BT - Book 1 - Chapter 24

Micah opened his eyes.  He was thirteen for the third time.  Rolling over, he buried his face in his pillow, and screamed out his frustration.  Two years of biting his tongue and serving as a slave for the Golden Drakes and the Royal Knights was more than enough.  Those last few months when he’d been treated as nothing more than a piece of meat tested him.  It took everything Micah had in him to not mouth off to Knight.  Only the knowing that he had a way out of his servitude kept Micah going.  This time, things would be different.   

He stood up, stretching his scrawny limbs.  He whipped around as the door to his bedroom creaked open, Esther’s hand, pudgy with baby fat just visible.

“Come on in,” he said, relaxing slightly.  Mentally Micah made a note to act more like an actual thirteen year old.  He emotionally might be twenty three, but everyone would expect more age appropriate behaviors.

Shyly, Esther slipped into the room, her eyes on her socks.  When she spoke, her voice was soft, the consonants stretching out in a childish lisp.

“I heard you yell,” she shuffled her socks across the hardwood floor.  “I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a mouse or spider scaring you.”

“And what would you do if there WAS a mouse?” Micah asked, reaching down to tousle her hair.  “That would be pretty scary.”

“I’d get Trevor!” Esther exclaimed proudly.  “He’s big and he said that if there were any kids being mean to me or any monsters that he’d fight them.  He’s going to be an aven shurer.”

“What about me,” Micah smiled.  As frustrating as everything was, this is what he was fighting for.  These little moments of innocence where his family could relax and go about their everyday business.  “I’m pretty strong and I’m going to be an adventurer too,” he continued.

“But Trevor beats you every time you race or wrestle,” Esther replied dubiously, inspecting his stick thin arms.  “Even Becky beat you last week when you tried to race her and she’s a girl. I think I’ll call Trevor if there’s a monster.”

Micah winced as Esther wriggled out of his grasp and ran out of the room, apparently satisfied that there wasn’t a spider or rat in his bedroom.  He’d forgotten that Becky, the tomboy daughter of a neighbor had been his rival until he began working for Keeper Ansom.  Of course, the word ‘rival’ overstated Micah’s role in the relationship.  Becky trounced him fairly thoroughly every time they tried to compete.

Frowning slightly, Micah pulled out the Folio and paged to his previous memories on Becky.  Sure enough, she received a combat related blessing and became an adventurer for the Sword Disciples, a mid sized guild similar to the Lancers.

Closing the Folio he sighed.  He truly did have the build and reflexes of a spellcaster.  Both Trevor and Becky grew up with muscles and agility of melee combatants, but even with all of his work in the previous timeline he’d barely reached an above average physique.  

Once again he’d have to go through all the awkwardness of puberty while working out and trying to temper himself.  He certainly wasn’t excited about another four years of body aches, hormonally destabilized moods, and cracking voices.

Still, having to start from scratch was better than being trapped by the Royal Knights.  Micah had learned his lesson there.  Without backing, if he revealed the extent of his gift some powerful force would swoop in and exploit him.  This time, he needed to find a way to defeat the Durgh alone.

It was time to see what tools he had to work with this time around.  Micah called up his status.

Micah Silver

Age 13 [ERROR] / 23

Class/Level -

XP

HP 8/8

Attributes

Body 4, Agility 3, Mind 9, Spirit 8

Attunement

Moon 4 Sun 1 Night 2

Mana

Moon 8//8 Sun 2/2 Night  4/4

Affinities

Time 10

Wood 6

Air 5

Blessings

Mythic Blessing of Mursa - Blessed Return, Ageless Folio

Skills

Anatomy  7

Enchanting  6

Fishing   1
Herbalism  5

Librarian  4

Ritual Magic  14

Spear   7

-Wind Spear 2

Spellcasting  20

He tapped his chin contemplatively.  His skill levels were high, even for someone at the twentieth level.  As awful as the Knights were, their methods were effective and being forced to repeatedly cast rituals and spells that should have been beyond his abilities did wonders for his skill growth.  In fact, he was fairly close to the skill requirements for becoming a Thaumaturge.  He just needed to upgrade his enchanting skill by 4. 

Summoning and opening the Folio once again, Micah turned to the page detailing Karin Dakkora’s ritual on energy transference and his theorized permutations on it.  The three major uses he’d speculated on were using temporal energy to fulfill some or all of the attunement cost in enchanting, using temporal energy to fulfill some or all of the life force requirement for a summoning, and trying to find a way to weaponize temporal transfer.  The final method was well beyond his meager store of mana at the moment.  After all, he’d need at least enough to initiate temporal transfer to begin siphoning temporal energy into a target.  The other two might be just what he needed to fight off the Durgh incursion.

In his last life, Micah focused on ritual magic, but he did manage to develop enough of a base in enchanting due to the similarity of the two fields to know that attunement was an enchanter’s primary problem.  Almost every enchantment took at least a half point of attunement, with more powerful enchantments taking multiple full points.  He could gain a point of moon attunement fairly quickly by ‘learning’ a first tier spell, but beyond that as a thirteen year old he didn’t really have a good way of gaining attunement.  Goods were given to youths for free, but by the same token no one in their right mind would buy an object from him.

If he was going to become a Thaumaturge, Micah would need to gain four points in enchanting without earning a single level.  He needed to up his timetable on the temporal transference ritual.  The only way he would be able to gain those skill levels would be if he was able to dramatically decrease the attunement cost of new enchantments.

Sighing, Micah closed the book.  The worst part was that he’d need to do all of this while maintaining a regularly normal schedule.  His family would wonder if he didn’t get an apprenticeship, so it would be off to Keeper Ansom’s library once again for him.

Despite being productive, the following months left bags under Micah’s eyes.  The library contained the basic books on ritual magic and enchantment theory he needed to finish adapting the ritual, but beyond that they were more or less a waste of time.  He’d already learned most of what he needed at the Royal Academy.

The nights on the other hand were of great use.  Almost casually he set up teleport beacons in his bedroom and at the dire stoat’s cave, the large weasel posing almost no threat to him.  Air Knife wasn’t a particularly powerful spell, but at his level of spellcasting and skill level in the spell, even with the meager handful of mana available to Micah as a classless blessed, he easily murdered the creature from a distance.

In the cave he brought out various animals caught in a series of live traps he set up in the forest or procured from the market.  They weren’t powerful magically, generally being young and inexperienced, but with practice he was just barely able to touch the temporal energy in them.  Surprisingly, he gained an extra point of moon attunement the first time he successfully performed the transfer ritual.  

It wasn’t as much of a success as he’d hoped, dropping the price of enchanting a bolt of his Father’s cloth to make it more lustrous and durable from one third of an attunement point to one tenth of a point, but it was evidence that Mursa smiled upon his efforts.  Strange really, he’d expected a more negative response from the stories told about Karin Dakkora.

After that he replicated the ritual as often as possible, transferring the age and experience from his collection of geese and raccoons two months at a time into enchanting a series of knicknacks. 

Without a class, Micah didn’t have the mana to make anything truly powerful, but that didn’t mean that his efforts were fruitless.  After almost two months he’d gained three points in enchanting and he had a collection of costume jewelry and cheap blades that would perform minor effects.  A ring that would pulse in the presence of poison.  A belt buckle that would aid digestion.  A necklace that created a bubble of air around the user’s head on command, letting them breathe underwater for a period of time or avoid gaseous attacks.

He was beginning to run low on attunement, burning through most of the points he’d gained from successfully ‘learning’ ritual magic and enchanting, but he finally had a goal.  In a nearby grove lived a great stag.  Once upon a time it must’ve been a king of the forest, chasing any other buck from its does with ease, but now age caught up with it.  

Its former red-brown coat was grey, fur falling off in clumps due to sickness and malnutrition to reveal the wrinkled skin beneath.  It was more than a match for Micah physically, but with the aid of magic he hoped to capture the creature in order to use it in a grand enchantment that would push his skill level up to ten.

The Saturday began like any other, with Micah making an excuse to Trevor and Esther about why he couldn’t play with them despite being off work at his apprenticeship followed by performing the teleportation ritual out to his cave.  Almost immediately he began working on a ritual, one he’d seen Brenden perform dozens of times but had never tried himself.

Regretfully, he dragged over the cages he’d made for the pair of badgers that he’d trapped almost a month ago.  He preferred using temporal energy to the more traditional way of performing rituals, but the first time through a ritual wasn’t the time to substitute.  After all, if this didn’t go perfectly, he would almost certainly die without someone on hand to protect him.

Opening the Folio he began the ritual, slashing open his forearm to drop blood all along the outside of the circle.  His voice took on a strange resonance as it began to mix and interact with principles far outside the visible world.  A strange pressure began to build around Micah as reality thinned.  For a brief second he glimpsed into a formless and chaotic beyond, just a sideways step from Karell, but he closed his eyes, refusing to let it distract him.

Then it came time for the sacrifice.  He plunged the dagger into one badger after another, over the past month of him continually rejuvenating the animals they’d become tame, almost pets.  It pained him to betray them, but a ritual of this magnitude called for blood and life.  The weak souls of the badgers wouldn’t provide much of an anchor, but they were by far the best medium he had on hand.

The darkness of the page parted like a curtain as a large hairy hand reached out from somewhere else and grasped onto empty air.  With a bestial howl, it pulled itself forward, staggering onto its hands and knees.  The gap in existence winked out behind it as it stood up, almost nine feet in height.  The Onkert Daemon was just as he remembered it, the snarling maw of a wolf placed on top of the huge and well muscled body of a gorilla.

Micah sighed only to quirk his mouth slightly when he received a point of moon attunement.  The ritual was successful, and the Onkert would follow his every command until its anchor, the pair of badgers, faded. 

He had between fifteen and twenty minutes.  He’d have to hurry if he planned on catching the stag that quickly.