight with Brox. But now, he had new objectives.

First, he needed to go someplace more assassins couldn't find him; getting lost in a dungeon full of monsters way above his Level was obviously a suicidally stupid plan, which meant that at worst it would take whoever was after him a long time to realize he'd done it. The time that bought him would give him time for his new second objective: studying his spells in light of his new understanding of the Status' interaction with runespace. Being able to manipulate his effective Level for spellcasting would be pretty ridiculous, and might even enable things like casting spells to raise his own stats; he'd suspected that stats were secretly numerical ever since seeing the +1 from Tok's robe, but knowing that a Level of 11 and a Pen Spinning Skill of Rank A were even theoretically interchangeable made it a lot more likely. Combined with his Summon Food and Drink spell, he didn't really need provisions or supplies other than his bedroll; it was a level of independence from material concerns he'd never had back home, and he intended to capitalize on it while the opportunity was good. Don't know if I should be happy or worried that I've stopped thinking of home as the "real" world, he grumbled to himself. Spending an indeterminate amount of time by myself is probably not gonna be great for my sanity.

He started following the right wall, remembering that that was a good way to get out of mazes; he didn't actually want to escape, he just wanted a small area to set up his bedroll away from any existing monsters. He'd been hoping for a little shelf of rock above a tunnel or something, but thus far most of the dungeon had been corridors of (ridiculously clean) masonry. He'd even seen a painting at one point.

Now he was trudging through a long, doorless hallway exactly ten feet high and ten feet wide; he had his hands swinging loosely at his sides and his jaws clamped shut to prevent himself from accidentally saying anything, which was giving him a headache. The place would have been pitch-black if not for the Mage Light spell he'd cast before casting Sanctuary; it was a little annoying the way it kept darting towards whatever he focused on, but it was better than having some glowing object on his person that might go out at an inopportune time. He was idly thinking about when to stop for lunch and what he might conjure when the light darted ahead of him, dimmed noticeably, and then brightened again.

Topher paused, frowning. That's weird. He focused on a spot directly in front of him and the light swooped back towards him, dimming and brightening again in the same spot. He sidled up carefully, making certain not to enter the darkened area, and directed the light back into it -- the rest of the corridor seemed completely normal, and even the darkened spot looked identical except for the dimming of the light when it entered it. Through careful experimentation, he determined that light entering the strange area from outside was not altered -- it was only when the light source itself was inside the area that its illumination became dimmed. Almost like it's underwater, Topher thought to himself.

He crept as closely as he dared, then kicked a small rock into the area; to his astonishment it stopped, wobbling slightly in mid-air, about six inches in front of his foot. He let out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding and flinched backwards, nearly letting out an utterance in shock, as his breath condensed onto a solid, slightly pulsating surface a few inches in front of his face. What the hell is that?

He thought about poking it with a finger, but didn't want to risk having his hand teleported off or something, and he couldn't pick up anything to jab into it. He might have stood there, staring at it and sweating, for an eternity if a fly hadn't buzzed past his head, abruptly halted a few inches into the darkened area, and then wriggled slightly before dissolving into a bubble of goo suspended at eye height. Topher's eyes bulged, and he had to press his lips together tightly to keep from shrieking.

It's some kind of invisible... digesting... thing. Jesus Christ, and I almost walked right into it. He thanked his lucky stars for having the foresight to have Mage Light up; unfortunately, it definitely meant that the way forward was blocked here. Shuddering, he turned around and retraced his steps, wending through another half-mile of corridors before coming upon a large open area where several tunnels intersected; one of them looked like a more natural formation rather than something that had been built by humanoids, so he darted down that one with a little bit more urgency than he'd originally intended. There could be more invisible whatevers. Or even traps! I'm lucky I wasn't skewered by arrows or something. He needed to check the book for trap-finding spells.

Finally, he found what he'd been looking for -- a little cul-de-sac that was slightly raised and off the main path of the tunnel. Sighing, he unrolled his bedroll carefully (apparently doing so didn't count as 'holding' anything, which was nice), and sat down on it, summoning his Ledger and fumbling his new grimoire out of his Magic Bag. He noticed with interest that the bedroll (large and square and about seven feet on a side when fully unrolled) had a small dark circle around it on the ground not too dissimilar to his Sanctuary spell -- probably the same effect, under the hood -- and felt unbelievably comfortable; what should have been a paper-thin covering over stony, bumpy ground instead felt like he was on top a memory foam mattress five feet thick. He sighed (accidentally dispelling his own Sanctuary) and shucked off his boots, wriggling his toes into the material. If I get eaten in my sleep, I'll sleep well enough on this that I'll never notice.

He conjured up a cheese sandwich and a glass of sweet tea (the spell seemed to have no problems with dairy or sugar, but couldn't do eggs except as a binder) and munched contentedly while he leafed through the heavy tomes. There were a lot of spells in the grimoire, which he really needed to transcribe after he found a more defensible position, but for now he was just skimming for something immediately useful. His Ledger had a few higher-Level spells he hadn't looked at yet that might be useful, including a Level 50 spell called Foresight that gave you some kind of limited danger sense, but was mostly full of attack spells and increasingly specialized sorts of protective spells; there were spells against poison, spells against acid, spells against life-drains, and so on. The grimoire was largely the same (including a bunch of heretic-type spells that attacked with poisons, acids, and life-drains) but had a slightly broader cross-section of what Topher had started to think of as "utility" spells which were generally the most useful to him. The first one that immediately jumped out at him was a spell called Feather Fall that didn't even have a Level requirement; he copied that into his Ledger immediately, because he'd had quite enough of falling from high places and had a strong suspicion he'd be doing it increasingly often the more he utilized his Attract Object power to fling himself around. The incantation was just "Bwin Ish", too, so he could gasp it out with almost no notice.

Once he'd finished with that, he went back to skimming; a lot of the higher-Level spells had terrifying implications, like an Alter Self spell that had a half-page of warnings about body-horror-type stuff that immediately gave him nightmares and a Dimensional Hop spell that made it very clear that miscasts would be fatal at best. But there were also a lot of spells that he thought he could make good use of: a Find Traps and Secret Doors spell (unfortunately costing 5 MP per cast and lasting ten seconds), a Banish Dead spell that supposedly did amazing damage against things like zombies, and a Cloak of Bravery spell that protected the caster (or a target!) from all forms of "fear", whatever that meant. There was also a Hover spell that made the caster levitate about a foot off the ground at all times, but to his immense disappointment he couldn't cast it despite meeting the Level requirement -- apparently a common problem, since the spell had footnotes about being relatively uncommon for Class spellcasting compatibility. He also found a Wall of Force spell that looked incredibly promising -- the base runes seemed to have a lot in common with the Conjure Shield sequences, but with a bunch of very twisty transforms using Jhu and Palz recursively that did something extremely weird to the base runes despite ending up with almost exactly the same sequences (producing "Zoff Xat" instead of "Zom Voq"). It required Level 45, though, so he wouldn't be casting it anytime soon.

Sighing, he turned to the end of the grimoire and found himself looking at the appendices that Dakath had mentioned; they were largely dry, very straightforward statements of how various sub-areas of magic worked, most of which he'd already figured out or stumbled into. He spent an hour or two reviewing the sections on runes and confirming that his hypothesis about runes having a singular identity and a nigh-infinite number of perspectives was at least somewhat well-understood (although the book made it sound like it wasn't at all common knowledge, mostly restricted to multi-disciplinary spellcasters) and picking up a few handy mnemonic tricks for trigonometric transforms (apparently useful with axial transforms like Yttr and Kuus) before unexpectedly running out of material and finding himself in the Item Crafting subsection. He blinked at the large, very plain diagram of a wand that was staring him in the face.

Fucking bullshit. Apparently the construction of a spellcasting focus was considered so obvious that the vast majority of mages figured it out on their own before High Runes -- the book made this insultingly clear and the author had very obviously considered writing this section beneath him (and the intellectual capabilities of anyone who needed this spelled out even more so). In a single paragraph, the book explained that such tools focused the mana of a spell according to their shape and structure; a staff used its length and weight to channel mana up and down its length to increase the effective power of a spell, while an orb radiated mana like an antenna to increase the area over which a spell could be distributed. A wand, on the other hand, focused the power of a spell down to a smaller area, and was usually utilized to target damaging spells against an opponent's vital areas; Topher dimly remembered Oguro using a fat, squat little wand to kill Naungraloth. A small footnote at the bottom of the page mentioned, very disdainfully, that gestures were important in the proper use of a wand to channel mana along the arc of the wand's motion, along with implying that anyone who needed to have this spelled out explicitly was too stupid to do anything with the book other than chew on it. The diagram also explained very succinctly how to craft such items, which was simply "affix a Magic Stone of the appropriate size to the end of a staff, stick, or glass ball" and channel one's mana into it while visualizing a fairly short sequence of runes in which a Danx transform featured heavily. Apparently the major difficulty in creating such items was the affixture, since one had to ensure that the mana wouldn't be interrupted while maintaining the integrity of both the materials and the Magic Stone. The crafter usually had to spend long periods (weeks or months) imbuing the binding material with their own mana and integrating it into the craftsmanship of the finished item so as to ensure the mana channel was clear.

Topher pondered. If it's actually that simple...

Summoning his Stylus, he dug the bottle of soulbond glue out of his bag along with the two Magic Stones he hadn't gotten around to selling. One (the one he'd gotten from the zombie) was too large for the purpose he'd had in mind (about the size of a large grape) but the other was roughly pea-sized and looked like it would fit on the end of the Stylus pretty well. Carefully, he daubed a bit of the glue on the underside of the stone, pressed it firmly against the top of the Stylus, and held it there for a few seconds while visualizing the runes from the book. After a bit, he let go; the stone stayed on quite solidly, even when he shook the Stylus really vigorously. Did it work? It's not glowing or anything.

He shrugged, twirling the Stylus between his fingers. I guess I could just test it out.

He gave the makeshift wand a few more spins, contemplating a potential target, and decided to fire his weakest Mage Dart at the floor next to his bedroll. Standing up and giving the pen a final spin, he leveled the Stylus with a flourish at a pebble near his bedroll and murmured "Bwin Zom Zefekk!" with only the tiniest infusion of authority.

The bolt which leapt out of the Stylus was the size of a soccer ball, brighter than the sun, and sharper than a spear. It rocketed into the floor and disintegrated a foot-wide hole at least several feet deep (beyond the limits of Topher's vision, anyway) and sent cracks leaping in every direction through the thick stone of the floor. Topher was just starting to realize the magnitude of his mistake when the floor under him lurched, the cavern collapsed, and Topher tumbled into darkness.