Jackal Among Snakes

Things weren’t like the movies. Rocky had people helping with his training, but the best Argrave could muster was a psychopath who wanted to do unspeakable things to him.

Argrave learned within ten seconds that someone trying to kill him was not inclined to help teach him, and Argrave certainly wasn’t a natural combat genius. King Norman rushed, Argrave defended feebly with a ward, and then he got hit when King Norman used two hands instead of one. With that, panic erupted and Argrave teleported away. After all that bluster, confidence, all he amounted to was a slight distraction on the king’s day.

He didn’t give up on the loop, though—he ambushed the king time and time again, and yet at best he scored a hit on the head that made the king bleed a little. After that, Argrave scurried away like a rat the moment that the king made any attempt to subdue him. Argrave reminded himself that he was doing to this to learn, but that was small comfort. What the hell was he actually learning? It was what he’d always done—land a hit, get scared if they ran at him, and then run away when he was actually in danger. Sometimes he’d rely on his Brumesingers, but now they, too, were absent.

After the first loop, the result was clear. Good King Norman had a slight cut on his brow, and Argrave had exhausted all of his resources. He desperately scrambled to get the next part of the message to Anneliese and his people, then entered the next loop.

Norman 1, Argrave 0.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, Argrave tried again on the next loop, and… a few… after it. Surely it couldn’t be this bad, he thought. The reality?

Norman 12, Argrave 0.

The best that Argrave ever managed was cutting King Norman’s throat. But that hadn’t killed the king—it’d only excited him more. He staunched the wound, hunting after Argrave all the while. Somehow, the king’s wound closed before he bled out. Confronting things objectively… Argrave hadn’t done anything different. He’d just gotten lucky. He was learning nothing.

This thirteenth go, Argrave confronted some facts. Fact one: he really had nothing prepared for true combat. [Bloodfeud Bow], [Electric Eel], [Nine-Tailed Bloodbriar]—they were good, hard-hitting spells, and the derivatives he’d made like the [Bloodarc Bow] were all the same. But Norman was faster than he was, stronger than he was. Argrave had no way to dodge besides teleporting with shamanic magic—brutally effective, but it would be a huge mistake to rely on that beyond what was necessary. Spirits were a valuable resource, not to be spent lightly.

Argrave thought about the skilled spellcasters he knew. Three stood out—Rowe, Castro, and the Alchemist. He excluded the third, because the Alchemist used his unique constitution to be a juggernaut every bit as strong as Orion. Argrave, fortunately, never had to face Rowe on the field of battle, but the aged elf had formal sword training and a divine weapon hidden in his cane that was more powerful than most. Castro, however, had beaten Argrave soundly in their spar. And how? Quick-thinking, an adaptable set of spells, and centuries of experience. Two others deserved mention—Onychinusa and Traugott. Their strength came from their A-rank ascension, but even still, they could endure people several magnitudes stronger than them because of their ability to avoid damage.

Each had ways to mitigate their lack of mobility. Castro masterfully used wind magic to dance with the grace of a peregrine falcon. Traugott fell through the Shadowlands to dodge even the strongest people like Orion with ease. Rowe had a dragon, naturally, but he also knew how to fight hand-to-hand as well as any soldier. Onychinusa could dissipate into magic to become immaterial. He didn’t need to throw himself against the wall that was Good King Norman until he succeeded. That was heading nowhere, fast. Argrave needed mobility.

Argrave let loop after loop end, delivering his plan to his companions piecemeal as he practiced shortening the time it took him to cast spells. He followed Castro’s lessons to the letter—complete the spell, waste nothing, and do it again and again while changing spells. All the while, he concocted ideas in his brain.

Argrave could copy Castro—controlled bursts of wind magic to move whichever way he pleased. He could just try and get good at hand-to-hand, like Rowe. But perhaps there was another option—the Traugott option, where he took full advantage of his A-rank ascension. Perhaps his blood echoes could become more than mere repositories for blood and magic.

Once that idea came to him, it took root. If Argrave could tie his movement to his echoes, he could move whatever direction he projected them in. They were intangible, they gave him various options… he felt it was the perfect solution. But experimentation soon proved that it wasn’t half as brilliant as he thought it might be.

Argrave first thought of a blood magic chain connecting himself and his echo. That had been easy enough to devise… yet the moment he tried it, he realized the foolishness of such a thing. He was able to make the blood echo yank the chain attached to his person with a spell. It did pull him away with tremendous force… and that was just the problem. Argrave couldn’t keep his balance, and it hurt like hell. If he didn’t have armor, he was certain it would’ve torn a chunk of his flesh off in the attempt.

After trying countless things and variations—practicing the movement, changing the spell to equally distribute the pull, Argrave realized that it might be feasible… but damned if it wouldn’t be hard to master. And even if he learned how to use it, he’d have to learn how to do so in battle. He wasn’t opposed, but he searched for more options.

Argrave tried something brutal—armor made of blood magic. It could take a hit well enough, but unlike a ward, force transferred through. A punch to the gut still felt like a punch to the gut, simply because of how energy transferred through objects. No matter how many variations it went through, he couldn’t create an absolute defense. Wards, too, were insufficient. If magic armor was possible, Argrave was sure it would have been done by someone smarter than himself in the past.

He didn’t lack for ideas. What he lacked was spells that could accommodate those ideas. He was still limited to segmenting spells—inventing new ones entirely was of yet beyond him. As he lost track of time in his desperate search, he very nearly asked his companions on the other side for help. He managed to reject that foolish notion, and finally managed to deliver his plan in its entirety. They started moving to fulfill his objective. Now, he’d have to watch them enact his plan and critique it in real-time.

But even as Argrave dismissed one foolish notion, another rose up to take its place. Why couldn’t he teleport to fight?

The main barrier was consumption of spirits and magic. [Worldstrider] was an A-rank shamanic spell, abundant both in its use of magic and spirits. Argrave delved into its composition deeply, examining all of the tool’s he’d collected in his arsenal. At first, it felt hopeless. For many loops, Argrave considered it nothing more than a dead end. But when he spotted Onychinusa and remembered her role in their defense against divinity… an idea came to him.

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Onychinusa had spread spirits throughout Vasquer. When they detected the presence of divinity, they returned to her—from there, she could teleport to confirm the location, then bring that information back. Argrave had learned that spell while trapped with the Alchemist—the spell was called simply [Spirit Lattice]. And in that spell, Argrave finally found what he needed to tie everything together.

Argrave imbued one of his blood echoes with a single spirit. It took him three loops—nine hours—to figure out how to imbue a spirit into an echo without the thing escaping once it’d left his body. Once he had that, he carefully dissected [Spirit Lattice] and [Worldstrider] both. Argrave already knew where the bulk of the spirit cost for [Worldstrider] came from—translating Argrave’s will into actionable teleportation. With that, he used the location-memory aspect of [Spirit Lattice], tying it to the spirit he’d imbued into his blood echo. He hoped to gut the spell while maintaining utility, and thus create cost-efficient, close-range teleportation.

When Argrave cast the resulting spell, he expected to hit a brick wall as he had countless times in the past. But on his first attempt, Argrave’s vision shifted with the familiar sensation of teleportation, and he felt the echo fade away. For a moment after, Argrave looked around in mute shock… but he couldn’t deny what had happened. His effort paid off. The days of experimentation had born fruit.

Argrave had created his own king’s rook that he could castle with, metaphorically speaking.

Argrave experimented joyously time and time again, projecting his echoes and then taking their place. He could control everything about them, from the position he stood to the direction he faced. Above, below, behind, around… anywhere he sent them, he could be. And most importantly of all, he had shaved away the teleportation cost by a staggering eighty percent, lowering the spell to C-rank and the spirit consumption to something negligible. It was more than amazing—it was combat viable, and the achievement brought with it a sense of pride that was the greatest Argrave had felt since… well, since perhaps ever. He thought of several names—[Echo Location], et cetera, but the one that he liked most was [Echo Step]. And so it was born.

Once he felt sufficiently skilled, Argrave returned to training. He didn’t jump into the fire immediately. Instead, he preyed upon the Flayer Knights. He went into that cruel torture cellar, pissed them off royally, and then fought as he dodged all of their attacks. And more than live up to his expectations, it wildly exceeded them. The speed, the adaptability, the surprise factor… Argrave could be a ghost, vanishing at will, appearing in a hidden location, and then beginning his ambush from the beginning.

But after a time, Argrave knew that he’d need to face his fears. Good King Norman awaited.

At the beginning of a new loop, as Argrave’s companions made their way into their designated positions, he again manipulated a meeting with the king at the training hall. He didn’t spare words, didn’t taunt—he merely began the fight, hitting the king hard in the chest with a [Bloodfeud Bow]. As ever, the monster took them as if it were a thrown stone rather than an all-powerful magic projectile.

Argrave had intense focus, practice, and a newfound advantage. Good King Norman’s speed overwhelmed him at first, and Argrave could find no opportunities to attack. He dodged, teleporting about the hall rapidly. The king charged like a bull toward red. Argrave appeared in the corner of the training hall, on the walls overlooking it, or inside the castle doors, King Norman came, using his bare hands like wrecking balls. His fists were far stronger than any weapon of this era could hope to be, anyhow.

But after a while… Argrave had time and composure enough to make one of his blood echoes complete another [Bloodfeud Bow]. He waited, waited, and then struck the king hard in the back of the head. Argrave smiled when he saw blood flowing down the king’s head… but the good king merely touched the wound, and looked at Argrave with a fading smile. Then… it became obvious that Argrave had never been taken seriously—not once.

King Norman changed his strategy. He still rushed, yes, but he calculated more. He wasn’t stupid—he’d seen Argrave’s blood echoes, and tracked their locations with cold red eyes. He implemented projectiles, throwing bricks and rocks like a barbarian. Yet these bricks, travelling hundreds of miles in seconds, could destroy Argrave’s fragile and fleshy skull in an instant.

It was a matter of time before Argrave got hit, hard. All it took was Norman predicting his location once, and a brick came flying at his head like an artillery shell. His Inerrant Cloak protected him from harm by expending his magic, but his composure was lost. Good King Norman came again, faster than the brick he’d thrown, and that feeling of overwhelming power set in moments before Argrave escaped once again, teleporting to a blood echo and then sending others to help him flee as the king pursued.

Argrave travelled far, far away, sitting in a quiet grove many miles from the city with his heart pumping like it never had before. That battle, that concentration—it was enough it felt like his heart would burst. He had been so proud, so confident, and yet when the going got tough, the tough got going. King Norman came alive when the threat became real.

It took an hour for Argrave to calm—and by then, the loop was nearly over. His legs were like jelly, and he let the loop pass by without contacting Anneliese and the rest. Partially out of frustration… and another part out of fear.

Once on the other side, Argrave didn’t let failure haunt him, paralyze him. He calmed his shaky soul by a quick conversation with the adorable Sophia, and then left shortly after. Once gone, he replayed the fight in his head, confronting his failures squarely. The problem… it wasn’t his dodging, no. That was solid. It kept him safe for a very long time against that monster. It was his ability to deal damage, and to retaliate to attacks.

Simply put, spells like [Bloodfeud Bow] wouldn’t work against Good King Norman. Argrave needed more. He needed something better. He had mobility. Now, if he could get attack and defense…

It didn’t take Argrave long to find an answer. He’d found one in Traugott before, and now Castro offered one. In their sparring match, Castro had compressed wards into tiny, yet incredibly powerful, defenses no larger than his hand. With those, the wizened wizard quite literally caught spells. Argrave knew of low-ranking spells that replicated that, somewhat.

In one loop, Argrave scanned through an exceedingly simple yet brutally effective spell its maker had dubbed simply [Burst]. It was nothing more than a hand-originated explosion of fire magic, compressed into a small area. With spell segmentation, Argrave created several different higher-ranked versions of power magnitudes higher, one for each element. It was likely redundant, but he thought each might be useful.

The spell’s power certainly rivalled a [Bloodfeud Bow] cast from a blood echo. With blood imbued into the spell, it exceeded it—and not by a small margin. But only at A-rank was it immensely powerful. His blood echoes could cast it, yet without the same power as the A-rank version. Argrave suspected he could manage only four, personally. Despite these drawbacks, he could use it to deliver a devastating blow at short range, or even deflect a coming attack if he was skilled enough.

Argrave practiced teleporting and casting [Burst] as quickly as he could for six hours, though with a lesser C-rank version to conserve magic. Once again, the Flayer Knights became his test dummies. The spell dismantled them uncomfortably easily, and his dodging became yet more impeccable. Argrave felt a sense of pressure, almost, as his companions neared the positions that he needed them to be in. There wasn’t much time left before the final act.

Finally, Argrave returned to the reigning champion, the undefeated, the 13-0 master… Norman. He felt as insane as Norman actually was, having endured this weeks-long torment without even the vaguest hope of victory. Four uses of [Burst] to defeat this man, ostensibly. And if this didn’t work… his ideas were running as thin as his time.