Absolute Mana Dominion: All My Talents Are SSS

Chapter 15: 15 - Four Star Spell

The carriage had no mana engine under it.

Two black stallions pulled it instead, matched, bred, and worth more than the vehicle they were dragging, and Adrien had not asked for any of it. The driver had been waiting at the gate with the door already open and Adrien’s name already in his mouth. Aurelian had arranged it, it was obvious.

’I don’t trust him. He wants the throne, the great houses back under control, and apparently he thought he could manage both before the kingdom tore itself apart. There was no way he’d started planning all of that yesterday.’

Adrien went back over their conversation. Aurelian had told him far too much for a man meeting him for the first time.

’Either he made one hell of a mistake, or he wanted me thinking about it.’

The second option sounded a lot more like Aurelian.

Two days of road ahead of him. The teleport circle had put him in the city, and no circle in the kingdom ran anywhere near Greymoor, so the last stretch went the way it had gone for four hundred years.

Adrien pulled the grimoire out of his bag.

Blue-grey leather, frost tooled into the spine, worn through at both corners. His sister had thrown it at his chest on the training ground and told him it contained everything from One Star through Three, followed immediately by a warning not to lose it and another not to look so pleased with himself.

She had been wrong.

Adrien found it near the back, sitting by itself after the last of the Three-Star entries. A blank page separated it from everything before, the sort of thing that made you think the book had already ended.

[Winter’s Reach]

Four Stars.

Adrien read the first line of the diagram and immediately understood what he was looking at. Ariane had spent hours in the training field working on this exact spell, and somehow it had been sitting inside the book she had handed him the entire time.

’She knew it was here.’ His thumb rested against the edge of the page. ’And she still gave me the book.’

That was enough reason to try.

He let Absolute Comprehension sink into the spell, and for the first time since awakening the talent did not simply hand him the answer.

It met resistance.

The structure was dense, layered in a way Frost Lance had never been. One principle depended on another, which depended on three more beneath it, and his talent began working through them piece by piece while the carriage rolled beneath him.

Fifty paces in every direction. Every Frost spell formed within that space struck considerably harder. The cold spread continuously from the moment the spell was established, freezing more of the surroundings the longer the caster maintained it.

Maintaining it was where the difficulty came from.

Frost Lance only needed to exist long enough to be formed and released. Winter’s Reach had to remain intact inside the caster’s mind the entire time, every moving piece held in place while Mana continued flowing through it.

The pressure behind Adrien’s eyes slowly sharpened until thinking about anything outside the spell became difficult. He kept reading anyway, following one section into the next and letting Absolute Comprehension do what it could.

Twenty minutes later, the driver knocked against the roof.

”My lord? Are you well? I thought I heard something.”

Adrien realized only then that he had made a noise. He pressed two fingers against his temple and answered through clenched teeth.

”I’m fine. Keep going.”

By the forty-minute mark, blood had started running from his nose. Adrien caught the first drop before it reached the page, wiped his face with his sleeve, and finally pulled his attention away from the spell.

The difference between this and everything he had learned before was becoming obvious. A One-Star spell barely asked anything from Absolute Comprehension. Two Stars had required effort. Winter’s Reach felt as though the spell itself had enough structure to resist being taken apart quickly.

’Four Stars really is a different animal.’ Adrien looked back over the diagram, tired enough that some of the lines had started doubling. ’Fine. I have two days.’

A window appeared over the page.

[New Spell Observed: Winter’s Reach | 4 Stars]

[Affinity: Aqua]

[Aspect: Frost]

[Absolute Comprehension active]

[Comprehension: 6%]

Six percent after nearly an hour.

Adrien rested his head against the seat and laughed quietly, which immediately made the pressure behind his eyes worse.

Ariane had spent two years learning the spell and could maintain it for roughly forty seconds. Looking at the number floating before him, six percent suddenly did not seem nearly as insulting as it had a moment earlier.

He returned to it after lunch and reached nine percent. Another session that evening brought him to eleven.

He should have stopped there but... he didn’t.

Adrien spent most of the night with the grimoire open across his knees, sleeping in short stretches whenever his mind refused to cooperate and waking up only to start again. By dawn, his eyes were red, his head felt twice its normal size, and he had managed perhaps an hour of actual sleep.

He kept reading.

The second day disappeared almost entirely into the spell. Breakfast went cold beside him. Lunch barely registered. Every time the pressure became too much, he closed the book for a few minutes, waited for the worst of it to pass, and opened it again.

Absolute Comprehension continued tearing through Winter’s Reach one layer at a time.

Then, sometime in the afternoon, the resistance vanished.

The last piece settled into place.

Adrien froze over the page.

He knew it. The entire spell was there now, complete inside his mind in the same way Frost Lance was. He understood how to establish the domain, how to maintain its borders, how the Mana had to circulate through it and what would happen if any part of that structure slipped.

A blue window appeared.

[Spell Learned]

[Winter’s Reach | 4 Stars | Novice 0%]

Adrien stared at it for several seconds before letting his head fall back against the seat.

”Finally.”

Two days, almost no sleep, several nosebleeds and a headache he was fairly certain had developed its own personality.

Still, Ariane had needed two years.

Adrien had needed two days.

He closed the grimoire with considerably more satisfaction than care and left it beside him.

By late afternoon, his skull felt as though somebody had been rearranging the inside of it for hours. Adrien leaned toward the carriage window and pushed it down to let some air inside.

The road outside was empty, bordered by trees on the left and a long open slope on the right. Pine, warm dust and the smell of horses drifted through the window, and for several seconds it was enough to clear his head.

Then Absolute Mana Sense reacted.

Adrien straightened before he consciously understood why.

He had not reached for the talent. Something had entered its range strongly enough that the warning arrived on its own, distant but unmistakable.

Whatever it was, it was enormous.

Kilometres still separated them, yet its Mana registered more clearly than people he had stood beside. Adrien had spent four days inside a castle containing some of the strongest people in the kingdom. He had stood ten paces from a Six-Star prince and felt Seven-Star figures moving through the ballroom, and until now he had assumed that experience had at least given him some idea of what the upper end of power felt like.

This made that assumption look ridiculous.

’What in God’s name is that?’

The presence was moving quickly, growing clearer with every passing second. Absolute Mana Sense kept feeding him information faster than he wanted it, enough that unease began creeping down his back before he had even seen anything.

For one stupid moment, the comparison that came to mind was Spider-Sense. His own magical perception had apparently decided to develop an alarm system.

The thought stopped being funny almost immediately.

Something crossed overhead.

The horses reacted first. Both animals screamed and pulled in opposite directions, jerking the carriage sideways hard enough that Adrien caught himself against the window frame. The driver shouted from above, fighting the reins while a shadow passed over the road and swallowed the afternoon light.

Absolute Mana Sense caught the creature in full as it went by.

Size. Density. Internal Mana flow. Layers of power compressed into a body moving faster than anything that large should have been able to move.

The information hit Adrien all at once.

His stomach turned before he could shut any of it out. He barely managed to get his shoulders through the open window before vomiting over the side of the moving carriage.

He was still wiping his mouth when the impact came.

Something crashed into the forest roughly six hundred paces from the road. The first trees went down immediately, followed by another line behind them, then another. The noise travelled deeper into the woods before finally dying away, and an entire section of birds erupted above the canopy together.

The carriage had already stopped. The horses kept pulling at their harnesses, desperate to put distance between themselves and whatever had landed nearby.

”My lord, get back inside.” The driver twisted around in his seat, pale beneath the dust on his face. ”We can reach the posthouse before dark if we leave now.”

Adrien opened the door and stepped down. His legs still felt uncertain beneath him, though whether that came from the last two days without proper sleep or whatever his senses had just forced into his head was difficult to tell.

”Take the carriage and keep going,” he said, pulling his bag from the seat and setting it beside him in the dirt. ”If I’m not at the posthouse by tomorrow night, send word to Greymoor. Tell my mother I’ll be later than expected.”

”My lord, whatever came down there—”

”I know.” Adrien looked toward the trees. ”That’s why you should go.”

The driver followed his gaze once. Whatever argument he had been preparing disappeared, and a moment later he was turning the horses around and getting the carriage moving again.

Adrien remained beside the road while the sound of the wheels gradually faded.

Dust settled around his boots. There was vomit on one sleeve, his head still hurt from forcing Absolute Comprehension through a Four-Star spell, and somewhere beyond the treeline something large enough to flatten several hundred metres of forest was breathing heavily.

Each breath carried through the ground strongly enough for him to feel it beneath his feet.

Every reasonable part of him suggested continuing toward Greymoor and forgetting the entire thing.

Unfortunately, curiosity had never been one of Adrien’s reasonable qualities.

He picked up his bag and started toward the trees.

...

AN: Add the novel to collections and send (power stones and golden tickets) support if like it ;)