Aethernea : Soulbound [Book 1]

Episode 64 - An Innovative Method of Torture

Previously:

After acing the first part of her Multicasting exam, Elaru placed all 50 cubes under her control and charged into melee range of the pink cactus. She kept avoiding its tentacles and popping bubbles. At the end of her exam, the last batch of bubbles appeared at the edge of the cactus's range.

When her cubes slipped past the edge, the Light spell went out of control and damaged one of the enchantment spells on one of the cubes. The cube went out of control and shattered a hole in the middle of a glass tank filled with healing potion. Deora acted quickly and tried to stop the potion from flowing out, he asked Zerel to help him Morph the glass to shut the hole, however, Elaru was the first one to arrive and help him.

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Only when the precious potion stopped leaking out of the tank did Deora come back to his senses. Like a raging dragon, he grabbed towards Elaru as if he wanted to pull her up by the neck, but she reflexively jumped a few steps back out of his range.

"You! You!!" Deora's shaking finger pointed towards Elaru, steam was almost coming out of his bright red ears, and his eyebrow was violently twitching the entire time. Finally, he couldn't hold it in, and flames suddenly enveloped his body.

Just as he was about to throw a fireball in Elaru's direction, an image of headmaster Eruan flashed in his mind. He gritted his teeth and put out the fire.

Instead of using flames, which had a high chance of causing more damage, his gaze landed on the remnant glass shards littered over the floor.

His eyes flashed with fury and the largest pieces of glass floated up into the air. Their sharp edges glittered dangerously towards Elaru.

Almost tangible killing intent swept over her, and her body subconsciously and instantaneously reacted. She pulled out two daggers strapped around her waist and cast a Protection spell on her own body.

Protection spell was a wide-spread dual spell (dual spell is a spell that had both an augmentation and transmutation based variant). The augmentation variant of Protection was based on Velocity while transmutation based variant was based on Morph.

Protection created a barrier around the body made out of particles of air (or anything else at hand) woven into a protective suit around the body.

After the suit of air is created, it would be enveloped by a Piercing spell which was also a dual spell.

The augmentation variant of Piercing is based on Velocity, and its purpose is to prevent the change of velocity from external sources. Which is to say that if an object, be it an arrow or a sword, collided with those particles, the Piercing spell would raise the velocity of the particles in the opposite direction of the attacking object, in an attempt to negate the outside force.

If the force behind the Piercing was higher than the attacking power, the foreign object would not be able to proceed further and would stop before making contact with the skin.

The transmutation variant of Piercing would do the same thing, albeit in a roundabout, slightly less efficient way. It would control the shape of the protective suit, making it so that it wouldn't allow the attacking object to bend it out of shape.

The sparks were flying in the air, both literally and figuratively, as Deora was trying hard to suppress his flames while glaring daggers at Elaru.

"You two...there is no need for such hostilities. It's only a few liters of healing potion and a single cube. It's really not worth getting upset about." The mischievous voice of Zerel cut through the tense atmosphere.