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1258 Words
She looked at Matt and said. “[Fireball] me.”
Doing as instructed, he cast a [Fireball] at Luna.
Anyone observing this from the outside would have seen a large man trying to murder a small black cat, but Matt knew the small cat was the most dangerous person on this planet by a large margin, and didn’t hold back in the slightest.
He wasn’t sure what he expected, but his spell just fell apart like a paper ball hitting water, with bands of fire flaking off as the ball traveled until it was gone, less than a foot away from Luna.
Matt felt like Aster as they both c****d their heads at the sight.
“Instead of blocking when you can’t dodge, it’s sometimes better to dissipate an enemy’s spells. This will be our first lesson of your advanced training.”
Kurt interjected with a raised finger as his pen flicked back and forth, writing, “This is one of those things that’s hard to start and harder to master. Practically every spell you encounter will need to be deconstructed differently, and people can reinforce their spells to counter this, though rift monsters basically never do.”
His pen hesitated for a moment, but Luna seemed to say what he was thinking. “This is typically a thing only taught to Tier 25s and higher in the army because it takes a degree of spiritual awareness, Domain strength, and a whole lot of practice. It’s my specialty, and I don’t normally teach it until Tier 18 or so, but you three need something to challenge yourselves with.”
After that, Luna went over how to actually dismantle a spell.
“The first step is identifying the skill, something which is a lot easier when you have a copy of the spell in your own spirit.”
Aster didn’t have a copy of the spell, but Luna simply had her feel the spell she had hovering over her tail.
“Now send mana into the spell, but don’t unleash it.” Seeing they all did as instructed, she continued. “Good. Now, look at how the skill is constructed in the air. Try and find the weak points. The nexuses and crossroads. Break enough of them, or the right one, and the spell will fall apart.”
All three of them easily dissipated their spells, and Luna grinned at them, white teeth shining.
“Now all you need to do is dissipate my [Fireball]s.”
She leaped backward, landing upon a pedestal a few hundred feet away and, with a wave of her tail, started conjuring three steady barrages of [Fireball]s, one for each of them.
While the fireballs didn’t hurt that much, they still burned and, most notably, physically pushed them back a few feet. The objective was clear, and the three of them fell into dodging the projectiles.
Matt slipped around a lick of flame as he pulsed his Concept, trying to drain mana from his surroundings, but Luna immediately suppressed his Domain with her own.
“Don’t try to run before you can walk, Matthew.”
Thusly rebuked, he returned to studying the skill structure and sending a stream of mana to unravel the spell. He failed utterly and was rewarded with a fireball to the face.
Aster seemed to have the right idea, he concluded, in trying to run away to get more time to analyze and attack the skill structure. Sure, it took her further away from Luna, but that wasn’t too much of a hassle. He dodged another fireball and tried running past it, studying the spell for weaknesses.
When that didn’t yield results, he pulled out his sword and started using [Dispelling Edge], comparing that skill’s effect to Luna’s new method. From what he could tell, it worked similarly, cutting through the threads of the spell’s structure.
Where it differed, however, was in specificity. Though far more efficient than anything Matt could even dream of accomplishing at the moment, it cut through the entire spell rather than just the important parts, like destroying a building by cutting the entire thing in half, rather than taking out the supports. The advantage, of course, was in not needing to know where those supports were for each different building.
Once he saw that, Matt put away his blade and started to change his strategy.
If there was one thing Matt had in spades, it was raw mana, and after getting some distance from Liz and Aster, he directed most of his mana pool to freely flow into the air, and using his mana control, he directed his mana toward the [Fireball]s Luna sent at him.
Instead of attacking the weak points of the spell mid-flight, Matt just threw thousands of mana at the spell, hoping to break anything.
And it worked.
He almost didn’t expect it, but the spell unraveled like a ball of flaming yarn and he had to resist cheering. He most certainly wasn’t doing it the way Luna wanted, but now that he had a feel for it, he was able to start making more directed attacks at the spell’s structure.
Matt then ran into his arch-enemy. His mana control. To do what Luna wanted, he needed to be able to feel a moving spell’s structure, identify the weak points of said skill, and then finally pick those weak points apart with as little mana as possible.
His spiritual sense was good enough that he was able to identify the skill structures without too much issue, but when it came to picking the spell apart, he ran into a wall.
He had oven mitts on and a chainsaw, where everyone else was working with a scalpel.
Even with years of training, his mana control was still behind where the others were. Though he had made up ground, the others weren’t stagnant and had pulled ahead while increasing their own mana control as well.
After the others got the hang of the new skill through a few weeks of training, he was starting to lag behind unless he just threw mana at the problem. Liz in particular was doing quite well; her expertise with stealing spells from her opponents translated admirably to their current task.
He eventually started closing in on the ladies’ success, and while his method was far less efficient than either of theirs, he was succeeding.
Liz was the first one to actually complete the challenge, laying a hand on Luna’s pedestal after dispelling three spells in a row. Luna stopped them with a nod. “Now that you have the first step down, it’s time to work on a skill I haven’t deliberately made easier to dispel.”
After several months of explosive training, Luna directed them back at the rifts. “Now I want you to delve a Tier 13 rift while only using two offensive spells, and only dodging after you’ve attempted a dispel. No armor spells at all.”
The first rift Matt got was one with swarms of mice, and Luna had him destroy it before making a new one. The next one had centaur-like monsters that cast half a dozen projectile spells, which was exactly what Luna wanted.
In a real fight, Matt managed to dispel exactly zero spells and was forced to dodge everything, but he felt he was growing used to the training. That said, he knew every attempt at dispelling a spell cost him far more mana than [Cracked Phantom Armor] would have used to block a same Tier spell.
- Writer
