Magic Breaker [Enby MC Anti-Mage LitRPG]

PoV: Sylves - Titania

I hold my stomach, laughter bubbling out of me.

[The Earthmother expresses her concern over your health.]

“Oh, this?” I ask, wearing a vicious grin. “Yeah, it’s pretty bad.” But, despite that, I laugh again. My single arm is pressed to my abdomen, doing little to stem the bleeding of my opened up guts.

But that’s okay. Because I’m a bit of a monster. 

I breathe, and then give a hacking cough as pain floods me. My knees buckle, crashing into the dirt. But despite that, I breathe. Despite it, my heart pumps. Blood leaks onto the forest floor, and it would have alerted predators, but it wouldn’t. My mantle hangs below me, and my own blood simply nourishes that carpet of moss.

And then I reach out. Balancing myself on my knees, I use my single arm to tear off clumps of red-green. I push them into my wound, I stem the bleeding. I hiss in agony when the pain races through me, but I continue. I continue until the bleeding is stemmed, until my insides are inside me again, and then I [Sing].

The moss of my mantle resonates. It drinks the blood, and grows. It drinks from the corpse in front of me, and grows. Obeying that truest law of nature, obeying the cycle. Things die, things grow, things live. 

Green clumps spread and close my wound fully. The patch replaces my skin. It’s a bizarre feeling, and it hurts like hell, and it’s nowhere near as good as real skin, but it holds. I’m alive. I breathe in the smell of the forest, and I laugh. 

“Hah. Hahaha.” My voice cracks, as tears run down my cheeks as I howl to the sky. It feels good. 

“Was that violent, huh?!” I scream at the corpse, kicking it roughly. Decayed bones snap like twigs, my mantle having feasted on their marrow. “You thought you were fucking better than me, didn’t you? Thought you’d never fall for it, huh? That you were safe, that you were hunting me, that you could lure me in? But which one of us ran? Which one of us ran?!”

I kick the corpse again, launching it into a tree and having it crumple into a bag of skin and bones. Nothing else left, having already fed the soil. My mantle hums. 

[Violent Trick 19 > 22]

A sneer weaves itself on my lips. They ran. The lot of them, the cowards, ran. 

I stand in front of a corpse, and that corpse belongs to Serra, the scithian mage from Ezekiel’s party. Long swathes of the green sea stood scorched and burnt, but in the end, the mage laid dead. And the rest of the party ran. Because they were pathetic cowards. Because Sylves was wilder than them, because she owned the forest.

She had led them through thorny vines. She’d beckoned the flora to attack them. Drifted just on the edge of territories of monsters. She’d made their life hell for two weeks, until they cracked. Until the mage lost her pathetic temper and cast a fire spell.

Until a bolt of ice had gutted Sylves open and she stuffed her wound with clumps of moss over a corpse. They’d hurt her home, and they paid for it dearly. [Hospitality] was a cruel skill, after all, and one did not burn a fae’s home without recourse. They’d played the game, and they’d lost because they didn’t get the rules.

Panting heavily, I collapse against a tree, the rough bark scraping my back. The forest could kill me now, but it won’t. 

[The Earthmother asks to become your patron Eye again. You are sponsored one minor request.]

Another laugh bubbles from my lips, this time one of elation even as I shake my head. “No.” I still taste blood and earth on my tongue. My skin is bruised and battered, my insides burn, but my mantle wraps around me, hiding me again. I fade away to be just another patch of green. I curl up in that blanket of dirt and moss and weep.

For myself. For the kind of person I am. For how good it felt to kill that fucking bitch for hurting me, for burning something, for hunting my friends. How I loved to turn things around on them, to stalk them, to make them fear me.

That creeping dread as I played them was delicious. And that’s terrifying. 

I played the prey. And now one of them lies dead in the ground.

Because I was always the hunter. Always the monster.

Points go into my heart stat. I cry for a while, then wipe my tears away. When my legs carry me once more, I stand up.

[Congratulations!]

[You have killed a descender. Claim an Authority.]

I’m afraid of them, after what happened last time. I’m terrified. But I must go up. I’ve gotten my fill of violence and lies, of bloodshed and the hunt. I just want to see my friends again.

- - - 

PoV: Snow Okiyama - Ion

[Job up! Imbuer 17 > 19]

[Class up! Nullmage 20 > 21]

[Level Up! 59 > 62]

My numbers increase as I work. More revenants arise, but they’re just fodder for my archive. The library of skills in there grows, and my understanding of the priest’s skills has grown by leaps and bounds. I have multiple possible progression paths mapped out, as well as suspicions on how those paths might affect their weak points.

The same goes for the soothsayer- though my preparations are less rigorous. I know to rely on my friends, after all, and Opal has been prepping their own countermeasures.

It’s kind of funny. Most of the others outstrip me in level by now. I’ve been holed up for too long. They’ve been fighting hordes of skeletons each day. Amelie especially has grown. By now her threads are strong enough to turn “conscious” skeletons into puppets. It’s insidious and a little weird to watch, but at the same time, I am proud of her.

Just in case, I did prepare countermeasures against the threads, though.

When the earth above me shakes with violence, I know that things will change. I smell fire. And I can feel the traces of mana. High-levellers recklessly throwing around their weight. 

Apparently it’s more easily allowed on the fourth floor. The higher you go, the fewer limiters there are. Which means that I can feel their mana. Feel it brush up against the edges of my grand weave. The enchantment I spent weeks on, now. And I catch the scent like a shark. 

[Observation 14 > 15]

Sulphur and flames crash against holy barriers. Flamando crashing into Ezekiel as they cut loose. Flametouched and Respitia.

[Flametouched laughs as the bones char. It tells Respitia to pull her pathetic pawns back, before they are turned to ash.]

[Respitia the Pure scoffs in reply, telling it to watch.]

I ignore them, instead focusing. “Bile. Open the ramps to the outside. They’re here.”

The minotaur looks at me with worry in his eyes. “That’s my last debt,” he says quietly, and I nod. 

“Yeah. You’re free to run after this. Thank you for your help,” I say. He’s scared. But he’s still here. And that counts for something. 

Above me, the earth splits apart, and heat washes inside. Flamando is really cutting loose out there. My skin dries up as I face the sunlight, my eyes widening at it. The boneyard burns. Flames are awash on the dry grass and muddy ground. Skeletons catch flame, revenants have their necro-muscles light on fire.

And slowly, ever so slightly, a smile spreads on my face. I wait. For a long, endless few seconds, I wait. 

Then the tower stirs. It reaches down with those fingers of mana, the tide of diamond shelled patterns, as my world goes white. My vision whites out. My ears ring like someone threw a grenade. Heat washes over my face, the shockwave enough to throw me to the ground.

And then I laugh. The mana finishes descending. The explosion is contained. I feel that same feeling again, knowing Flamando is being yanked up yet another floor, and I grin. The heat leeches from the world, the flames smothered, going from the blast of a small nuke to a simple swath of fire.

We can handle that. “Opal, Thatch?” I point a finger. “Get them.”

My two best friends smile, and a moment later, they’re out there.